@scottalanmiller said in KVM Desktop Setup Ideas:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

KVM is also nice because you can continue using that machine as a regular desktop as well, if you need to do so. (Can't do that with VMware, Hyper-V or XenServer).

No one expects to use their Type 1 hypervisor as a desktop.

What? Tons do. Both KVM and Hyper-V are very popular for exactly this.

No. . . very few people say "I'm going to install Hyper-V and use it as my daily driver on my Dell Server" no one does that.

Actually a HUGE number do. It's insanely common for developers especially and IT folk. It's hard to state how common this is.

Have you never heard of the desktop virtualization market? This is a totally normal thing. Nearly everyone I know does this, both IT and dev and loads that are neither.

The only reason I don't use Hyper-V for testing is because we get VMware Workstation for free as a partner; I used VirtualBox for a long time when Hyper-V on Windows 7 couldn't create virtual machines, just to test out a few things or use it as a place to keep up-to-date images which I could capture later for deployment without using any additional server resources.

Type 1 definitely runs better as it doesn't stack the hypervisor on top of the OS, but I definitely don't see VMware Workstation going away.

I can see a couple niche things about VMware Workstation though; of course, there is more to add to the list. 1) Many that don't use it to push new configs to their VMware environment; if it's just being used as stand alone for some VMs, you could use literally anything else (and many are free obviously). 2) Nested virtualization to test clustering, site replication, etc while not needing to buy really expensive hardware.

One thing I am shocked many MSPs don't do, which we've done since the first deployment, is secure each Office 365 CSP account (delegated access to each customer through one provider portal) with MFA. In reality, if the MSP was compromised, every customer is then compromised.

I also witnessed many MSPs not securing their secure password databases with MFA. They secured the front end client application in case a computer was compromised or stolen, but the database itself was wide open.

@StorageNinja said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@bbigford said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

They are slow as fuck in most environments

Are they slow, or did someone underprovision the Shitrix environment behind it?

Not a configuration issue with infrastructure (Citrix or VMware), since zero clients ran great. The thin hardware endpoints were always just slow as fuck.

@Emad-R said in Guess what SSH can do VPN:

The protocol that has more features than my mom

I envy you for having a living mom.

@Dashrender said in Why are Windows Management GUI Elements So Tiny?:

@scottalanmiller said in Why are Windows Management GUI Elements So Tiny?:

@WrCombs said in Why are Windows Management GUI Elements So Tiny?:

I was actually just talking about this with some coworkers of mine.

If you ever work with any other system, then work with Windows, it's shocking how silly and ridiculous it is. You can't "see" anything. It's like they wanted to mock people for choosing the GUI.

I love how you frequently go to this - they must want to mock people..

I'm sure it rarely if ever actually starts there. As already said - it was legacy, and never updated. They are finally getting around to updating most of the control panel applets - but we're still frequently stuck dealing with the old style for things like the java security admin, etc.

But wouldn't that be hilarious if it were true?

Internal MS plot to fuck with people: "Haha these idiots buying our operating system for the GUI... you know what would REALLY be funny? Release management tools that they can't see, so they have to squint their eyes and get really close to the screen. Their eyesight will get worse and they'll look even older while doing it with that stupid look on their face. HAH!!"

@StorageNinja said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@Dashrender said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@StorageNinja said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@Dashrender said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

Why are you locked to GPO? Why can't another management solution be used?

Because plenty of people have other applications and platforms that for AAA use AD and don't support other LDAP/Kerberos systems so given how cheap per user a CAL is they say "screw it" and use AD to distribute GPO (note GPO isn't tied to AD it's just commonly viewed that way).

Wouldn't that affect the other side of the VDI, though, not the client side?

Couldn't it do both?

Maybe, I mean you CAN control thin clients with GPO, but not normal thin clients.

Correct. The thin client itself I see managed by either thin client management tools (Terradichi Teradici) or by MDM API's.

FTFY

Thin client, absolutely. They are slow as fuck in most environments as they are just terrible hardware with an onboard OS that still needs to be patched. They are neither a stand-alone computer with full functionality, or a zero client with speed and security; they are the worst of both worlds.

Zero clients though, completely different story as that's a software-delivery discussion.

@DustinB3403 said in SPAM Filtering with Zimbra:

Here come the recommendations for Barracuda Spam Filter (physical on premise). . .

Definitely not physical, but they aren't a clear winner.

There are definitely some caveats with their hosted service. Barracuda has been kind of a weird company... they have some of the best support I've ever had, and it's American so there is no language barrier. But CONSTANTLY buggy... the saving grace is you call support, get someone in 10 seconds, and they say something to the tune of "we've got a bug report on that already, it should be resolved soon", and within about 24 hours or less it's resolved.

I've considered it a company designed by engineers, for engineers. Everything I expect is there:

• Highly customizable products.
• No-language-barrier support, and able to reach someone quickly.
• If there's a bug and you know about it, be transparent.

One gripe I have with their cloud filtering though, is for quarantines every email is treated like a person... including distribution lists. If a distribution group is reachable externally and has 20 users, you will have 20 people resetting that quarantine password every time guaranteed. Another gripe I have is with their email encryption section; I can never remember to escape characters... if you use [SECURE] as the content policy filter in the subject (prepended for encrypted email) and forget to escape [ and ] then send anything with the individual letters S-E-C-U-R-E in the subject then you're going to end up with every single message encrypted with any of those letters in the subject. [SECURE] has to be escaped as \ [SECURE\ ] or it won't work how you want it; fixable, but not the most intuitive at a glance... even a pro tip of "you need to escape characters" would be acceptable.

Other than that, their services are pretty affordable with a decent budget and some good features. Competitors on the same tier would be ProofPoint (though they are starting to show their age while also lacking innovation) and MimeCast (very decent, I put them only slightly behind Barracuda). I put MimeCast slightly behind Barracuda because their main selling point is an Outlook add-in... that's dumb and difficult to manage with lots of users since add-ins are a notorious ticket-generating headache. But I would say MimeCast and Barracuda are still very close in terms of cost and functionality; can't speak to MimeCast support but I hear decent things.

Re: MongoDB Major Change to Licensing

@scottalanmiller said in MongoDB Major Change to Licensing:

Let me tell you, we had been loving MongoDB, but this makes me feel SO much better deciding to move to ScyllaDB recently.

I'll have to take a look into ScyllaDB. Obviously, it's not a 1-to-1 replacement for MongoDB, and maybe that's a great thing. Got any pros/cons while I'm doing some research on it?