The Comms Room

pauska

10:00

but what is there to protect against?

porn?

children mastrubate before they know what mastrubate is

Dan

@tombull89 Yeah, it's actually pretty clever. I have nothing against it from a child protection standpoint

tombull89

Although I think keylogging everything was a bit overkill. It was even used on the teachers machines.

Dan

@pauska No, it's primary purpose is actually child protection - stopping paedphiles and the like. Everything else is sort of secondary

@pauska And how dare you accuse of being American!

tombull89

@pauska If a child is actively seeking out such material is could point to issues at home. Physical, sexual, mental, abuse the schools have a responsibility to investigate.

RobM

That's the thing. The UK has laws around the "safe guarding" of students and that gives us a legal obligation to do our best to protect the students

Dan

10:04

And with the current media flurry, none of those responsibilities are going anywhere

tombull89

@Dan Even more with that guy eloping to france with a student.

Dan

@tombull89 Haha yeah, what the fuck was he thinking

Well, I know what he was thinking, but you know what I mean

tombull89

@Dan But he was arrested when he was trying to find a job. It sounded like they were going to make a go of it leaving everything behind and living over there.

Dan

@tombull89 Yep, he was going the whole hog

I get the impression he wasn't your average child molester - rather just stupidly fell for a young girl. Not that it excuses his behaviour, but I don't see him as predatory

RobM

Yeah, no excuse as you say, but he did something less malicious and more stupid

tombull89

10:10

@Dan No, I don't blame him fully. You can't (apparently) help who you fall in love with, but when she's 15, you're a teacher of hers and you're already married to someone else...really?! Stupid is indeed the word.

The fact he's ruined the rest of his life, career, and marriage for a couple of days...madness.

Dan

@tombull89 Yep - I had a girl who made it pretty clear she fancied me when I was working at the school. I was only 18, but it still made me very uncomfortable and I took all my child protection training to heart.

@tombull89 Exactly - we may not be able to fully control how we feel, but we absolutely can control how we act and react

tombull89

@Dan Same, I was 18 on my apprenticeship (in an all-girls school). Uncomfortable was certainly the word I would use.

Dan

@tombull89 Yeah, it's just....not right, is it? And so risky. We had a new teacher who left his old school near enough on the strength that it was his local school at home and he'd had girls pinch his bum in night clubs and stuff "for a laugh"

tombull89

@Dan I'll admit, I've bumped into students (current/ex) while out in town but I always have to remember to keep that "professional" teacher/pupil level.

Dan

@tombull89 Probably worse for us, too - because outside of work I was hanging around with people of a similar age. (Like I say, I was only just 18 when I started working)

tombull89

10:26

@Dan I think my age has both helped and hindered in my job. I get on quite well with the students but some staff don't take me as seriously as they could.

Journeyman Geek

@tombull89: you could just be like me and look older ;p

Dan

@tombull89 Yeah, I had the same problem.

Man, yesterday I didn't eat lunch until 2:00pm. Today I could happily eat the entire lot right now

RobM

man i could go back to bed right now

Dan

@RobM That too, but I pretty much always feel like that

RobM

yeah...

the prescription I'm on at the moment isn't helping, it really screws sleep patterns up

Dan

10:31

@RobM Offset it with cocaine

RobM

that's one way

tombull89

@Dan Could get expensive.

RobM

there is that.

Dan

@tombull89 Oh, you just have to steal stuff and then the habit is free

RobM

that'll end well

:-)

Dan

10:34

I've been catching up on Fresh Meat

Pretty impressed

RobM

Or get a job that pays me what I earn now but allows me to stay at home asleep while they mail me cheques.

i know, good luck with that, too

tombull89

@RobM Testing mattreses for Ikea?

RobM

there's a thought

note to vendors that like to deliver overly spammy emails: Annoying the postmaster for a domain and ignoring his request to stop the email overload is a fantastic way to get all your emails for the domain routed to /dev/nul

I'm still waiting to hear from that college, never mind ikea

Dan

@RobM I meant to ask about that - still waiting then

RobM

yup, I sent them an email follow up yesterday, nothing yet

Dan

10:44

:(

I don't like this modern trend of not notifying people either way, nowadays

RobM

yeah...

Dan

Fair enough at the first application phase, but after that how much effort is it to send a mail merge pre written "Thanks for applying, but..." letter

RobM

Actually I'm surprised. Their application process said that they would let people know, specifically to confirm they had destroyed all application form data as per their data protection statement

Dan

Maybe they are just deliberating then

Worst experience I ever had was West Midlands Ambulance Service when I attempted to start a career as an ambulance person

RobM

Mind you, given what I've seen so far, the lack of acknowledgement is about their level. There's a lot I didn't mention here in case they looked me up and found it on google, but the job might very well be that of the captain of the titanic if you see what i mean

Dan

10:47

Nothing hugely specific, just farcical from day one til I dropped out

RobM

@dan they just cocked everything up?

