A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

FOR FUCK SAKE ANDROID STUDIO!!! 5GB RAM WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!!! I NEED THOSE VMs RUNNING AND USING 5GB IS NOT COOL AT ALL!!

Use Docker, it's awesome because you won't need VMs anymore.

Using Win7: You need a VM for running docker. 😫

Yes Autodesk, I am fully fucking aware of the fact that it is not made for Linux but for what reason do you feel the need to block me from downloading it?! You know, there is Wine and there are also VMs... fucking pricks

And then they even start mixing languages 👏

How has coding impacted your life...?

- Using Linux
- Valuing OpenSorce over cracked software
- Using more CLI than GUI programs
- Only playing games that run on Linux or Wine
- Hating Micro$oft
- Utilizing VMs and Servers
- Tinkering with Hardware (RPi, custom PC)
- ...

... Nah not that much. 🤗😅

There are 3 types of questions.

Type 1 is a question that can easily be answered and mostly appears as the first result in Google.

Type 2 is a question that can be answered by stitching together various type 1 answers.

Type 3 is a question that has not been answered. It may be a bug you’ll have to find out about by reading an email chain 12 years ago or maybe a reason why epoll() doesn’t work on Linux VMs. There is no solid yes or no. You’ve most likely encountered this when reaching page 3 of your Google results and every link is purple (visited).

This is where depression and isolation hits. This is where you realize that if you can’t help yourself, no one else can (or has the experience and time to do so). This is where you must rely on your knowledge and infer an answer to your question pushing your concepts and theories to the extreme. If you solve this question, you’re solving it for someone else who may trek the same path later in the future. You’re solving it for the world!

If you’re willing to solve, attempting to solve, or even giving a reasonable inference about a type 3, you have a true engineering mindset.

Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.

Worked today… At Saturday.

Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....

*rolls eyes*

We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.

Guess why I got called...

Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.

It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.

*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*

The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.

Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.

IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...

*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*

Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.

Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...

NOTICE SOMETHING?!

Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.

After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.

Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…

*turning into antichrist*

I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.

Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...

Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.

But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.

Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.

Just one hour implementing shit.

*goozfraba*

Pour one out for our last VMS/Alpha computers heading to the great bit bucket in the sky.

Was decent hardware in it's day, 20 years ago, but we now run EC2 instances that are faster. 🙃

Desktop SSD just failed. All VMs lost. Domain admins too drunk to fix. No timesheets no sprint diary no mail no IM.

Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?

I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.

They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.

"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."

The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.

Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

Too many night shifts.

But it's done.

After the last migrations my emotional state is... Questionable.

VM migrations between different CPU vendors and generations leading to segfaults because of unsupported X86 extensions.... Thx for doing that at 23 o'clock after 8 hours of work....

Forgetting a left over NIC in a virtual machine, creating a routing loop, leading to very erratic behaviour and fun things.

Someone forgot to check the '"Unique" box, mass spawning a cluster of VMs with same MAC adresses....

DNS fuckery since someone thought that reboot would flush the cache of an DNS server.... Nope most DNS servers have persistent caches. You'll have to flush manually.

And let's not forget the joy of the 12 plus pages of when and where to move VMs, harddrives and VLAN configuration.

Oh migrations are such a festival of joy.

Finally done with that shit -.-

Absolutely seamless upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra. Total time from downloading and installing Sierra, testing all my apps, servers, VMs and VPNs....under 90 minutes 💪

DigitalOcean, beyond doubt

You might argue that having everything in a single place is bad, but having domain management right next to my servers is really nice. Spinning up new VMs with just a few clicks, and then being able to take it down again five minutes later is a blessing.

VMs.....You always have to install Google chrome... Can't OSs just include it in the installation? No Microsoft is forcing you to use Edge and Internet Explorer

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

Got my first Linux magazine with real worth tips for noobs with advanced stuff (like mounting a web mail server using Nmap, create personalized distros ssh, terminology and stuff , you don't see that in most noob magazines).
First point... Comes with a CD with 4 distros (OK... I perfer to download the latest for my VMs) and 200 euros worth of.. Linux software?
And I ripped this beautiful cover before even reading it... Killing a wasp. So, worth the 10 euros even before opening it

A becomes B
B becomes C
C becomes A
D becomes B
E becomes A

Now add real hostnames... Make this list longer (roughly 15-18)

Add resource calculation, migration of VMs, organizing new hardware, removing and rebuilding hosts, etc.

I think my brain is permanently damaged and cannot be repaired.

Hardware migration finally over tomorrow.

I really won't miss the fuckton of Excel lists, constant speaking mistakes, having sore fingers from mutilating the desk calculator etc.

I'm too tired to be happy. But... It's over.

Shit. My ssd died y-day. Got a new one [970evo] today (tx bro!).

Guess who's gonna spend the night recreating the whole env: ui, scripts, triggers, integrations, tunnels, qemu vms, apps, bkup restores,....

Shit

Sometimes I have to work with physical hardware. There are over 300 machines in our lab, split among two subnets. But for some reason, I can never access my machines by hostnames.

Every other week, there's an IP conflict on this network, requiring me to log into the active directory server and delete old DNS entries. This usually happens because someone decided to deploy 64 VMs on a huge server, all at once, didn't boot them with a delay, let alone with with a warning to IT.

Then when my superior asks how my progress has been and I respond with "I can't even get the machines to ping each other by hostname, there's something wrong with the DNS:, I get the following response: "HOW COME NOBODY ELSE IS HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THIS. YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT", from someone who spends 90% of the year abroad, working remotely.

TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

My employer uses latest and greatest macbooks. It's fuking awesome. I wasn't a fan until I found the ease of android and iOS development on it. I even started using Atom for web development. And I bought a Mac mini for a dedicated jenkins server. I don't think I'll ever go back to windows. There's just no point. I know it's expensive but it gets the job done. No more fukin mac VMs on VMware. Fuk that shit.

Before I realized what a Vagrant Box was, I thought everyone was talking about cardboard boxes for homeless people.

So there I am thinking everyone was talking about homeless people and I finally understand that it's a service for quickly deploying VMs for local development when I get invited to a party after a convention with my hosting company and I look over the rail and see a vagrant man asleep on a cardboard box.

Some Project Manager outsourced a redundant RADIUS setup with MySQL backend. We got 2 copies of a daloradius appliance running on Ubuntu 10.04. Once I saw this, I started to get a bit suspicious and requested to audit the system and database redundancy. With the system in production, and without getting back any documentation, I got into the VMs using the default root password. This was not even the worst part, as I found. One server was using a local MySQL instance, while the other was also using the first one's MySQL instance. When I reported this, I was told to comment clearly any changes to the configuration files, which resulted in commenting the word SHAME above each change.

So it's 2018 and i am wondering is there a:

Laptop with at least 16go of ram that can last AT LEAST 24 hours ?

Tasks involved:
Running vms
Ide
Browser

Work related stuff

No Apple products please

Thanks!

Ps: i already got a couple of laptops so i am not in a hurry i am more looking for something that i can carry around while traveling in a lightweight manner

"Suggest an AV/AM product, Avast refuses to install."

I do malware research as a hobby and have for a while, so I can generally spot when something's up before I even run a program. If i'm unsure about it (or know something's up and wanna see its effects for S&Gs) I throw it into one of a variety of VMs, each with a prepped, clean, standardized "testing" state.

I see no point to AV/AM products, especially as they annoy me more than anything since they can't be told not to reach into and protect VMs (thereby dirtying up my VM state, my research, crashing the VM hypervisor and generally being *really* annoying) and they like to erase samples from a *read-only, MOUNTED* VHDX.

However, normal people need them, so I usually suggest this list:
• MBAM is good and has a (relatively) low memory footprint, but doesn't have free realtime protection.
• Avast is very good as it picks up a lot, but it eats a FUCKTON of resources. It also *really* likes to crash VM hypervisors if it sees anything odd in them.
• AVG is garbage. Kill it with fire.
• Using Windows Defender is like trying to block the rain with an umbrella made of 1-ply toilet paper.
• herdProtect is amazing as it's basically a VirusTotal client but it's web-based and not currently available to be downloaded. (Existing copies still work!)
• Kaspersky. Yes, it spied on US gov't workers. No, they don't care about anyone BUT US gov't workers. Yes, it's pretty good.
• BitDefender: *sees steam game* "Is this ransomware?"

hope this helps

Canoncal.. buddy.. pal..

We need to talk about the content on the server image's login screen.

Now, I get that lots of developers will use the server image out of a desire to keep their environments minimal.. but at the same time, is the same server image that will be deployed on thousands of VMs all over the world really the place to be talking about "great IDEs available on Ubuntu" complete with smiley faces?

I'm dead serious I log in and there are fifty seven lines of crap on the screen. I don't need links to your docs or support pages, I definitely don't need cutesy links to "hey look at this cool stuff you can do on Ubuntu!", and I absolutely don't need advertisements for your paid services.

This is some of the tackiest stuff I've seen outside of Gitlab shilling for GKE in the paid enterprise version.

Stuff like this turns actual users off. Sysadmins, the ones who are going to be seeing this stuff since it's visible on SSH shells only do not care about your cutesy IDE advertising.

Grow up.

FINALLY, all my dreams have come true, now I can totally say I don't really miss Linux all that much (although I work with Linux all the time, as all my VMs are on Ubuntu).

Obviously, Microsoft has a port of the ssh client and server on windows.

Planning on building a Ryzen 5 2400G setup for light gaming/home lab stuff, I need it to run a bunch of VMs and have passable frame rates in games on Linux (I hardly play AAA hard to port games, so should be okay there).

Planning on going full Linux for this, you guys got any tips/warnings/gotchas? Also, have any of you encountered issues with using NVMe SSDs on Linux?

I built an expert system (what we used to think of as AI back then) that could read the circuit diagram of a complex electronic circuit, figure out what it was meant to do, and set up the test gear to test it and diagnose manufacturing errors.
In 1985, using Vax/VMS and OPS5.

More recently, I was on a project (can't claim to have done it all myself this time) that used a neural network to detect patients in a care home that fell over/fell out of bed and alert the nurses' station.

Very eventful day, please see enclosed several smaller rants.

===================

My college's systems are shit and not only do they use HTTP for everything, even the stores and financial aid purchase system, they have homebrew JS shit for PGP site encryption (nifty...), but they exchange the PRIVATE KEYS instead of the public keys. Over HTTP. Not even HTTPS. Also if you log in more than 10 times in 24 hours it's supposed to lock you out of your account until you call... except it locks EVERYONE out. Found this out when on campus, trying to get my textbooks, when suddenly everyone had login lockouts because i'm a "paranoid bastard" and "afraid of idiot college students" for not telling a PUBLIC PC to remember the one password (enforced by password auto-sync across all their shit, not ideal, no) guarding my SUPER-SENSITIVE FINANCIAL AND ACADEMIC DATA... among the other hundreds of issues this college has. I now see why this college is the only one I can afford...

===================

Can't pass-through raw DVD drive access to VMs as VM managers crash when I try (yes, even QEMU...) so i've gotta install Windows on a shitty 80GB laptop HDD for literally one quick project. On the bright side, if my theory proves correct, you'll no longer need modchips for PS2s.

