It's easy to argue that an aggregate total of something should be appropriated by someone "in charge" for some worthy cause. I'd love 13,000 man years to be dedicated to solving major problems. More power to those involved.
I think you're far overestimating the work power of 13,000 minimum wage "man years". McDonalds corp owns (err, employs) 166,358 workers in the United States (extrapolated from their published numbers). You can rest assured, the 13,000 "man years" are easily covered by folks happily making your BigMac and Fries. Would you like an ice-cold McShake or McApple McPi with that? (Pi intentionally spelled as such, to keep up with your side of the argument, which incidentally is the number of apple-like flavored slices included, and the number of grams of known carcinogens in a McDonalds apple pie)
I'm not a big wiki fan. I'm just getting all the information gathered into a usable form where I can start making up some documentation on it. But hell, wiki, text files, or at least something more than "We named our servers for historical royalty of Europe from 2050BC to 1750AD". And be damned if someone says they're having problems with "King Henry". Which one? King Henry III. Of Bavaria, England, France, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, or Spain? Ummm.
Just kidding on those names, that's not really the way this network is named, but it's pretty damned close. "organized and methodological" seem to not be in a lot of people's vocabularies. (a metha-what? isn't that a drug or something?)
Thanks for the drink, I really needed it.:) Something to numb the pain.
As it is, I've never seen any site enforce paragraph indention, probably because it would break other layout items.
As I learned writing letters way back in grade school, the first line of paragraphs are indented. Optionally, in styles such as business form letters, you can leave the indention out. That is optionally, where it is not forbidden to indent the first line of a paragraph. Maybe you were taught differently, or maybe those who taught you, and therefor you, never learned the appropriate use of indenting paragraphs.
Typically, I would use the tab to indent, but when web based email clients became popular (and generally online forums didn't exist), I had to stop using the tab, since it was a great way to end up sending the message before it was complete. Tab typically replaces three to five spaces. Again way back in the day of web based email clients, any more than two spaces would frequently be eaten by the web application, resulting in two spaces. Rather than risk differences, I adopted two spaces.
Using spaces for tabs isn't unusual to me, since I originally learned to type on mechanical typewriters. Computers were just showing up in school for general use around the time I had reached typing classes (around 8th grade) with electric typewriters. With years of experience typing already, the only thing that I had to really adjust for was that you can't press electronic keyboard keys quite the same way that you have to pound on a mechanical typewriter. Well, that and the fact the numeral one (1) key was no longer missing.:)
I know a lot of these items are totally archaic, and many people on here have only seen them in museums. Some of us had them and used them. We also learned a long time ago how to format documents, and those little social graces have stuck with us. And yes, I'm terribly annoyed when I write out something in a web form, and extra spaces are collapsed to be one space, so indentions and space between paragraphs are destroyed.
People wonder why I qualify most statements in an emergency. Not "this will fix it", but "this *MAY* fix it". Never "I don't know when this problem happened", but "This problem existed before I started working this trouble report". You never know 100% positively that your fix will repair the problem. A failing drive is easy to diagnose, and most of the time you'll be right. A failing drive because the controller is going wonky, or someone put the cable a little too close to the fan and it slowly shaved through a few leads, is a lot harder to diagnose. And yes, I've seen all three scenarios and others.
And as I've learned, no number of department head sign-offs will mitigate stupidity. I swear, you could write up a change request for cleaning the servers, which includes a garden hose, soap, bucket, and sponge, and you could likely get it approved, if you slide the obvious mistakes (Hmmm, garden hose in the datacenter?) down to the middle of the third paragraph. Phrasing it as "Lauryldimethylamine oxide cleaning agent with pressurized dihydrogen monoxide removal process in compliance with 29 USC 654" may work better. (Lauryldimethylamine oxide was the biggest word I noticed in the MSDS for Gunk Purple Cleanser/Degreaser, which I'm fairly sure would be worse for electronics than just tap water)
I guess you don't work in that kind of environment. You *have* to know the office politics involved before you just go around making changes. Otherwise, you'll end up in a position to not ever worry about the office politics, because you won't be working there.
I'm in a different position now. If something doesn't work, I expect a phone call. They tell me what they intend to do. I consider it, and let them know. If there's a business reason not to do it right away, it may be put on hold. Otherwise, it gets done as soon as possible. That's usually, if we find it at 1pm, don't do it until 6pm, not sometime next month.
I won't even bother ask which Dell switch you're using, because I've seen enough stupid errors with the Dell switches that I've used. You could tell me leprechauns jumped out of the 1000baseFX ports, danced a jig, and jumped back in, and I'd believe you.:) If their version of STP is broken, I wouldn't be surprised in the least. Then again, some rocket scientist may have disabled it for faster connect times. I don't remember if it's disabled from the factory or not. I cringe when I hear someone say "set all the ports to 100baseTX, and turn STP off". It's not surprising when I hear something catastrophic happened later on.
I saw almost exactly the wiring scenario you're talking about. From the main switch, they had 6 switches chained down 5 racks. I spent... well, quite a while... following cables. The first switch in the chain was attached to the main switch (as I already mentioned). The 5th in the chain also was directly attached to the switch, *AND* was in the chain. At least the main switch was a decent one (Cisco Catalyst 5500), so it just stopped the nonsense. I was diagnosing another problem, and found it. {sigh} Oh ya, the original problem was a complaint that connectivity was terrible on any machines on the 6th switch. It was still terrible after I disconnected the extra link. There's something to say for *NOT* allowing consumer grade switches on a network that requires more than the consumer grade hardware can support. I told them to run cables from each machine to the 5500 (13 slots, lots of available ports). They refused. "But that Netgear switch is GigE". {sigh} I then suggested they at least run each switch from the 5500. The result? Problem diagnosed, no changes accepted.
That has more to do with check your work than it does with the prolonged control processes that businesses put in place. I've seen the control processes made by committee fail miserably. Sure, they want all this stuff done. The 400 point checklist frequently misses some essential piece, like "is it the right drive?" and "verify it's rebuilding properly". The last step would have screamed "You're doing it wrong".
If there's no clear indication of which drive to change, I tend to be very cautious. Most good arrays have a nice friendly indicator light. The rest, I take my time, and make sure I'm right before yanking anything out. That would also indicate the difference between a datacenter monkey and a good SysAdmin.
