My day started off with a failed RAID controller and hasn't really improved since.
I've made some progress on my post-vacation ticket backlog but days like these make me wish I weren't ~75% of the IT department where I work...
Speaking of progress, I beat episode 4 of Life is Strange on Monday night and am already replaying it in anticipation of episode 5. Definitely blows all other "make choices and see the story change"-type games out of the water IMO.
Converted an ancient workstation we're decommissioning into a white noise machine, all I needed was a DBAN DVD!
@MattSpeller said:
@anonymous $10/mth to do wordpress
Just so you know, you can definitely make a small WordPress site work well on the $5/month option. There's some stuff you will want to be able to do in Linux/WordPress before doing it on a production VPS, namely swap file management in Linux and site caching in WordPress, but once you have those down you might be able to save some money on hosting 
Might be worth trying out if and when you do a test restore of your site. If you do want to test it out, keep in mind you'll have to do the restore from a WordPress-level backup and not a Digital Ocean server snapshot/backup - they don't let you restore those to a smaller-sized VPS.
With all that said, their $10/month option is what I would pick if I were planning on hosting a forum on the same server.
@scottalanmiller said:
Dominica is whipping up fried rice here. We have to cook at home a lot because we get so much produce delivered every morning!
This summer we had a ton of people that had very productive gardens and wanted to give us free produce. It was awesome, but after the nth bushel of tomatoes we had to really brainstorm on what we could do to use them all.
Funny, I just saw this thread as I was reviewing the anti-Lenovo post I just wrote up over at SW. Normally I wouldn't trash a brand like that but there were just so many people trying to convince the OP to switch from Dell to Lenovo 
My stance is that they very well could have decided it would be too risky to include their crapware in their business-grade stuff. But based off what I know about huge, ethically questionable technology companies, it's at least equally possible that they are just using more subtle methods to hide their unwanted software that won't be discovered for months/years.
Either way, I haven't met someone who prefers their keyboard layout, their trackpoint, or their overall design over any other company's... so it's not really a sacrifice to say "No more Lenovo purchases" and grab popcorn the next time they get caught doing something shady.
Trying to get Google Auth's SSH PAM working... learning a lot about configuring OpenSSH in the process!
@scottalanmiller that all makes a lot of sense, and is probably also why I've heard that Debian is more popular among the open source enthusiast crowd where having OEM support isn't as much of a critical requirement. Thanks for the clarification!
That is a good idea! I'm in the middle of things at the moment but I did take an AMI of before I started messing around... and it's not working as it is now anyways, so I wouldn't really lose too much by starting over and applying what I've learned while taking notes.
It's one of the last parts of putting together a PCI DSS 3.1 compliant webserver, a project which has simultaneously been a gigantic timesuck and a great learning experience for Linux administration. Between log rotation/retention, cron jobs, auditing and PAM configuration I am starting to feel like I know how to do stuff besides "sudo service [whatever] restart"!
I cannot imagine someone buying a $200 "box" for security. When a $99/year subscription is tossed in there as well it goes from "maybe some people will buy this" to "maybe one person will buy this".
Caught in the dichotomy of wanting more time to work on things while wanting the day to be over and done with.
On the plus side, I just officially flipped the switch and the PCI compliant website should be live within the next 10 minutes or so. I'm always anxious when going live with a new site, but I've double and triple tested everything to the point where I'm reasonably confident that I'm the only one that will notice the change.
Mandrill and MS Hosted Exchange are coexisting pretty peacefully over here with DKIM set up.
One time Mandrill decided to cut off our access while they investigated whether or not we were secretly using their service for spam - Hosted Exchange emails continued to flow despite that.
On that note, in my experience you're more likely to trip Mandrill's internal spam filter than get blacklisted elsewhere, but that's only happened to me once in a few years of using it so far.
