The Comms Room

TheCleaner

13:00

@ewwhite - so my new company hosts their servers with AOS. I hope your company doesn't charge what they do...I shake my head everytime I read one of the contracts I'm going through.

Chris S

Well it depends on your scale. Smaller clusters of a <100 nodes, the warranty is very important. Large clusters expect failure on a regular basis and simply plan to buy replacement servers/parts as they go.

ewwhite

@TheCleaner AOS?

TheCleaner

yes...?

RobM

@TheCleaner Dell will warranty their high end server and storage for 7 years. The price of the final few years is not... pleasant... But they'll do it.

But yeah it seems like an odd question to ask in the first place.

TheCleaner

Sorry @RobM and @ChrisS - my comment was more like "if you can't easily research warranty coverage on your hardware, do you really think you being involved in building HA clusters is the wisest choice of human resources for the project?" ;)

RobM

13:08

ah. And yes, you're right

File under "If you have to ask how then you don't"

Chris S

I'm surprised that someone who can't work HP, Dell, IBM's websites had the brain power to ask on SF.

RobM

to be fair, Dell and HP's websites are both mazes of twisty passages, all alike. And all leading to "we're sorry but that information has moved to $dead link"

MDMarra

@Dan Clones/templaes/single pane of glass

It's not a lot, but it's worth it to some people

Oh, and SnS

ewwhite

System call usage summary for 32 bit mode:
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
 33.71    0.579832           5    114704           read
 23.99    0.412569           4    105975           _llseek
 15.25    0.262297           5     57576           fcntl64
 10.04    0.172685           4     45180           rt_sigprocmask
  7.37    0.126806           5     24220           poll
  6.45    0.110996          20      5671           write

MDMarra

By the way, La Salle killed Boise State last night!

ewwhite

13:13

that's for 10 seconds of work on a Linux system

I probably need to go to stack overflow

MDMarra

Very shortly, I will be reinstalling my work laptop with windows 8

It's been nice knowing you guys. I assume it will take me at least 6 months to figure out how to get back into chat

This estimate is based on how long it took me to figure out how to log off of server 2012 yesterday

tombull89

@MDMarra Get a spare machine with YouTube access - you'll need it.

MDMarra

I still have an iPhone

I'll survive

Actually getting a work iPhone on Friday :D

No more phone bill for meeeeee

Chris S

Work can reimburse me, I'll not carry one of their though.

MDMarra

Why not?

Crummy usage policy?

HopelessN00b

13:21

@MDMarra Heh. My favorite thing about Server 2012 was the pop-up box I got the other day telling me to tap it to pull up some menu. I laughed, I cried, I died a little inside.

Chris S

I had a friend who did that, switched to a work iPhone. Then the company went under, stopped paying their bills and she couldn't get her phone number released.

RobM

doh

Chris S

Also 1. Our work phones have a 500 minute plan (or something like that); with 2 GB data, and some number of text messages. My personal plan is 100% unlimited everything. 2. They pay about $60/month per phone for what they get, I pay less. But I still get "reimbursed" the $60. 3. They use iPhones.... I'm an Android sort of person.

MDMarra

@ChrisS That's not a bad deal. I'm not responsible for overages so the actual plan doesn't matter to me

Chris S

I don't think I would go over, or not often, and I wouldn't have to pay for it, but I'd have to explain it.

A: You went over on your minutes by 12,000 minutes last month
Me: Well I was talking to one of my friends... She's going through a rough patch.
A: Aren't you married?
Me: The 5 pound bag of M&Ms is your favorite, right?

2

jscott

13:28

@MDMarra shutdown -l and logoff still work just as expected in 2012 :)

HopelessN00b

@jscott It's just much harder to figure out how to pull up a windows that lets you type those commands into it. :)

jscott

@HopelessN00b Windows +R still pulls up the "Run" dialog, just like XP/2003/2008

I'll concede that the "hover here" shit is completely unintuitive.

Chris S

@jscott It wont be an administrative prompt.

WinKey+X -> Command Prompt (Admin)

HopelessN00b

@ChrisS Yeah, that's the other thing. Since you need to run everything elevated to actually do anything, why the $#%@ isn't that the default behavior? Stupid MS.

