I don't like anything political on here, but this is affecting us all, even non-US people.
Today is the day, take a stance, fight for NetNeutrality

A couple of years ago, I was working in a computer shop as a "technician", I was 15, first job I ever had.
One day an elderly lady came into the shop, probably 50'ish, she and her whole family "suffered" from electromagnetic radiation, and the mother had the worst suffering. She complained about her TV box that just had died.

I accept the tuner and see it's wrapped with 10 layers of aluminium foil, with a tiny hole for the IR receiver.

The whole box smells like burnt electronics, and the foil gets darker for each layer I unwrap. I try explain to her that the box gets warm and overheated by wrapping it like this, and she's lucky that it didn't catch fire.

I further explain to her that she will not get a new box, because the warranty does not cover _this_. The mother tells me she has to wrap it like this, because she gets headaches when she's watching the news.

She then proceeds to go into a rage mode and gets her whole family into the shop, where all of them starts yelling at me, the younger kids start throwing stuff down from the shelves and touching the TVs with sticky fingers (literally, sticky, like yuck!).

Unsure what to do, boss is in a meeting, and my colleague is busy in the back.

So I calmly tell them that in this building there's 4 wireless networks, 3 wireless phones, high voltage cables run in the wall behind me, there's factory tracks 20 meters behind the building, next door business is an electrician, you're standing in front of wall with 30-40 TVs, 5 HDMI splitters, 3 TV boxes and a Blu-ray player. And they've all been standing in front of them for the last 10 minutes.

They all suddenly feel really sick and run out of the store, never to be seen again. From that day, I decided I'll never work in a shop again, and pursued my dreams to become a developer.

TL;DR: Family is "sensitive" to electromagnetic radiation, almost put burnt down their house because of stupidity, yelled at me. I decided to pursue my dream as a developer.

Browsing devRant at 41 000 feet.
Note, picture taken only at 23 000 feet’ish

Never question the management. They don’t know the answer either.

I’ve finally gotten a desktop for work. So I don’t have to use my own mbp.

I think I’ve got enough screens, for now.
What annoys me is that none of them are same type, size or brightness

Since my last update, I got a new screen. We reorganised the office, so I got a new spot in the office (corner with no one behind me). Got a monitor stand.

I’m costing the Norwegian people so much. All this stuff I request, is financed by the tax kroner.

Haven’t posted here in a while, life has changed lots since last time. I applied to a new job in September/ October last year, called in for 1st round of interviews in December, got job offer in Valentine’s Day this year. I got a 42% Pay rise increase by going from private media company to governmental company.

Plus the annual pay and pension negotiations just got completed (all gov employees), so that’s a 1.55% payrise. And because I’m in an union, I might get another 1.24% payrise later this year.

So now I work at the National Archives of Norway. Which is just awesome.
Attaching a picture of my new desk, just missing the new 27” monitor I added on the left side.

I’m so happy right now, I love doing this. Now just gotta wait for the 10Gbit switch so I can start working on the 150TB storage server solution

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

I’ve started the process of setting up the new network at work. We got a 1Gbit fibre connection.

Plan was simple, move all cables from old switch to new switch. I wish it was that easy.

The imbecile of an IT Guy at work has setup everything so complex and unnecessary stupid that I’m baffled.
We got 5 older MacPros, all running MacOS Server, but they only have one service running on them.

Then we got 2x xserve raid where there’s mounted some external NAS enclosures and another mac. Both xserve raid has to be running and connected to the main macpro who’s combining all this to a few different volumes.

Everything got a static public IP (we got a /24 block), even the workstations. Only thing that doesn’t get one ip pr machine is the guest network.
The firewall is basically set to have all ports open, allowing for easy sniffing of what services we’re running.

The “dmz” is just a /29 of our ip range, no firewall rules so the servers in the dmz can access everything in our network.

Back to the xserve, it’s accessible from the outside so employees can work from home, even though no one does it. I asked our IT guy why he hadn’t setup a VPN, his explanation was first that he didn’t manage to set it up, then he said vpn is something hackers use to hide who they are.

