Author: Daniel

Sysadmin turned bearpuncher. Whereabouts unknown.
Work
April 13, 2016

98/240

Imagine my surprise when the Dell guy said he wouldn’t be back tomorrow.

Apparently, when Dell’s project manager told us that he’d be available for three days, it was mostly for if something went absolutely wrong like a show-stopping hardware failure.

Imagine my relief when I don’t need the Dell guy here tomorrow because we’re done.

We got three machines migrated over with vMotion and could’ve snuck in a 4th before the end of the day. I was hoping for one.

I will say, Nutanix and Dell made this really painless, if slightly vague on some particulars. Like, you can’t mix deduplication and compression on a storage container. It’s one or the other. We’re taking dedupe because we work with data that’s largely already compressed, and we run a lot of the same OS. We also ran into a snag with their license server not being able to validate our purchase, which locks us out of RF3 redundancy (RF3 being something like RAID 60 as far as I can tell). It’ll get fixed in a day or so and then we’ll be able to start building a timeline for moving production machines. And the hot vMotion we were hoping for won’t happen because of a CPU architecture mismatch, so it’s gotta be cold. Which is fine, that’s some comp time for later anyway.

I’m like 85% of the way done with a very important slide deck. It needs a few more slides and some decisions answered, and now that we are out of the planning phase and into the doing phase I think we’re going to have a better understanding of our wants versus reality.

Some weeks fly by and some crawl. To get “over the hump” of this particular week feels like an accomplishment. It’s not often you deploy … (More) “98/240”

General
April 13, 2016

88/240

As I’ve grown up, I’ve begun to really appreciate the benefits of proper sleep. More topically, the drawbacks to not getting enough sleep. My legs are still feeling heavy from yesterday. Should’ve gotten to bed probably an hour earlier, but it’s a hard sell when I only get a couple hours between getting home and going to bed, and I already have to fit food and a shower in there.

Today I’m stepping back on Nutanix and letting my systems guy work with Dell to get us going. Wednesday is my one day a week with no obligations, no meetings, no plans. So it’s good for those larger projects, like drafting a plan for the new file server infrastructure to present at the manager meeting. This is one of the things that got me the job in the first place, the ability to plan and use resources effectively. It’s funny how my direct reports keep trying to reassure me that I don’t have anything to worry about with regards to the probationary period, they’re really trying to help relax me. I finally had to explain it as, “As long as there’s some objective amount of uncertainty that I may or may not keep this job, I’m going to worry about it.” It’s not a terribly productive expenditure of energy…or is it? I’m working pretty dang hard because there’s that uncertainty, that obligation to prove my value through actions.

We’re in an interesting line of work. There’s a lot of room for automation, and you can really work harder now in exchange for not working so hard in the future. I’d much prefer to spend some time busting my ass building some automated systems, so down the road I’m just monitoring hardware and working with some orchestration tools for whatever piece … (More) “88/240”

Gaming Life Work
April 12, 2016

74/240

We got Nutanix racked and stacked, powered up, networked, and updating. It’s also the most I’ve walked since I started here by 40% over the next highest day according to my Fitbit. It didn’t seem like that much in the moment, but by 3:30 I was feeling it. It’s about 5 miles of walking, all between two adjacent buildings.

So, a number of things to be thankful for. All the gear is working well. The Dell tech, so far, has been quite good and works well with us. I bought lunch for the team and that went over quite well. No dead drives out of 38 to get started.

Good chance that tomorrow we’ll be out of the setup phase and ready to vMotion some test machines, and seeing if we’ll be able to use Nutanix’s in-built backup utility. The details we got initially aren’t promising on that front, and we may need to spring for Veeam B&R. If we have a VM living on the cluster tomorrow I’ll consider us well ahead of schedule.

I can already tell this week is going to fly by.

I had to put in a change request for a new Software Restriction Policy. The last SRPs I had to deploy were to block CryptoWall. This one is to block Windows 10. Despite a Group Policy named “Do not upgrade to latest versions of Windows”, a registry key named “DisableGWX” (Get Windows X), and a registry key named “DisableOSUpgrades,” I’m still somehow not being clear enough to Microsoft, because new updates are pushing the GWX app anyway.

Our users can’t perform the upgrade themselves anyway, they lack local admin rights to do so. But it still nags the user and basically asks them why their sysadmins are horrible security-haters.

It’s hard to believe that … (More) “74/240”

Work
April 12, 2016

63/240

I strongly considered another 45 minutes of sleep this morning, which would’ve left me driving up to work instead of relaxing on the train. I don’t know where this responsible side of me came from but it’s a rather welcome addition.

