FurAffinity: Six Years of Mediocrity

[Eaglebird]

If I have to be honest, I'm confused as to why the rest of the staff has no problem with Cerbrus. He's made roughly the same amount of mistakes I did while a mod, but because none of them were stepping on the toes of other mods (well, there was an instance where he decided to call out Ratte for bewildering reasons, so once then), he's apparently fine. Apparently they wanted to permaban my forum account because I argued with Cerbrus about an infraction, stating that I don't show the staff respect, and therefore I should be permabanned. I'm not disrespectful to them in public on FA or FAF, and my arguments are not emotionally charged, and yet apparently it was -so bad- that they wanted to permaban me. If there's anything I learned while being on FA staff, is that select individuals absolutely -hate- it if you argue with them, and will never let it go. It's kind of ridiculous.

They have no problem with him because he fits perfectly with their attitude, and that's about all there is to it. God forbid you make someone in power look bad, it might make the users distrust us!

[Pi]

<&yak[away]> Eevee_: Yes and no. Trogdor is still set up as both the file and the app server, so it runs both. I can not exactly pinpoint yet why php coredumps occationally and the resulting ~10-15 sec of whitescreens, but LA ~85 during peak time might have something to do with it.
<Eevee_> yak[away]: holy fuck
<Eevee_> are you telling me you have 44U
<Eevee_> and eight machines
<Eevee_> and you are using one of them
<kay> two, theres still a machine for SQL I gather
<Eevee_> oh yes phew
<&yak[work]> Eevee_: three, if you count the ad server: database, file + application, and advertisments. We've only recently obtained all that additional hardware and have yet to put it to use - which will probably include a second file server, second database and two app servers, the latter two of which will probably be load balanced. The rest will be for web and VPS hosting and sister projects.

I could expend the energy to circle everything that's wrong with every one of yak's words, but instead I'll just point out that their web-hosting thing was supposed to be up in 2008, and they're still fumbling around with it.

That, and when something starts dumping core, you chuck that shit into a debugger.

BONUS:

<Eevee_> yak[work]: how did the ad server end up as a dedicated machine?
<&yak[work]> A VPS that's beel allocated half a dedicated machine. Because OpenX is pretty resource demanding, retardedly so in my opinion. Just as I've come to expect from any "management system" that comes free.
<&yak[work]> And even those that don't. It's a frustrating trend that any relatively serious PHP app ends up being slow and bloated.

The doublethink is just fucking palpable, especially considering that just a few days ago yak claimed that his own code is "very light on both the memory and the CPU, fast, streamlined, optimized and minimalistic".

[nrr]

That, and when something starts dumping core, you chuck that shit into a debugger.

Because I know he reads this:

Code: [Select]

$ ulimit -c unlimited
$ $PROGRAM
$ gdb $PROGRAM $CORE_FILE
(gdb) thread apply all bt full
Yes, it really is that easy.

(Whoops, throwback to an earlier time when I did `ulimit -c unlimited` (or its equivalent elsewhere) in my init files and got into the habit of doing `ulimit -c 0` to keep from filling my disk with core dumps.  Totally my bad.)

[Conan]

Since we're talking about their hardware...

Over the weekend it was discovered that their monitoring server still had the default "guest" account enabled. By default, Cacti installs with the guest account enabled but many of the features are disabled. Historic graphs don't work, but real-time ones do, meaning you could get a brief snapshot of Trogdor's resource usage, and other interesting notes. Keep in mind, these screenshots were taken around 3AM, so these are far from being peak times.

First off, we see that Trogdor has the worst uptime of all the servers, and also has the highest ping.




Apparently it didn't save, but Trogdor's CPU usage was hovering around 90%. It jumped up to 100% a couple times.

I assume this is why they're looking into buying a new fileserver, this one's almost filled up!



As was noted in the code leak, Yak receives a copy of every email the server sends.



Another interesting discovery (note that these reports were not working), Dax, who's only tie to FA is being the IRC admin, was set to receive the "top downloaders" lists. Why the IRC operator needs the list of the top downloaders on the mainsite is beyond me.

[Fiz]

Another interesting discovery (note that these reports were not working), Dax, who's only tie to FA is being the IRC admin, was set to receive the "top downloaders" lists. Why the IRC operator needs the list of the top downloaders on the mainsite is beyond me.

I believe Dax was a tech admin of some sort for a short time on FA. AFAIK, he set up some equipment for them.

He didn't stay a tech admin for more than a few months though, so I really don't know what happened there. Probably explains why he is set to receive that list, though.

[Eaglebird]

I believe Dax was a tech admin of some sort for a short time on FA. AFAIK, he set up some equipment for them.

He didn't stay a tech admin for more than a few months though, so I really don't know what happened there. Probably explains why he is set to receive that list, though.

I would believe that, knowing how lazy anyone in charge of things of that nature is with regard to removing someone from a list or position. 

[Conan]

The Cacti installation is rather new, I believe it only went back to some time in December.

[Fiz]

The Cacti installation is rather new, I believe it only went back to some time in December.

Hm I'm pretty sure Dax wasn't a tech admin around December.

No idea why he'd be set to receive that data then.

[loki]

The Cacti installation is rather new, I believe it only went back to some time in December.

