What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.
Bad because as of Splunk 10.x, Splunk bundles postgres to integrate with their SOAR platform. Parenthetically, this practice of bundling stuff with Splunk is making vuln remediation a real pain. Splunk bundles its own python, mongod, and now postgres, instead of doing dependency checking. They're going to have to keep doing it as long as they release a .tgz and not just an RPM. The most recent postgres vuln is not fixed in Splunk.
I've been here since 2016. I have never, not even once, downvoted any comment on HN. Today I downvoted every single of that person's comment in this thread. That discourse does not deserve to be heard, much less to occupy attention and debate.
The W in Santiago, Chile, has a full-length floor-to-ceiling glass window in the shower, with the morning sun shining right in. Your other option is a bathtub set in the middle of the bedroom itself. Mercifully the WC has a door.
The human body lacks the enzyme to digest inulin, it passes through the gut and feeds the gut bacteria, which I guess is why it's labeled a pro-biotic? Jerusalem artichoke (the root of a sunflower, Jerusalem is a corruption of girasole) contains a high concentration of inulin. This tuber is usually found served at upper-end swanky restaurants. One year I found it at a farmer's market, bought a bunch and gleefully carted it home. It was rather delicious. Also, gas that would turn a cow inside out. Beware.
Cumin is an olfactory note in perfumery. When well-paired it adds a lovely and unusual note of spice. Example: The Different Company Rose Poivrée was created by Jean-Claude Ellena, the in-house perfumer for Hermes before the current one. It has notes of coriander and cumin, subtle but distinctively there. If you like it, you like it. Unfortunately for me, after a while it starts smelling like a stinking armpit. Indole is another compound use in perfumery, at intense concentration it smells like poop.
Odysseus is shown stringing his bow in The Return (2024). The challenge was to string the bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axes. I had no idea what this meant so I went looking. In fact, it's to shoot the arrow through the eye of the axes. What's the eye of an axe? It's the hole where the handle attaches to the blade.
From a logging perspective, there is a time when an event happens. The timestamp for that should be absolute. Then there's the interaction with the viewer of the event, the person looking at the log, and where he is. If the timestamp is absolute, the event can be translated to the viewer at his local time. If the event happens in a a different TZ, for example a sysadmin sitting in PST looking at a box at EST, it's easier to translate the sysadmin TZ env, and any other sysadmin's TZ anywhere in the world, than to fiddle with the timestamp of the original event. It's a minor irritation if you run your server in UTC, and you had to add or subtract the offset, eg. if you want your cron to run at 6PM EDT, you have to write the cron for 0 22 * * *. You also had to do this mental arithmetic when you look at your local system logs, activities at 22:00:00 seem suspicious, but are they really? Avoid the headaches and set all your systems to UTC, and throw the logs into a tool that does the time translation for you.
The server does not "know" anything about the time, that is, it's really about the sysadmin knowing what happened and when.
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I'm a Splunk Certified Architect with 20 years experience with OS, platform, HPC and adjacent technologies, looking for short-term engagements. I currently run a multi-clustered Splunk infrastructure built by me, in AWS and on-prem, with 15TB per day ingest by volume.
Michael Lewis' (author of Moneyball, The Big Short) podcast Against the Rules had an episode about why we question experts, this was during the tail end of COVID. He asked, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why is it we don't have people who argue that you could jump off bridges and tall buildings and lived, but so many people arguing that you don't need the vaccine. Perhaps because no one had jumped off tall structures and lived, but there are lots of stories about how someone who got the vaccine died anyway, or didn't get the vaccine, got COVID, and is still alive and thriving. There's also a lot of "Dad was a pack-a-day smoker and lived to be 95", "Every year that I got the flu shot, I got the flu, this year I said the hell with it and skipped the shot, no flu." Every time I hear that I desperately want to correct the person, but nobody wants to hear the "akshually ... there's no correlation" bit. I don't want to be "that guy". But the more these pithy sophism are said and heard, the more it becomes ingrained in the aggregate of common beliefs. There's not even a scientific nuance there, it's utterly wrong. To erase those beliefs one has to wipe away years of repeated exposure and reinforcement to this casual sort of ignorance. No one has the time to do that. In this story, the son also exposed the father to ChatGPT hoping it can overcome his father's beliefs with an overwhelming amount of facts, and it didn't work.