===================

Found a couple odd lines in my xscreensaver config:

GetViewPortIsFullOfLies:False
nice: 10
pointerHysteresis: 10

the first 2 I can't seem to figure out what do, and the last taught me a new word. Fun!

===================

that's it, it's over, why are you still here

Linux software RAID and LVM are pretty powerful.

Bought a new server case for my home file server / VM host. 3U with 16 hotswap bays. Had 2x software RAID1 mirrors already with everything on them. Inserted 2 new disks with system running. Created new RAID10 array using these, with their mirrors as "missing".

Created new physical volume. Extended volume group into it, then used pvmove to transfer every logical volume across. Shrunk volume group to no longer use the old RAID1 array, disassembled that array, added its disks to the new array... Now just waiting for the mirror disks to sync up.

All this, with the system and several VMs still running.

And with a backup, of course ;)

running 6 nested vms... inside a browser.

Bloody mother fucking jesus christ....

It's working.

Sometimes I really wish I had the gift to be creative and to e.g. draw a (metaphoric) image of the shit I had to fix and how it felt to fix it.

It's sad not being able to share stuff in a way everyone can understand it :/

I uncludged the last bits of the networking / loadbalancer / craptastic network.

The whole chart that includes most of the associations / information for the network fits easily on a A2 paper. Internal only.

Just migration of a few remaining servers to Proxmox and a large MySQL to Postgres migration outstanding....

1.75 years and it's the first large milestone achieved. Large milestone as in it will not be a total clusterfuck anymore.

Still a lot of stuff to do...

But down to one major OS, Debian, for everything (container / VMs)... only LTS supported versions for services...

No more stuff that's so old it's near fossil state. We stillhad Ubuntu 12.04 running... :) ;) And XenServer is nearly gone...

Too many feels. Too many brain poofs. And way too much pain.

!rant
Linux experts, please read if you have time

Seeing all the posts ranting about Ubuntu, I'm starting to wondering : I have a laptop on Ubuntu that I set for my courses at school, I took Ubuntu because I could try at school with VMs, liked it and because between this and Linux Mint, I wasn't aware of all those distributions.

So my reflexion is : Since I've started my internship, which would be the final semester (I'm in last year of studying), I use this computer mostly for personal coding projects, which aren't ambitious and I sometimes use my Windows too, so my computer is a kind of switch-not-so-often.
Should I keep it to Ubuntu or should I try to install something else ?

I've heard of Solus, which got my curiosity, and Arch Linux, but this one is not want I think I need. But seeing all those distributions here made me confuse, I dunno if I should upgrade something that's a kind of placeholder for coding and do stuff when the Windows (which is my main laptop) is busy doing things.

Have any suggestions ?

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

HEY Y'ALL! I need help.

So...... recently me and a friend are trying to move servers from a paid one to our own, named Vector. All of the web-side is basically done. However, port 25 is blocked by the ISP. After a few days of messing around in various Linux VMs, we gave up.

Point is, does anyone know where we could get a cheap VPS for email hosting?

Defaults are great.

Especially if they change and suddenly cause havoc.

:)

When will I learn that some defaults should be explicitly set.... *sigh*

At least Proxmox has an REST API to change the default value of aio=uring to aio=native....

Otherwise I'd have to update a few hundred VMs manually. :(

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

It took literally days to get our software installed onto the client VMs and get the services started correctly.

On our own test VMs the same task takes all of about an hour or so. Mind you these VMs are supposed to be created and match the client's environment almost too the T. Same configurations, same third party software, same environment variables and the whole 9 yards.

This was not the case at all.

Environment variables were not set, third party software was not installed, and I honestly don't remember the list of things wrong with how they setup the VM. Sparing the details, the errors were also not helpful.

They also gave us critical information we needed for development days before we were going on site to test. The amount of hackery we had to do could be a completely separate rant on its own.

While desperately trying to to stay sane long enough to get our services started, the only thing I could think was how great it would be if there was a fire or something. Anything, just to have an excuse to go back to the hotel and actually sleep. The second day there we finally had everything installed and running.

I shit you not, just as we began our first test, the fire alarms went off.

At this point in time the team was extremely (pissed tf off) annoyed to put it mildly. Assuming it was just a drill, we left our stuff and went to eat dinner. After we came back we found out it in fact was not a drill...

Moral of the story:
Don't wish bad fortune on a customer even if out of impulsive spite.

Other moral of the story:
Don't leave your belongings behind only because you think the fire alarms are just a fire drill. It may not be.

P.S. Karma's a bitch.

If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:

This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...

Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?

Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...

All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).

So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?

There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...

Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...

Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.

Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.

As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...

Have a good night(/day)!

This 3 day weekend couldn’t come at a better time! Today has done everything it can to delay it and everything has been a superb annoyance!

It started off with our internal systems going down, a frustratingly tedious project proposal process, our phones went down, off the wall calls to support all day causing them to ask me junk.

As a parting gift the pending windows update and it completely crashed my development VM and corrupted my install of virtual box. I had planed in only working a half day, but worked 6.5 hours, hit traffic al over. Was late to the event.

Not I get here and there’s a bunch of smokers outside and I could reallllllly use a drag. But I’m not gonna. 😒

Just ready to kick back and do non computer things til Tuesday. 😎

The CI infrastructure and external tooling at the company I work at is a complete joke. Feels like it was designed by an intern left alone.

95% of the time a build fails or hangs, it's because we are getting race conditions or a hanging VM with our crappy Windows jenkins slaves. Quite possibly because we are not using proper tooling for monitoring those VMs as well. Anyways, I don't have access and control on it and it's not even my job to fix it.

Though, I am being asked to monitors these pieces of junk jenkins jobs outside of my work hours because company devs all over the world use it... but there is no fucking way to know it failed unless I log onto jenkins every hour and check everything manually... which is stupid as fuck for a software engineer.

