Just another Swedish programming sysadmin person.
Coffee is always the answer.

And beware my spaghet.

  • 3 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle













  • You’re lucky to not have to deal with some of this hardware then, because it really feels like there are manufacturers who are determined to rediscover as many solved problems as they possibly can.

    Got to spend way too much time last year with a certain piece of HPC hardware that can sometimes finish booting, and then sit idle at the login prompt for almost half a minute before the onboard NIC finally decides to appear on the PCI bus.
    The most ‘amusing’ part is that it does have the onboard NIC functional during boot, since it’s a netbooted system. It just seems to go into some kind of hard reset when handing over to the OS.

    Of course, that’s really nothing compared to a couple of multi-socket storage servers we have, which sometime drop half the PCI bus on the floor when under certain kinds of load, requiring them to be unplugged from power entirely before the bus can be used again.


  • The predictable interface naming has solved a few issues at work, mainly in regards to when we have to work with expensive piece-of-shit (enterprise) systems, since they sometimes explode if your server changes interface names.
    Normally wouldn’t be an issue, but a bunch of our hardware - multiple vendors and all - initialize the onboard NIC pretty late, which causes them to switch position almost every other boot.

    I’ve personally stopped caring about interface names nowadays though, I just use automation to shove NetworkManager onto the machine and use it to get a properly managed connection instead, so it can deal with all the stupid things that the hardware does.






  • Go has a heavy focus on simplicity and ease-of-use by hiding away complexity through abstractions, something that makes it an excellent language for getting to the minimum-viable-product point. Which I definitely applaud it for, it can be a true joy to code an initial implementation in it.

    The issue with hiding complexity like such is when you reach the limit of the provided abstractions, something that will inevitably happen when your project reaches a certain size. For many languages (like C/C++, Ruby, Python, etc) there’s an option to - at that point - skip the abstractions and instead code directly against the underlying layers, but Go doesn’t actually have that option.
    One result of this is that many enterprise-sized Go projects have had to - in pure desperation - hire the people who designed Go in the first place, just to get the necessary expertice to be able to continue development.

    Here’s one example in the form of a blog - with some examples of where hidden complexity can cause issues in the longer term; https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride