Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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Faydra said:
More fun from my day:

I don't know if I should be impressed with this little computer that could or appalled.


The system is an 11 year old Sun T5120 (well past retirement age for this hardware!) with 32gb of RAM with just ~570mb free:

RAM Total 32544.0 Mb
RAM Unusable 726.6 Mb
RAM Kernel 7141.2 Mb
RAM Locked 21481.9 Mb
RAM Used 2614.6 Mb
RAM Avail 579.7 Mb

It appears to have 14 database instances running on it and hasn’t been rebooted in 1668 days (4.5 years).​



Then, as I was marvelling at that one, I found another with 6.8 years of uptime.

SunOS xxxxxxxx 5.10 Generic_147440-23 sun4v sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-T200
$ w
9:50am up 2513 day(s), 1 min(s), 1 user, load average: 4.03, 4.46, 4.94
User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what
xxxxxxxx pts/12 9:49am w​


Wow. Just wow.
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Solaris on SPARC was a wonderful Unix flavour.
 
theprestige said:
Please do me the courtesy of assuming I'm well aware of these arguments, and have made my own choices about how to respond to the situation. I've seen your rant before. Hell, I've ranted your rant before. I don't mind if you dissent, but don't think you're telling me anything I haven't already considered.
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You claim to have made the same rant yourself, yet you used the word "google" as a verb (instead of a more generic "search") eight times in the text I quoted. it seems like you're very comfortable with using their services.

Just because you understand this doesn't mean everyone does. That's one of the reasons forums exist: to introduce people to new ideas. Even if the ideas are negative ones, such as "Pychic mediums are frauds" or "Google is not good."
 
erlando said:
Yeah well... I tried DuckDuckGo and some others I forgot the name of. Common for them all was that especially for technical stuff they sucked. Big time. So.. As long as Google does the trick better, Google it is.
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My experience is I very rarely can't find results with DDG, but the technical stuff I look for is computer related and they do well on that. They may well be less useful in other broad subject areas.

In fact, a couple of times in the last few months I've unblocked Google from my /etc/hosts file so I could search for something there and was astonished at how poor results were. It was almost like "we think you're actually looking for <something slightly different> so we'll give you those results instead."
 
One problem I have with internet searching for the answer to a problem is that the first several choices I get are often posts from various forums saying "I'm having the same problem!" No help at all.

I usually know enough to skip over those and get to a viable solution eventually.
 
Blue Mountain said:
You claim to have made the same rant yourself, yet you used the word "google" as a verb (instead of a more generic "search") eight times in the text I quoted. it seems like you're very comfortable with using their services.
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A lot more comfortable now than I used to be. My point is that I get where you're coming from, because I used to be there myself. I'm not there still, obviously.
 
catsmate said:
Solaris on SPARC was a wonderful Unix flavour.
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That is the only unix box I ever touched. It was a magic machine at the time and it had its own room and its own minder. I had to schedule time on the machine or Humingbird in remotely from my PC (which was less magical) but oh I loved that beast.
 
arthwollipot said:
Things I wish more people knew, part MCMLXXVICBNDP:

Your password will expire 3 months (or however long it is) to the minute after you last changed it. If you changed it at 09:50 last time, it will expire at 09:50 this time. If you are logged on at that time, you'll suddenly start losing access to things.

Change your password no less than a full day before it says it's going to need to be changed.
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Ours start to nag when your password has 10 days left. Through experience I've found it's best to wait until Mondays to change it, I have had to change on a Thursday and managed to forgot it over the weekend :o
 
Blue Mountain said:
RANT! Gah! I hate Google! I detest their deep tendrils in the web, their omnipresent code snippets in damned near every page I visit, and their creepy tendency to grab as much information about me and my browsing habits as they can get their filthy hands on. I despise the fact that in order to use a lot of sites I have to solve an idiot Google ReCaptcha, which drive me nuts and which binds me to their Terms of Service in addition to the site's.

Google is an advertising and privacy sucking company first and a search provider second. To a huge degree the omnipresent advertising and tracking that's made the modern web damned near unusable can be traced back to Google and their business practices.

And I really hate it when people use the word "google" as a verb to mean a "web search." Not that it's unprecedented; several common words in English originated as corporate trademarks. But to see people, especially computer techs, casually using it to mean "searching" makes me cringe, almost as if they were talking about "*******" when they mean "black people."
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I suspect that you're fighting a losing battle there.
 
Mongrel said:
Ours start to nag when your password has 10 days left. Through experience I've found it's best to wait until Mondays to change it, I have had to change on a Thursday and managed to forgot it over the weekend :o
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Here's a fun fact: I have never forgotten a work password. In my thirty years in the computer-enabled workforce I have never needed to have a password reset. Not even once. And I don't use crap passwords, either. I used to, but not for about twenty years.
 
arthwollipot said:
Here's a fun fact: I have never forgotten a work password. In my thirty years in the computer-enabled workforce I have never needed to have a password reset. Not even once. And I don't use crap passwords, either. I used to, but not for about twenty years.
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Have you checked the basement for pods?
 
Blue Mountain said:
My experience is I very rarely can't find results with DDG, but the technical stuff I look for is computer related and they do well on that. They may well be less useful in other broad subject areas.

In fact, a couple of times in the last few months I've unblocked Google from my /etc/hosts file so I could search for something there and was astonished at how poor results were. It was almost like "we think you're actually looking for <something slightly different> so we'll give you those results instead."
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Admittedly it's been a while since I tried DuckDuckGo. They absolutely horrificly sucked at the time. They might have gotten better. I wouldn't know.

A quick comparison I just made using some of the things I typed into Google the past week shows that DuckDuckGo has an overwhelming bias towards StackOverflow. First batch of results is almost exclusively SO. Google has SO links on the first page but also several blogs and relevant MSDN links.

I like SO. But not like DuckDuckGo likes SO.

I'll stick with Google.

ETA: Sorry for derail. Now back to the regular scheduled IT support venting.. :D
 
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Dr. Keith said:
That is the only unix box I ever touched. It was a magic machine at the time and it had its own room and its own minder. I had to schedule time on the machine or Humingbird in remotely from my PC (which was less magical) but oh I loved that beast.
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Indeed it was (and is) excellent. Stable, efficient and powerful. I still have a couple of SPARCs in storage.
Back in the day ('90s) we had labs full of SPARCStations, plus units for specific devices like NMR machines.
 
erlando said:
A quick comparison I just made using some of the things I typed into Google the past week shows that DuckDuckGo has an overwhelming bias towards StackOverflow. First batch of results is almost exclusively SO. Google has SO links on the first page but also several blogs and relevant MSDN links.
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I found google kept pushing parasite sites like expertsexchange (and boy did I misread that first time) that repost stuff from other sites.
 
Mongrel said:
Ours start to nag when your password has 10 days left. Through experience I've found it's best to wait until Mondays to change it, I have had to change on a Thursday and managed to forgot it over the weekend :o
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At my last two workplaces, despite some arbitrary restrictions on password characters, I was able to use the same password (a reasonably secure one) and just change the digit at the end each time I was required to choose a new one. I have never divulged a personal password, despite the IT department routinely asking for it if they ever had to work on my laptop (which was against the published security guidelines).
 
erlando said:
Admittedly it's been a while since I tried DuckDuckGo. They absolutely horrificly sucked at the time. They might have gotten better. I wouldn't know.

A quick comparison I just made using some of the things I typed into Google the past week shows that DuckDuckGo has an overwhelming bias towards StackOverflow. First batch of results is almost exclusively SO. Google has SO links on the first page but also several blogs and relevant MSDN links.

I like SO. But not like DuckDuckGo likes SO.

I'll stick with Google.

ETA: Sorry for derail. Now back to the regular scheduled IT support venting.. :D
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The reason Google's results are better than DuckDuckGo's is that Google knows you and knows what you're looking for.
 
zooterkin said:
At my last two workplaces, despite some arbitrary restrictions on password characters, I was able to use the same password (a reasonably secure one) and just change the digit at the end each time I was required to choose a new one. I have never divulged a personal password, despite the IT department routinely asking for it if they ever had to work on my laptop (which was against the published security guidelines).
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I like long passwords, preferrably the CorrectHorseBatteryStaple kind. At my current job they have a password management system that will ask you to change your password ever so often. This system limits the password to 8 letters, 2 characters and no punctuation... :rolleyes:

Funny thing is, it is possible to "circumvent" this system by changing your password using the ordinary Windows functionality. So I can have my 24 character password anyway.

At least IT doesn't ask for passwords. Not that I would tell them.
 
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