Dr. Honked posted:

aaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww yyyyyiiissssssssssssssssssssssssssssss



it fucken owns

coffeetable posted:

are you talking about modern mainframes or about stuff from the 1980s that's still chugging along? b/c i honestly did not know mainframes were still A Thing (i am a childe)

i also hadn't thought about how loltastic the security would be in software designed under ye olde assumption that all users would be in the same room

quazi posted:

Everybody is familiar with the concept of a bloated installer. Stuff like iTunes, NVIDIA drivers, the whole OS.. and not just Windows -- Mac users are having to deal with this crap too. Everything is getting too fat, and it's not just the nerd siting in the chair.

The absolute last platform I expected to see a bloated installer was an IBM mainframe running z/OS. For those of you not familiar with it, this is a text-based world full of simple-looking stuff that performs insanely powerful tasks. The closest thing I can equate it to is Unix or DOS, and even then, that analogy breaks down within seconds.

Even though I've only been a system admin for four years, I still have experience with products like: IOF, CA Disk, TMON, MXG, Syncsort.. Due to the spartan interface on this platform, products don't install anything remotely looking like a whiz-bang feature. Most mainframe programmers pride themselves in writing software with as little overhead as possible. Most of the time, an installation routine involves a series of batch jobs where you edit some dataset names to point them in the right direction, run those jobs, edit a couple config files, and boom -- you've installed something!

For the longest time, the most complicated install procedure I encountered was to verify that a handle in CA Disk was configured to view dataset control blocks in such a way as to make the backup utility jobs not mark the 'last accessed' field in datasets they were looking at. Stuff like that can twist your brain into knots if you're not careful, but even then, configuring it was a matter of setting a parm and executing a job.

Most software weighs in between 10MB and 100MB, while CA Disk was around 600MB. (oooh! it nearly filled a 3490 tape!) But when you consider that it's a third-party replacement for a fundamental part of the OS, that's kinda expected.

Enter SAS, an 800-pound behemoth of statistical analysis software. We've got several departments who rely on this, and since I'm the junior sysadmin, it's naturally my job to make sure the software is kept up to date.

I log into the SAS website and find the latest installation file (Release 9.2). It's 8MB. I think, "that's not bad for something that does so much! This mainframe platform sure is efficient!"

I then follow the instructions and upload it to the Unix side of the system. (Background) All of the latest IBM mainframes are divided into two sections -- z/OS and Unix, where the Unix side is also known as OMVS (Open Systems). The OMVS side is more of a vestigial growth that hangs off z/OS, but the two sides have complete read-write access between eachother.

The next step in the process is a bit baffling. "Set up an X Window server on your workstation." It turns out that the installer is a panel-driven wizard, and now the mainframe, which up until this point has only dealt with a text interface, now has to drive a graphical interface. I can't help but wonder what the hell the installer could possibly be doing in the background that I couldn't do by hand, but I was curious to see this. (Also, it's the only method for installing the product.)

My supervisor hooks me up with an IBM-recommended X-server, and upon running the SAS installer and connecting it to my workstation, a little "Press 'Next' to continue the SAS installation process" window pops up on my machine! Sure as poo poo!

But as nice as that sounds, that's when everything starts going to hell. My mainframe user account spikes to 100% CPU usage and stays there as long as I have the X-server connected. This triggers a resource shortage, which triggers a red message on the master console, which leads to a phone call from the folks in the datacenter making GBS threads themselves asking me if they need to worry about this. The next big surprise is that this installer doesn't actually install the product, it's just a downloader. Remember when I said that we mainframe admins consider a 600MB installation a big thing? Well, the SAS Downloader pops up a message warning me that I don't have the space to download all 7.8GB of the product.

SEVEN POINT EIGHT GIGABYTES?! GREAT SCOTT

I feel the need to remind you that this is a product for a text-based interface. "What the hell?" doesn't even begin to describe what I'm thinking. First, what could possibly be in it? Second, our system cannot allocate an OMVS volume big enough to contain it, and I'm pretty sure a company with such a rich mainframe heritage as the SAS Institute would be well aware of this type of limitation. (OMVS volumes are actually z/OS datasets, and the largest dataset we can allocate is 10,000 cylinders*, which comes out to a little bit less than 7.8GB.)

_{*-- There are ways around this, but it's drat tricky once you've put the machine in production.}

I hop back on SAS's website and find a Windows version of that same downloader, along with instructions for downloading the data to my workstation and then uploading it back to the mainframe. Even though I don't have the space to upload it, I want to see what's in it.. And yes, I verified with SAS tech support that both the z/OS and Windows versions of the downloader get the exact same data.

I use WinDirStat to try to find out what is making this sucker so damned big.

- It has a tree with over 1500 subfolders.

By file type:
- There are over 500 JAR files (which it probably uses), and they weigh in at 1.8GB.
- There are nearly 100 ZIP files, and they're 1.6GB.
- Some "PAX" files.. 1.3GB.. (if they're what I think they are, they're kinda like zips)

But the next one is so funny it makes me cry inside:
- 191 EXE files, 853MB.

You know, "Windows executables".. Programs that run on Windows. Programs that have no business taking up precious space on a mainframe because z/OS considers them to be complete gibberish. The average mainframe is so big that it makes a Windows box look like a cell phone, and ours is no different. It needs Windows EXE files like a fish needs a bicycle. "What the gently caress is this poo poo doing here, SAS?!"

I check the folder tree, and there's 200MB of .Net redistributables and service packs, 220MB of ACE redistributables (in nine different languages!), 176MB of JET redist (in 20 languages), and over 1GB of products that can only be installed using their respective "setup.exe" files. It turns out that the SAS Download Manager grabs the installation data for every single platform for which SAS is available, and it doesn't give you the ability to 'uncheck' any of it. It's all 7.8GB or nothing.

I call SAS tech support to see if there's any way to get a smaller installation package (similar to the previous version, which was about one-tenth the size)..
-- Their answer: "no."

-- Me: Can I just delete all of the EXE files, and remove the folders that are obviously installing stuff that is foreign to the mainframe?

-- Them: "Uhh.. that's a bad idea. This installer is Java based, and Java is cross-platform and it might need to access some of that data and possibly execute some of those exe's in the background."

Let's just say the conversation fizzled from there and I gave up.

gently caress it, we're sticking with SAS Release 8.2 until the end of time.

Sweevo posted:

Sweevo posted:

Optimus_Rhyme posted:

there's no 'stuff from the 80s'. It's like saying Windows 2012 is 'from the 90s' and it's more like 'from the 60s'. Anyway, it's super crazy poo poo especially because every system programmer from about 1970 on up drinks the IBM koolaid (including their own engineers) and then poo poo like the Logica breach happens and people STILL think it didn't happen and that Logica is trying to cover it up.

Also my most recent project:

http://t.co/Aiepahi8MM

Some of my favs:












(all of these are just chillin on the internet)

death .cab for qt posted:

okay so at first I was like "haha i should tell my uncle about this guy" cuz he worked at ibm for a while, left, and went back eventually, and he did a lot of programming work for them, so he'd get a kick out of it

then you posted a pic that had nd in it and I gotta ask is your middle name Henry "Porkchop"

dur posted:

someone post that video of the guy turning on the old mainframe and it takes like half an hour to do so

The Leck posted:

im the yamaha p series.

what amp do you use for your synth/piano jamming? is something in the roland kc series? i've been wanting a little portable synth like that for a while, but i don't have any way to make it loud enough to be heard other than a guitar amp that i'm afraid it might blow up .

Dr. Honked posted:

i use a fender mustang 1 mk2 but that's because i am mainly a guitarist. that works fine for me but i had to set up a clean patch on the amp via the computer, which is a pretty wacky concept, because i am from the olden days. you might want to consider one of the very nice powered monitors that are in fashion right now?

ol qwerty bastard posted:

My idiot spare time project: finally figuring out how to do graphics with Python and then doing the simplest poo poo i can think of in it, apparently

fractals!





conway's game of life!



langton's ant!



yeah i know i'm really breaking new ground here

i also wrote a thing for doing anti-aliased lines but then realized pygame already had one

oh well

ol qwerty bastard posted:

My idiot spare time project: finally figuring out how to do graphics with Python and then doing the simplest poo poo i can think of in it, apparently

fractals!





conway's game of life!



langton's ant!



yeah i know i'm really breaking new ground here

i also wrote a thing for doing anti-aliased lines but then realized pygame already had one

oh well

Dr. Honked posted:

aaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww yyyyyiiissssssssssssssssssssssssssssss



it fucken owns

802.11weed posted:

i bought a pinball machine & it owns

Angry Moo Cow posted:

i want one

802.11weed posted:

i bought a pinball machine & it owns

kwinkles posted:

a giant mess of relays and solenoids

kwinkles posted:

pinball machines are like a giant mess of relays and solenoids

kwinkles posted:

they have soldering stations, a wood shop, a bunch of cnc stuff, 3d printers, a metal shop, and a cnc embroiderer so i can even make shirts with dicks embroidered on them

Sagebrush posted:

designing myself a new desk. i have these great massive solid steel legs from my old desk cause when i moved i had to throw out the desk top cause it was way too big and heavy (about 6 feet long 3 wide). it was ugly cheap formica kind of material anyway. so am designing myself a new hardwood top that i'm gonna cnc on the router. debating what type of wood to use and how many hidden compartments to install

01011001 posted:

exactly they own

dur posted:

how much does it cost to go there and use their stuff?

01011001 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyiY_3cyEuo here's a robutt. only fell in once filming it, too

802.11weed posted:

i bought a pinball machine & it owns

01011001 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyiY_3cyEuo here's a robutt. only fell in once filming it, too