RIP Dude - First Anniversary

I can't believe it's been a whole year since my beautiful best boy had to leave us...

I miss you everyday my big yellow beauty.

http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/rip-dude.html

Network Guru Fails at Monitoring his own Bandwidth

Do I come on here to bemoan the seeming incompetence of others a lot?... Because I have  just had an annoying 20 minutes talking to one of our "Network Experts", there's a server box running Ubuntu, its actually a virtual machine, and it was being blamed for crippling the network on the host machine - which has to run several other Windows Server 2008 Virtual Machines.

For some reason, this came across my desk, because someone has decided that though I can't advise the company on Linux server usage or adoption, I can be called into sort out the problems other fools create.

So, this server was running, the administrator chap is sat there with PuTTY connected to it and he's saying there's too much network traffic coming from the box.

Looking at the process list the machine is doing nothing, when I ask for one of its users to be made to use it, the CPU usage is a time flitter and then the usage is over, it appears to me the Virtual machine host is waking the VM, using it, and closing it.

The processes being used are simple webservices, so there should be no network traffic unless someone is using the server.

So, I ask.. "What's your idea that this machine is causing the issue?"  Very smugly the admin presented me with an A4 sheet with two graphs, one shows all his servers running with the Ubuntu machine present, and there's a whole load of traffic going on... The next is the same graph, with the Ubuntu box removed, and there's nearly no network traffic.

Then within PuTTY connected to the box he opens iptraf...

And he points to the statistics and declares, "See, this is running multiple kilobytes a second"...

Lets recap... "This machine is crippling our network usage on this box".... "using up kilobytes a second"... If any of you don't grasp how absurd this is please stop reading now, because the guy was clearly serious.  He's not that old, he's younger than me, surely he realises kilobytes a second on a modern gigbit backbone is nothing?  No, he seriously wants the ubuntu box silent.

So, what's causing this tiny trickle of bandwidth... Of course, he's connected to this machine with PuTTY...

"Close this window and take me to the machine in the server room"

In we go, and from the console plugged into the machine I run iptraf... look what we see now...

Yes, its zero...

When he is running his measures and checks he's connected over the network to the machine, he's been measuring his own bandwidth administrating the machine, and apparently the kilobytes per second that took were too much for him, I feel like this guy should be thrown from the building, not be earning far more than me in the "superior" position of "network guru god" which hs holds...

So knowing the machine is idle, I wonder what causes the bandwidth, so with the iptraf still running, I call up the user and ask him to get working again... and sure enough there's little trickles of bandwidth from the Ubuntu box, no spikes, no major blocks of transmission.  Hence after a few minutes I conclude the Ubuntu box though active, is only taking a tiny amount of the total bandwidth available to the machine, and so I start to look at the other machines...

And with just perfmon on the two Windows Server 2008 boxes with the user operating his end, I can see that the Windows boxes are spiking their network traffic, just with task manager you can see one box taking 20% the total available to it, and the other over 45%... This is a gigbit connection, and 20% of it is taken for maybe 30-50 seconds each minute and then goes quiet, then the 45% hog is there for maybe every 10 seconds of each minute.

They're scheduled tasks, as the users input items into their programs, the programs process and send out instructions, e-mails and update other databses.  The trickle of data I/O to the ubuntu machine is just such a feed, the Ubuntu box sucks/queries data from MS SQL Server on one of the machines and squirts it into MySQL where a very old (like 8 year old) unmaintained program written in C with MySQLConnector picks it up and uses sendmail to e-mail a load of people.  Such notifications take maybe 0.25 seconds and run every 5 minutes, the amount of data is small, and looking at the physical name of the Ubuntu box "e-mailer relay" I think it's safe to say its not using a lot of bandwidth and the other machines are to blame.

How I educate the "network expert"... This is my next task.

Where the fuck is our £180?

The wife and I have been saving a little bit of money each week, all year, so we can buy the kids (nieces and nephews) a nice Christmas gift, this cash was kept in an envelope at the in-laws, and the wife went to collect this on Friday.

Now, she remembers picking it up and counting it, then thinks she put it down again... Somewhere, or in a pocket, or whatever...

Yes, you get the picture, it has been lost.

So, no Christmas pressure off of our wallets, oh no, utter and total waste, and not only that, but the wife has lost it, I'm pretty sure she dropped it outside here in the street between the car and the front door, and some lucky bastard has walked off with a £180 Christmas bonus...

But the wife of course, blamed me... Now, I admit I just asked her to think about where she'd last seen it, what pocket it was in, what she was wearing... so you know, I was being unreasonable, asking her to THINK!... And then of course, asking her to do things a set way, like... Keep money in your purse... or better yet, as I originally suggested keep the fucking money in the savings account in the bank so it can't get lost!

Oh no, all my fault, my problem, mine to sort... So annoyed, so utterly and fucking annoyed with it all.

Lighter Linux Format?

Being quite a Linux fan, I'm also a Linux Format subscriber.

The only magazine I buy, and subscribe to, I even contribute in some small ways to the magazine having had a letter or two printed and sending in a popular code item about writing a Virtual CPU from this very blog.

So I was a little shocked to see Graham, the editor, is leaving with this latest edition, some of the regular writers are leaving too... It is a tangible blow to the publication.

But as big a blow as it may have been, I do wonder whether signs of it have not been on the horizon for a few months, because the magazine has gotten a little lighter, it may only be my imagination, I may go to the stack of back copies I have in my new man loft and take a look at the thickness, but I remember I could read the copy cover to cover, now it seems that the distance cover to cover is about 5-7 pages less... And then suddenly these staff departures?

Noooooooooooo

I've had to wait a while to post this, its something which annoyed the shit out of me at the time, but there's nothing I can do about it...

My wife borrowed my old mobile phone, she was only going to use it for like a day... Did she just put her SIM in it and leave the phone alone?....

No, she set the fucking thing up with pink flowers and stupid ring tones, she basically started to treat the phone as hers...

This included her EMPTYING ALL THE TEXTS AND CONTACTS.... I lost pictures of my niece as a baby, I lost pictures of now deceased pets, I lost contacts whom were not migrated to my new phone but where historical.... I lost basically 2008-2011 in phone terms... and... and I'm really sad about it.

The wife, doesn't give a shit either.