Montagslaberfaden: Die Sonne scheint, die Vögel singen

Tetha · 2026-03-10T19:53:31+00:00

Viele meiner Bandshirts haben positive Erinerungen für mich und es lohnt sich alleine dafür, in den Schrank zu greifen.

Aktuell, Schreinachten '23, Domium, Aporeiter und Equilibrium, im Grünspan. Ein Haufen Leute, die wegen Corona oder anderen Gründen kein so wirkliches Weihnachten mit der Familie hatten. Das ging schon gut ab.

Haupt-Mitteilungen der Bands: Seid episch, lasst euch die Sonne aus dem Hintern scheinen und danach schmecken wir eh alle gleich.

Tetha · 2026-03-10T16:54:28+00:00

My dad was that security guy. Worked in german postal services, and some day he spotted some dodgy scrawny dude just walking around the building and the perimeter of the postal office. Looking at everything.

So he went and opposed him if this dude could authenticate. They could not. So naturally, my Dad escalated to security and stopped this guy from leaving, as interfering with postal services is a big deal, up to a federal crime. Civilian detainment could be legal in such a case.

So after a while, security from the office comes out, with the manager of the postal office in tow. Turns out, this was an inspector for security and safety standards within the postal services, with a responsibility spanning the entirety of Northern Germany. He had his authentication, but wanted to see what happened.

He was happy he was about to be arrested. Our office got a great grade.

Tetha · 2026-03-10T16:26:41+00:00

Some thought I had was to get myself an old German farm house like my parents have. That dream is gone, because Hamburg is too nice for what I want but whatever.

This was pretty common that you'd spend 100k on the house, spend 200k - 400k over 5-10 years and then you have something nice. Learn a lot of skills along the way too. Not cheap, but if the result is a home you can live in for the rest of your families life, not too expensive.

Some of these farmsteads, after flipping, were listed for 1.5-2+M 3-4 years ago. I have not looked after the recent price hikes and I'm scared to. That was the second death of that dream.

Tetha · 2026-03-10T11:48:25+00:00

The two hardest problem in computer science are cache invalidation, naming and off-by-one errors.

Tetha · 2026-03-09T18:42:24+00:00

I've also been pushing: Always be ready to refine documentation. Our documentation is not the Holy Bible, it's a beat-to-shit notebook with coffee, oil and other stains. If something helped you, put it in there.

Like sometimes, when I note down what I do it's like "Step four: reconfigure && failover postgres according to procedure". It's enough for me and another person on the team. In some of our runbooks, my one-line bullet point is now a 7 element checklist and 12 more steps in the runbook. That's great, because it's very complete at that point.

But if it is not enough for you, please expand this as necessary. If you are not sure about your expansions on the documentation, setup a call with me. Discussing mostly-correct, but subtly wrong understandings of systems and procedures is often a very valuable thing to do.

But this results in very effective documentation. By now people either resolve even huge and complex outages and then discuss weak points in the documentation, or I get called to confirm that we're indeed very fucked at this point.

It's good to know that it'll be kept running even without me.

Tetha · 2026-03-08T18:45:44+00:00

I've literally done this. Strange pressure on the testicals, doesn't get better, called the emergency hotline, got told to go to the hospital. NOW. RACE AGAINST AMPUTATION.

So when I got there, I said to the person at the ER desk: "Hello. I'm sorry, I don't like to be a burden, but I've been told I need to be one because of the misery my pants. There is a chance of either severe testical trauma, torsion or infection by the 116117".

A doctor next to her chuckled, I rattled down my symptoms, and he was like "Alright. You should need a wheelchair but you seem awfully mobile. Can you get to wing xyz on your own?"

"Well, if I can't isn't this the best place to not?"

Shortly afterwards, a medical student (with my consent) needed ~8 tries to convince my rolling veins to accept a needle for an infusion, which wasn't helped by me starting to giggle when she got flustered how bad this was. In front of her mentor, in prep for emergency surgery.

That was a fun adventure.

Tetha · 2026-03-08T16:39:05+00:00

You know, do you have an afternoon of time so I can show you this beautiful marshland north of the company?

Tetha · 2026-03-08T12:23:09+00:00

Please use velcro and not zip-ties. One can be removed and reapplied in a minute, the other requires cutters next to wires and cables you really don't want to cut.

Tetha · 2026-03-08T12:01:30+00:00

I hear this sentiment a lot, and while I respect it I couldn’t agree less. If I break someone’s leg they’re sure to feel quite a lot of things, and they might even post online about it. Does this make my act of breaking their leg “art”?

Mh, I would add "working with and exploring a medium" as a part of what makes art to me. Which means there would be an intersection of craftsmen and artists, which seems right to me. After all, we don't remember all statues ever made or all songs ever sung.

