The Comms Room

@ewwhite I do get that you might be a bit annoyed if they are monitoring the Internet connection. I want my personal internet usage to be personal, and not reviewed by my place of employment.

ewwhite

I think they have someone on airbnb.com who has a place as well

so they're just doing what I did... but with more of a permanent arrangement.

hopefully, a cleaning service.

voretaq7

@ewwhite presumably

ewwhite

10:11 PM

but my wife visits sometime... so it just seems awkward.

Joel E Salas

Is there a tool like tcptrace that is still maintained?

voretaq7

it's not uncommon for NYC companies to do that or have a standing hotel suite though

@JoelESalas iLOL - maintained?!

ewwhite

@voretaq7 Every company I've worked for in the past had corporate rates negotiated with hotels.

Michael Hampton

What's to maintain? It's not like Internet protocols change every week.

Zoredache

@JoelESalas What is tcptrace doing for you that you can't do with wireshark?

ewwhite

10:13 PM

"Oh, you're going to London? Stay at The Cavendish using our account."

@voretaq7 So not nasty or weird?

Chopper3

@ewwhite I do indeed use Riverbed Stringrays (Zeus ZXTMs) extensively

ewwhite

@Chopper3 We do, too. I have serious questions about topology.

voretaq7

@ewwhite well nasty depends on the cleaning service

but not particularly weird for NYC - it's a major cost-savings over paying B&B/Hotel rates, and a huge tax write off for the company.

Chopper3

@ewwhite this is nicer - the-hempel.co.uk

ewwhite

@Chopper3 But my office was on Piccadilly Circus.

@voretaq7 So I'm being a bitch?

voretaq7

10:19 PM

@ewwhite you're being a picky traveler

which is great for you but the company would rather spend less money :-D

ewwhite

I'm averaging $185/night in NY. For an apartment.

voretaq7

@ewwhite they can probably get a better deal with their own place and a maid service

ewwhite

@voretaq7 Right... It's just... I have certain standards...

:-X

voretaq7

@ewwhite and you think hotels meet them? LOL

Michael Hampton

Considering what many "apartments" in NYC look like, I don't blame you one bit for resisting this.

voretaq7

10:23 PM

@MichaelHampton meh, I doubt the company would invest in a one bathroom postage stamp under the el

ewwhite

@voretaq7 I've found three great places in NY... One, two and three...

Michael Hampton

@voretaq7 You never know.

ewwhite

@voretaq7 They tried to put me in Secaucus and the Hotel Penn!

voretaq7

@ewwhite well Jersey is unforgiveable

and I wouldn't do a week at HP

Michael Hampton

I've stayed in the Hotel Pennsylvania. I would much rather have crashed at my friend's house in Westchester...

ewwhite

10:25 PM

@voretaq7 Once I saw this review...

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite That is approximately the same as I experienced, minus the breakfast which I skipped.

ewwhite

So I'd trust my judgment a tad bit more.

voretaq7

@ewwhite meh, the rooms are crap, but I've never been in one that was dirty like they describe

Michael Hampton

It was a nice place, and it could be again, but its current owner really wants to demolish the building and put up office space - but there's a row over its historic status.

voretaq7

then again I only stay there 3-4 nights every other year

Michael Hampton

10:27 PM

So the interior can't be remodeled...

voretaq7

@MichaelHampton the interior (at least the hotel floors) can be gutted if Vornado wants to

the historic preservation fight is only over the building itself

ewwhite

So, is this a push-back sorta thing, or no?

Michael Hampton

@voretaq7 After that experience, I started crashing on the handily provided cots on the second floor.. :)

ewwhite

I already book my own flights...

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite If they're determined to do it, I recommend you pick the apartment that they end up leasing.

Joel E Salas

10:28 PM

wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/wire-%20shark.html

Best 404 page

voretaq7

@ewwhite meh, depends on if pushing back means no more company-paid stay IMHO

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton It's a friend of my boss renting the place.

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite BTW, I got a 404 on that kickstart URL...