Chris S

I find myself using WinKey+X alot in Win8/2012

RobM

13:33

I find myself installing "start is back" in windows 8

jscott

Do you need elevation for logoff?

tombull89

4

Chris S

Apparently not for logoff, wasn't sure when you asked....

I'm still a little mad at Allie for abandoning her site; but I guess money changes people, and she's apparently had depression issues for a long time that she's "dealing with"

MDMarra

@HopelessN00b UAC

That's not new to Server 2012

And it's good, imo

jscott

I'm not any sort of 2012 expert though, I'm intentionally avoiding the tile things. Once on, I pull up the Desktop (app?) and get elevated powershell and carry on from there.

Chris S

13:37

@jscott Yeah, "desktop" is more or less an app...

HopelessN00b

@MDMarra Good idea, shit execution. There are easier ways to train everyone in the world to click through every security dialogue. :/

MDMarra

It does more than prompt for elevation

It does process and session isolation as well

which is arguably just as important

anyway, about to reboot to install win8

byebye

tombull89

so What Have You Tried? is now blocked if posting as a comment...

Michael Hampton

@tombull89 Really? WTF?

Chris S

OSX Peeps - Does the MS RDP Client open .rdp files? Support TS Gateway? Anyone know what version of the protocol it supports?

Michael Hampton

13:40

Fine, I'll just vote the questions NARQ instead.

tombull89

@ChrisS Does NOT support a gateway.

HopelessN00b

What have you tried? — HopelessN00b 23 secs ago

Chris S

@tombull89 O_o

HopelessN00b

Seems to not be blocked to me.

Michael Hampton

@HopelessN00b I don't see any such comment?

Stack Exchange

13:42

Standalone Sysadmin: How do you manage database server instances?

posted on March 21, 2013 by Matt Simmons

One of the many differences I've noticed with this infrastructure versus the others I've dealt with is that our database instances here aren't centralized at all. If a specific service (such as a website on a specific web server - we don't really centralize those either) needs a database, the database lives on that machine. [...]

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton I deleted it after posting to chat.

It wasn't precisely on point, and honestly, I don't want to get into another "herp derp, halp me fix tha things!!!!" question anyway.

tombull89

27

A: "What have you tried" epidemic

I agree - these are getting old. If the question's really missing something, either down-vote / close / flag or take the time to explain what is missing. Starting now, comments that consist of nothing but "what have you tried" are blocked completely, and comments that consist of little more than...

Maybe it's just a SO thing.

Chris S

@tombull89 Do you know of any apps that do support RDP 6.0+, TS Gateway, and opening a .rdp file?

tombull89

@ChrisS no, sorry. Once we found that it didn't support a gateway we quietly tossed out that idea as no-one was going to use a Mac from home anyway.

Oliver Salzburg

Can someone recommend a continuous backup solution for Windows Server that works locally? I've looked at several solution now but they all want to "interact with the cloud"

HopelessN00b

13:48

@OliverSalzburg A what, now?

Oliver Salzburg

@HopelessN00b Continuous backup. In contrast to snapshot based backup

Like CrashPlan, which I tried to get working on this system for weeks :P

tombull89

Volume Shadow Copies?

Chris S

@OliverSalzburg Like "Windows Server Backup", which comes with Windows?

Michael Hampton

@ChrisS Since when did they add continuous backup?

Oliver Salzburg

@ChrisS I've only used that for snapshot-based backups so far. I was not aware it could do continuous

Chris S

13:50

@OliverSalzburg CrashPlan isn't Continuous... It takes snapshots at regular intervals.

@MichaelHampton I don't know of any backup solution that's "Continuous"

HopelessN00b

@ChrisS Yeah, this was my confusion too.

Michael Hampton

@ChrisS R1Soft CDP

Continuous data protection

Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. It allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time. CDP is a service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location. There are multiple methods for capturing the continuous changes involving different technologies that serve different needs. CDP-based solutions can provide fine granularities of restorabl...

