The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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Tigren: Oct 3, 2003

evol262 posted:

That said, most people inside Red Hat run CentOS, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, or other distros (even though RHEL and other Red Hat products are free for us). It's just nicer in many ways to use one big yum repo than it is to worry about channels.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 18:17

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 19:29

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

Tigren posted:

Nothing wrong with Gentoo.

If you are a ricer, anyway.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 18:29

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Nobody inside Red Hat runs Arch or Gentoo. It's mostly OS X now, actually.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 18:31

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Suspicious Dish posted:

Nobody inside Red Hat runs Arch or Gentoo. It's mostly OS X now, actually.

Almost the entire RHEV group (at least the original Qumranet acquisitions) still runs Gentoo. I've never understood why.

Surprisingly large portions of the Openstack Network and Openstack Compute teams run Arch (there's some Ubuntu here as well).

I've never seen OSX from anyone in engineering. But that may be because I work in virt, and nested virt on OSX is a clusterfuck even when it works (thanks, Fusion).

But, like most things here, it probably varies a lot depending on who you interact with regularly.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 18:44

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

I was talking about management and marketing. There was a giant thread on memo-list before I left about whether it's OK as a company for us to be giving management MacBooks, and we decided it was.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 18:46

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Oh, well. I guess there's that.

It was easy to tell who was going into business roles instead of engineering based on what laptop they picked.

But my only interaction with other people here is at conferences (and sometimes in Brno/Tel Aviv), so it's a sea of Thinkpads. Spending time in Westford/Raleigh would probably mean seeing a lot less engineers and a lot more "other".

At least they're not running the CSB.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 18:49

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

One of the desktop team's major goals, last I left, was to actually get a usable CSB in front of people. Not sure if that's still ongoing.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 19:05

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

Suspicious Dish posted:

One of the desktop team's major goals, last I left, was to actually get a usable CSB in front of people. Not sure if that's still ongoing.

What is CSB?

# ? Jul 12, 2016 20:21

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Corporate Standard Base, the internal RHEL distro used for employees that aren't too technically inclined.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 20:24

jre: Sep 2, 2011; To the cloud ?

evol262 posted:

Almost the entire RHEV group (at least the original Qumranet acquisitions) still runs Gentoo. I've never understood why.

Surprisingly large portions of the Openstack Network and Openstack Compute teams run Arch (there's some Ubuntu here as well).

This explains a lot of about openstack

# ? Jul 12, 2016 20:56

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

evol262 posted:

Regarding bloat: this is a hate word, and it's totally meaningless. "Bloat" applies to people running outdated computers on new versions of operating systems with mandatory desktops which push the limits (Vista, PPC macs on 10.6, etc). Linux doesn't require a desktop. Your data science computer is hopefully not an outdated POS. There are 99% odds that using a desktop on your workstation (if you do) is going to take more resources than the entire operating system. Firefox/Chrome alone will probably take more resources than the rest of your OS once you have a couple of tabs open on modern websites.

Most people regard "bloat" to be programs installed that you never have a chance of using for a specific computer/server. Having Libreoffice installed is totally useless for someone running a headless server. The proper answer is to tell them to install a minimal install of their preferred distro but really I think those people just want an excuse to complain and be apart of a team. The Arch Linux nerds do it all the time.

Anyway, I'm going to be proactive for once and create a backup of my box. What exactly is the best way to handle this? I've got it running rsync -aAX and excluding /dev /sys /proc /tmp /run /mnt /media and /lost+found. It's dumping to a mounted nfs share but it's not exactly moving at a swift pace. It's shuffling along at 0.06kb/s according to rsync's --info flag. Would a better solution be to rsync it to a local folder then tar it up and then rsync that tar file to my storage? Would packing it in tar preserve ownership settings of the files? Unfortunately all the of the installed applications and configuration files don't follow any sort of pattern. Some install to opt, some to /srv/ some poo poo gets crammed into the /etc folder. I have to rsync the entire thing to catch everything.

YouTuber fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jul 12, 2016

# ? Jul 12, 2016 22:43

Mao Zedong Thot: Oct 16, 2008

YouTuber posted:

Most people regard "bloat" to be programs installed that you never have a chance of using for a specific computer/server. Having Libreoffice installed is totally useless for someone running a headless server. The proper answer is to tell them to install a minimal install of their preferred distro but really I think those people just want an excuse to complain and be apart of a team. The Arch Linux nerds do it all the time.