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton Gotta VPN in ;)

voretaq7

@MichaelHampton see I have this thing where I like to shower. And occasionally work out, which necessitates ANOTHER shower.

Michael Hampton

10:30 PM

Yeah, good point.

voretaq7

and frankly my standard for conference hotels is "No bedbugs, get out of the shower feeling cleaner than when you went in"

Michael Hampton

DEFCON wins on that score...usually.

voretaq7

@MichaelHampton yeah... DEFCON loses on every other score though

ewwhite

@voretaq7 creepy-crawlies...

voretaq7

the best part of that conference is Vegas, and frankly I'd rather just go to Vegas :P

Michael Hampton

10:33 PM

Why do you think I prefer to crash at my friend's place in westchester?

voretaq7

@ewwhite OK yeah, let's be fair and upgrade that to "No unregistered occupants"

then again to me a hotel room serves a similar purpose to my apartment. "I need somewhere to sleep and store my shit"

ewwhite

but on the real, you'd totally rather be in a Nolita loft, right?

voretaq7

@ewwhite I'd rather be in the west village somewhere

preferably with someone else paying for it

ewwhite

Oh yeah... one more place I want to try - on 4th and Christopher.

voretaq7

ok, go-home time

bblZ0r

ewwhite

10:36 PM

airbnb.com/rooms/532288

pimpin'

voretaq7

@ewwhite I know that building

not a bad area, but high traffic at night

ewwhite

@voretaq7 heh... o rly?

I do like it over there.

Barracuda called me personally to apologize for their service outage.

Michael Hampton

They still haven't fessed up about using EC2, though?

ewwhite

They said, "we do not use AWS... this was an issue at our co-location facility. A power outage."

Michael Hampton

Uh huh.

Item: Barracuda Reputation Block List

HopelessN00b

10:48 PM

@ewwhite Someone powered down AWS?

Michael Hampton

Item: How to Use says the RBL is at b.barracudacentral.org

error@underground ~ $ host -t ns b.barracudacentral.org
b.barracudacentral.org name server ns03.barracudacentral.org.
b.barracudacentral.org name server ns01.barracudacentral.org.
b.barracudacentral.org name server ns02.barracudacentral.org.

For the rest, see the starred message on the right.

ewwhite

Right... so sketchy?

Michael Hampton

It means this service absolutely 100% is on AWS.

Now maybe they use a different RBL in their hardware appliances, but somehow I doubt it. 30 seconds in Wireshark should discover whether this is true...

ewwhite

Well, an example address that was down is...

d18315b.ess.barracudanetworks.com.

Michael Hampton

Those are indeed on Barracuda's own IP address space.

11  oak1-ar1-xe-1-1-0-0.us.twtelecom.net (66.192.251.182)  103.450 ms  101.882 ms  103.385 ms
12  126.wecare.net (66.162.144.126)  107.744 ms  111.317 ms  109.642 ms
13  mail.ess.barracuda.com (64.235.154.66)  110.559 ms  108.030 ms  109.079 ms

HopelessN00b

10:53 PM

So someone *did* power down AWS (According to Barracuda).

At least Amazon's mixing it; not a switching/routing problem this time.

WesleyDavid

@MichaelHampton Want to write an expose and put it on my blog?

Michael Hampton

Raise your hand if you just went to www.wecare.net.

ewwhite

I did.

Michael Hampton

Now raise your hand if you're now thinking... WTF?

WesleyDavid

@MichaelHampton O|

Looks better.

ewwhite

10:55 PM

Soooo, unprofessional.

Michael Hampton

The other IP address seems more reasonable:

16  38.104.38.94 (38.104.38.94)  46.707 ms  43.798 ms  47.993 ms
17  173.225.179.26 (173.225.179.26)  48.515 ms  48.620 ms  47.231 ms
18  mail.ess.barracuda.com (64.235.150.197)  44.994 ms  48.482 ms  48.873 ms

Joel E Salas

I'm debugging some weird network stuff

WesleyDavid

@JoelESalas Did you start with your face?

