@Jesse_b What do you think of amazon.in/ARMORSUIT-PC-P50R-Aluminum-Tower-Computer/dp/… as the basis of a backup PC?

One advantage of a backup PC is that if my main PC was to fall over and die one day, I could switch to using the backup PC (hopefully temporarily), and keep working.

@FaheemMitha Seems okay to me. I kind of hate this trend of "gaming" pc cases though

Currently, if my main PC MB was to die, I'd be seriously inconvenienced. I have no real backup computer options. Just a 12 year old laptop, which is still working.

I've been burned by them in the past being cheaply made

Probably because (a) I haven't used it much (b) it's a Thinkpad.

@Jesse_b My main/only computer has a Lian Li case. They're pretty nice as cases go.

Though I haven't dealt much with computer hardware, so I don't have much basis for comparison.

that's rupees right? If so it converts to about $84 USD and that is comparable to what we would pay in the US for something like that

Yeah I mean a computer case doesn't have many moving parts. My current case is a thermaltake and all the extra slot covers have just fallen out over the years because the retention clips aren't very good

not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but kind of crappy

my last case the clear plastic window on the side just fell out

@Jesse_b Yes, Indian Rupees.

My current case dates from 2007. They don't really age much. The case I linked to above appears to be from 2009. Has the form factor aged much since then? I guess it wouldn't have USB 3 slots.

@Jesse_b Sometimes they contain fans.

@FaheemMitha yes that is another thing the current case I have has lost a fan

The Lian Lis are nice cases. They're a bit expensive, but considering how long you can keep a computer case, it's reasonable to spend a little extra. Plus aluminium cases look good and weigh less.

Here's a review of that case - hardwarezone.com/review-dragons-lair-lian-li-pc-p50r/…

@Jesse_b Do you have a proper computer to do backups to?

@FaheemMitha I don't I should be better at that :(

@Jesse_b What do you use for backup?

@FaheemMitha YOLO

@Jesse_b ?

@FaheemMitha "you only live once" ( I don't do backups really )

@Jesse_b Oh. Well, that's a bad idea. Not doing backups, I mean.

Anyone will tell you that. Even basic backups are better than nothing.

@FaheemMitha Yeah I've been thinking about just doing something in the cloud

@Jesse_b A local backup is good too. Do you have unlimited internet?

@FaheemMitha Yeah

I can't back everything up remotely so easily, because I don't have unlimited.

One can get unlimited lines, but they're expensive.

Though internet is getting rapidly cheaper here. And better. More alternatives.

Someone is doing a lot of investment in the area.

Even 10 years ago, it was terrible.

@FaheemMitha the internet is a huge marketing tool. Over 1 billion people in India, it would be profitable to get them all on it

@Jesse_b Of course.

More ways to get eyeballs for ads.

Of course, the net has other uses too.

Plus, ad blockers. Yay.

I have no idea if everyone uses them, but if not, I have to wonder how they cope.

I was watching this show "the nineties" the other day and they went over the microsoft monopoly lawsuits

I didn't realize it was all about internet explorer and how they saw it as a sales tool and didn't want one company controlling what sites would show up with priority (google)

but so many other monopolies exist, as long as they don't interfere with the other monopolies in different markets the government leaves them alone

one company owns all the funeral homes, one company owns all the eyeglass makers

@Jesse_b Google pretty much has a monopoly on search, in practice.

Not sure what anyone can do about it, though. Since there is plenty of competition, in theory.

And ads aren't the only reason people would want to expand internet access. It's pretty basic to a modern industrialized economy.

Which India isn't, but perhaps they have ambitions to get there.

Speaking of the internet, my Hathway line is still down. Lucky I have a second one.

Hi. From a script file I do something like echo "OK". From another script I capture into variable called STATUS. However, the test [ "$STATUS" != "OK" ] fails...any idea why?

@deostroll [ "$STATUS" != "OK" ] fails because the status variable IS equal to OK

Oh my bad, I meant it passes

How are you capturing the OK

it is a docker run command: STATUS=$(docker run -t $IMAGE sh /foo.sh)

What is the exact output of docker run -t $IMAGE sh /foo.sh does it contain any extra whitespace or newlines?

the last line in foo.sh is simply echo "OK"

What are all the other lines

and I'm not super familiar with docker, it doesn't give back any "success" verbiage does it?

Some if conditions, etc etc

Do any of them echo anything besides OK?

yes docker does give it, in the sense if you did exit 1 from the script, you get that same status code in the host shell

I mean it would be best just to run docker run -t $IMAGE sh /foo.sh in your terminal and see if it spits out anything other than OK but you could also put set -x at the top of your script and see if anything else is making it into the STATUS variable

Nope. It doesn't spit anything else.

infact echo $STATUS also simply prints OK

$ [ "$STATUS" != OK ] && echo pass || echo fail
fail

So you would get pass?

