Main PC:
Late 2012 27" iMac, i5, 32GB Ram, 1TB fusion drive - Apple gave it to me for free!!!

Server:
Intel NUC i5, 16GB Ram, 250GB M.2 SSD, Esxi 6, VMs running Adtran WLAN controller, Centos 7 running Jackett app, Ubuntu 14.10 running Mfi controller, Unitrends appliance, Ubuntu 15.10 running MusicBrains mirror

Storage/file server:
Custom build, Asrock E3C224D4I-14S mainboard, Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 CPU, 16GB 1600 ECC ram, Lian-Li PC-Q26A case, 10x 3TB WD Red drives, 120GB Kingston SSD, 64GB Crucial SSD, FreeBSD 10.2', ZFS RaidZ2, Crucial drive as L2ARC, running Plex Media Server, Transmission and a few other media workflow automation apps

Cloud
Amazon Cloud Drive
iCloud
OneDrive - moving away from it after Microsoft pulled the stunt with (un)limited storage
Google Play Music

Mobile
iPad Air 2 64GB
Kindle Fire HDX
IPhone 5S 16GB
Apple Watch - my wife just bought it, so I might not get to use it at all 😞

Media Center
Asus Chromebox - rooted and running Openelec distro with Kodi and PlexBMC client
PlayStation 4
Chromecast
Fire TV stick
Amazon Echo
Apple TV 2nd gen, retiring soon
Apple TV - the new one
Roku 3 - probably retiring soon with old Apple TV

absolutely @MattSpeller But I look at everything as a consultant anyway, if i'm called, i bill 🙂

@Dashrender said:

Interesting question. I still wouldn't say that we are cloud based as a core, because I read core as what I'm doing inside my own walls. It appears that to you core means what your LOB app is.

If you asked the owners / doctors what the core function of your IT was... would they think that it was the LOB or that it was.... other stuff?

The core is what runs operations, not what IT uses.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Yeah, surprisingly there appear to be many companies using Skype for normal employees now. It works surprisingly well.

What I want to know is how do you transfer a call? I suppose you could conference in someone, then simply drop out.

But I ask - where are you seeing this Skype in Business use? in those California Startups you mentioned in the other thread?

Lots of modern companies don't use a receptionist. Once you go to Skype, people contact by name, not by "company."

We see it all over. California is where I've worked for companies that use it. But it was the northeast where I kept saying it was useless and I kept being told that tons of customers used and required it.

@Minion-Queen said:

@IRJ Yes the answer is yes.....

Sigh!

@johnhooks said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@DustinB3403 said:

A bit of an old post (2013) but apparently "Facebook doesn't virtualize its servers, because its software already consumes all the hardware resources, meaning virtualization would result in a performance penalty without a gain in efficiency."

Seems odd, but ok, and I assume their still using Spinning Rust too... (again I know the topic is almost 2 years old)

This is one of those odd situations. I had a 10K compute node (yes, 10K individual servers) cluster on Wall St. We didn't virtualize at the individual server level because the entire thing was treated as a single computer and virtualized at the cluster level.

This is what Facebook is doing. Those are not really individual computers, the virtualization is up the stack higher.

You can even do this at home with Maas and Juju 🙂

Not quite the same. That's just super efficient management of hardware. It doesn't turn the hardware itself into a cluster that acts like a single computer. It acts, more or less, like an autoprovisioning cloud, but not like virtualization.

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Would you rather all of your IT staff be rabbits or all of management be frogs.

I have no idea what this mean?

Once we are asking fanciful, impossible questions... what is the point? We might as well talk about fairies and talking animals taking over jobs.

Well, Youtube does have the armies of code monkeys.

@DustinB3403 said:

Alternatively and at the bottom of the page, there is SADMS. A GUI way of joining Ubuntu to a windows domain.

thnks ... will check soon

I can report some off and on Bluetooth issues on a Thinkpad from the Lenovo outlet. No wifi issues for me, but after resuming from hibernate I often have to uninstall the monitor to be able to adjust the brightness at all.

The price was pretty right. But yeah that was before Superfish etc. too. I put in more memory and an ssd, reinstalled Windows fresh and we'll see if anything catastrophic keeps it from holding me over for a while.

The display isn't too hot though, and makes me want one of those 1080 Toshiba Chromebooks for some browsing (and playing with Crouton).

@Ambarishrh said:

Is it a good practice to have a firewall first between internet and WFE servers and then between WFE and Application Servers? I am looking for a design diagram for such a setup

Depends on your needs. For a small setup, probably unnecessary. For compliance, potentially required.

We use firewalls against every single device on our network at the VM level. Communication in and out is always monitored and we have procedures on allowing traffic through. This provides compliance and proper lockdown between machines.

Don't think of the firewall as another device. If you have a single device, additional subnets with it inspecting the traffic is sufficient.

