Between "speed tax" photo radar on freeways and "Nickel Bag" Joe Arpaio in Arizona, I would definitely call the state highly prosecutorial against it's citizens.
I have one of these. Note that you can get them cheaper than what ThinkGeek sells them for, but they have a nice web page.
As an example, I metered some new 1U servers that I which indicates a range of 0.8 - 1.5A depending on system load. This is important, since we are at 14A of a 20A circuit in our data center. We are going to have to upgrade here soon.
I don't think I would fully realize how bad the lag is on my Samsung SyncMaster 245T if I didn't have my Viewsonic PS790 here next to it. I play TF2, L4D, and a number of other PC games on the LCD and Linux on the CRT, but I can move the plugs around whenever to check the difference.
LCD really needs to improve on this. LCD in the office is good, but for multimedia LCD is just barely good enough.
I'm disappointed in LCD.
Note that I make around $92K-$98K per year depending on the side business. I would pay $1000, maybe $2000 for a decent LCD if I was convinced it was as good as a CRT.
At my company, our IT director read some article somewhere that it was good to use Runas and not allow people to use admin accounts by default.
As a result, the IT director mandated that all sysadmins, such as myself, needed a new username_adm account with Domain Administrator privileges and our regular interactive-login accounts had their superuser privileges dropped. We were told to use Runas and similar tools to escalate privileges and to use similar tools to do our jobs.
It was a nightmare.
It was about three months before the order was rescinded.
Windows was not designed for this, so it's real-world implementation is horrible. It caused massive problems with compatibility with administrator applications, Runas itself broke other admin tools due to sub-processes not starting with the right privileges and environment problems. Runas itself is just a pile of crap, but we tried other tools to no avail. By the end of two months, all the admins had just migrated their profiles to their username_adm profile and were logging in interactively with it instead of their old accounts.
Meanwhile, the OSX and Linux admins continue to use sudo happily, and almost nobody has the root passwords.
I myself am the network engineer. I use an OSX laptop, but I do a lot of stuff on Windows too.
I would be thrilled to have a sudo-like implementation on Windows to use, but it doesn't exist. Runas is crap, so please stop pushing it as a solution until you've actually tried to use it at your job as a sysadmin. Tell me about YOUR success story and stop preaching about what you have very apparently never tried yourself.
The simple answer is that management has no business getting involved in this issue.
To placate management, you need to have a simple doc, a spreadsheet, that shows the hostname of each server and then what it does, where it is, and who manages it -- THAT's what they really want. It's your job to keep that documentation and be able to present it when called upon.
Also, in your meetings with management, don't say "fordprefect has a failed hard drive." Instead, say "the MySQL database server has a failed hard drive." Remember that they don't work on the day to day stuff, so you need to translate for them.
If needed, whip out RFC 1178 and be able to justify what a good hostname is and how poor fundamental decision making in technical areas results in higher support costs.
Ultimately, if you have a former-technical/wanna-be-technical micro-manager who thinks you work for him instead of him working for you, then you need to get a new manager. You can't fix stupid. You can't fix someone else's poor judgment -- only make sure that your own is sound.
Many, many, many times have I had to chide another foolish junior sys admin for stupid naming schemes.
Here are my DO NOTs for hostnames;
1.) DO NOT use your hostname as documentation. Do not use the name to indicate it's location, what it does, or who operates it.
This one comes up over and over again because stupid admin wants to name his server "WizCorp-fs-001". I then remind him if he has a problem remembering what company he works for, because the hosts fully qualified name is "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp.com". Why not just name it "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp-server-room-001.california.wizcorp-IT-department.wizcorp.com" and get the stupid to the max right off the bat?
Dumbass admin # 2 wants his servers to have their location in their hostname, such as dbhost.PHX.wizcorp.com. This is all good, until the host needs to move to Nevada. Nice work there dumbass.
Generally, this one just goes hand-in-hand with admins who can't keep any documentation about their work.
The exception to the above is for special hosts, such as network devices, local resources (IP-enabled things that won't ever move, like an AC unit or environmental monitor), and cluster hosts. ISPs do this, and noob-admins see what the big guys are doing and somehow thinks that their piddly 500-staff office company needs to do the same thing.
