Virtual Linux server Install... Must Check Media for weeping angels...


  • FoxDev

    the title pretty much says it all, had to share this though.

    so my buddy works as security for a local firm, and the gig he's got right now is to provide security for a tech business. He was a comp sci major for a while before money became an issue and he dropped out.

    anyway, he just called me about a conversation he just had with a late working tech at the gig. tech was installing some Ubuntu VMs.

    turns out the tech was having the VMs do a disc integrity check as one might if installing form a physical CD to make sure the disk is readable and the install won't crap out half way through due to a scratch.

    he was doing that on every install, to an ISO image... because the install process asked him if he wanted to do so (the default was no btw)



  • Or you know, clone the first Ubuntu install and just change the hostname if one is setting up multiple VMs at the same time.


  • FoxDev

    or with the newer server installs you can even have the first one set up a tftp server and install them all at once multicast style.


  • Banned

    You know, most people click "yes" in each and every dialog box they encounter in life. No matter if it's default or not.


  • FoxDev

    i'm aware of that. i expect my computer technicians to have a modicum of common sense and think about things a bit.

    it's like a basic requirement for the job!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    it's like a basic requirement for the job!

    Apparantly[1] not.

    [1] See what I did there?


  • FoxDev

    if you want to get hired by me it is!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    You don't know--there could be a cosmic ray!



  • You never know when that virtual CD will get a virtual scratch on it.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Some people really do not think through what they are doing. If he did it once, I might give him a pass. I believe that part of the process is calculating an MD5 hash of the disc (disc image in this case) and verifying the integrity that way. True, it would be easier to do that on a download before uploading it to a CIFS/NFS ISO library, but on the first install I might give him a pass.

    Doing it everytime, because he does not know WTF it is actually doing, that is pretty messed up.

    Of course, not just installing once and then cloning and changing the hostname is TRWTF. What hypervisor was he using? VMWare and XenServer both do automated installs for Ubuntu and other common distros (not sure about Hyper-V, don't work with it much), that would be another viable alternative, that would be slower, but a hell of a lot more intelligent way of going about it than running disc integrity checks on VM installs...

    Edit: I just remembered a WTFery story that is on par with this one...

    We are frequently tasked to assist on-site IT support for other companies. We get brought in when they are in over their heads, or they need more manpower, etc. One day a technician of mine calls me and tells me that one of the guys they are supposed to be assisting is moving VMs from one host to another with Acronis. It took me a second to realize what he was talking about, and he had to explain it to me because the WTFery level was so high on this one.

    The technician was plugging in a USB external hard drive, booting the VM into Acronis and taking an image of it, then he would move the drive to the new box and do a restore just like you would with a bare metal install. My tech showed him what server pools and storage migrations were (they had paid for one of the high levels of XenServer before it went open-source) and he was done before the end of the day. If he had kept treating it like a bare metal install, it might have taken him a week.


  • FoxDev

    @Intercourse said:

    Doing it everytime, because he does not know WTF it is actually doing, that is pretty messed up.

    according to my friend it was for every install.
    @Intercourse said:
    Of course, not just installing once and then cloning and changing the hostname is TRWTF. What hypervisor was he using? VMWare and XenServer both do automated installs for Ubuntu and other common distros (not sure about Hyper-V, don't work with it much), that would be another viable alternative, that would be slower, but a hell of a lot more intelligent way of going about it than running disc integrity checks on VM installs...

    that information is not available. this is a THIRD hand story....sorry.



  • @mott555 said:

    You never know when that virtual CD will get a virtual scratch on it.

    Virtually never?



  • Meh. I've gotten cdc errors on ISOs before after they were good for some time.
    That was a sign for me to move everything off the physical drive before it failed.

    But I've never said yes to checking the media for an ISO.
    I've seen people at my work do that for a remotely mounted iLO install.
    Why they want to have a machine remotely verify the disc before installing it (pretty much doubling data transfer) is beyond my understanding.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Nprz said:

    cdc errors on ISOs

    I'd be perturbed if my ISOs developed Ebola!



  • Filed under: Superscript is hard[1]

    [1]No it isn't

    Although I'll give you a pass. Disco doesn't use reddit ^=superscript Markdown notation.



  • Woosh …



  • CRC is what I meant.



  • @accalia said:

    if you want to get hired by me it is!

    I take it Jacob won't be getting a gig with you then?


  • FoxDev

    for a tech job, nope.

    if i want an awesome new barn, yes



  • I had no idea you were so prejudiced.


