PenlessScribe

Tape Drives?

Posted by HiFiSilverFish@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 163 comments

Did everybody lose an unknown number of emails from M365 issues?

Posted by aMazingMikey@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 61 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

My experience sending from Gmail to a domain whose MX servers aren't up is that it won't send you a warning message for several days. And at that point, I don't know how frequently it retries.

Show of hands... Who's dealing the new telnet vulnerability?

Posted by JVBass75@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 71 comments

Do you permit selling or giving old equipment to employees?

Posted by roger_ramjett@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 380 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Our company had an unusual policy: computing equipment was sent to a recycling company who was prohibited from reselling the equipment to our company's employees. I don't know how they enforced this.

Looking for a device to remotely cut power off and on for anything plugged into it, or possibly schedule a power-cycle.

Posted by icansmellcolors@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 45 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

For simple systems we have used WTI products, which you can access with telnet and have a clean menu system designed to be controlled with something like *expect*.

You guys ever think of changing career?

Posted by AxegrinderSWAG@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 405 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

My most recent job was doing on-site admin for a group of users that were mostly work-from-home. It was actually a bit lonely. Many days the only thing I spoke was "thank you" to the bus driver and the cafeteria workers.

Anyone else have regrets about their major choice and or think about going back to college?

Posted by sys_admin321@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 63 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

I never did my masters thesis. Now that I'm retired I think about doing it, but even if they'd readmit me at this point, the $60K/year tuition is a putoff.

Bought RAM in October to dodge price spikes… now I have to return it because “year-end optics”

Posted by icekeuter@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 278 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Our users often had "use it or lose it" money become available late in the year, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the stuff had to be delivered and invoiced by December 15. In some cases the vendors had to deliver empty boxes.

Bought RAM in October to dodge price spikes… now I have to return it because “year-end optics”

Posted by icekeuter@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 278 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Our users often had "use it or lose it" money become available late in the year, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the stuff had to be delivered and invoiced by December 15. In some cases the vendor had to deliver empty boxes.

IT Specialist Simulator

Posted by DntCareBears@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 248 comments

PoE+++?! WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?

Posted by MRMAGOOONTHE5@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 400 comments

Potentially dangerous elevated cabinet

Posted by Brief_Regular_2053@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 202 comments

Is it normal to have so many process running in /opt mount?

Posted by imitation_squash_pro@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 5 comments

Is it normal to have so many process running in /opt mount?

Posted by imitation_squash_pro@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 5 comments

Call from CISA?

Posted by Specialist-Desk-9422@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 50 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

It can arguably take very little to make government cybersecurity take action. I worked at a small division of a 400000 person company. A summer intern's project involved doing traceroutes to everyone in the access log of the division's external webserver. One of these was a .mil site. They considered this an attack and contacted a company executive 12 levels above the intern.

Bug in Rust coreutils rewrite breaks automatic updates in Ubuntu 25.10

Posted by cachemissed@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 300 comments

Do you read recreationally?

Posted by Eliogabalus1@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 161 comments

Our developer says they still do not officially support server 2022 and are still testing. Isn't this a bit long to be testing?

Posted by Normal_Loquat_3869@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 217 comments

How we found a bug in Go's arm64 compiler

Posted by ketralnis@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 37 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

I'm used to seeing the SP saved at a fixed offset from *FP, so at runtime you don't need to keep track of space added to the stack frame due to C VLAs or alloca(), you just move the saved SP to SP before returning. Does ARM mandate doing things differently?

Open TCP/9100???

Posted by Virtual_Low83@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 123 comments

how AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs

Posted by 2minutestreaming@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 7 comments

What do you name your computers

Posted by PhantomNomad@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 580 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

For us, it was $10K per line item. When we bought 30 video cards, they sent us 30 asset tags. We put them on the back of the PCs and they just had to trust that we had installed the cards.

What do you name your computers

Posted by PhantomNomad@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 580 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Bean counters need to find the asset tags quickly. At my past employer, they'd periodically send a few people to our site to check on a thousand servers. It was bad enough that they left the rear doors of my racks (where the fans are) wide open. I don't need them poking through my servers trying to find the manufacturer's service tags.

configure a web server that will last decades - is it feasible?

Posted by Ok_Armadillo_6015@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 55 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

GoDaddy had a nice service awhile back using Apache name-based virtual hosts. They managed the DNS. For around $5/month, you got access to a shared Linux server. Ssh in, copy files to ~/www-docs/, and you're done. There were just a couple of flaws: (a) there were hundreds of sites on each IP, some less than reputable, and McAfee blacklisted the IP I was assigned to. (b) GoDaddy discontinued the service after a few years.

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

Posted by ketralnis@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 17 comments

Policy on people bringing their own laptop.

Posted by Raknaren@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 307 comments

What’s an IT “truth” which other departments assume, that really annoys you?

Posted by SirNo241@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 892 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

The guy in the office next door always used to ask me what we do when people aren't asking us questions in person. "So you just play games?" I had to explain that we're always busy.

when is lunch too fancy ? vendor vent

Posted by LowMight3045@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 60 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

I turned down paid lunches for this reason. If the sales reps needed to eat, we all went to the company cafeteria. I accepted mugs, and just put them in storage because I don't drink coffee. A couple years ago I unearthed a Sun mug, new in box, from around 1990.

Insurance company going to do Internal Pen Test. I attempted to Lock the network down beforehand.

Posted by Electronic_Tap_3625@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 344 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

My brother leased a credit card terminal that did its own security scans. He got fined because his Comcast For Business router had passwordless SNMP on the external interface.