Joel E Salas

is 0.02% RST rate acceptable for web services?

HopelessN00b

Oh, I get it. A little slow on the uptake today, I guess. Need moar caffeine. Or maybe moar strippers... haven't have a company-provided stripper ina quite a while either.

Michael Hampton

10:57 PM

@ewwhite So that host name you gave me has two IP addresses in round robin. The latter seems to be in an actual data center. The former seems to be hanging off some WiMax connection in ... Arkansas?!?

WesleyDavid

@MichaelHampton Blog that stuff.

HopelessN00b

@JoelESalas Depends. Probably a little too high for anything enterprise-level (IMO), but far too low for Facebook and the like.

Michael Hampton

Or maybe it's Wisconsin. Or California. I really can't tell, since half the traceroute goes over Time Warner's network for some bizarre reason.

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton this is who I trust my email delivery to?

HopelessN00b

If it's a social media site, raise it by a couple orders of magnitude. If it's an enterprise something or other, decrease the RST rate by at least an order of magnitude.

Adrian

10:59 PM

Got a phone call today. Recruiter wants me and 2 other folks to sell our souls to the Mouse for $45/hour W2'd for the next 18 months.

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite I dunno. MAYBE the one in the backwoods somewhere is their disaster recovery plan?

ewwhite

HA

we're all hacks

HopelessN00b

@Adrian And you told him to double it, plus send you a recruitment fee for the other 2 souls, right?

Michael Hampton

I've done some crazy $#!+, but putting a realtime blackhole list off a WiMax connection in the middle of nowhere is not one of them.

Adrian

@HopelessN00b No, told him to send me a list of the costs for the benefits they offer and I'll think it over.

Joel E Salas

11:01 PM

I'm debugging some weird network stuff

HopelessN00b

@ewwhite For what it's worth, they do a better job than the guys we trust it to, who don't seem to be located on WiMax in Arkansas... hell, Google uses DevOPS and an expected failure model, so who knows what to make of anything anymore, right?

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite OK, I think that wecare.net thing is a false alarm, somebody didn't update a PTR record somewhere.

HopelessN00b

@Adrian Really? Must be real eager to get out of your current hellhole... but if what I hear is true, Disney's pretty awful to for. Dunno if that applies to IT workers or just the drones.

Michael Hampton

[rwhois.twtelecom.net]
%rwhois V-1.5:003AB6:00 rwhois.twtelecom.net (rwhois_ngd v0.9.0 by James Sella)
network:Class-Name:network
network:ID:ddc40cd6-f13c-11e1-9085-0015c5e40be3
network:Auth-Area:66.162.0.0/16
network:Network-Name:BARRACUDA-NETWORKS-INC-66-162-144-124
network:IP-Network:66.162.144.124/30
network:Organization;I:137bcfea-f05b-11e1-8726-0015c5e40be3
network:Org-Name:BARRACUDA NETWORKS INC
network:Street-Address:11085 SUN CENTER DR
network:City:RANCHO CORDOVA
network:State:CA
network:Postal-Code:95670

Adrian

@HopelessN00b Well, I'm pretty much doing a little of everything here, from user support to deep engineering. Would be nice to focus on real technicals for awhile. But yeah, I've heard AWFUL things about Disney and I'm sure it scares away most of the talent around here.

Disney is NOT a popular organization in this town.

HopelessN00b

11:04 PM

@MichaelHampton Cool, I should tell our CIO about this, so he starts an initiative to eliminate PTR record use by us immediately. Could make us look unprofessional and all.

Michael Hampton

@HopelessN00b He put a resume up on Dice.com. His phone's been ringing off the table ever since.

@ewwhite OK, so it's not off a WiMax in the middle of nowhere, it's off a Time Warner connection in California. Only slightly below WTF status...

Adrian

@MichaelHampton That drives me nuts. People always remember their As, but not the PTRs.

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton Sheet, that'd do it. I gotta get around to putting together a respectable one of those one of these days. Probably give me more leverage in negotiating rate and such.