I only just now found out that the Surface Pro 3 has a default scaling of 150%, when I set that to 100% the blog is tiny as fuck. I think I’ll work on that for the rest of the trip up. I’m going to let this new theme ride for a while and see what I think of it.

I would be more internet-productive if there was any mobile signal out here. I feel like it’s more correct to blame the USB modem here than Verizon, because my phone has signal for 90% of the ride whereas the modem has signal for…maybe 20%. It’s disappointing to say the least. It’s also free, so I can’t complain too loudly.

Nutanix begins about four hours from now. I’ve gotta figure out how Dell is going to get all the gear from my office to the datacenter. Hopefully we can jack a rolling cart or two or three from somewhere.

I have a couple of “soft skills” pieces I’ve been meaning to write for bluesoul.me and /r/sysadmin, including one about GTD. I think I’m going to hold off until I finish reading Time Management for System Administrators and see what can be adapted there. I’m a couple chapters in and it seems to be rather heavily inspired by GTD. But, maybe there’ll be something good in here just the same.

The other bluesoul.me piece is on the new file server infrastructure, which I might see if CSO Magazine is interested in since this is being built with security in mind first.… (More) “63/240”

Life Work
April 11, 2016

50/240

I really dislike this business of moving offices in the middle of the biggest server implementation in the last five years. Neither us nor the people in the room we’re headed to want to do this right now.

I did manage to snag a pretty sweet 30″ monitor along the way, but I can’t get the full resolution out of it without an adapter. This irritates the piss out of me. The monitor is DVI-D Dual Link. The docking station is also pinned out for DVI-D Dual Link. However, it actually runs as single link, halving the throughput and leaving me with 1/4 of the maximum resolution, so Lenovo could save a quarter on a dock they sell for 300 fucking dollars. This leaves me to have to buy an active DVI-to-DisplayPort adapter for like $125. That’s some shit.

I was pleasantly surprised that I went all day without even the 0mg juice. I might go through a fair amount of chewing gum at this rate, though. Might have to figure out how to buy Doublemint in bulk. Did you notice they stopped the fat packs of gum? Everything’s these slim packs of 15 now, and I swear to god there’s less gum to a stick now, it’s either thinner or smaller, maybe both. I double up on the gum, I’m not a part of your system.

I tuned in to DI today for the first time in ages. They’ve grown up so much, it’s incredible. They also have a lot, and I mean a lot, of advertisements. Pandora seems to have hit on the appropriate price to go ad-free and the number and duration of ads to endure if you’re not a paid subscriber. DI is 40% more, and the ads per hour time is probably six times … (More) “50/240”

Life
April 11, 2016

39/240

If it could warm up just a bit more in the mornings I would be so happy. Like, another 5 degrees so I can skip the jacket? It’s ridiculous to have to bring a jacket home when it’s 81 degrees getting off the train.

I’ve had an odd sort of illness going on. A nice rattling cough, and what felt like asthma after playing some PIU yesterday. The interesting coincidence of it is that it’s coinciding with the last little push to drop vaping. I don’t know if it’s 1% or 100% responsible but I feel like there’s got to be an element of correlation.

Right now it’s been roughly 39 hours with no nicotine in the system. I know roughly what to expect here, it takes about 10 days to get completely out of the system and that for addicts, the worst of it comes over the next two days. I also know that since e-juice uses nicotine isolate rather than the compound that includes whole tobacco alkaloids, the MAOIs that trigger an addictive response are not present. And if there was a “worst of it” to get past, it’s laughably easier than smokers have it.

It’s one thing to have science on your side, and another to actually believe the science. I’ve secretly been dreading this transition even while knowing that it shouldn’t be a problem. And then halfway through Saturday, I just decided to switch to 0mg juice and that was that. I think part of what’s making it easier is that I’m not leaving myself with no options. I actually have my 6mg juice and tank in my coat pocket along with the 0mg juice and tank. It’s there if I decide it’s not going to work. I’d be more than a little disappointed in myself … (More) “39/240”

Life Work
April 8, 2016

Transmission Level: Pitino

Yes, a few things got done here and there today, but overall today went beyond mailing it in, towards something like faxing it in. Never really felt 100%, and there just wasn’t much terribly important going on today anyway. Read-only Friday is especially sacred when you’re shorthanded.