  • FoxDev

    is individual X capable of performing the job I would be hiring them for?

    if the answer is yes they will be considered for the job; if the answer is no they will not be.

    I fail to see how this is prejudice as i don't give a pair of dingo's kidneys what colour, race, creed, sex/gender (or whatever the hip young kids are calling it these days), criminal record (so long as it doesn't impact their ability to perform the job) or species individual X is/has, i care whether they can do the job.

    in Jacob's case he is unqualified for a job in IT and thus would not be considered for that job. He is, however, apparently bloody amazing at putting up a barn and so would be considered for such a position.



  • The way we do this is to have a clone-able template volume available on the SAN, when we need a new container we just clone this image, login to it from the host, after which the selected template will make the necessary changes to this template (it will do things like lookup the A and AAAA-records for the given hostname and write them to the /etc/network/interfaces file).

    There is a nightly cronjob that actually starts the template and installs updates, so that the template stays current. All in all, creating a new container takes around 2-3 minutes.

    Doing it manually is too error-prone and slow.



  • @accalia said:

    in Jacob's case he is unqualified for a job in IT and thus would not be considered for that job. He is, however, apparently bloody amazing at putting up a barn and so would be considered for such a position.

    How do you know he's "amazing at putting up a barn?" Just because he's Amish? Talk about stereotyping! Does every Amish man need to be good at building a barn? Maybe he's working in IT because he's really bad at traditional construction. You don't know.

    When did this website become so full of prejudice? Really, it used to be a forum of such refinement and high-class character. It's gone downhill since such fine members as mobiuswilters left.


  • FoxDev

    @scrib said:

    How do you know he's "amazing at putting up a barn?"

    i don't. but the linked video makes the assertion.

    Additionally the Amish are generally known for their woodworking skills, among many other skills. I also note the fact that Jacob's took kit includes only woodworking tools. Given these two facts I think it reasonable to assume that he has some degree of skills in woodworking.

    Of course if i were to actually hire him to put up a barn i would need more information, but what little i already know/have inferred would be enough to get him past the first level of interview


  • BINNED

    @accalia said:

    I fail to see how this is prejudice as i don't give a pair of dingo's kidneys what colour, race, creed, sex/gender (or whatever the hip young kids are calling it these days), criminal record (so long as it doesn't impact their ability to perform the job) or species individual X is/has, i care whether they can do the job.

    I think @flabdablet was just doing a little friendly trolling.

    To your point, though, there are people who see any distribution that doesn't match the general population as evidence of discrimination. I got into an extended argument with @snooder about this on the old CS forum about this. I gave what I thought was an excellent counterexample: I was the only African-American in an amateur orchestra. The key point was that the orchestra by policy didn't do auditions; you just showed up with an instrument and sat wherever you wanted. Given that policy, I decided that it wasn't the fault of anyone there that the numbers didn't match the general population. @snooder took the position that it wasn't equal opportunity because there should have been an outreach program aimed at the inner city to get more African-Americans interested in classical music.


  • FoxDev

    there's a difference between what equal opportunity is and what people with too much money on their hands say it is.

    equal opportunity is not making sure any and all subsets of a population (jobs, after school activities, sports teams, college enrollment, etc) match the overall population's proportions of gender/sex (or whatever we're calling it today), race, creed, age, etc

    equal opportunity is, that no matter what gender/sex (or whatever we're calling it today), race, creed, age, etc applies for a position in any subgroup of the population (jobs, teams, etc) they will be given THE EXACT SAME CONSIDERATION AS ANY OTHER INDIVIDUAL WOULD

    this means that i can be equal opportunity employer and still have no [Ethnicity X] on my team if the reason there are no [Ethnicity X] on my team is any of the following:

    • No one of [Ethnicity X] has applied for a job
    • People of [Ethnicity X] have applied but have not met the minimum job skills required
    • People of [Ethnicity X] have applied and were found to have the minimum job skills required, but a decision was made to select a different, higher qualified, candidate.
    • People of [Ethnicity X] have applied and were offered the position at a fair wage as would be offered to any other ethnicity given their skills and level of experience, however the candidates declined to accept the offer.
    • People of [Ethnicity X] have worked on my team before and have chosen to leave to pursue other opportunities and their replacement if any was not of [Ethnicity X] because of one of the reasons on this list
    • People of [Ethnicity X] have worked on my team before and have been fired for cause and their replacement if any was not of [Ethnicity X] because of one of the reasons on this list
    • People of [Ethnicity X] have worked on my team before and have been downsized due to shrinking business chosen by a fair and impartial selection process.
    • and that's about it... <thinking> yep.

