[10:11] <zxm-pi_> allo allo
[10:11] <daftykins> gooood mornin'
[10:12] <daftykins> cor, already solving client problems and it's not even mid-day
[10:22] <zxm-pi_> charge extra for unsocialble hours. you can still taste the toothpaste! :-P\
[10:51] <daftykins> :D
[10:51] <daftykins> looks like i'm going to succeed in swinging diddledan some more work though, which is nice!
[10:52] <zxm-pi_> the old geeks network :-P
[10:53] <daftykins> \o/
[11:11] <daftykins> ok gotta head out, bbl \o
[11:12] <zxm-pi_> o/
[11:29] <stevenm> oh yeah I was here for a while - then I forgot
[11:29] <stevenm> hi again
[11:30] <zxm-pi_> o/
[14:50] <daftykins> \o
[14:50] <daftykins> hmm, half way home from one - got a call to walk straight back and go to another :D
[14:51] <zxm-pi_> don't have an e-scooter for moving servers? :-P
[14:53] <daftykins> haha, nah my clients are usually quite accomodating with my preference for a lack of transport
[14:56] <zxm-pi_> a market that hasn't even really started yet ttps://cleanscooter.in/i/6d/e5/28/ed91d86f5f87c469e57d826461.jpg
[14:57] <daftykins> :)
[14:57] <daftykins> or perhaps if i was feeling fit still - https://cdn.webshopapp.com/shops/212063/files/110249687/johnny-loco-cargo-dutch-delight.jpg
[14:58] <zxm-pi_> i'd imagine on narrow island streets that would be a bugger on corners. i see them having trouble here in older parts of dublin
[15:04] <daftykins> i'll sooner die on the hills and valleys :D definitely not going to try
[15:11]  * diddledan wanders in
[15:11]  * diddledan looks confused
[15:11]  * diddledan wanders out
[15:11] <diddledan> (that's "The Father Dougal" method)
[15:12] <zxm-pi_> not so much a method as a calling
[15:14] <diddledan> such a shame that Graham Linehan has turned into a bit of a contemptable person lately
[15:16] <zxm-pi_> he chose the oddest hill to die on
[15:44] <daftykins> yay a wild diddledan appears
[15:44] <diddledan> or a dopeydoodah
[15:44] <daftykins> diddledan: how are you gonna defeat that pesky contact form then? seems mad it's a requirement o0
[15:45] <diddledan> aye
[15:45] <diddledan> I can probably whip something up :-)
[15:45] <daftykins> \o/
[15:45] <daftykins> have i given you all you need to get cracking?
[15:45] <diddledan> https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53113 <-- my very important change to WP :-)
[15:45] <diddledan> yup, I think so
[15:46] <daftykins> there's even a free pic of my cat Mischief in the root xD
[15:46] <diddledan> :-o omg *kittycuddle*
[15:46] <daftykins> ooh fame with WP
[15:47] <daftykins> btw i spotted a teensy tiny typo on your site, top left "...Snap Packger for Linux."
[15:47] <diddledan> oops
[15:52] <daftykins> yay fixed
[15:53] <diddledan> ;-)
[15:55] <diddledan> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8exvTjZqrxs
[15:56] <daftykins> looking forward to reducing the wordpress instances under my control, seems all too easy for drama to occur if a plugin doesn't like a new release or similar
[15:56] <daftykins> wow that looks beefy
[15:56] <diddledan> aye, especially as WP seems to be moving to a less backwards-compatible-at-all-costs stance
[15:57] <daftykins> hrmm something to help boost revenue?
[15:57] <diddledan> donno. it's all being driven by the block editor
[15:57] <diddledan> which has far too much churn for my liking
[15:58] <daftykins> :D when you mentioned that'd involve learning i was like "NOOO! learning's horrid!" ;)
[15:59] <diddledan> as a plugin dev, I like that it allows me to replace a shortcode with a "block" that has guard rails so users don't try to do something that just cannot be done
[16:02] <daftykins> that's already talk beyond me! i've seen 'shortcode' mentioned but don't really get what it means
[16:03] <diddledan> a shortcode is a specially-formatted bit of text that gets replaced by WP plugins or theme code - my plugin hooks to shortcodes of the format: [a-z-listing configoptions]
[16:04] <diddledan> it's completely freeform though, so users can put whatever they want between the begin [ and end ].