I can't even implement slack hooks to get notifications or something when it fails because we will stop paying for it soon, so I have to connect to my freaking VPN on my PC and check everything.

And what's the fucking ghetto solution instead of fixing it properly? Restarting VMs and rerunning a build. Because someone in management wants to see a passing build, even though it means jackshit. Half of these jobs are tagged as unstable, so what's the fucking point?

Pisses me off when people work like morons and pressure others to do the same.

Oh my damn god,
I just found the remote-server plugin for vsCode and holy fuck balls, it's the one thing I've wanted from vsCode since ever.

When you dev in VMs and are forever working with remote code using SFTP and git on a remote servers, it's a pain in the ass.
But this, god damn this solves all of that, and with connection specific plugins, I think I just came.

Why is it that the tech Youtubers of this world (and tech reviewers in general) tend to completely skip development as a use case, and instead (if they do ever move off gaming) focus on things like Rendering & Modelling / CAD work? I'm sure there's *way* more devs in the world than CAD guys, surely?!

And if they *do* give it the light of day, it's always a quick benchmark based on "Firefox compile time", "Linux kernel compile time" or similar. Dude, it's 2020. Much as some would like to believe otherwise, most guys stopped compiling swathes of heavy C & C++ as part of their normal workflow over a decade ago.

Real-world tests I want to know about are things like docker performance, common IDE startup performance, compile performance of different sized applications on a bunch of langs like Kotlin, C#, Java, Clojure - or node.js performance, Tensorflow performance on NVidia's vs AMDs latest GPUs, etc. I care about how many IntelliJ instances & VMs I can have open way more than how many Chrome tabs I can forget to close.

But noooo - forget that, here's how fast Blender can render a BMW! 😬

In the world full of VMs be someones container <3.

When you dual boot ubuntu and windows, then decide to remove Ubuntu because,who ate you kidding, you're not actually using it, then you get bored and want to try the new Linux distro that branched off from arch and vms at the same time so now you're experiencing the wonders of chakra on oracle virtual box....🤔

I have a LOT of Floppies but no floppy drive that works with my current Win7 machine, and my XP one is in multiple boxes for parts... so for now I can only stare at NetWare 4 to 4.2, WfW 3.11 and DOS 6-22.

Smart me made VMs on his XP machine and transferred them to his Win7 one.

I also have data tapes... now that is NEVER gonna work on my Win7 so... anyone knows how it could *possibly* work out?

Also... I got documentation on Compaq servers... those are nice.

AAAAAAND since I’m a huge MIDI nerd... I have a SC-55mkII hooked on the UM-ONE mkII and those shitty cans that I’m gonna switch (hopefully) soon for a nice pair of Cakewalks MA-15Ds.

Also, I’m looking for one of them 5150s because 80s IBM and since I also like keyboards... the one and only Model M.

Anyone can hook me up with a cheap one?

Support run checks on our core VMS twice a day and report back their findings. We had big problems.

Trying to setup a ltsp server for fun. Neve done server things before.

The server and the thin client are in VMs. So I start, install openssh, and them when I try to ssh... WHY CAN’T I FUCKING CONNECT, I CHECKED THE IP WITH IFCONFIG, oh shit, forgot to configure the vm network... so ssh works! Then I setup dhcp (I really don’t know what I’m doing, just following the tutorial), the ltsp configs thing, build the client image and then, I HAVE NO FUCKING INTERNET CONNECTION. Continues, boot up the thin client... WHY CAN’T YPU FUCKING FIND THE SERVER!! Then I realise the vm is not an ubuntu one, so delete it and make a new one... WHY DOES IT STILL DOESN’T WORK!!!!!! Oh wait forgot to connect to the network! Goes to put the network adaptor, and: wait! I don’t need NAT! So I replace the NAT by the correct network, and: Wait it lets me choose the weird thingy intel/pce thingy, oh I remember now! It said we needed the “...III FAST...”! Activate it and... IT WORKS ! !!!! CONNECTS TO THE SERVER!!! GOT THE DHCP!!! WAIT!!!!! What is THAT 🤬 TFTP LOADING THING!!!:

TFTP open timeout

🤬 YOU!!!!!!!!>>

I am not a php dev and I have nearly 0 knowledge of php. All I know about php is that xampp is your friend and you have to write that $ everywhere. But that one day I had to setup phpLDAPadmin on apache2.
I have nothing against php, but I just don't want to have anything in common, since I'm just perfectly fine with my java.
So I had to make it work. Fought my way through different incompatible versions of php and phpldapadmin only to see "not found" on phpldapadmin.
I thought, like, wtf?? Especially when index.php of apache2 is displaying just fine? I mean, I can "edit" some php code, but configs and php setups are just something like out of my world. Tried setuping it on different vms - same result. I've buried way too many hours into this with no result. Finally I gave up and contacted a friend of mine which is like php god for me. He did same thing as I did in ~ 10 mins, but the result was the same. Tweaked some configs - same. Scratched his head, sat for 5 more minutes, did something and boom - it works!
I've asked him, what is that php magic and the answer killed me:
"Index.html was missing"

At that moment I just wanted to exit through the window. Sadly, there were no way to open it.

Yes, I am this stupid in php. But I still miss all these wasted hours...

We had a tutorial on how to use spark/Hadoop.. part of the tutorial was the installation instructions for Ubuntu vms.

The Prof insisted we used an older version of Hadoop (v2.1.5), so naturally this required pulling older repos and older versions of java.

Naturally, some of the people in the class got some namespacing issues and garbage left from uninstalled packages.