That same place was very fond of sending replacement parts to the datacenter, for their "tech" to install. I've known a lot of datacenters, where their "tech" was the security guard. Sure, I trust him to follow simple instructions (Find the machine labeled X. Reboot it.) Sometimes even those simple instructions are screwed up. There's nothing like getting a database server rebooted in the middle of the day, when you asked for some other server to be rebooted.
Talking the "tech" through fixing the array after they swapped the wrong drive is always entertaining. "Entertaining" roughly translates to "I've pulled out all my hair, I now want to drive up there and shoot him."
I love people like you. Well, you're like me too. The day may come where I'm unavailable (hopefully not a busassination), and someone else may have to take over my job.
I just took over a network. I'm still discovering "secrets", since nothing was well documented. Maybe the root password to a box is one of the 100 passwords in the three documents with passwords. Maybe not. I don't care to count how many machines I've had to use less than traditional methods to get onto, because no one knew any passwords.
That reminds me of a bunch of servers I was moving between datacenters. The guy in charge of IT (I won't call him a title, since he didn't deserve one) had a group change the settings so everything would "just work". Nope, that didn't get done. They were suppose to be ready to shut down, and would come up in the new datacenter with their new IP's. Not only didn't they have the new IP's, but they didn't have the right root passwords on. On a noisy call from the datacenter, I tried to get the root passwords from him. Nope, he wouldn't say what they were. "You have sudo, use it." Sure, I have sudo, but I also didn't have a local password. The only authorized logins were via SSH with the ssh keys.
Reboot. init=/bin/sh. Oh look, we're on. Set myself a local password (against company policy), reboot again, fix the problem. Oh look, it's working now. It was faster to root the machine from the console this way, than to fight with him about getting root passwords. And for those who don't know, if you use this method, nothing gets logged, because nothing is running to log anything.
I was talking to someone. They said I couldn't possibly hack this new server they had. I also knew someone who worked in the same room as it. It wasn't a production machine. A quick (and less than graceful) reboot, and I was on the console. I changed the motd to say "There is no security without physical security.", and logged out. Less than 5 minutes total, including me poking around the filesystem a little. It's amazing how many people leave their shell history enabled, AND type passwords on the command line for various things.
I did tell him exactly what I did, after he discovered it (the next morning). I then reminded him the usefulness of keeping servers in a locked cabinet, in a locked server room.
Another example, if it takes a month and endless meetings to replace a failing drive during scheduled maintenance, and a half hour to replace a failed drive at any time,...
Sadly enough, I've had a simple drive replacement tied up in meetings and other office politics for months. Write up a proposal for change, sit in meetings where various department heads without a clue discuss the potential hazards, write up the rollback process (for changing a drive?). Your plans are torn apart and put back together. Departmental announcements, customer notifications, etc, etc. Accounting wants numbers, and proposals from 3 sources for the cost of a replacement drive (which you have 5 of in the datacenter, and a regular supplier). You're sitting there with the mind numbing noise flowing past. All you can think is "the array was set up with no hot spare. It's running in a degraded mode. Change the damned drive." Of course, complaints of slow drive performance are scattered throughout the meeting.
Two months and more meetings than you can remember later, they slate it for an arbitrary windows. Saturday at 3am. Not only change it, but you are required to stay while it rebuilds, "just in case...". Just in case? You have me working 8 to 7 Monday through Friday, weekends on demand (which are every weekend) AND you want me to blow off Saturday night to do the change? Ah who cares, I don't need sleep.
Then Thursday afternoon before the schedule change is done, a second drive in the array fails, and the whole thing is down. All the same people who were in on the meetings start screaming "How could you let this happen?!"
Thursday afternoon becomes Thursday night, and by Friday morning you have the array back up and working, through some dumb luck. (crossing fingers, praying to whatever gods may be listening, and tapping the drive with a screwdriver at boot time to make it spin up). The only planning that helped is that you keep a change of clothes and a toothbrush in the car, since you don't have time to go home once you're done. In doing the work, you notice the same thing happening to a neighboring machine. Damned aging hardware. So you just change it without the mess that accompanied the first change. Not only are you bitched out for not fixing the first array in time, but you get it twice as bad for fixing the other one before it became a problem. How could you have independent thought? How could you make a change without proper authorization?
The only thoughts still in your head are "I hate this job", "my car keys are in my pocket, and I could just leave." Is this the day you quit? Maybe, just maybe. Just one more thing, and that'll be it. I don't need this shit.
Friday afternoon, not sleeping since Wednesday night, you are told "Do [some other task] after hours tonight." No, you won't get paid any overtime since you're on salary. The task will take at least 8 hours, and they need it done before Saturday morning. Do you scratch out a resignation with a sharpie on the CEO's wall at 2am, or do you just walk out?
And the top programs run through sudo? "sudo su" and "sudo sh":)
The article wasn't suggesting controls for a single admin to accomplish a task. They were talking about requiring at least 3 admins to do the same thing in three identical environments to accomplish one task.
"Ok, we need to reboot server X, all of you on my mark type 'shutdown -r now'... 3... 2... 1... mark"
"Dammit Mark, you didn't hit enter in time. Lets try again."
Actually, if the laws in place right now, and the common popular opinion of firearms were different, there would have been a different outcome.
A random shooter at a public event wouldn't have the opportunity to fire 30 rounds, injuring or killing a dozen people.
If several trained Joe Public's were there and carrying their sidearms, the threat would have likely been neutralized after just a couple shots were fired at most. How many times have we read about workplace shootings, someone shooting random individuals in the public, and other events like this. Depending on the jurisdiction, people are either encouraged not to carry, or forbidden by law.
Simply enough, there is no way for your average unarmed citizen to fight back. Some people will say "this never happens". It does happen. It happened today.
Actually, I don't believe I made such a stupid mistake. No, I totally agree with you. I gave up on VMWare several years ago, using VirtualBox instead. The reason was exactly as you said. I wanted a new kernel for some new feature, and VMWare would only work on something several versions behind. That was back when it was Innotek's Virtualbox, before it was bought and then absorbed in a merger.:)
The only thing I've had a problem with lately was getting OSX to run right in a VM. Well, running wasn't very hard. Getting it to dynamically resize the screen just plain doesn't work (with good reasons). The whole reason was for my girlfriend, so my machine would look like her Mac, except when I switched to the other OS's. Once I had it working I was like "what now?" It reminded me of installing BeOS.:)
I haven't run into a C64 in years, so that category was dropped. It was actually "Sweet, I used to own one of these...." TI-994A, Apple ][e, C64. If I actually see one in person somewhere, I'll be excited. The last one was in the early 90's, sitting in the back of an old nonfunctional truck, in a barn, with a bunch of other scrap. I figured after almost 20 years, it was time to let it go.