Anyway, I'm going to be proactive for once and create a backup of my box. What exactly is the best way to handle this? I've got it running rsync -aAX and excluding /dev /sys /proc /tmp /run /mnt /media and /lost+found. It's dumping to a mounted nfs share but it's not exactly moving at a swift pace. It's shuffling along at 0.06kb/s according to rsync's --info flag. Would a better solution be to rsync it to a local folder then tar it up and then rsync that tar file to my storage? Would packing it in tar preserve ownership settings of the files? Unfortunately all the of the installed applications and configuration files don't follow any sort of pattern. Some install to opt, some to /srv/ some poo poo gets crammed into the /etc folder. I have to rsync the entire thing to catch everything.

Backup things you need or care about, not everything. Backup data and config, not just the state of your system at a given moment (use FS snapshotting if you want to do that). Config management is really not overkill in any situation it prevents you from rsyncing your entire disk around.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 23:21

RFC2324: Jun 7, 2012; http 418

so loving future posted:

Backup things you need or care about, not everything. Backup data and config, not just the state of your system at a given moment (use FS snapshotting if you want to do that). Config management is really not overkill in any situation it prevents you from rsyncing your entire disk around.

puppet + git is always the answer to this, imo.

til I find something even better.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 23:25

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

I have five active subscriptions/entitlements for RHEL, but as far as I know we only have three RHEL servers. Can I get the list of system IDs using those entitlements from RedHat's portal anywhere? I think the other two might belong to one of our dozen offline VMs, or maybe they belong to ancient decommissioned servers, but I think getting the list of known system IDs would be a start.

e: nevermind, I found it :v:

ee: I don't need to use these subscriptions for CentOS machines, do I? Would they even provide support for it?

anthonypants fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Jul 13, 2016

# ? Jul 12, 2016 23:27

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

YouTuber posted:

Most people regard "bloat" to be programs installed that you never have a chance of using for a specific computer/server. Having Libreoffice installed is totally useless for someone running a headless server. The proper answer is to tell them to install a minimal install of their preferred distro but really I think those people just want an excuse to complain and be apart of a team. The Arch Linux nerds do it all the time.

I agree that default package sets can be "bloat" in some sense, though I generally interpret "bloat" when asking what a minimal distro is to run data science stuff on to mean "things in memory". Disk space is cheap, and "bloat" there isn't nearly as relevant as the metric ton of poo poo Vista came with out of the box (bizarro live sidebars, 3d accelerated desktop when most people were running terrible 2d-only integrated GPUs, etc), which is why I complained about it, I guess.

YouTuber posted:

Anyway, I'm going to be proactive for once and create a backup of my box. What exactly is the best way to handle this? I've got it running rsync -aAX and excluding /dev /sys /proc /tmp /run /mnt /media and /lost+found. It's dumping to a mounted nfs share but it's not exactly moving at a swift pace. It's shuffling along at 0.06kb/s according to rsync's --info flag. Would a better solution be to rsync it to a local folder then tar it up and then rsync that tar file to my storage? Would packing it in tar preserve ownership settings of the files? Unfortunately all the of the installed applications and configuration files don't follow any sort of pattern. Some install to opt, some to /srv/ some poo poo gets crammed into the /etc folder. I have to rsync the entire thing to catch everything.

tar does preserve ownership, yeah.

I mean, the ideal is to have everything installed as part of a package, then you can just back up /etc and whatever your package repo is. Failing that, rsync is perfectly appropriate. That's an absymal speed, though. Does top (of any kind -- iotop, iftop, etc) show what it's doing?

anthonypants posted:

ee: I don't need to use these subscriptions for CentOS machines, do I? Would they even provide support for it?

No. This is one of the only ways to make Red Hat mad at you about entitlements -- filing bugs on CentOS against RHEL.

# ? Jul 13, 2016 00:51

calandryll: Apr 25, 2003; Ask me where I do my best drinking!; Pillbug

Dancer posted:

So I'm a molecular biology student, about to do some bioinformatics courses, and I need to be running Linux for them. During a bioinfo project I did a while back, the university computers I used were running Red Hat, but I just looked and you need to pay to use that long term. On their website I also found this thing called Fedora that's free. Should I assume that that's similar to "proper" Red Hat? Alternatively, any other distro you guys would recommend for scientific purposes (for example, I do intend to work with some rather large datasets so it would be nice if the OS itself wasn't bloated)?