Now, the tutorial was geared towards business/math people, not com sci. So most of the people didn't understand why apt didn't let them run certain commands (even though it very clearly just asked for them to run autoremove or autoclean, like in the "error message"). When the Prof and their "experienced TA" saw these messages, their recommendation was "make a new fresh vm".

The fuck? I heard that, run over and was like no. Just run the suggested command, it's literally a simple issue. And the guy didn't believe me. I had to sit him down, show him how I literally typed what the console was asking for, and everything just worked... The guy's response was "well that's Linux for you, its really complicated and can never trust anything, this time it worked, but next time it might not". Dude... Do you even know what you are saying? Like you are a supposed expert, least have some understanding of the package manager you are using. Maybe things will then be less "schrodinger cat".

God damn I can't wait to be out of this stupid fucking school. Never going back to academia.

Trying to setup a staging server boss says just use AWS, system admin doesn't like that thought because it doesn't involve him so waited all day for 3 VM's and still not ready... All I need is 3 blank CoreOS VMs nothing fancy like even doing the cloud config no. Anyone else has colleagues scared of moving out of the private high maintenance servers in the basement?

More tales from University Tech Support:

Haven't been able to get ahold of this staff member for weeks to do required maintenance. Emails, VMs, surprise office visits, she's never anywhere to be found.

Finally my boss emails her with the subject line "Free Money", and gives her some sass in the email about calling IT back.

Yeah, she responded in minutes...

Tried to install WAMP manually to learn PHP. It almost put me off development altogether, but great when it worked and I learnt a lot doing it. The next time I used Xampp before moving on to vagrant & VMs.

Sometimes setting up the Dev environment is the hardest part of learning. But better to learn in dev than production!

I'm afraid of tomorrow.

The last weeks.... Were shitty.

And I might finish the first part of the VM migration next week...

I planed for failure. Next week was the worst estimate...

Do you remember when you've played a game and noticed the sudden increase of ammo / health / mana bars and that the enemies got stronger? Endboss time? Fickity fuckity you'll die soon time?

I guess that's this tingeling feeling in my head...

And I'm realllllly scared, cause the last fuckup was a NIC brick on one of the VMs host server. Never had that before.

Pray satan that the week will show mercy.

Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?

I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!

Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos

That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!

Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger

Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!

My employer really needs to invest in better machines.
My VM is still running a Windows Update that has taken 50 minutes already.
Fucking 50 minutes in which I couldn't do a fucking thing.
Either the windows update is a huge update but my guess is that I'm on a slow as fuck hard drive that gets virtualized with about 3 other vms
(we use remotedesktop to access the vms that run on the server)

Most people will know how the AI in 2001 A Space Odyssey came to be called HAL. By the simple expedient of taking the letters IBM and applying -- to each.
How many remember how the Windows have all come to know and love started out as Windows NT?
It came about when Digital pulled the funding for the new version of it's VMS operating system, and Bill Gates swooped in and hired Dave Cutler, who basically took all the code with him to make the new version of Windows.
And stick the finger to his former employer, incremented VMS to get WNT.

Another step down the rabbit hole.
I've moved from running VMs when I want Linux, to a Fedora 26 / windows 10 dual-boot.

Always test your code, especially if you did a commit to master on Friday afternoon. Otherwise, you will end up deleting thousands of vms.

my new rig is more and more causing me issues:

- Ryzens fucking kill 9x and MS-DOS applications and the OSes themselves when they run unemulated, so they can't be run in a KVM. This makes them slow as shit, and in qemu-TCG's case, buggy as shit too. VMs can't reboot successfully, they have to be totally forced down and brought back up on TCG or they hang during the reboot. It also performs poorly. VERY poorly. The "shit runs full-speed like 65% of the time and it feels slow as fuck as video output is a stuttery blurry mess" type. This makes 2 projects problematic to complete and I have to remake 17 VMs in virt-manager now as vbox doesn't work with any virtualization method for a 9x/DOS guest now!

- For some reason my new RX 5500xt has an issue when it hits about 80% usage, the fans spin to 100% on it at 80% and taper off to like 5% when idle. Pretty standard stuff... except it's erroneously tied to... current load, not temperature. Hmm.

- Debian got an update that renames my ethernet device mid-boot. Up until just before the login screen, it's named "eth0". After that, it's named "enp8s0". This was hell to work around and idk why it does this.

To the sysadmins:
We are currently installing and configuring dns, dhcp, smb, ftp and webserver on Ubuntu vms in class.
The teacher changed his mind and want us to install a system that has everything installed and configured.
He recommended Zentyal to us.
What would you use and why would you use it?

Why Virtual Box is so laggy on Mac?
I gave it maximum resources and it's just sucks. On windows however Virtual Box is so fly...
Does anyone have any free virtualization solution for Mac (I'm trying to run Linux VMs)

I shut down my 5 azure vms and i am still getting billed??? WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT. THIS DOESNT EXIST ON AWS. WHY IS BILL GATES SUCH A CHILD RAPER AND FUCKS CHILDREN IN THE EPSTEIN ISLAND

I have too many geeky non-dev activities. I don't know which is the geekiest...

Built a server rack out of bits of spare wood (going to rebuild and improve it in future). Wired up the entire house with network cabling. Didn't need to, just prefer not to use WiFi for things where possible. Also ceiling mounted a PoE WiFi AP for things that have to use WiFi (e.g. smartphones).
DIY built a rack mountable Pi shelf with faceplate.
Configured a dedicated TV tuner/PVR PC used by Kodi running on Raspberry Pi for a couple of TVs (all diskless/network boot).
Got a colocated server running in a data centre for running various VMs on for different things. Run my own email, webserver, DNS, VPN, voice chat server, various other stuff.
Gradually getting into electronics, which overlaps with dev a bit.
Sometimes I play games. I built a dedicated VR PC which occupies the smallest room of the house.

