In 2003-2004 at my previous employer the company rolled out Blackberries to management and "key" personnel. Being responsible for a relatively large part of the infrastructure at this joint, I also got one.
One day I arrived at work and found the messaging group folks had delivered the BBs to some of the people in my area, and there was a box in my desk as well, with a little booklet (the must have cost a fortune to print, it was that well done) with usage policy (of course), instructions and steps for setting it up. The younger kids were besides themselves and already setting up the sync cradles and sending messages to each other. I picked up the phone and called the project manager, who was a friend of mine. I asked him to send one of his people to pick the box up.
"But everyone's getting one." "I don't care, I don't want it." "You are on Tier 1 and you're supposed to be on call..." "I am. I have a cell phone, and if the IPC melts down at 3 AM, someone can call me." "But this lets you check your email!" "That's exactly why I don't want it"
A few days of back and forth politik ensued, and eventually my boss relented and let me be. Note that this was the time when the devices could not make phone calls - I hear they can now. Oh joy.
I figured that once I had that thing I'd never be able to get away from it, even on vacation. And that's exactly what happened to everyone else. People won't think twice about sending you an email for stupid little things at 10:00 PM, because they're working and figure everyone else should be as well. But making a phone call is very different, and most people won't do it unless it's something really important. People think it's no big deal because it's just a message. Bullshit.
If the data center is on fire, sure I want to know, no matter what time it is. But I don't want to hear little pings and murmurs from a PDA next to my bed because some VP couldn't find a file for tomorrow's presentation, or a fscking file server is down and Julie in accounting can't get to it. All that can wait until the morning.
If I had taken the thing and ended up in that 24/7/365 situation I don't think I'd sue my employer, but I would have probably ended up leaving a lot sooner than I did. Probably even if I were eligible for overtime. A case of "they ain't paying me enough for this crap" if I ever saw one.
Here's a funny one for you which will cause nightmares: systems named after firearm cartridges.
Holy crap, that's terrible. Who the heck thinks up stuff like that? I have a great horror story too. I mentioned celestial bodies in my post. Imagine an organization that starts off with just a few boxes, names them after the planets. Then the Sun. Then major moons ("enceladus is down!!"). Then, instead of moving to a decent naming system, they insist on looking to the heavens. So on with named asteroids, major things like Oort Cloud, then galaxies and nebulas and... well, you get the picture. By the time you move to the Messier catalog you're naming your boxes 'crab', 'horse' and 'owl', which pretty much puts you back at square one.
So you get names like 'oakbrook-17893021.foo.bar.yay.call.me.org', which is less than useless.
It sucks to be you then *grin*
One thing though, the 'STO' code seems kind of weird. I get that it probably means 'storage', but wouldn't 'FIL' be better instead?
I agree, and I did ask them about it. They did consider FIL but ended up not using it because it doesn't 'sound' right when you spell it, while 'STO' does work. It kind of makes sense if you compare how 'FIL218' and 'STO218' sound when you're talking on the phone. 'eff-ai-elle'? Weird.
I understood IAH was the airport code, not random letters. I just never realized that the original one was HOU, which makes a heck of a lot more sense.
Having never actually flown into or out of Houston, I had no idea it had two airports, but I guess LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are good examples of how that happens.
Thanks for the clarification, and also to the other person who mentioned as much.
I'm not a developer so I don't get to say all the cool things I do at work often here *grin*
OK, at my current employer there are about 100 or so servers in a single geoloc, so it's really no big deal to name them. My previous job was at a company with a few thousand boxes spread out over three timezones in four cities (in the US), India, Australia, the UK and Brazil.
I was not involved in the naming scheme project, but I thought it worked very well.
Basically, the machines were named as follows:
[three-leter tasking code][3 digit num sequence].[location subnet].[main subnet].[company name abbrev].com
So let's say the company was Mordor Corp. The FQDN for a web server box in the Portland data center would be:
WEB219.pdx.us.mordor.com
An app server in Brazil was:
APP416.ads.br.mordor.com
In the case of the servers in the US, initially they used the airport codes for the cities (Portland = pdx, Houston = iah, Ft. Lauderdale = fll, etc) but later we just came up with three-letter codes for some data centers because it was more intuitive (HOU is better than IAH). For the other countries, we used the generic 'ads' subdomain and the two-letter ISO country code.
The server types were:
STO - File servers APP - Application servers (could also be web servers) WEB - Web servers (dedicated) SQL - Database (any type) PDC - Primary domain controllers SDC - Secondary domain controllers EXC - Exchange servers DNS - Guess LIC - Licensing servers TSS - Dedicated terminal services boxes SRV - Generic servers (to be avoided!)