I’m baffled by this imbecile of an IT guy, one problem is he only works there 25% of the time because of some health issues. So when one of the NAS enclosures didn’t mount after a power outage, he wasn’t at work, and took the whole day to reply to my messages about logins to the xserve.

I can’t wait till I get my order from fs.com with new patching equipment and tonnes of cables, and once I can merge all storage devices into one large SAN. It’ll be such a good work experience.

Here’s my desk at work in the main office. Annoyed by the two different screens on the side. And the lack of cable management.

I had a girlfriend
She ransomware
Now I wannacry
Can i petya dog?

!rant

I received my duck with the santa hat yesterday 😍
Proudly placed in my desk

So, the company I’m working for is finally merging with its sister company. That means budget for upgrading our infrastructure. And guess who volunteered to be in charge of it, and future sysops. That’s me.

Previously we haven’t had anything close to a sysops, and our servers has been neglected and never updated nor upgraded since 2012. We even had a Windows Server 2012 running with rdp wide open...

I was noticing some slow network and it was dropping some connections. So I booted up my old XP install with Java 6 so connect to the ASA 5505, I see it’s logging max connections of 10000 has been reached.

Fine, I recon it’s my colleague backing up his entire machine to Google Drive.
Because when he shut it off, n connections dropped.

I check back in the log, and I see there’s 4-500 connections happening per second, I think WTF and check the source IP. Lots of random IPs from Vietnam, all going to a Windows2008 Server using rdp.

(I didn’t setup our servers, so I didn’t know which server it was accessing)

Ask my other colleague, he told me it’s a windows server from an earlier project that’s not used anymore.
I rdp into it, see there’s users logged in from around the world, and I immediately do a shutdown.

Would you look at that, connections per second dropped to about 50.
I guess that server isn’t going back online ever.
And I now need to ask management for a budget to update our network infrastructure, because the old ASA 5505 is begging me to die.

TL;DR gg previous employees didn’t shut down old servers and left them open to the world to enjoy

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

I did a stream last night with 4 other devs/ sysops. The theme were ranting and alcohol, lasted for almost 8 hours.
When I woke up this afternoon, I regret it all, but totally doing it next month too

Please forgive me father, for I have sinned. I turned on light theme on DevRant, for the dark one doesn’t work that well in the sun

So I've taken over a project, well, not really taken over, we've been hired to add more functionality to a Wordpress site.

I have never seen such a messy code in my life... variables have mixed languages, indentation is a mix of tabs, 2, 3 and 4 spaces, camelcase, snake case, short names, long names. ' and ", no spaces after commas (gotta save those bytes doode)
Almost like it has been copypasted from everywhere.

I think I said 10-15 hours for it. I think I will spend a lot more time tidying up this code.

Hey, look, 3 index files!!
index.php
index__backup.php
index__backup_2.php

I don't dare to look into the CSS or JS, but I know I have to

O'joy has come, it is time to make the best if/switch statement...

Worst part I can't see a pattern in this, so I have to hardcode all this shit.
Even worser part, it has to be updated yearly... woop w00p

rant_type = "self rant"

I've made my IRC client look like my Sublime Text, so whenever I'm chatting and any of my superiors look at my screen, it looks like I'm working hard :D

Though I often find IRC a good place to get help, it's often instant, and I often get the proper answer straight up, instead of going through lots of StackOverflow pages and other sites

!rant
Just signed a contract as a full-time web developer at Mid-Norway's largest productions house.
Prior 6 months as an apprentice, no prior formal education, self-taught since the age of 12, and I'm 20 now.

I see myself needing a stress ball in the future

I'll rant about my biggest hurdle later

I put it in raid

Yesterday one of our clients gave us the OK to launch their annual financial reports, 4 minutes before stock market closed and most of us was heading home.
Problem was we didn't have the proper access to their servers, so I and a senior consultant just spent a few hours calling our client and their IT infrastructure provider.

