3 ms·

I posted this on here a long time ago but NetBSD was always a winner for me. I set up a dialup gateway for a small company in the late 90s on it on a skip dived

by baz00 3y ago

I posted this on here a long time ago but NetBSD was always a winner for me. I set up a dialup gateway for a small company in the late 90s on it on a skip dived Compaq desktop. Forgot about it and moved to somewhere completely different in the industry. Out of the blue about 2010 I think it was I got a call saying that it had stopped working. Figured I better go and look at it for them. Got there and found the disk completely full of logs but still spinning which was a surprise. The failure was the dialup ISP had cancelled their dialup service. I found another one, signed them up for it temporarily and ordered an ADSL line and router for them and swapped that in a couple of weeks later. The compaq was retired. Some trite syslog analysis suggested it managed 7 years of uptime in one stretch killed only by what looked like a power outage. There was no UPS on it.

stevezsa8 3y ago
Nice work.
networked 3y ago
I remember that! Here is your original comment from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503464. I enjoyed that subthread. (I assume you don't mind it being linked to this identity, since the details are identifiable. Sorry if you do.) I like follow-ups on predictions, so please allow me to request one. When asked in that thread, you said you would "probably controversially" choose Windows Server 2012 on a mid-range HP DL or ML server for a system meant to last over a decade. Almost a decade has passed. Do you think today that this would have been the right choice at the time? I am not questioning your choice as an anti-Windows thing or anything like that. I am genuinely curious.
- baz00 3y ago
  Oh wow. Details show how bad my memory is as well - stories fade and change over time :) Well over a decade has passed now and I have nothing to do with Windows whatsoever any more and am running fully Apple on the desktop and Linux on the server side of things. I wouldn't have anything to do with it any more. That was a completely wrong prediction. I inherited a lot of Hyper-V infrastructure with SCVMM which really finished it off. What did work was CentOS on AWS EC2 though although I'm not sure that's good any more what with the whole RHEL controversy recently. So for another future prediction which will be equally wrong: I don't have a clue any more and am trying desperately to find a way out of the industry.
aftbit 3y ago
I have had more systems go down for full disk than any other reason (besides my own bugs of course). Even when I try to use logrotate, there always seems to be some kind of trick or mistake. /var/log should be a ring-buffer filesystem that discards oldest records whenever full & writing new records. I wish I knew how to do that reliably.

by baz00 3y ago

stevezsa8 3y ago

Nice work.

networked 3y ago

I remember that! Here is your original comment from 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6503464. I enjoyed that subthread. (I assume you don't mind it being linked to this identity, since the details are identifiable. Sorry if you do.) I like follow-ups on predictions, so please allow me to request one. When asked in that thread, you said you would "probably controversially" choose Windows Server 2012 on a mid-range HP DL or ML server for a system meant to last over a decade. Almost a decade has passed. Do you think today that this would have been the right choice at the time? I am not questioning your choice as an anti-Windows thing or anything like that. I am genuinely curious.

baz00 3y ago
Oh wow. Details show how bad my memory is as well - stories fade and change over time :) Well over a decade has passed now and I have nothing to do with Windows whatsoever any more and am running fully Apple on the desktop and Linux on the server side of things. I wouldn't have anything to do with it any more. That was a completely wrong prediction. I inherited a lot of Hyper-V infrastructure with SCVMM which really finished it off. What did work was CentOS on AWS EC2 though although I'm not sure that's good any more what with the whole RHEL controversy recently. So for another future prediction which will be equally wrong: I don't have a clue any more and am trying desperately to find a way out of the industry.

aftbit 3y ago

I have had more systems go down for full disk than any other reason (besides my own bugs of course). Even when I try to use logrotate, there always seems to be some kind of trick or mistake. /var/log should be a ring-buffer filesystem that discards oldest records whenever full & writing new records. I wish I knew how to do that reliably.