Oliver Salzburg

@ChrisS Their product description disagrees, but I didn't come to argue about that ;D

Chris S

@OliverSalzburg Marketing and the technical truth rarely agree

RobM

@chriss @tombull89 iTap does what you want

Michael Hampton

13:52

@OliverSalzburg I suggest starting with Wikipedia's list. Several programs listed there have this feature.

Chris S

@MichaelHampton I understand the concept, I just don't know of any software that actually implements it.

@RobM I'll check it out. Thanks!

Oliver Salzburg

@MichaelHampton I am already looking at a list and I already evaluated 3 products from that list and none were satisfactory. Which is why I decided to poll this room :)

This list: backupcentral.com/wiki/index.php/…

HopelessN00b

@OliverSalzburg Guess we don't know any better than you do, then. Though, for what it's worth, data retention and management hell.

Oliver Salzburg

Well, thanks anyway :)

Chris S

@MichaelHampton I've got the feeling that list was compiled from Marketing information... I know as of a few months ago that CrashPlan didn't install anything into Windows where it would be aware of every disk write...

Michael Hampton

13:56

@ChrisS Yeah, well, "every 15 minutes" is not quite "continuous" but it's often good enough.

Chris S

And in reviewing their Marking BS, their "Continuous" feature is just local caching of the incremental backups which are transferred to the "cloud" when a connection is available.

@MichaelHampton Well if we're going to throw Windows Backup aside for not being "continuous" when you can configure it for the same settings as software that advertises itself as "continuous" then we're just being arbitrary.

ewwhite

@chriss @MichaelHampton I use R1soft CDP heavily here.

Oliver Salzburg

@MichaelHampton Pretty sure the 15 minute thing is a limitation of the free version, in case that makes a difference

Chris S

@ewwhite Works well I assume? Actually continuous?

ewwhite

In fact, I just started a filesystem snapshot/copy at a produce company a moment ago

Chris S

14:01

@OliverSalzburg Unless something's changed fairly recently, no.

ewwhite

@ChrisS it's a very efficient kernel module that can take point-in-time copy-on-write snapshots.

Oliver Salzburg

Oh hey, I actually was on the R1soft website already today: r1soft.idera.com

Count the amount of times "free" appears on that page :P

ewwhite

it's Idera now, and I use the hell out of the hot-copy driver.

Oliver Salzburg

@ChrisS Maybe you need to update, I don't know

Or maybe explore the settings some more :D

ewwhite

Think of R1soft's product as being able to capture the state of a Linux system the same way VSS does on Windows.

Chris S

14:03

@OliverSalzburg Or Marketing got a hold of the UX people and told them it needed to appear Continuous.... I'm extremely skeptical of such things.

MikeyB

@MichaelHampton Just store everything in a database and do log shipping. Problem solved! /sunglasses

Oliver Salzburg

@ChrisS Under Settings -> Backup, I have the option to set "Frequency and versions" which is set to 15 minutes by default. Personally, I have the increased to only run once an hour because I don't need a backup of my files every minute while I'm working on them :P

But I hardly know enough about the product to argue if it's actually continuous or not. I'm just interested in the aspect that it basically runs all the time and produces a continuous "timeline" of versions

And "continuous" may only be a marketing term in this context, but it seems like it's uniformly applied to the same concept across available backup solutions, so I adopted it :)

ewwhite

@OliverSalzburg yes, it does

tombull89

?!

just went from minus 30 seconds to 0, and then is counting up from there.

Michael Hampton

> P.S. As a humorous aside, if this question gets down-voted, closed or voted to be closed as non-constructive, I will probably kill myself. You will have blood on your hands.

RobM

14:13

what question is that?

jscott

2

Q: Correct way to update Google Chrome MSI through Group Policy

I am deploying Chrome through group policy. This is working fine. Obviously Chrome has a pretty regular update cycle. I am not allowing Domain Users to install Chrome updates. Having subscribed to the release blog, and downloaded/tested a new release MSI, what is the "correct" way to deploy a C...

RobM

ah

He's got a real dilemma on his hands there given how frequently chrome is updated.