Unsure which is the geekiest thing!

Updates! (( ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ ))

Why do they break things..

After updating my system my VMs suddenly stopped working, all of them. They didn't crash or anthing but became unsuable, stuff like force logouts..

Almost lost it, but thankfully there was a difference in the snap version and the deb package..

At first that also didn't want to work, but it was just that the snap wasn't completely removed so it had some problems..

Now thankfully it *seems* to work again.
( ´꒳` )

I hope my boss learned his lesson: dd if=/dev/zero of=[hdd storing DB about VM cluster]
- is a very very bad idea...

For a moment, I forgot how wasteful the government can be… our team is being forced to use VMs in the cloud which will cost somewhere around 3-5 hundo a month per instance

Git repositories? What is the best online for free

Android Studio + Kotlin

Hey guys
So, I'm thinking on starting programming again... slowly cause of Burn out

I'll be homesick now for a while and I want to start coding again.
I've been making Apps for Android in App Inventor, but now I want to make stuff that sincerely will be hard on a complete visual programming language.
So, I'll be starting to learn kotlin

My problem now is that I don't do any really programming for years, and most of my knowledge is from 1990's. I want to put my code in a git repository but GitHub doesn't have a free option and I can't spend money now, since I'll gain a lot less.

What are the best alternatives online, or tricks, like online VMs

thanks for the time

hi guys,
I've been in an interview a while ago for an IT position in a government agency, my CV had Vmware stuff, the guy asked, if we had a couple of VMs then we wanted to install few apps however we weren't sure if the apps would break ours VMs what should we do?
I answered the first thing we do is to create a snapshot for that VM so we can revert to it in case something is broken.

The guy just gave me blank eyes and i felt like if he disagree then he gave me another question

Am i wrong?

Learning to troubleshoot issues with vms. Had to break a vm with a script I was given and then fix it. Docs I was given said x error should be in y log. I check the log; nope. Check the other logs for other possible errors mentioned; nope. Turns out something else broke instead and before of the thing I was supposed to break. Rip me

Does anyone else’s employer have their developers code exclusively on VMs?😱

!rant

To all the Mac users in here, I want to get in on the iOS app business, but I kinda don't have money for a new macbook. SO! What are your experiences with MacBooks older than 2013? I'm talking about the Air and Pro. Keep in mind that I won't need to run VMs in this, as I have another new Windows PC fully loaded.

Sure, you *could* set up identical VMs on your server and just have one config file for your java application. But why not just set up lots of users on the server, keep various configs in source control, and have a manual task to change the config you're pointing to when you build?

Idiots.

What's the best Linux distro for someone who had been using windows forever?
I've screwed around with Kali and Ubuntu in VMs but for a dual boot what should I really go with? I want to run android studio, unity and visual studio mostly.

Happy to have a new Server available!!! 16 GB RAM with a sum of 8 cores with up to 3,6 GHz and RAID 10 with 16 TB memory available. I will run a ton of VMs. One will contain an open stack instance which I am very happy to finally explore & work with!!!

Today i chartered new realms for me.

I created a new hyper-v vm on the company windows servers and added a 5th instance to it, but instead of running another windows server i installed an ubuntu 18.04 (cause i am a bit familiar with debian from my raspberry pi)

we have two servers, one which runs the 4 vms and a replica. I first had the new vm on the main server but it occured me to move it instead to the unusued replica machine. That kinda worked..i did a planned failover but the main server isnt configured to be the replica..and even when activating that it didnt work. This is weird.

For the moment i ignored that and proceeded to install nginx, mariadb and php 7.2..basically the lemp stack. I managed to setup nginx and a static ip adress for the machine (which was different from how i remembered it to do (in 18.04 its not done with the network conf but a yaml file).

in the end i added two different virtual servers, one for actual use and one for dev stuff (with phpmyadmin running for instance), listening on port 80 and some random other port.

as a test i brought a mediawiki onto the Port 80 server and it worked.

on monday i have to figure out how to implement the wildcard certificate i have for our company domain (internal dns simply routes intranet.company.com to the local server vm)

i am mighty proud cause all my experience with linux was with a raspberry pi so far and i am fairly certain i did it right and without shortcuts this time. (unlike my raspberry experience)

just wanted to share

(i also sweated a lot of blood when editing the hyper v settings as i did not set up the server in the first place)

((i also installed xrdp and a mate desktop, but i am less proud of that, but sometimes seeing folders graphically helps me))

Is booting linux from a drive a good way to start with linux if I'm not too sure I should make it my main os? The only thing keeping me back at this point is gaming since it's my gaming rig but idk I have 2 distros I want to use/decide between that I've loved on vms in the past but it's just me actually going through with doing it

Made my day.

Need to setup some VMs and the users refuses to give me the public key.

No words!

So sick of my coworker explaining to me how I should do a task. Dude, I've already planned out how I'm going to handle the situation. If you really want to help, wait until I create my pull request, review it, and then make your suggestions there. Unless I ask for your advice on how to do something, I don't need you to tell me how you would do things, especially since i have, what, 5 years working in the framework when you have 2 months?

Created a win7 vm for a test in an environment of all of Linux vms. Named it billgates. I'm 99% sure my other vms increased resource load in spite. There is a revolution brewing.

Today at work, I had to do a dry run of our new production environment config for our VM server.
So I setup ESXi in a vm in my workstation. Installed it it, no problem. Setup some VMs, still going good. Then my supervisor came and said I have to make some tweaks and use vCenter. I thought: meh, that came late but ok. Download the vCenter installer from our internal CDN and ran it. Sorry general config, blah blah blah. "Setup with embedded or external platform service controller?" -"Embedded" - "minimal requirements: 11GB ram, 250GB disk storage, 2 CPU cores". Well... Fuck me. My workstation specs: 8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, 4 cores.