Adrian

@MichaelHampton pretty much. Let 4 others go to voicemail today. Need to call them back.

Some of them emailed me too and even sound halfway decent

HopelessN00b

0

Q: What's the best way to create a static backup of a website?

I have an old Joomla! site that I would like to convert to a static set of html pages (since it's not being updated anymore and I don't want the overhead of having a MySQL db running for something that is never updated). Is there a command-line tool that could basically crawl and download the en...

Shit, right?

Michael Hampton

11:07 PM

Yeah, you don't do that. You take away UPDATE privileges from the database user..

@ewwhite Now let's go see what their OTHER IP address looks like...

HopelessN00b

But it's not updated, so not a problem.

=D

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite So the other IP address is hosted at a place called ManagedWay in Detroit...

Adrian

@MichaelHampton Hmm. I bet Detroit is a good place to put a DC nowadays. Has to be lots of excess capacity there.

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton Actually, speaking of that, I need to call TWC up and ~~tell them they suck~~ request some customer service. That should be pretty quick, right?

Michael Hampton

Adrian

11:11 PM

My boss just got back from there and the place is damn near empty. You could bulldoze about 16 city blocks and nobody'd notice.

Michael Hampton

What's wrong with that picture?

84104

@MichaelHampton Windows 8

HopelessN00b

@Adrian As long as you don't mind your servers getting spray-painted with graffiti, it would be ideal.

84104

@HopelessN00b Flame decals make your server run faster.

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton Someone stole your Start button?

Adrian

11:12 PM

@HopelessN00b No worse than Seattle.

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton No, I got it. Your computer's surrendering to something. There's a white flag in the corner.

84104

@MichaelHampton Or did you mean how their site is https, but their css is http, so chrome's mixed content blocking is stopping the pretty?

Michael Hampton

@84104 Bingo!

@ewwhite You'll love this. "Build your cloud with us and isolate yourself from local power, network and security events."

HopelessN00b

Their little line about how the cloud isolates you from power, network and security events is pretty funny too.

Michael Hampton

We have 10 Gigabit uplinks into Tier 1 backbone providers ...and my connection came in via the longest cogent traceroute I've ever seen. It was like the Greyhound bus that stops in every single town along the way and takes forever.

Adrian

11:17 PM

GODDAMMIT GODDAMMIT.

Those schmucks overwrote my SPF record AGAIN.

Michael Hampton

@Adrian A stiletto in the ear will solve that.

Since you can't bring your gun to work...

Adrian

@MichaelHampton Exactly. But the schmucks are in Portland anyway.

Never Ever use IPNS for anything.

Or SiteSpecific

Or Anyone they own or operate.

Zoredache

@Adrian How are they able to mess up your DNS? Do you not run your own?

Adrian

@Zoredache No, they host the public master along with the web page. I can't control that, unfortuately.

The boss is getting pissed though, so I might be able to get that sorted out.

Zoredache

@Adrian Ah, how are they destroying a specific record? Do they actually manage the records as well? That seems like the type of thing that you would manage yourself via some control panel.

ewwhite

11:32 PM

@MichaelHampton Oooh, where?

Adrian

@Zoredache They change whatever the fsck they want to change.

And yeah, I have to go fix it in cPanel every time those assholes mess with it.

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite It's scrolled off; see above :)

ewwhite

Wow.

Michael Hampton

23 mins ago, by Michael Hampton

@ewwhite So the other IP address is hosted at a place called ManagedWay in Detroit...

WesleyDavid

@Adrian iPenis?

Zoredache

11:33 PM

@Adrian Silly questions, but you haven't given your developers access to that cpanel have you?

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite Oh, aside from the gems from their web site I posted above... there's this:
24x7x365
Is not
optional

Zoredache

@MichaelHampton bleah, are we making fun of that company since their front page has mixed http+https content on it?