--
2.) DO NOT make a hostname unpronounceable. There are three primary places where a hostname gets used; on the keyboard, on the label, and on the phone. If I can't go in with my cell phone to the computer room, read the label exactly as it should be sanely pronounced to another admin on the phone, and he can't accurately type it out after two tries, it's a bad hostname.
If your hostname is fs-01-PHX.6FL, you're probably an idiot. Again, hostnames are not documentation, and you need to be able to pronounce it. I can't pronounce that crap.
And, while we are on the subject, what is the problem with you people who can't label your hosts? If I was your boss, I would walk into the server room after every new host was installed with a checklist of things to make sure you didn't screw up. If you failed to label a host, you would get one warning, and then be fired. It's REALLY important that someone be able to find the host after an outage -- you won't be able to tell what the host is based on the monitor output, because it's dead! I would not be bitter about this one if it wasn't a problem over and over and over and over...
--
3.) DO NOT use as many special characters in your hostname as you can dream up, especially the dash "-" and underscore "_". I'm talking to YOU WINDOWS admin.
Windows admins are more guilty of this than anyone else. First, they name their firewalls fw1-DEN1 and fw1-DEN2, and then they name their switches sw1_DEN1 and sw2_DEN1. WTG there dummy; you just caused untold frustration for years and years to come as I guess if you're character-of-the-day was an underscore or dash.
In general, DO NOT use hyphens/dashes or underscores in hostnames, or something even worse. I've had an actual experience where an organization used underscores on some hosts, hyphens on others, but their label maker could not do underscores, so they always used hyphens on the labels. Lots of fun when you are trying to figure out why you can't ping "web_0001.foobie.com".
--
4.) DO NOT name your new replacement host after your old host. It's a new host, give it a new name.
I don't know many times I've had to deal with the aftermath of this one, but it's a lot. If it's new hardware, it's a new hostname. Get over it. You need to get creative again an
I'm the network admin for a company of about 300 or so people. We have a 45Mbps rate-limited 100BASE-T Ethernet circuit through Cox Communications.
Today we were hitting a steady inbound speed of about 35-37Mbps, all definitely video and random stuff traffic, probably people reading websites.
This, combined with a little walk around the office and the number of streaming video feeds of the days news that I could see on desktops made it pretty clear what was going on.
I did nothing and let people watch their news. It wasn't hurting others who were doing legit business and there was even some very relevant info, given Obama's statements regarding science funding and the nature of our particular business.
Re:First Lesson in writing a Review
on
The Zen of SOA
·
· Score: 1
I can't mod this up any more. Dear subbie: Don't me a dummy. Only jerks/fools use acronyms without explaining what they are.
I support your statement regarding crappy software. ACS is a real pile -- given it's importance, you might think they would improve upon it a little more. Call Manager has annoying issues up the wazoo. MARS looks kinda neat, until you actually try to use it and end up fighting against it all the time.
I look more and more fondly upon Juniper. Their new EX series switches and smaller routers could start hurting Cisco here in a few years in the SMB market, rather than just carrier.
This definitely gives weight to the argument for waiting a bit to run software upgrades."
I'm going to pick on submitter here. This is your fear of the unknown. There is another guy who I work with that likes to pull this BS out of the air all the time when a new release comes out.
His argument: Ohnoz, I'm scared.
My argument: Here is the changelog. These are the real risks that are posed by continuing to use the old version. These are the benefits of upgrading.
When I started working for the company, software was years and years out of date. He had used this excuse for a long time to basically not do anything he thought was risky, but had in fact amassed a huge amount of risk to the business that ended up costing us a lot of real money.
Granted, there is some value to waiting a reasonable short period of time to gather your wits and read the changelog before upgrading/patching, but that should never be an excuse to coddle a fear of the unknown.
I'm surprised that none of the responses that I see so far mention the obvious solution that I do; fire the inept. It doesn't matter what your organization or profession is -- every organization has some rules and guidelines to prevent stupid mistakes from happening.
