Cutting infrastructure cables has already been happening w/o help from those of ill-intent. What we need to work on is assuming the worst can happen and concentrate making very fast repairs to get things back up as sson as possible. I recall back around 1997 a back hoe in the Chicago area took out 1/3 of the U.S. the Internet traffic for most of the day. What we need in an emergency is an army of huffy sys admins to stay on the phone the telco providers to shout "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE... I WAS INSTALLING DEBIAN OVER HTTP AND NOW MY SERVER IS DEAD!!! I NEED CONNECTIVETY NOW!!!" and keep it up until the cable repairs are done. Well maybe not like that but we would do better training an army of technicians to repair infrastructure quickly in an emergency that way less downtime, less havoc. In other words don't rely on the cable company repair people who will be there next week sometime between 8AM and 8PM.
I appreciate Chris' response to the Server51 ripoff comment, but I have to admit it's sort of half-true in that it was Andover's response to VA's SourceForge.
In late 1999, Scoop and I and few others in Andover were pointed directly at SourceForge and we were told we had to respond to this (meaning we had to build something to compete with SF). So we started building Server51, it was certainly meant to compete with SourceForge (our concern at the time was that SourceForge could someday overtake or at least deflate Freshmeat as a relevant open source destination) but we honestly wanted to make something far better than SF was at the time, something more useful for devlopers and users, and make it kind of fun with the campy alien conspiracy theme (the idea was the server existed in an unknown location and everyone working on the server was part of some larger X-Files plot) . We didn't use any SF code (although it was available to the public) or SF architecture, we started from scratch and had our own ideas on how to make it all work, be reliable, fast, and scalable. I think what Tim meant by "direct ripoff" was "competetion". Well anyway after VA acquired Andover the intention was that SF and Server51 would be merged, but really Server51 was in beta and SF was already quite large so it was like merging and motorcycle with a bus... it didn't quite happen, just as well SF eventually improved anyway and I think its better that open source community has cooperation between Freshmeat and SF instead of having to announce new releases in two places at once.
...of all these beeping lights and flashing buttons? That's all we have here are beeping lights and flashing buttons and no one knows what they're FOR and they're BEEPING and THEY'RE FLASHING AND BEEPING AND FLASHING AND BLINKING... I CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE! Will there be an Airplane III?
Yes, we fell behind moving schedule, we asked movers if we could postpone sending machines out until slashdot was stable on west coast, they said "No, sorry, our movers will be there Thursday morning to take your servers west." So here we are group of happy sys admins pulling an all-nighter to shove this entire site out west before the moving van arrives. YAY! Sorry about the DNS sloppiness everyone, we should've primed that earlier.
... as Rob said, same as was on east coast: 4 quad-pentium VA 4450 DB servers running MySQL and Red Hat 7.x, plus 9 VA 2251 web servers running Debian and Apache + mod_perl + slash. Load balancing across web servers via Arrowpoint CS800 switch (which is now a Cisco product). The move was in order to consolidate our network operations on west coast. Choice of Exodus over other colos was that we've been overall satisfied with Exodus service and costs, and the datacenters we occupy are owned by Exodus parent, Cable&Wireless, by all appearances they have a stable parent company, but you can never guess what financial status a telco will be in 12 months from now the way the telco market has been in the past 2 years: look at WorldCom 18 months ago as compared to today... who knew? but they're not about to close their doors but still, every telco has bad-looking finances these days but doesn't mean their datacenters will go dark next week. (These are only my own opinions by the way, not official opinions of OSDN, and IANATFABJASATYVM: I am Not A Telco Financial Analyst but Just a Sys Admin, Thank You Very Much)
Re:Perhaps I'm missing something but...
on
Slashdot is Moving
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Exodus Boston 2 NOC is what we at OSDN call "Exodus East" and Exodus Santa Clara is what we call "Exodus West".
Some security consulting firms host free 1-day seminars which combine some useful security information with blatant sales pitches for their security products. Just be cautioned that the speaker giving the talk may mix useful information with a few thinly-veiled attempts to scare you into buying their services. But pick their brains clean if you get a chance to ask questions, it's free.
I noticed Radio Shack has been advertising this device TeleZapper for $49 which sends a "disconnected" tone up the line everytime you answer a phone call so telemarketers with autodialers automatically tag your phone number as disconnected. Anyone have one of these things? I guess it'd be difficult to tell how well it works if number of spam calls received is still > 0.
... and that's why there also be a job market for debuggers!
