/dev/chat - 2013-10-08 (page 1 of 2)

« first day (1095 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3852 days later) »

1:18 AM

a bit of multics and VMS history:

1

A: Any reason behind Linux is designed as a single directory tree?

Multics Multics was the first operating system to introduce the hierarchical file system as we know it today, with directories that can contain directories. Citing “A General-Purpose File System For Secondary Storage” by R.C. Daley and P.G. Neumann: Section 2 of the paper presents the hierar...

@Gilles - Much better answer than mine 8-)

wait, no reversal badge to the most upvoted answer? :S

I deleted mine, I had voted to close that Q and offered that answer as a beginning for the OP to read up on it, didn't seem a good fit for the site, nice answer though.

Very nice, I was hoping someone would post a comprehensive one. The question was on the hot questions list.

1:43 AM

I'm trying to convince a new user to post a new question his next problem. Is there a meta post explaining the SE model about this somewhere? I mean that once the initial problem was solved, any subsequent problems should be addressed in a new question.

I'll just get him into chat. Could somebody upvote this Q so he can get the rep to chat please?

1

Q: Unable to install any programs

I'm trying to install programs but no matter what program I try installing I get the following error. For example I downloaded skype 'skype-debian_4.2.0.11-1_i386.deb' and ran the command cd downloads And then sudo apt-get install skype-debian_4.2.0.11-1_i386 And I get the following...

software-installation apt crunchbang

@terdon - I still think it's a pointless Q, but now it has a stellar answer.

Had me stumped for a while, googling 'asdf'

I was wondering what the hell kind of new arch that was :)

And the guy does try. This was a good question for example:

2

Q: Can't install any version of Linux

So I was trying to install #! (Crunchbang) and downloaded the 64 bit version and tried installing it. Everything would work until it was time to install grub. The grub installation would fail every time. I then tried installing the 32bit version (note I am on a 64 bit machine) and everything wo...

linux boot grub

In the sense that he did try various things and researched and put some work into the question.

@terdon - yeah you asked about this one yesterday, I didn't feel like googling for it, been sick the last couple of days and that Q would've wiped me out.

Oh, sorry to hear that. Nothing serious I assume since you're here.

Flu?

yeah bad cold

1:51 AM

It is nothing serious right?

ok

that's no fun though

been going to work so it isn't that severe

stuffy head and runny nose huh?

but haven't felt like digging deeply into a Q like that

yeah

getting over it though

Well, I got the other guy on chat, thanks for the upvote :)

it's the same guy, right? for both Q's?

1:58 AM

yup

I'll ask about the first one

Discussion between terdon and user261…

Imported from a comment discussion on unix.stackexchange.com/q...

2:21 AM

@terdon - you're so close: 9,999

hang on i'm looking for one to push you over.

Aaaaaaaaa

:)

Shit, when did that happen, last I checked I was at 9970 or so and keeping my fingers crossed.

I was pushing you over

hang on i found one, ready?

drum rolllllllllllllllll

YES! :)

there you go congrats

Thanks!

2:23 AM

yeah

Cool, I get to see the mod tools :)

i saw you were close yesterday and i ran out of votes

so i figured i'd push you today

you've earned it

this was the 10k A: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/46897/…

Whohooo :)

yeah, I realized. That was a nice answer though so I don't feel bad :)

oh yeah, you saw the 10+, duh

(basks)

And I made the first page this week.

I think I might be spending too much time here. :)

2:28 AM

ha, never

Yeah, you're sick and you can't stay away

yup

what's the first page?

all time?

yeah

Still inching slowly upwards on SU as well.

Not that I pay attention to such base concerns of course

i dont' watch the pages all the time either

wait! you actually watch the page?

2:33 AM

keeps you motivated, i look at them from time to time

@Braiam from time to time :)

Also the rep leagues

lol, I just check whenever a answer get upvoted seeking for improvements :P

btw, somehow I have more answers then @terdon in AU (vs. yours UL) and I don't have so much rep :(

well... half of it actually :P

it was fun when i started out, i'd be so happy when i made it to the top 10 pages, then 5, then 1, then as i moved up the rows

I'm in the 7...

it was weird at first as you started to pass some of the ppl that had higher reps

2:36 AM

@Braiam it's a different crowd. Also, number is not the issue. At some point I had way more As than Stephane for example but had way less rep of course :)

@slm heh, yeah.