Sometimes these mistakes are not apparent, and the check/rule is there for a good reason.
However, my experience is that most of these checks/rules get put in place because some stupid fool went and did the kind of thing that a stupid fool would do, and it's an attempt to save the stupid from doing what they would otherwise do naturally; stupid things.
"You can't fix stupid."
If you have inept staff around, they are going to do stupid things and there is nothing you can do to stop them, so stop trying, and fire them.
I greatly wish that a couple of guys that I work with would get fired. I like them personally, but they are fark-ups. They just can't manage to consistently do things right. In some cases, they consistently screw things up.
So, as a personnel manager, please do your job. When people fark up, warn them, then fire them. If you don't the talented people are going to get tired of fixing the work of the inept and quit. You end up with the "Dead Sea" affect, where you're only left with the worthlessly inept and your business sinks.
Don't make a new rule/law/check, just solve the root source of the problem; fire the stupid people!
Um, actually I work at a biotech/cancer research institute that does a lot of nerogenomics research and related stuff. We are about 50% Apple and 50% Windows on the desktop. Who do you think buys those $10K Macs? Visual designers and researchers. Granted, that's a different product segment, but we have lots and lots of MacBook Pros around too.
Unfortunately, Runas is mostly crap. My IT Director thought this would be a great idea and forced all sysadmins to loose their special domain Administrator privileges and then make a privileged username_adm account for everyone. So, we have to use the _adm account to do anything with Administrator privileges. Some applications just don't work through Runas, it really screws up your environment, and using it just isn't easy. The solution is that most admins have ditched using their username accounts and just log in interactively with their username_adm accounts now. Fat lot of good that does.
I admin GNU/Linux systems (Debian or Ubuntu), FreeBSD, OS X, and Windows hosts in a multi-site 600+ user environment. Sudo is great. Runas is mostly crap. That's my real-world, I've-used-it opinion.
Well, it does coincide with my personal experience of the Microsoft Red Ring of Death. My XBox 360, bought in late 2006 if I remember correctly, just died a few weeks ago and we recently got the replacement back. Adult-only home, well ventilated and treated properly.
Units will continue to die for years to come. For us owners, this problem will continue for a long time.
Most XBox 360 consoles before the recent hardware changes will die with unreasonably short lives. It's just a matter of time. It's a design flaw, not a manufacturing flaw.
Due to the large amount of wealth that this family has access to, I don't see a problem here. If it was someone else without access to such large resources, I could understand this being a problem. They can definitely afford it. After all, what was the guy doing? Recreational flying.
I had some bug report that I put in a year or two back regarding some other stupid user interface changes. I think it was something regarding the ability to require ctrl+enter to send messages as a configuration check-box item, rather than just enter.
The response was bla-bla-bla not my fault technical reasons bla-bla-bla would make code look pretty. The primary concern was that re-introducing that portion of code would require the code to not look pretty, due to some GTK for Windows bug.
Pidgin has been on a down-hill roll for a few years now. This is not surprising. I stopped using it (and stopped using IM-chat services all together) a few years ago.
The local prosecutors office ordered and conducted the arrest of the newspaper editors for disclosing the fact that they had been requested, through the act of a horrifically crooked grand jury subpoena (which neither the judge nor jury had approved or even seen), to turn over a list of their entire readership and website visitors over a period of years.
What kind of world do we live in, if an intellectual man, never mind a common man, can not come before a judge and say, "I have been wronged." It is not to harm and disparage out society to merely suggest that this is a bad idea? And, finally, do you really have such a high opinion of lawyers?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same state where the owners and operators of the New Times were arrested for exposing extreme judicial misconduct by prosecutors;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_New_Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/business/media/19cnd-arrest.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=login
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/99912
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13508_3-9800829-19.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376598/
Between "speed tax" photo radar on freeways and "Nickel Bag" Joe Arpaio in Arizona, I would definitely call the state highly prosecutorial against it's citizens.
Read the headline. Small firms may not have a development staff to pull this off.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/7657/
I have one of these. Note that you can get them cheaper than what ThinkGeek sells them for, but they have a nice web page.