Sometimes we all have to make a sacrifice.... or 4. I prefer to think of it as the advancement of human civilization. Murder just has such a negative sound to it.
And you know how much people in black vans like to be pulled over and have to show identity?
From what I understand, not very much at all. Of course that leads to newspaper blurb the next morning "Officer Shot During Routine Traffic Stop". If you bother to read down (barely anyone does) there is a mention that there were no witnesses. In the continuation on page E68 towards the bottom you'll notice "dash camera footage is missing"
A few days later, you'll also notice some random citizen missing, last seen somewhere in the vicinity of the previous story. There was your witness. And their little dog too.
Never, not ever, will you see the story about you, the poster of the reverse engineered chip for the officially non-existent satellite. If you do show back up, your story will be considered as plausible as an alien abduction or fairy circle disappearance. Well, that is if you tell anyone. Which is better, to tell the world "I was abducted by a mysterious government agency" which no proof can be provided, or STFU? Oh, the later. If you keep talking about "the incident", you'll either be disappeared, or end up in a padded room. The padded room is more useful as incentive for others to STFU though.
Makes you wonder how many conspiracy nuts are just plain nuts, or have something to say that's just too wild to believe. I'd say the later has a percentage lower than 0.01%.... and on that topic.:)
I got my favorite conspiracy crap newsletter this morning. The lunatic signed me up because I made a press contact years ago, even though I've mocked them more times than I care to count. There's a news story about Tampa International Airport closing a runway to renumber it because the normal natural magnetic shift has changed the magnetic heading just enough to necessitate it. I did find it on a "good" conspiracy site. He runs interesting news, and people comment on it. I found the truth behind it, and posted it there. The truth is that it was one degree away from needing a change, and it's finally passed that last degree. They're closing the runway because they have two, and it won't effect normal flight traffic this time of year. This morning, the nuts conspiracy newsletter attributed it to government conspiracies, the end of the world, and the idea that the world will be shattering on Dec 21, 2012 because of distortion of the magnetic fields caused by the sun and the universe as a whole. {sigh} The truth may be boring, but when the conspiracy is so nuts, it just gives me a headache.
Oh, gotta run. The black van is here. The guys are picking me up for work. We have to have a friendly talk to someone posting on Slashdot this morning by the name of "mysidia". Oh good, that's you. Can you confirm where you'll be, so we can save some time. It's always a pain when we have to track your cell phone to pick you up.:)
That isn't all that uncommon. I guess no one recalls the 2009 news stories about the classified "fogbank" material in nuclear warheads. When the gov't wanted to upgrade some nuclear warheads, it was discovered that the material wasn't documented, and no one remembered how it was made.
I couldn't find anything on the lost vacuum tube design, but I wouldn't be totally surprised. There have been plenty of things over the years that were superseded by something better, and the predecessors were forgotten about. Trade secrets often include keeping very little documentation about them, so they won't be accidentally released (or stolen).
I've worked with quite a few things over the years where a working copy existed, but you couldn't replace it. Sometimes it took a virtually clean room reverse engineering to replace it. Sometimes it was hardware. Sometimes it was some application (like a server-side app) where it had been compiled once a decade ago, and no one had a clue where the source was. Well, they *did*, it was just "oh, well Bob did it on his computer. He left 8 years ago. We don't know where to find him", and his desktop had been reformatted, handed down through several other people, and finally retired to the trash a few years before.
For stuff like vacuum tubes, and ancient apps that don't run on modern hardware, it's usually worth doing it fresh. For things like classified materials that keep nukes from spontaneously exploding, that knowledge can be virtually irreplaceable. There are various lost arts, that if you have to fall back to raw materials, we'd be screwed. I like using the loss of civilization and modern technology as an example. If you, I, and a few thousand skilled Slashdotters were dropped on an deserted island (or an alien but Earth-like) planet, how long would it take for us to raise technology from nothing to build a working computer? Assuming an abundance of easily identifiable raw materials, like "hey, that's iron ore", maybe we could build a forge, and make some decent hand tools. We may be able to build primitive radios, but I doubt we'd ever get far enough fab the first solid state chip, much less a CRT or LCD screen, before the first generation died off of old age. The second generation may have a clue, but no true memory of the technology in working form.
Consider other "high tech" items. I love the car analogies, so we'll go in that direction.:) Could we build a car? I know quite a few of us know a lot, but could we actually design and fabricate one from scratch, even with another car as a template. Sure as hell in such a scenario we'd never build the first ECM. Could we get as far as a primitive carburetor? Who am I kidding, we'd probably get stuck on something like how to make tires.:) That's assuming no meeting-hungry managers or aspiring politicians were in the aforementioned group. If that happened, we'd end up stuck in endless meetings forming committees to discuss every feature, and we wouldn't get the first item put down on paper because how to make paper and a pencil would be stuck in committee for the rest of our lives.
The idea of "lives" may be rather short anyways. How many of us are hunter/gatherers and farmers? Not enough to start from scratch.
Kinda ruins those fun aspirations of colonizing alien planets, doesn't it? 1,000 space nerds fly to and are dropped off on a habitable planet circling one of the closest stars, just to die of starvation before establishing a society capable of self sustaining itself, because we don't have the skills to bring our technology up to "modern" levels.
When do the lawsuits against these guys start rolling in for publishing images of copyright-protected visual arrangements of wires and transistors?
You know, you'd think that wouldn't you. But leak one drawing of one chip for an old government "communications" satellite that never existed, and WOOSH... Swooped up by three guys in a black van, a bag over your head, and then you wake up in a cell in some facility with guys in suits asking lots of questions, but never answering questions like "Where am I?" and "Who are you guys?" Just remember, don't ask either of those, nor the magic question "What agency are you from?". You may not have noticed the electrodes taped to your testicles, but you sure will after they push that little red button in front of you. It seems they just want answers, but the answers you give aren't ever enough. Oh, and "your momma" is never the right answer either. It's apparently worse than most expletives.