Best get some update done tomorrow 🙂

Looks like there is a beta...

http://docs.citrix.com/content/dam/en-us/xenserver/xenserver-65/windows10techpreview.pdf

@JaredBusch said:

@IT-ADMIN said:

is this feeling is wrong???
because whenever i'm doing something on the cloud i start have concern on security

I most certainly do not. The only reason to feel safe locally is because you are practicing security through obscurity, and that is not security.

Well known reputable providers have security teams dedicated to ensuring their services are secure.

^^^ This. Not only do they have teams of people that do this, and they have people with a lot more experience than you are likely to have, and lots of them... but they also have more money and resources, take security much more seriously, don't deal with SMB politics crippling their security efforts, have tons of reputation on the line and the big one... they know their product far better than anyone else and simply have more capability to protect it.

So many things use snapshots under the hood, space can grow and shrink pretty rapidly in confusing ways.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

You'll probably pay the same for support in either case.

Not likely, like Cisco gear, Cisco support is normally charged at a premium.

NTG charges more for Cisco support than they do for UBNT support?

WE don't, but we aren't a Cisco reseller either, as nearly anyone dealing with Cisco is going to turn to. Although ERL support goes faster than Cisco support, so it is cheaper naturally as it is cheaper to support.

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Jason said:

@dafyre said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@JaredBusch said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@Dashrender said:

Zero LAN?

yeah for the OP, I was wondering if going to a cloud solution would be workable.

Moving to Azure AD requires all the endpoints to move to Windows 10, or ditch Windows altogether and move to Linux.

I don't know that Azure AD is feasible for us at the moment. Keep in mind we are a manufacturing company that often times needs to support legacy software which works with machines out in our shops. Windows 10 for everyone is not really an option just yet.

Right, so you can easily keep the hub and spoke and only use it for AD authentication and such.

Really you need to look at what you are pushing over the pipes.

In a hub and spoke design, do folks often allow VPN access to the hub but then allow the vpn connected clients to connect to other site resources as well (i.e. might need access to a file server at each location)?

This is why you see @scottalanmiller pushing for things like ownCloud or SharePoint, et al... It doesn't matter where you are connected from... as long as you have internet, you can access your ownClooud / Sharepoint instances.

Yeah but that doesn't work for everyone. Mosltly SMBs that can get away with that.

Having worked in the enterprise space.... what about the enterprise would make that harder than in the SMB space? Other than massive legacy investments to replace?

Like you said... Legacy applications... My second thought would be scale. How many end-users do you have to separate from the LAN / Servers -- especially if it is a typical office environment.

Legacy applications can generally be used without a LAN, just takes a little work. Not 100% of the time, but commonly.

Actually I think that scale makes it easier because some of the difficult mesh things that SMBs do enterprises don't because they don't scale - like using desktops as file servers.

I can agree with this mostly, I think. Scale is not such a big issue for the enterprises because they have the funding to pay for it, so they get the benefit of the economy of scale as well. (Buy more, get it cheapter, etc).

@ryanblahnik said:

I'm open to learning about any area. Networking, Linux and system administration have been some of the most interesting to me so far, and I keep sensing I'll be needing to start a base in programming too.

I would open a new thread for each topic you are interested in resources for and we can talk about ones that we know or dig up some stuff to check out.

Definitely most everyone that I have seen is on .local. It was the advised standard for so long and it was so during the era when the majority of companies moved to AD. Even though the new standard has been around for a little bit now, nearly every company I deal with moved to AD prior to that time period. New companies get new AD, obviously, but as a market percentage they aren't so much yet, that I've seen.

@Dashrender said:

Yeah, even as complex as they are, everything else in my thinking is considerable much harder to use. Things like SharePoint are definitely use when using with online versions of the Office apps, but local version, adds a challenge, maybe not a lot of one, but one non the less.

I agree with you but only insofar as we are talking about users for whom the process and tradition of using them is already well established. For users who are new to computers, users who have already made the transitions or users coming from a mobile background (iOS, Android or ChromeOS) I think that it is the opposite. File servers are actually rather complex when you remove the "but we are already used to it" factor.

I think that it is a lot like Windows and Linux. Find someone who has never used a computer and let them try both and every time I've attempted this the answer has been that Linux was easier and more obvious. But it is nearly impossible to find someone who hasn't already been trained on Windows. Same thing here. The idea that you have to shift through a pile of files and that files might be hidden nearly anywhere within folders and folders within folders and you have a rather complicated solution requiring knowledge of filesystems and of the storage decisions being made. Pretty much all major alternatives from "cloud drives" like ownCloud to database style systems like Sharepoint make this far more natural, powerful and intuitive for end users. It's just very hard to find end users not already extremely versed in the old way.

@MattSpeller said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Do you have front to back cooling like hot aisle cold aisle? The racks should be sealed front to back when possible 🙂

lol we have top down cooling - it's highly custom. One big AC unit in ceiling blowing cold down.

Nothing is sealed, no doors front or back, no sides on racks.

Can't imagine that it matters then.