@scottalanmiller said in "Snapshots" on win10 laptops?:
@Pete-S said in "Snapshots" on win10 laptops?:
I want to be able to take a snapshot and then install things and then being able to roll back everything to the exact same place.
Windows Backup and Restore does this via the Volume Shadow Service (VSS). They call it a backup, but if the target is local, it's just a snapshot.
Windows Backup and Restore doesn't seem to allow a local target. I'm on 21H2.
Or do I need to use 3rd party solutions for backup and imaging?
Is there something in Windows 10 Pro that I can use on a physical laptop that works like a snapshot on VMs?
I want to be able to take a snapshot and then install things and then being able to roll back everything to the exact same place.
It doesn't have to be a "backup" in the sense of being able to replace a defective SSD or similar. Just something similar to a snapshot on VMs.
@scottalanmiller said in December 2022 Maintenance:
Yes, I've been saying this about certain core functionality for a long time.
Me too, since the early 90's.
VB plug-ins and Delphi plug-ins were the bane of my existence for many client projects back in the day on Windows. You'll use something and when the client wanted some changes made a year or two later, the plugins didn't work with the latest version, hasn't been upgraded or were deprecated. In either case you had to find another plugin, rinse and repeat or just give up and solve the problem with your own code.
@scottalanmiller said in December 2022 Maintenance:
@Pete-S said in December 2022 Maintenance:
FYI youtube links are broken (no embedded view).
yeah, all of the plugins that handled that are no longer available
I tried bringing the old one in, but it doesn't do anything anymore, either.
Classic plug-in problem.
Also the reason why the idea of extending the software´s base functionality with plug ins sucks in general. Better to have that functionality embedded in the base software so it can live on forever. Otherwise every upgrade breaks something else.
What I'm trying to say is that plug-ins SUCKS. Much better to have developers who want add functionality contribute to the open source project instead. That's the way to do it.
Preferences for categories have gone missing. Now I get to watch cat pictures again...
FYI youtube links are broken (no embedded view).
For the .it TLD.
Who can register a .it domain?
"An unlimited numbers of .it domain names can be registered by anyone who is an adult and has citizenship, residence or commercial headquarters in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), in the State of the Vatican, in the Republic of San Marino and the Swiss Confederation."
Source, the Italian NIC
https://www.nic.it/en/find-your-it/how-register
@dimforest said in Do international TLD's have restrictions?:
ML is using the .it TLD, which is obviously for Italy... but it's a perfect TLD for the site given the subject matter.... obviously. Just something I've never thought about until now but are there any actual restrictions on using the TLD like this despite this not necessarily being an Italian based site/company? Are they just free to use however you want along with some "suggestions" to use them a certain way?
Some country TLDs have restrictions and others do not.
If you check a domain name with a certain TLD at godaddy.com you'll see what restrictions apply.
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Stop Using Secure Email:
@JasGot said in SAMIT: Stop Using Secure Email:
@scottalanmiller
For regular e-mail (not "Secure E-Mail"), isn't the message traveling un-encrypted when it is moving MTA to MTA on port 25?If you use things like free cPanel email or your ISPs email or have your nephew deploy his own email server without hiring any IT people... it's plausible that someone will screw up the config and leave it unsecured or if you accidentally host your email with scammers or something. That's essentially true with any misconfigured system of any type.
And even when misconfigured, most systems today will enable it by default. You'd have to run something unmaintained for a super long time or really go out of your way to do a bad job to have it come up in a new deployment.
There's no reasonable case where a business (or an individual at home) would not have obvious access to a secure system and defy all reasonable recommendations for many years and demand to be intentionally insecure to make them be in a situation where they don't have security on their own end and only if sending data to an insecure second party would the data be at risk and when that happens, the encrypted channel is moot because the target itself is insecure so it doesn't matter.
Yes, even scammers and spammers use TLS nowadays.
The only time we ever receive emails that are not TLS encrypted have been same odd email notifications from ERP or LOB systems. Probably legacy systems.
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:
Here's two important takeaways I think people should have...
- If you represent an employer, you should never want to have employees that are adversarial with you. You want to be a good employer that encourages employees to like working there and seek the common good. Good employers should want to benefit employees, and employees should want the business to do well. It's mutually beneficial. If it isn't, rethink things. If you are doing things as an employer to negatively impact your employees beyond what is necessary (like making them work, lol) why? That's just shitty. If your employees hurt work just to hurt the business, why are you paying them? There's always someone who will appreciate the job. Be a team, or move on.
- As an employee, you shouldn't want to work in an environment where you don't desire the success of the whole. Employment is a huge portion of our lives and being happy with your work, with your career, are keys to being a happy person. If you feel hostility towards your job or your career, move on. There are other employers out there. If we were more aggressive about leaving bad ones, bad ones would be less common. One of the reasons that bad employers thrive is because people just put up with it. And the more good employees put up with bad employers, the fewer good employers are out there.
While you make good points there is an obvious advantage for the company supplying IT and office equipment for the employee and that is taxation.