I'm a molecular biologist and linux user. I run all my software, mainly next-gen sequencing stuff, on an Ubuntu server. Find one that you feel comfortable with and stick to that one. I think most software is available for all the major ones in their repos.

# ? Jul 13, 2016 02:21

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

evol262 posted:

No. This is one of the only ways to make Red Hat mad at you about entitlements -- filing bugs on CentOS against RHEL.

That's good. Exactly one of the five servers I have an entitlement for is using its entitlement (even though it hasn't updated in years) and at least one of them is a CentOS box -- I can tell because it's the same VMware UUID, so someone installed RedHat on this VM, went through rhn_register, and then decided to go back and install CentOS??? I still need to go through the other three tomorrow, but this is really stupid.

# ? Jul 13, 2016 04:57

fuf: Sep 12, 2004; haha

Thanks again for the wordpress security advise last week.

I'm trying to disable PHP's eval function as another little security measure.

I added "eval" to the list of disable_functions in php.ini:

code:

disable_functions = pcntl_sigwaitinfo,pcntl_sigtimedwait,pcntl_exec,pcntl_getpriority,pcntl_setpriority,eval,

if I create site.com/info.php with phpinfo() in and visit it then I see the same list of disabled functions (with eval at the end), so I assume the site is reading the right php.ini file.

But if I go to site.com/test.php:

code:

<?php
$string = 'cup';
$name = 'coffee';
$str = 'This is a $string with my $name in it.';
echo  $str. "<br>";
eval("\$str = \"$str\";");
echo  $str;
?>

then I see:

code:

This is a $string with my $name in it.
This is a cup with my coffee in it.

So eval is still working? :confused:

e: ok so apparently "eval" is not an "internal function" so you can't disable it with disable_functions unfortunately

fuf fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jul 13, 2016

# ? Jul 13, 2016 14:20

DeaconBlues: Nov 9, 2011

Since installing Fedora 24 I've had the 'Software' GUI utility twice tell me I have updates and need to reboot to install.

This morning it happened a couple of minutes after I used DNF to make sure my system was up to date.

What gives? Does this mean that using the package manager is not enough now, in order to stay updated?

# ? Jul 15, 2016 06:34

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

It's likely that PackageKit is caching this and doesn't realize you dnf updated. File a bug.

# ? Jul 15, 2016 18:51

DeaconBlues: Nov 9, 2011

OK. I'll look into filing my first bug.

# ? Jul 15, 2016 22:18

ItBurns: Jul 24, 2007

so loving future posted:

Unless you have a real good reason you should probably just use Ubuntu.

This is a good choice and Ubuntu has wide support among the scientific products I've seen.

Failing that, I'd visit the websites for the specific software and see which distro they officially support/recommend and pick the least esoteric out of the most commonly recommended ones.

# ? Jul 16, 2016 04:47

Ellie Crabcakes: Feb 1, 2008; Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

fuf posted:

e: ok so apparently "eval" is not an "internal function" so you can't disable it with disable_functions unfortunately

Try this.

# ? Jul 16, 2016 05:51

DeaconBlues: Nov 9, 2011

Can anyone explain why my Transmission downloads are automatically surrounded by single quotes, since wiping Fedora 23 and installing 24?

It's only the directories, not the files within them, but it's bloody annoying. Transmission never used to do this.

# ? Jul 16, 2016 15:17

HPL: Aug 28, 2002; Worst case scenario.

Fedora is being snarky about your choice of downloads?

# ? Jul 16, 2016 15:23

DeaconBlues: Nov 9, 2011

HPL posted:

Fedora is being snarky about your choice of downloads?

I'm 98.64% sure you're joking, but the ones without quotes either a) Had the quotes manually removed by me, or b) Were direct HTTP downloads, not using Transmission.

# ? Jul 16, 2016 15:51

waffle iron: Jan 16, 2004

DeaconBlues posted:

Can anyone explain why my Transmission downloads are automatically surrounded by single quotes, since wiping Fedora 23 and installing 24?

