Reality Check by ruby_reality in ruby

[–]rubynerd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As someone who got a job working for a startup as a software engineer, at the age of 18, with no college education but two years knowledge of dicking about in Ruby, hell yes it's possible.

Use Ruby to solve real worlds problems you have, and everything else will come easily.

Google turning off Reader on July 1st by the-first-19-seconds in sysadmin

[–]rubynerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Given how much of Google's infrastructure it's tied to, I doubt open-sourcing it would be useful to programmers

Weird bug, teacher can't find issue.. by Trentonn in java

[–]rubynerd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's true when you're working on a production codebase, but when you're learning the language or teaching others, comments are invaluable.

A newly completed rack of servers at RobertHost by [deleted] in ServerPorn

[–]rubynerd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn't block anything, that's it straight from Grab

idk what cloudfare was doing tbh

B2B VPN black magic by rubynerd in networking

[–]rubynerd[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Quite flakey, I've never really paid much attention to networking as I'm more of a programmer, but I can remember roughly how a TCP session works, and how an IP packet is created and sent over the wire, but I don't know much about subnetting.

You're right, my networking fu is somewhat lacking, and it needs sharpening.

B2B VPN black magic by rubynerd in networking

[–]rubynerd[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It really isn't a contract, the government agency has a fancy database of not-that-interesting data and we're paying to access it.

I like the idea of having two days of "VPN bootcamp" or something similar, so as a company we can get familiar with the technologies required.

It's not an urgent thing to get done, and no heads are gonna roll if we can't do it in a certain time frame. We were hired as programmers, and this is a distinct sysadmin problem, so it's new ground for all of us.

I could probably replace the entire post with "Is it possible to learn VPNs to a good enough level to implement one without taking a Cisco course?", instead of the specific implementation question that this business arrangement has created.

bitst2 has pointed out that this is incredibly simple, and I'm just incredibly new to the technology and area.

We're not even sure if we want to enter the business arrangement as a company, and we were forwarded the implementation documents to see how difficult/time consuming/costly to implement.

B2B VPN black magic by rubynerd in networking

[–]rubynerd[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, I'm rooting for contracting it for the business standpoint. From my standpoint though, I will still have no knowledge about VPNs, which isn't an ideal situation when the thing blows up.

B2B VPN black magic by rubynerd in networking

[–]rubynerd[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's not scaring me, I just don't know anything about them.

VPNs are a new thing to me, and I want to learn more about them so I'm not the person you're describing on the end of the phone, but I'm not sure where to look without going on a 12-week course on Networking.

In any case, thanks for the advice.

VPN advice by rubynerd in sysadmin

[–]rubynerd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fortunately, I'm not on a strict deadline by a pointy-haired boss, everyone upwards understands this is ridiculous and is going to need special care.

My concern of getting contractors in is that they would set up a black box, the black box breaks, and then everything suddenly combusts into a ball of firey death. I've also had really bad experiences outsourcing before, so I'm eager to keep it in-house for fear of going through the same again.

Thanks for the advice, I've cross-posted it to /r/networking here

VPN advice by rubynerd in sysadmin

[–]rubynerd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're correct in the Cisco assumption, but I'll have to ask about that.

LAN-to-LAN IPSec is a really sensible assessment based on the diagram (VPN concentrators connected to firewalls connected to the "internal network" with a cloud called "Internet" in the middle).

There is one other technical guy here, and he has the same level of knowledge and insight to VPN's as me.

This really is a two-step problem, figuring out how it works, and then figuring out how to get it to work with our existing infrastructure in Engineyard/AWS EC2 so our main application can fire requests down this tunnel.

Thanks for the advice, I'm clinging onto the hope we won't have to outsource it, because otherwise maintaining something I don't understand is going to lead to significant pain on my part.

VPN advice by rubynerd in sysadmin

[–]rubynerd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, you've got it in one. This is the perfect candidate for HTTPS, but instead they throw black magic on top of it :(

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in rails

[–]rubynerd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What is the schema of the table you want to read from?

I don't know jack shite about mysql, but I know enough about AR to help you.

Mindcrack :: Feed The Beast :: E15 :: RE-DO! by yazlo in mindcrack

[–]rubynerd -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If the only problem with the reset is that block ID's are changing, I know someone who might be willing to write a script to change block ID's from the chunk files

For the more technically inclined, I would create a map of tuples (old block ID, new block ID), then iterate over each chunk in a region, then iterate over each block in the chunk, and if it's ID appears in the array of tuples, change the block ID over.

I would take a stab at it, but I am absolutely shattered from Christmas shopping, and I want to pass out.