@derobert Thanks derobert. The reason i am asking the questions is to help clarify the topics i have read as they are often than not unclear to me. I'll bear in mind to ask the question to the general room rather than necessarily direct them to an individual.

@Jesse_b There might be a carriage return character at the end of the outputted string.

@RuiFRibeiro Sasha Baron Cohen's first type...

@Fabby ;) I also do not enjoy panis et circenses

@RuiFRibeiro Damn! Your Latin is less rusty then mine...

>:-)

@Motivated This is a question and answer site.... Not a question and answer room.

0:-) ;-)

@RuiFRibeiro Is bread and circuses a reference to SBC?

@FaheemMitha en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

"The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority."

"In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace[1] — by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). "

On a related topic, if you’re interested in the origin of words and phrases in English, historyofenglishpodcast.com is fascinating.

@StephenKitt Albeit I prefer reading than hearing, it seems an interesting site, thanks. Bookmarked!

@RuiFRibeiro what I like about the podcast format in this case is that you can hear the pronunciation (old and new), which in many cases is half the story!

@StephenKitt Good point...I just prefer reading cause I do it often at odd hours, and I am much faster reading something.

@RuiFRibeiro Yes, I know what it means. I was just wondering in what context you were employing it.

@RuiFRibeiro Me too. I think most people can read much faster than any human could speak.

@FaheemMitha Yeah but I think the main benefit of podcasts is the ability to do other things while listening. Most people can't read and exercise or read and drive at the same time

Although the amount of people I see texting and driving would beg to differ :-/

@Jesse_b Yes, of course.

Personally I'm not sure I'd want to do most things when listening to a podcast. (Once upon a time they called it radio.) It would be too distracting. Cooking might be ok.

@FaheemMitha I think driving and exercising are also good times for it. I wouldn't necessarily want to do it while working because that involved much more thinking. Driving and exercising are sort of mindless activities that rely mostly on muscle memory

@FaheemMitha context....Fabby said he does not enjoy football when I talked about the Alig Interview to Beckham

solaris find is wild

@Kusalananda: I mentioned that issue to the OS developers at my company and they asked me to file a bug report and said they will patch it out :P

(former SunOS engineers)

@Jesse_b Seems as if they didn't.

@Kusalananda Didn't what?

Patch it out. If you're referring to the find behaviour with {}.

The standards text is: A utility_name or argument containing only the two characters "{}" shall be replaced by the current pathname. If a utility_name or argument string contains the two characters "{}", but not just the two characters "{}", it is implementation-defined whether find replaces those two characters or uses the string without change.

Yeah I just asked them about it today, I'm sure they didn't have time :p. Also as they no longer work for oracle it wont make it into solaris, only illumos

one of them suggested find ... -print | awk '{printf "mv \"%s\" \"%s.foo\"\n", $0, $0}' | sh -ex but I couldn't figure out how to work the date into it

@Jesse_b And you say they wrote some of the shell utilities? That piece of code has a huge code injection vulnerability.

Just try using it on a file with a ; and a double quote in its name... and other interesting this maybe.

@Kusalananda I'm not sure that person did but yeah I've seen some senior engineers run into basic shell pitfalls before. I can't really judge it much because there is no doubt they are C gurus and well versed in many other languages. I think they mostly just don't focus on shell

"I built this house, it's really good, but I'm not really good at the joining bricks together bit"

I dunno, I feel that's a bit of an unfair analogy. Especially in construction where framers rarely know masonry and even if they do, they almost certainly wont be experts in both :p

Yeah, I know.

And we have seen plenty of questions from CS students trying to solve flawed problems. I think many of the teachers are instilling poor shell practices to their students :p

Well I suppose it's also likely the students are presenting the issue sort of XY but if not the instructors are pointing them towards solutions that are not ideal such as parsing ls

@Kusalananda archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-10/…

Stephen Bourne advocates parsing ls

@Fabby It helps provide further context to the topics when the site doesn't necessarily support. Secondly, by asking questions and discussing it allows me (at least, i can't speak for others) to gain a deeper understanding. I am hoping that with the combined experiences and knowledge of the people in this room, i can go beyond the basics. I do plenty of research before i ask questions since i'm not expecting to be spoon fed if that's your concern.

Does anyone know of any (non-vendor specific) documentation about integrating a monitoring system into an incident management system so that the alerts would automatically generate a ticket? I'm trying to write up a proposal for my company and would like some backup information but so far I've only been able to find technical documentation on specific applications and not really any write ups on why it is or is not a good idea.

I think it would be off topic for server fault as it's asking for learning materials

@Motivated Perfect for posting questions on the site so everyone can benefit from yours in th future!