[16:04] <daftykins> ah ok so they just call the plugins into being, think i've seen that with the contact form 7 stuff inline on a page
[16:04] <diddledan> yup, the cf7 plugin has shortcodes to let you embed a contact form where you want it
[16:05] <daftykins> i was gonna repeat my tale of (both of our) other school-era friend's VPS woes of getting turned into a spammer until i noticed, so it'd certainly be nice to lock that down
[16:06] <daftykins> i wonder if i should prod him into checking the specific wording because i was really hoping just an obfuscated email address on the contact page was going to cut it
[16:07] <diddledan> I'm curious which spec mandates the contact form - it's an interesting requirement
[16:07] <daftykins> mmm
[16:07] <daftykins> he's a pretty time poor since he's a Doctor in the day, then does all these biz's on the side
[16:08] <daftykins> -a
[16:08] <diddledan> aah.. probably some medical thing then :-)
[16:08] <daftykins> yeah, if you caught me blabbing about all the server setup i was providing and doing stuff with XCP-ng, this is the one :D
[16:09] <diddledan> aha. XCP-ng is pretty funky
[16:10] <daftykins> ah it was gold last night, saved my bacon in a snap, i attempted to build a newer version of its' management tool and it messed up because the wrong node version was installed... i shutdown that VM, connected to the secondary one on my second host here in Guernsey and one-click restored the Exeter one to a snapshot taken at midnight last night, back in business without a problem :D
[16:10] <diddledan> 🎉
[16:11] <zxm-pi_> but now you can use your favourite captchas to filter out bots :-P https://i.imgur.com/GQqZWR4.jpg
[16:11] <daftykins> LOL
[16:12] <daftykins> that's great
[16:12] <diddledan> I've got three proliants running vmware in my home lab.. I keep wondering about whether XCP-ng might be better considering they're almost out of VMware's back-compat supported hardware
[16:13] <daftykins> might be! what vintage are they? i snagged myself 12th gen Dell PowerEdge's for peanuts
[16:13] <diddledan> I do particularly like VMware's automatic vmotion tho
[16:13] <diddledan> they're Gen8's (latest is Gen10)
[16:14] <daftykins> ooh i have that client with the ML350p gen 8 still (although it's not been turned on in months now)
[16:15] <daftykins> i've been loving it personally, for some reason VMs don't seem to boot as quick as on my home haswell whitebox solution running ESXi, but i don't know if that's down to generational gains in VT and so on
[16:15] <daftykins> i talk to the devs over in their channel here though, Olivier's cool
[16:15] <daftykins> as cool as the French can be ;) hehe
[16:15] <diddledan> they're certainly batting above their weight class :-)
[16:16] <diddledan> it's impressive what they've managed to pull together considering Citrix's XenServer wasn't completely OSS
[16:16] <daftykins> because of Andy's second biz plans there, i'm hoping we can add at least one host to paid support eventually with the XCP-ng team, $500/yr iirc
[16:17] <daftykins> yep - and the features they've got planned are very cool
[16:17] <daftykins> minimalist webUI on-host instead of having to run a management VM etc, plus i spotted virtual TPMs being considered
[16:19] <daftykins> have you got shared network storage already for all your hosts?
[16:19] <diddledan> atm they're running vsan
[16:19] <daftykins> ah ok so presumably vendor locked in
[16:19] <diddledan> yup
[16:20] <daftykins> i'm running RAID10s on SAS HBAs in each of my 2
[16:20] <daftykins> they're really standalone but i put in a site to site VPN and added the other server to each, so i have management redundancy in essence
[16:20] <diddledan> I was wondering whether XCP-ng's vsan would be available for laypeople that are playing in their homelab
[16:21] <daftykins> hrmm might be worth joining us in #xcp-ng and seeing what the other guys make of things, since they've probably touched the more serious stuff
[16:22] <daftykins> there's a Matrix bridge bot i think the platform of choice is, for the team
[16:22] <diddledan> *yoink*
[16:22] <daftykins> :D
[16:23] <diddledan> if I can do away with the vmware £200/yr homelab thingy then that'ld be awesome :-)
[16:23] <daftykins> love having 128 GB RAM in both my hosts to play with
[16:23] <daftykins> hehe, absolutely
[16:23] <diddledan> I've only got 48GB in each of three boxes
[16:23] <daftykins> then you can buy that mega switch!