6 hours later, a large bill from the IT provider for after hours work, the job was done. A job that would take 5 minutes of uploading and 5 minutes of database transfer.

Oh man, I fucked up...
I was doing after hours work for client, setup website with https.

Can't work over sftp with current user,so I give it the same user ID as apache, get files transferred and shit.
Go back to change uid, set wrong uid, now my user is ntp, I can't get into root, can't set password...
I fucked up

Tail between the legs, sent email to clients support, asking them to fix my user fuck up, waiting for reply

I think the report rant function should have a verification function. Like asking me if I'm sure I want to report this rant.
I just reported a rant I didn't mean to, because I wanted to mute notifications on it

Poor Mr. Squishy working as a window stopper, since some clever folks at the property management department, after months of nagging to get blinds so that the light reflected doesn’t interfere with my (light in general, not direct sunlight).

They installed the blinds in front of the window, so it can only be opened a few centimetres… Well done! Well done! I have to choose, either slightly warmer air than I prefer, or bothersome light reflection in all of my monitors.

!rant

The perks of working in a medium large company with ~35 employees

Today there's a concert for Stargate, Alan Walker and Ne-Yo. Where we've made the video effects for Stargate.

Now we're having a summer party with our biggest clients, free alcohol and food. Later we're walking to the concert where we and our clients got free tickets.

Internal memo this morning, showing up tomorrow is not mandatory

Security! I wish clients would listen to me regarding security...

The client has started to ask me to give them access to all the logins I have for the email, domain, server etc.
I created them a new account and gave them admin access.

Now they’re asking for password for all the email accounts (I don’t even store them). So I asked why, she wanted to have them in case some of the employees forgot their password.

I explained to her, deeply and many times, WHY THIS IS A BAD FUCKING IDEA. I also discovered she’s keeping it in a document, clear text.

Why do they pay me for support, when they want to have access to everything...

I’m wondering if they’re planning to find someone else to do their support, or do it themselves.

I didn’t even think 25€ pr month is that expensive for support

!rant
Woop woop, just got my stickers!
Next challenge, stress ball

How to NOT handle dates!

Do not put the date to "mdy" format, today would be 050217.
Working on an intranet for some multi-billion corporation, and was wondering why events from last year were showing.

Last year's events were 28th of October, 2016, and was showing as upcoming events :)

Checked the code, and saw this. Quick fix, turned dates to UNIX timestamp, and it worked.

No comment

!rant

I just did a thing. Signed the contract for buying my very first apartment at age 21. So fucking stocked, and feel bad for my wallet

I just had a look in the basement of our building, and discovered this setup. Any one have any idea what it might do?

Biggest coding distraction... Clients.
Having to explain to them how to use their own website, or fix something they fucked up and then tell them to refer to the manual we provided them.

It would be easier to swim down to the Mariana Trench without any aid

Shoutout to all the devops people currently on their parent's WiFi trying to fix a database issue in production

Looked at this and thought, wow, I must’ve gone to bed really early on Wednesday (ons)
Then I realized... all the other days were just really late and barely and sleep. Maybe try to go to bed before midnight this week...

So we're about to launch the annual financial reports for a multi-billion corporation, but as usual, they're late at providing us with the information we need.

Recently they thought they had been hacked, so they blocked our access to their servers, which we need to upload the annual reports! Oh, the lovely hierarchy in large companies.

But hey, they finally decided to drop IE6 support, so that's a win

We recently hired a new developer, fresh from uni. Very little real experience as I can see.
Unfortunately I weren't available for the interviews, so they chose a dev without me.

All his code is messy, over complicated and uses symfony framework for _everything_
He can't do shit outside of it.

He was tasked to find and replace some links in a few hundred excel documents, he spent ages trying to parse the xlsx documents and the replace the links and write to the document. Spent all day on it, with no results. Even though I often asked him how he was getting on, he said all was fine.

