will_hughes

   Location: Sydney, Australia
   Remote: Yes, preferably (I have a quiet home office and 100Mbit+ FTTH internet) 
   Willing to relocate: No
   Technologies:  C#/.NET, Powershell, Windows, Linux (Centos/Ubuntu), Ansible, Octopus Deploy, T-SQL, Redis, HAProxy, IIS, Elasticsearch/ELK, Graphite/Grafana, Zabbix, 
   Résumé/CV: Yes, email me. 
   Email: will@willhughes.me 

I'm looking for another job in the IT Operations space. Remote working would be a plus, but not required.

If you've got a role like this - please reach out.

   Location: Sydney, Australia
   Remote: Yes, preferably (I have a quiet home office and 100Mbit+ FTTH internet) 
   Willing to relocate: Maybe, within AU/NZ - lets talk. 
   Technologies:  C#/.NET, Powershell, Windows, Linux (Centos/Ubuntu), Ansible, Octopus Deploy, T-SQL, Redis, HAProxy, IIS, Elasticsearch/ELK, Graphite/Grafana 
   Résumé/CV: Yes, email me. 
   Email: will@willhughes.me 

For my next job, I'd like a role involving IT Operations - a mix of backend dev/automation and IT Infrastructure management/monitoring/support.

Does that sound like your company? Give me a shout.

   Location: Sydney, Australia
   Remote: Yes, preferably - at least part of the time (I have a quiet home office and 100Mbit+ FTTH internet) 
   Willing to relocate: Maybe, within AU/NZ - lets talk. 
   Technologies:  C#/.NET, Powershell, Windows, Linux (Centos/Ubuntu), Ansible, Octopus Deploy, T-SQL, Redis, HAProxy, IIS, Elasticsearch/ELK, Graphite/Grafana 
   Résumé/CV: Yes, email me. 
   Email: will@willhughes.me 

For my next job, I'd like a role involving IT Operations - a mix of backend dev/automation and IT Infrastructure management/monitoring/support. Somewhere that's low BS, and things can get done without endless meetings.

If you're looking for someone to join a team of like minded folks, give me a shout.

Well clearly I didn't try hard enough

Well, I had the advantage in that I already knew I wasn't touching it on Docker with a ten foot pole, and we use Ansible, so that made my google search pretty obvious.

Close versions of ES+Kibana not working together

Yep, that's a pain in the arse, and a trap for inexperienced players still.

Also of note is that the latest versions available through the package repository are not the same as the latest supported by the Ansible role. The ansible role will install a specific version of Elastic, you'll have to be careful to take note and synchronise that with the versions of Logstash and Kibana you install. (This is why we're on 6.1.3)

- maxConcurrentShardRequests not being set on Kibana for some reason (so when I got them talking, a silly query parameter was holding everything up) - I wasted a ton of time due to some files from a failed installation causing an obtuse error -- I think it was a NoShardAvailableActionException

yeah, can't really help with either of these two - I already had a working ELK1.7 install, so for us it was pretty much a case of stand things up, and perform some modifications to templates/queries/etc, and off we went.

Yeah so has anyone actually tried to get ElasticSearch up and running lately?

Actually, yes. I just finished doing our migration from ELK 1.7 to 6.1.3.

We're using installs direct on VMs (rather than docker), and for that we push the configuration/install using Ansible. Their Ansible role[1] works reasonably well for installing Elastic. The Kibana and Logstash configurations were done using regular RPM install from the repo.

[1] https://github.com/elastic/ansible-elasticsearch

The one thing I miss about working for a major national telco was access to the internal newsgroups where you'd get deep discussions triggered by someone's random question on things.

Probably because they support older SSL/TLS versions and/or cryptographic ciphers.

The first quoted instance is still apparently an ongoing case[1] as of this month, so it's not exactly settled.

[1] http://www.bcdemocrat.com/2018/01/04/former-abbey-inn-owner-...

will just report you to the cops if they see sleight-of-hand

Why? Just add it to the order.

Wrong thread?

Also, it may be true where you are, but it's not universally true. I know the cycle and timing of the lights near my home, and I keep getting frustrated by people who don't press the button and now I need to press it, and wait an extra cycle.