[16:23] <daftykins> aww
[16:24] <daftykins> that's not half bad though, plenty to muck about with
[16:24] <diddledan> yup, more than enough for me to play with.. the only thing I really need (want) to keep available is my plex server
[16:24] <diddledan> ... 17TB of video :-o
[16:25] <daftykins> :D
[16:25] <daftykins> can't recall if you were active the other day when i mentioned a dude come in who ran his entire setup from a single NUC - including his router, with a single 1TB SSD for both XCP-ng boot + all VMs, then it failed
[16:26] <diddledan> wow
[16:26] <diddledan> and eep
[16:26] <daftykins> he came in on his mobile with boot broken xD
[16:26] <diddledan> poor person :-(
[16:27] <daftykins> naturally he was not a paying customer and was getting a tad heated blaming the product... i eventually extracted a smartctl output, SSD lifespan was at 7% and had oodles of bad sectors and block errors D:
[16:27] <diddledan> I feel for them <3
[16:27] <daftykins> i don't, he had no backups xD
[16:27] <diddledan> ...
[16:27]  * diddledan checks notes... oops, nor do I :-p
[16:28] <diddledan> I have backups of stuff I can't reproduce tho
[16:28] <daftykins> redundant storage though?
[16:28]  * daftykins spots a tumbleweed
[16:28] <daftykins> ;D
[16:28] <diddledan> worst comes to the worst if my boxes here die I have to re-rip my blurry discs
[16:29] <diddledan> on vmware I've got vsan set up with 1 redundant copy
[16:29] <diddledan> doing iti in software rather than via raid
[16:29] <daftykins> what's the main pool disk config behind the vmware vsan?
[16:30] <diddledan> vsan is similar to zfs in that it likes you to use an HBA rather than a raid card
[16:31] <daftykins> ah yeah, so handles disks directly
[16:31] <diddledan> so I have three boxes, and 2 copies of all data spanning the three available pools of disks - vsan does a JBOD like thing on each host and then does the redundancy over the network
[16:32] <daftykins> ooh-err, hope it does some periodic verification :D
[16:32] <diddledan> it still lets you lose a single disk without killing the entire host, tho, so it's as useful as a native raid
[16:32] <daftykins> mmm, or as good as RAID5 at least
[16:32] <diddledan> you know I'm unsure about whether it reverifies on the regular
[16:33] <diddledan> the idea is that you can lose an entire host without losing your data
[16:33] <daftykins> may be worth a poke, i set up Andy's Google Workspace SMTP relay from the management VM and pointed the iDRAC emails to it to ensure i get warned about the RAID10's
[16:33] <diddledan> (that's how I have it anywho)
[16:34] <daftykins> i get weekly notifications about the PERC doing some 'patrol read verify'
[16:35] <daftykins> gonna go pop the kettle on, bbs
[16:35] <diddledan> ☕
[16:37] <diddledan> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrBw0pbF11s
[16:41] <luna> o/
[16:49] <daftykins> heya
[16:49] <luna> hi
[16:56] <luna> yay Katie
[16:56] <daftykins> eh?
[16:57] <luna> just a Londoner i fancy
[17:09] <daftykins> 'tis danger afoot in the big smoke!
[17:09] <luna> well its COVID and i am unemployed
[17:16] <luna> :(
[17:17] <daftykins> can't be an enjoyable time of late, then?