End of day, I get a tad furious, whip out my terminal and do the whole task in 10 minutes with basic bash

Let's play a game.
Dev-ops roulette, loose it all or walk away a lucky boi.

Run this command
sudo [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You lucky boi";

I think devRant portrait should add one more skin colour, #fff, for us from far North where the sun is gone for 4 months each winter

I recently started on a project, in WP though, but I strongly believe the dev is an imbecile. He's no longer with us (thank god)

Doesn't remove old code, just comments it out, or leave the file there. He loved to use and rewrite plugins, so you can't update them.

I removed this one particular plugin, which seemed to hold the website together, because when I removed it, all the suppressed errors suddenly popped up.
I've used 3 days to clean up the code

Did I say that there's a .scss file for the site, but it's written as normal css and the output .css file has also been changed, so I can't clean the scss file and compile it, because that fucks up the css file =}

Just let me add a new feature to this Wordpress site, I'll just enable debugging to see if it produces any errors.

TURN IT OFF!! TURN IT OFF!!

All I could see was error upon error upon error. Mostly from old and not updated plugins.

I'll just leave it there till client decides they want a new rebranding and start from scratch

Just done with The Phoenix Project. Amazing book, I got if as an ebook. Wouldn’t mind more books similar to that style

Ffs, I just spent the whole weekend setting up our new storage server. Moved it into the rack. Entered the UEFI to enable idrac. And BAM! The uefi decided to load it’s own raid config over the raid controller.

Raid controller bios doesn’t let me load it’s own config after that. So I have to reset the controller and setup raid, os and the whole shot again.

To make it even better. Debian doesn’t load the firmware for the broadcom chip, since it’s a non-free driver. Making me have to do lots of manual config after the install just to get it on the internet.

I wish I could’ve just bought a new server instead of working with this shit.
I would’ve used FreeBSD with ZFS, but our server only has 8GB ram, and I need about 120GB extra to work smoothly with all the storage.

It’s just a pita working with this. One step forward, ten steps back.

I was going to get supporter... 😩
Then this happened

Holiday in 6 days, wohoo. 3weeks in Thailand. So ready for it.

Currently working on a huge real estate website. Design got approved yesterday, yesterday I finally got partial access to the clients real estate data. Where the data is uploaded to our server as zip files containing a xml file and files attached to it.
Deadline is tomorrow, but has been pushed back 2-3 weeks, which sucks as I probably have to work whilst on vacation

What a long horrid weekend this has been.
So much overtime gathered though.

Started Friday 5am, went to Oslo to do some drone footage for one of our clients. Got back home at 11:30pm.
During the day I had also been doing some work for this other client we have, they were supposed to have project launch the 22nd, but called on Friday and said it has to be on the 15th instead.

I got a few hours of sleep, woke and worked all day till I passed out at my desk for a few hours, went to the office (on a sunday) to talk to the PM and CXO about the project (great help, they were my rubber ducks)

Good part, I get so many days off now

After months of launching an intranet for a major corporation, that ONLY were supposed to be temporary until they went over to Microsoft Sharepoint solution. They're now asking for new features, like not having it locked to their VPN, and make it responsive, maybe make it an app!

It was all thrown together and a lot of spaghetti code, because the terms were that it would be temporary from when they merged with another company till they got the Sharepoint solution up an running. Oh, and it is all run on a Wordpress 3.3 solution, they don't want to upgrade it, because they would loose some irrelevant plugin that they love.

We had this social network in Norway, called Nettby (similar to MySpace). Where you could write HTML code on your profile page, and add css of you had a premium membership. That's how my interest for web started. i had no idea what I was doing.

Then I made a website for a LAN-party for my hometown, with booking seats and payment, and the works.

Made my first commercial website a year later, I was 12 at the time. 6000 NOK (underpaid, but for a 12y/o it was a lot of candy)

Fast forward to highschool, teachers say computers are a waste of time, and I'll never be successful in life with that.

