@scottalanmiller said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:

Except "rock solid" compared to a few hundred dollars for more modern, faster gear from non-Cisco. Support for an ASA costs more than just upgrading to a better product.

I'm not enough of a network specialist to go into the cisco vs $insertNameHere debate. But I've built several datacenters in the past decade, and the ones where there was NEVER any problem with the firewalls was the ones where the customer paid for the Cisco kit. The same goes for switches btw. Other have used meraki, ubiquiti, dell/sonicwall and even fortinets, there were always hardware problems after a while. The Cisco based DCs just kept working. They also cost much more, so it's really a matter of calculating the TCOs properly.

@Pete-S said in ISP Failover with Cisco ASA:

All ASA 5500 series are EOL though so I don't think you can (or should) upgrade the license on them..

Those things are still rock solid though, and with the 5 figure prices on the newer series, plenty of businesser prefer not to upgrade

@scottalanmiller said in Shell Speeds, Bash and PowerShell:

@dyasny yeah, but it does threading at least. Better than nothing. I've done Python threading for this and for remote automation tasks, even bad threading is screaming fast because there is so much latency everywhere else.

That, again, depends on what you are automating. Blazing fast distributed systems are a reality, and those are usually not written in Python (yes Openstack is mostly Python, but we all know just what a huge pile of awful it is)

@scottalanmiller said in Shell Speeds, Bash and PowerShell:

In reality, neither is a screaming fast language. It's just that they are both excellent at specific tasks. Python rocks at automation and scientific programming (but nothing beats R or Fortran for science.) Node rocks at stateless web apps. If speed alone were the concern, C would win, with Java right behind. And languages like Go being pretty high. But those types of languages tend to be very poor for automation writing.

Actually, Java isn't anywhere near C or C++, it's closer to Python, with all the JVM madness and tuning and lack of hardware awareness. Python is also pretty horrible at threading. This is the main reason Go is becoming so popular - it is exactly great at the stuff Python lacks in, especially threading.

@Obsolesce said in Shell Speeds, Bash and PowerShell:

What's beyond shell functionality? I don't think I've come to that point or had a need to?

even simple stuff you can probably solve, to a point with awk and jq, are way easier to do in Python, and the more you need to do, the harder it gets to implement in simple scripting languages. These days, if there's something simple to do, I just use ansible, and for anything complex, I just go for python. Even if the task looks simple enough for bash, once you start getting into it, you find yourself wasting time on unneeded bashisms that are totally avoidable with a proper programming language.

And yes, I confess to even writing deep recursion scripts using bash when I was younger and less experienced.

I skipped the discussion, but I see two main points here:

1. Plenty of DSLs support both Windows and Linux, they are made for automation, use them.
2. For anything more complex, where you actually have to script and a DSL gets too clunky, bash/powershell also tend to get too clunky and hacky to be useful. I simply revert to Python - it runs on both platforms and is much more powerful than either bash or powershell.

libvirt has dnsmasq built in, to serve DHCP. It can also be configured to serve DNS to the libvirt NAT network, and the host.

This is an example of a working configuration: https://fabianlee.org/2018/10/22/kvm-using-dnsmasq-for-libvirt-dns-resolution/

@scotth said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

I'm all about point & click adventure games. The 1st one I played was King's Quest 6.

Sierra! I got the entire series years later and clicked my way through it all using a dos emulator. The first ones were black and white iirc

@scottalanmiller said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

Same for me. it's all about the story.

Exactly, for me the best games feel like I'm watching an interactive movie. You'll never catch me in an online game exactly because of that.

@bnrstnr said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@dyasny If you like Diablo 3, check out Path of Exile. They just released the PS4 version. I've been playing the computer version for about 6 months and loving it. It's significantly more complex, but the Diablo type games have always been my absolute favorite

I actually prefer stuff with less hacknslash and more quest, like Sacred/Sacred2 and Divinity. But shooters are what I use to relax after work, when there is time

I recently gave up on keeping a decent desktop for gaming and got a ps4pro instead. The only thing I keep to there is never buying games that are more expensive than $20.

Got a bunch of battlefield editions and diablo 3 in there, so far so good. I like good cinematic shooters once in a while.

