AFlyingGideon

Didn't know what ROM was in front of family

Posted by throw-away-2025rev2@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 397 comments

Didn't know what ROM was in front of family

Posted by throw-away-2025rev2@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 397 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

> A normal user Wikipedia isn't really helping, so: what is this? Some sort of random number generator connected to a robotic effector, perhaps? BTW I haven't disks of Linux. I store images on a PXE/DHCP/TFTP/HTTP server I call my "install server". Does that make me this "a normal user" you mention?

Didn't know what ROM was in front of family

Posted by throw-away-2025rev2@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 397 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

> floppy disk versus a DVD-RW Floppy disks became decreasing floppy over time. At this point, I call the multi-terrabyte SATA HDDs I have sitting on shelves "floppies" because they're external portable storage.

Small business owner—built my own IT stack, now out of my depth. What’s the right off-ramp?

Posted by nschafler@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 118 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

You're hardly the only person who's grow a business's infrastructure in this way. Find a vendor that's had experience with this type of transition. They'll know how to extract what you know.

What is your favourite go-to response when a user states "but I'm not tech savvy"?

Posted by FluffyMumbles@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 319 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

> learned helplessness That's certainly true in general. Also feeding this is limiting the tools people can use to solve their own problems... but that's sometimes necessary. I'm currently dealing with a "developer" who - with help of Claude, naturally - wanted to allocate all available space to the wrong volume. If it were someone else, he'd likely have access to the tools for this. In his case, that would be asking for trouble.

What is your favourite go-to response when a user states "but I'm not tech savvy"?

Posted by FluffyMumbles@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 319 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

One presumes that someone hired for a non-trivial office job is more capable than a fast food vendor given the pay differential. It is therefore reasonable to have higher expectations.

What IT problem still feels weirdly unsolved?

Posted by GreatGrumbles@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 41 comments

Why are developers some of the most IT inept users?

Posted by sccm_sometimes@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 783 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

This makes me sad. One of my kids entered the Java world this way. Alas, he defected to C#. His older brother has also moved away from Java, but to Python. That's okay with me.

Why are developers some of the most IT inept users?

Posted by sccm_sometimes@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 783 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

> Vlans setup for things like CCTV monitoring, which can be piped out a secondary wan connection. So you've at least one additional router beyond your description. That makes having two vlans more understandable in that the two have different gateway hardware. This could be done w/o the segmentation, but it's probably easier this way. I'm more used to vlans being used for security reasons. Effectively, vlan A sees everything outside itself as less trusted, whether another local vlan B or the Internet. Needless to say, firewalls sit between vlans. I do this even in my own home. The wifi network to which guests connect has a firewall between it and my alarm system vlan or my servers' vlan etc. My kids also have their own vlan, but that's just me being lazy and making traffic balancing easier. Once, I believe, I exploited vlan segmentation to cheapen bridging but that was years ago (when I was helping to migrate a part of a data center).

Why are developers some of the most IT inept users?

Posted by sccm_sometimes@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 783 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

> potential vlans, single router Why segment the network into separate vlans if there's no need to protect devices on one from those on another? This just pushes more traffic through your router which is forwarding packets between those vlans.

Had an interview yesterday. . .

Posted by dogcmp6@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 270 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

Even without the other information, this is a _strange_ question. The interviewee didn't know the person that left. Didn't know details about the job beyond the superficial information presented. Didn't know anything. How can the interviewee be expected to answer? There's a missing piece to this. Is the interviewer building a case against this structure for the job? Is this a test of the interviewee's level of need for the job?

User forgot their laptop password. Had it saved in a Notepad file. On the desktop. Behind the password.

Posted by Cordannis@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 169 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

> They’re allowed to not understand extremely basic functionalities of a device they use every single day I know a pilot who nearly turned his aircraft into a glider (and actually did so for a minute) because he didn't understand an extremely basic bit of functionality.

Caused a big outage at work- how do I move forward?

Posted by VOXX_theLock@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 733 comments

Lost my laptop. Backups saved the data, but not the sticker history.

Posted by Xned@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 139 comments

Wondering about learning languages programming.

Posted by OkPerformer3262@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 26 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

This is a terrific perspective. Learning bottom-up this way is educationally great. I almost did this (DEC-10 assembler followed FORTRAN), and it worked well for me. This path is not, however, going to provide early gratification. Some won't prefer this path as a result. It also means learning machines before software engineering. Some may argue against this, but I believe it works: the whys behind software engineering are likely to be more clear. However, since this is close to the path I followed I may be biased.

Everyone is telling me to change my field (IT) and learn a trade.

Posted by ybicurious@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 376 comments

Everyone is telling me to change my field (IT) and learn a trade.

Posted by ybicurious@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 376 comments

Lost my laptop. Backups saved the data, but not the sticker history.

Posted by Xned@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 139 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

I think stickers are somewhat silly... it is similar to the consumers or vendors who believe that the color of the computer's case is important. I will admit to one exception, though. There's a staff member in our school district who has either a full-sized sticker or a case which causes her laptop to look like one of those black and white composition notebooks we used as kids or in labs. As far as I'm concerned, that should be standard for all district devices.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

Sort of. It would be more accurate to state that they put a feature on the front end of their DNS management which appears to be this but really isn't. According to the cited article, their authoritative servers never return this "virtual record". I recall other vendors doing this but with different names for these "virtual records" such as ALIAS or ANAME.

Our hosting provider terminated our VM for "DNS tunneling." Turns out we just had no DNS cache.

Posted by Gullible-Angle4206@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 72 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

The lessons should have been learned before building an application which acts like an attack. This is what comes of the "anyone can code" nonsense that was bad even before AI opened that trap door even wider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt%27s_Script_Archive and PHP's `mail()` function were bad enough. It's not the 90s.

Our hosting provider terminated our VM for "DNS tunneling." Turns out we just had no DNS cache.

Posted by Gullible-Angle4206@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 72 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>Terminating a scraper running these sort of numbers seems like good internet stewardship. I was thinking the same. Permitting such behavior is also a path to finding the address space viewed as toxic.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>Companies are doing everything they can to replace humans. https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/hr-technology/businesses-rush-to-rehire-staff-after-regretted-ai-driven-cuts/568292

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>the inefficiencies of the Microsoft ecosystem keep a lot more people in their jobs This is funny as I just had a conversation with a financial planner who argued that the equity market was too efficient to "game" for profit but that the greater inefficiencies in the fixed income market made for better opportunities. I'm not used to thinking of efficiency as something to be avoided.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

Yes. I could also point out, since others have mentioned `systemd`, that a restart can trigger a cascade via dependencies. I coded a systemd configuration to set up the firewall/routing logic for a podman container recently and about half the time I'd "restart" instead of "reload" as i was building it ... which would cause the container to also be restarted.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

Also... that's not the most common error I've seen in zone files. That would be forgetting the terminating period on record values where it's needed. Perhaps second most common would be creating a CNAME record with the same name as one or more other records.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

I'm a long-time UNIX user who manages Linux system and would never touch anything MSFT, but "prefers Mongo" is a red flag to me. There may be good reasons to avoid a relational database in your case but "prefers" doesn't seem like one of them.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

Assuming "reloading the application" means restarting it... There are plenty of services which can be told to reread their configurations without restarting. In many cases this doesn't matter much, but some services are much quicker to reread their configuration than fully restart. I added the caveat at the start of this message because many applications call rereading their configuration "reloading", so there's some ambiguity.

So my company is switching half our Windows servers to Linux....

Posted by A_SingleSpeeder@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 593 comments

Is it normal to understand code when reading it but completely freeze when writing it yourself?

Posted by liamkeats@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 81 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>Don't try to solve a project all at once. In fact, that's how any nontrivial software is written. Break the problem down into smaller problems, choose one, repeat until there's a small problem that can be solved. Then the next, the next, etc., combining the simple solutions into increasingly complex solutions until the problem is solved. This approach to problem solving - divide and conquer - is useful well beyond software engineering. However, be warned that not every decomposition will work. Sometimes, one ends up in a dead end and backtracking is needed. This will also look very familiar when learning algorithms. Software engineering involves remarkably few techniques that we reuse over and over and over... including the technique of reuse.

Running equipment past end of life - what's the oldest in your environment?

Posted by pinghome@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 183 comments

why does devs tend to choose a macbook over a windows/linux laptop?

