S1E8: "On the Origin of Processes"

Posted 2016-06-07 01:30
Modified 2017-01-28 23:23
Comments 0

A (very brief and scattered) history of *nix operating systems, closed-source/proprietary software adoption in a business context (and how F/OSS software plays into that), various filesystems used as the default in several distributions, and the /proc virtual filesystem.

• News
• Notes
• Sysbadministration Award
• Errata
• Music

News

Starts at 9m07s.

• Jthan is moving to CA to work at Apple as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).
  • He hasn’t gotten his NDA and other paperwork yet, so we don’t know if he can mention what division/department he’ll be in, but as soon as we get clearance we’ll mention it.
  • I mention GlassDoor, which is IMMENSELY enlightening.
• Windows 8 at the very least causes high CPU load if the username has “user” in it
• Microsoft planning to kill the Windows Live mail application.
• Microsoft also pulls a webpage popup trick to get people to upgrade to Windows 10 in a, shall we say, less than honest manner.
• The FBI warns about USB keyloggers disguised as phone chargers.
  • I mention the USB Condom, now rebranded as SyncStop.

Notes

Starts at 23m08s.

I was drinking a PBR, Jthan was drinking a Colorado Native Lager (and Miller Lite)- and also mentions Lagavulin scotch, and Paden was drinking Buckeye Vodka again.

• History of *nix
  • UNICS started it in 1969, then MULTICS happened. From those came AT&T Bell Labs’ UNIX, then PDP’s, VAX, BSD, then GNU/Linux, then the SCO vs. Linux war (lol.), and from there BSD and GNU/Linux start to just take off exponentially.
  • I mention Plan 9
  • I mention the talk that mentions why the ‘UNIX Philosophy’ might need revision in the context of GNU/Linux.
  • I tell Jthan about baby boomers having stronger passwords than millenials.

• Closed-source software in a business environment (53m30s)
  • The article we refer to is here.

• CentOS 7 default filesystem is XFS (1h06m03s)
  • The article Jthan mentions is here.
  • SUSE default filesystem for / is indeed Btrfs.

• Procfs (1h13m47s)
  • This does a better job than us prattling on.

Sysbadministration Award

In this segment, we highlight system administration mistakes. Think of them as the IT equivalent of the Darwin Awards. (1h18mm10s)

A tech thought he brought down the entire network by resetting an AP to factory settings. (Spoiler alert: he actually didn’t do it, and it has a happy ending.)

Errata

• I refer to Plan 9 as “Plan 9 from Outer Space”- that’s the (terrible) movie they got the namesake from. The actual name is “Plan 9 from Bell Labs”.
• I was almost certain procfs was obsoleted. I think it may have just been the conntrack procfs component in the kernel, upon retrospect.

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories Season One