  • BINNED

    @accalia said:

    equal opportunity is, that no matter what gender/sex (or whatever we're calling it today), race, creed, age, etc applies for a position in any subgroup of the population (jobs, teams, etc) they will be given THE EXACT SAME CONSIDERATION AS ANY OTHER INDIVIDUAL WOULD

    That is in fact what Joe Q Public thinks equal opportunity means. The problem is that some of the people you mention with too much money on their hands hold government positions.


  • FoxDev

    or have a pack of ravenous lawyers on a very loose leash and are not afraid to let them off the leash entirely whenever they damn well feel like it.

    After much thinking about it I have decided that if i could add one law to the books, just one it would be thus:

    The plaintiff in any non-criminal lawsuit shall be responsible for all fees incurred by the plaintiff and the defendant in bringing the case to court. This includes all lawyers fees for the defendant. Should the plaintiff win a ruling in their favor the defendant will then be responsible for repaying to the plaintiff the value of the fees incurred by the defense.
    

    there would probably need to be a lot of extra lawyery words i'd have to add to it but that would be the gist of it. you want to sue you have to pay for both sides, if you win you get paid back for the opposing sides defense.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @accalia said:

    The plaintiff in any non-criminal lawsuit shall be responsible for all fees incurred by the plaintiff and the defendant in bringing the case to court...

    This makes prosecuting cases to correct government abuses very, very costly. Maybe you should add in an exception for non-criminal cases that aim to correct grave injustices or government abuses.


  • FoxDev

    Given that the chances of me being able to actually enact such a law are nill, or at least incalculably close to nill, i think it's a moot point.

    Still will take under advisement.



  • @accalia said:

    in Jacob's case he is unqualified for a job in IT

    But how could that be? He interviewed so well!



  • @antiquarian said:

    That is in fact what Joe Q Public thinks equal opportunity means. The problem is that some of the people you mention with too much money on their hands hold government positions.

    </troll>

    Seems to me that until bigotry and prejudice actually stop being things, there will be a need to make sure that equal opportunity is actually being offered as it should be.

    It's the ongoing existence of bigotry, prejudice and unexamined privilege that make (a): "please justify the fact that the demographics of this organization don't match those of the population at large" a better default regulator's position than (b): "we'll just assume everything is unicorns and rainbows and that you folks really are running a straight meritocracy here until we're given good reason to think otherwise".

    Whining about "reverse racism" and "equal opportunity gone mad" helps prop up bigotry, prejudice and unexamined privilege. And that, in turn, keeps putting off the day when position (b) will cause less harm and right more wrongs than position (a).


  • BINNED

    @flabdablet said:

    Whining about "reverse racism" and "equal opportunity gone mad" helps prop up bigotry, prejudice and unexamined privilege. And that, in turn, keeps putting off the day when position (b) will cause less harm and right more wrongs than position (a).

    I haven't seen anyone here doing that, so nice straw man, but there's a good point behind it. It's part of the huge game "Let's You and Him Fight" which is American politics. One of the reasons that racism will never go away is that there is a group of people who have an interest in it continuing to be an issue.



  • Who might that be?


  • BINNED

    There are obvious suspects (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and every gender/race/etc studies professor), who would need to get real jobs if discrimination was no longer a thing, but I think it goes deeper than that.

    To get an idea, let's start with this question: what changes would you have to see in the world for you to say that privilege was no longer a thing?



  • Unpossible, I think. There are always ways in which I'm going to be better off than you, and ways in which you're going to be better off than me; privilege is always circumstantial.

    Best we can do, it seems to me, is remain aware that privilege is always a thing, and remind ourselves that when people whose lived experiences are worse than our own in some respect report what those experiences are like for them, often the best thing to do is just STFU and listen and learn - as opposed to "correcting" their point of view based on some kind of guesswork-based projection of our own lives into their circumstances.

    The changes I would need to see in the world in order to believe that privilege was no longer a problem would need to involve both universal application of that principle, and a considerable blunting of the extent to which multiple forms of privilege occur in clusters.


  • BINNED

    @flabdablet said:

    Unpossible, I think. There are always ways in which I'm going to be better off than you, and ways in which you're going to be better off than me; privilege is always circumstantial.

    So the movement has essentially set up the goal posts somewhere they will never be reached. I think we have our answer.