Seriously, copyright is nothing to mess with. And more importantly, watch out for black vans, no matter how innocently they may be following you. If you've been posting stuff like that, they aren't innocently following you.
Why's that van been parked outside all night? Gotta run, someone's at the door.
You know what's funny, that (the parent's argument) was the song of the Windows fan boys for so long. Now I'm somewhere that I have an abundance of old hardware, and a mix of new and old operating systems. I'm finding it easier to throw Linux on a box, than to pray that Vista or Win7 will work. CPU and memory wise, sure it'll work. But dear god don't try to find drivers for some fairly standard old video card (like a 4Mb to 32Mb PCI card), sound card, or printer. There are three categories for old systems. "Good enough for Win7", "Wow, a great Linux machine", and "don't bother". Why bother with a 1Ghz machine, when I have stacks of 2.0Ghz to 2.8Ghz machines to use. Oh, and if anyone is interested, I stumbled on a stack of probably a dozen 200Mhz Pentium CPU's. I have no idea what to do with them, but they'll probably end up in my own personal museum.:)
We just played a little game with one of our techs. "Can you get Win2k3 to install" on some old Dell servers with the original Win2k3 license stuck on the case by Dell at the factory. Linux? 5 minutes from an install CD I made, or 15 minutes from the distro original CDs. Both are current. Win2k3? 3 days of head pounding, calls to Dell support, downloading and running BIOS updates, and some mystery driver emailed and being told "try this". 24 work hours for 1 server, versus 0.25 work hours. Poor guy, he was a huge Windows fan. By the end of it, he looked like he was going to personally go and bomb Redmond.:)
The best work around I've found is to run Linux on them, and then provide any pesky Windows needs with a virtual machine under VMWare.
I inherited several old printers, which were wonderful old workhorses of their time. My mom still on her WinXP machine, because it still runs any app she wants, and is fine for CPU and memory (2.8Ghz, and I upgraded her memory for 2GB last year). I tried to plug it into my Win7 Home Premium laptop (USB to Parallel converter required for both machines). Nope, sorry, no Win7 drivers available anywhere. No kludges other than "get a new printer". Yet still, it's supported perfectly well under Linux. heh.
I actually haven't had a problem with a new run of the mill system, or even most exotic hardware, for years under Linux.
How's the saying go? Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
I'd be willing to bet most drivers don't know the majority of laws that they have to follow right now. Without looking them up, try these. They apply in most states.
How many forward facing white lights on a passenger are allowed in your state?
What is the acceptable range, in inches, for the front bumper of a vehicle to be?
What vehicle is suppose to have a downward facing blue light in the rear? Hint: It's not any governmental vehicle.
How many passengers may travel in the front seat? How many occupant seats may a vehicle have, and still be driven without a CDL. I actually almost ran into trouble with this one. First order of business, remove 46 seats.
My state has some other interesting laws. Front side windows may be tinted to a percentage of opacity. The windshield may also be tinted, but for not more than X inches or X percent of the vertical height, whichever is less.
I've known people who were given tickets for doing 55mph on a 55mph road, because on one stretch of road the speed limit was changed for 40mph, and the change was unannounced. The speed limit was then changed back a few months later, and people were cited for driving too slow.
I've had the luxury of reading both the abridged book, which law enforcement uses to write tickets, and the unabridged state laws. As I've been told, all an officer has to do is follow you long enough to find you breaking some law. Ignorance of the law you broke does not constitute a defense. "I didn't know my phone was a distraction" or "I didn't know watching porn on my in-car TV while I was driving was illegal" (BTW, two criminal infractions there, assuming nothing else happened).
Even the state plays the same game. Try looking on YouTube for red light camera traps. You'll see my own video there, along with plenty of others. There is a federal guideline (but not law), with precise formulas for determining how long a light should be yellow, which includes indicated speed, the width of the intersection, and the G's that would be required to stop. When I was ticketed, the yellow light should have been for at least 4.5 seconds. The video evidence showed the light was yellow for 3 seconds. I took the luxury of pulling the video into Adobe Premier, and overlaying timestamps. At 4.5 seconds, I was clear of the intersection. Unfortunately, a $150 ticket is cheaper than a $500 lawyer, and since the state law doesn't say it should follow federal guidelines, they win. They get to play the "we didn't know" game, and since the city or county is profiting from it, it's doubtful you'll win.
The majority of traffic laws, including the new texting laws, are for the profit of the jurisdiction. They may save a few lives, but they could save more by stricter guidelines to allow people to drive. I got my drivers license in or around 1987. I haven't been retested by the state to prove proficiency. Well, I wasn't tested initially either. I took drivers ed in school, and the slip of paper saying I passed was all the proof required that I could drive. I take driving seriously, since it's my life in the car, so I keep myself up to date on laws and improving my driving through various methods. Someone, like my own mother, has been driving for decades without any sort of retesting, nor other methods of improving or reinforcing her driving ability. Unfortunately, she is the norm, and I am the exception. I still go over on occasion just to spot check her car to make sure it's performing properly. Last time, the tires were under-inflated. Most state guidelines require checking your vehicle including lights and tires, every time you intend to operate it, to make sure everything is within normal operating parameters. I swear, I see people with burned out headlights and marker lights daily
You've never been to Tijuana, haven you? They have the highest density of pharmacia's, strip clubs, bars, and brothels I've ever seen. I'm sure they spam too, I've just somehow managed to stay off their spam lists.
You haven't seen my hotmail account. I haven't used it for any practical purpose in years. If I only allowed folks in my whitelist, the account would be empty. As it is, it's always full of spam for porn and online pharmacies.
Of course, the only legitimate purpose is for when people claim they can't send to or receive from Hotmail.
Unfortunatley, A few days ago, I did find that we didn't have any rum in the house. And as I've found, a strong Jack Daniels eggnog really doesn't taste as good as you'd think. And with my normal mixing proportions (In a pint glass, mix 75% alcohol with 25% eggnog. Stir, and enjoy), it took me a whole 5 minutes before I could just make myself a pint of "Jack and no nog egg nog". Not quite as festive, but I was well lit.:)
Sometimes that's what it takes to keep the marriage working.
"Honey, you drink too much".
"Sweetie, you complain too much. That's why I drink."