Chris S

@OliverSalzburg You must not be a SysAdmin =/

jscott

We use the Coporate MSI and just let the Update service do it's thing. ;)

Chris S

Just finished scanning through the latest CrashPlan, no file system filters (ie, no CDP, only incremental)

Oliver Salzburg

14:19

@ChrisS I'm actually more of a programmer. But in that regard, I also used terms like Ajax and people were like "OMG IT'S XHR YOU NEWB LOL!!!" So, meh.

Chris S

@jscott Wouldn't the user have to be a local admin thought?

@OliverSalzburg Programmers aren't grumpy like SysAdmins. To be a SysAdmin it's required that you die a little every time you hear a user using a marking definition for a technical term.

Iain

7

woo hoo

Chopper3

@Iain well done :)

jscott

@ChrisS All the Google update services run as Local System. And we have per-user installs disabled via GP.

Chris S

@jscott Oh, that is pretty well designed then. I'm mildly impressed.

ewwhite

14:23

@Iain mmhmmm

Iain

So, someone just flagged the automagic Let us continues the discussion in chat comment.. as too chatty :(

@Chopper3 cheers - how're you feeling ?

jscott

@ChrisS There's also a Mozilla Maintenance Service running as Local System, but I'm not sure how frequently it updates Firefox.

Chopper3

@Iain good thanks, radiation from Monday though so that may change

Iain

@Chopper3 Will the radiotherapy affect you like the chemo did ?

Chopper3

@Iain different, tired yes, 'sunburnt' yes - the other ide effects vary from person to person

MikeyB

14:27

Illegal is awesome: gawker.com/5991667

jscott

@MikeyB internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html

MikeyB

@jscott Yeah, saw that yesterday. Pretty awesome.

jscott

That must have take some serious cojones to pull that off.

Oliver Salzburg

@ChrisS Heheh, thanks for the heads-up ;)

Mathias R. Jessen

o.O ... I just brought down an SQL Cluster with procmon

3

tombull89

14:41

@jscott, Luckily, Windows has WSUS to manage updates. And Ninite Pro makes updating of Flash and Adobe relatively painless.

jscott

@tombull89 The Google Update service makes updating Chrome (et al) painless as well :)

tombull89

@jscott well, when we're sat in our office doing very little then we'll look at it. In the meantime we've got bigger things to worry about

MikeyB

14:56

Dan

Got a mate who needs to build a single node ESXi server with no shared storage. Doesn't need need much space, it' sjust to run a couple of TS boxes - will 4x 146GB 10k SAS drives in RAID10 do the trick do you think?

gravyface

@Dan how many TS users? There's a good MS paper out there that talks about requirements for TS (RDS) and classifies users as typical/heavy knowledge workers, takes into account "heavy" usage like opening a full-screen powerpoint presentation, video/audio, etc. and breaks it down by RAM/KB/s/CPU/I/O requirements per user.

anyone here using Nagios/Zenoss/Zabbix for Windows Server monitoring?

MikeyB

@Dan Yeah… depending on workload :p Presumably it'll have a proper RAID card with flash cache and all that. Put gobs of memory in it for read cache - memory is dirt cheap.

Dan

@gravyface Well, this is part of the problem - his boss, is, uh insane. At the moment the usage is very light (I forget the software, but they're logging in to run the client side of some business application). The vendor quoted him 2x 1TB 7.2k SATA drives in RAID1 which I didn't feel was the way forward

gravyface

@Dan show that paper to the boss.

if you're not doing what MS recommends, then... uh..

Dan

15:09

@gravyface They don't do what anyone recommends

Iain

@Dan they need to pay more for $consultants then

Dan

@Iain When my friend joined they didn't have a single legit MS license in the building....

tombull89

@Dan nice

Tanner

@gravyface I've been poking at Windows using Nagios but nothing complete, just a few things our current monitoring system doesn't cover that I want to check up on.

MikeyB

@HopelessN00b TROLOLOLOL you poor bastard

tombull89

15:12

@HopelessN00b SAP?

HopelessN00b

@MikeyB Meh. I Figure it'll provide some good stories, and I might get see a SAN catch fire before I find a new job. Could be worse.