Dan

@RobM Ah

RobM

@dan I know that might sound a bit sour grapes, but I know for sure that there's something odd going on there.

Dan

@RobM Basically, it was phase 2 of a pilot of a brand new role in ambulance services. It was called "Emergency Care Assistant" and it was below, EMT, but you didn't need any formal medical qualifications so I thought it was a brilliant opportunity

RobM

sounds good

Dan

10:49

Spent about 6 months all in all, faffing about doing interviews and paperwork. I even had to do a formal ambulance driving test (Passed first time cos I'm ace). In the end, it turned out that they had been misreporting their ambulance weights to VOSA. When it came to light, and after all the faff, they gave me the chance to continue but I'd have to fund doing my category C (LGV) driving license myself, with NO guarantee of a job at the end

RobM

ffs.. bollocks to that

Dan

But even prior to that, it was just a mess - kept going on hold, I'd hear nothing for weeks then be told "Oh, you need to come here to do [this]"

RobM

what a mess

Dan

It upset me to be honest, because had they found out a few weeks later it's plausible I'd have been offered a job so they would have funded me. I really did like the idea of the career and I sort of regret that I couldn't pursue it

And who doesn't like the idea of driving an ambulance :D

RobM

yeah.. :-)

Dan

10:51

Just realised that must have been about 7 years ago now

RobM

long time ago now, then

Dan

Yeah, scary actually, don't know where my life has gone sometimes

Can't believe I can put "8 years experience" on my CV, now. Seems two minutes ago I was ranting about the "2 years experience required" bit on adverts

RobM

fantastic times with fantastic people of course

Dan

@RobM True that

RobM

heh wait until you're a worn out cynical bofh at 41 like me ;-)

Dan

10:53

:D

RobM

I can put 20 years experience down but as some of that involved operating punch cards...

Dan

Really don't know what I want to do with my career now. I was reading ewwwhite and MDMarra's posts yesterday about their ambition and I just don't have that anymore. I've spent 8 years working really really hard to get promoted and earn more money, but I do feel I'm at a point where I'm just okay with it now. I earn enough at my level and the work is interesting and challenging.

RobM

Well if you're happy, there's no rush to do anything. I'd keep an eye on where things are going though so you're somewhere in the middle of the pool.. that's why I purchased a mac a few years ago... wanted to get up to speed with them so I had more to my name than Windows admin and some vaguely remembered "unix for mainframes"

Dan

@RobM Oh yeah, I've far from stopped learnin

Got a VMWare VCP 5 book being delivered today

RobM

cool :-)

Dan

10:58

Just don't know how fussed I am about responsibility and promotion. I worry that much more and I'll have to do that worrying outside of hours thing :D

RobM

that'll keep you quiet for a while. We're looking for hyperV 3 training at the moment because that's almost certainly where things are going here

Dan

@RobM I had HyperV on my lab until this morning - got to learn some more VDI for an install in a couple of weeks

tombull89

I've not put Windows 8 on my desktop but I'll probably do it on my laptop just to get some expereince with it, and over the Christmas break put Server 2012 on my home machines to have a look with, mainly Hyper-V.

RobM

Well promotions... sooner or later you have to specialise, either in technical things or management things, imho. Even being a "generalist" is choosing to invest enough time in knowing 'just enough' about a range of things to be able to be the glue joining together a team of specialists, Or choosing to be a SME it manager

Dan

@RobM I think my last job put me off the non-technical streams

RobM

11:00

why?

Dan

I loved it in a lot of ways, but in the end, it was just like being a bloody UN delegate in a warzone. Just a constant battle of trying to be nice and keep people sweet

RobM

I can manage people and projects, but I'm always, or at least for the foreseeable future, going to be approaching that from the point of view of a technical person who can manage rather than a manager who can talk tech.

If nothing else, the bad stuff you see can be a playbook for what you *won't* do if you're in the chair running a department, or a project.

Dan

Very true

RobM

@dan I know what you mean, I used to feel that way, but even now as a senior sysadmin, I find myself spending at least as much time talking to people or groups as I do on the tools

whether its talking to user groups about requirements or justifying a project spend or training junior members of the team

Dan

@RobM Yeah, I love dealing with people. But it's nice to be able to say "Oh, you need to chat to your account manager about that" now

RobM

11:03

absolutely

but now i'm essentially the guy the account manager comes and talks to after he's talked to the customer.

Dan

I must admit, I think people skills are a lot more important than some techies appreciate.