As an example, I metered some new 1U servers that I which indicates a range of 0.8 - 1.5A depending on system load. This is important, since we are at 14A of a 20A circuit in our data center. We are going to have to upgrade here soon.
Meetoo
I don't think I would fully realize how bad the lag is on my Samsung SyncMaster 245T if I didn't have my Viewsonic PS790 here next to it. I play TF2, L4D, and a number of other PC games on the LCD and Linux on the CRT, but I can move the plugs around whenever to check the difference.
LCD really needs to improve on this. LCD in the office is good, but for multimedia LCD is just barely good enough.
I'm disappointed in LCD.
Note that I make around $92K-$98K per year depending on the side business. I would pay $1000, maybe $2000 for a decent LCD if I was convinced it was as good as a CRT.
Hi.
At my company, our IT director read some article somewhere that it was good to use Runas and not allow people to use admin accounts by default.
As a result, the IT director mandated that all sysadmins, such as myself, needed a new username_adm account with Domain Administrator privileges and our regular interactive-login accounts had their superuser privileges dropped. We were told to use Runas and similar tools to escalate privileges and to use similar tools to do our jobs.
It was a nightmare.
It was about three months before the order was rescinded.
Windows was not designed for this, so it's real-world implementation is horrible. It caused massive problems with compatibility with administrator applications, Runas itself broke other admin tools due to sub-processes not starting with the right privileges and environment problems. Runas itself is just a pile of crap, but we tried other tools to no avail. By the end of two months, all the admins had just migrated their profiles to their username_adm profile and were logging in interactively with it instead of their old accounts.
Meanwhile, the OSX and Linux admins continue to use sudo happily, and almost nobody has the root passwords.
I myself am the network engineer. I use an OSX laptop, but I do a lot of stuff on Windows too.
I would be thrilled to have a sudo-like implementation on Windows to use, but it doesn't exist. Runas is crap, so please stop pushing it as a solution until you've actually tried to use it at your job as a sysadmin. Tell me about YOUR success story and stop preaching about what you have very apparently never tried yourself.
Really good point!
The simple answer is that management has no business getting involved in this issue.
To placate management, you need to have a simple doc, a spreadsheet, that shows the hostname of each server and then what it does, where it is, and who manages it -- THAT's what they really want. It's your job to keep that documentation and be able to present it when called upon.
Also, in your meetings with management, don't say "fordprefect has a failed hard drive." Instead, say "the MySQL database server has a failed hard drive." Remember that they don't work on the day to day stuff, so you need to translate for them.
If needed, whip out RFC 1178 and be able to justify what a good hostname is and how poor fundamental decision making in technical areas results in higher support costs.
Ultimately, if you have a former-technical/wanna-be-technical micro-manager who thinks you work for him instead of him working for you, then you need to get a new manager. You can't fix stupid. You can't fix someone else's poor judgment -- only make sure that your own is sound.
Wow, why has nobody posted this yet? Too obvious? I doubt it, considering the awful ways I've seen people name computers;
RFC1178 - Choosing a name for your computer
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html
Lots of good, timeless advice.
"Hostnames are not documentation."
Many, many, many times have I had to chide another foolish junior sys admin for stupid naming schemes.
Here are my DO NOTs for hostnames;
1.) DO NOT use your hostname as documentation. Do not use the name to indicate it's location, what it does, or who operates it.
This one comes up over and over again because stupid admin wants to name his server "WizCorp-fs-001". I then remind him if he has a problem remembering what company he works for, because the hosts fully qualified name is "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp.com". Why not just name it "wizcorp-fs-001.wizcorp-server-room-001.california.wizcorp-IT-department.wizcorp.com" and get the stupid to the max right off the bat?
Dumbass admin # 2 wants his servers to have their location in their hostname, such as dbhost.PHX.wizcorp.com. This is all good, until the host needs to move to Nevada. Nice work there dumbass.
Generally, this one just goes hand-in-hand with admins who can't keep any documentation about their work.
