GOD DAMN THE STUPID IPTABLES, aaaaah!

Today I learned that
iptables -I INPUT -i !lo -j DROP
and
iptables -I INPUT ! -i lo -j DROP

are two completely different rules, the first of which doesn't work (in ~99.9% of cases)

yet both pass and get added to the firewall. And both rules show exactly the same in the state listing (iptables -L -n -v).

And I was wondering why the hell the firewall wasn't working...

I am starting to get more and more ticked off when I google a language's function name, and the first result isn't the official documentation.

Come on, I don't care about some stupid article describing how a function works in 10 paragraphs, with modal windows all over the place annoying me about "subscribing to newsletter", cookies, registrations and so on.

I just need to find the stupid function description!

GOD DAMN THAT OLD BROKEN DATABASE.

Having to work with a legacy old database system running MySQL 4.0 is a pain. Especially when even finding a frikin manual for the thing is hard af.

And a cherry on top is dealing with encoding and collation in a system, that didn't really have a wide support for it yet.

10/10. At least I am only dealing with it so that we could later shut it down for good.

Is it weird that, despite the professional setting, when a client actually thanks us/me for swift/efficiently done job that I feel a little happier with myself?

I really don't know how I feel about SystemD.

Their recent reveal of Systemd-Homed made me once again doubt the logic behind the project. I mean, yes, systemd is handy to work with at some occasions (SysVInit, for example, doesn't store information about when a certain service failed), but SystemD is slowly eating up more and more of the system's jobs, and I'm a little worried, what would happen if SystemD suddenly went bust.

That will never happen, I know, but... Wasn't the idea behind Unix... Its modularity? That its made up of clearly defined parts that cooperate with each other, rather than a huge, monolithic projects that handle several functions at once?

This is not meant to be a hate post about Systemd, just a little... reminiscence about its goal and role in the Linux community.

Any ideas are appreciated! Discussions are welcome. Just... keep it civil. Please.

The feeling of dread as still a semi-junior sysadmin when an app doesn't work after an update.

I got stressed, triple-checked everything that I changed and that I followed all steps of the documentation of the upgrade process, then, as a last step before going over in half-panic mode to my boss, I try to restart the stupid java app and it starts working.

Wtf. Why. Why didn't it work the first time I started it? D:

Ugh! Anyone also finds it incredibly annoying that regex notations can change between programs? And I don't mean like PCRE vs jS, those are functional differences.

I mean like... In sed, I always spend trying out all possible combos of backspacing when dealing with special notations like quantifiers {}, sets [], match groups () and so on!

Why can't it be just so that backslash anything = character literal, and not the functional counterpart.

Or at least stick to either one of the options, not like sed, where matchgroup is \(\), quantifier \{\} but a set is just []

Also wish sed supported reluctant quantifier (*?), having to use negative character set matching makes it much less readable...

It has to be Keybase.

It is exactly what I need - A secure yet practical cloud storage, where only you own the crypto key, with the added bonus of maintaining a blockchain-based identity online, with proof system and all.
Also has a secure PKI-Based E2E chat when I want to talk to someone about something I don't want the general government to necessarily know.

Definitely recommend the service! Even with the odd decision to include an option of a Lumen crypto wallet or whatever, you can just ignore that feature if you're not into it and it doesn't slow you down.

Stupid shell globbing! I always forget that * does not include hidden files, then get all surprised that a 1:1 copy doesn't work the same, ugh!

I need to learn to use rsync dir-from/ dir-to/ instead of rsync ./* dir-to/...

Hey guys!
Once again, I got a little stumped when writing one thingmajig in Python.

I am normally not a programmer (Work as sysadmin), so I don't really know all the fancy abstract ways things are done "properly", which is why I need to ask here:

I have a program, separated into parts. The "core" is a part that sets commandline argument structure (using the argparse library), loads master configuration file, sets up the main logging facility, and then proceeds to load "plugins" - python files with one or more classes that implement one specific abstract class that forces them to implement a common interface of init, run, cleanup functions.

The core then proceeds to initialize those classes, run the "run" function, and run the "cleanup" function.

If the plugin class throws a Warning, it is only logged and runtime continues. If it is anything else, the program logs it and stops.

Now, the issue is, sometimes, a user may want to continue even if a non-warning occurs.

Lets say that I am creating a user, and the user already exists. Sometimes, the program user might want to continue with further plugin execution. And what I was told was to implement specific commandline switches that force continuation of runtime despite the plugin failing.

How should I implement it? The most obvious thing is to add a specific switch for every plugin, but that is exactly what I am trying to evade. I want to have the core as abstract as possible.

Other solution I thought of is to have a file of some sort that would list extra switches to implement, then it would be up to the class to implement if it uses the switch or not (I pretty much pass the entire Namespace received from parse_args() function), but this also feels kinda hackish.

I thought about having some sort of function that the plugin could call in the core to add a new argument, but at the point that plugins start loading, the argument parser is already compiled and cannot be changed further.

Any other ideas of how to re-implement the program are also welcome! I may not do it this times, but I'd at least learn something new again.

