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patrck

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patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, the Mitnick hack of Shimomura (rsh + predictable TCP seq #s) was already out there due to that incident's publicity.

How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them out, and disabled telnetd / rlogind?
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Nice. like a command-line version of Charlie Cheever's bunny1. https://github.com/ccheever/bunny1
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, Harford overweights the trade-offs and does not cover any benefits.

For parents, one large gain is explaining your work to your kids. They get to see how you work, and this provides a template for them. Of course, whether this is good or not....
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, think cheap and distributed. Like Tsutomu Shimomura's quiet Xterminal connected to a noisy box in another room.

The alternative gamer-mentality of tightly coupled cpu, gpu, and storage with huge IO is quite costly.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Though, if your bias is towards action, how do you avoid stepping on toes?

These discussions seem like MBA brain-teasers, ie. there can't be any hard and fast rules, so each case needs to be individually worked out.

There's probably a sub-reddit for this.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, it seems odd that a golang solution was used instead of just shell.

  paths() {
    dir=`dirname $1`
    while test "$dir" != '/' && test "$dir" != '.' ; do
      echo $dir
      dir=`dirname $dir`
    done
  }

  find $dir -type f -not -path '*/.git/*' | while read file; do
    cnt=`wc -l < $file`
    for d in `paths $file`; do
      printf "%s\t%s\n" $cnt "$d"
    done
  done | awk '{
    hierarchy[ $2 ] += $1;
  }
  END {
    for (dir in hierarchy) {
      printf("%8d %s\n", hierarchy[dir], dir)
    }
  }' | sort -rn | head | sort -k 2
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
One of the best classes I ever had was a stats class where the prof assigned a paper a week for us to review and mark up any and all faults. In the beginning, the papers were from journals like The Canadian Journal of Forest Research (which we came back with drenched in red ink), by the end we were punching holes in the Lancet.

Granted, the papers and progression were hand-picked by the prof. However, the final effect was that the students became fairly competent at reviewing papers in general.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Gnu M4 manual works well, while for TeX there's the Gentle Introduction.

For an abstract, design/implementation introduction, though? There isn't. We don't learn about macro languages just as we don't learn about domain specific languages.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Schools don't teach macro languages is probably the biggest problem.

Before YAML or Dockerfiles, it was the way to declare state and reduce complexity for sysadmins. Basically, any time you had data that needed multiple projections (eg. hosts to forward and reverse zonefiles), you reached for m4. The same went for unwieldy configs (apache, sendmail, etc.).

Culturally, macro languages seem to be just learned ad-hoc, ie. how many here have had a class in m4 or TeX?
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, Audit for the win.

And it's not "billing", it's Compliance + Bill Presentment (marketing!) where we are always trying to find the most profitable local maximum of explainability to Sales, Customers, and Management/Enforcement while also having hard checks to prevent or at least mitigate losses.

No one wants a Knight Trading excursion....
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, think like equity analysts during upturns, and in a downturn think like credit, ie. map out the sources and uses of funds.

The big caveat here is rising rates on floating rate debt, and the marginal response of revenue to higher rates.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I guess CCAN died?

https://ccodearchive.net/
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, this is received unix lore: anything needed to recover a system needs to be statically linked and in /bin or /sbin.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
The gnu m4 manual is the go-to documentation.

One way to think about m4 is as form-substitution, eg. the ssh-config customization via sed.

Another is as text generator, eg. the classic sendmail config generator, where one writes m4 succinctly which in turn generates complex files.

From a 10,000 meter perspective, all the managed servers' config files are a projection from the central config repository. If that config is already an m4 file, then all that's left is finding the variant configs and handling them.

`make` is another nicety, as it handles the dependencies, eg. scp'ing the config and then HUP'ing the daemon only when that config changes.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Corollary to this is that Conferences are judged not by their overt content, but by their curation of the un-conferences / birds-of-a-feather meetings that they facilitate.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Seems like it should use m4 instead of sed/awk for the templating. And `make` for the dependencies that will arise, eg. HUP sshd after config change.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Typing directly into a shell is a smell for teams that manage unwieldy-without-automation amounts of machines.

Shells are just REPLs; use your editor to drive them. This helps document what exactly was done on a machine, and encourages code re-use (yank-put from last time) and other tidbits you get when editing (git repos, git search, etc.).
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, it seems a lot of this reduces to preferences.

FWIW, my email has just INBOX, Archive, and Todo. When documenting, I will log the message-id of an email, so that I can just query on that later. For me, this feels like a don't-make-me-think kind of setup, where I just swipe left-or-right through my inbox (which is ~100 emails/day) and then process Todo into Archive.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
A couple reasons maybe:

Specialization means everyone's chasing their own frontiers in their companies, which leads to less toe-stepping?

"Everyone knows" IT is complex. So as long as things are working, there's no real impetus for other people in the company to sully their shirtsleeves.
patrck
·4 ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break.

lol. I run IT. Nobody at my workplace knows what I do.

Contrary to TFA, my automation gains accrue to myself and my company. It seems difficult to see this as anything but win-win. I get respite and time to think, and my company gets improved responses and uptime.