I wonder why I've been divorced twice. At least now I've met someone who I like being around, and don't even need to drink to drown my sorrows of being with.:)
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I think you're far overestimating the work power of 13,000 minimum wage "man years". McDonalds corp owns (err, employs) 166,358 workers in the United States (extrapolated from their published numbers). You can rest assured, the 13,000 "man years" are easily covered by folks happily making your BigMac and Fries. Would you like an ice-cold McShake or McApple McPi with that? (Pi intentionally spelled as such, to keep up with your side of the argument, which incidentally is the number of apple-like flavored slices included, and the number of grams of known carcinogens in a McDonalds apple pie)
I'm not a big wiki fan. I'm just getting all the information gathered into a usable form where I can start making up some documentation on it. But hell, wiki, text files, or at least something more than "We named our servers for historical royalty of Europe from 2050BC to 1750AD". And be damned if someone says they're having problems with "King Henry". Which one? King Henry III. Of Bavaria, England, France, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, or Spain? Ummm.
Just kidding on those names, that's not really the way this network is named, but it's pretty damned close. "organized and methodological" seem to not be in a lot of people's vocabularies. (a metha-what? isn't that a drug or something?)
Thanks for the drink, I really needed it. :) Something to numb the pain.
Actually, the web browser does exactly what it is told to by the HTML and CSS. You can tell it to indent P tags.
As it is, I've never seen any site enforce paragraph indention, probably because it would break other layout items.
As I learned writing letters way back in grade school, the first line of paragraphs are indented. Optionally, in styles such as business form letters, you can leave the indention out. That is optionally, where it is not forbidden to indent the first line of a paragraph. Maybe you were taught differently, or maybe those who taught you, and therefor you, never learned the appropriate use of indenting paragraphs.
Typically, I would use the tab to indent, but when web based email clients became popular (and generally online forums didn't exist), I had to stop using the tab, since it was a great way to end up sending the message before it was complete. Tab typically replaces three to five spaces. Again way back in the day of web based email clients, any more than two spaces would frequently be eaten by the web application, resulting in two spaces. Rather than risk differences, I adopted two spaces.
Using spaces for tabs isn't unusual to me, since I originally learned to type on mechanical typewriters. Computers were just showing up in school for general use around the time I had reached typing classes (around 8th grade) with electric typewriters. With years of experience typing already, the only thing that I had to really adjust for was that you can't press electronic keyboard keys quite the same way that you have to pound on a mechanical typewriter. Well, that and the fact the numeral one (1) key was no longer missing. :)
I know a lot of these items are totally archaic, and many people on here have only seen them in museums. Some of us had them and used them. We also learned a long time ago how to format documents, and those little social graces have stuck with us. And yes, I'm terribly annoyed when I write out something in a web form, and extra spaces are collapsed to be one space, so indentions and space between paragraphs are destroyed.
People wonder why I qualify most statements in an emergency. Not "this will fix it", but "this *MAY* fix it". Never "I don't know when this problem happened", but "This problem existed before I started working this trouble report". You never know 100% positively that your fix will repair the problem. A failing drive is easy to diagnose, and most of the time you'll be right. A failing drive because the controller is going wonky, or someone put the cable a little too close to the fan and it slowly shaved through a few leads, is a lot harder to diagnose. And yes, I've seen all three scenarios and others.
And as I've learned, no number of department head sign-offs will mitigate stupidity. I swear, you could write up a change request for cleaning the servers, which includes a garden hose, soap, bucket, and sponge, and you could likely get it approved, if you slide the obvious mistakes (Hmmm, garden hose in the datacenter?) down to the middle of the third paragraph. Phrasing it as "Lauryldimethylamine oxide cleaning agent with pressurized dihydrogen monoxide removal process in compliance with 29 USC 654" may work better. (Lauryldimethylamine oxide was the biggest word I noticed in the MSDS for Gunk Purple Cleanser/Degreaser, which I'm fairly sure would be worse for electronics than just tap water)
I guess you don't work in that kind of environment. You *have* to know the office politics involved before you just go around making changes. Otherwise, you'll end up in a position to not ever worry about the office politics, because you won't be working there.
I'm in a different position now. If something doesn't work, I expect a phone call. They tell me what they intend to do. I consider it, and let them know. If there's a business reason not to do it right away, it may be put on hold. Otherwise, it gets done as soon as possible. That's usually, if we find it at 1pm, don't do it until 6pm, not sometime next month.
Three words. Spanning Tree Protocol. :)
I won't even bother ask which Dell switch you're using, because I've seen enough stupid errors with the Dell switches that I've used. You could tell me leprechauns jumped out of the 1000baseFX ports, danced a jig, and jumped back in, and I'd believe you. :) If their version of STP is broken, I wouldn't be surprised in the least. Then again, some rocket scientist may have disabled it for faster connect times. I don't remember if it's disabled from the factory or not. I cringe when I hear someone say "set all the ports to 100baseTX, and turn STP off". It's not surprising when I hear something catastrophic happened later on.
I saw almost exactly the wiring scenario you're talking about. From the main switch, they had 6 switches chained down 5 racks. I spent ... well, quite a while ... following cables. The first switch in the chain was attached to the main switch (as I already mentioned). The 5th in the chain also was directly attached to the switch, *AND* was in the chain. At least the main switch was a decent one (Cisco Catalyst 5500), so it just stopped the nonsense. I was diagnosing another problem, and found it. {sigh} Oh ya, the original problem was a complaint that connectivity was terrible on any machines on the 6th switch. It was still terrible after I disconnected the extra link. There's something to say for *NOT* allowing consumer grade switches on a network that requires more than the consumer grade hardware can support. I told them to run cables from each machine to the 5500 (13 slots, lots of available ports). They refused. "But that Netgear switch is GigE". {sigh} I then suggested they at least run each switch from the 5500. The result? Problem diagnosed, no changes accepted.
hehe.
Sorry, I had to laugh.
That has more to do with check your work than it does with the prolonged control processes that businesses put in place. I've seen the control processes made by committee fail miserably. Sure, they want all this stuff done. The 400 point checklist frequently misses some essential piece, like "is it the right drive?" and "verify it's rebuilding properly". The last step would have screamed "You're doing it wrong".
If there's no clear indication of which drive to change, I tend to be very cautious. Most good arrays have a nice friendly indicator light. The rest, I take my time, and make sure I'm right before yanking anything out. That would also indicate the difference between a datacenter monkey and a good SysAdmin.