There were a couple more but these were the main ones.
This scheme worked very well because the identifiers and numeric sequences are mnemonic, but most importantly, it scales. Numeric sequences were assigned as servers were imaged and named, pulling the codes from a simple database application someone at the company wrote. The sequences were tasking-specific, meaning that APP servers were sequential and unrelated to the WEB sequences, for example. The only problem I ever saw with that was the situation where we had more than 1,000 server of a single type, but as far as I know that never happened. In any case sequences could be re-used as servers were retired.
I've seen server naming schemes that used cartoon characters, Star Wars figures, elements, celestial bodies, etc. None of them worked (or would have worked) beyond 100 boxes or so.
Well twitter, I can't take credit for finding this, but your dislike of Bruce Byfield is well-known. Judging from your comment in that blog, I'd say he's not as radical as you'd like, thus probably diminishing the value of everything he says. You've made it clear once and again that you see everything in black and white, meaning anyone who doesn't hate Microsoft must hate free software and extremes of that nature. In this case, Bruce Byfield must be "ignorant", because he's saying something you don't like. As opposed to a well-researched opinion, which is what I thought after reading the article.
Opinions you disagree with are not "FUD".
By the way, I'm probably the last person you should be replying to with your sockpuppet accounts.
It's possible he suffers from Acute Quote Blindness, or AQB. AQB is a terrible, debilitating disease that wreaks havoc on the cred levels of online pundits.
AQB has also been linked to Broken Sarcasm Gland Syndrome (BSGS), but the research in that area is still ongoing.
I honestly don't see the difference between IE7 and IE6 on either XP or Vista. And I think IE is a heck of a lot faster to load and initialize than Firefox. But Firefox seems to render pages slightly faster than IE7.
You might want to check the IE add-ins or whatever they're called. A girl at work started having problems with startup times and some pages that would get stuck when loading in IE7, until she figured out that the Skype ActiveX control was causing it. She disabled it and everything started working fine.
I think the IE7 solution to ActiveX sandboxing was well done. It's still a problem, but a lesser one I guess. I always thought that was the most serious issue with IE.
It just feels like it's taking forever to make IE a good browser. All those years in a stagnant pond where the order of the day was fighting little fires instead of improving the product beget Firefox, and now Microsoft is really feeling the heat. Competition is good, but Microsoft seems to still be moving at a glacial pace.
Anyone who has doubts about why "ibane" might be so interested in the fate of twitter's sockpuppets can click on my homepage and make up their own minds.
That is, if ever-constant shilling and tortured "Vista sux" fabrications (as if there wasn't enough to dislike the OS to begin with) weren't enough to put two and two together.
This insistence on trying to create a correlation between Microsoft and your problems on Slashdot are probably one of the reasons all but one of your eleven accounts are now posting at negative karma.
Your problem is that you continue to blame vague conspiracies by evil corporation$ instead of understanding that people find what you do here distasteful.
This goes way back. I'm not sure why he attached so much importance to that, but he's been blaming "John Marriot" or whomever ever since that happened.
Anti-Slash hasn't been active since mid-2005 that I can see from their comment database.
You already posted in this article with three differentaccounts. Would it bee too much to ask to only use one? Is it really that difficult to make your point without pretending you're multiple people? Why do you insist on gaming Slashdot this way?
Do you have a better reason for the attack on Peter Quinn? How about Peter Gutmann?
See twitter, here's the problem. You're carrying on a conversation with someone who is trying to get you to come to your senses, and the only thing you're capable of is to continue to claim Bill Gates has a personal vendetta against you, equate yourself with people who actually do contribute good things to free software, and continue to deny that you have no sockpuppets.
The premise of your argument is invalid, therefore everything else can be safely discarded as it is, just fluff. "M$" is not after some random Slashdot user. You were shunned by the community because of your extremism, and your response was to create 9 more accounts that shill each other and accuse everyone that disagrees with you (or points out your shilling) as being employed by Microsoft.
If you can't see the inherent problem in all this, then your paranoia is in fact real and not faked, and there's nothing anyone can do or say to help you.
Slashdot Mirror
#12 actually. And thanks again...
In 2003-2004 at my previous employer the company rolled out Blackberries to management and "key" personnel. Being responsible for a relatively large part of the infrastructure at this joint, I also got one.