What the bloody fucking hell does this stuff need 250 GB disk space for?!

Well at least I've got a permanent upgrade for my workstation.

Manual resizing VMs. 😩

Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....

Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.

O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...

Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.

Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.

I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.

After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.

But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...

...Thrice.)

The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.

So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!

👾

I had a 1Tb external hard drive on the corner of desk (My fault, i know, but at that time i didn't have a lot of space), i used it to keep mostly unimportant things like game files, VMs, movies and stuff like that. Once i was streaming a movie from the pc to the tv in the other room, suddently the tv disconnected, i went to the pc room to check, and i found out that the evil monster that lived in my house (the cat) dropped it off the desk.
The hard disk died and brought all its files with it, luckly i had backups for most of the important files, but i had to download again around 300GB of stuff.... with my slow internet.

Whoops, my head will be squashed tomorrow. Asked to put monitoring in other week by boss, sysadmin been complaining about high CPU, apparently 10 requests (different domains) to the one VM on our servers every 10 seconds is killing it. However this server is being used for MySQL and serving web requests by Apache and PHP. Then also running a few jobs like consuming queues etc.

Wtf do I do? Every time I tell him about more resources (we have decent 2 rack servers just running 20 vms and only 1 VM is for web sites) he says software should be made to work with what we have.

!rant
I'm a full stack web dev (LAMP, MEVN), not a sys admin. Besides complete control of my os, are there any benefits to a Linux-based os like arch or ubuntu? I've played around and set up both in VMs, but I'm struggling to find a benefit that justifies the setup commitment.

This is with nothing open. How the fuck am I supposed to work on here. Defiantly won't be firing up any VMs

--
Yes, it's all background crap, no I can't close any of it. Yes, I have rebooted

Best Linux distro for NodeJS back end projects? Maybe I have to work with docker or VMs. I currently have Ubuntu Mate but I want to change. I have 8Gb of RAM and performance is what I need.

2nd Question with low priority: is anyone able to use office 365 without the online solution in any Linux distro?

Don't know why but I prefer to work/code on linux. It pissed me off when we had to work on windows on java and C labs on uni. On first data bases lab we got linux machines and the first thing we did was starting windows VMs...

These days I now spend more time each week fucking about with Docker and VMs than I ever did when we were setting up the local environments ourselves.
I love the concept of Docker, but it seems to create more problems than it solves.

Yesterday evening I updated Windows 10 on my PC to 1909. Everything was fine, just a quick update.

Today I saw that all my VMs in VMWare Workstation don't work anymore. And they contained all my work for university.
Okay, let's just revert back to 1903. This can't a problem, right?

But Windows decided that it should revert back to 1809, not to 1903.
Also that was my home PC, and I had remote connection.
Yes, now it doesn't work too, because Windows removed Chrome Remote Desktop while reverting.

Thank you, Windows.
Thank you, Workstation.

Hey Guys.
VMs - VirtualBox or VMware?

IV'e been using VMware v14 cracked, my principal VM is a Linux mint machine, wich one deals better with Linux VMs?
I haven't used Vbox since I found a craked VMware 14 but should stop using it..........
Also, what is the best way to have a prepared to mount VM in a pen drive? Lets say I place my Linux mint machine in my 64Gb pendrive I take everywhere, I want to plug it to any machine (windows most likely) and use it pronto to run the VM instead working in that machine.

I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!

Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.

The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.

I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.

So I was just thinking scenario wise how if I founded a military organization who’s aim was to depose an insane dictator from power while remaining undetected including from all his insane supporters how I would use Linux

After I took every source package offline and modified and source checked it and disabled the ability for it to use regular tcp ip for anything but tunneling

The reasoning ? I just installed one program and it downloaded 40 some extra packages that I have no idea what are doing

Linux is great but do we actually know what the software is doing ? Same as windows only you can’t compiler that from scratch

It’s either trust a bunch of random people or trust a bunch of random people part of an evil company

Not the best of choices

But oh how beautiful it would be after I had 500 people pick every last package apart with a reasonable deadline of 2 years entirely offline at frozen versions

Then we could fork all the projects
Or only implement very carefully source reviewed patches transported via offline medium To computers that are running vms to house and test all additional patches so if it blows up we just copy our raw frozen image back over it and either scrap or repair the change

As connecting to the internet in general is not an good idea for silent running

Windows Remote Desktop Connection for ALL of our VMs. No VPNs whatsoever. If an employee wants to connect to work from home, we have to set up RDP on their PC. 😐🔫

Damn it XenCenter! Why won't you reboot the VMs like I tell you!? Force reboot also didn't work. Now I have to shut it down and restore a back up VM. This has been going on for the past 2 weeks!!

So I had this discussion yesterday..
Virtual Machines on a SSD: Yes or no? Good or Evil?

What's your opinion?

I keep the OS partition of my VMs on my SSD, because they are unusable otherwise. At least if it is a Windows vm.

LXC/LXD containers are awesome for Windows VirtualBox users. It would allow creating a single Linux VirtualBox VM and then create multiple LXC containers (full-blown Linux machines) utilizing all the full resources of host Linux VirtualBox VM, keeping it always a clean image. Super efficient utilization of RAM and storage. No need to create multiple VMs for different Linux OSs.

Today I was going to wipe an server used for testing purposes, I thought that all vms are just tests that has been left over from restored backups.

Was in the raid controller configuration ready to format the drives an couple of menu navigation away, a colleague came looking for me and said an website was not working, strange...

Turns out that one VM responsible for hosting our internal websites was on that machine

Anyone had the reverse of the classic, I've got a programmer that compiled on two of my VMs but not the third
They're each clones of an original. What, since when was this a thing?

I have done some experiments on my server in the past. It's a great way to learn new things. However, I am bound to make some mistakes and over time the sever becomes messier and messier.

A week ago I installed UNRAID on my machine and I love it! I can now have my critical infrastructure live and working in docker containers and vms.

Then if I want to do an experiment I spin up a VM in a couple of minutes to do my thing and remove it when I am done. No traces left!

Man i realy need to get of my windows host.
My productivity takes a nosedive whenever im on windows idk why.
I'd love to use linux fully but my fav game Overwatch has shit performance running on linux.
So the best solution would be to pass through my gpu to a windows vm for gaming.
But that would require a new gpu for the host system as the ryzen 7 1700 does not have a gpu.
I dont have any experience with passing thtough gpus. But could i make 2 vms that acces the same gpu, ofc not at the same time. So that i could have a gaming vm and maybe use another linux vm if i wanted to do something which profits off gpu acceleration.

Even after all these years I still miss VMS.

Why the heck does everyone thnk it's a good idea to run docker Containers inside a vm?
Or Containers in general...
This is unneeded redundancy and it kills the performance aspect, which makes containers favorable in comparison to vms...

!Rant
Hey guys, who's using those new Intel U series processors? What are your thoughts on them? What's kind of OS you use and work you do with them? Are they reliable when using docker or VMS?
I'm asking cuz most reviews show that they are really bad compared to even older processors. I know that they are only dual core and use less power, but are they reliable for dev jobs?

I think the next world war will be between people who use Tabs vs people who use Spaces

Great winows update caused all my vms to reboot breaking my dev environment. Thank you windows 10.

why must my boss insist on using a bunch of laptops to run vms.

Am I missing something with VMs? Every time I set one up (either linux guest on win10 host or the reverse), what I get is so slow and laggy that I can barely use it. I always give my VMs about 70% of my ram and at least 4 cpu cores, but still, it ends up being as slow as my grandma's 10 year old laptop.

On the other hand, I've seen people on youtube editing fucking videos in their VMs and the performance was so good that you couldn't even tell if its a vm or not.

This happens both on my desktop (8th gen i7, 16GB ram and ssd) and on my laptop (same cpu, 8GB ram, nvme).

Is virtualbox not good enough, are my devices not powerful enough or am I just too stupid?

How did you get the people from Info Security and Compliance on board this continuous delivery thing ?

I am being asked to run antivirus scans on my own code and binaries as part of build.

Is this common practice? Am I missing something?

I am going to deploy stuff on Azure PaaS. I can understand having malware scan agent on azure VMs scanning the infra, but this?

At work we are currently planing to migrate our source code to the latest compiler version. But I don’t think that we will migrate everything from the old version to the new version this time. Then we have to use three different compiler versions at the same time, with three different IDE versions. And how many VMs are you using at work?

How can anybody use virtualization on Windows? Seriously! My second experience with Hyper-V. Not only it can't do basic stuff like forward devices into VM. And CPU and network configuration is simply a joke with almost no settings. But even those few stop working after a while! Aaarrrgh! Spend hour clicking like crazy trying to get network working. I wanted just a simple network between host and guest. Willing to setup static IP. Can't be simpler. But no, can't do. Somehow started working after ten times trying the same. And stoped after few seconds. Are you kidding me? And there are people using this peice of crap seriously and even call this production? Screw it. My brother will have to learn to have VMs in Linux.

Its been awhile since I opened up my Server VM to play around with. Until when I had to login to my DB VMs, I forgot the password. And forgot to save them into my password manager. Whelp, perfect for me to go back to square 1.

Anyone use docker in production handling monies and hundreds accounts? In Django in my case but doesnt matter the framework. More concerned with security and stability moving from paas to docker based paas. Worried I'll move everything to docker and end up moving back to vms bc of some issues or some vulnerability.

My previous job was Engineer ( Ops part of DevOps), supporting the devs with VMs, configurations, dev and test environments, CI maintenance, DBA, DB-dev and such, it was sexy.
In my current company, I have no technical role, but today's task: build a small webpage in sharepoint in HTML.
And the perv part is: it's still bettet than having no Technical task at all...

I really like Linux but it makes me mad when apps I use, like Adobe XD, are available for everything but Linux.

I'm not even going to start with HBO not being able to load streams on Linux. I payed money to stare at a black screen.

I tried to use PlayOnLinux for Adobe Creative Cloud but XD doesn't even appear there.

I also hate dual booting because when I'm using Win or Linux for a bit I tend to make different desktops for different programs/IDEs/browsers and I like them to be open at all times for easy access when I want to do shit. Dual booting means having to open all this again

VMs are even worse in that they tend to be very slow and when I see choppiness when moving windows I immediately "nope" out of that shit

I can't put up with Windows's bs anymore, but not being able to use the software I need is even worse.

I don't know what to do

//not a rant
In Semptember I will be attending information technology at university, and I was wondering what kind of laptop should I buy:
optimal screen size? (13.3 or 15.6)
ram? (for VMs)
processor?
dedicated graphics? (or should I just stick to integrated)
I will be mainly coding, running VMs and school stuff(maybe some casual game like League or Minrcraft), so I was wondering if you guys could help me out with the decision

i do linux for the VMs

The project I'm currently working on: developing a new rootless container deployment to host some legacy Python applications (zope/plone). The initial plan was to just host those on VMs with all the legacy software, I at least convinced everybody to develop a new container deployment for it, which could be re-used for other things. However, it's a lot more work, and working with Puppet goes at a meandering pace.