* Posts by Jenny with the Axe

21 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2017

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Jenny with the Axe

Yeah, that happened

Back in late 90's at a national ISP, one of the sysadmins didn't see any reason to avoid alcohol just because he was on call. His favourite drinking place was just around the corner from the office anyway, so it's not as if he'd need to be able to drive there in case something happened!

Something did happen. He got back to the office and up to the server room... and stumbled, bringing an entire rack down.

I think he sobered up fairly quickly thanks to the adrenaline. I also don't think the customers ever knew the cause of that outage.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

Jenny with the Axe

Re: Backups

I used to work at a bank, where there were regular disaster tests. Disaster was simulated by shutting one of the data centres down and checking if all services were still available as they should. Next time they'd take another data centre. Yes, in the daytime (though on a weekend when the securities exchange was closed).

That's just one of the reasons I felt proud to work there.

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Jenny with the Axe

Re: rude maintainers

I can't imagine him being anyone's plant. I can't imagine him listening to anyone he considers less smart than himself, which (rightly) means most of the world and includes the people who'd theoretically be running a plant.

Of course, he might have spent decades building that reputation in order to be the perfect plant...

Jenny with the Axe

Re: rude maintainers

That's the one I'm talking about, anyway.

DJB has gone on to do more brilliant things, mainly in cryptography (as in actual cryptography, not cryptocurrency). The man *is* genuinely brilliant, and very used to being the smartest person in the room - because he is scary smart. But at least back in the qmail days, any suggestion that something in his software was maybe not the perfect platonic ideal was not exactly favourably received.

Jenny with the Axe

Re: rude maintainers

I'm fairly sure I know which one you meant - one that was technically quite good, and which I worked with for years at an ISP, but which a lot of people refused to touch due to the rude and contemptuous behaviour of its creator. His attitude was contagious, and one of the main reasons why that MTA never got as wide a userbase as might have deserved on a purely technical basis.

The lesson is that it doesn't matter how good your software is on a technical basis if you make it really unpleasant for people to find ways to use it.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Jenny with the Axe

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

The axe was quite useful when I started out as a sysadmin - my first job was managing email systems, including handling spammers...

My proudest moment was when one of our clients posted in a comment thread about spam that "you'd better not spam from Algonet because their postmaster has an axe".

Jenny with the Axe

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

This is one of the reason I'm a better sysadmin than 90 % of the self respecting chaps...

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

Jenny with the Axe

I parsed that quite differently than it would appear you did.

The CAT wrote that they "investigated two individuals for potentially unacceptable behavior over IRC and Twitter."

My reading of that is that the CAT were informed of behaviour which may or may not have been unacceptable, and that they investigated whether it was, in fact, unacceptable. As they found it to be so, they instituted a ban.

Your reading seems to be that after investigation they found that it was "potentially unacceptable".

I call that a radical interpretation of the text.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Jenny with the Axe

You do have a point :-)

When I was a younger and stupider sysadmin, I enjoyed taunting the windows people that I didn't need to reboot my systems for every little thing. Now I have learned that regular reboots are useful, not because the OS needs them, but to find stuff like the broken config files while you've still got a reasonable chance of remembering why they were changed and what they ought to look like...

Jenny with the Axe

I'm thinking that the person who "managed" that box before did not deserve being laid off. He deserved being fired.

No, the creator of cURL didn't morph into Elon Musk and give away Bitcoins. But his hijacked Twitter page tried to

Jenny with the Axe

About the Stockholm geolocation

It's not hard to figure out that Daniel lives in Stockholm.

If I wanted to do this, I'd get a free trial account with any provider of VPNs that has endpoints in the area where the mark lives. Or even just an AWS EC2 instance hosted in Stockholm would probably work. Or a previously compromised random PC that is in the right area.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Jenny with the Axe

Ask them to flip/unplug/swap, not check

Asking someone to check if a socket is on, or a cable is properly inserted, never works. Ask them to unplug and plug it back in instead.

Back in my tech support days in the mid 90's I once got a call from a user whose computer was stone dead. After she'd unplugged the cable and plugged it back in, both ends, it still didn't work, so I was preparing to send a repair tech out - which would take a couple of hours as she was in a very small site far from the nearest tech support centre.

Then I got the brilliant idea to ask her to swap sockets, plugging the desk lamp (which functioned) into the socket she'd had the computer in. Desk lamp stopped working. Computer worked in the other socket.

I saved the company a total of five-six hours' worth of travel, and the user had a productive day instead of sitting around waiting for the repair person.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Jenny with the Axe
Pint

Oh, the humanity...

Back in the 90's, some of my coworkers didn't take the whole on-call thing too seriously. Oh, they did carry the pager, and they did stay close to a computer they could use to login. What they did not necessarily do was stay *sober*.

One of them got a page when he was well on the way to completely shitfaced. As his favourite drinking hole was about 100 metres from the office, he went there to fix whatever it was. And went into the server hall, stumbled, caught himself on a rack... which he overturned.

I'm fairly sure the outage report to the users was sanitized.