That same place was very fond of sending replacement parts to the datacenter, for their "tech" to install. I've known a lot of datacenters, where their "tech" was the security guard. Sure, I trust him to follow simple instructions (Find the machine labeled X. Reboot it.) Sometimes even those simple instructions are screwed up. There's nothing like getting a database server rebooted in the middle of the day, when you asked for some other server to be rebooted.
Talking the "tech" through fixing the array after they swapped the wrong drive is always entertaining. "Entertaining" roughly translates to "I've pulled out all my hair, I now want to drive up there and shoot him."
I love people like you. Well, you're like me too. The day may come where I'm unavailable (hopefully not a busassination), and someone else may have to take over my job.
I just took over a network. I'm still discovering "secrets", since nothing was well documented. Maybe the root password to a box is one of the 100 passwords in the three documents with passwords. Maybe not. I don't care to count how many machines I've had to use less than traditional methods to get onto, because no one knew any passwords.
That reminds me of a bunch of servers I was moving between datacenters. The guy in charge of IT (I won't call him a title, since he didn't deserve one) had a group change the settings so everything would "just work". Nope, that didn't get done. They were suppose to be ready to shut down, and would come up in the new datacenter with their new IP's. Not only didn't they have the new IP's, but they didn't have the right root passwords on. On a noisy call from the datacenter, I tried to get the root passwords from him. Nope, he wouldn't say what they were. "You have sudo, use it." Sure, I have sudo, but I also didn't have a local password. The only authorized logins were via SSH with the ssh keys.
Reboot. init=/bin/sh. Oh look, we're on. Set myself a local password (against company policy), reboot again, fix the problem. Oh look, it's working now. It was faster to root the machine from the console this way, than to fight with him about getting root passwords. And for those who don't know, if you use this method, nothing gets logged, because nothing is running to log anything.
I was talking to someone. They said I couldn't possibly hack this new server they had. I also knew someone who worked in the same room as it. It wasn't a production machine. A quick (and less than graceful) reboot, and I was on the console. I changed the motd to say "There is no security without physical security.", and logged out. Less than 5 minutes total, including me poking around the filesystem a little. It's amazing how many people leave their shell history enabled, AND type passwords on the command line for various things.
I did tell him exactly what I did, after he discovered it (the next morning). I then reminded him the usefulness of keeping servers in a locked cabinet, in a locked server room.
Sadly enough, I've had a simple drive replacement tied up in meetings and other office politics for months. Write up a proposal for change, sit in meetings where various department heads without a clue discuss the potential hazards, write up the rollback process (for changing a drive?). Your plans are torn apart and put back together. Departmental announcements, customer notifications, etc, etc. Accounting wants numbers, and proposals from 3 sources for the cost of a replacement drive (which you have 5 of in the datacenter, and a regular supplier). You're sitting there with the mind numbing noise flowing past. All you can think is "the array was set up with no hot spare. It's running in a degraded mode. Change the damned drive." Of course, complaints of slow drive performance are scattered throughout the meeting.
Two months and more meetings than you can remember later, they slate it for an arbitrary windows. Saturday at 3am. Not only change it, but you are required to stay while it rebuilds, "just in case...". Just in case? You have me working 8 to 7 Monday through Friday, weekends on demand (which are every weekend) AND you want me to blow off Saturday night to do the change? Ah who cares, I don't need sleep.
Then Thursday afternoon before the schedule change is done, a second drive in the array fails, and the whole thing is down. All the same people who were in on the meetings start screaming "How could you let this happen?!"
Thursday afternoon becomes Thursday night, and by Friday morning you have the array back up and working, through some dumb luck. (crossing fingers, praying to whatever gods may be listening, and tapping the drive with a screwdriver at boot time to make it spin up). The only planning that helped is that you keep a change of clothes and a toothbrush in the car, since you don't have time to go home once you're done. In doing the work, you notice the same thing happening to a neighboring machine. Damned aging hardware. So you just change it without the mess that accompanied the first change. Not only are you bitched out for not fixing the first array in time, but you get it twice as bad for fixing the other one before it became a problem. How could you have independent thought? How could you make a change without proper authorization?
The only thoughts still in your head are "I hate this job", "my car keys are in my pocket, and I could just leave." Is this the day you quit? Maybe, just maybe. Just one more thing, and that'll be it. I don't need this shit.
Friday afternoon, not sleeping since Wednesday night, you are told "Do [some other task] after hours tonight." No, you won't get paid any overtime since you're on salary. The task will take at least 8 hours, and they need it done before Saturday morning. Do you scratch out a resignation with a sharpie on the CEO's wall at 2am, or do you just walk out?
I really hated that job.
And the top programs run through sudo? "sudo su" and "sudo sh" :)
The article wasn't suggesting controls for a single admin to accomplish a task. They were talking about requiring at least 3 admins to do the same thing in three identical environments to accomplish one task.
"Ok, we need to reboot server X, all of you on my mark type 'shutdown -r now' ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... mark"
"Dammit Mark, you didn't hit enter in time. Lets try again."
Actually, if the laws in place right now, and the common popular opinion of firearms were different, there would have been a different outcome.
A random shooter at a public event wouldn't have the opportunity to fire 30 rounds, injuring or killing a dozen people.
If several trained Joe Public's were there and carrying their sidearms, the threat would have likely been neutralized after just a couple shots were fired at most. How many times have we read about workplace shootings, someone shooting random individuals in the public, and other events like this. Depending on the jurisdiction, people are either encouraged not to carry, or forbidden by law.
Simply enough, there is no way for your average unarmed citizen to fight back. Some people will say "this never happens". It does happen. It happened today.
Actually, I don't believe I made such a stupid mistake. No, I totally agree with you. I gave up on VMWare several years ago, using VirtualBox instead. The reason was exactly as you said. I wanted a new kernel for some new feature, and VMWare would only work on something several versions behind. That was back when it was Innotek's Virtualbox, before it was bought and then absorbed in a merger. :)
The only thing I've had a problem with lately was getting OSX to run right in a VM. Well, running wasn't very hard. Getting it to dynamically resize the screen just plain doesn't work (with good reasons). The whole reason was for my girlfriend, so my machine would look like her Mac, except when I switched to the other OS's. Once I had it working I was like "what now?" It reminded me of installing BeOS. :)
I haven't run into a C64 in years, so that category was dropped. It was actually "Sweet, I used to own one of these...." TI-994A, Apple ][e, C64. If I actually see one in person somewhere, I'll be excited. The last one was in the early 90's, sitting in the back of an old nonfunctional truck, in a barn, with a bunch of other scrap. I figured after almost 20 years, it was time to let it go.
