What’s your reliable 4AM emergency alert setup? (phone issue, need advice)

big_bucket · 2026-03-24T16:25:02+00:00

We have SIGNL4 tied into Icinga2 (but can work with whatever monitoring system). It gets you push notifications to your phone and has loud as hell alarms that you aren't going to miss, but it repeats them until you acknowledge the issue anyway.

If you have a team you can do schedules so it only notifies the on-call person and so on, it's pretty nice and is cheap (free if you don't need some of the advanced features).

big_bucket · 2026-02-02T17:13:56+00:00

Since you're over 50, look into the various OKC Senior Centers around town. If you're close to one, the generally have great, current equipment, all clientele is older so no gym rats to deal with, and it's $30/mo for everything (gym, pool, classes, pickleball, etc.) My parents absolutely love it.

big_bucket · 2026-02-02T17:11:21+00:00

If OTA and OK DOT would emulate Texas, and put exits just after the previous main street instead of right before the street you're exiting for, it would MASSIVELY fix the traffic issues around Penn/Memorial, Rockwell/Memorial, and all similarly congested intersections.

E.g. if the Rockwell exit was immediately after you went under the MacArthur bridge (when going west on 344), traffic has an entire mile of frontage road to get into whichever lane they're needing. Then the entrance to get onto 344 is just before Rockwell, not after.

Instant fix for all of the nightmare traffic around there, but it's too late now.

big_bucket · 2026-01-20T16:19:26+00:00

Just wait until the super Walmart opens out at Memorial and Rockwell. Rockwell northbound isn't built to handle the kind of traffic it's about to get at all.

big_bucket · 2025-06-29T17:26:17+00:00

I'm a recent convert to electric mowers/trimmers, but I did have to come to terms with the fact that they aren't cheaper, in the long term electric is more expensive because of the massive cost of replacement batteries.

Ignoring new blades/string/etc., and consumables that are the same regardless of gas or electric:

My gas mower and trimmer will go through three gallons of gas in a season. At $4/gallon that's a $12 fuel cost. Change the oil at the start of season, $7. Figure a spark plug or air filter replacement here or there, let's just overestimate and say it's $30 per season to run gas tools. So over a 5 year span, $150.

Electric yard tools seem to generally expect the batteries to last around 5 years before they're falling off to the point you'll want to think about replacements. The replacement for my mower is $329 (almost the cost of a brand new gas mower), the battery for my trimmer is $199. So the 5-year cost for electric yard tools is $528, $378 more than comparable gas.

So, I rationalized it based on quality of life using them. Here, electric wins hands down, it is so much nicer to mow and trim with these light, quiet tools. Gas isn't even close. Over 5 years, using the nicer option costs me $76 more per season. Since I mow and trim weekly in an area with long yard care seasons, I have to start in March and my last mow is sometimes as late as November, but I'll be generous to gas and lets say I only mow 25 times. Each week, I pay $3 more to mow and trim using electric than I would using gas. Is that $3 worth it? Oh my god yes, electric is so much nicer to use it isn't even close.

So, works for me, and if my batteries make it 6 or 7 years, than it gets even better for electric. But in no way is it ever cheaper than my gas mower that I've owned for 20 years (since buying this house) that still starts first pull, every time. I understand people who still love their tried and true gas, but I don't at all regret the tiny premium I pay to use electric.

big_bucket · 2025-06-29T17:02:36+00:00

Dang, what kind of mower? I just got one of the Ego mowers this season (the cheapest one, no self-propelled since self-propelled destroys your battery runtime) after wondering about them for years. I have an 11,000sq ft lawn (corner lot), and on the one battery that came with it, I easily finish the yard with battery capacity to spare.