And no, this was not the last time he was drunk when on call.

It has been 20 years since cybercrims woke up to social engineering with an intriguing little email titled 'ILOVEYOU'

Jenny with the Axe

Re: Memories.

I remember that too - back then I was working helpdesk, and trying to get people to understand that the email was a hoax was really hard. But at that point we'd still say "you can't get a virus from an email".

A year later, when "I Love You" started spreading, I was email sysadmin at an ISP. That was... not fun.

Let's authenticate: Beyond Identity pitches app-wrapped certificate authority

Jenny with the Axe

Re: But where do the certificates come from?

The "P" in PKI stands for "Public". The point is that by publishing the processes and safeguards against issuance of false certificates, the certificates can be trusted. If there is no trust, well... the entire point of using PKI falls to the wayside and it's just another way of encrypting, rather than authenticating, data.

Jenny with the Axe

But where do the certificates come from?

They talk a lot about using certificates. But where are the certificates coming from? How are they issued, how do they guarantee that nobody can get a false certificate, how does revocation work, where is the CA, how is the CA's key managed... If they want us to rely on PKI, they need to show that we can trust their PKI.

The delights of on-site working – sun, sea and... WordPad wrangling?

Jenny with the Axe

Emacs FTW

Back in the 90's and early 00's I was sysadmin at a place where one of the devs had had the only copy of the source for several utilities on his laptop. Which he dropped in front of a bus. Hard disk was unrecoverable.

A year or two after that, we needed to move a certain server to a different subnet. The server happened to be a sort-of-LDAP-thingy used for every single user login for all customers. The devs dutifully hunted through all source code to find any place where it had been hardcoded and make the program use config files or arguments instead.

And on the night when we did the move, we discovered that the RADIUS server source had been on the bus-crushed laptop, *and* had a hardcoded IP address. No client was able to login at all.

I ended up editing the binary in Emacs, and instead of entering the new IP address, I used a hostname that we could then enter into /etc/hosts. We found a few more bits of software where I had to do the same, though the others didn't have quite as large an impact...

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Jenny with the Axe

"Your backup routines suck!"

Back in 1997 I was working helpdesk for an organisation where a lot of users still had Windows 3.11. One of them called in and asked us to do a restore of a document that she had stored on a network drive.

I asked for the name of the document and the user wasn't sure. I asked when it was created, and the user told me:

* User had created the document that day and worked on it for several hours, carefully saving it often.

* Once User was finished, they closed it, They then decided to rename it

* User clicked on the document in Windows Explorer and marked the entire filename, including the ".doc" extension. They wrote the new name and pressed Enter.

* Then the file lost the "picture of the paper with the three little lines" . In other words, since User removed the ".doc" extension, Windows no longer associated it with a known file type and so the icon meaning "I know what this is" changed to a blank one (I think - like I said, this is more than 20 years ago).

* User got scared and deleted the file. And then called asking me to restore it.

The only problem was, even though we *did* do backups of files on network drives, those backups were made during the night... And documents on network drives did not end up in any Trash folder or had any other sort of recovery mechanism.

The user was not happy.

Female-free speaker list causes PHP show to collapse when diversity-oriented devs jump ship

Jenny with the Axe

I followed the link to Larry Garfield’s blog post.

At the start he says that the conference contacted him directly and asked him to submit proposals for talk.

Later in his post, he says that he asked the organizers to directly contact women and ask them to submit posts. Their response: "the organizers told me they actively don’t want to do outreach, and just let whoever wants to submit submit."

Based solely on that blog post, it would appear that they *did* do outreach, to an established speaker who was also a white man. Did they do any outreach to people not matching that profile? If not, they were limiting themselves and (presumably unintentionally and unconsciously) excluding people without an established track record. This does not exactly make for an exciting conference with new content.

"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." Is that what PHPCE is going for?

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

Jenny with the Axe

Reminds me of back in the late 80's/early 90's when I was "the IT person" at the small office where I worked, simply by virtue of being the only one not afraid of figuring things out. (Yes, I was https://xkcd.com/627/).

I was on vacation for three weeks. When I came back, one of my coworkers asked me to look at his computer because it had been very slow for almost the whole time I was away. Now, in those days, processor speeds increased a lot more dramatically, so that some games became unplayable on the faster computers because they simply ran too fast for the player to have a chance to react. So a lot of models had a "turbo button" that you could use to switch between the processor's max speed and a speed more suitable for the games.

Yes, you guessed. My coworker had managed to hit that button instead of the power button one day. It had been running at a quarter speed ever since, and he'd never dared to try to figure it out for himself.

The really scary part is that it took me another ten years before I actually started working as a sysadmin, rather than doing whatever I was doing and also fixing everyone's computer...

GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail

Jenny with the Axe

Re: Super! Great

Actually, I've worked in places that did emergency testing. They did things like "let's kill all the connections through one datacenter and see if our customers can still access their stuff." Also "let's restore the backups to this test system and see that it works". As Gitlab has now discovered, backups without restore testings are not backups....