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20:06
Who here uses ZFS.
I'm trying assess the learning curve
We do, but I've had limited exposure to it. We only have a few systems.
Me me me! Oh, pick me!
@chriss how long do you think it would take an educated dev/sysadmin to grasp the day-to-day concepts?
@ChrisS As far as I know none of the homos in the room are telling other people to fondle their pecs :-)
@ewwhite two steps
one is tiny if you're familiar with (AIX-style) LVM (or similarly not-too-sucky software RAID).
the other is learning about replication and the like, which isn't bad if you're already familiar with other storage technologies.
@ewwhite 8 hours of training should be enough to really "get it". Or a month of just messing with it... Best guess...
20:15
@Cole More UV up there, dude.
@voretaq7 What's stopping you?
@chriss client asked for NFS server running Linux. We built it using hardware RAID by LSI and adding SSDs for cachecade. We deliver it. Client says "reformat it...install Ceph".
@ewwhite LOL - classic
I suggested ZFS as a better use of the gear. I think it's 10TB usable.
@Adrian Just on my forearms, luckily had sunscreen on my face
20:18
That's why I hate working with external clients. They all say "do what I say and not what I really want" and they all mean "do what I want and not what I say"
@freiheit I have the same general reaction to people grabbing my tits as most women I know (shot to the nuts, knee to the face, then walk away grinning smugly)
@voretaq7 I think it depends on how they grab.
@ScottPack well the least I deserve is a nice dinner, maybe a bottle of wine...
posted on May 15, 2013 by SysAdmin1138

We all know it can happen, a BIOS update of some kind bricks whatever just got flashed, but it's one of those things you hope happens to other people first so you know not to go there. It happened to...

@voretaq7 How nice? You talking a steak dinner at a place where the servers wear pants or a little In'N'Out?
20:24
@ScottPack wine and dine, then (maybe) in'n'out...
@freiheit Pervy bastard.
@ScottPack they don't HAVE to be wearing pants - skirts would be acceptable.
Steak and Bacon are mandatory though.
2
@voretaq7 Point amendment accepted.
@voretaq7 So when I worked for the phone company I was given ~30 minutes for lunch. There was a Rally's across the street.
@ScottPack no.. it depends on how they look, and how much they make
@voretaq7 I put on 30-40 pounds that summer.
20:26
@ScottPack we call them Checkers up here.
@voretaq7 Their french fries are to die for.
theres a clear line on the graph between harassment and flirting... x being physical attractiveness and y being bank account size
@MattBear It figures you would fall into the size matters camp.
@ChrisS I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
@WesleyDavid We can both only wish to have his abs.
20:35
@ScottPack Oh I'm getting there. Believe me.
I'm getting firmer, but I still have a little excess pooch that hasn't melted off yet. So far my fur is still disguising any definition that I am getting.
@WesleyDavid how much do you ride a week?
That sounds rather personal.
@MattBear Don't ride... =/
I LIFT, BROSEPH!
@WesleyDavid knuckle bump
20:37
May 6 at 19:12, by MDMarra
@WesleyDavid I got married. @EvanAnderson had a kid. @Chopper3 beat cancer. You can buy a fucking bike.
5
thought I was the only one that diddnt ride :p
@WesleyDavid How big are your quads?
heh heh I cant believe I pulled this off, wife and I were fighting
old, stupid fight...
fighting ended, and I got a signed document from her saying she will never bring it up again
@freiheit Big enough to strangle an alligator.
20:44
@ScottPack not around here - they used to be great but now they don't junk them as often so they're soggy and bleh :(
@voretaq7 That sucks. I have fond memories of those battered french fries.
@ScottPack they're still battered - which just makes the soggy worse :(
Yeah, that sucks.
we used to make special trips to the first (and back then only) Checkers on LI in high school when it opened
but now the standard All American burger is cheaper, better, and while not battered the fries are at least fresh.
No banana shake though.
Thankfully for me I was getting them at lunch time from a city that's near enough in the South. Always a line for those 800 calorie fries.
20:48
@ScottPack got a small, didjya?
Time is running out!