We’re moving offices, by all accounts. Going down two floors, getting the entire ops team in one place is a plus, and it puts us right by a little side-door to get in and out quickly. What I don’t get is that this went from concept to “get your shit and get out” in two days. State government is agonizingly slow in so many other ways, why the rush here? I will be more than mildly inconvenienced here; I have a half-dozen servers and some 10GbE switches in my office to be deployed next week. I’m going to try and stall so they only have to get moved once.

Nutanix is about 12 business hours away from reality. I know the team has been fighting for a hyperconverged solution well before I got here, but it’s going to be crazy to finally have it all come together. I hope my systems guy doesn’t think I’m micromanaging by wanting to be in the datacenter when this goes live. Won’t get another chance at a game-changing deployment for five years, I want to be right in the middle of it.

I don’t know if it’s just from lack of sleep but I’ve had this tic in my eye for days. I’m gonna see if I can catch a half hour nap.… (More) “Transmission Level: Pitino”

Gaming Work
April 8, 2016

Gross Performance

This is the least sleep I’ve managed on a work day, while still making it to work, in quite a long time. Things didn’t really go according to plan for the most part. I did make a purchase last night, the Asus VG248QE gaming monitor. I’d been watching this growing arena of 144Hz monitors with some interest; I knew the science was there for a noticeable improvement over your standard 60Hz or 75Hz display.

Even knowing the science was there, I was not prepared for how dramatic a difference it would be with the right games. The big ones that let the GTX 970 show out was NBA 2K16 and X3: Albion Prelude. There’s a smoothness that I’ve quite literally never seen before in a PC game. And for all the shit people give these 144Hz displays for being washed-out looking, for a TN display it looks incredible even when making full use of the high refresh rate. My plan is to also get a 27-inch (60Hz) IPS display and see how I like it. I’m starting to think I might just want to get another of these, because at some point in the future I’ll have the desk space to run 3 of them and get that sweet triple-monitor gaming experience. It’s an enticing proposition.

DangItBobby was well-received, I do like the /r/sysadmin community and how it leans towards being helpful when it’s sensible to do so. A lot of places have the chance to be helpful and the culture of the place means it’s just shitposting instead.

I’m left with not much to do today, I need to do a little technical writing, some additional instructions to the end-users for something we rolled out. I think I’m going to write a soft-skills piece for bluesoul.me and /r/sysadmin … (More) “Gross Performance”

Nerd Stuff Work
April 7, 2016

That script ain’t right

So I have a code offering today, which I’m calling DangItBobby.ps1. It lets you remotely disable the NIC of a computer given only the username that is logged in. In essence, when in the middle of a ransomware infection, and you see that the owner of all the files is changing to Bobby, you run the script and provide credentials of a local admin account. Then you tell it you’re looking for Bobby, it’ll check AD to make sure that’s a valid account, then check with WMI to see if there’s an explorer.exe process running under Bobby’s context on each computer, which you can narrow down with the first few characters of what the workstation might be. If they’re logged into multiple workstations it’ll let you choose which one to work with. Then it’ll give you a list of NICs and a little information about each one, and let you choose which one to disable.

I hope I don’t need to tell you to be careful running this.… (More) “That script ain’t right”

Nerd Stuff Work
April 5, 2016

The more you know, the less you say.

Pleased to report that Windows 10 hasn’t reduced the Surface Pro 3 to smoldering rubble. In fact, it’s quite a happy upgrade so far. The Verizon USB card seems much happier in 10 than it did in 8.1, and the applications all came over flawlessly so far, quite a feat considering it went all the way from NT6 to NT10. (That’s nerd sarcasm, by the way.)

I was mildly amused by being notified that I’d earned some money from Amazon Affiliates. That would be from my I Miss Grantland project, which runs ad-free and has a page where you can buy books on Amazon from writers featured on the site. The site has been up for about 3 months and has managed something like 104,000 hits. Out of those, about 132 hits were to said book page, representing about 7,000 clickable links. 88 clicks were made (a ~1.3% clickthrough rate) and 7 items were ordered, representing Amazon cutting me a check for almost four dollars. It’s seriously a good thing that the whole thing is automatic and able to run on my shared hosting account, so my only expense is the domain renewal.

It’s not hard to understand why so many sites are fucking littered with ads. All that said, I still run an ad-blocker. Not because I feel people shouldn’t get paid for creating content, but because the current system is a mess and more than a little insecure. E.g., malvertising. It’s one of the great unsolved puzzles of the Web. For a long time, Flash was the enabler of the worst offenders. Now it might be JavaScript. A simple, if regressive, solution would be to standardize on text-based ads, with the use of a 1px transparent image for basic tracking for per-impression based ads. Image-based ads … (More) “The more you know, the less you say.”