@slm yeah, I passed some ppl that had more time and rep when I started too :P

I'd been on the site a full year plus before i started to answer

Actually I remember Stephane. He and I joined at more or less the same time. And he left one of his comments pointing out an obscure error in exquisite detail. I remember thinking, who does this guy think he is? Tiny new user with no rep. And later, later I learned, I understood. :)

@kurtm congratz sir, you are the #1 this week...

stackexchange.com/leagues/40/week/unix

@Braiam Thanks. My wife was the one who pointed it out to me. It was just an added bonus :)

2:39 AM

@kurtm - yeah you blew the doors off with the sort A

@slm No kidding, right? I answered that one a maybe one or two more Saturday night, went to sleep, and woke up and had over 200 reputation. Quite a surprise.

And that one, I initially was like "Yeah, why the hell would that be there?" So I hit the man page. And there it was.

Not bad, you hit the cap on the first day, Don't think many have ever done that

I was totally flattered when I got the Teacher badge. To top it off, I hit the cap right around the time SE rolled over to the next day, so that helped me in those rankings. Kind of a perfect storm for reputation on my first two days.

Heh, good start.

I had previously seen references to SE and I was all "Yeah yeah". And then I read what it was about, and put it on my list of things to look at when I got a moment. And then I found this section. Right up my alley.

2:46 AM

@kurtm What made you join the site on that day?

I think it was Ars Technica publishing another SE article (which honestly, I find a little annoying). It reminded me I wanted to check it out at the right time when I was done with the homework in my classes.

The questions that were up had a few that piqued my interest, so I signed up and started answering.

It really took me into Day 2 before I realized how reputation actually worked.

it can be highly addictive

It takes a while to get the hang of it.

Yes. Yes it can.

But yes, we have SE anonymous meetings here on tuesday afternoons.

2:50 AM

What classes are you doing?

Bring cookies.

i think the meeting started like a month ago on a tuesday and never ended

8-)

I'm actually taking 2 psychology classes right now. I'm in the last 4 classes to finish a degree I started a long, long time ago.

We are pretty much always here if you haven't noticed

what degree?

please say something computery

Applied Networking and Systems Administration.

2:52 AM

we need more technical ppl in the world

Was originally Computer Science when I started long ago.

ding

I'm the SA for Software Engineering department at RIT. (And yes, StackExchange being SE messes with me a little).

shut up

I live in rochester

RIT is rochester institute of Tech.

I can't shut up. I've been here pretty solid for almost 20 years.

2:53 AM

me too

moved here in 1997

how long at RIT working?

I actually originally started at RIT as a freshman in 1990. Had a bumpy academic career. Re-started, and went on co-op around 1995ish. And didn't go back. Until I started working at RIT beginning of 2004.

10 years this January.

nice

i started my masters at RIT did all the class work and stalled out on the project

went to SU for undergrad

My buddy, who I met at Freshman Orientation 23 years ago, is the SA in Computer Science two floors up from me.

You guys are probably cousins.

what's the m in kurtm?

i'm slm

2:56 AM

No, but it turned out when I met him that he went to High School with my cousin :D

M -> Mosiejczuk

oh boy

M -> Mingolelli

@terdon what's your full name BTW?

I win for most consonants in a row :D

The fun trivia fact is that Mosiejczuk is a Polish spelling of a Ukranian name. Very uncommon. So I can say with reasonable certainty I am the only Kurt Mosiejczuk in the world.

@slm Charles Chapple

Of course, that means when you do a search and find 18 year old me mouthing off in the usenet archives, I can't really disclaim it :D

where's the terdon come from?

@kurtm - ha

2:59 AM

"It was that other Kurt Mosiejczuk" "There aren't any others." "Damn"

@slm Typing randomly into a terminal while installing my new Linux distro back in uni

must have been about 19. Been using it ever since

@terdon You should have said "Isn't it obvious? Charles Chapple -> terdon" :D

true true :)

I thought it was something to do with a dinosaur

And I can say with even more certainty that I am not the only Charles Chapple around

3:02 AM

or is it like turd on

dinosaur? Nah, just randomness

NOOOoooooooo

Mind you, I pronounce it more like teardon

you just hit the keys and that was you

Using the Greek e sound

that's how i say it too

not really :), there's no such sound in English

3:03 AM

when i mention the goings on here at work and with other tech. friends i say it like teardon

Now I will make the mental pronunciation correction. Although I had it "Ter Don".

gilles says it's zilles

i thought it was guilles

@kurtm yeah, more like ter don in my head

stephane is steven but i say stef on

@slm nah, that's a normal French name

stephane is steFann I think

3:05 AM

Yeah, I suppose the pronunciation on Gilles would be closer to Zilles.

Yeah, it would be SteFann.

It's basically zil

Is it zil, or zeel?

zill

he said zil

when i asked him one day

/me had four years of french in junior high and HS.