@voretaq7 Big Buford with extra bacon, large fry, large diet coke. I wonder how many of that order they went through each day.
@MichaelHampton I'm sorry but people have been saying that for 10 years ... I NO LONGER BELIEVE YOU
@Zypher Oh, so you're one of those crazy "IPv4 truther" conspiracy theorists, eh?
20:51
They shouldn't have made it do all this crazy extra shit. Just ipv4 with larger addresses and people would be using it already.
FTFY.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", meaning to give a false alarm. The fable and its history The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral at the end of the story shows that this is how liars are not rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. This echoes a statement attributed to...
@ScottPack Diet Coke? Freak.
Banana Shake!
@voretaq7 I am not shaking your banana tyvm...
20:52
@voretaq7 That's what all the fatties order. A hodel of diet coke. That way they can justify the large fry.
@DennisKaarsemaker Shake the isoamyl acetate before serving!
@DennisKaarsemaker truth, also the hand-wavy "it'll just work autoMAGICALLY" doesn't help
"Ahmma gonna haaaaave two big bufords, three large fries, and a DIET coke - ahm watchin' mah figure!"

...watching it become ever closer to perfectly spherical?
@voretaq7 I will not oil your banana either :)
I've missed you @Zypher. What's happened to our relationship? :'(
20:54
@DennisKaarsemaker Remember, bananas provoke stinging.
@Zypher I always find hand-waving dismissals of technical questions highly reassuring. Don't you?
@freiheit sales guys must love you.
@WesleyDavid Missed you too ... busy busy (and forget to log into chat.se)
@freiheit my FAVORITE is "What happens when the DNS server goes down" ... "It won't" or "Oh you'll remember the 128bit ip of that server"
@freiheit if you do the hand-waving correctly it becomes a backhand
@DennisKaarsemaker Haven't been following the IPv4 address exhaustion over in Europe much. Considering you folks usually seem to integrate that stuff better/faster than we do here, how's it going over there?
20:55
@Zypher DNS never goes down
@Zypher Google is just going to have to buy DEADBEEF addresses for their new public DNS.
@freiheit Blackberry/RIM never has server outages :)
@voretaq7 User error
@Adrian ipv6 uptake is increasing, but nobody noteworthy seems to think ipv4 exhaustion is real. We'll just see people selling off unused blocks.
@freiheit You know what else never goes down?
@freiheit Yes, having users is an error condition.
20:57
@ScottPack your mom?
@Adrian It's pretty bad from what I hear, you can't get anything above a /22 at all, full stop, and you practically have to give up your firstborn to get anything near that.
@ScottPack Family chatroom! Family chatroom! :)
2
@DennisKaarsemaker I actually wouldn't know on that one.
@DennisKaarsemaker damnit, that's what I was going to say!
@freiheit Along with half the room...
20:57
@voretaq7 Ok, that made me laugh, but I'm wondering where you draw your lines.
@MichaelHampton we found getting a /21 pretty easy and my vps provider just got a new /17
@voretaq7 You let your family in here?!
@ScottPack I don't draw
:P
@freiheit You want people to stop asking what you're doing? Show 'em.
@DennisKaarsemaker Hm, interesting. Last I heard RIPE was telling anybody who wanted more than a /22 to go to hell.
@MichaelHampton ARIN is telling anyone who wants anything to go to hell
20:58
@Adrian I believe the other half were going to say "your wife"
but that's their general attitude.
@MichaelHampton oh, they've done that for ages.
@voretaq7 Last I heard from ARIN was, if you want IP addresses, go buy them on eBay.
I must say, having an election happening certainly keeps the review queueueueues clean :-)
If only my employer could sell IP addresses... We might be able to make up for our budget shortfall that way...
20:59
@freiheit you can lease out /24s under your block
no rule says you can't delegate routing :P
We have a /18 that I keep recommending cost recovery on.
@MichaelHampton really? we got a /24 from them not that long ago
@Zypher OK, I'm exaggerating a bit.
@voretaq7 I think in our /16 we have at least a few /24s we're not using...