Posted by theusrl@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 152 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>I think the real reason in companies isthat they often don't offer Linux machines in the first place. I suspect that it's also that K-12 schools tend to use microsoft or apple. People often fall into the trap of believing that what they've learned first is "intuitive". There's something of a controversy floating around parts of edutech about Chromebooks, in fact, with some worried that the obscuring of too much detail is preventing students from learning. A common manifestation of this is the complaint "young people don't even know how to download and save a file". I'm not sure i agree that this is a problem as long as interested students have the opportunity to go beyond these hand-holding devices. Plenty of members of our FRC have laptops running a Linux distribution, for example. Meanwhile, those not interested in the details of these tools have easily used tools facilitating the learning of other things. Where I become unsure is that the Chromebooks, in many districts, are loaned to students at no cost. The laptops running Linux require a family to invest. What of families that cannot afford this? There are organizations which try to help mitigate this divide, but they're not ubiquitous.

why does devs tend to choose a macbook over a windows/linux laptop?

Posted by theusrl@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 152 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>Not everyone is born with 10 years of experience That applies to all skills related to software development, so it seems moot. If someone wants to be a practitioner of a trade, they learn the trade. They learn the tools of the trade. A carpenter arguing that he or she wasn't born with the skill to use a measuring tape as an excuse shouldn't be permitted to wield a hammer. >MacOS is beginner friendly It's really not except for those who learn it first. We're not born with UI skills either. As a side note, I've seen numerous apple users with a desktop messy and overloaded enough to know that they're not using their UI in an efficient manner. I've seen this with users of microsoft and linux too. That suggests to me that there can be bad users of any UI. A hammer does not a carpenter make. >The "getting technical" part can come later And then they're ready to be professional software developers. What you're describing as "frontend", without "getting technical", is just graphics (not even reaching the level of UI or HCI (for which those technical skills are necessary but not sufficient)). >It's like learning to drive That's a good metaphor. The person without "getting technical" uses the tool. A mechanic - who's learned more - works on the tool.

why does devs tend to choose a macbook over a windows/linux laptop?

Posted by theusrl@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 152 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

I've some issue with a software developer who doesn't "want to get technical". Fedora for laptops here, too, with RHEL-based servers. The workstation/server divide keeps shrinking, first running server distributions via KVM and, more recently, using docker or podman.

Are certain certificates not worth it because AI?

Posted by TheFrozenDude07@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 41 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

In the past, we've sent people to Cisco training and they'd return having learned useful material. This is a number of years ago, though, so it may have changed.

How many old timers in here?

Posted by aliesterrand@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 2412 comments

Learn to Speak

Posted by theMightBoop@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 454 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>In tech support roles, you interact with customers at different levels (end users, technical customers, and all points in between). Yes. I once dropped an upstream peer (a vendor) because I wasn't permitted to speak to anyone who'd not ask how to spell "BGP" when writing up a ticket. The company had just been acquired, and actual engineers were no longer accessible. I understand that this isn't exactly OP's point - with which I agree and would extend to include written communication - but it's not completely unrelated, either. A service vendor (whether internal or not) should be able to communicate effectively with customers at various levels.

What’s your first command when a Linux box feels off?

Posted by saymepony@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 109 comments

Anyone read this 49 day SSL expiration thing and think they would rather just retire?

Posted by HJForsythe@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 1070 comments

Machine Learning engineer needed help...

Posted by Technical--Jaguar@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 121 comments

My manager just "fixed" a production server and now I'm the one who has to explain what happened

Posted by Explossives@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 90 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>the manager hitting the big red button exposed a lot of weaknesses in your current system It should also be recalled that there was some event which triggered the desire to reboot and therefore could not be a result of the reboot.

IT Admins 40+, question about glasses 🤓

Posted by muffnman@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 138 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

My eyes are lousy and confusing: astigmatism in one, near in one while far in the other. I therefore cannot speak to off-the-shelf. I didn't ask for "computer lenses" at first. I described the issue, and they were his proposed solution. Since then, though, that's what I've requested.

Large Consulting Firms and Horrible Code

Posted by Super_Refuse8968@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 34 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

I don't know about "on purpose", but I recall one job where the consulting firm spent a good deal of effort tuning the DB server down to the platter level and then built "queries" using "LIMIT 1" and iteration. It worked out for me because i rewrote them as actual queries and sped the application remarkably. Notably, though, the manager kept rehiring that consulting firm. I sometimes think I was unclear in my explanation, or perhaps too polite or forgiving. Other times, I suspect a kickback. I'll never know for sure either way.

IT Admins 40+, question about glasses 🤓

Posted by muffnman@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 138 comments

AFlyingGideon@reddit

>40+? What’s *that* supposed to mean!! I recall a visit to my eye doctor. I mentioned my new difficulty reading my phone screen or books. He looked at my charts and said something like "yes, I can see that." I'm curious about everything, so I asked which of the tests I'd just taken showed this. He told me "your birth date".