It's only the directories, not the files within them, but it's bloody annoying. Transmission never used to do this.

There aren't really quotes, it's just some kind of bash setting whenever the file has spaces in the name.

The change caught me off guard in Fedora 24 as well.

# ? Jul 16, 2016 16:27

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

ls now quotes them because people often do stupid things like ls | fartzone or want to copy/paste them

it makes sense and i like the change

# ? Jul 16, 2016 17:09

DeaconBlues: Nov 9, 2011

waffle iron posted:

There aren't really quotes, it's just some kind of bash setting whenever the file has spaces in the name.

The change caught me off guard in Fedora 24 as well.

Ah. So it's just the new way bash is displaying them! Fanks.

I will now look at torrenting some fartzone.

# ? Jul 16, 2016 19:37

Lum: Aug 13, 2003

DeaconBlues posted:

I will now look at torrenting some fartzone.

- The Fart Zone? We're IN the Fart Zone? So what are we supposed to do now?
:black101:

- Perhaps you should find yourself a toilet.
:whip:

- But the Fart Zone is full of methane and eggyness and skidmarks and...
:black101:

- My ancestors came from the Fart Zone.
:black101:

- I was taught that although there are not many clean toilets there are some, Perhaps you should find one.
:whip:

- You mean, we should find one? We're together in this.
:black101:

- I'm a dead rat I have no future.
:black101:

- The sphincter will not contain me for much longer, be certain of your need before you choose to release me.
:black101:

- In the Shite Universe I have been fartness. Perhaps in the Fart Zone I will be shite.
:whip:

- OK, Kecks. Let's find ourselves a toilet.
:itoilet:

- As you command, captain.

Theme song: Yo eggs yo! Bum fart ray! yo eggy arse, the runs, brown wee. Yo eggy ARSE, the runs, brow-n wee_eeee....

(With apologies to people who didn't watch obscure Canadian/German sci-fi back in the late 90s!)

Lum fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Jul 17, 2016

# ? Jul 16, 2016 22:40

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Got an alert this morning that one the root partition on server 36 was filling up, so I ran 'yum clean all' and cleared up like 30GB. Patted myself on the back, called it a day.

Earlier this evening we got an alert that some workflow mailer service had stopped on server 15. The oracle contractors who got this ticket checked port 25 on server 17 and then emailed us asking where this nonexistent server is. This made my boss flip out, and he wants to blame this on my running yum clean this morning, which is complete idiocy. He thinks server 36 is to blame because that's what the contractor logged into to telnet into server 17, and it's the server that's trying to use server 15 as some mail relay or something.

How do I get my boss to be less willfully ignorant when it comes to Linux?

# ? Jul 17, 2016 05:57

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

First off, you mean ssh, right? Not telnet?

But, in general, this problem isn't specific to a Linux, and your boss isn't "willfully ignorant". He just sounds like he's kind of incompetent or clueless regarding managing systems in general.

You solve your problem in multiple steps:

no telnet
Lists of servers in some centralized source. DNS is fine. That way "server17" returns an address lookup
You do root cause analysis on why the workflow mailer failed
You fix it, then email this analysis to your boss, the contractors, and any other relevant principals, without assigning blame or trying to correct his "ignorance" and without mentioning Linux. Your boss panicked because something changed, then something broke at the same time. Prove that these are not related by finding the actual cause of the failure. This proves your competence, illustrates a failure by the contractors, and maybe teaches your boss a little (in a non-judgemental way)

# ? Jul 17, 2016 08:15

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

evol262 posted:

First off, you mean ssh, right? Not telnet?

But, in general, this problem isn't specific to a Linux, and your boss isn't "willfully ignorant". He just sounds like he's kind of incompetent or clueless regarding managing systems in general.