3:05 AM

yeah, but the l is long in most accents

my kids had been bugging me about his profile, since they see me on here all the time

/me had 8, learned nothing and then spent three years living in France

@slm Yeah, I was around or read the conversation anyway

/me took spanish, only know how to ask where the library is

well?

My Dad was yelling at me growing up, telling me to take Spanish, but I wanted French. I admitted years later, that yeah, probably would have used Spanish more often.

3:07 AM

donde es la bilioteca

Ou est la biblioteque?

esta but not bad :)

that's it

Actually, that will depend on region you can use both ser and estar for places

@kurtm yup, there are bound to be some accents dotted around in there

yeah the ser estar thing really was too much for me

3:08 AM

But my written French is horrible. I speak it relatively well but writing it is another matter

i'm not a language guy like that, i'm into programming

@slm I know, it was a pain. I eventually got it by osmosis more than anything else.I spent 7 years in Spain so I had to

You can't really learn a language well unless you live there and are forced to use it

it all seems like a mess to me

It is. English especially. One of the more fascinating things about it.

yeah, since we live near canada not speaking much spanish

yeah i hate english too

3:09 AM

:)

speak in perl ? print yes : print no

@terdon Yeah, but I don't know how to put them in with my US keyboard :D

i constantly make up my own words for things which seem like that should be the word, finally I just went with it and do that now regularly

i tell ppl, hey new words have to come from somewhere

@slm That's true. I get more opportunities to read french now. When I was at BSDCan in May in Ottawa, it was like remedial french class since all signs are in both English and French. :)

@kurtm - I think a lot of ppl just copy paste them in

I liked the fact that English is one of the few languages where spelling bees exist. Since most languages words are spelled just like they sound.

3:12 AM

Dunno about most. Spanish is the easiest I've seen

Everything else I've touched is weird. French is insane.

So is English.

Greek is OK, but we have 5 different ways of spelling the i sound

i'm hoping i can just get a babble fish and be done with it

Actually, once you know the french rules, it's not bad.

Yeah, I whish

@kurtm defend beaucoup

I mean, I know the etymology, but why is beau pronounced bo?

Most consonants are silent in French if they end the sentence or have a consonant after them.

Why not pronounce it bo?

Well, because you could do so with bo

why tack all the extra vowels?

What about the final x's?

3:15 AM

It's because of the rich vowel groves in Northern France.

That's worse than the silent e's

@kurtm :)

The X makes it plural.

In latin

and not always: je peux for example

...head's spinning...

I'm not saying some of their stuff isn't odd. But most of it has an internal logic.

3:16 AM

A friend told me it's because of scribes from the middle ages

And compared to English, it is super-regular :D

they were paid by the letter. Since the orthography was not standardised, they would add as many as they could get away with

Yes, the poor scribes who had to deal with the glut from the vowel groves.

@kurtm English is definitely a contender, no argument there

Keep in mind that my last name is Mosiejczuk. I'm more tolerant of excessive lettering :D

3:18 AM

@slm sorry, getting off topic here :) And Sam's sick, we can't inflict linguistic arguments on the poor guy

You'd have to be :)

Do you speak any Polish?

Not a word.

I grew up around it, but never understood it or was taught it.

@kurtm - do you do a fair amount of unix work in your day job?

Some of that may have been because apparently they may have been speaking Polish, Ukranian, and/or Russian depending on who was involved.

@slm Yes. And some... windows too. sob

I'm a big OpenBSD guy nowadays.

That's the one that I've never installed

slackware, debian, suse, redhat, never a bsd though

I actually run a mirror listed on the official lists :D

OpenBSD install is easier than most Linux distros.

3:21 AM

filedump.se.rit.edu

(Most people just think it's hard)

this you?

That's the one :D

I was so tickled the first time I was doing an install at home and the installer picked my mirror to install from :)

how big is it?

The mirror? Or OpenBSD?

(I have 3 or 4 release on there)

3:22 AM

mirror

filedump# df -h /var/www/ftp
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd1a 1.8T 845G 911G 48% /var/www/ftp

Sorry, I have 6 releases plus the snapshots.

not too bad

filedump# du -sh *
89.7G 4.8
107G 4.9
107G 5.0
123G 5.1
125G 5.2
138G 5.3

154G snapshots/

But each of those has many architectures.

how'd you get into unix? through school or before or after?

you're quick with the command lines

First used UNIX back in 1990 at a fellowship I had at GTE for the summer.

