Replying to @scottalanmiller's private messages. They are just a little older than one year.

Sorry guys, was busy with ... stuff and... more stuff and other things and so on. I try to be here more often again in the future.

@popester said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Still hacking away at learning Linux file systems. Question: What filesystem types would I run into, or which should I master first?

ext4 is a given. What is common in the SMB realm?

ext4/3/2
zfs
btrfs
xfs

@hobbit666 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@hobbit666 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Doing some work from home, so looking into Windows/Unifi/DC logging

So on this what do people use? ELK Stack, Graylog, Solarwinds etc. Zabbix maybe?

Sounds good. Maybe Grafana? Everything you mentioned is a decent choice (except Solarwinds, never used it)

@wirestyle22 said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@thwr said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@DustinB3403 said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@wirestyle22 said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@DustinB3403 said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@thwr said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

Bought my wife a copy of Titan Quest... bad idea Still a great game which supports LAN-only multiplayer - sadly, most older games don't play well with with virtual NICs from Hyper V and Docker Desktop.

Looks like an early rendition of WoW.

It's more like Diablo. Great game for its time

like Diablo and Diablo 2?

More like D2 or PoE. The interesting aspect is that you can combine two classes, like rogue + mage or rune + defender.

To be fair Titan Quest doesn't hold a candle to PoE. No hack n' slash really does. Before POE it was an incredible interpretation of the genre though. Thoroughly enjoyed it

haha, no, absolutely not. PoE is a hell of a game with the most complex skill tree ever.

Abusing post #77777

One of our VMs went wild today, still not sure why. Very high CPU usage on different processes, maybe a bad Windows update. @StarWind_Software immediately sent me a mail about a possible issue, offering assistance (VM runs on a StarWind HCA cluster). Love your service guys.

Which translates to:

Sold merely in customary household quantities!

**Please buy only one pack of toilet paper **

Therefore:

1 pack = regular price
2 packs = regular price + 5 EUR
3+ packs = regular price + 10 EUR per pack
Maybe it will work that way?!

All "supplementary revenues" will be donated to corona aid (organizations)

@scottalanmiller said in Programming Printers:

@thwr said in Programming Printers:

No, seriously, from what I understood he's talking about configuring things, maybe creating some macros to switch paper feeds or printing a form template stored on the printer (Lexmark and many other "big" printers can do this).

Yup, I have a good friend who is a programmer (like a 10X big time programmer that works for places like Dell and major consulting firms and names his own price) and his father in law thought his job was a joke, even though he earned way more than him and got to work from home or anywhere that he wanted and was a third his age and never had to go to college, yada yada) because the father in law was a video game programmer himself.

Well, actually he meant that he installed a video game once. Like Curtis, he thought that "installing software", you know like popping in the floppy and double clicking on the install icon, was what programming meant. Programming is just too complex of a subject for many people. Once they can't grasp what software does, they tend to start imagining that programming is something that they have seen or could understand and weird concepts start to arise. Like changing the time on your analogue watch becomes programming. Write a poem is programming the paper. Putting soap in the dishwasher is programming the dishwasher. Driving a car is real time programming. Writing your diary in bed is embedded programming.

A bit offtopic: I just had to think about my old mentor. He was like Yoda, like 200 years old, always smiling, barely speaking German at all (he was from Poland). He once said: "Wait 15-20 years, you will see that a lot of developers will actually configure things instead of doing real development." - this was in the context of the massive amount of upcoming frameworks. And he was right: I just had a meeting about a project where a partner used like 10 different frameworks (not little APIs but full blown frameworks) to run a little embedded webserver - they failed big time, the result was unstable like nothing else I could imagine.

Anyway, long story short: IT is big, there's a lot of misconception and wrong understanding of things.

@StrongBad Good analogy.

@Dashrender: Different shells provide you with different programming (or scripting) capabilities. For example, zsh and (k)sh differ in word splitting. Here's a good read about that: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/FAQ/zshfaq03.html#31. And here's how zsh differs from other shells at a more global scope: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/FAQ/zshfaq02.html

@scottalanmiller said in Billing Hour Segments:

For customers paying "by the hour" we normally do 15 minute increments. Anything less and the overhead of tracking costs more than the cost of the work, it gets totally silly. Lots of agreements will be something like "two hour minimum with fifteen minute increments after that."

^ This. Never forget all sorts of side work. Billing and documentation are just two examples.

@scottalanmiller hehe. Bonus points? Well, I think I just need to poke around a bit.

@RamblingBiped said in Programming Printers:

I've been programming since the late 80's. I can remember setting the time on my parent's VHS so they could record a TV show.

I can't believe I've been leaving that off my resume all these years!

Do you remember ShowView (VCR Plus+, G-Code, VideoPlus+)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code

@MattSpeller said in What the Poo and Moderation of Swearing:

@thwr said in What the Poo and Moderation of Swearing:

My 0.02c:

Stingy bastard

Narf... ok, your point

@scotth: I will deploy a hybrid SW two node cluster soon. Many other solutions use KVM under the hood, which means that you will have to either script something or do agent based backups.

With Hyper-V, you just use Veeam (or whatever you prefer)

@scottalanmiller said in If you are new drop in say hello and introduce yourself please!:

@thwr said in If you are new drop in say hello and introduce yourself please!:

@scottalanmiller

@thwr said in If you are new drop in say hello and introduce yourself please!:

@scottalanmiller hehe. Bonus points? Well, I think I just need to poke around a bit.

Uhm, in this case... I will have to delete my account. What's the point in helping others without proper points and medals?
Just kidding

Oh well, I mean... each post is worth ten points. So you can just add up your posts and multiple by ten! There you go!

Ha, perfect. A really fast way to get divorced
Thanks for the warm welcome.

JavaScript? Seriously?

I think you should first learn a programming language, not a scripting language. Something strong-typed, preferably.

Just add a ban for 2 hours after 3 failed logins, will hurt much on their script.

Added country block (automatically updated CIDR ranges) to my firewalls (pfSense in this case) a few years ago, anything but my country gets blocked. I'm not seeing many attempts anymore since then. This won't help against a professional attempt, but you get rid of 99% of the kiddies.

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@thwr said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scotth: I will deploy a hybrid SW two node cluster soon. Many other solutions use KVM under the hood, which means that you will have to either script something or do agent based backups.

With Hyper-V, you just use Veeam (or whatever you prefer)

I use agents regardless

And I don't know why, as it conterfeits some of the virtualization fundamentals, IMHO. But I don't want to start this discussion now.

@JaredBusch get a dump from the disk and compare it to a backup maybe?
BTW: 0/1/0/1 is not that secure, there may still be magnetic echoes. DBAN is always nice to actually kill something, physical shredding is even better

@Shuey said in What programming language should you learn first?:

I've heard from multiple friends who code that C (C11) is a great foundational language for anyone interested in pursuing programming or even just for developing better logic skills.

C is great for learning, but can also be tricky for beginners. A more high-level OO-language like C# or Java could also be worth a look (@scottalanmiller will probably disagree on C# and I'm not a fan of Java at all for a lot of reasons).

What makes C a bit hard is that you need to get into pointers and arrays pretty early for simple things like "strings" - C just does not know such a thing. Also, the missing memory protection can be tricky: You can easily read and write data outside the boundaries of a previously defined array, for example.