One day I arrived at work and found the messaging group folks had delivered the BBs to some of the people in my area, and there was a box in my desk as well, with a little booklet (the must have cost a fortune to print, it was that well done) with usage policy (of course), instructions and steps for setting it up. The younger kids were besides themselves and already setting up the sync cradles and sending messages to each other. I picked up the phone and called the project manager, who was a friend of mine. I asked him to send one of his people to pick the box up.
"But everyone's getting one."
"I don't care, I don't want it."
"You are on Tier 1 and you're supposed to be on call..."
"I am. I have a cell phone, and if the IPC melts down at 3 AM, someone can call me."
"But this lets you check your email!"
"That's exactly why I don't want it"
A few days of back and forth politik ensued, and eventually my boss relented and let me be. Note that this was the time when the devices could not make phone calls - I hear they can now. Oh joy.
I figured that once I had that thing I'd never be able to get away from it, even on vacation. And that's exactly what happened to everyone else. People won't think twice about sending you an email for stupid little things at 10:00 PM, because they're working and figure everyone else should be as well. But making a phone call is very different, and most people won't do it unless it's something really important. People think it's no big deal because it's just a message. Bullshit.
If the data center is on fire, sure I want to know, no matter what time it is. But I don't want to hear little pings and murmurs from a PDA next to my bed because some VP couldn't find a file for tomorrow's presentation, or a fscking file server is down and Julie in accounting can't get to it. All that can wait until the morning.
If I had taken the thing and ended up in that 24/7/365 situation I don't think I'd sue my employer, but I would have probably ended up leaving a lot sooner than I did. Probably even if I were eligible for overtime. A case of "they ain't paying me enough for this crap" if I ever saw one.
Here's a funny one for you which will cause nightmares: systems named after firearm cartridges.
Holy crap, that's terrible. Who the heck thinks up stuff like that? I have a great horror story too. I mentioned celestial bodies in my post. Imagine an organization that starts off with just a few boxes, names them after the planets. Then the Sun. Then major moons ("enceladus is down!!"). Then, instead of moving to a decent naming system, they insist on looking to the heavens. So on with named asteroids, major things like Oort Cloud, then galaxies and nebulas and... well, you get the picture. By the time you move to the Messier catalog you're naming your boxes 'crab', 'horse' and 'owl', which pretty much puts you back at square one.
But hey, at least the pay was good!
Did you hope he didn't do it, or did you hope his wife was still alive?
So you get names like 'oakbrook-17893021.foo.bar.yay.call.me.org', which is less than useless.
It sucks to be you then *grin*
One thing though, the 'STO' code seems kind of weird. I get that it probably means 'storage', but wouldn't 'FIL' be better instead?
I agree, and I did ask them about it. They did consider FIL but ended up not using it because it doesn't 'sound' right when you spell it, while 'STO' does work. It kind of makes sense if you compare how 'FIL218' and 'STO218' sound when you're talking on the phone. 'eff-ai-elle'? Weird.
I understood IAH was the airport code, not random letters. I just never realized that the original one was HOU, which makes a heck of a lot more sense.
Having never actually flown into or out of Houston, I had no idea it had two airports, but I guess LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are good examples of how that happens.
Thanks for the clarification, and also to the other person who mentioned as much.
Let him have a few mod points. It never lasts long anyway.
Long story.
I'm not a developer so I don't get to say all the cool things I do at work often here *grin*
OK, at my current employer there are about 100 or so servers in a single geoloc, so it's really no big deal to name them. My previous job was at a company with a few thousand boxes spread out over three timezones in four cities (in the US), India, Australia, the UK and Brazil.
I was not involved in the naming scheme project, but I thought it worked very well.
Basically, the machines were named as follows:
[three-leter tasking code][3 digit num sequence].[location subnet].[main subnet].[company name abbrev].com
So let's say the company was Mordor Corp. The FQDN for a web server box in the Portland data center would be:
WEB219.pdx.us.mordor.com
An app server in Brazil was:
APP416.ads.br.mordor.com
In the case of the servers in the US, initially they used the airport codes for the cities (Portland = pdx, Houston = iah, Ft. Lauderdale = fll, etc) but later we just came up with three-letter codes for some data centers because it was more intuitive (HOU is better than IAH). For the other countries, we used the generic 'ads' subdomain and the two-letter ISO country code.
The server types were:
STO - File servers
APP - Application servers (could also be web servers)
WEB - Web servers (dedicated)
SQL - Database (any type)
PDC - Primary domain controllers
SDC - Secondary domain controllers
EXC - Exchange servers
DNS - Guess
LIC - Licensing servers
TSS - Dedicated terminal services boxes
SRV - Generic servers (to be avoided!)
There were a couple more but these were the main ones.
This scheme worked very well because the identifiers and numeric sequences are mnemonic, but most importantly, it scales. Numeric sequences were assigned as servers were imaged and named, pulling the codes from a simple database application someone at the company wrote. The sequences were tasking-specific, meaning that APP servers were sequential and unrelated to the WEB sequences, for example. The only problem I ever saw with that was the situation where we had more than 1,000 server of a single type, but as far as I know that never happened. In any case sequences could be re-used as servers were retired.
I've seen server naming schemes that used cartoon characters, Star Wars figures, elements, celestial bodies, etc. None of them worked (or would have worked) beyond 100 boxes or so.
Thank you!
By the way, thanks for raising the visibility of my post.
Your posts are still at -1, where they belong.
Hi AC -
Do you have a link to this, if it is accessible (I know some of those mailing lists are not public).
Thanks.
Well twitter, I can't take credit for finding this, but your dislike of Bruce Byfield is well-known. Judging from your comment in that blog, I'd say he's not as radical as you'd like, thus probably diminishing the value of everything he says. You've made it clear once and again that you see everything in black and white, meaning anyone who doesn't hate Microsoft must hate free software and extremes of that nature. In this case, Bruce Byfield must be "ignorant", because he's saying something you don't like. As opposed to a well-researched opinion, which is what I thought after reading the article.
Opinions you disagree with are not "FUD".
By the way, I'm probably the last person you should be replying to with your sockpuppet accounts.
It is pretty easy to notice the difference between IE 6 and IE 7 on Vista.
I know that. What I emant is that on the same hardware (pretty much), I can't see IE7 being much slower than IE6.
Also, how do you not notice the tab support in IE 7?
I don't understand that...? Of course I noticed it.
It's possible he suffers from Acute Quote Blindness, or AQB. AQB is a terrible, debilitating disease that wreaks havoc on the cred levels of online pundits.
AQB has also been linked to Broken Sarcasm Gland Syndrome (BSGS), but the research in that area is still ongoing.
I honestly don't see the difference between IE7 and IE6 on either XP or Vista. And I think IE is a heck of a lot faster to load and initialize than Firefox. But Firefox seems to render pages slightly faster than IE7.
You might want to check the IE add-ins or whatever they're called. A girl at work started having problems with startup times and some pages that would get stuck when loading in IE7, until she figured out that the Skype ActiveX control was causing it. She disabled it and everything started working fine.
I think the IE7 solution to ActiveX sandboxing was well done. It's still a problem, but a lesser one I guess. I always thought that was the most serious issue with IE.
It just feels like it's taking forever to make IE a good browser. All those years in a stagnant pond where the order of the day was fighting little fires instead of improving the product beget Firefox, and now Microsoft is really feeling the heat. Competition is good, but Microsoft seems to still be moving at a glacial pace.
That is, if ever-constant shilling and tortured "Vista sux" fabrications (as if there wasn't enough to dislike the OS to begin with) weren't enough to put two and two together.
This insistence on trying to create a correlation between Microsoft and your problems on Slashdot are probably one of the reasons all but one of your eleven accounts are now posting at negative karma.
Your problem is that you continue to blame vague conspiracies by evil corporation$ instead of understanding that people find what you do here distasteful.
Note that "Odder" and "freenix" are the same person.
You guys are way too prickly about spelling... *grin*
Anti-Slash hasn't been active since mid-2005 that I can see from their comment database.
You already posted in this article with three different accounts. Would it bee too much to ask to only use one? Is it really that difficult to make your point without pretending you're multiple people? Why do you insist on gaming Slashdot this way?
See twitter, here's the problem. You're carrying on a conversation with someone who is trying to get you to come to your senses, and the only thing you're capable of is to continue to claim Bill Gates has a personal vendetta against you, equate yourself with people who actually do contribute good things to free software, and continue to deny that you have no sockpuppets.
The premise of your argument is invalid, therefore everything else can be safely discarded as it is, just fluff. "M$" is not after some random Slashdot user. You were shunned by the community because of your extremism, and your response was to create 9 more accounts that shill each other and accuse everyone that disagrees with you (or points out your shilling) as being employed by Microsoft.
If you can't see the inherent problem in all this, then your paranoia is in fact real and not faked, and there's nothing anyone can do or say to help you.
No, of course you're not.