March 2015 - Roundtable

Inventory software?
by Adam Thompson 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

I'm looking for recommendations for good IT inventory tracking software. It must track not only hardware assets (those are a dime-a-dozen) but also software, licenses, and support agreements. It doesn't have to be free or open-source, if it's reasonably-priced and good value. It should definitely run on UNIX, at least the back-end stuff. I do *not* need automatic inventory-gathering capability. Anyone know of anything that works for that? (BTW, for those that don't know yet, yes this is my new full-time gig, and yes I'm still available for paid work through Avant. Gratuitous plug: we also sell & support JIRA, Confluence and all the other Atlassian software. Call us for all your DevOps needs.) [image: Avant logo] *Adam Thompson* Senior Systems Administrator *voice:* 204.789.9596 x24 | *email:* athompson(a)avant.ca | *web:* avant.ca

2 1

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report - Page 1
by Adam Thompson 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-… -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

1 0

Free Hadoop ebook
by Trevor Cordes 12 Mar '15

12 Mar '15

This showed up through an affiliate of O'Reilly MAPR and I thought it might appeal to some club members. It's a totally free 130pg professionally done ebook. You have to register your name/email to get the link (honor system). It looks like it's an overview of the technology for beginners who may want to learn more. I doubt it's of much use to those already experts using these technologies. It's only free until the end of the week (and I'm not sure how O'Reilly defines "end") so get it by Friday if you want it. https://www.mapr.com/real-world-hadoop?imm_mid=0ce2ce&cmp=em-data-na-na-new…

1 0

Another reason to use ECC memory...
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 11 Mar '15

11 Mar '15

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/cutting-edge-hack-gives-super-user-… http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/10/rowhammer/ http://www.google.ca/search?q=rowhammer -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

2 1

WTB IR blaster
by Trevor Cordes 11 Mar '15

11 Mar '15

Does anyone have a computer-connectable IR blaster (ie transmitter) kicking around they don't want anymore? I'd love to buy it. USB, serial, parallel, whatever, if I can plug it into any computer from the last 15 years it's what I need. The only catch is it must support modern linux, like kernel 3.18 and lirc0.9.2. Most "dumb" non-usb ones fit that bill. Some USB ones would work also. The only one I don't want is a mceusb-based one, as that's what I have and the above kernel+lirc broke it. If you have one, email me with the details and asking price. Thanks!

1 0

*sigh* I wish there was a better way...
by Adam Thompson 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

To find the closest and/or fastest CentOS mirror, a function which is sadly lacking from CentOS (at least as of v6), this is what I just hacked together. Documenting it here for posterity. (If you wanted to sort by RTT instead of hopcount, you could either reverse the order of i & t in the END block of the awk script, or figure out sort(1)'s ridiculous -k option.) #!/bin/sh printf 'Hops\tPing\tHost\n' for h in $( lynx -listonly -nonumbers -dump http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/6/isos/x86_64/ | egrep '^https?://' | sed -e 's#^https*://$[^/]*$/.*$#\1#' ); do mtr -c 1 -r $h | awk -v h=$h 'BEGIN {i=0;t=0} /^ *[0-9]*\./ {i++; t=$5} END {print i,t,h}' & done | sort -n | head -10 wait

1 0

Recommendations for IP KVM switches
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 10 Mar '15

10 Mar '15

Howdy folks. We've got a bit of money to spend before budget year-end, and I thought it might be nice to finally do something more orderly about remote console access to some of our servers. (Right now, we have some systems with ILOM/ALOM, some on small local-only KVM, and some with no remote management capability at all.) We're looking at probably a couple 8-port units for a couple different racks. We're somewhat concerned about costs, of course, but want something reasonable in terms of features. (E.g. remote authentication through various means like RADIUS & AD would be nice.) Anyone with experience with particular brands of IP-accessible KVM's? Any recommendations on what to get? What to avoid? ;) (Canadian supplier would be preferred.) -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

2 1

Re: [RndTbl] Roundtable Digest, Vol 123, Issue 8
by Michael Doob 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

Exactly what are the differences between the Linux and Windows versions? Cheers, Michael ------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Doob Telephone: (204) 474-9796 Department of Mathematics Fax: (204) 474-7606 University of Manitoba email: Michael_Doob(a)umanitoba.ca Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2015 11:54:54 -0500 From: Wyatt Zacharias <wyatt(a)magitech.ca> To: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca> Subject: [RndTbl] PDF Font help Message-ID: <CANd2pR04sVOf4ExJVEhSe4WN6bUkUpAcDmNKZCP-HY22i3YGxw(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" I'm not all that familiar with the typography world, so I'm hoping someone can lend some insight into a problem I'm having. We have pdf reports generated by Jasper which are created using the Helvetica font. My main problem, is a report generated by Jasper on Windows is slightly different than the one generated by Jasper on Linux. I'm guessing this is an issue with something other than the fonts, but to be sure, my question is does the system generating the pdf need the font installed to use that font? I assume not, since I can inspect the pdf with Acrobat, or the pdffonts command and it confirms that the font used is Helvetica. My second question, is if the pdf is being created properly, would it render improperly on a desktop that does not have Helvetica installed? If I need to have the font installed, where can I find plain old Helvetica? As I said, I'm not familiar with typography, but I can find every variety out there of helvetica, except straight up "Helvetica". -- Wyatt Zacharias

2 1

PDF Font help
by Wyatt Zacharias 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

I'm not all that familiar with the typography world, so I'm hoping someone can lend some insight into a problem I'm having. We have pdf reports generated by Jasper which are created using the Helvetica font. My main problem, is a report generated by Jasper on Windows is slightly different than the one generated by Jasper on Linux. I'm guessing this is an issue with something other than the fonts, but to be sure, my question is does the system generating the pdf need the font installed to use that font? I assume not, since I can inspect the pdf with Acrobat, or the pdffonts command and it confirms that the font used is Helvetica. My second question, is if the pdf is being created properly, would it render improperly on a desktop that does not have Helvetica installed? If I need to have the font installed, where can I find plain old Helvetica? As I said, I'm not familiar with typography, but I can find every variety out there of helvetica, except straight up "Helvetica". -- Wyatt Zacharias

2 3

Funny comment
by Trevor Cordes 09 Mar '15

09 Mar '15

I had to confirm what $x=!!$y meant in perl. Remarkably, typing !! or "!!" or \!\! into google gives you nothing. Had to use English. Got this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2168406/what-does-double-exclamation-poi… The +42 answer is quite good. Exec summary: !! is good for cleaning vars into 1 (true) or '' (false), which is important to keep warnings from complaining about undef vars. Anyhow, read the comments in the +42 answer. Hehehe. Let the flamewars begin!

4 3