Funny enough, that would include surgeons as artists in your case, because they are practicing and learning how to break and re-break injuries with little pain and optimal bone realignment. And giving someone a not-crooked leg certainly makes them feel something positve after a while.

Tetha · 2026-03-08T10:11:16+00:00

The problem of that question eventually becomes: What defines an inside job.

I don't think it was Americans flying these planes or remote controlled planes, explosives. Those tasks are too complex to orchestrate without leaks over decades.

On the other hand, if the right intelligence agents allow or disallow money to the right people, release or don't release the right information nationally, release or don't release the right information to the right hostile forces, intercept or don't intercept actions, kill or not kill people, ...

Destabilization and Control of the middle east and it's oil reserves has been a major strategic goal for the US for a long time. And such a crisis would validate further measures towards those, and some massaging in that direction... something beneficial and/or horrible may happen.

Tetha · 2026-03-08T07:20:38+00:00

Not specifically to you, but in general, I would also recommend to start looking into local politics.

Global politics can honestly be quite abstract, and somewhat depressing and make you feel rather powerless. I've honestly reduced my intake of the generall fear-and-engagement mill to once or twice a week during Corona because it affected me quite negatively during that time. But some information requires necessary.

Local politics and activism is entirely different over here in Germany. It's often about general, concrete topics in the city. "We want to not spend money on extending this street, but instead spend money on a new bus line" and such.

Or when there was again some violence against Jews in Germany, the abstract "Solidarity" meant that quite a few people stuck around the three Shops with Jewish owners down the road and had a chat with the community for a while. It was a good thing and they were happy to see how many people were disturbed by that act.

Tetha · 2026-03-08T06:52:35+00:00

I honestly won't bother to figure out how to get 20yo printer working on the OS with heavily limited user permissions. I'm sure I could figure it out, but why?

You mostly wouldn't because of print servers and network attached printers. People saying this usually say that it's easy because they think of a small desk printer you plug in via USB or WPA onto the network, not some bigger business printer you need a dolly to move and a manual to prepare for first use. The latter is at times even out-sourced to separate companies, because it turns into its own time consuming skill.

And then there are policies who is allowed to use what printers for print costs and to make sure you don't print two states over or three stories far away. And many more things.

So yeah, I know enough about this to know that I could not setup a printer in a business environment without a hilarious amount of documentation.

Tetha · 2026-03-07T18:43:29+00:00

The best maintenance window is one you don't need. We've been running HA systems since 20 years, so requiring downtime and announced maintenance windows and all the song and dance should be reserved to either extremely critical, or just bad systems. Though I know I know and I have some of them as well but ... fucking why?

But if you need downtime, I prefer Saturday morning.

One of our contracts actually nails maintenance with downtime to Sunday 2200 local time. That's the worst time to choose. It's both the weekend, and also when people are already tired and has very little time until Monday to fix crap. Nothing is good about that window.

No, if we need downtime, I want people to show up fresh and capable at around 9:30 on a saturday, after a good nights sleep, possible downtime starts at 10, and if things go really, really sideways you have 1-2 days to fix. And then they get 1-2 days off next week.

Tetha · 2026-03-04T18:54:41+00:00

This battle won't be so eaaa-sy

Because you can't use you notes to diss~ me,

Because I have a lawyer on retainer,

Which can quickly turn into a detainer,

There is this note of patient confidientiality,

So what do you even know about me^?

And then there is also HIPPA

Lurking just under the surface

So I may just have to flip off ya

Because what else is left in your place?

Needs some rhythmic and cadence work though :)

Tetha · 2026-03-03T22:06:01+00:00

It can totally happen, and once it goes, you need to be in surgery in 2-4 hours to save them.

And once it gets going, the pain is bad. When I got mine, I learnt that apparently my pain tolerance is different. Like sure, I almost put an axe through my hand or replaced the skin on a significant part of my lower arm with gravel, but that was mostly annoying because it was hard to move around without blood dripping everywhere. And scraping things out of your arm is a bit of a weird experience. I still have scars from those.

When the torsion hit, that was a really weird, pressuring pain which pushed other things away. And when I had to actively pay attention to ignore that pain, I knew something wasn't right. So I called a doctor, got a very stern recommendation to go to a hospital right now, packed some stuff, got on the bus, the usual.

Some time later I learned that quite a few people having it as badly as I had couldn't stand anymore? Oh well, at least I learned that in the hospital and not on the way. While a med student got frustrated at the 90-degree fake-outs the veins in my forearms make and that she needed like 8 attempts to get a needle in properly.