Got another conference I'll have to fly to. Maybe next year

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

But we established that when it matters... emergencies... there is no competition. So private not only doesn't have to be competitive, but without government controls can overcharge by anything that they want since you can't agree to the price ahead of time (that's how the US does it, all prices are after the fact.)

Healthcare by definition can't be a competitive market for the parts that matter and anyone actually discusses.

I'ts like with bus management companies. If they want to take over a popular route which is sure to bring in money, they are required to establish operations on less popular routes, and maintain them. The same works in Israel for medical providers - if they want a chunk of the tax money, they have to maintain hospitals and ERs as well.

Since medical care in Israel is so good, they actually make money there as well - millions come in from medical tourists

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

Sure, but private is WAY more likely. Because it has all the problems of government, none are removed as it is still part of the government, but then the private risks on top of that. Nothing is perfect, but we can reduce the points of corruption or failure.

The idea is, when there is good competition, there is no room for corruption or abuse of the system. You go corrupt or do generally bad things, and people will simply go to the competition. This would work under normal conditions, but here the accessibility of medical care is so low, you have no choice bu to go to the corrupt, overexpensive and generally badly managed service providers. This is something the govt should be stopping, instead of quietly ignoring

@scottalanmiller government-only management is prone to abuse, unneeded bureaucracy and other wonders we see here in Canada. The Israelis found a way to combine government/tax based care with private sector competitiveness. Might not be the best approach, but it seems to be working quite well, better, at least, than the Canadian govt-only or US private-only approaches.

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

1. Emergency services are anything but a corner case. They are, in fact, the only truly important case.

That is one case where you don't have a choice, anywhere, under any system, if you cannot decide where to take yourself, someone will have to decide for you. If you can decide, then decide and go where you want, it's your choice. I really don't see a problem here

2. Are you really saying that you have choice when the cornerstone of care is when there is no choice? That choice when it doesn't matter is enough to override when it does?

Again, you pick the care provider you like best, price is the same, it's in the taxes, so what you really choose is the GP you want and the kind of service you want to receive. When it comes to ERs and hospitals it's even easier - you just go to the hospital you want, nobody checks which provider you belong to, it makes no difference to them.

Bottom line - you are never presented with a bill unless you go for non-covered stuff like plastic surgery and dental care or massages etc. Your GP and the specialists he might direct you to for whatever reason, all come from your healthcare provider, but hospitals and ER are open to all customers equally, no matter which provider runs them.

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

Billing is okay, but what's the point of choice if you can't make it. It kind of defeats the whole purpose as location alone matters.

Are you telling me that if there is a corner case when you are unconscious, and can't tell the ambulance where to take you, that means there's no choice about which GP you go to, for example?

@Nic this is the case in the US, true. In Israel it is not. All medical staff, except private clinics who do not participate in public healthcare, are covered. You never get billed for anything that is covered, no matter where you get treated, as long as it's at an institution that is part of the programme (most of them are) and your reason for treatment is justified and covered under the list of covered treatments (99% of the surgeries and things like cancer and AIDS are covered so no loopholes there).

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

The problem is that when you are bleeding out or unconscious you can't pick. Just a fundamental fact of being unconscious

WHen it is a broken leg or ruptured appendix, of course you get choices.

I don't see why that is a problem. In such a scenario you are taken to the nearest ER and treated there. If the hospital is not run by the company you subscribe to, it doesn't matter, you still don't have to pay anything extra, the companies bill each other. If you come around and decide you want to be in a different hospital, you can request a transfer, and either just go to another hospital or get transferred in an ambulance (if the transfer is medically justified, it's free, otherwise, you get a bill).

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

The problem is, in systems like this, they don't reasonably accommodate emergency services. WHen you are dying, you go to whomever responds, there is no choice.

Nope, emergency services are totally covered. You can go to any hospital, the entities running them will bill each other transparently to you.

The one thing they do practice there is the actual veritability of the reason for using emergency services. If you're having a heart attack, and call an ambulance, you will not pay a dime. If you coughed a few times and decided to use them as a taxi to an ER, you'll get a bill (about $200 iirc, not even close to the 4 figure numbers you would see in NA).