So did they install an older version of Cacti? I read in the manual that Guest accounts are disabled by default on Cacti so either some dumbass went in and purposefully enabled it or downloaded and out of date version in December:

The latest stable version is 0.8.7g, released 07/09/10.

From here:

By default in 0.8.7 and later of Cacti, Guest or Anonymous access is disabled. This is shift from previous release that came with the "Guest" user enabled and set.

Enabling "Guest" access is easy. But, you must understand that you should only allow the designated "Guest" user access to what you authorized. It is not sugguested that you give the designated "Guest" user more than just access to graphs. To enable guest access, first, need a designated "Guest" user. Cacti by default comes with one already created that has access to only graphs. It is important to note that the default guest user has access to all graphs on the system. Once you have created the "Guest" user, you need to tell Cacti what the "Guest" user is. This is done by updating the Authenication Settings and selecting the "Guest" user you have designated. The "Guest" user must be enabled and be set as the guest user for anonymous access to work.

This goes back to children playing around with shiny hardware trying to pretend to be adults - there's no reason to give anonymous access to anything related with administering a website.

[Conan]

The Cacti installation is rather new, I believe it only went back to some time in December.

So did they install an older version of Cacti? I read in the manual that Guest accounts are disabled by default on Cacti so either some dumbass went in and purposefully enabled it or downloaded and out of date version in December:

The latest stable version is 0.8.7g, released 07/09/10.

From here:

By default in 0.8.7 and later of Cacti, Guest or Anonymous access is disabled. This is shift from previous release that came with the "Guest" user enabled and set.

Enabling "Guest" access is easy. But, you must understand that you should only allow the designated "Guest" user access to what you authorized. It is not sugguested that you give the designated "Guest" user more than just access to graphs. To enable guest access, first, need a designated "Guest" user. Cacti by default comes with one already created that has access to only graphs. It is important to note that the default guest user has access to all graphs on the system. Once you have created the "Guest" user, you need to tell Cacti what the "Guest" user is. This is done by updating the Authenication Settings and selecting the "Guest" user you have designated. The "Guest" user must be enabled and be set as the guest user for anonymous access to work.

This goes back to children playing around with shiny hardware trying to pretend to be adults - there's no reason to give anonymous access to anything related with administering a website.

They had something like 0.8.7c.

:|

[Conan]

Bumping with two things.

One, it's been a couple months and they still don't have their hosting service up like they said they would have done by now. There hasn't been a single mention of the new UI and it's progress, and the new help and support site turned out to be a neglected Knowledgebase that's just sucking money out of Dragoneer's wallet. I wonder how the work on the "commission ratings system" is going... Something tells me it won't launch for a while because Dragoneer is currently quite far behind on the Iron Artist he wanted to be done by May and doesn't want any negative comments for taking so long!

Two, it's now been two weeks since Japan was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami, and FurAffinity has finally taken notice and posted a news article about it.

The tsunami in Japan has affected us all in some way. To help our friends in Japan we've put up link to the Red Cross donation page. We encourage people to donate and support those who have been affected by this tragedy.

Do good deeds!

Love,
Fender

Way to look like a bunch of inept, uninformed jackasses, FA. Most sites posted this, y'know, two weeks ago, hours after the earthquake happened.

[ProvincialTwit]

I'm guessing one of the admins noticed a pocky shortage at their local import store and decided that that meant it had 'affected us all in some way'.

Or maybe something like "why hasn't nipponfur posted a new torrent of super princess loli neko-chan in 2 weeks?  What, an earthquake?  I must inform everyone!"

Points for using the right form of affect/effect though.

[Jim Demintia]

Points for not making it some kind of skeevy affiliate link.

[Dima]

Points for using the right form of affect/effect though.

Effects on our affects have an approximate affected effectiveness

[Jim Demintia]

Points for using the right form of affect/effect though.

Effects on our affects have an approximate affected effectiveness

You think that's bad

[MazelTovCocktail]

Points for using the right form of affect/effect though.

Effects on our affects have an approximate affected effectiveness

You think that's bad

I often find myself using that sentence to simplify things when I need to explain the hierarchy among bison in Buffalo, NY. 

Where would we be in this world of infinite knowledge without Wikipedia?

[Dima]

Points for using the right form of affect/effect though.

Effects on our affects have an approximate affected effectiveness

You think that's bad

I either want to murder the English language or have terribly raunchy indiscreet sex with it, I can never truly decide which.

[Jim Demintia]

Hope this isn't thread necromancy, but it doesn't seem worthy of it's own thread: the donations page is back up, as of April 7 (the latest Fender post on the main page). Interesting information includes the current stated monthly cost of the site ($1695). Go to the site and you see Dragoneer wants money orders to a Pennsylvania address. Interesting that he can't accept checks.

I have noticed that every now and again (maybe once a day), FA repeatedly loads up a blank page. Wait 30-45 seconds and it's okay, but rather slow. No idea why that would be.

[Conan]

Interesting that he can't accept checks.

He has stated he has (unreasonable) fears of accepting checks for whatever reason. I think they didn't want them to bounce and somehow cost them money. Another theory is that checks would let you see what account it was deposited into, and we all know he likes to use his personal accounts to pay for FA...

[Pi]

The leading hypothesis on the blank page thing is that their PHP interpreter is crashing.

Meantime, Yak showed us evil trolls some code; apparently he's moving the site to use a real bbcode parser now (at least, as real as PHP gets). No word on the coredumps.