Sometimes we all have to make a sacrifice. ... or 4. I prefer to think of it as the advancement of human civilization. Murder just has such a negative sound to it.
Bank of China
Bank of Chile
Bank of Constantinople (now Bank of Istanbul)
What is this oyster you are referring to, and why is it blue?
From what I understand, not very much at all. Of course that leads to newspaper blurb the next morning "Officer Shot During Routine Traffic Stop". If you bother to read down (barely anyone does) there is a mention that there were no witnesses. In the continuation on page E68 towards the bottom you'll notice "dash camera footage is missing"
A few days later, you'll also notice some random citizen missing, last seen somewhere in the vicinity of the previous story. There was your witness. And their little dog too.
Never, not ever, will you see the story about you, the poster of the reverse engineered chip for the officially non-existent satellite. If you do show back up, your story will be considered as plausible as an alien abduction or fairy circle disappearance. Well, that is if you tell anyone. Which is better, to tell the world "I was abducted by a mysterious government agency" which no proof can be provided, or STFU? Oh, the later. If you keep talking about "the incident", you'll either be disappeared, or end up in a padded room. The padded room is more useful as incentive for others to STFU though.
Makes you wonder how many conspiracy nuts are just plain nuts, or have something to say that's just too wild to believe. I'd say the later has a percentage lower than 0.01%. ... and on that topic. :)
I got my favorite conspiracy crap newsletter this morning. The lunatic signed me up because I made a press contact years ago, even though I've mocked them more times than I care to count. There's a news story about Tampa International Airport closing a runway to renumber it because the normal natural magnetic shift has changed the magnetic heading just enough to necessitate it. I did find it on a "good" conspiracy site. He runs interesting news, and people comment on it. I found the truth behind it, and posted it there. The truth is that it was one degree away from needing a change, and it's finally passed that last degree. They're closing the runway because they have two, and it won't effect normal flight traffic this time of year. This morning, the nuts conspiracy newsletter attributed it to government conspiracies, the end of the world, and the idea that the world will be shattering on Dec 21, 2012 because of distortion of the magnetic fields caused by the sun and the universe as a whole. {sigh} The truth may be boring, but when the conspiracy is so nuts, it just gives me a headache.
Oh, gotta run. The black van is here. The guys are picking me up for work. We have to have a friendly talk to someone posting on Slashdot this morning by the name of "mysidia". Oh good, that's you. Can you confirm where you'll be, so we can save some time. It's always a pain when we have to track your cell phone to pick you up. :)
That isn't all that uncommon. I guess no one recalls the 2009 news stories about the classified "fogbank" material in nuclear warheads. When the gov't wanted to upgrade some nuclear warheads, it was discovered that the material wasn't documented, and no one remembered how it was made.
I couldn't find anything on the lost vacuum tube design, but I wouldn't be totally surprised. There have been plenty of things over the years that were superseded by something better, and the predecessors were forgotten about. Trade secrets often include keeping very little documentation about them, so they won't be accidentally released (or stolen).
I've worked with quite a few things over the years where a working copy existed, but you couldn't replace it. Sometimes it took a virtually clean room reverse engineering to replace it. Sometimes it was hardware. Sometimes it was some application (like a server-side app) where it had been compiled once a decade ago, and no one had a clue where the source was. Well, they *did*, it was just "oh, well Bob did it on his computer. He left 8 years ago. We don't know where to find him", and his desktop had been reformatted, handed down through several other people, and finally retired to the trash a few years before.
For stuff like vacuum tubes, and ancient apps that don't run on modern hardware, it's usually worth doing it fresh. For things like classified materials that keep nukes from spontaneously exploding, that knowledge can be virtually irreplaceable. There are various lost arts, that if you have to fall back to raw materials, we'd be screwed. I like using the loss of civilization and modern technology as an example. If you, I, and a few thousand skilled Slashdotters were dropped on an deserted island (or an alien but Earth-like) planet, how long would it take for us to raise technology from nothing to build a working computer? Assuming an abundance of easily identifiable raw materials, like "hey, that's iron ore", maybe we could build a forge, and make some decent hand tools. We may be able to build primitive radios, but I doubt we'd ever get far enough fab the first solid state chip, much less a CRT or LCD screen, before the first generation died off of old age. The second generation may have a clue, but no true memory of the technology in working form.
Consider other "high tech" items. I love the car analogies, so we'll go in that direction. :) Could we build a car? I know quite a few of us know a lot, but could we actually design and fabricate one from scratch, even with another car as a template. Sure as hell in such a scenario we'd never build the first ECM. Could we get as far as a primitive carburetor? Who am I kidding, we'd probably get stuck on something like how to make tires. :) That's assuming no meeting-hungry managers or aspiring politicians were in the aforementioned group. If that happened, we'd end up stuck in endless meetings forming committees to discuss every feature, and we wouldn't get the first item put down on paper because how to make paper and a pencil would be stuck in committee for the rest of our lives.
The idea of "lives" may be rather short anyways. How many of us are hunter/gatherers and farmers? Not enough to start from scratch.
Kinda ruins those fun aspirations of colonizing alien planets, doesn't it? 1,000 space nerds fly to and are dropped off on a habitable planet circling one of the closest stars, just to die of starvation before establishing a society capable of self sustaining itself, because we don't have the skills to bring our technology up to "modern" levels.
You know, you'd think that wouldn't you. But leak one drawing of one chip for an old government "communications" satellite that never existed, and WOOSH... Swooped up by three guys in a black van, a bag over your head, and then you wake up in a cell in some facility with guys in suits asking lots of questions, but never answering questions like "Where am I?" and "Who are you guys?" Just remember, don't ask either of those, nor the magic question "What agency are you from?". You may not have noticed the electrodes taped to your testicles, but you sure will after they push that little red button in front of you. It seems they just want answers, but the answers you give aren't ever enough. Oh, and "your momma" is never the right answer either. It's apparently worse than most expletives.