0:-)

@Jesse_b Unfortunately, that's what you'll be limited to...

You can still take the nuggets from the best what's available, build a matrix of what you want and then compare and rank.

(if not already available on sites like Wikipedia)

@Jesse_b When you were a N00b, that's what you did too...

@Jesse_b Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach ...

@Fabby :p That's what I was thinking when I wrote that but I have met plenty of very qualified teachers so I didn't want to be abrasive

I've taught Windows, Excel, Word, WordPerfect, ...

And people still ask about me coming back 15 years later...

Windows!

I just got bored with it.

@Jesse_b Yup: how to use a mouse!

What's the difference between a Serif and Sans Serif font,

How to configure your system...

When I see some users nowadays, I'm thinking about taking it back up.

Actually, the first thing I started with is:

@Jesse_b Why does the on-off button look like a one piercing a zero?

If you want to be a good teacher, it takes a lot of energy...

And it pays crap.

I believe that thinking in general takes significantly more energy than some care to admit

I get worn out from sitting in my chair at work and just trying to write documentation/scripts/etc

@Jesse_b A sign you're doing a great job!

@Fabby meh, mediocre at best

@Jesse_b Who in your department is doing a better job than you?

@Jesse_b Which reminds me of a funny story: I used to be the IT PM in a business unit,

and one of the business PMs says: "Aren't you cold here?"

me: "No, because I'm working hard and I'm actually hot"

Just when the director of the department walks past, smiling, pointing at me and giving me a thumbsup...

The other people were not amused...

:D >:-)

@Fabby Well it's not a very high bar

@Jesse_b My point exactly...

You're worn out because you're the top dog...

/shrug

AFK. Fixing myself a drink.

My efficiency is a direct result of my laziness

For example my department was tasked with running a specific test every hour earlier today so I setup a little script running on a cron job that runs that test and emails us the results hourly :)

@Jesse_b Easy people accept the way things are.

Difficult people insist on changing the world around them to suit their needs.

@Jesse_b Therefore, all progress of the human race can be attributed to lazy and difficult people

makemail () {
	local html_header="From: <${lb_mailfrom}>\nTo: ${lb_mailtoo}\nSubject: ${lb_subject}\nDate: <${lb_maildate}>\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n"
	echo -e "${html_header}"
	echo -e "<html>\n<body>\n\n<h1>LB Check for $(date)</h1>"
	echo -e '<div style="background-color:black;color:white;padding:20px;">'
	echo -e "<pre><code>"
}

complete with bad html and all :P

@Jesse_b :D :D :D

Before there were rules in MS Mail, I used to have a MAPI (Mail API) program reading my mail and responding to most recurring questions.

I used to support 2000 end-users all by myself and develop and deploy and write the end-user docs and train.

I still cannot believe I did all of that by myself, because when we had 5000 end-users there used to be 4 people and a Team Lead doing less than I did back then.

But then, Every time I left any company, I was replaced by 3 people.

Rui! o/

Calamare, Tartar sauce and ratatouille today.

Tomorrow: turkey tits, green beans, mushrooms, paprika, Pommes pins.

@Fabby cool.

And probably white asparagus. (dunno yet)

privileged asparagus

@Fabby Squid w/ potatoes and carrots, stir-pot

@Fabby Thinking of doing a little surprise to wifey and doing an Apple pie English/American style (I prefer them to the French Apple pie, especially when hot)

@Jesse_b take advice from my errors

@RuiFRibeiro :D Telepathy!

@Jesse_b when automating that kind of stuff, keep quiet about it. Otherwise, it is work "you are not doing"....people are ass backwards.

@Fabby ;)

@Fabby Remember about that OpenVas stuff a while ago?

@RuiFRibeiro vaguely...

@Fabby Vulnerability scanner, it was a pain to install it in Debian....

You helped another ISP doing stuff you've been doing for a while, right?

@RuiFRibeiro yeah, my company has been pretty good about it in the past

@RuiFRibeiro And?

@Fabby I worked for other ISPs in the past, working for the biggest nowadays....yeah...

@Fabby Well, a rookie was tasked to compile all that ....stuff per customer, and being the liaison with them....excellent.

@Fabby We are asking customers to fix the stuff, and I help the rookie debug false positives.

@RuiFRibeiro Ah...

Now I'm following again...

Hey, It's Friday night and I might have had a drink or two.

@Fabby Had had a couple of whiskeys ;)

@RuiFRibeiro Which one?

@Fabby Started on double Black Label, and ended up on Glenfiddich

:D

I hope the first one with Coke???

@Fabby How about your side?

Polish Wódka and Coke Zero.

@Fabby Nope, I drink it pure.

@RuiFRibeiro Glenfiddich: yes. Black Label???