Dan

@tombull89 The place isn't my cup of tea, far too random, but my mate seems to enjoy the challenge. He's got them legit now, at least

HopelessN00b

SAP AG

SAP AG is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Germany, with regional offices around the world, SAP is in the market of enterprise applications in terms of software and software-related service. The company's best-known software products are its enterprise resource planning application (SAP ERP), its enterprise data warehouse product – SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HAN...

tombull89

Sybase? NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE.

MikeyB

@Dan Aren't 300GB drives the same price or cheaper than 146GB?

Dan

15:15

@MikeyB I'm....not sure

HopelessN00b

@tombull89 Essentially, hugely expensive and resource-hungry software for "business intelligence," resource management/planning and forecasting. It's a bitch and a half even when you do it right.

MikeyB

IBM 2.5" SAS 10K drives: $190-ish for 300GB, $170-ish for 146GB

SmallClanger

@MikeyB Similar for HP. for 10k, there's no point in 146GB in new systems. (Still a big markup for 15k, though)

HopelessN00b

@SmallClanger Kinda depends, actually. We may as well load up our SAN with 146's, since our bottleneck is on IOPS, not capacity.

MikeyB

146GB 15K: $210-ish.

SmallClanger

15:20

@HopelessN00b Sure, if you need the spindles, but if the price difference is, say < $5, is there any benefit to sticking with smaller disks?

MDMarra

Gentlemen, I come to you from Windows 8!

MikeyB

@SmallClanger Penalty, actually. Short-stroke the bigger ones.

SmallClanger

@MikeyB Point.

HopelessN00b

@SmallClanger Cheap-ass boss, not wanting to hear shit about why there's all this unused capacity, too. Not every reason is a technical reason.

SmallClanger

@HopelessN00b Also a point :)

MikeyB

15:22

Wow, a GIS for 'short stroking' turns up lots of hard drive and gun pictures. And:

2

jscott

@MDMarra Do you have a touch-enabled device?

MDMarra

negative

jscott

That sucks

I keep finding new things in 2012 that are "nice" but I haven't found anything outstanding. The DHCP clustering thing is close.

SmallClanger

@MikeyB Isn't that what the Carna Botnet research came up with? Turns out the internet is mostly nazis and kittens.

HopelessN00b

@SmallClanger And porn. Don't forget porn. NEVER forget the porn.

SmallClanger

15:25

I'm calling him "Kitler"

MikeyB

@jscott Wow… we've only had that in isc-dhcpd for 10 years now.

gravyface

@Tanner yeah, we've been using N-Able, tried Kaseya, etc. etc. and none of them deliver what they promise: best practices on monitoring windows events. I don't want to have to sift through 1000s and 1000s of possible event IDs to include the ones I truly care about and if the commercial (expensive) monitoring systems are not going to deliver, I'm going open source and customizing it myself.

SmallClanger

Though he's more of a cute, ginger Goebels

MDMarra

@MikeyB yeah, it's not clustering, it's HA DHCP without failover clusterin

Which has also been in dhcpd forever

Still, doesn't make it any less exciting in the windows world

@jscott what about dedupe?

Tanner

@gravyface Oh you're worried about the event logs? I never did find a solution for that.

MikeyB

15:28

@MDMarra failover clustering → lease replication?

MDMarra

ya

tombull89

@MDMarra Excellent. Now turn your machine off.

jscott

@MDMarra Yeah, I'm not sure what we'll see there, we have block-level dedupe on our SANs. And our remaining physical servers are dwindling.

Tanner

@gravyface I don't know of a product that will say "Yo, this is the important stuff. Ignore all the rest of Windows whining and look at this event." You'll probably have to set up the filtering yourself.

MikeyB

@MDMarra I know that's also in isc-dhcp… not sure when it was added.

ewwhite

15:30

@Dan oooh, single-host ESXi

MikeyB

@gravyface splunk?

Dan

@ewwhite Everyone's favourite

Jacob

@tombull89 We have servers in the UK now :)

ewwhite

@MikeyB 300GB drives are the new sweet-spot. Manufacturers aren't making the 146's any longer.

MikeyB

@ewwhite We do that a lot for small clients, but not for friggin' terminal server. On 1TB SATA disks.

Jacob

15:30

Hi all

ewwhite

@Dan I have plenty of them out there.

@mdmarra has even worked on some!

tombull89

@Jacob \o/ that was quick

gravyface

@Tanner the funny thing is, they all say, "we work closely with Microsoft to deliver best practices..." or "we have worked with our customers to tailor the monitoring..."

MDMarra

@ewwhite ?

Jacob

@tombull89 I partnered with a friend who owns BigBrainGlobal networks, he already had gear in the UK

ewwhite

15:32

@MDMarra Time's a wastin'! ⌚ I need OUs configured!

Dan

@MikeyB What's wrong with doing it for TS?

MikeyB

@Dan That should have been one sentence.

gravyface

I'm not talking about monitoring events for $obscureApp, I'm talking about event ID 55 (Ntfs volume corrupted), Exchange threshold space exceeded, dismounted, etc., Security events like a user was added to the Domain Administrators group, failed login for administrator, etc. Stuff that everyone cares about, low-hanging important event IDs, etc.

tombull89

@Jacob what's your site again? I work with a couple of guys who might also be interested.

gravyface

@Tanner and if I have to compile my own list of event IDs, then I'm not paying $1000 a month to do it.

Dan

15:34

@MikeyB Ah, yes

Jacob

@tombull89 We're in a transition period right now, so tell them to expect changes,but Minerhost.com

Tanner

@gravyface If you find something that doesn't suck, ping me?

gravyface

@Tanner for sure.

@Tanner I'd like to ask this as an SF question, but it'll probably get shot down as "shopping".

MikeyB

@Jacob Oh, nifty!

Jacob

@MikeyB Yeah, my new position is director of BigBrain Gaming, and I have a small share of ownership

MDMarra

15:40

@ewwhite some of us have real jobs!

MikeyB

@gravyface nxlog.org ?

whistles

Olipro

if you want a cheap VPS... lowendbox.com

Chris S

How the F does 5 IPv6 Address work? Why not 8 so it's a clean boundary??

Olipro

what?

are you saying someone's dishing out a range?

ewwhite

@MDMarra When can you do it?

MikeyB

15:47

@ChrisS They're not giving you a range, they're just putting you on the same /64 as everyone else probably.

MDMarra

@ewwhite tonight

I'll create the OUs, UPNs suffixes, the users, and the mailboxes

Olipro

@MikeyB well yeah... it has to either be onlink or use static ND entries

Jacob

@ChrisS what are you talking about?

Adrian

mornin gents

tombull89

Ah, @HopelessN00b, that "what have you tried" filter is only on SO. The rest of SE is untainted.

ewwhite

15:54

@MDMarra maybe just the users. I'll handle addresses with Exchange address rules. I may separate the users to different databases.

Jacob

@Adrian Good afternoon Adrian :)

Adrian

@Jacob Ain't quite yet, unless you're a Newfie.

Jacob

@Adrian Do/Have you seen Stargate SG-1?

tombull89

New trailer for Star Trek - Into Darkness out today. Looks quite good.

HopelessN00b

@tombull89 Probably only a matter of time, though. The rest of SE was untainted by the review audits for a while too.

Adrian

15:55

@Jacob Actually, I'm old enough to have taken my girlfriend out to see the movie when it opened in '94. =)

Jacob

@Adrian I meant the TV series :P

Adrian

@Jacob Yes, I know. And my GF (now ex-wife) always had a huge Richard Dean Anderson crush, so I've probably seen all the episodes at least 3-4 times.

Jacob

@Adrian I just seem to remember the character Adrian Conrad everytime you appear, but he was evil... Oh Wait, Nevermind.

Adrian

Hey now, I'm simply misunderstood.

Let's call it Chaotic Neutral.

voretaq7

@Adrian my desk is chaotic. We're still not sure if it's good, neutral, or evil though.

3

Jacob

15:59

russian accent GLORIOUS UNION.

Adrian

@voretaq7 Any help desk should be chaotic good. If it's lawful good, it tends to lapse into being policy-driven instead of business needs.

Tanner

I started out chaotic good, heading towards evil mighty quick though...

HopelessN00b

@Tanner Yeah, I think these days I'm apathetic-evil, leaning towards alcoholic-burnout.

Adrian

Blergh. I'm skipping the meeting.

Tanner

Although, I think I'm also slowly going from chaotic to lawful at the same time. I'm getting evil for reasons now. There are rules.

I was already an alcoholic-burnout some time ago. Got that one covered...

Adrian

16:03

Waste of my time at this point. Honestly, even if they toss a 12-hour/week bone my way to keep me from being actually unemployed, I'd rather be not getting a paycheck than staggering into work once a week and having to act like everything was still peachy keen.

voretaq7

@Adrian All desks start out lawful. As they mature they become chaotic.

(really, it's in the monster manual!)

Adrian

@voretaq7 You're right. I'd forgotten about that. I used to have an old copy of that hanging around. Gave it to one of my ex-GFs who was a gamer.

voretaq7

Office D&D... NPCs are desks, the coffee pot, the copy machine, the Fax Of Doom, the electric stapler...

Adrian

@voretaq7 What about the dogs brought in by staff? NPCs or player characters?

voretaq7

@Adrian Smart dog, or stupid dog?

Adrian

16:08

@voretaq7 mostly little yappy dogs. not sure of actual intelligence.

they rotate through via a sign-up sheet

voretaq7

@Adrian NPCs. Favorite prey of the shredder.

Adrian

i'll buy that

I need to start working with Tomcat. Mot of the job I've been looking at want several years of experience managing it.

voretaq7

16:42

Adrian

@voretaq7 Yeah, not that kind, unfortunately.

voretaq7

I heard you're working with Tomcat, so I used a Tomcat to blow up your Tomcat.
You're welcome.

Adrian

16:54

Heh. I'm always a step or two behind on the memes.

I did get confirmation that I'm not alone in thinking that management stepped on their schlong. Company that prides themselves on actually innovating hired a bunch of middle management from Microsoft.

MDMarra

You'd think there'd be decent support when calling Microsoft partner network support

not the case

Chris S

@MDMarra Yeah, no... It's only marginally better than calling the 800 number

jscott

Much like having HP field support show up, only to have them waiting on hold with HP phone support.

WesleyDavid

@voretaq7 Thunderbirds are GO!!

@MDMarra Now we're getting somewhere.

@voretaq7 Yo dawg I heard you like Tomcat so I got TomTom to tell you how stupid you are while Tom O'Connor throws load balanced handsets at your head!

@MDMarra Oh and if you can use get-content -wait to actually show a log file's contents as they're written, i.e. just like all the PowerShell wing nuts say it can but in reality it doesn't, I will bear hug you so hard.

Chris S

17:16

@Jacob The first host listed on lowendbox.com, you get 5 IPv6 addresses.. Seems like it would be a lot easier to give customers 8

WesleyDavid

@ChrisS Sounds like a strange holdover in thinking from IPv4.

Chris S

Nice site though.... I've been torn between dumping my current VPS and using it for secondary DNS/MX/etc. I just wasn't sure if that was worth $10/mo; or $5 if I drop back to the 64MB plan. But if I can get a KVM or XEN host with 128MB for <$5/mo, it's probably worth it.

@WesleyDavid Probably. Especially since most places with just a /64 could give away 32 or 64 addresses to every one of their customers for the next 100 years and never run out.

MikeyB

@ChrisS If you give someone 32 addresses, they'll try to use them all.

Chris S

@MikeyB Good; when they "run out" they can buy another block of 32 =]

I'm all for finding ways to charge idiots extra

HopelessN00b

17:31

@Adrian Not sure how good a thing that is. A) Middle Management, so it's not like that's a particularly innovative field to begin with, and B) Microsoft, post-Gates hasn't exactly been great with innovation anyway. They seem to just be taking the worst ideas from other successful companies and somehow making them even worse at Redmond.

