Posts by lowjik 14 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2018
I didn't realise Rackspace was still a thing ... Oh well maybe not for much longer.
I always thought the writing was on the wall for them when I saw them advertising their expertise to help you with your AWS cloud journey or some such similar marketing speak. Quite the statement from the once mighty Rackspace that they will help you build on someone else's cloud.
I guess this sort of event here is what happens when you mess up your overcommitted storage..... Eeek
I had a boss once who espoused the "I have nothing to hide" line too once.
I replied "Oh cool - in that case, please can I see your internet history, your bank statement and can I get the long number across the middle of your card and your pin please?"
He didn't like it - don't worry, he was a d1ck
It all comes down the difference between privacy and secrecy. He may indeed have had no need for secrecy but he would probably prefer at least a few things to remain private. In some cases you are bound by terms of service to keep things private such as your card PIN - good luck convincing a bank that you shouldn't have to hide anything and that they should pay for your indiscretion
I have long suspected that all recruitment "consultants" could be replaced with a reasonably simple SELECT query...
I actually got to prove this many moons ago with my first commission of independent tech work - my then girlfriend (now wife and mother to our first child) had a 'year in industry' job as part of her degree course and was placed at an agency of sorts that provided health related training and they needed a business application to manage job vacancies and applicants.
I mentioned I could build something for a price - negotiations went well and an Access db was created that essentially had two main tables with a many-to-many relationship that represented applications from applicants to vacancies. It worked, I got paid
Later it turned out that the owner was .... less than scrupulous (I had my doubts after working even for only a few days) and this resulted in my partner being removed by the University from her placement and no further placements would happen with them - yup that bad
Anywho fastforward many years later (5?) I got a call on my mobile from an unrecognised number asking for support on this very application at which point I quizzed the person calling (turns out they has swapped cheap labour sources universities) and I politely declined the opportunity to proide support but recommended a check on disk space/old records to be removed - my bad for actually putting my personal mobile in the 'help' dialogue on the app!
Turns out a simple set of tables and select query can indeed be used as a complete implementation of a recruitment agency!
I think I have posted this before but maybe not here
After some hours of toiling in the bowels of an ancient bespoke PHP CMS, I was greeted with this particular comment. After exclaiming "WTF is this?" quite loudly in the middle of the office (oops) our glorious leader at the time replied (rather triumphantly) "oh yeah, that was me!"
Turns out he could detect but not recover from an intermittent error so ... just redirect back to ourselves and hope it doesn't happen again .....FFS
When you work at, say, a digital agency and your local IT security team insist on using Cisco Umbrella DNS - then every new domain you register in order to build and launch a shiny new website for a client is rendered un-render-able to everyone on site as it's seen as malicious. So you now have to whitelist every domain you register to avoid a cryptic, hard to debug (can't support https - natch) issue every FSCKing time
I think to be fair Umbrella sees POSTs going off to a newly seen domain name and thinks "Aha - baddies" which i guess is reasonable until you factor in our use case
This is a bar converted from a sub-street level victorian lav - nicer than it sounds and I could swear it was called The Convenience but now The Temple on Great Bridgewater Street just off Oxford Road. Not bad going by the reviews
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4755979,-2.2421413,3a,75y,271.06h,77.51t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-TszKrSIKvVBLz7arSk3Hg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
I had a strange issue once with leaving/entering the US. A long time ago I went on holiday to the British Virgin Isles but had to get a visa to travel through the united states, booked last minute had to go via New York JFK and San Juan Puerto Rico! Anywho, we were hungover to buggery on the last day and I didn't notice that the little green slip stapled in my passport wasn't removed on leaving. No biggy right?
Fast forward a couple of years later and I had a gig installing hardware and software for my companie's new venture in the US, Greenville to be precise. I arrive at immigration in Charlotte with a business visa. The officer inspects my passport and asks me what I am doing in Puerto Rico - I casually explained I traveled through there on holiday and then proceeded to get a massive grilling about who I was and what I was doing and why. Turns out it looks like I am still in San Juan all because someone forgot to remove some stapled slip of green paper from my passport. Which I could (should?) have removed myself, if I had known.
Can't really rely on that can they? This was post 2001 too
Many moons ago as a fledgling junior dev in a guest access solutions startup company:
Friday at beer o'clock and everyone leaves the office just a tad early as the bosses weren't in that day. Got about 2 miles down the M62 before one of the bosses was calling asking why we just had a spike in support calls and logs all claiming login failures of some kind ...
Turning around at the next junction and heading back to the office in time to see our network admin and said senior dev pulling in to the car park too - all got the same call obviously.... worrying
We start looking for logs and find that nothing can talk to auth1 our central authentication server (auth2 was not quite configured as a master-master replica yet but the db cluster was just fine) and there was no response when trying to SSH in to this machine.... panic growing
A call to Rackspace fanatical support to find out more reveals the machine has indeed been shutdown - would we like to start it back up? Yes. Yes we would, very much please
Patiently waiting for said Gentoo production server (ask our network guy) to respond to a network ping eventually it did! However many services are not running ... a few simply needing starting, one or two had issues that were trivial to resolve - got it back running eventually with around 1500 authentication attempts having failed during the ~1hour of downtime, ouch
The logs reveal that it was indeed our senior dev who typed shutdown -h now on the the machine. He was then ridiculed for some time and the resident gentoo expert aliased shutdown to echo "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that"
This then lead to a series of "hilarious" aliasing wars across various workstations and dev servers. Try to stop someone from being able to fix their alias problem after everything useful is aliased to something funny is quite difficult on such flexible systems. Fun though, for a given range of fun
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