Spent the weekend jumping through various hoops to get my new Raspberry Pi Zero working. First my desktop's internal SD card reader wouldn't turn on, then I had to go out and get a powered USB hub so I could plug in everything I needed for the initial OS setup... Overall you definitely have to spend significantly more than $5 to get "the $5 computer" to actually do stuff, but almost all of it is stuff you can reuse on your next Pi so whatever.
I also found out the hard way that our main TV is the only thing with an HDMI port where I live. It felt funny installing Raspbian using the main house TV, but once I got the OS + WiFi configured I got it running headless without too much trouble.
I'm still at the point where my mind is blown every time I look at it. I skipped the regular Pis so the next smallest computer I've owned is a laptop. Now I have a computer that's smaller than a business card. I posted a picture of it on Facebook and my Dad asked me if the Pi was "like... the chip?" that you put in a full computer.
Next steps - getting some wires so I can connect some GPIO components!
But you guys, somehow they have lower prices on equivalent hardware! That means it's all worth it.
/s
Back in the WC3 custom game days I remember hating DotA because I wanted to play things like Sheep Tag, Tower Defense etc and had to sift through all the DotA games to find them.
Then I got into HoN and eventually Dota 2 and I understood why it was so popular. After I graduated from college, I stopped having the free time to commit to 30-45 min matches and cut mobas out of my life for a while, but I got hooked again with Heroes of the Storm.
Now Heroes is pretty much the only moba I'll play because matches usually end within 15-25 minutes and you don't need to have amazing micro skills to be good. Best of all, there's no All chat, which seems to have really cut down on the saltiness and general negative atmosphere that mobas usually seem to cultivate.
Other than that I've been playing a lot of Rainbow 6: Siege lately... I've always been a fan of FPS games and it's fun to have some strategic decisions to make on top of "what gun should I pick".
@MattSpeller said:
Lots of that stuff (especially VM's) can be done hands on for cheap or free. Highly recommend that, nothing has helped me learn faster.
I know Scott buys lots of books from something or other site - I dunno, he'll probably chime in.
True enough, I got to show some of my friends the magic of VirtualBox a couple months ago and it made me realize how much I had learned just from fiddling with it in my spare time. I also have a spare server running a couple of Linux VMs off of XenServer ... I guess I'm just hoping there's an awesome book out there that describes how it works so I can understand the theory behind it a bit more. It's my top choice in terms of specialization right now so I'd like to be able to really understand it.
Starting some robocopy jobs, adding to my list of IT pipe dreams and making plans to enable all of Goverlan's features on our network before the trial runs out.
Oh and watching the clock get closer to the weekend while waiting for the traditional Friday IT User Disaster to happen, of course...
@scottalanmiller said:
That Facebook is using HHVM in production makes me a little more comfortable with it.
True, but I would guess that Facebook's application runs mostly on code that Facebook is responsible for maintaining. On the other hand, most WordPress websites have at least a couple of third party plugins and/or themes and those usually assume you're running on PHP 5 so there's a higher chance of stuff like this happening.
Probably wouldn't be an issue very often but I would be more paranoid about updates breaking things if I were running HHVM in production.
@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Thus, when the datacenter peeps created the RAID 10 it removed all partitions from all drives and used the full capacity of the drives for the RAID.
So this is a process question.... but what are people in the datacenter doing System Admin tasks? I've seen places do this before, but it seems like a bad idea. There is no need for a NOC / DC tech to be doing this and the SA always has to double check it anyway and there is a lot of room for error. And when you want to tweak things, like this, the process gets broken and it doesn't hold up anyway.
Why not let the DC do the physical work and leave the system's configuration to the systems people?
I actually don't know what any of those acronyms are LOL. I'm a web developer and this is my new server and it's colocated in a datacenter a few states away and at this point they have to do any and all non-remote desktop tasks, there's just no other option. It's got a DRAC card but I'm new to servers and learning this as I go and that's not set up ( yet ).
NOC = Network Operations Center
DC = Data Center
SA = System Administrator
Someone correct me if I'm wrong!