S0E17: "Annal Action"

Posted 2015-10-27 02:41
Modified 2017-07-02 23:41
Comments 0

In this episode, and no- the title is NOT a typo, we talk about data archival/storage, VPS providers, computering in modern media, and taskwarrior.

• Notes
• Errata
• Music

Notes

• “Red Hat is buying Ansible”
  • and Debian is dropping LSB
  • and you should definitely read the FHS
  • and know your XDG spec as well
• Also, SHOUT-OUT TO panopt1con ON REDDIT FOR PLUGGING US!
• I couldn’t even finish the absolutely-disgusting Bolthouse Farms Daily Greens. I THOUGHT it was this. It was not.
• Specifying Fedora’s DNF repositories
• TaskWarrior is awesome. The documentation isn’t too bad, either. You can also check out the Taskserver, which also has pretty good documentation as well.
• VPSes, or Virtual Private Servers, are basically VMs (Virtual Machines) that are hosted on the Internet with a WAN-accessible IP address that you lease out
  • Ideally, you should run KVM with libvirt on your own infrastructure. But…
  • Our personal favourite is Linode (and is the provider we use to run Sysadministrivia!)
  • We also mention Linode’s Longview
  • I used to work for Tektonic (I believe they are under different ownership now), but they use Virtuozzo / OpenVZ
  • A Small Orange, another previous employer of mine, also offers some pretty decent VPSes; the pricing is a little higher but they tend to be first to roll out new technology, and also has a lot of user-friendliness
  • Digital Ocean is pretty decent, but nothing really special. A good provider for development, for sure, as the instances are fairly cheap.
  • RamNode offers both OpenVZ and KVM (KVM is full-virtualization)
  • And Vultr has some good locations as well.
• Remember, backups are for recovery of data to be available at a moment’s notice; archival is for the storing of data that you may need data in the future, but don’t need immediately.
  • Bitrot prevention/archival retention, or data preservation, is going to be your biggest obstacle to consider
• My favourite clip is still this because of how silly it is
  • Don’t be like Jthan. Learn the OSI Model for networking.
  • And in Jurassic Park, this clip
  • And in Hackers. This is not what a datacenter or NOC looks like. Or filesystem access. Or… anything.
  • Ooops! It was actually The Matrix Reloaded, not The Matrix, in which Trinity actually uses nmap (and a utility named SSHnuke) correctly.
  • While the goth lab girl in NCIS is pretty cute, she definitely doesn’t follow proper procedures for labs (WHY are your sleeves UP?). And along with nonsensical jargon, it has a totally unrealistic model for typing.
  • Give us your favourite media faux-pas for computing here! Be sure to include your twitter handle!

Errata

• I’m pretty sure Jthan moved his Linode because he moved from PA to CO.
• You technically CAN oversell on KVM, but it’s a bit difficult to do- so most KVM providers don’t. :)
• Next time I am using a nailgun to firmly affix Jthan’s imagination cap in place.
• Jthan still has not seen Jurassic Park or Star Wars.
• This one came in over IRC but they left before I could thank them:

< Tarragon> I found a slight errata in S0E17. You said the number of packages in CentOS would be larger than Debian because you can pull in RHEL repositories. CentOS is about 12,000 packages in total while Debian is 56864 pre compiled plus a further 14975 source packages

Thanks for the correction, Tarragon! (Though I think wondered how many EPEL pulls in?)

• It turns out the visualizer used in Jurassic Park is real! Thanks to “RikyM” who pointed us out to fsn!

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories (Pilot Season)