[17:17] <luna> nah hard to go see someone irl
[17:20] <daftykins> *nod*
[17:20] <daftykins> it's weird to think of because it's life as normal down here on the islands
[17:20] <luna> oh
[17:21] <daftykins> aside from travel anywho
[17:22] <zxm-pi_> yes but you've eliminated covid in the community and long may that continue
[17:31] <diddledan> no fair!
[17:31] <diddledan> although I'm getting my second prick tomorrow
[17:32] <daftykins> come now, none of us leave the house anyway! :D
[17:33] <diddledan> wait, that's a requirement?
[17:34] <daftykins> only to truly appreciate the freedom... so i'm told
[17:34] <diddledan> well that's shenanigans
[17:35] <daftykins> *nod*
[17:35] <daftykins> well HelloFRESH have tricked me today, each week you get automatic selections offered
[17:35] <daftykins> they sent me the recipe cards of the automatic offers, but the ingredients for what i manually picked
[17:36] <daftykins> is this hard mode?
[17:36] <diddledan> haha
[17:36] <daftykins> "make these tacos from this Thai curry set"
[17:36] <daftykins> uuuuuuh
[17:36] <diddledan> wait till you get to the final boss
[17:36] <daftykins> omw
[17:36] <daftykins> can't snapshot and restore ingredients :(
[17:39] <zxm-pi_> this is where you type the ingredients into a find a recipe site and it gives you the menu? :-P
[17:39] <zxm-pi_> *the recipe?
[17:39] <daftykins> maybe next week there'll be a padlock on the box
[17:40] <daftykins> i'm not sure i signed up for this D:
[17:43] <diddledan> this tweet of mine seems popular https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/eFfTgKRN/image.png
[17:44] <diddledan> in situ: https://twitter.com/diddledan/status/1387794037017616391
[17:49] <daftykins> :D
[20:25] <daftykins> hmm, today's client has this old Panasonic phone system, calls itself an "Advanced Hybrid System" with what the manual says are "proprietary telephones" - what i'm wondering is whether with this in place, it's impossible for an ADSL service to function
[20:28] <daftykins> i'm beginning to think "yes" because at the wall socket, all of which are 8P8C - a modtap converts it to a standard BT plug... on popping in a microfilter, nothing functioned behind it :D
[20:30] <daftykins> i think it needs rewiring so the router connects to the line first, then i pipe the voice out of that one to this old system
[20:32] <daftykins> pretty funny... client goes to telco this morning and says he wants to upgrade from ADSL to VDSL - telco employee says "sir it shows here you have 3 phone lines"
[20:32] <daftykins> "oh my, cancel the other 2 please" client says - telco employee ignores that ADSL is on one, so the service disappears from the property entirely, i got called
[20:35] <daftykins> should thank them for all the extra business i suppose
[20:46] <zxm-pi_> phone companies don't screw up small. they go full sledgehammer on you :-)
[20:48]  * daftykins pages Peter Gabriel
[21:07] <diddledan> is "macOS Big Sir" a euphemism for a thingy?
[21:08] <diddledan> 🍆
[21:08] <diddledan> "and this, this is my Big Sir"
[21:10] <daftykins> Big Sur!
[21:10] <diddledan> suits you, sur
[21:10] <daftykins> https://imgur.com/gallery/US2v5Ze
[21:11] <diddledan> wtf?
[21:12] <daftykins> i'm now picturing that lady from the BBC News that presents the Antique Roadshow, introducing a person having their elderly mother or father get appraised by an expert
[21:13] <daftykins> *Antiques
[21:14] <diddledan> "I'm afraid this piece is too damaged to be worth anything"
[21:17] <diddledan> you know the world has gone completely bonkers when you get: https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/navvu8Ct/image.png
[21:17] <diddledan> drive-through oxygen from a temple
[21:18] <diddledan> and just like here, there's loads of folk saying what a great job the Indian Government is doing and that lockdown isn't needed
[21:19] <diddledan> I guess you get lunatics in every country
[21:21] <diddledan> in unrelated news, I'm worshipping the moon next week
[21:44] <daftykins> oh really? sorry i went to wash up D:
[21:45] <daftykins> and yeah arguably India has a lot more!
[22:14] <daftykins> solely due to population count of course