Hey, I haven't been around here in a while, but I'm back, so deal with it! Things have calmed down in my glamorous professional life (part time male model, part time stock broker, part time astronaut) to where I can share more of my dementia on the Internet.
Funny note, coming back here I noticed everything was huge. I thought "man the layout is really terrible!" and then I realised I had it zoomed in nearly 150% or so. Fixing it made it a lot better.
@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
What does SAN stand for?
70% of IT pro's got this rightI think you should have at least heard about that...
Sweet and Nutritious
@Danp said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Internet down. Looks like Cox is having a major outage.
I've heard there's a pill for that.
I sneezed so hard my cigarette vanished, somehow it flew over my monitor and behind my desk. At first, for a brief stupid moment, I thought somehow I may have completely inhaled it.
As the person who owns all those sock puppet accounts and is the true genius behind all of their knowledge, let me say: you're welcome.
If I may butt in here and show off I've talked about the text editor war on my blog (and here) before:
http://tonyshowoff.com/articles/vi-vs-emacs-nope-theyre-both-terrible-and-obsolete/ (link to MangoLassi conversation in post)
In all seriousness, because the post is a little over the top, if you want to be a sysadmin with Linux, Unix, BSD, old SunOS machines from the stone ages, etc you really need to know how to use vi. I know how to use vi, I despise it, but it's necessary from time to time. Often there are easier, less terrible editors available, but not always, and sometimes other editors aren't capable of completing the task for whatever reason (vipw for example).
My personal recommendations are nano or pico or FreeBSD's formerly popular "ee", I use these pretty much all the time, except, again, vi does come up.
Without reading the thread, as someone who started a shared hosting company in 1998 and has been dealing with it since then, it barely pays for itself. You really need to have tons and tons of customers for it to work out. Customer service doesn't really mean a damn thing, because the kind of people who really obsess about that when it comes to web hosting don't know anything, which means because they don't know anything, they'll go with GoDaddy or whatever their registrar provides.
The only way to really work is to provide hosting of something most others don't, like Windows hosting. If you're providing LAMP, your service has been done, and is everywhere, and nobody is going to move to you. Providing node.js hosting and other things is going to be much more difficult in a shared environment as well, so I wouldn't count on grovesocial moving to you. You maybe can get some of your clients to move their sites, but you won't be living off it.
Customer service couldn't hold up any of the many open source companies as making them "different", there's no reason to think it'd make a difference with yours.
I used to reply to all the threads on Spiceworks about this, every few weeks somebody else wants to do it. Weirdly no one ever comes back saying they were successful.
Also with your image/design. That won't work in shared hosting environments, because you don't know if the customer's application even can handle load balancing, most can't and it'll just confuse them and possibly break their app, or at the very least end up logging your balancer's IP address as every single one of their visitors.
The way we do it is having several Apache instances running on each server along with some customised stuff going on, chroot, etc. We do provide services where people can have load balancing, but nobody provides direct, out of the box load balancing or redundancy to customers who are looking for shared hosting, because people who are looking for that don't usually use shared hosting, and the kind of people who use shared hosting are the kind of people who don't know how to deal with it.
Security is a damn nightmare. I've seen many shared hosts over the years get rooted or have processed spawned from PHP, Perl, etc which worked outside of the configuration bounds, etc.
It'll cost a lot and you won't make your money back, unless you figure out how to be very niche, and then you've got other problems because if it's that niche there won't be a "how to setup X hosting company" tutorial out there, complete with dealing with billing, refunds, security nightmares, etc.
That's a pretty cool story, I say definitely nurture her technical side. I've noticed that in the west, especially America, there's a subcurrent of almost discouragement for girls to be interested in technology. It's vague, it's subtle, but it's certainly there. You just need to counteract any potential crap she might get, primarily from people in TV marketing. it sounds like you're doing a great job already so I don't really need to say any more on that. 
It does remind me though how on Spiceworks and even in my own IT company, that when there's a service disruption similar to yours or a machine cannot talk to the world, they don't go through the OSI model and check everything one by one. Doing that saves a lot of time, because I think IT people often simply assume it's always either bad cable or software misconfiguration/failure on the machine itself, not potentially each layer in between. A similar situation happened a few months ago, where a network switch went bad at one of our offices so the connections to a few servers suddenly vanished.
One of our novice employees decided to hard reboot all of the VM hosts he couldn't contact, which was 4 out of about 12 total. Everything presumably came back up and started as it's supposed to, but it still didn't work, and he and someone else were having a hell of a time trying to figure this out. They called the office manager who was out and he suggested checking the switch, and they did, and it still didn't work. The other guy was pretty busy as well, otherwise the rest of this story probably wouldn't have happened.
So this young guy hard resets the machines again, and still nothing, so finally he calls me. As a general rule, you're never supposed to call me unless it's a major problem and nobody can figure it out.