Apple instructor pointer invalid
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
Back in high school, computer programming class using Apple IIe, class is learning to type simple 5 line programs, I'm in back of the class keying code for a space invaders game, the teacher is explaining to the class how to swap the values of two variables (my syntax may not be Apple ][ compliant but it was something like this)
...so the class enters this code and runs it and everyone sees "20 20" on their screen instead of "20 10" and the teacher for the life of him can't figure what the problem is... so I let them discuss it for while I'm tweaking my game code and eventually I go to the board and write
A = C A = B B = C
The class was baffled that alogrithm worked, so was the teacher. This is why there will always a job market for computer programmers.
...but if you save a doc or xls in newer versions of Office and send it to someone with a much older version of Office by default they won't be able to open it, they have to ask you to export to older format then resend. This is what happened between Office 6 and Office 95, so at some point you get tired of asking people to export to an older formats because you're version deficient -- in a business communication this doesn't seem professional because the person at the other end is wondering what's up with your company if you're still using old software which is making it a pain for them to be communicating with you. So you just give up and buy the newer version even though you probably weren't needing any of the newer features. Microsoft gets yet another sale out of you.
...at least until you can no longer open Office docs people sent you from the later versions of Office, like what happened between Office 6 and Office 95.
<MICROSOFT BACKCOMPATIBLE=OFF>We have ways of making you upgrade<MICROSOFT>
Re:Personalization won't work until Spam is dead..
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No, VA is not in Chapter 11, in fact VA has hardly any debt and still has cash in the bank. As for Slashdot, it's best revenue stream has been advertising and large ad clients such as IBM will not buy ad space here unless we post a network privacy policy
I stumbled across this video game review show on TBS Superstation the other night, basically two guys sitting in a living room playing and talking video games. It was on so late I'd need a Tivo to catch another episode. Here's more info about the show.
Re:No need to reverselookup hostnames for geotarge
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 2
It's bascially just top-level domain targeting, loosely referred to "geotargeting". Using HostnameLookups in Apache is not the optimal solution, I've tried other approaches and it ends up causing big problems and headaches. True geotargeting requires a large database (which some compnaies sell) that maps subnet address to city/country, and then you're talking about hitting another database in realtime for every page loaded and I don't want to do that Slashdot.
Tim did not buy Slashdot and take it public. I think you've got Tim confused with Andover.Net. As a company we only bought two of these chairs as part of our trade show exhibit booth for Slashdot, IIRC Rob and Jeff requested them since they had to sit at the booth for extended periods of time. So two Areons per 60 employees, maybe we have a chance to redeem ourselves.
I'm not sure what's happening with moderation but since so many people wanting to know: One of our netops quit suddenly Sunday without any explanantion, I assume she was put off by being called in on a weekend and being asked to stay late until it was fixed. I don't know, but these things happen so we deal with it. One thing you don't want to do is publically flame someone who still has your root passwords (although I trust this particular person with our root still), besides we're not mad at her, wish her well, sorry things didn't work out.
Despite my user info here which I haven't bothered to edit, Andover.Net no longer not exists as a company or a group of people -- all the original Andover.Net crew resigned or was laid off already save a few including me. The corporate parent of Slashdot and it's lawyers is VA Linux of Freemont, California.
For the record Andover.Net *did* go to bat to defend the free speech of Slashdot forums (remeber the UNISYS-GIF flamefest anyone?) even the nuisance trolls, more than once. We stood our ground even when we were about to go public when risking a lawsuit would've sank us.
Andover.Net was the best company I ever worked for, and the executives cared. We were able to buy Slashdot not by making the biggest cash offer (others offered more) but by offering a unique arrangment of editorial freedom that other suitors would not offer.
Anyway today I can't say if Andover.Net would've survived this cold market and stood up to this lawsuit today. You have to pick your battles. Right now we have bigger fish to fry here.
As long as you can convince your employer that your projects should be released under some GPL-like licence, and you get that code uploaded somewhere into the public before you leave, then no matter where you go from there you can reuse your code.
I also watched "Merchants of Cool" and it is easy to see the parallel that cool up-and-coming web sites can sell out just like cool up-and-coming bands sell out, and then the small artsist are made into willing participants the "demand generation" machine. The ethics of the businesses talked about in "Merchants of Cool" is far more bothersome in that it demonstrates a commercial machine feeding on the emotional needs of teenagers. On the other hand I'd like to think we can break the web advertising demand cycle for more ads, bigger ads, by giving more direct control to the users. So I think the feedback loop is ethically OK as long as each participant is fully aware of the situation and allowed to knowlingly participate in how it plays out.