Most countries have sales tax and payroll tax so when an employee (not a company) buys something for his own money, that money has been heavily taxed already.
So in a win-win scenario for the maximum benefit of everyone, an employee should never buy anything for his own money that a company can buy.
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:
@Pete-S said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:
Well, if you extend the definition of lvm then everything is using it
Everything should be using it, it's the only really logical approach in the modern world. The idea of hard partitions should have died long ago. But we saw people using it just today in an example, it's still out there in a lot of servers.
If you skip the LVM layer entirely today, you'd feel it. You'd lack snapshots, ability to resize (within reason), and all the flexibility we expect.
I know it seems weird to think about, but if you look at how LVM2, ZFS, a PERC and Qcow2 works... it's all identical under the hood. But it is all different from partitions, but the same as each other.
I think the only thing that makes it feel like these might not all be LVMs is that one of them used the name LVM2 23 years ago, and the others did not. In the Windows world they called their LVM "dynamic disks". Only on Linux and AIX did their LVM layer get called LVM or LVM-something. Everyone else gave it a product name rather than the category name.
In that case physical drives are using lvm too.
Mechanical disks can remap their logical sectors to physical sectors. SSDs even more so. And NVMe drives have namespaces which maps logical blocks into different independent "drives".
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:
If you skip an LVM layer inside a server, you normally provide one from the outside. File based LVM systems like Qcow2 and others allow you to do some flexible things that don't require partitions such as resizing and providing different containers as completely different drives eliminating the need for partitions inside the containers because you can create an unlimited number of logical volumes.
Qcow2 on top of XFS or ETX4, for example, is the same as an LV on top of LVM. Just fatter. LVM2 is one type of LVM that works by making a super lean filesystem and making LV files on top of that. Qcow2 doesn't create the underlying lean filesystem and relies on traditional fatter filesystems like XFS or EXT4, but has basically all the same functionality - can be copied, resized, unlimited numbers, snapshots, etc. It's an LVM without the complex management layer.
The other approach is like ZFS, where the LVM layer is built into the filesystem itself. This is essentially the LVM approach + XFS or similar, but all through a single command line to make it feel like a single entity. But the layers remain the same regardless of it we break them out to an incredible degree like making file based virtual disks, if we have a management layer that does only that like LVM2, or we integrate it all into a single entity like ZFS.
Well, if you extend the definition of lvm then everything is using it 
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:
@Pete-S said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:
LVM is just another abstraction layer that adds nothing. Debian by default doesn't even install lvm but you could if you wanted to.
That's because it's added by default by the hypervisor.
No dear, read my post in full before replying.
@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:
Everyone talks about disk partitions like they are a modern tech, but they were broadly supplanted by more advanced logical volumes over twenty years ago. Should we still really be talking about partitions most of the time?
I have an opposing view. Re-partitioning drives is a non-issue today. All the reasons that lvm was invented has disappeared when running workloads as VMs using thin partitioning.
LVM is just another abstraction layer that adds nothing. Debian by default doesn't even install lvm but you could if you wanted to.
I don't even use lvm on the new kvm hypervisor setup I'm working on, where one might argue it actually makes sense.
But I need thin provisioning and while lvmthin works libvirt doesn't support it. Using qcow2 files is just a lot more straight forward and flexible process.
@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
It's here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685
It's probably good to move off SD cards but the thing is that SD cards are actually fine because flash is flash - no matter what enclosure you put it in.
The real problem is that the flash memory need to have enough write endurance for the application. And people doesn't know and don't buy the right type of SD cards.
According to vmware you need 128 TBW (over 5 years). Industrial SD cards for example can have that. SD cards that goes into phones and cameras don't.
Same problem with usb sticks as boot devices and "clever" people using SATADOMs for high endurance cache. Oh well.
@gjacobse said in Data Erasure Software?:
@Pete-S said in Data Erasure Software?:
@Yonah-S said in Data Erasure Software?:
so DBAN is the low end solution by Blancco. I am looking for something in the middle range for mid size enterprise.
Mid size enterprise? Then don't deal with that crap.
Decommissioned equipment is sold to recyclers that will securily erase all drives with certificates and then resell your equipment or the parts in it.
Or,.. recycle and shred you HDD or SSD with cert
Or that. Either way, only DIYers and tinkerers not driven by business decisions can afford to mess around with stuff like that.
Enterprise companies should off load this kind of work to other companies that can do it much better and much cheaper than they can.
@Yonah-S said in Data Erasure Software?:
so DBAN is the low end solution by Blancco. I am looking for something in the middle range for mid size enterprise.
Mid size enterprise? Then don't deal with that crap.
Decommissioned equipment is sold to recyclers that will securily erase all drives with certificates and then resell your equipment or the parts in it.
@Yonah-S said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:
@Pete-S have you thought of selling it? there is a big market right now for getting rid of old/unused hardware. Especially if you have any SSD's in there.
Thanks, but we're keeping it. Just want to extract the maximum value out of it while it's occupying rack space