What is going on in Unix with errno's limited nature

Posted by ketralnis@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 5 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

The only weird case I know of is ptrace, which can return -1 even upon success. So with that, you have to do `errno=0;` just before the call to ptrace, then check errno after the call.

emotional toll of working with "dead man walking" coworkers

Posted by e7c2@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 279 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

When I was laid off, we got one month's notice. I decided to take the early retirement option, so I spent that month working rather than looking for another job. But people treated me as if I was going to die any day. I was implementing the OpenShift rollout, and prospective users were asking my boss, right in front of me, whom they should coordinate with.

Printer hack attempt over the phone?

Posted by DefinitelyNotDes@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 25 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Sure, but the scammers calling in don't know what the mark has, they're just hoping it's something that they can make vulnerable. My neighbor who ran an all-Mac shop got calls from "Microsoft support" inviting him to download a Windows RAT.

portable usb c kvm that can be used from my laptop

Posted by Physical-Ad-828@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 14 comments

One of our two data centers got smoked

Posted by _Xephyr_@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 173 comments

What requirements are not commonly found in today's devices that will become mandatory in 5 or 10 years?

Posted by Finn_Storm@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 82 comments

Printer hack attempt over the phone?

Posted by DefinitelyNotDes@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 25 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Maybe roll back the firmware to an old version that can get hit by [Faxsploit](https://www.tenable.com/blog/faxsploit-allows-remote-code-execution-through-hp-all-in-one-printers).

Ever had logging break things in production?

Posted by Fabulous_Bluebird931@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 23 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

We had one group that did cluster computing and sent out logs using Ethernet broadcast. At one point their 16 system cluster saturated a 100mbps network and nobody could login to stop it. They quickly rewrote to use multicast and added a second Ethernet for login access.

Does Linux have some mechanism to prevent data corruption due to power outage?

Posted by birdsintheskies@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 17 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

We had a building-wide UPS that was sick for a few months (affectionately called an IPS), so we had some crashes due to power outages. Ext3 with journaling. If fsck says you have duplicate blocks in two files and offers to fix it, it just copies the duplicate blocks so they aren't shared any more, and you're practically guaranteed that one of those files will be corrupted. Luckily all our important data files had their checksums embedded in the filename, so they were easy to verify.

My after work friend, Marijuana

Posted by livevicarious@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 360 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

I lived half a mile from a shopping center. Almost every night I ate at a restaurant. Italian, Chinese, Subs, Greek diner, Denny's. Then shower and fall asleep watching TV. Didn't have a computer at home to distract me until 20 years into my job.

Worst password policy?

Posted by OptimalCynic@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 337 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

To access HR services, we had to use a "PIN", which required at least one uppercase LETTER. I thought about telling them what PIN stood for, but I don't think HR had much tolerance for being corrected.

People's names in IT systems

Posted by ZAFJB@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 186 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Multics supported overstruck characters almost sixty years ago, reportedly because one of its inventors wanted to login using his properly accented name, Corbató.

Sysadmins that say S-Q-L instead of sequal.

Posted by njaneardude@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 1647 comments

How many computers (working or not) do you have sitting around at home?

Posted by geek_who@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 538 comments

Any ideas for kids day in office?

Posted by pnut815@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 46 comments

Why TCP needs 3 handshakes

Posted by stackoverflooooooow@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 76 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

When we went to restaurants in Quebec, we did the following 3-way handshake to begin communication for the session: Staff: Bonjour. Us: Hello. Staff: Hello.

Has HPE always been this pushy and ignorant?

Posted by DDRDiesel@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 62 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

HP was the only OEM that wouldn't ship us pre-built systems or give us much of a discount. We were a 400K employee US company. DL 360. HP would ship the parts to our VAR, who would assemble the system, (maybe) burn it in, then ship it to us at 6% above their cost. I had to verify with my management that they really wanted to pay more than list price for these things.

arXiv moving from Cornell servers to Google Cloud

Posted by sh_tomer@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 89 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Having it not physically on Cornell's premises is a win. If the administration decides to withhold all Cornell funding unless DEI papers are removed, Cornell can quickly spin off ArXiv.

Planned Power Outage - Shutdown Manually Or Rely On UPS

Posted by clayrogers@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 101 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

We rebooted our systems monthly. Clustered so there wasn't any actual downtime for the services. But we were dependent on upstream servers for a few things that only revealed problems when the entire site was powered down. I was careful not to rely on DNS or on the site-wide LDAP password server, but we used the site-wide NTP server. One time it came up 3600 seconds off, which was just within NTP's default tolerance, so a number of our systems were an hour off. After this, the boss looked into getting hardware NTP servers, but it wasn't clear they could receive radio signals in our sub-basement computer room. Ultimately we decided to sync to the corporate NTP server around 15 hops away.

What made you finally get over your imposter syndrome?

Posted by jenscottrules20@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 170 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Nothing deflates you faster than being laid off in a force reduction plan. Getting great reviews and bonuses every year and suddenly they decide you're in the bottom 10%.

Dealing with a data center eviction

Posted by unquietwiki@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 66 comments

PenlessScribe@reddit

Our AP moved locations and a bunch of payments - paper checks - were late. They had a policy that they won't pay late payment fees. A few months later, one online service cut us off because of this. No notice given to me, the customer who originated the PO. Accounts Payable said they wouldn't pay the fee ($10) even if I authorized them to. Boss said to pay the fee to the vendor with a personal check and voucher it.