The exception to the above is for special hosts, such as network devices, local resources (IP-enabled things that won't ever move, like an AC unit or environmental monitor), and cluster hosts. ISPs do this, and noob-admins see what the big guys are doing and somehow thinks that their piddly 500-staff office company needs to do the same thing.
--
2.) DO NOT make a hostname unpronounceable. There are three primary places where a hostname gets used; on the keyboard, on the label, and on the phone. If I can't go in with my cell phone to the computer room, read the label exactly as it should be sanely pronounced to another admin on the phone, and he can't accurately type it out after two tries, it's a bad hostname.
If your hostname is fs-01-PHX.6FL, you're probably an idiot. Again, hostnames are not documentation, and you need to be able to pronounce it. I can't pronounce that crap.
And, while we are on the subject, what is the problem with you people who can't label your hosts? If I was your boss, I would walk into the server room after every new host was installed with a checklist of things to make sure you didn't screw up. If you failed to label a host, you would get one warning, and then be fired. It's REALLY important that someone be able to find the host after an outage -- you won't be able to tell what the host is based on the monitor output, because it's dead! I would not be bitter about this one if it wasn't a problem over and over and over and over...
--
3.) DO NOT use as many special characters in your hostname as you can dream up, especially the dash "-" and underscore "_". I'm talking to YOU WINDOWS admin.
Windows admins are more guilty of this than anyone else. First, they name their firewalls fw1-DEN1 and fw1-DEN2, and then they name their switches sw1_DEN1 and sw2_DEN1. WTG there dummy; you just caused untold frustration for years and years to come as I guess if you're character-of-the-day was an underscore or dash.
In general, DO NOT use hyphens/dashes or underscores in hostnames, or something even worse. I've had an actual experience where an organization used underscores on some hosts, hyphens on others, but their label maker could not do underscores, so they always used hyphens on the labels. Lots of fun when you are trying to figure out why you can't ping "web_0001.foobie.com".
--
4.) DO NOT name your new replacement host after your old host. It's a new host, give it a new name.
I don't know many times I've had to deal with the aftermath of this one, but it's a lot. If it's new hardware, it's a new hostname. Get over it. You need to get creative again an
I can't imagine the typical connoisseur of consumer television having the intellectual or emotional maturity to understand or care about such issues.
I'm the network admin for a company of about 300 or so people. We have a 45Mbps rate-limited 100BASE-T Ethernet circuit through Cox Communications.
Today we were hitting a steady inbound speed of about 35-37Mbps, all definitely video and random stuff traffic, probably people reading websites.
This, combined with a little walk around the office and the number of streaming video feeds of the days news that I could see on desktops made it pretty clear what was going on.
I did nothing and let people watch their news. It wasn't hurting others who were doing legit business and there was even some very relevant info, given Obama's statements regarding science funding and the nature of our particular business.
I can't mod this up any more. Dear subbie: Don't me a dummy. Only jerks/fools use acronyms without explaining what they are.
I support your statement regarding crappy software. ACS is a real pile -- given it's importance, you might think they would improve upon it a little more. Call Manager has annoying issues up the wazoo. MARS looks kinda neat, until you actually try to use it and end up fighting against it all the time.
I look more and more fondly upon Juniper. Their new EX series switches and smaller routers could start hurting Cisco here in a few years in the SMB market, rather than just carrier.
This definitely gives weight to the argument for waiting a bit to run software upgrades."
I'm going to pick on submitter here. This is your fear of the unknown. There is another guy who I work with that likes to pull this BS out of the air all the time when a new release comes out.
His argument: Ohnoz, I'm scared.
My argument: Here is the changelog. These are the real risks that are posed by continuing to use the old version. These are the benefits of upgrading.
When I started working for the company, software was years and years out of date. He had used this excuse for a long time to basically not do anything he thought was risky, but had in fact amassed a huge amount of risk to the business that ended up costing us a lot of real money.
Granted, there is some value to waiting a reasonable short period of time to gather your wits and read the changelog before upgrading/patching, but that should never be an excuse to coddle a fear of the unknown.
There is no cop to pull them over.