So, he tells me all that happened, and the first thing I said to him, verbatim was:
Don't you think if the network connections to multiple physical machines stopped working, it wouldn't be the machines, but probably something else?
He said:
Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense, I just assumed it was the hosts.
So, I told him to go through the OSI model, use it as a general guide, and check everything and told another guy there to make sure he did it right and understood checking doesn't mean looking to see if the light is on. During the first stage, they figure out it was is the switch that had gone bad. It still lights up, it seems like it works, but it simply doesn't. They changed it out and everything came back up.
Except... email, the hard rebooting really messed with Exchange, and even thought it was spanned across three servers with DAG, it flipped out. That wasn't hard to sort out, obviously and things were back to normal in no time.
Checking each thing first and knowing whether or not it works is a good way to go about it, and I think a lot of young people especially forget that. In a sense, if it's not something I can fix right through this terminal and it's still plugged in, then it's completely broken.
You may be wondering also why there wasn't teaming with multiple switches. Actually, there was, however they were in the process of moving the machines to the other server room across the building, so it was a situation of the bare minimum being there just for that day until after EOD. It was a hell of a time for the switch to go out, but it taught this guy a powerful lesson.
I didn't fire him, though he thought I was going to. I told him "that's why you're paid what you are, it's entry level, any of the other guys made the same mistake they'd probably be fired, primarily for the idiotic hard rebooting thing. Next time think about the problem, and go down the OSI model list, and never, ever hard reboot anything unless you know for certain the machine is hung up."
I guess that was kind of long, but I also see people on Spiceworks running into this thing a lot too. Sometimes I jump the gun myself and then when my initial suspicions are wrong, I remember to go back to the list.
Like Hammer, let's break it down:
In both IPv4 and IPv6 the machines have an initial self-assigned IP address (link-local), and that's what they use to make the requests and get the responses. These work differently for both protocols. You'll probably notice with IPv4 it'll be an IP address like 169.254.0.0/16, depending on the stack and configuration. In IPv6 the self-assigned address is based upon your MAC address, and often with the advertisement mentioned above, it'll respond with almost the same address, just the "prefix" will be different. In other words your link-local address in IPv6 will start in fe80::/10, but the first half of that will change to something else in most cases.
DHCP and BOOTP work almost in the exact same way, so since you're not a network guy, you can gladly think of them as essentially the same thing. There are also proprietary or modified versions of DHCP which some networks use (like ISPs).
I hope that makes sense.
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
US election: Trump 'encourages Russia to hack Clinton emails'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-36907541
starts hacking
I personally have refused to comply with GDPR. There's a weird irony in that so many non-EU companies (specifically American) felt the need to comply just because, as I saw on SW oh no, the EU gonna come after you somehow! yet when the EU implements a pain in the butt copyright law, suddenly "well, those laws don't apply to us." So I moved my company location from Czech Republic to Russia, and I'll sell to EU citizens anyway. I say, bring it on:
I noticed I didn't make your list, well you made mine, my Nixon-style enemies list.
I'm not surprised, more than once on Spiceworks I've been told the reason the person has left Spiceworks full time and moved to ML is because of me, only when they finally notice me, the horror comes full circle. I do have more best answers than helpful posts by a wide margin, most people it's the other way around, so I must be doing something right, though harshly.
I'm only on ML, Spiceworks, and a Russian IT community that also has a Serbian sub-forum, I hate pretty much everywhere else. This is a great place and I want to show my gratitude by saying thank you for posting here as well.
@siringo I think @JaredBusch is plenty beautiful, I know I had the image he kept posting of his ape-like chest blown up and put over my mantle. Truly not since Adam has perfection been moulded from clay.
Edit: I think this may be the most poetically stupid thing I've said in a while, I'm actually impressed with myself.
One month doesn't even seem that long, maybe it's because they don't have any customers?
I answered this on Spiceworks already, but for the sake of cross posting since you did, I will say again: get a new drive, lowering quality is always a terrible idea, you can't go from lossy to lossy without destroying quality.
Luckily, and I mean really lucky, my wife thinks Valentine's day is a ridiculous holiday which attempts to commercialise love, especially in that it's more-or-less aimed at making men feel obligated to spend money on women otherwise they get in trouble. Additionally the cost of Valentine's day had steadily been rising over the last few decades to about $110 per person (women). She repeats this to me every year, and tons more, it takes about 5 minutes of ranting. At any rate, not only do I not have to do anything, I will get in trouble if I do.
Instead, years ago, we picked a day in the middle of June to celebrate our love.
@jyates said:
Beard length directly correlates to Linux knowledge. Tell them if you shave, you'll know less.
Possibly not a good idea, if he works with Windows exclusively he may have to take off the first layer of skin.