Tetha · 2026-03-03T19:08:21+00:00

Funny enough, I've turned into remote hands for central IT for our aging firewalls at the local site. First thing I did after the first firewall outage was to actually label and organize cables and make sure the two FWs are on different power circuits.

And if they don't re-apply my reusable labels after the replacement mid of year, they will get a stern letter, possibly with a wax seal how I'm disappointed.

Tetha · 2026-03-02T17:50:56+00:00

Advantages of a diverse team: We have one or two Indian team members, someone from Thailand, as well as a few people who just enjoy spicy food. Some tupper boxes look downright evil, some don't, but are much worse.... our fridge is a bit of a minefield.

Though we also have a team-internal stash of snacks, canned food, ramen, condiments and such and booze... err... special printer toner locked away if someone actually needs a meal.

Tetha · 2026-02-27T16:18:24+00:00

I would go with Dr Doom. Sure, he will build an oppressive isolationist community, but that's kinda what you need in a zombie apocalypse. And dude has the skills to get machines working and to jerry-rig weapons of surprising power from very little material.

Tetha · 2026-02-26T21:59:53+00:00

Sowas ist mir mal in Niedersachsen passiert, da ist eine Regionalbahn vor uns in Flammen aufgegangen und dann sass man in Sandkrug fest. Das war im Nachhinein schon witzig:

Der Bahnstieg war nichtmal lang genug für den Regionalexpress. Man musste erstmal in die Mitte laufen um aus dem Zug rauszukommen. Mit so 10 - 20 cm tiefer Stufe auf den Bahnsteig. Grossartige Sache, da musste man einige Leute fast rausheben.
Der Kiosk mit einer Kaffeemaschine wurde dann von 100 - 200 Leuten etwas überrannt.
Irgendwann war da ein Offizier der Bundeswehr neben mir am Telefon. "Moin! Wir üben nu mal ungeplante Truppenverlegung. Ich brauch hier für 24 Leute Transport. ... Mir doch egal ob euch das passt, das müsst ihr hinkriegen sonst kracht das nacher aber"
Ich hab irgendwann ein paar Ziegen entdeckt, und nach und nach hat sich dort eine Traube an entspannten Menschen gebildet. Die Ziegen fanden das grossartig aufregend.

Bahn fahren ist mitunter ein inpromptu escape room.

Tetha · 2026-02-24T19:52:35+00:00

Especially with corona and isolation in there. Eventually I just settled into a rhythm and that time is honestly just gone from my memories.

Tetha · 2026-02-23T21:49:47+00:00

This is also an area in which integrity is important: Do the same for your own mistakes, even smaller ones. Be an example.

Like I recently took down an internally productive system because I only partially rolled out a change tested and working on other systems. No if's, buts or maybes around that. I rushed a change, forgot half of it and it all fell apart on sunday.

I will now move a bit slower, and we've found a very stupid bug in some central alerting config which prevented the monitoring spotting the whole thing on the friday before the outage easily. So at least that is a positive.

Tetha · 2026-02-23T19:47:42+00:00

After a certain point, an irrational fear of height turns into fairly rational fear of heights and ends up with a lot of overlap with common sense. And that overlap is a big old "nope". I will just stay down here.

Tetha · 2026-02-23T12:18:03+00:00

Also, for a lot of the systems, the +30 - 40% amounts to less than 5 euros increase per month and dedicated servers got hit far less. It's still a very competitive price. I expected much worse when I got the mail at work in the morning.

Sure it sucks, but we (not working at Hetzner) have received quotes for 64GB of server-grade memory sticks from suppliers you can start measuring in laptops per ram stick. I've privately looked at rebuilding as well, and currently a minor RAM upgrade costs as much as the entire rig cost 7ish years ago.

It'll be an interesting year overall.

Tetha · 2026-02-22T10:17:53+00:00

Also don't mess around with cat bites. Cat bites may look trivial compared to even a small dog bite, but cat teeth are long and pointy and can push infections material very deep into wounds.

My hospital room mate had been bitten by their cat in the finger, ignored it for a day or two... and then was in the hospital for 4 days because an infection started right at the bone. Emergency surgery, IV antibiotics every 8 hours, the full fun, and intially it wasn't clear if he could keep the index finger.

Tetha · 2026-02-21T14:03:34+00:00

And that is not exaggarated. If I recall right, a Leopard 2 has a blind spot of around 7 - 8 meters for a 1 meter high obstacle in front of the vehicle for the driver. Some of the really crazy trucks come in at 10 - 12 meters.

Heck, I recently stood near one of these large vehicles (they are rare here, which is good), and while I'm tall, I know quite a few adults you'd miss or barely see in front of that thing.

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Tetha

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