I'm surprised that none of the responses that I see so far mention the obvious solution that I do; fire the inept. It doesn't matter what your organization or profession is -- every organization has some rules and guidelines to prevent stupid mistakes from happening.
Sometimes these mistakes are not apparent, and the check/rule is there for a good reason.
However, my experience is that most of these checks/rules get put in place because some stupid fool went and did the kind of thing that a stupid fool would do, and it's an attempt to save the stupid from doing what they would otherwise do naturally; stupid things.
"You can't fix stupid."
If you have inept staff around, they are going to do stupid things and there is nothing you can do to stop them, so stop trying, and fire them.
I greatly wish that a couple of guys that I work with would get fired. I like them personally, but they are fark-ups. They just can't manage to consistently do things right. In some cases, they consistently screw things up.
So, as a personnel manager, please do your job. When people fark up, warn them, then fire them. If you don't the talented people are going to get tired of fixing the work of the inept and quit. You end up with the "Dead Sea" affect, where you're only left with the worthlessly inept and your business sinks.
Don't make a new rule/law/check, just solve the root source of the problem; fire the stupid people!
Um, actually I work at a biotech/cancer research institute that does a lot of nerogenomics research and related stuff. We are about 50% Apple and 50% Windows on the desktop. Who do you think buys those $10K Macs? Visual designers and researchers. Granted, that's a different product segment, but we have lots and lots of MacBook Pros around too.
Unfortunately, Runas is mostly crap. My IT Director thought this would be a great idea and forced all sysadmins to loose their special domain Administrator privileges and then make a privileged username_adm account for everyone. So, we have to use the _adm account to do anything with Administrator privileges. Some applications just don't work through Runas, it really screws up your environment, and using it just isn't easy. The solution is that most admins have ditched using their username accounts and just log in interactively with their username_adm accounts now. Fat lot of good that does.
I admin GNU/Linux systems (Debian or Ubuntu), FreeBSD, OS X, and Windows hosts in a multi-site 600+ user environment. Sudo is great. Runas is mostly crap. That's my real-world, I've-used-it opinion.
Well, it does coincide with my personal experience of the Microsoft Red Ring of Death. My XBox 360, bought in late 2006 if I remember correctly, just died a few weeks ago and we recently got the replacement back. Adult-only home, well ventilated and treated properly.
Units will continue to die for years to come. For us owners, this problem will continue for a long time.
Most XBox 360 consoles before the recent hardware changes will die with unreasonably short lives. It's just a matter of time. It's a design flaw, not a manufacturing flaw.
You've been thinking about this article;
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
Due to the large amount of wealth that this family has access to, I don't see a problem here. If it was someone else without access to such large resources, I could understand this being a problem. They can definitely afford it. After all, what was the guy doing? Recreational flying.
I have to agree with you. I stopped using Pidgin a few years ago due to the stupid developers of the software.
I had some bug report that I put in a year or two back regarding some other stupid user interface changes. I think it was something regarding the ability to require ctrl+enter to send messages as a configuration check-box item, rather than just enter.
The response was bla-bla-bla not my fault technical reasons bla-bla-bla would make code look pretty. The primary concern was that re-introducing that portion of code would require the code to not look pretty, due to some GTK for Windows bug.
Pidgin has been on a down-hill roll for a few years now. This is not surprising. I stopped using it (and stopped using IM-chat services all together) a few years ago.
Easydns.org. It's a Canadian company. I've registered with them for years. Good ethical business with good service.
Similar to this;
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2007-10-18/news/breathtaking-abuse-of-the-constitution/
The local prosecutors office ordered and conducted the arrest of the newspaper editors for disclosing the fact that they had been requested, through the act of a horrifically crooked grand jury subpoena (which neither the judge nor jury had approved or even seen), to turn over a list of their entire readership and website visitors over a period of years.
I hope for a similar, if not stronger, reaction.
What kind of world do we live in, if an intellectual man, never mind a common man, can not come before a judge and say, "I have been wronged." It is not to harm and disparage out society to merely suggest that this is a bad idea? And, finally, do you really have such a high opinion of lawyers?