Details
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Aboutautomation tools author, sysadmin, devops engineer, beer lover, husband, dad
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Skillsperl, redis, linux, json, ugly html, system architecture, security, spelling
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LocationDenver, CO, USA
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Github
Joined devRant on 6/18/2017
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I initially chose System Administration simply because it was attractive to me to be the HMFIC, and generally above the law as corporate policy is concerned, as said law for the most part applied to people with less comprehensive knowledge about how any given system or technology works.
Since then though, I've learned that there's basically no better way to become a jack of all trades than being a sysadmin. There's no other position in the tech field that more easily and gracefully parlays into other specialties.
I write automation and aggregation software now, but I still consider myself a sysadmin by trade, as automation is just another function of system administration. I write everything in vim, and almost entirely in perl, because I am concerned above most other concerns about performance. I could learn C or Go or Rust or some other low-level compiled language, and I'm sure I could create even more performant software that way, but that would take me farther away from my passion: System Administration. -
It took me eleven months of working from home to investigate renting a coworking space. Eleven wasted months! The coworking office is TOTALLY worth every USD.11
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What's your favorite terminal font? I'm on the lookout. I've gone through Ubuntu mono, fira code and fira mono, and I'm currently on jetbrains mono. They're all lovely, but I know there's a universe of fonts out there, and I'd like to know what others are using.19
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I don't downvote much, but I definitely do when someone replies to an, "I'm back" post with, "LoL WhO tF r U?"
Don't be an asshole.16 -
IBM is taking a shit in our mouths. I suppose we should have seen this coming, but almost our entire environment runs on CentOS. Not only will we have to find a new distro (which will probably be CoreOS with kube, bleh) but we'll have to get everyday trained up on it.11
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I pay for Youtube, because I'm a Google music (now youtube music, and much worse than it was) subscriber. Youtube pisses me off because if I curiously watch some video, their algo swoops in and starts recommending videos from r/youseeingthisshit or Craig ferguson clips, or fox news, or pbs kids or some other bullshit I don't want in my feed. The only way to disable algo, as far as I know, is to browse "incognito," which then forces ads on me.
Has newpipe been broken for everybody else for a while too?9 -
Expert: "The core problem with passwords is that they reside on a server."
I suppose that's true, but only if you're a complete moron. Store a hash of a password, and users can authenticate against it with a password that doesn't get logged. This is technology that's been around for over fifty years. If you're storing passwords on a server, you deserve whatever trouble you get.6 -
Turns out the only thing that was keeping me from using alacritty was the lack of keyboard-based text selection. About a month ago they released version 0.5.0, which added the ability to toggle "vi mode," which allows built-in, simple navigation of the current buffer using common vi keys. Consider me hooked and converted from urxvt, which works well, but lacks a lot of modern features, and is a bit clunky to configure.3
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What kind of pranks have you had in your office when people leave their desk without locking their computer?
In an office where I used to work, we would send an email from the offender's account to the extended org about how he/she loves bacon.
One guy would start sending messages to every personal IM contact: "you suck." Over and over.14 -
I went on a coding tear last week, probably because my boss was on vacation. I optimized the bejesus out of a half dozen apps and created five or six new features to downstream apps. But now I need to write them all down, and make retroactive stories for them. I hate admin.5
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Do you have a favorite status bar app? I have been using polybar since I switched to bspwm in December, and I've been really happy with all the customizations and plugins you can write for it, but I just wonder if anyone has been using any other bars that do something they really love.8
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Linux is hard to learn and master. That's fine with me. Windows is intuitive, but not user-friendly. Linux has a steep learning curve, but then is far more user-friendly than any other operating system. To me, that steep learning curve was far more than worth it, as I now have a desktop that does whatever I want, and behaves exactly as I want.
People come to Linux hoping that it will be easy to pick up, and then get angry when it isn't. Then they claim that the community is toxic, because Linux users are happy with something they think is broken.
Linux is hard to learn, and that's fine. That's valuable, to me. That's part of the appeal to me(and millions of others). Linux is unforgiving when you lack the knowledge gained in that steep learning curve. That's fine with me too. As its userbase grows, so too does the number of knowledgeable people who work to make it better and invent more amazing things for it.
If Linux was easy to learn, it wouldn't be as good as it is, and to me, that's reason enough to love it.42 -
What's your favorite monospace font for use in a terminal emulator? I enjoy Fira Mono, myself, but if you're using something you like, I would love to know what it is and why you like it.7
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I got my second system76 machine this week. The, "meerkat" is a rebranded 10th gen Intel NUC, and I got it to replace the ancient corporate refurb I have at a friend's house in Kansas City, on Google Fiber, which I'm running as a plex server. The existing machine was already five years old when I got it used in 2016, and it's lasted far longer than anyone expected, including its manufacturer. I replaced its media storage with an onsite NAS last year, and now it's time for the computer itself to get the Marie Kondo treatment.
I am loving the Meerkat! I have been configuring it here in Denver this week while I have some time off, and when it's all set the way I want I'll get it shipped off to KC. I just tested out plex on it, playing Planet Earth II while the media scanner was running. Didn't even blink. I can't wait to get this thing in place!
Buy more System76!3 -
Early in my career, I worked at a large American telecom for a couple years. All their HP-UX servers had the root password set to "hpworld" which was the vendor default.1
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I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.
In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.
Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."
In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.
We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.
As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.
Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.
But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?9 -
I started using duckduckgo about ten years ago and have evangelized it ever since, including on devrant, but I think I've just about had it with it. Let me explain.
I was more than happy to accept the less-than-google results for standard searches, because I could force the site to only show me results that matched an exact string if I put quotes around it, or force the results to include or exclude results with words with minus or plus characters before them.
But that's all gone now. Now, plus just means, "show me more results with this word," and minus means, "show me fewer results with this word." Wrapping a string in quotes doesn't mean you require anything exact anymore. The name of the game with DDG now is the same as Google: engagement. Narrowed results or fewer results means less chance of clickthroughs, and you can't sell ads that way.
For normal searches, I'm off duckduckgo. It makes me sad.
Let me clarify though that DDG's bang searches are still fully functional, and are still an absolutely indispensable part of my workflow. I use them well over a hundred times a day, every day. I updated my rofi script for web searches to use qwant, but still go to DDG if the search string begins with a bang.5 -
Anybody know a terminal emulator for Linux that supports searching/selecting/copying text in the scrollback buffer without the mouse? This is a killer feature of iterm that I have yet to see on a Linux TE.14
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I'm rewriting the wrapper I've been using for a couple years to connect to Lord of the Rings Online, a windows app that runs great in wine/dxvk, but has a pretty labyrinthine set of configs to pull down from various endpoints to craft the actual connection command. The replacement I'm writing uses proper XML parsing rather than the existing spaghetti-farm of sed/grep/awk/etc. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.1
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It gives me a break from the kids. But the cost of that is increased strain on my poor wife, and knowing that that sucks all the joy out of it.3
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Anybody having trouble with work VPNs during the health crisis? I can't imagine most have ever had this kind of test before.4