[AC-Admins] Trash talking servers / admins

[Scott 'Simba' Garron]

      After grepping through some channel conversations today, I noticed 
this little snippet (irrelevant conversation removed):

06:03PM <Inaki> you know, if we reduced the network to glider, cheetah 
and husky, it'd be perfectly stable
06:03PM <Pippin> and otter, I think?
06:04PM <InvinPoomie> which servers are where?
06:04PM <InvinPoomie> any server in the UK?
06:04PM <Inaki> ya otter's pretty stable
06:04PM <Inaki> lion and snowleopard are garbage
06:04PM <InvinPoomie> i wonder where they are located
06:04PM <Pippin> squirrel=germany, husky=UK, lion=florida, 
otter=texas(?), glider=califhornia, snowleopard=virginia(?)
06:05PM <Pippin> oh, and cheetah=chicago
06:05PM <Inaki> er ya =D
06:05PM <Pippin> there was a map somewhere.
06:06PM <InvinPoomie> So Simba's is junk? ;)
06:06PM * >Pippin made a whizzy google maps map ages ago but, of course, 
never actually got round to telling anyone about it :p
06:07PM <Inaki> Lion's been okay recently, but ya.. it had all sorts of 
problems
06:08PM <Pippin> lion is on a network whose uplinks tend to have outages 
sometimes.  lion itself is stable as far as I know, but with a crummy 
network connection and services hosted with it, it tends to disrupt the 
whole irc network if it hiccups.
06:08PM <InvinPoomie> i know nothing about IRC networks
06:08PM <Inaki> Pippin: yep.. thats the problem
06:09PM <Inaki> also trolls have root on that box >.>

      In particular, I'm pointing out the "lion and snowleopard are 
garbage", "lion is on a network whose uplinks tend to have outages 
sometimes", and "also trolls have root on that box" comments.

      Now, if our own admins have such low opinions of our network 
servers and don't discuss those opinions, how can we continue to operate 
effectively?

      First, I'd like to point out some facts:  After reviewing the 
admin's list archives from the beginning of the archive (May 2006), I 
see that, according to Nagios, lion was out a total of about 490 minutes 
between then and the end of January 2008.  There are a total of 871200 
minutes of time that passed during that timeframe.  490 is about .06 
percent downtime (ie. 99.94% uptime).  Granted, it's not a stellar 
"99.999%", but it's still not "garbage".  That's using the absolutely 
highest number of downtime minutes that I could generate.  That includes 
the 220 minutes that I brought the whole machine down when Yappy 
mistakenly did an rm -rf in the wrong directory and I was trying to do 
data recovery for him.  That also includes the minutes that Nagios may 
have had issues on its end when lion was still operational on this end 
(those minutes are very few and far between.  Kudos to Pippin for having 
stellar uptime with that).

      Prior to the archives (2005 and 2004), lion had lots of problems 
that were related to the machine itself.  I admit that it was running on 
old, failing hardware, and that has been rectified.  If you're referring 
to that, I don't know what else I can do.

      I haven't bothered calculating uptime for the rest of the servers 
using the same method, but I'll bet that you'll find similar results 
with all the rest of the servers.  Lion was never down for days at a 
time during the recorded archive due to datacenter moves, IP address 
changes, or switch ports being bad.  It's still in the same data center 
with, I think, the same IP address that it has had since the beginning.

      The "trolls" comment had me kinda floored, though.  The people 
with root on the physical machine are:  simba, harik.  People with root 
on the virtual machine with the IRCd:  simba, harik.  People with root 
on the virtual machine with services:  simba, harik, mach, yappy, 
simtra, ratchet, rasvar, mrbrain.  mrbrain is an ex-sysadmin at ao.net. 
  simtra used to be involved in the furry fandom, but is also an ex AO 
employee.  Neither of them are trolls.  That leaves ratchet, mach, 
yappy, and rasvar.  Mach is anti-troll.  Rasvar wouldn't troll and 
doesn't have time to troll.  Ratchet is mostly anti-troll.  Yappy is 
anti-troll.  That leaves harik, simba.  I've been known to troll Furnet, 
'cause like... lol-Furnet.  harik is in a category all his own, but is 
generally only chatting in #furry, somewhere that he is considered "old 
guard".  I'm *really* interested in where this whole "trolls" comment 
came from unless you're talking about me.  I suppose, "if the shoe 
fits", I'll wear it, but "trolls" was used in plural, and I'm certainly 
not more than one person.

      Now...   With those facts, what's really on your minds?  If 
there's a perceived problem, I'd like to know about it and attempt to 
correct it.

-- 
Scott "Simba" Garron