Adrian

@HopelessN00b Yeah. Exactly. For the first time ever yesterday, the non-fulltime staff were referred to as "the contractors" with unspoken overtones of "mere" preceding it.

WesleyDavid

@Adrian Sounds like things went downhill fast all of a sudden.

Adrian

@WesleyDavid Yeah. That, and we were too busy kicking ass & taking names to realize that the mgmt. was busy screwing it up while we were busy delivering solutions.

HopelessN00b

@WesleyDavid Yeah, a great manager might not be able to boost a company into the stratosphere, but a really bad one can sure put a company into a deep, dark pit of no return.

WesleyDavid

@Adrian So these people were very recently hired? By whom and for why?

Adrian

17:37

@WesleyDavid One was new. The other was supposed to be managing us, but wasn't actually doing anything. Apparently doing nothing was better than what we are getting.

WesleyDavid

@Adrian How big is this company?

Adrian

@WesleyDavid Was ~100 a couple years ago. ~300 now.

WesleyDavid

@Adrian Oh okay - for some reason I was thinking it was a small < 50 person A-team of consultants at a boutique firm.

Adrian

used to be.

WesleyDavid

And how many people are negatively effected by this turn of events? I'm trying to see how quickly the downturn and exodus of consultants will get noticed by the C-level execs.

And if they'll care.

ewwhite

17:42

How do you guys deal with this?

Halp!! E-mails to any Comcast.net|aol.com|yahoo.com e-mail addresses are getting bounced. Do you know why?

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite I've had to deal with pretty much that exact thing.

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite First, give the client a Valium.

Second, read the bounce message.

ewwhite

@WesleyDavid I wish there could be a point where I could say, "Don't do business with people who use those services."

WesleyDavid

Tracking down bounces at major domains and then explaining there's nothing that can be done.

ewwhite

I've had comcast.net just block my client's ISP's netblock before... just cuz.

WesleyDavid

17:44

@ewwhite Pretty much. I would tell people to call those businesses / contacts and tell them they're choice to run a business with Yahoo email address is poor.

If my client didn't get it and still wanted a fix, I just priced out the cost of sending all mail through an outbound SMTP host like Sendgrid.

mossy

oh its @WesleyDavid.

Hi @WesleyDavid.

WesleyDavid

but yeah, it's frustrating

@mossy Rawr! Howdeh.

ewwhite

but here's a question: Being on the IT side, it's hard to put myself in the shoes of someone who actually uses yahoo, aol and hotmail... do those people expect to receive mail reliably?

do they receive mail reliably?

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Yes, they do, because they think it's a big huge brand that "just works" and "everyone else's email gets to me so what's YOUR problem!"

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite People who use free services tend to be far more demanding than people who pay for services. Ironic...

WesleyDavid

17:46

I'm more amazed that people think it's okay from a branding perspective to run a business from a yahoo email address.

HopelessN00b

@WesleyDavid Yes, well, the one thing the world will never have a shortage of is stupidity.

Michael Hampton

WTF

jscott

Well, it does contain the words "malicious" and "iframe". :)

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton Serves you right for using AVG.

jscott

Not to mention lots of PHPy and base64() goodness.

freiheit

17:51

@MichaelHampton I'll bet there's a code sample that AVG is triggering on

jscott

@freiheit Yeah there's a base64 string in there

Chris S

@MichaelHampton Didn't you have problems with AVG false-positive on a batch file a week or two ago too?

Michael Hampton

Quite possibly.

Oh, I see he uploaded the malicious PHP code.

HopelessN00b

Go AVG. Gettin' medieval on malicious text since $Year[Threat_has_been_Removed_Successfully]!

freiheit

@jscott A base64 string that decodes to ~~http://browserglobalstat.com/statD/stat.php~~

voretaq7

17:56

@WesleyDavid TomTom runs Tomcat on Tom O'Connor's Phone?

(BACON MAN LIVES IN A BACON HOUSE!)

WesleyDavid

@voretaq7 TomTom's Talented TomCat Tapped Tom O'Connor's Trembling Tuba Tuna IhavenoideawhereI'mgoingwiththis

Transcript for