I think they should only retaliate on US officials (elected and who work for DHS). Ask them to reveal passwords to national secrets when they enter the country, then detain them for hours when they refuse.

Unfortunately I don't think this will do what you expect - they'll probably happily hand over their password.

what's the problem with the HTTP-01 challenge?

Nothing, yet.

But who's to say that another similar bug won't be found in common shared-hosting platforms that forces LE to turn that challenge off too?

This is already covered in the book. The water ice on Ceres had already been used up in the colonisation efforts of Earth and then later: Mars.

Nothing says I control the domain like the ability to add and remove data from the authoritative DNS servers for the domain label (and children thereof) in question.

Unfortunately this makes life difficult for us.

We run a whitelabelled platform with tens of thousands of users - it's hard enough to get many people to understand setting a CNAME record (vs just setting an A record). Requiring them to update a TXT record once would be a big enough challenge, but doing it every 30-90 days is never going to happen. The smaller customers would probably be happy with us hosting their DNS, but we're not going to do that - the larger ones wouldn't.

TLS-SNI being gone and DNS being unworkable means we're left with HTTP only.

You're going to find it a hard road to convince anyone that ISPs shouldn't be able to perform standard network management activities on their network.

It's also extremely unhelpful to bring it up in the context of NN.

With Australia, submarine transport costs to Singapore (nearest 'major' Internet hub)

There's very little direct bandwidth to Singapore - there's only one cable going west (SEA-ME-WE-3), it's old, and constantly has breaks.

Unless you live in Western Australia, your traffic (even to Singapore) doesn't go via that - it goes via the US over SXC or Endeavor to the east, or to the north to Guam (PIPE-1) or Japan (AJC)

It's reasonable for them to zero-rate that traffic as they're effectively passing their cost savings on to their customers, as opposed to trying to double dip by charging content networks for access to their subscribers. This may violate more pure definitions of net neutrality, but should be desirable behaviour as it's pro consumer.

I agree, however I've had (heated) arguments with people on this aspect. Not everyone agrees, and thinks that all traffic should be zero-rated if any traffic is going to be.

Under the net neutrality definition linked above, blocking specific ports is a clear violation.

I don't see how you can read that from the linked wikipedia page. I assume you're conflating blocking ports with blocking/slowing protocols.

Please direct me to a source explaining why malicious network traffic is exempt from net neutrality.

It's not an exhaustive policy document of every possible reason why network access might be terminated/restricted. eg no discussion of terminating/filtering BGP peering announcements from a misconfigured device.

Few people, if any, have ever said that network management activities are would be prohibited under NN. If someone is actively disrupting the network, or is otherwise acting maliciously, then clearly as a network operator you're going to be permitted to block that traffic.

Over the past decade, many residential customers have called to enable port 25 so they can run their own mail server

Sure, but even if they did permit it - the chances you will be able to run a mail relay from an IP that's clearly in the same network block as a bunch of other residential networks is near zero.

Most major mail providers will outright block you for existing in that range, and most others will block you for being unable to demonstrate control over the IP (by setting Reverse-DNS).

Are you talking about the Binge-On service[1]? That's an optional service on both the customer and provider side.

Either way, there's no additional charges on the customer or provider side.

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html

The argument for prohibiting zero-rating under NN generally goes like this:

If provider X provides a very limited (or no) quota for regular internet traffic, and provides access to sponsored zero-rated services - then this inhibits competition, and (depending on how agressively it's implmented) can inhibit free speech.

This has been seen seen in some countries such as India where facebook.com was zero-rated traffic, and data prices for regular internet access were extremely high.

It's also seen today in Australia where Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play Music services are zero-rated traffic on certain mobile (cellular) plans - many of these plans also have zero-rated access to various popular social media platforms too (facebook, instagram, etc) - and data quotas are generally fairly limited (2-10GB/month is typical for mid-range plans). A competitor to these services is going to have a very hard time entering the market, since their customers will all have the data usage come out of their regular quota.

Continuing with Australia - Most ISPs provide zero-rated access to Netflix (or provide 'unlimited' quota). Telstra does not zero-rate Netflix traffic, but they do zero-rate Foxtel and their own movie/tv services. At the same time, having rather low data quotas.

So those who're stuck with Telstra (eg because they live in an apartment/development that is a Telstra-exclusive estate, or just because they're on a 24-36 month contract, having been unaware of the problems) - are unable to use Netflix.

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent network operators from stopping malicious activity on their network.

Blocking Port 25 to specific providers unless they pay up would be a problem, but blocking port 25 globally (except, say, to their own SMTP servers) is perfectly okay.

does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade

Are you really that suprised they block it? It's an exceedingly effective anti-spam measure.

Another HN user who actually works for Telstra saw my post above and reached out to me via email to try and reach a resolution

Good to hear.

Checking your profile seems you're rural - The old Telstra Countrywide unit used to have a lot of influence over the organisation, to the point where they basically ran their own show and told the rest of the organisation to GTFO on most of the corp processes.

Ended up with some interesting showdowns, but usually meant a better outcome for TCW customers (sometimes at the expense of Retail customers where there were boundary conflicts)

I have spoken to her twice now with no result either.

If you don't get a good response, Escalate it - find out who their manager is and call that person.

One of the advantages for having a business service is that there's a defined SLA with penalties. It used to be 4 hour response, 8 hour restore minimum for all business services.

If it's been down this long you should be getting a decent rebate.

Telstra is the current product of a hundred years of monopolistic government owned telco.

They were forced into competition through providing wholesale access to the copper network in various formats, but they've retained ownership of the CAN.

Basically no matter who you get your landline or DSL services through, it's going over a bit of Telstra owned copper at some point.

Things are changing somewhat with the NBN rollout, but not necessarily for the better.

They're trained to keep the peace. 'Measured', I don't know about.

I can imagine they're personally motivated to try and resolve things without resorting to arresting someone as that would result in paperwork/processing/etc back in the office.

It's not too uncommon to see police get involved in negotiating disputes where there's no specific powers they can exercise (other than removing/arresting the person for trespassing/breaching the peace/failure to obey a 'move on' order).

Have the cops turn up makes both sides treat things a bit more seriously - the store manager wants them gone ASAP to stop making a scene, and will be more likely to do whatever it takes to escalate the issue to someone more senior if the police ask.

First thing in 2008

Hello time traveller. While you're at it, buy/mine Bitcoin. It seems crazy, don't worry - it doesn't get any less so. Sell it Mid December 2017.

Also, if you're not getting anywhere and it's a business line service - find out who your account rep is, and call them up to fix this kind of rubbish.

Otherwise, yeah, go sit in a Telstra store until the cops turn up to fix the issue.

Nobody uses cheques, obviously (although they do exist).

Cheques are now mainly used for business to consumer payments, and for large value transactions, where it's done as a bank-drawn cheque usually.

The bank I use doesn't have a branch anywhere near where I live, so when I got sent a cheque a while ago I had to ask how to go about depositing it. Turns out the bank I use for my credit card will happily accept them via their ATMs which print out a receipt with a scan of the cheque.

Change the values there a bit and see how you still feel.

Walmart won't report you to the police if you agree to

- pay them $5000?

- undertake a voluntary 'community service program' at a Walmart designated location (store cleaner on the shift nobody wants at Walmart) for 20 hours per week for 12 months

Remember, that one conviction for minor shoplifting could permanently impact your life. Eg: limiting job opportunities, places you can live, whether you get to see your children in a custody dispute, whether you are entitled to vote or stand for election.

If Walmart knew someone had virtually no other option, they could press their unfair advantage.

I've found that particularly high pitched sounds can bounce of hard/flat surfaces very well.

Better for whom?

"modest" doesn't mean driving Teslas and eating out every night.

It means being able to afford the basics: housing, food, healthcare, transport, and still being able to have enough left over to build a 'rainy day' (emergency) fund.

And the reason "modest" rather than "minimal" is because one is living, the other is effective slavery.

People who cannot afford for one moment to stop are people who are on the edge of disaster. Any (additional) misfortune that strikes - whether by their own actions or not - could send them from "surviving" to now being forced into debt, which while it might provide temporary relief, almost certainly means they are now in a downward cycle.

With a living wage, even if misfortune does drive them into debt - there's at least a better opportunity for them to work their way out.