Then I was at Computer Science House at RIT, and was using BSD UNIX on the house systems (4.3 Tahoe and then 4.3 Reno)

3:25 AM

i first learned of it when i worked at niagra mohawk

we had sunos at SU

i went to SUNY albany my 1st year of college, they had VMS

I've used Ultrix, SunOS 4.x, Solaris 2.x,7,8,9,10, Slackware, Debian, Red Hat (briefly, and hated it ever since), Ubuntu.

I've used VMS, but that's not a UNIX :D

Oh, you've put your foot in it now...

> Red Hat (briefly, and hated it ever since)

:D

ha

@slm just breathe in, breathe out

3:27 AM

i'm the RH guy on the site

You poor poor man.

Don't you know there are better options?

ducks

as in Real Headache :P

they're all good

I have to say I was quite pleased with the RH and then Fedora systems I used. I was not administering them however

we debugged a issue with our active directory setup today at work for like 5 hours, happy not to have windows is all

3:28 AM

I don't touch Solaris any more. I was recently made to use Solaris 10, and it turns out it has gotten much more batshit crazy since I stopped using it.

last i used was 10 as well, i worked at kodak for 15+ years

I don't mind AD so much. But I use it as LDAP and Kerberos.

And I'm not really sold on ZFS so far. I've seen too much wrong with it, and my recent experience with Solaris 10 made me decide that:

we have 3 domain controllers and they had apparently stopped syncing their sysvol's for like 70+ days, we realized it today

ZFS is not a filesystem. It's a VM bolted onto the side that can mess with its host systems settings.

@slm Ugh.

I wouldn't want to maintain the # of Windows desktops I have to without AD. But I have UNIX (mostly OpenBSD) running almost all of my other infrastructure.

yeah we toyed with the idea of using ZFS for the dedup capabilities since we deal with image data where i work and a lot of the files are replicated all over

3:32 AM

I took System Administration 2 at RIT, and they made me use CentOS. I ended up putting in lots time not because I didn't know the concepts, but because I had to fight with the super-retarded ways RedHat runs things.

yeah same here wrt to AD and windows, that's why we use it, the rest of our infrastructure is CentOS on KVM

True, I suppose I should count my NetApp in amongst my infrastructure.

De-dup is very nice.

yeah we had that at EK which was a nice feature, we have 2 24TB NASes now. One is the backup to the other

we couldn't afford a NetApp

we use these boxes which I've been pleasantly surprised by. Thecus

Thecus? I may look into that.

I like my NetApp, it tends to just work. But yeah, it's fscking expensive.

thecus.com/product.php?PROD_ID=44

we have the N12000

3:36 AM

I looked at alternatives last time we needed to replace a NetApp, but no one did the transparent NFS/CIFS sharing. And I couldn't believe it. No one just mapped kurt->SE\kurt. The easy part. No one did the easy part.

2of them, it joins the AD domain. The hardware is amazingly well built, the software is warty

yeah they are in a class all by themselves

at EK we were heavy Unix and Win and the netapp boxes made a lot of the headaches go away

I hear they use Xeons for blazing speed. And have rock-solid security.

:D

I have allergies to marketing nonsense :D

yeah the chinese to english doesn't translate that well

support is bad

I don't think that is a translation problem, I think that is a marketing department problem :)

we had an issue when we initially set it up where we under spec'd the number of inodes we'd need, and we ran out

they wanted us to connect it to the internet so they could remote in which we said no, tell us, and they wouldn't, we ended up resolving it our selves

3:40 AM

Ouch.

"We want to remote in." "That's nice. But no. Tell us what to do."

the earlier versions of the s/w didn't give you an option to set the inodes

Did you mute the phone so they couldn't hear the laughter?

exactly

there was nothing they could do anyway, you have to set the inodes at filesystem creation time with ext4

we had a 2nd nas so i set that one up correctly and shed enough files over to it to free up enough inodes to limp along, then we formally cut over to the new one a week later

Yeah. Running out of inodes is almost always a painful experience.

i just hung up on them

they weren't of any help

3:43 AM

When did you burn down their building?

yeah when i did my calculations i knew we needed more, but the UI didn't allow for you to change these

i still like there hardware

@terdon Did you run away so you wouldn't get blood on you? There has been no deathmatch over Red Hat... :)

our 2 NASes hum along and we've had zero issues otherwise, but it's meant for an expert

but i'm the most senior unix guy so ppl were getting anxious as to what was up

Yeah. I'd probably be looking at another vendor. I can be an expert on that stuff, but don't like being forced to be. Especially if the product is supposed to do it.

you know the drill

3:45 AM

@kurtm Nah, I ran away cause it's very late here and I'm in the middle of rewriting a ~800 line script

If I stop now, nothing will work and I won't remember it tomorrow so I have to finish it :)

@terdon Ok. You just went silent right after the Red Hat comment :D

I understand that completely. Is it perl? The write-only language? :D

@terdon - don't you just submit what you'd want here as a Q and ask us to write it?