You solve your problem in multiple steps:

no telnet

Lists of servers in some centralized source. DNS is fine. That way "server17" returns an address lookup

You do root cause analysis on why the workflow mailer failed

You fix it, then email this analysis to your boss, the contractors, and any other relevant principals, without assigning blame or trying to correct his "ignorance" and without mentioning Linux. Your boss panicked because something changed, then something broke at the same time. Prove that these are not related by finding the actual cause of the failure. This proves your competence, illustrates a failure by the contractors, and maybe teaches your boss a little (in a non-judgemental way)

Telnet over port 25 was their method of testing connectivity to the mail server, that's all I meant. I'm sure we have some telnet going on elsewhere, but.
We have a list of servers in a spreadsheet. Server 17 doesn't exist in it, but my boss found some documentation ~somewhere else~ that refers to this server as a mail server or relay or something. He wasn't clear.
And our DNS is garbage. Not only is aging/scavenging not turned on, but everything that isn't a desktop is using a loving static IP, so everything's pointing at old DNS servers from when the server was originally set up.
I couldn't fix today's issue, because it was some Oracle app which is a black box and managed by one of two third-party contracting firms. We have literally no clue what the support boundaries or expectations are, and I'm the first semi-Linux person this company has seen in several years.
I asked their tech what could have caused this issue, and said it would've been overwritten after some patches they applied yesterday. I haven't heard my boss reply to this yet but literally telling me that 'yum clean' could have overwritten or reverted the configuration directive they're talking about is driving me up the loving wall.

# ? Jul 17, 2016 09:36

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Robo Reagan posted:

Any forks I should look in to? I remember Firefox did something Opera-ish that annoyed a lot of nerds somewhat recently.

e:Nevermind, the complaints were a fuckchange thing instead of any real complaints. Firefox it is.

Mozilla did announce a Firefox change for the near future where they'll be discontinuing any old-style plugins that can actually interact with the browser chrome to do useful things, and instead they're going to be doing web-only extensions like Chromium. That's pretty aggravating, IMO, but it's more of a reason to switch away from the browser than not to switch to it.

# ? Jul 17, 2016 14:36

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

anthonypants posted:

: words:

This whole environment sounds like a badly managed clusterfuck. Your boss's ignorance of what "yum clean" does is the worst of your problems, honestly, and even showing him what it does with strace (or following the code) means he'll freak out at the next unknown command.

# ? Jul 17, 2016 17:25

astral: Apr 26, 2004

Vulture Culture posted:

Mozilla did announce a Firefox change for the near future where they'll be discontinuing any old-style plugins that can actually interact with the browser chrome to do useful things, and instead they're going to be doing web-only extensions like Chromium. That's pretty aggravating, IMO, but it's more of a reason to switch away from the browser than not to switch to it.

For the record, Firefox's newer type of extensions will be able to interact with the browser chrome, too. It's going to be a superset of the Chrome APIs.

# ? Jul 17, 2016 17:47

Robo Reagan: Feb 12, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

RFC2324 posted:

Nothing wrong with Gentoo.

If you are a ricer, anyway.

I thought Arch was the ricing distro. Either way I'm getting my feet wet with Arch before bothering with giving up halfway through installing gentoo.

# ? Jul 18, 2016 02:09

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

Robo Reagan posted:

I thought Arch was the ricing distro. Either way I'm getting my feet wet with Arch before bothering with giving up halfway through installing gentoo.

https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/

# ? Jul 18, 2016 02:53

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

evol262 posted:

This whole environment sounds like a badly managed clusterfuck. Your boss's ignorance of what "yum clean" does is the worst of your problems, honestly, and even showing him what it does with strace (or following the code) means he'll freak out at the next unknown command.

You don't even know the half of it.

Turns out the Oracle consulting firm was running some updates that morning, which would account for why we got a disk utilization alarm, and they used a config file updater script that had at least one ancient setting, and it used to point at server 17 for mail, which doesn't exist anymore.

# ? Jul 19, 2016 00:17

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# ? Apr 23, 2024 19:29

Obsolete: Jun 1, 2000

I have a gigantic CSV file that uses pilcrow as the delimiter. I've tried to change it to tabs using tr and sed and can't seem to figure it out. It seems like the command doesn't recognize the pilcrow as a valid character, regardless if I'm using the symbol itself or hex code. I can't seem to hit on the right combination of characters that it wants me to use to run properly.

code:


tr '[pilcrow goes here]' '\t' < source.CSV > dest.csv

I've also tried with the $ in front of the first set but that didn't work either. I've tried both the character itself (u00b6) and some different hex combinations for it (\xb6, \xc2, etc).

Does tr not work with these non printable characters? I tried sed as well but don't think it will work.

Sorry if I didn't explain that very well. I've tried a bunch of different combos of characters and can't seem to hit on a solution.

# ? Jul 19, 2016 18:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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