RobM

and its just something i drifted into, so i'm saying it could just happen even if you don't seek it out

Dan

@RobM Yeah - I think I'm just feeling odd because I've not drifted anywhere since I started. I've always had a next step plan

RobM

well these days, even if you have someone on the team who's like the old sterotype of an IT geek who's not allowed to talk to actual customers because he's antisocial then all that really happens is the rest of the IT team become his customers

there's nothing wrong with a plan of "I'm comfortable here, so I'm just going to acquire knowledge, enjoy life and ponder my next step carefully" ;-)

Dan

@RobM Yeah I know :D Just feels odd

I'll just make sure to keep learning just incase someone wants to pay me a load of money

RobM

11:07

hell even "smoke weed every day" works as a life plan... if you're snoop dogg anyway

tombull89

@RobM "Doing a TomTom"

Dan

@RobM Seems to work for him :D

RobM

true enough :)

isn't he banned again?

Dan

Suspended, I believe, yes

I'd still love to meet him

RobM

I know. He's got to be a complete loon, hasn't he? Or he really is all the snark and bitterness in every sysadmin come to life inside a gollum or something. Which would still be interesting to meet, though possibly only from a distance

Dan

11:11

To be honest, my money is on the classic quiet mutterying IT stereotype

I reckon one or the other though, no middle ground.

RobM

could be...

but very bitter

Dan

Yeah#

I've got a good mate who is not dissimilar at times. Great bloke, but I absolutely cringe at the way he talks to people sometimes - he forgets that not everyone is as technical as him

The way I see it, is that I need less technical people else nobody would pay my wage

RobM

Yeah likewise, my 'assistant' here is like that. Good guy, great technically, but could start a fight in an empty room

without meaning to

Dan

My office makes me laugh

Because we're all consultants and, in theory at least, on equal standing - the rows when there is a disagreement are brilliant

tombull89

It's not just people skills us IT people need, it's common sense too.

Actually, more common sense in general would be good.

Dan

11:18

Yep, truth

Something I see all the time (And I'm guilty, too) is forgetting that IT is there to provide a service

RobM

yeah its a means to an end, not the end

hmm that's not bad... just got my pension statement

£15k lump sum and £21k pa from current pension when I retire

Dan

Pension.....pension.....pension

What's that then

RobM

you don't have anything in place?

Dan

@RobM Nope

I've got two tiny ones from before

RobM

doh

Dan

11:27

This is the downside of working for a very small company

RobM

yeah

Dan

Sometimes I worry, othertimes I realise that the pension age will almost certainly be 75 - 80 by the time I get there

RobM

true

of course we'll all be living to 120 by then too

Dan

Hope note

RobM

uh huh

SmallClanger

11:54

WTF support ticket of the day: "Someone keeps unplugging my internet cable as they say it makes noise that annoys them. Annoyingly to me they don’t put it back in before they leave so I have to clamber under my desk every morning to plug it back in. Could one of you have a look at this when you get time. "

Rqomey

Has @ewwhite been around today at all?

Dan

@Rqomey Nah

tombull89

@Rqomey Tends to be in later on.

Rqomey

@tombull89 thanks mate, I'll check in later

Dan

@SmallClanger Haha, I'd love to know the root cause

tombull89

11:57

@Dan Still on dial-up. Beep beep beep beeep ksssssshhsst. Click. Etc.

RobM

@smallclanger clearly the answer is to shoot the user who's hearing things

they'll stop hearing things, they'll stop unplugging things, case closed, everyone happy

SmallClanger

@Dan Just spoke to the guy and apparently it's legitimate. One guy leaves at 5.30 and the guy next to him has been unplugging his network lead because his network card makes a high-pitched beep on the edge of hearing range in time with the activity LED.

No sign of the noise at the moment, so I've asked him to grab me at the end of today.

RobM

weird

Dan

@SmallClanger To be fair, it'd probably annoy me. Swap network card, job done!

RobM

yeah if its legit, probably some circuit board component on its way out

SmallClanger

12:03

Yeah, I can understand that driving someone nuts. It's on on-board NIC, though. will have to disable it and dig out a spare PCI card.

Dan

Desolder the LED

My laptop now gets so hot that there a bits you can't touch

Think a strip down is in order

SmallClanger

@dan Did you buy a mil-spec one by mistake with a thermite self destruct mechanism?

Dan

@SmallClanger That'd be awesome

ewwhite

@Rqomey I've been sleeping... finally.

And I just realized that tzselect is a command!! Thanks to serverfault.com/a/450444/13325

Since RHEL 6, I've been manually linking the zonefiles.

SmallClanger

@ewwhite Much easier with Debian. just type: dpkg-reconfigure -reconfigure tz-configuration --I've-typed-configure-too-many-times-and-the-word-has-lost-all-meaning...

ewwhite

12:13

@Dan What you're saying about ambition is not a bad thing. I may have a bit of A.D.D., but I've spent my entire career managing multiple environments. Going from that to one company never worked well for me. But I'm also damaged from being fired a few times and being in some unhealthy work situations... so part of that ambition is an attempt to protect myself financially.

Rqomey

12:45

@ewwhite Hi mate, about serverfault.com/questions/449988/… Is the performance issue reproducible?

ewwhite

not sure... I think it's a VMWare tools issue

and since I tend to keep up-to-date, I've probably run into a bug.

pauska

have you checked the local event log on the vm's?

you could be encountering the same problems as I do (RPC storm)

ewwhite

@pauska didn't look yet

Rqomey

@ewwhite I was going to suggest checking esxtop, there may be another world running, this wouldn't report in your guest

or procmon of course, in the guest, just to be sure

Dan

13:00

2

A: Capture CCTV Camera over TV Tuner PCI Card

This answer comes from: Record from VHS Tapes in AskUbuntu.com Using this process you can capture anything coming to your computer directly in the TV Tuner PCI/USB Card and it provides support for both PAL and/or NTSC formats. Good luck! Sorry, this is going to be quite long. First of all w...

@ewwhite Fair points!

ewwhite

Plus, I like $$$

Dan

@ewwhite Me too, but also the time and energy to spend

ewwhite

@dan in the USA, there's no job loyalty... I used to work next door to the McDonald's corporate headquarters. At some point, they outsourced almost all of their corporate IT.

And it was a sad sight...

tombull89

@Dan He's the author of the same post on AU.

Dan

@tombull89 To be completely honest, I forgot AU was a SE site so I didn't even click

pauska

13:19

RobM

It's @WesleyDavid

pauska

RobM

emo kitteh

Dan

theregister.co.uk/2012/11/20/…

RobM

oh....my...

Basil

13:29

morning

MikeyB

MikeyB, Thanks. We lost hope on recovering the data. Our server hosting is not able to provide us with consultant or advanced help. Actually we have not issued any pvcreate command after we upgrade the server. I think the server guys did something wrong when they upgraded the server. Anyways. Thanks for all the help. I will be configuring a new logical volume. Hope I can ask for help if what I am planning to do is right. — Jan Mark yesterday

I suspected as much

Scott Pack

@voretaq7 Do you keep trying to call me?

Dan

At my old job we had a nifty little VNC client that used psexec to install remotely meaning you could VNC to any machine you had admin rights on. Anyone got anythign similar?

Scott Pack

Fucking Sophos quarantined psexec for me. Jerkfaces.

tombull89

@Dan There's eleventy billion VNC packages - although none ring a bell with machine deployment.

It would probably be quite quick to do it yourself with psexec. Then again given the number of switched with psexec, maybe not.

ewwhite

13:40

Infographic...

The Rise of Coding

Dan

@tombull89 Yeah, I've got too much on to faff with it

I will at some point

MDMarra

@Basil I WIN

tombull89

that...was unexpected.

MDMarra

?

Scott Pack

@tombull89 So's the Spanish Inquisition.

MDMarra

13:48

I missed it :(

-5

Q: How to use Windows Active Directory Server Publically

Hi i have a windows server 2008 which has a public ip i wish to connect all my employees Laptops on the network of that server but couldn't find any doc relevant to that !!

windows-server-2008

^ This guy's so weird

Basil

@MDMarra :(

tombull89

@MDMarra An image that reaslised it was being hotlinked and goatse-rickrolled me.

3

as you do.

MDMarra

I tell him it's a bad idea, he asks me to guide him. I said no, that's too broad, he says he asked for a guide

Scott Pack

@MDMarra You're too old to understand.

Dan

@ewwhite I can't get over the broken XML at the bottom, sorry

MDMarra

13:49

@ScottPack ok

Scott Pack

@MDMarra Old man.

MDMarra

:(

I partly think that guy is trolling

pass

tombull89

GOD DAMMIT THE URL DOES THE SAME THING.

Dan

God damn - every time Linux fucks me cos I used the wrong case in a word I want to burn things

MDMarra

0

Q: How to specify port setting in security constraint in web.xml file of java ee application

For some reason i want to specify port setting here so can you please tell me is there any markup available to mention port here <security-constraint> <web-resource-collection> <web-resource-name>securedapp</web-resource-name> <url-pattern>/*<...

java https

^Wouldnt that have been on-topic for SO?

tombull89

13:55

@MDMarra I'd say yes, but it's a shitty question nevertheless.

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