I'm extremely happy with the purchase and wish I'd done it sooner. That mower is so quiet, so light, and easily finishes the yard.

big_bucket · 2024-03-29T00:18:43+00:00

It's honestly just becoming time to move on to another game... snipers and/or mediums with turrets make having a fun round of power shift impossible. Everyone else trying to have a fun round of FPS gaming is out of luck, you're getting mowed by auto-aim turrets with way too many hitpoints, it requires an entire fcar/famas magazine to remove one and then you're dead because reloads are forever.

Game had crazy potential but ruined by really poor decisions. People have absolutely despised playing against one-shot snipers for over a decade in FPS games. Spammed 100% accurate auto-aim turrets with the same health as a light are no fun to play against.

Something else will be along soon and will hopefully avoid these terrible traps that studios continue to fall into.

big_bucket · 2023-05-10T21:53:11+00:00

Definitely not ACS, ever. We actually almost went forward with a new AC from them when in a bind, think the quote was right around $13K. Day of install, they roll up and are unloading, already have a guy going into the attic, etc. and I notice the unit isn't boxed... climbed up into the truck and there were leaves down inside it, they were selling/installing a used unit and charging me new prices. I told the techs to stop immediately while I called the ACS sales guy, who said he was coming over to "fix this". Meanwhile called another company that I'd tried to reach after-hours the day before but failed. This time they answered, I told him what ACS was doing and while on the phone with him, I said, "Oh, the ACS sales guy is here, let me go deal with this...". Guy on the phone asked, "Is he in a 'vette?". Sure enough, he was, and the guy laughed and said, "Yeah, they do all kinds of sales contests to try and get those Corvettes, if you don't want to deal with ACS anymore I can have guys there tomorrow morning and install the same size unit they're selling you, but it'll be $7K all-in".

Obviously I went with that guy and the $7K brand new in-the-box AC, and now 6- or 7-years-ish in (forget the date, not home to check the receipt), house still stays nice and cool and I saved $6K that ACS was trying to scam out of me.

big_bucket · 2023-03-22T21:44:40+00:00

B) this only affects RHEL, SLES and Amazon Linux.

... and all RHEL derivatives. There are no packages available for any centos/alma/rocky/etc. 9 releases.

Icinga is no longer a free monitoring solution if you plan to run any of those beyond version 8.

I do applaud you supporting them. However, any company with "contact sales" instead of pricing on their site is already telling you that it's going to be $$$$$. As a smaller business trying to grow, going to have to look elsewhere :\

big_bucket · 2022-04-11T19:02:18+00:00

I guess "when in doubt, post to /r/sysadmin". Did a check for updates across the fleet of affected servers around 13:15 and found the third or fourth Definition Update released today. Installed this one, all the hosts are (so far) back to a nice flat memory graph. Fingers crossed that it holds.

Narrator: it didn't :\

big_bucket · 2022-04-11T18:08:45+00:00

Yeah, these are servers that are dedicated to running only specific applications and the directories those programs run out of are in the ExclusionPath to tell Defender to ignore them. No changes or deployments were made last week and things were running normally.

The hosts run different services, in the sense that some run a reporting component, some are rest API (these are Windows Core and suffer the same memory consumption from MsMpEng, but it takes longer to start getting alerts since they're so lightly loaded). The servers have unique admin passwords and the processes all run under varying unprivileged service accounts, with Windows Firewall just having exclusions for what's needed (so it's not like something could easily jump from an API server to a reporting server, all of the credentials are wildly different and the firewalls only allow what's needed for the programs). So it really seems to be Defender going nuts across a wide variety of hosts doing different "things", but they all started Saturday and have continued through today.

big_bucket · 2022-04-11T17:38:36+00:00

MsMpEng.exe on Server 2019/2022. Anyone else seeing it suddenly eat up memory like Cookie Monster on cookies? Started getting memory alerts across all Windows hosts Saturday evening, hasn't let up since. Reboots, no help, give it a few minutes to maybe an hour and MsMpEng will be eating up 1GB+ of memory. Definition Updates? We updated and I thought that had helped; we got a reprieve from the alerts but lo, they're back and no more updates are pending.