@freiheit Renumber so you can make a contiguous /23 or /22 and you'll be golden :)
21:01
@voretaq7 Blackberry doesn't have outages, it has spontaneous user health awareness windows whereby Crackberry addicts have to seek recovery for withdrawal. It's a public service, really.
2
hell ISPs are happy to get /18s or /19s these days.
@WesleyDavid OK, I'mma star that.
Let's see... we've only got DNS entries in 148 of the /24s, so there's probably over 100 unused /24s...
HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS
I FOUND A PICTURE OF @WesleyDavid WITH LIZARDS!
All of you! Buy servers that do THIS!!
@voretaq7 No fair, he snuck up on me. =(
21:04
@voretaq7 Looking at what we don't have DNS for, we could easily carve some of those out without any renumbering... I see at least a few chunks of 10 or more empty /24s in a row...
@ewwhite An extra $1,000 per server later: "I have more graphs that my clients can ignore! Go me!"
@ewwhite pfft - that's nothing. I had a fucking datacenter that did that!
@ewwhite but I thought there was stuff in Gen8 that you didn't like...
@freiheit They're growing me... like mold...
Any of you guys know of customers using Adtran equipment?
21:06
yep
:9444554
WHy?
@ewwhite Seen a couple postings for network positions looking for Adtran experience. Wasn't familiar with their stuff.
@ewwhite Hey, Gen8s and non HP drives
@Adrian mostly telco gear
How much of a PITA is it?
@Adrian usually people use Adtran routers... not even... it's usually Adtran being deployed by ISPs
@WesleyDavid You'll pay so much for the drive carrier that you may as well just use an HP disk.
21:08
@ewwhite Client of mine has a stack of WD RE4s and wants to put them in a Gen 8 ML 330.
With a p410 or something
P420. And you'll have a hard time finding the carriers.
@Zypher Ah, now I remember why it's familiar. A couple of our T1s used an Adtran CSU/DSUs at $job[-2].
~$50-70 each
The Cisco CSU/DSUs were more reliable though.
@ewwhite 420 WOOOOOO!!! The parity is so hawt it's smokin' and blazin' dawwwwwgggggg!!!! lolololololololol
@ewwhite And heck. This is turning into a really sucky situation.
21:10
@WesleyDavid eBay is the only source.
@WesleyDavid Are the WD RE series no longer considered good stuff? Or is this a hardware interaction problem?
@ewwhite So small office has two servers. ML 115 G5 from 5+ years ago and an N40L MicroServer. ML 115 is dying. Like, parity errors and crashing three times a day and needs to be power cycled. I want to migrate them to the MicroServer, but the system requirements for SBS 2011 need MOAR cores than the Microserver has.
@WesleyDavid I can find you the carriers.. Howmany drives?
@WesleyDavid k. GIve me the budget
@ewwhite My VAR is saying that the controller itself will poop itself.
@WesleyDavid Microserver will accommodate a decent controller
21:12
@ewwhite Dude, this is a non profit that had to cut health care and hours two years ago and hasn't recovered. So, like $1500 to maybe $2500 if I kidnap someone.
@WesleyDavid $2500 and what specs are needed?
@ewwhite Yeah, but the CPU - SBS 2011 needs a quad core and 2GHz+ or supposedly it won't install.
(storage, etc.)
@ewwhite Four drives, two mirrors, one for C: and one for Exchange / Sharepoint. They're on 2 250 pairs now. I'd like 500GB.
16GB RAM
A controller that isn't on the motherboard kicks ml 115
@WesleyDavid all HP controllers these days are on the mobo...
21:14
@ewwhite I meant one that isn't fakeraid.
@freiheit rawr!!!
@ewwhite And this place will probably want to stick to their known VAR so don't put time into this. I gotta go with what they know.
I'm just frazzled that their existing stock of HDs won't work.
My guy can get a server in with those specs at or below that price
@ewwhite mew? what? huh?
G7 ProLiant, though
21:15
@Adrian AFAIK WD is still great. I've never had problems with them. I think it's just hardware interaction and major vendors getting picky.
@freiheit see Gen8 screenshot above
@ewwhite I don't care about that. G7 is good enough for this place.
@ewwhite you might need a new controller in that box...
@WesleyDavid Cool. I've never yet had problems with the RE series of drives.
@freiheit but at least it graphs!
21:17
@ewwhite That still looks better than what we got with a couple of our Dells...
@Adrian Yeah, I haven't used the Reds yet. I've used Greens, Blues, Blacks, and they all work good if you know what you're buying.
People getting Greens and then connecting them to a hardware RAID card get all pissy, but they're kinda silly.
@ewwhite you've been hanging out with Jason Dixon haven't you? :P
@voretaq7 hmmm?
@ewwhite graphing and monitoring
We've got 6 Dell R805 boxes with LSI cards that we're using for VMware. On two different of those servers, we've had the OS halfway drop out of vSphere (the VMs still running, but all sorts of other stuff stops) in a way that makes me think the OS just can't get to the drives at all. No light on the front. Nothing. Pull the drive out of slot 0 and it finally shows an error. One we just replaced the drive, the other we replaced the drive and the RAID card.
First time: crazy freak accident
21:20
@freiheit That happen to us ~weekly
SuperMicro with Adaptec or LSI RAID controllers running aRAID 1 for ESXi
@voretaq7 Graphite isn't involved, so I'm going to say no?
so much so that we have a procedure for notifying client, going into each VM, shutting down, isolating the host, rebooting and bringing it back into the cluster
@ewwhite Arg. Once ~weekly in a population of how many hosts?
@MilesErickson a couple of hundred vSphere hosts.
@ewwhite WTF? I have some basic expectations of RAID cards that come from the server vendor... Namely, that they hide hard drive failures from the OS (unless multiple drives fail) and that they alert us to the hardware failures....
21:22
@freiheit Not in ESXi land... and they're lockups.
@ewwhite So that's on all the ESXi stuff? With fucking hardware RAID cards?
yes
but crappy raid cards. I don't think people should have to buy raid cards. It should be integrated tightly with the server.
How did they break this shit so that the OS driver needs to be involved for a drive light to go amber?
@freiheit The only foolproof solution is to import extra-virgin RAID cards from Italy... but, as you can imagine, those are very expensive.
@ewwhite Somehow we never had a problem like that with any of our HP VMware hosts...
21:26
@freiheit Well, no. THis happens with supermicro
Apropos to nothing, I have discovered that, just prior to ceasing their manufacture entirely, Asus actually created an absolutely perfect netbook.
@ewwhite This is (yet another) reason we'll be sticking with HP and not getting any more Dells. :)
@WesleyDavid it COULD BE!
:=)
@MilesErickson ...and promptly went bankrupt.
@MilesErickson Make sure they're "first press" RAID cards :-)
@voretaq7 Netbooks are like really good scifi tv shows? The best ones go bankrupt or get cancelled?
Seriously, though. Comfortable 11" form factor, snappy dual-core N2600 with HT, verified >10 hour battery life, sub-$300 price point. If people knew these things were on the market in 2012, they would have been buying them in place of real computers.
(Hence, bankruptcy?)
21:31
@freiheit yup
@MilesErickson Which was this?
the last-gen eeePC
@MilesErickson Yep, I would probably have bought one of those.
It's an Asus EEE PC 1015CX.
@MilesErickson yeah
My boss had a Toshiba netbook - MacBook Air light/thin, with a transreflective daylight-readable display...
@MilesErickson Looks pretty nice, except for two things: First, the screen resolution is kind of low. I would have expected 1366x768 in that form factor. Second, being shipped with Ubuntu preinstalled.
@MichaelHampton Remember, 1/4 the price of a MacBook Air (at least here in India).
21:37
@MilesErickson Oh yes. That netbook.
Grah, anyone else get an email about how DynDNS is introducing arbitrary rules on how to keep your free account? You now have to log in to their control panel every 30 days or else you lose your account. I've had my account with them for 10 years and have not logged in since the very first day I configured my account
@MarkHenderson Fuck. That. Shit.
I'll run my own DNS server. With dynamic updates. And zone delegation.