    @flabdablet said:

    Best we can do, it seems to me, is remain aware that privilege is always a thing, and remind ourselves that when people whose lived experiences are worse than our own in some respect report what those experiences are like for them, often the best thing to do is just STFU and listen and learn - as opposed to "correcting" their point of view based on some kind of guesswork-based projection of our own lives into their circumstances.

    You mean like this?

    tl;dr: Someone with experiences worse than average complains about them online and gets the exact opposite of what you propose. So much for universal application.



  • @antiquarian said:

    the movement has essentially set up the goal posts somewhere they will never be reached

    Which movement would that be?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    and that's about it... <thinking> yep.

    For larger organisations, there's also more subtle things like whether the job openings are being advertised in a non-discriminatory fashion. The aim is to get to equality of opportunity, modulo reasonable likelihood of the person taking the job in the first place (so grumbling about jobs in Adelaide, South Australia not being advertised in poor neighbourhoods of Baltimore, MD won't really cut much ice) and to let peoples' successes and failures be their own.

    Put it like this, if you've got an equal opportunity hiring policy but you only ever advertise the jobs in the local country club's members' magazine, you've really not done a great job at advertising in a non-discriminatory way! (Even if the positions are appropriate for that clientele, you'd still be unfairly excluding similarly able people from elsewhere.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @accalia said:

    The plaintiff in any non-criminal lawsuit shall be responsible for all fees incurred by the plaintiff and the defendant in bringing the case to court. This includes all lawyers fees for the defendant. Should the plaintiff win a ruling in their favor the defendant will then be responsible for repaying to the plaintiff the value of the fees incurred by the defense.

    You'd be better off throwing in some “reasonable”s in there, and another clause to make it more symmetric. If the dispute is over a few hundred bucks, the defendant should have some incentive to keep costs to an appropriate level, instead of hiring a $10k/hour lawyer…

    In the UK (well, strictly in England and Wales), generally thought of as a “loser pays” jurisdiction, the awarding of the winner's costs against the losing party is a Remedy in Equity, not a normal part of statute law. In particular, it is required to balance the injustice of the case winner being out of pocket for their costs in prosecuting/defending against the injustice of inflicting those costs on the losing party. (It also can't be used to allow the winner to make a profit; they're very distinct from fines or compensation.) The effect is to encourage the parties to bring largely balanced and appropriate legal power, making being the losing party not too horrible. But the costs tend to go up a lot once you get into appeals, especially if the judge thinks the appellant is being silly and pig-headed obstinate…



  • @accalia, is that Daniel Jackson in the OP?


  • FoxDev

    NFC. thats the trouble with using GIS as much as i do and being surprisingly ignorant of modern americana (ironic, isn't it? i've lived here all my life, or at least off of it that wasn't online)

    i think i searched for facepalm and grabbed the first one that i didn't remember using here.



  • Modern? That show went off the air about a decade ago, give or take a decade.


  • FoxDev

    if it's not sci-fi or *MASH my knowlege of americana is spotty at best, and i havent kept up too well with the scifi since about 2005 when we dropped cable.



  • @accalia said:

    if it's not sci-fi or MASH* my knowlege of americana is spotty at best

    A lot of cultural references here go over my head. I just smile (or laugh, if other people are laughing) and pretend I know what we're talking about.


  • FoxDev

    i tend to make the woosh hand gesture but not ask for clarification, if clarification is provided well and good, otherwise it was not meant to be ans we move on.



  • @accalia said:

    i tend to make the woosh hand gesture

    I try to avoid letting on that I've whooshed; I'd rather not get that badge. IRL, there's no badge involved, so meh; the references are usually to movies, TV shows or music that I'm not interested in, so I don't consider the fact that I didn't get it doesn't bother me much.


  • FoxDev

    i'm a pretty open person.

    there's a lot of things i won't tell you unless you ask about them, but precious little i won't tell you if you do ask about it.

    I live on a "if you asked the question you deserve the truth" system, which is why it is always a good idea to think carefully if i ever ask you "are you sure you want the answer to that?" because that's the only warning you are going to get that i think you might not like the answer.



  • @accalia said:

    if it's not sci-fi or *MASH my knowlege of americana is spotty at best, and i havent kept up too well with the scifi since about 2005 when we dropped cable.

    Stargate SG-1 is kinda sci-fi ish.


  • FoxDev

    hmm.... true, never got too into it when it was on air (on the channels i get anyway) been meaning to sit down and watch it one of these days though.


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