Michael Hampton

@Zoredache No, we're making fun of them because they apparently had an outage yesterday (coincidentally at the same time as the EC2 event) which took down Barracuda spam filtering appliances.,

Zoredache

Ah

Michael Hampton

One of the really nice things about having a Linux box at your fingertips is GNU whois. "Oh, our vendor had a power outage..." clickety Now I know who your vendor is, and judging by their web site, I can't imagine why you would have ever done business with them in the first place.

Adrian

11:40 PM

@Zoredache My Devs are more well-behaved than their neckbeard over there. =)

That said, my Devs are stepping very carefully around me. This pleases me inordinately.

Journeyman Geek

lol

@MichaelHampton: hell yes.

Zoredache

@Adrian I forget did you have nagios or something setup? If they keep losing it I would be tempted to add an alert with repeats that spams their helpdesk.

Adrian

@Zoredache Ooh. That's a good one. No, all my monitoring is hand-written Python and Shell scripts that email me.

I've been allowed to investigate that again, but have no time for it yet.

@HopelessN00b And you want to know why I'm looking to jump ship? Boss just flip-flopped like Romney. Dude just decided to not move to CentOS and told me to look into a 180-day migration to Windows 7.

Ack!

Zoredache

@Adrian Well it shouldn't take more then a few minutes to hack up a quick python script then. Or maybe have of your devs do it.

Adrian

@Zoredache I was notified of the DNS change 3 minutes after it happened by one of the Python scripts. Doing that would involve dropping in maybe 2 lines of code.

Note; Vastnet.com is ALSO owned by these jerks.

Michael Hampton

11:46 PM

@JourneymanGeek To which statement was your hell yes?

Zoredache

@Adrian btw, don't let me bug you too much. I just like solving the technical problem. Even though it sounds like this is mostly a layer 8 issue.

Michael Hampton

@Adrian Distribute bind zone files via puppet?

Adrian

@Zoredache naw Dude. Seriously, if takes a lot to irritate me. You have to actually be mentally-ill or a user to irritate me. You guys DO get me more wound up though. =)

@Zoredache And an L8 issue that needs to be solved with a water cannon, I think.

Michael Hampton

@Adrian They don't let you near the clients, then?

Adrian

@MichaelHampton Not near the really ill ones. We're not trained for it. And I have a reputation that took a decade to mold.

Cranky. Mother. Fscker.

Michael Hampton

11:50 PM

If I wasn't allowed to do my job, I'd be cranky too.

Adrian

dammit. Their stupid Cpanel app insists on putting the cpanel machine's entry in the SPF record.

Michael Hampton

Oh god, you have to use cPanel for anything? I am so sorry.

Adrian

@MichaelHampton Not happy about it, but noone here can deal with anything better and trusting anything to 1 person is stupid for an organization standpoint.

What happens if I get sick? Yeah, I get a phone call.

Michael Hampton

Whatever it is, there has got to be a better way.

Adrian

And yet another reason I'm looking for a position on an IT team.

And not leading it.

I did get told today that I should change my resume' though. My position title is 'Network Administrator' and I need to put System Administrator in parentheses after that.

Joel E Salas

11:54 PM

@Adrian Say you're currently labeled "network administrator" but you want a "systems engineer" position

Michael Hampton

You're the poor sod who has to replace a cable somebody accidentally rolled over with their chair, then?

Adrian

@JoelESalas Yep. My responsibility is for everything, thus the 'network' in the title.

Joel E Salas

@Adrian Not sure what kind of crazy naming you guys have, but network involves routers and switches, not servers and applications

Adrian

@MichaelHampton I'm responsible for making sure it gets done. I have 2 hardware padawans and a software support padawan for that stuff.

Michael Hampton

And there's a router somewhere that you have to mangle?

Adrian

11:56 PM

@JoelESalas I know. The position used to be called "computer support specialist" and my boss used to have this position and likes flashy titles.

@MichaelHampton Which I'm also responsible for, though they'll all Linux servers.

Michael Hampton

Yeah, I guess you're a "Network" administrator, then. Though that wouldn't fly in a large network... Definitely add "System Administrator" in there somewhere.

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