Slashdot Mirror
Cutting infrastructure cables has already been happening w/o help from those of ill-intent. What we need to work on is assuming the worst can happen and concentrate making very fast repairs to get things back up as sson as possible. I recall back around 1997 a back hoe in the Chicago area took out 1/3 of the U.S. the Internet traffic for most of the day. What we need in an emergency is an army of huffy sys admins to stay on the phone the telco providers to shout "THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE... I WAS INSTALLING DEBIAN OVER HTTP AND NOW MY SERVER IS DEAD!!! I NEED CONNECTIVETY NOW!!!" and keep it up until the cable repairs are done. Well maybe not like that but we would do better training an army of technicians to repair infrastructure quickly in an emergency that way less downtime, less havoc. In other words don't rely on the cable company repair people who will be there next week sometime between 8AM and 8PM.
I appreciate Chris' response to the Server51 ripoff comment, but I have to admit it's sort of half-true in that it was Andover's response to VA's SourceForge. In late 1999, Scoop and I and few others in Andover were pointed directly at SourceForge and we were told we had to respond to this (meaning we had to build something to compete with SF). So we started building Server51, it was certainly meant to compete with SourceForge (our concern at the time was that SourceForge could someday overtake or at least deflate Freshmeat as a relevant open source destination) but we honestly wanted to make something far better than SF was at the time, something more useful for devlopers and users, and make it kind of fun with the campy alien conspiracy theme (the idea was the server existed in an unknown location and everyone working on the server was part of some larger X-Files plot) . We didn't use any SF code (although it was available to the public) or SF architecture, we started from scratch and had our own ideas on how to make it all work, be reliable, fast, and scalable. I think what Tim meant by "direct ripoff" was "competetion". Well anyway after VA acquired Andover the intention was that SF and Server51 would be merged, but really Server51 was in beta and SF was already quite large so it was like merging and motorcycle with a bus... it didn't quite happen, just as well SF eventually improved anyway and I think its better that open source community has cooperation between Freshmeat and SF instead of having to announce new releases in two places at once.
...of all these beeping lights and flashing buttons? That's all we have here are beeping lights and flashing buttons and no one knows what they're FOR and they're BEEPING and THEY'RE FLASHING AND BEEPING AND FLASHING AND BLINKING... I CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE! Will there be an Airplane III?
Yes, we fell behind moving schedule, we asked movers if we could postpone sending machines out until slashdot was stable on west coast, they said "No, sorry, our movers will be there Thursday morning to take your servers west." So here we are group of happy sys admins pulling an all-nighter to shove this entire site out west before the moving van arrives. YAY! Sorry about the DNS sloppiness everyone, we should've primed that earlier.
... as Rob said, same as was on east coast: 4 quad-pentium VA 4450 DB servers running MySQL and Red Hat 7.x, plus 9 VA 2251 web servers running Debian and Apache + mod_perl + slash. Load balancing across web servers via Arrowpoint CS800 switch (which is now a Cisco product). The move was in order to consolidate our network operations on west coast. Choice of Exodus over other colos was that we've been overall satisfied with Exodus service and costs, and the datacenters we occupy are owned by Exodus parent, Cable&Wireless, by all appearances they have a stable parent company, but you can never guess what financial status a telco will be in 12 months from now the way the telco market has been in the past 2 years: look at WorldCom 18 months ago as compared to today... who knew? but they're not about to close their doors but still, every telco has bad-looking finances these days but doesn't mean their datacenters will go dark next week. (These are only my own opinions by the way, not official opinions of OSDN, and IANATFABJASATYVM: I am Not A Telco Financial Analyst but Just a Sys Admin, Thank You Very Much)
Exodus Boston 2 NOC is what we at OSDN call "Exodus East" and Exodus Santa Clara is what we call "Exodus West".
Some security consulting firms host free 1-day seminars which combine some useful security information with blatant sales pitches for their security products. Just be cautioned that the speaker giving the talk may mix useful information with a few thinly-veiled attempts to scare you into buying their services. But pick their brains clean if you get a chance to ask questions, it's free.
I noticed Radio Shack has been advertising this device TeleZapper for $49 which sends a "disconnected" tone up the line everytime you answer a phone call so telemarketers with autodialers automatically tag your phone number as disconnected. Anyone have one of these things? I guess it'd be difficult to tell how well it works if number of spam calls received is still > 0.
... and that's why there also be a job market for debuggers!