@Fabby I make a point of having my whiskey and vodka w/ anything else.

@Fabby Mixing scotch with cola is punishable by death in some areas

I like to mix my vodka...

@Fabby Double Black Label....it tastes "like ham"

@Fabby Kept in smoked wood....

@Jesse_b Single Malt: yes, Blended??? The only way to drink it!

@Fabby Blended whisky is actually smoother than single malt

Thats the reason they blend it, to make it more smooth

@Jesse_b Sacrilege!

@Fabby I like my drinks pure and rough nowadays.

:D

@Jesse_b I prefer not blended ;I

@Jesse_b I like good single malt to drink pure (not even rocks)

@Fabby Seconded, not even rocks.

and blended for mixing...

@RuiFRibeiro I generally don't care, single malts are expensive because it's rare that a single cask produces a whisky worthy of sipping

@Fabby I have to find a kit of stones.

I actually like Jack Daniels single barrel.

Blended whisky is all from the same batch but will be a mix of different casks to improve the taste

@Jesse_b Not over here.

Have here a Chivas that wifey gave me for xmas....

Most blended is just good for mixing.

@RuiFRibeiro That's a good blend, but still a blend

@Fabby yep

@Fabby I can give you another use for blends ;-P

@Fabby It's the same everywhere, especially since scotch can only be produced in scotland :p

@Jesse_b Whiskey comes from Scotland only.

@Fabby whisky*

@Fabby Nuts, whiskey and....tadadada......chocolate mousse.

whiskey is how bourbons spell it

except for makers mark

@Jesse_b Whisky comes from everywhere, and the Kentucky and Tenessee single Barrels are good, but very expensive over here!

@Jesse_b hey, I spell whiskey

@RuiFRibeiro Most scottish companies spell it whisky, US companies spell it whiskey

below Scottish Single Malt, but close.

@Jesse_b Never seen wisky....

@Jesse_b I thought it was the other way around, but I'm not arguing...

Look on your bottle of chivas and glenfiddich :p

@RuiFRibeiro Wiske is a girl's name...

caskers.com/chivas-regal-12-year-old-scotch-whisky/…

glenfiddich.com/us/national/where-to-buy/…

jackdaniels.com/en-us/whiskey/…

@Jesse_b yeah, wisky lol

@Jesse_b Like I said: I thought it was the other way around, but I'm not arguing!

:D

IOW: You're very probably correct.

Japan also spells it whisky, they were heavily influenced by the Scottish and make a product very similar to scotch

@Jesse_b I prefer to use whiskey....

My Mac dictionary is telling me whiskey US & Irish, whisky BE

lol

Well the US definitely had more influence from the Irish than the Scottish

@Jesse_b Before the country was made dry...

What was that called again??? @Jesse_b

@Fabby prohibition

@Fabby My wife makes some steamed rice cakes....and I soak them in whiskey before eating them.

The Scots were just better smugglers than the Irish!

@Jesse_b Yesh!

@RuiFRibeiro You should try dipping a real Cuban into whisky and then lighting the whisky.

(obviously the whisky on the cigar, not the one in your glass)

:P ;-)

Then smoke and drink.

@Fabby I still have here the cigars from two years ago....out of 5, only smoked 1/3....of 1 during two weeks....

I used to bring Cuban cigars to one of my ex-colleagues in the US.

@RuiFRibeiro So you need help smoking them???

:D :D :D

@RuiFRibeiro Did you know that as a US citizen you risk prison time when you bring Cuban cigars into the USA?

@Fabby Most def yep....How I managed to only smoke 1/3 of a cigar in 2 weeks is still a mistery lol

Whereas as a non-citizen, you only risk confiscation...

@RuiFRibeiro :D :D :D

lol

@Jesse_b I know the law...

E.g.:

I ship beer to the US.

However, I stick a home made label to it mentioning in 6 languages including Spanish and Russian

Not for human consumption, decorative use only

Liquids with russian on them definitely get searched

@Jesse_b I've never had a bottle confiscated.

@Jesse_b Better use persian ;-P

Also: the Customs document mentions:

Decorative vase

@Fabby ;)

@Fabby Send some lol

@RuiFRibeiro Can't find a picture... Must be on my work laptop.

Magnum bottles only.

@Fabby cool

too lazy to boot work computer

@Fabby Doctor ordered only one glass a day ;.P

I need to fix myself another drink! BRB...

@RuiFRibeiro That would not fly in Belgium...

Doctor would specify: 25cL/day.

:P

BRB

@Fabby ;-P

Has someone have to decode a dmidecode output of a machine with 1.5TB of RAM?

(RAM, not disk - we have some of them....)

@RuiFRibeiro The largest machine I ever deployed had 8TB of RAM