@MarkHenderson Nope, never got any such email. Though if I did, I'd just go down there and ask them WTF is up with that.
@MarkHenderson Automate?
(They're across town.)
21:39
@MilesErickson Yeah I think I will :P
@MichaelHampton It's clearly just an imposition to make you pay to not have to do it. Please, go kick them in the balls for me
@MichaelHampton ... how?!
@MarkHenderson I gave him a donation back when it was a one-man bedroom operation and he promised it would be free forever.
@MichaelHampton Damn. Back in 2002 I was a cheapskate. I should have done that too ;P
@MarkHenderson The irony is that I don't really use it anymore.
21:45
ugggh caffeine crash
@MarkHenderson And anyway, $25 a year isn't all that bad. Plus it's 100% organic and fat-free!
@MichaelHampton No, i guess not. Apparently though I have used 15 of my 2 free hostnames
All but one untouched since 2011 - I want to keep them there just to spite them now
@MarkHenderson Now that's some interesting math.
I can kind of understand why they might want to do something like that: people just create free accounts, take up some resources and then never use them.
Which is why you used to lose it if you had no updates to your records in 90 days
@MarkHenderson Yeah, though I think having to log in is going a bit far. I'll mention it to <redacted> next time I see him.
My girlfriend's ex, who she's still on good terms with, is a sysadmin there.
21:51
@MichaelHampton Cool. I'll wait and see if it's reversed
In the meanwhile, automate it :)
Oh, hey. This afternoon I checked into a hotel normally frequented by Indian tourists. They did the usual passport-photocopying and police-state paperwork, I paid for the room, and later I casually asked for the wi-fi password. The clerk had a brief conversation with the manager in a language that was not English, which so far as I can tell went something like: [Clerk] Wait, can we let a foreigner use our internet connection? [Manager] No, it's too risky. Just tell him it's broken.
Also, they use WEP.
Anyone have a pfSense box? 2.0.3?
@MilesErickson Should be easy enough to get access to then
@WesleyDavid I do but I can't get into them right now
Whats up?
@MarkHenderson On the dashboard, see if the uptime field is editable for you. I can click in it and change the uptime.
Doesn't survive a refresh of the page, but still, kinda funny.
Uptime fields should always be editable! #devops #cloud #i-reject-your-reality-and-substitute-my-nosql
@WesleyDavid Hah ok I'll try it next time I'm on that site
22:00
Man the datacenter bathroom smells like exploded, deep fried ass.
@MarkHenderson For sure... except that the world's most perfect netbook uses Broadcom device ID 4727. I don't think it's impossible to get it into monitor mode, but it apparently would require some hacking.
22:20
Symantec. Making software downloads difficult since (by the looks of things) 1993:
(nb: The download manager is enforced and is a java plugin that only works in IE)
@SmallClanger Serves you right for using a Symantec product.
Why in the world does anyone still use BackupExec? How in the world can a backup utility require a two-gigabyte download?
God is punishing you for your sins.
And Symantec's sins
and Oracle's sins
and maybe McAfee's sins.
Thing is I still quite like BackupExec. Granted, this might be Stockholm Syndrome, but...
Symantec has been on my shit list ever since they bought Central Point Software solely to kill their superior product. (If you're really old, you'll remember something called PC Tools. It was better than Norton Utilities.)
How in the hell can anyone like BackupExec? Sounds more like Amsterdam Syndrome to me.
22:27
I guess I am really old.
@SmallClanger (Seriously, what do you like about it?)
It does the job I need it to do and has done for years. I guess I got used to its quirks back when Veritas still owned it and Symantec haven't managed to ruin it, yet.
At least it hasn't pissed me off enough to make me want to look for something else.
@Hennes Says the man who apparently owns a SuperUser chatroom dedicated to the intricacies of LHarc. :-D
It has been ages since I used lha, arc, dmz and similar
oh, and pkzip.exe ;-)
BTW, that chat room was 155 days ago.
@Hennes Phil Katz, unsung hero of the BBS era. Drank himself to death in a hotel room at age 37.
22:34
@MilesErickson I wouldn't call him an unsung hero. More like an unsung anti-hero.
I'd even go so far as to call him a huge asshole.
@MichaelHampton I didn't know him personally. Do tell.
@MilesErickson He got his start by ripping off the source code for ARC and claiming he wrote it.
@MichaelHampton he lovingly tended all the bugs in that original ARC code.
@voretaq7 Without attribution.
@MichaelHampton do you really want your bugs attributed to you? :)
22:37
@voretaq7 Um, yes?
@MichaelHampton ...want my bugs too? :)
@voretaq7 No, you can keep them.
you suck, hedgehog.
One thing that stands out in the Wikipedia article is the tiny dollar amounts that changed hands in the SEA vs. PKware legal battles.
It's almost as though the technologies that we used to transfer data across the continent were of trivial importance.
22:45
@MilesErickson Things were very small then; if you were "online" you were one of a very very small group.
@MDMarra Eh, let my systems get hacked.
@MichaelHampton Believe me, I know it.
@MichaelHampton As a matter of fact, we all used to get together for bowling on Monday nights.
@MilesErickson Ho ho ho.
@MichaelHampton No, seriously. It was organized by the sysop of the largest local Galacticomm BBS.
It was Friday nights at Fuddruckers, where I was.
22:52
@MichaelHampton Did you get a soda pop and drive home in your tractor
@JoelESalas Would have, but starting in the early 90s it just wasn't safe to be out on a tractor late at night. Too much gang violence, ever since those SoCal kids came to town.
@JoelESalas No, I got a huge burger and took the bus (hey, I was 15).
@MilesErickson rofl.
@JoelESalas Used to be, the bad kids would just be out cow-tipping... then the Deere-jackings started.
23:12
@MilesErickson Have you moved on to a new 3rd world country yet?
@Ward Bhutan, in a few days. Recently I've been in the NE Indian tribal state of Meghalaya.
@Ward There's this village called Nongriat that is famous for its bridges over streams: they are made of living fig tree roots.
@Ward Feels like some far corner of Middle Earth.
@MilesErickson Oh yeah. I forgot you were getting weird in Asia
Sounds awesome
After four months, I'm just about done with it, really. Never before have I traveled until I was actually starting to get sick of it. We'll probably call it good after five.
On the other hand, I probably won't dive straight back into work when I get home.
@MDMarra It's definitely awesome. Highly recommended.
@MDMarra Good exercise, too: about 2500 stair-steps down from the road to the village in the span of 3km, and the reverse when it's time to leave.
hey anyone have a stolen device policy I can look at?
thats 'stolen device' policy, not stolen 'device policy'
:p
@MilesErickson yeah sounds like it haha
23:27
User: "I get an error every time I right click my mouse. I think it's a virus."
Me: "I scanned your PC. It doesn't show anything."
User: "Maybe the virus is on my mouse!!!"
@MattBear Funny how a lot of companies' information security policies are obviously stolen.
@MilesErickson It's awesome you're able to do that
@MilesErickson SANS institute has a lot to build off of, thats where most of them come from I'm betting
@WesleyDavid User: "I get an error when X." Admin: "That's interesting. Let's try to fix it. What does it say?" User: "Oh, I don't know, I just close it."
I just suck at lawyer speak, hence the "lemme see so I can steal!"
mine would be, "lost device? Smash it with a hammer"
23:32
@MattBear That stuff is reasonably legit. I've seen far worse... as in "did you know that your $policy_x mentions that you have a Jet Propulsion Laboratory?"
@MilesErickson lol really?
@MattBear Yes, I seriously have encountered an insufficiently modified "borrowed-from-NASA" policy document in my professional life.
@MilesErickson thats kind of funny lol
@JoelESalas Give it a shot sometime. It's not as expensive as you think, if you stay off the beaten path most of the time.
@JoelESalas Nongriat was about $12 a day all-in, and I stayed there for a week.
@JoelESalas Give it a try sometime. You'll like it, and places like Thailand, Lao, Cambodia, and India are not nearly as expensive as staying at home.

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