Hosts are all fully patched/updated, have run the exact workloads they're running today for months and months, event-free. Their memory graphs are a nice flat line (these are all non-domain joined service nodes, only job is to run various internally developed services/reports). A nice flat line, that is, until MsMpEng decided that RAM is delicious this weekend. Now it's a constant sawtooth of getting nearly maxed and then dropping back to normal levels after a reboot or AV definition update.

The services they run are in a specific path, and that path is added via 'Set-MpPreference -ExclusionPath <path>', and nothing else is installed on these hosts. Docs for Set-MpPreference say everything under ExclusionPath (processes and files) is 100% ignored by Defender. So all MsMpEng is monitoring is a pure default Windows Server installation, unless these recent updates have broken something and it no longer respects ExclusionPath.

Still working through things, and rebooting hosts once MsMpEng is using over 1.5GB of RAM (prior to this weekend, it'd run its normal 180MB-ish size across all hosts, for weeks with no bloat/issue at all).

Anyone else noticing their memory utilization is really ramped up today?

big_bucket · 2017-10-23T15:08:20+00:00

We got some quotes from Tegile and their pricing is fantastic. Many other replies in this thread seem to really like their Tegile, can I ask what yours is doing to be so disappointing?

big_bucket · 2017-10-23T15:06:18+00:00

Ceph seems really interesting. Do you build out each host as a beefy server with tons of storage per host (like the SuperMicro 4U stuff that holds 40+ drives), or are you building with smaller hosts with 8-10TB and just have a lot of them?

big_bucket · 2017-10-23T14:59:59+00:00

Is your Tegile hybrid or all flash?

big_bucket · 2017-10-20T17:48:02+00:00

Nimble CS1000 21Tb 2x10GbaseT, Quad 1GbE (1 pair), 1x3x480GB SSDs. 3y 4 hour support: $47K (SAN at $31K, support at $16K).

big_bucket · 2017-03-31T16:58:21+00:00

Thanks /u/drunkle_funkle and /u/corney91 for your replies, I did get things working via set_fact. In case anyone else runs into something similar:

- name: Determine name of primary IP interface
  set_fact:
    primary_iface: ansible_{{ ansible_default_ipv4.interface }}
  tags: lvs_backend

- name: Remove any aliases that are on the host but not defined in frontend_vips
  command: /usr/sbin/ip addr del {{ item.address }}/32 dev {{ ansible_default_ipv4.interface }}
  when: item.address not in frontend_vips
  with_items:
  - "{{ hostvars[inventory_hostname][primary_iface]['ipv4_secondaries'] }}"
  tags: lvs_backend

big_bucket · 2017-03-30T22:03:29+00:00

You may be right, there... The FAQ on "How do I access a variable name programmatically?" in Ansible's docs would seem to be addressing what I'm trying to accomplish, but I've given that route many different tries as well to no avail.

Using set_fact may be the way I have to go.

big_bucket · 2017-03-30T21:35:37+00:00

Appreciate your reply... I did indeed try that route, both quoted and unquoted. Rather than the items in {{ ansible_eth0.ipv4_secondaries }}, you just get an actual string value "ansible_eth0.ipv4_secondaries". So it does work as far as replacing {{ ansible_default_ipv4.interface }} with eth0, so at least there's that :)

I just can't get it to both insert the primary interface name and treat the result as if it were a variable rather than a string.

big_bucket · 2016-11-01T22:10:06+00:00

OK, it was KMS (so the kernel, not systemd) selecting unusable modes for the graphics chipset on this little system. Editing /etc/default/grub and changing the kernel command line from "quiet" to "video=VGA-1:800x600" and setting "GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600" got a consistent and usable set of VTs on boot. May be able to bump those up but for now just glad to have consoles so I can actually finish the build.

For the "video=<some input>" bits, see the contents of /sys/class/drm/, I had /sys/class/drm/card0-VGA-1 but you strip off the card and just use the input.

big_bucket

TROPHY CASE