I was hoping to egg you guys on but since it failed... @slm's too nice, that's his problem

he's really making friends with us tonight huh

:)

3:46 AM

I can be nice with misguided Red Hat users. :D

He's never even tried a BSD. He doesn't know any better.

no, it's one of those things where I've decided that rewriting is better than continuing to edit

hate that decision

So I copy the old script into a new file bit by bit, making the necessary rearrangements

@terdon What? You don't just keep throwing code at it until it works? :)

I have it all in my head right now and I won't tomorroe

@kurtm doesn't everyone?

And anyway, I get some leniency, I'm a biologist not a CS guy!

3:48 AM

I remember in high school there was one kid in the programming course who literally did that. His programs would be like 5-10 times the size of mine, and still didn't work completely right.

@terdon Weirdly, my wife studied biology too. She's pretty competent tech-wise.

Yeah? Try teaching Perl to a bunch of Biology seniors, see how you like it

yeah you said she saw you on the rep league page

That was not about your wife, obviously :)

Is she on SE?

stack exchange

Not yet, I don't think. I need to check. She did ask what my username was after I signed up so she could cyber-stalk me.

@terdon Thanks. I did make the translation to the right SE on the second mental attempt :D

The wife did mention I was somewhere on the quarterly ranking list about a half hour ago.

So she must be around, "cyberspying" on you

3:51 AM

does she work at RIT too?

No. She actually takes care of the house. I hate doing it, she doesn't mind. And she gets to learn whatever she wants in her spare time.

She got the BSin Biology and 1) didn't like it any more. 2) Didn't want children in new and innovative shapes.

no kids then?

Not yet.

@terdon Morpheus will distract you in the night and made you forget? Isn't backwards?

@Braiam It can vary. If he's got the whole complex thing in his head now, there is no guarantee it will be there tomorrow. Sleep is good for insights, but not necessarily for maintaining a lot of little details in your head.

Even if you are sure you will remember all those details in the morning, it is usually a trick.

4:07 AM

when I can't figure out something I counsel Morpheus... normally... then PC normally breaks before I go to sleep... so it's the perfect timing :P

I've just had too many times where right before I sleep I'm so positive I will remember it tomorrow. And all I remember the next day is there was something important I was sure I would remember. And not the actual important part.

@Braiam what Kurt said. It's not that I have things to figure out, I have it figured out and need to do get it done while it's all in my head

2 hours later…

5:57 AM

any one here?

3 hours later…

8:42 AM

@slm no, /ʒil/. The /ʒ/ sound like the s in vision. A voiced palato-alveolar sibilant, not an alveolar one like /z/.

It's like Jill, but without the /d/ at the beginning

12 hours later…

8:42 PM

@slm did you see this one?

2

A: What is the easiest way to add a string on the beginning of every line of the file from the command line?

:|paste -d'foo ' - - - - input > output (just kidding, though you'll probably find it's the fastest of all the solutions posted here :-b). The canonical way is: sed 's/^/foo /' < input > output

: == true if I remember correctly, what's going on there?

9:04 PM

never mind, I think I got it

@terdon it's a joke: : | foo is basically equivalent to foo </dev/null

What had stumped me was why the paste works with it and not without

I am halfway to figuring it out :)

@terdon without it, where does it get input from?

I guess the - - - - means that paste needs input

Exactly, which is why it also works with

echo -n "" | paste

it just took me a while to decipher the meaning of - - - -

cool trick though

echo -n "" is equivalent to :

9:09 PM

yeah, finally found help : and understood

thanks :)

hmm, hang on, so why is paste splitting the 'foo'?

I mean:

:|paste -d'foo ' - - < a
haha hhaf

:|paste -d'foo ' - - -< a
haha hhafo

and so on, each - (which means read from STDIN) adds another character.

So, consecutive - characters split the delimiter?

9:22 PM

Argh, OK, got it. -d expects a list, so since it is given 4 empty input "files" (- - - -), it writes the whole delimiter. Nice!

9:47 PM

@terdon - try this and you'll see more of what's going on:
:|paste -d'foo ' - - - - - - - - somefile

it just keeps pumping 'foo ' at ya

@slm yeah, I figured it out

I hadn't realized that -d is a list

@terdon Don't answer questions when we're all asking for the actual error message :p

« first day (1095 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3852 days later) »

Transcript for

Oct '138

/dev/chat

General discussion for unix.stackexchange.com. If you have a q...

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile