tool

And despite security recommendations, too many IT depts still force password resets every 90 days…

It could be for contractual or for insurance reasons. We have some contracts with government agencies that require it, and our cyberinsurance also does. Even though NIST has been recommending for years to do long passphrase + MFA and no reset unless you suspect compromise.

So yeah, the reason behind this might not be just plain incompetence.

This is why I got all of our devs to start building with the target of a Docker container in mind.

And for the ones who still won’t or can’t wrap their brains around Docker, I run their shit through a Github Actions workflow that spits out their ugly baby as a Docker container. In the end, I don’t give a shit what it is, your Rube-Goldberg piece of shit is getting stuffed into a Docker container.

“It works on my machine!” Yeah, well, your machine is now everyone’s machine thanks to the magic of containers. Now fix your broken shit so PagerDuty doesn’t call me at 3am again. Fuck.

Never going to happen, same for Excel.

Whatever future iteration of ChatGPT that eventually enslaves the human race will be using Outlook and Excel to keep track of the genocide.

I’ve been doing -fr like forever. Don’t know why

BURN THE HERETIC

I don’t even ask for that anymore because it rarely leads to good ends. What I do now is send an email summarizing the dumb bullshit that they want me to do, describe the detrimental effects that it will have in excruciating detail, ask if there are any corrections and if my understanding is correct, and say that if I don’t get a reply from them by X time, I’ll do $DumbBullshitThing at Y time/date. It gets CC’ed at least one level higher than them in the food chain and also to my personal email address for CYA.

It puts the onus on them, creates a paper trail, and also places the blame on them when shit blows up because they asked me to do $DumbBullshitThing when the consequences were clearly laid out.

It’s so rare for me to have to use the modulo operator I’m actually excited when I come across a situation where I can.

Even now, the only thing that Javascript has going for it is that it’s not Groovy…

I hate Node and NPM so much that I have a physical reaction to just seeing the words now.

I already disliked Node & NPM quite a bit, but the hatred and disgust got to the point it is now after having to write a CI/CD pipeline in Groovy/Jenkins for a Node site that that our devs were building. I had to automate the build/deployment of Satan’s favorite framework in Satan’s favorite language. I came pretty close to quitting.

It’s out the door now, but I’m in the middle of reimplementing the pipeline in Github Actions so I don’t drink myself to death when they come knocking to do it again.

I’ve been using Linux professionally for a couple of decades and using it altogether since like 1996. I never knew about the timeout command. I’m gonna have some fun with that.

I wonder if I can set someone’s shell to it…

More like <esc><esc><esc><esc><esc><esc><esc><esc>… Just in case

MY PEOPLE!

VSCode is what made me finally switch away from vim for anything but minor edits. It’s just too good.

I did set up vim keybindings in it, though.

I first settled on vim as a teenager because I was a fan of… performing surprise penetration tests.

It defaults to opening files read-only, so you don’t have to worry about the access/modified time on the file changing if you open one for… science reasons.

Quick editing for me is in vim. Anything else is in Visual Studio Code. Which I have set up with vim keybindings.

That certainly makes me feel better for letting the Magic Smoke out.

I don’t think it became easier at all until it was forked off into Xorg and they started making dramatic improvements.

I think it was trial and error for hours at least.

It certainly was until I discovered the monitor I hadn’t fried had the modelines printed on a sticker on the back…

So I’m not the only one who fried a monitor trying to get X11 working…

and how hard it was to get x11 working

Oh good God. If you really want to test someone’s resolve, sit them down at an old computer with a CRT and no Internet and have them configure X11 from scratch. Seeing that default X11 crosshatch background for the first time was practically orgasmic after the bullshit I went through to make it work.

That’s one of those traumatizing experiences I’d completely blocked from my memory until I read your comment.

Traumatizing experience #2 that just came back to me was getting a winmodem working and connected to my ISP via minicom.

Aside from the callback chains and API shit, my issues with Node rest almost entirely on the lack of a standard library, because that led to the state of NPM today, which is just an absolute garbage-fire shitshow as far as I’m concerned.

I have my own separate issues with NPM, namely its dependency resolution (my God, just take dnf's dependency resolution algorithm and use it), trivial packages that other packages list as a dependency (is this an int? Is this running on Windows? Better take this one line and make it a package!), and the relative inability to remove a package from a registry (did a secret slip in there while testing? Tough shit!). The worst of that being the trivial packages, I think, because then you can end up with projects that can have a dependency tree 10s of thousands packages long.

And all that bullshit wouldn’t be even 1/16th of the problem it is today if there were a standard library.

You should take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, though, I’m just a DevOps Sysadmin, and aside from running some software that uses Node, most of my experience with it is unfucking it when our devs come to me to fix the tangled monster they’ve created.

I’ve had something similar happen, except the post that I found which fixed the problem was made by… me. Apparently I’d had the problem before, figured it out, and then posted an update about why it was happening and how to fix it.

That was some Twilight Zone shit.

At that point you may as well go full Vagrant or start using Docker images.

And no matter how quirky or obtuse venv/conda/pip can be, they will never be as bad as Node. Ever. Node will hold that King Shit crown forever, or at least to God I hope it does.

Something worse than Node coming around and getting popular might just make me quit IT altogether.