Seriously, copyright is nothing to mess with. And more importantly, watch out for black vans, no matter how innocently they may be following you. If you've been posting stuff like that, they aren't innocently following you.
Why's that van been parked outside all night? Gotta run, someone's at the door.
You know what's funny, that (the parent's argument) was the song of the Windows fan boys for so long. Now I'm somewhere that I have an abundance of old hardware, and a mix of new and old operating systems. I'm finding it easier to throw Linux on a box, than to pray that Vista or Win7 will work. CPU and memory wise, sure it'll work. But dear god don't try to find drivers for some fairly standard old video card (like a 4Mb to 32Mb PCI card), sound card, or printer. There are three categories for old systems. "Good enough for Win7", "Wow, a great Linux machine", and "don't bother". Why bother with a 1Ghz machine, when I have stacks of 2.0Ghz to 2.8Ghz machines to use. Oh, and if anyone is interested, I stumbled on a stack of probably a dozen 200Mhz Pentium CPU's. I have no idea what to do with them, but they'll probably end up in my own personal museum. :)
We just played a little game with one of our techs. "Can you get Win2k3 to install" on some old Dell servers with the original Win2k3 license stuck on the case by Dell at the factory. Linux? 5 minutes from an install CD I made, or 15 minutes from the distro original CDs. Both are current. Win2k3? 3 days of head pounding, calls to Dell support, downloading and running BIOS updates, and some mystery driver emailed and being told "try this". 24 work hours for 1 server, versus 0.25 work hours. Poor guy, he was a huge Windows fan. By the end of it, he looked like he was going to personally go and bomb Redmond. :)
The best work around I've found is to run Linux on them, and then provide any pesky Windows needs with a virtual machine under VMWare.
I inherited several old printers, which were wonderful old workhorses of their time. My mom still on her WinXP machine, because it still runs any app she wants, and is fine for CPU and memory (2.8Ghz, and I upgraded her memory for 2GB last year). I tried to plug it into my Win7 Home Premium laptop (USB to Parallel converter required for both machines). Nope, sorry, no Win7 drivers available anywhere. No kludges other than "get a new printer". Yet still, it's supported perfectly well under Linux. heh.
I actually haven't had a problem with a new run of the mill system, or even most exotic hardware, for years under Linux.
How's the saying go? Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
I'd be willing to bet most drivers don't know the majority of laws that they have to follow right now. Without looking them up, try these. They apply in most states.
How many forward facing white lights on a passenger are allowed in your state?
What is the acceptable range, in inches, for the front bumper of a vehicle to be?
What vehicle is suppose to have a downward facing blue light in the rear? Hint: It's not any governmental vehicle.
How many passengers may travel in the front seat? How many occupant seats may a vehicle have, and still be driven without a CDL. I actually almost ran into trouble with this one. First order of business, remove 46 seats.
My state has some other interesting laws. Front side windows may be tinted to a percentage of opacity. The windshield may also be tinted, but for not more than X inches or X percent of the vertical height, whichever is less.
I've known people who were given tickets for doing 55mph on a 55mph road, because on one stretch of road the speed limit was changed for 40mph, and the change was unannounced. The speed limit was then changed back a few months later, and people were cited for driving too slow.
I've had the luxury of reading both the abridged book, which law enforcement uses to write tickets, and the unabridged state laws. As I've been told, all an officer has to do is follow you long enough to find you breaking some law. Ignorance of the law you broke does not constitute a defense. "I didn't know my phone was a distraction" or "I didn't know watching porn on my in-car TV while I was driving was illegal" (BTW, two criminal infractions there, assuming nothing else happened).
Even the state plays the same game. Try looking on YouTube for red light camera traps. You'll see my own video there, along with plenty of others. There is a federal guideline (but not law), with precise formulas for determining how long a light should be yellow, which includes indicated speed, the width of the intersection, and the G's that would be required to stop. When I was ticketed, the yellow light should have been for at least 4.5 seconds. The video evidence showed the light was yellow for 3 seconds. I took the luxury of pulling the video into Adobe Premier, and overlaying timestamps. At 4.5 seconds, I was clear of the intersection. Unfortunately, a $150 ticket is cheaper than a $500 lawyer, and since the state law doesn't say it should follow federal guidelines, they win. They get to play the "we didn't know" game, and since the city or county is profiting from it, it's doubtful you'll win.
The majority of traffic laws, including the new texting laws, are for the profit of the jurisdiction. They may save a few lives, but they could save more by stricter guidelines to allow people to drive. I got my drivers license in or around 1987. I haven't been retested by the state to prove proficiency. Well, I wasn't tested initially either. I took drivers ed in school, and the slip of paper saying I passed was all the proof required that I could drive. I take driving seriously, since it's my life in the car, so I keep myself up to date on laws and improving my driving through various methods. Someone, like my own mother, has been driving for decades without any sort of retesting, nor other methods of improving or reinforcing her driving ability. Unfortunately, she is the norm, and I am the exception. I still go over on occasion just to spot check her car to make sure it's performing properly. Last time, the tires were under-inflated. Most state guidelines require checking your vehicle including lights and tires, every time you intend to operate it, to make sure everything is within normal operating parameters. I swear, I see people with burned out headlights and marker lights daily
You've never been to Tijuana, haven you? They have the highest density of pharmacia's, strip clubs, bars, and brothels I've ever seen. I'm sure they spam too, I've just somehow managed to stay off their spam lists.
You haven't seen my hotmail account. I haven't used it for any practical purpose in years. If I only allowed folks in my whitelist, the account would be empty. As it is, it's always full of spam for porn and online pharmacies.
Of course, the only legitimate purpose is for when people claim they can't send to or receive from Hotmail.
And silly me, I just mix what I want.
Unfortunatley, A few days ago, I did find that we didn't have any rum in the house. And as I've found, a strong Jack Daniels eggnog really doesn't taste as good as you'd think. And with my normal mixing proportions (In a pint glass, mix 75% alcohol with 25% eggnog. Stir, and enjoy), it took me a whole 5 minutes before I could just make myself a pint of "Jack and no nog egg nog". Not quite as festive, but I was well lit. :)
Sometimes that's what it takes to keep the marriage working.
"Honey, you drink too much".
"Sweetie, you complain too much. That's why I drink."
I wonder why I've been divorced twice. At least now I've met someone who I like being around, and don't even need to drink to drown my sorrows of being with. :)