I frikin' love updating Gitlab, every time I do, I feel a sense of dread that some part of the process breaks and I will have to dive head first into the huge thing, with almost no knowledge of how the internals work!

Am I the only one who just loves when I do "curl 127.0.0.1:9200/_template" and get back entire 32" screenful of compressed JSON?

Frikin elastic...

I just found out google web dev tools let you copy a request as curl command!

Time to scrape some websites baby!

"Our supplier asks that you double the number of php child processes for this fpm pool"

"Are you aware, that that would lead to about 100% of memory overcommit, taken the current limit of 128MB/child, and that if a lot of them started at once, the system would probably go for OOM-Kill, which would most probably kill your database, that still runs on 100% MyISAM tables that do not support transactions, and you'd have to kiss your data integrity goodbye, right?"

"Uh... Nevermind then"

I get that some people are not IT-versed, but really... Hire someone who knows what they are doing and doesn't live 20 years in the past, god damn it!

For some reason, seeing source code in my native language (Czech) disgusts me and decreases my motivation to read through it.

Anyone else knows that feeling?

Client asks if we could proceed with migration today, or on monday

We agree on today and proceed to spell out the procedure, if it's okay

Client replies that they would prefer to migrate on monday, and asks how long the downtime will be, and whether it would be possible to migrate without downtime.

Why, of course, but only if your frickin infrastructure didn't consist of a *single* machine!

Ugh, why me...

>Project uses Nginx for maximum efficiency
:3
>Still uses php5
D:

Whyyy?!

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

A client is like: Help! We got a 500 in our wordpress administration panel and there is no error in the log, it must be your infrastructure at fault!

So I calmly replied to them that wordpress handles its errors on its own, and without the appropriate debug flags enabled, doesn't log it anywhere. Even mentioned that a PHP app can change the error handler no problem, and linked them to both, PHP and Word press docummentation.

Didn't hear from them since.

So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.

We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!

Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).

I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.

Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.

My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.

And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"

Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?

I'm currently writing a discord bot using the discord.py library and I cannot decide how to structure my code.
I was thinking of writing it in modules, with a core script that would load any valid module class that would include an array of all the event hooks it wanted, whether it wanted to send messages and so on.

It's a nice way to practice python after my last working bot that I wrote in (Sit down for this) PHP using an outdated and abandoned wrapper (Yeah, event-based programming in PHP, I know)

Are there any better ways to do this? I really don't want to hardcode all the functions in, only to have it fall apart later after adding another feature...

I feel accomplished. After arguing with my family for a month or so, I finally solved the WiFi issues in my room! (We live in a flat. And the thick, concrete walls eat the signal super well)

I used to have 2 MBs downstream at most, with very common disconnects and general connection issues.

Now, just yesterday, I laid about 50 meters of ethernet cable all the way from my room to the other end of our house. Laid the cable along the top of our walls so that mom did not have to constantly whine how bad it looks.

Biggest issues were doors (Parents refuse to drill into the walls here, they tend to crumble a lot), but ended up running it under the door just tightly enough that the doors don't squeeze it in any way.

It works great! The cable is almost invisible, and now, my downstream is 30 MBps!

The only downside is that I used an old wifi router in my room that supports only 802.11b/g/n, not ac.

So I decided to install a third OS on my laptop and oh boy, I never thought I'd have to deal with so many issues!

First, I had to make space for the new OS, so I did the only feasible thing - Shrunk a windows partition (Used for gaming only), then installed the third OS into it. (For clarification, one OS was Windows, the second Debian for work and the new one was Kali for a course at school about security and ethical hacking)

Well... After I installed and tried out that the Kali worked... My Debian began to make problems. It would hang for almost a minute during start as it tried to mount a (for some reason) no longer existing Swap partition.

After it gave up and I found out... I, fortunately, fixed it after just a bit of googling. At least I learned to repack the ramfs.

It worked all fine and dandy... Only... My Debian now shared the swap with Kali.

Few weeks forward, last friday, I tried to boot up Kali at class... Only for it to... Stop at a black screen, weird.

Some minor detective work later, I found out nothing was... Wrong really.
But... For some mysterious reason, my complete GDM just.... No longer worked.

One LightDM and XFCE instal later (Thanks god that at least TTY still worked fine), it finally worked again, and this time, I booted back into Debian, shrunk the Kali partition a little more and dedicated it's own swap there. Setting and resetting everything, and finally had a working triple-boot laptop...

My only question is... Why?

Does sharing Swap really affect the system so much, besides hibernation ofc.

How can you tell that your PC is under a heavy load?

When, despite having your high-quality active noise canceling headphones on and playing games, you can still hear what must be your GPU having a heatstroke and having it's fans spin at 100%.

Never knew it can be this loud. Or maybe the headphones are just crap.

So, been at a 4* hotel for the first time. And in their relax lounge, they had an iMac.
There was nothing wrong with it... Until I rebooted it.

Edit: It appears they did it for a proprietary hotel software of some sort that only runs on Windows... But... It didn't really work either, so 10/10.