Turned 20 a few months back, I run my own corporation, and work at mid-Norway's largest production company (web, 3d, video, graphics)

When you reach a moment when you can't come up with more class names, you just name them randomly

Holy fuck, I though working with Wordpress was a fucking nightmare, but it’s a dream compared to the shit I am estimating maintenance on...
It’s running on Asp.net and the Sitecore cms... I have no fucking clue what the fuck is going on anywhere

I’ve estimated 3-4 days for doing basic maintenance like improving SEO and fix some minor semantics. Everything is wrapped in a fucking <form> element, I mean every fucking thing. It goes;
<body><form method=POST>shit content</form><body>

Kind of a rant towards devRant.
Thought I'd buy a t-shirt to support devRant, but a fat fuck like me is too big for 2XL shirts. Should I buy two and stitch them together maybe?
@dofx

!rant

I don’t know what I’m most excited about for tomorrow.
Tomorrow my imbecile flatmate moves out, and we have a Christmas party at work, but I think the most exciting thing about tomorrow, is getting the keys to my own apartment tomorrow.

I still can’t believe it, a year ago I was a school dropout, got money from the government, till today, 21 years old, full time employee at mid-Norways largest production company, and buying my own apartment

Just ordered myself a stressball, a cape and a duck. I wonder if @dfox and @trogus does what’s written in the special request field

The tale about our famous imbecile IT guy goes on.

After 7++ emails from the CXO and 4 emails from head of dev department, the IT guy has still, not provided the access I requested for our servers.

Do note, the head of dev department has been appointed by the Board of Directors to manage the infrastructure upgrade and merge.

The way everything has been done till now, is that one person controls everything and holds the usernames/ passwords. That’s going to change. At least 3 people will know it. And a super user will be created, and password given to the board of directors in a sealed envelope

I guess someone is at risk of loosing their job...
/me looks at IT guy

!rant

Just got my new monitors. 2x 28” 4K monitors... didn’t realise they were this big, so now I gotta get a new desk, but that’s fine, I just bought an apartment with a spare room I can make into an office (as soon as the current tenant moves out)

I live in a co-share apartment, and the owner wanted to sell it, so I bought it.

At college, second year, basic CS for that school. The teacher calls me to her office, and asked me if I had any backup of my work, because the school computer I used, had crashed and the school didn't have backup of it.

2 years of school material, lost. So the teacher and school director had to vouch for me. Still got best grade in glass.

I need some help speccing a server.
We have 5 video editors/ 3D animators, who’s currently working on their own machine and keeping a version on their machine.

I want a server that allows 5 people to work on it simultaneously. Preferably a few SSDs for the current project, then 50 TB++ of long storage. What raid should I use, how much ram, cpu, what system should I run, etc etc

I had a lead dev on our team saying we should drop PHP and write everything in D, because their syntax is basically the same. And replace our MySQL database with MongoDB. We have data going back to the early 90s, I don’t even know how many entries we have in the production database.

We just adopted python on new projects so that it’s easier to find developers.

I don't know if anyone else has this issue on devRant, but I don't get the devRant app icon in my notifications the my Apple Watch. Would be sweet if it were fixed.
Though, I see Snapchat and some other apps also don't have the icons

Nice that devRant looks better on the iPhone X now, but I think there should be some padding at the bottom, so that stuff doesn’t get too close to the home bar thingy

Argh, so yesterday was a day of, so everyone in the office took today off, so they get a long weekend.
But here I am getting ready for a morning client meeting which starts in 10 minutes

Sippin on some carbon black battery, just shoved a sausage in my face. Can’t wait till meeting is over so the weekend can start

Fucking Intel. Only allowing specific SFP transceivers on their x520-da2 card. I gotta load the firmware with a flag to be allowed to use my ubiquti transceivers.

And for some reason grub doesn’t let me use the “array” as the firmware said. So only one sfp port is active on boot. So I gotta find a clever way to get it to load properly. Maybe add a script to run at boot that does what I want.