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A Sysadmin's Worst Halloween Fears
Criswell writes "This weekend's Strenua Inertia Extravaganza comic strip deals with the fears of the system administrator... It's a special online 'exclusive'... Enjoy!"
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Well, at least MY worst fear is when Mount Redmond opens its crappy Windows to release the airborne toxin WinDozeium, which will cause anyone who inhales it to instantly pass out as a result of a brain GPF. However, my legion of Daemons will prevent this from happening with their superior error handling capabilities.
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
Its just trying to emulate tar ... :)
/dev/psaux. :)
tar - is for stdin, so you use tar xvzf filename.tar.gz
ps aux to me, though, makes me feel like i'm sending a request to my mouse on
OFTC: By the community, for the community
i had the problem of converting over to not using the dash. for the longest time, i would type ps -aux and get ps griping at me... i eventually converted, but now when i'm at school and try to do a 'ps aux' on IRIX, it has _no_ idea what it is.
:)
btw, 'ps aux' makes me feel like i'm sending it to my mouse also
Webcomics.com is running a special Halloween Comics Section featuring comics with halloween related storylines and all sorts of crossovers between different internet comics. It's pretty fun. All of these are internet only as well.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I do medical imaging, so I've been used for quite a while to dealing with monochrome/color displays. While color monitors are becoming quite good if you're willing to spend the money (All the color monitors I work on have trinitron tubes), matching the pitch of a grey monochrome monitor is quite chalenging (put R,G,B channels in the space of one grey pixel).
The first time I came across this fact was in Russia, with diagnostic filmless X-ray here. You wouldn't want to see the difference when compared to a color normal display! Displaying the same images on a color monitor just look awful, and can be quite dangerous if you rely on the quality of the monitor for diagnostic purposes!!!!
So anyway, a few years later, here I am with my two monitors (saved from the skip). Both are 1280x1024 21" DEC monitors, there's a color one (VRT19HA) and a BW (VR21 I think) that is plugged on the green output of the color monitor (so in fact both display the same stuff).
If I program and do a lot of text stuff, I will look at the BW monitor, whereas if I do color stuff, I will look at the color one, clever hey? ;-)
Even better, with Xfree 4.0 I should now be able to get a different display on both of them (haven't tried x2x though), especially now that I managed to get myself a second matrox millennium 2, ideal for the purpose with the sync-on-green hack! When I am done, I will definitely use a true monochrome setup, because while the green channel is okay with most of the stuff, it's a little bit weird if you get color information in your xterms, sometimes you just miss some of the stuff :-)
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
the man page tells all...
:)
Berkeley syntax (aka ps aux) doenst have a dash. SysV syntax (ps -ef) does. GNU ps does both, and it figures out what syntax you are trying to use based on whether the dash is there or not. (some flags have differing usages based on if they are berkeley or SysV)
thus ps -aux whines, and ps -ef doesnt
If you look for yourself, it is indeed refreshing to have some Geek Humor in this paper, and it is something to smile about in the morning, which, I'm sorry to say, cannot be said about the other comic stips.
I was, indeed, pleased to see this article on Slashdot.
Kudos!
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
And with our new Doom sysadmin tool, those zombies are dead within minutes!
I suggested the following as a story this morning and thought it was much funnier:
Rasterman Shaves Head!
Mandrake's Seedier Life Exposed!
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I think this would be even more humourous than 404 error :-)
Of course, this site isn't really mono.. it's grayscale. On a true monochrome screen (like an old Mac) it would all be dithered to hell.
when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!
Who's idea was it to make the ps command inconsistent when it came to handling switches and complain about using it the standard way? The dash is used so often and (otherwise) consistently that it will always be "ps -ax" to me.
while(offtopic){Eh? No..I opened it with SVGALib in lynx :) :)
hint: there is nothing you _need_ X for. }
That comic reminds me though, does anyone know if there is an effective way of killing zombie processes? Or could we make unused signal 16 SIGZMBIE and instruct the kernel to destroy it at all costs?
"init! You have misuderstood my orders! *alt+sysrq+l* (don't try that!!)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Totally off topic (yet it will hopefully prove a point), this article has been very kind to posters. Just about every post has gotten moderated, and most of them are moderated up. Very weird, yet I guess it's expected for so few posts. Anyway, just an observation I had. Now watch this get moderated down : )
AN admins worst fear is NOT zombies, it is an uber-luser with the root/admin/supervisor password. Imagine the horror: "Since Nick isn't here, I'll just install SP6 for him" or "This QSECOFR person hasn't changed their password for a long time, I'd better disable their account!".
I submitted this as a story, but its late in America now, so I doubt anyone will get to it while its still Halloween. (Its actually November in AU now, but thats a different matter...)
Go to Google, and look twice at the logo.
I want the dash too.
export I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS=t
is your friend.
Zombies are children that have finished executing, but their parent does not care. The parent needs to call the wait function to shut down the child properly (and transfer the exit status to the parent process).
You cannot kill such a zombie, since the parent might care at a later time. The kernel cannot know in advance when the parent is going to call wait and thus the only way to kill the zombie is to kill its parent. A zombie is merely the exit status of a program, waiting to be picked up. If you kill the parent, the kernel can finally be sure that the exit status is not being picked up, and both parent and child/zombie goes away.
You can, when you program, instruct the kernel to take care of any finished children by saying that you are never going to call wait. But you have to do that on a per-program basis, and in advance.
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Basically the same old worn out Microsoft bashing trying to come off as humor. What's missing is that essential dash of wit and the slightest hint of originality.
I wonder, did someone purposely set this up to make Linux advocates look like twits?