Back in high school, computer programming class using Apple IIe, class is learning to type simple 5 line programs, I'm in back of the class keying code for a space invaders game, the teacher is explaining to the class how to swap the values of two variables (my syntax may not be Apple ][ compliant but it was something like this)
10 $A = 10
20 $B = 20
30 $A = $B
40 $B = $A
50 PRINT $A
60 PRINT $B
...so the class enters this code and runs it and everyone sees "20 20" on their screen instead of "20 10" and the teacher for the life of him can't figure what the problem is... so I let them discuss it for while I'm tweaking my game code and eventually I go to the board and write
A = C
A = B
B = C
The class was baffled that alogrithm worked, so was the teacher. This is why there will always a job market for computer programmers.
...but if you save a doc or xls in newer versions of Office and send it to someone with a much older version of Office by default they won't be able to open it, they have to ask you to export to older format then resend. This is what happened between Office 6 and Office 95, so at some point you get tired of asking people to export to an older formats because you're version deficient -- in a business communication this doesn't seem professional because the person at the other end is wondering what's up with your company if you're still using old software which is making it a pain for them to be communicating with you. So you just give up and buy the newer version even though you probably weren't needing any of the newer features. Microsoft gets yet another sale out of you.
<MICROSOFT BACKCOMPATIBLE=OFF>We have ways of making you upgrade<MICROSOFT>
No, VA is not in Chapter 11, in fact VA has hardly any debt and still has cash in the bank. As for Slashdot, it's best revenue stream has been advertising and large ad clients such as IBM will not buy ad space here unless we post a network privacy policy
I stumbled across this video game review show on TBS Superstation the other night, basically two guys sitting in a living room playing and talking video games. It was on so late I'd need a Tivo to catch another episode. Here's more info about the show.
It's bascially just top-level domain targeting, loosely referred to "geotargeting". Using HostnameLookups in Apache is not the optimal solution, I've tried other approaches and it ends up causing big problems and headaches. True geotargeting requires a large database (which some compnaies sell) that maps subnet address to city/country, and then you're talking about hitting another database in realtime for every page loaded and I don't want to do that Slashdot.
Time to go to bed for a week! Eeegad.
From what I gather it has to do with Slash code, they're tweaking it.
It's going to bounce up and down while Slash coders debug the DB.
We turned off the banjo web servers for a few minutes to see why the DB server is spitting out bizarre errors.
Tim did not buy Slashdot and take it public. I think you've got Tim confused with Andover.Net. As a company we only bought two of these chairs as part of our trade show exhibit booth for Slashdot, IIRC Rob and Jeff requested them since they had to sit at the booth for extended periods of time. So two Areons per 60 employees, maybe we have a chance to redeem ourselves.
...and never did. This time it was a different piece of equipment. Fun fun. Please reply with your acronymns for OSDN below.
I'm not sure what's happening with moderation but since so many people wanting to know: One of our netops quit suddenly Sunday without any explanantion, I assume she was put off by being called in on a weekend and being asked to stay late until it was fixed. I don't know, but these things happen so we deal with it. One thing you don't want to do is publically flame someone who still has your root passwords (although I trust this particular person with our root still), besides we're not mad at her, wish her well, sorry things didn't work out.
For the record Andover.Net *did* go to bat to defend the free speech of Slashdot forums (remeber the UNISYS-GIF flamefest anyone?) even the nuisance trolls, more than once. We stood our ground even when we were about to go public when risking a lawsuit would've sank us.
Andover.Net was the best company I ever worked for, and the executives cared. We were able to buy Slashdot not by making the biggest cash offer (others offered more) but by offering a unique arrangment of editorial freedom that other suitors would not offer.
Anyway today I can't say if Andover.Net would've survived this cold market and stood up to this lawsuit today. You have to pick your battles. Right now we have bigger fish to fry here.
As long as you can convince your employer that your projects should be released under some GPL-like licence, and you get that code uploaded somewhere into the public before you leave, then no matter where you go from there you can reuse your code.
I also watched "Merchants of Cool" and it is easy to see the parallel that cool up-and-coming web sites can sell out just like cool up-and-coming bands sell out, and then the small artsist are made into willing participants the "demand generation" machine. The ethics of the businesses talked about in "Merchants of Cool" is far more bothersome in that it demonstrates a commercial machine feeding on the emotional needs of teenagers. On the other hand I'd like to think we can break the web advertising demand cycle for more ads, bigger ads, by giving more direct control to the users. So I think the feedback loop is ethically OK as long as each participant is fully aware of the situation and allowed to knowlingly participate in how it plays out.