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

And beware my spaghet.

  • 12 Posts
  • 51 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.






  • In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
    I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.

    We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.