Sometimes a hot stove must be touched. If I were the son, I would ask the father to double down for another $10K, or even $20K. I believe that somewhere deep inside the father, there is a ghost of an understanding where the line of reality exists. He's just so deep into his world that he can't see where he mixes up the hope that these things will happen, vs the belief that these things will happen. But if you ask him to put real stakes on the line, say, even $100K if he has it, he will not be so unwavering in his belief.
There's another store with a long history that I fear will not survive the ruthless dismantling of the brick and mortar stores: WAWAK Sewing Supplies, they sell buttons, button-hole maker, zippers, D-rings, and probably the largest inventory of German-made threads.
Every time I go into a Joanne's it's more and more like a junk hobby shop, and not a nice one. Aisles are dimly lit, you can't see the merchandise, fabrics are stashed in disorderly piles, marked down things at the front; the people who work there aren't sewists and so can't really answer when to use this thing instead of that thing for a particular application. It's never a nice shopping experience. I would rather they had a third of the inventory, but better quality, and the option of buying stuff to get it delivered there.
I'm sad that we're no longer a maker society, there's so much skills and craft that are being lost, perhaps irrevocably. Seems like anytime I go in search for how to do a thing, the first thing I find is something to buy.
Have you seen The Tinder Swindler? A woman borrowed $250,000 USD from 9 separate banks to give money to a man within months of their meeting. I don't know how one gets to that place.
I listened to the accompanying podcast, it was so engrossing and the narrative was so compelling I binged the entire 8 episodes. It starts out with a bank in Kansas whose CEO had burned $47 million USD on a crypto scam. A woman, who by all estimations, was a smart, competent, self-directed adult was scammed out of $150K, not just her own money, but borrowed from her family, and took out a loan for $35K at a ruinous interest rate of 26%. There's a whole lawless world and physical cities operating these scams. When I hear the victims' account of how they were scammed, I was just beyond belief because their actions were so far out from the norm. They themselves acknowledge this when they recount their actions in hindsight.
Just like people who ask, how can you forget your baby/pet in the backseat of a car. It sounds outlandish but it happens, to all kinds of smart people. How can you give ten thousand dollars to someone on the internet, who you've chatted with but never met? And yet it happens and continues to happen. My takeaway of the comment elements for victims: loneliness (and neediness) and a tiny big of greed. This is not a condemnation, we are all greedy in some dimension. The scammers were successful because they presented a picture of readily available affluence, everyone is swimming in it, it seems so easy, why not me. Another vector of why social media is poison. I found this series fascinating!
Lamy Safari friends, I bought one, and it went unused for years because it was no fun to write with. The nib was scratchy, not feedback, scratchy, and no small tweak ever made it smooth. I was on the verge of buying a sheet of micro-mesh to fix it when I came to my senses, what the hell was I doing, like trying to fix a smokey candlewick for light. I thought to myself, it can't all be like this, and bought a TWSBI Eco. This was going to be my last fountain pen if it didn't work out. And, dear readers, it is amazing! It writes like butter, words cannot describe, I whip it out every chance I get to write with it.
(The Lamy does OK with a very wet ink and cheap printer paper. I use it to doodle, so all is not lost.)
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Have you inherited a giant Splunk cluster operating on hundreds of TBs of data, and you're not sure what's in it, or how to leverage what's in it for Business and Operational Intelligence?
Do you have more than one Splunk instance, in cloud, on-prem, a hodge-podge of Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, and you need to combine their operations across network enclaves?
Do you have logs from devices running not-an-OS? Does rsyslog configuration fill you with dread? It does for me too, but I've written lots of them and integrated them with Splunk.
Do you have data for which you need to enforce compliance, but you're not sure how?
Do you need to build a Splunk cluster from scratch? In a week? Do you have a derelict cluster that needs optimizing, cleanup, a multi-version upgrade?
I'm a Splunk Certified Architect who have worked with Splunk since 2008. I manage multiple clusters of +10TB/day by volume. How can I help?