Best posts made by Carnival Boy

From "how do I find my licence key" to "companies should run Linux" in 24 posts

@scottalanmiller said:

Marketing and research are by far the primary means of getting information out, but sales plays an important role as well.

Not for me. I'm struggling to think of any product I've bought as a result of sales people. Marketing & research cover everything for me. In fact, sales people are such a turn-off for me, that I'm more likely to buy a product if they don't have any sales and I just talk to an engineer.

Yeah, I get this as well and haven't resolved yet. Hopefully someone on here will have the answer.

You don't need to restore from backup to get the original on-line, you just need to execute "RESTORE DATABASE DB1 WITH RECOVERY". This is what I used and it seemed to work fine - this wasn't on a production server though, so I can't guarantee anything.

@RamblingBiped said:

So currently not intended to be all that useful in regards to systems administration.

Hmmn, yeah. It doesn't look that useful. It certainly doesn't appear to be as bigger deal as the OP makes out.

Exactly, Breffni. That's why I wrote earlier "So one of my main criteria for a "good VAR" is that when I order something, the right product turns up at my door at the right time."

In many ways, I find the Account Manager more important that the VAR. A good account manager will do lots of chasing for you to make sure everything is ordered and delivered prompty, and know the right people to talk to if you have any queries or problems. Several times I've ditched a VAR because the account manager leaves and I don't like his replacement.

@scottalanmiller said:

The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.

We also offload the backup files to an external hard drive, weekly. The 1GB network connection in the server is going to be much slower than the USB 3.0 connection, I believe.

With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?

I don't believe in a specific budget for preventing downtime. Redundancy and disaster recovery is baked in to every single IT decision, so is a part of every IT budget. You can't separate it out. Preventing downtime is why we buy enterprise gear rather than consumer gear, for example. It's why we run RAID10 rather than RAID5. It's everywhere.

Secondly, "downtime" is too general a term. It's impossible to define. I've never experience a situation where an entire organisation is "down". It would happen in case of power loss or flooding or fire, but those are things generally covered by other department's budgets - they're not specific to IT.

What I experience is single systems being down, or being in a degraded state, such as e-mail, ERP, internet access. Availability for each component is treated on its own merits. For example, it's relatively easy to quantify the cost of an e-commerce website being down and mitigate against that. Put this wouldn't come under a general IT budget, it would be bundled in to the cost of running an e-commerce website.

So I would never ask either of the questions that the OP has listed. I don't think either are relevant or realistic in the real world. Yes, you can define the cost of providing certain HA solutions, but by definition HA doesn't prevent downtime, it only mitigates against it (hence the word "High" rather than, say, "Total"), so you'd still be asking "What kind of budget do we have to reduce our risk of downtime" and not "to prevent downtime".

Correct. OEM lives and dies on the machine it was first installed on. It's not transferable. I think what Jared was saying is that it doesn't matter whether it activates or not - that's irrelevant as to whether it is legal or not. Just because it activates doesn't mean it is legal.

Anyone done one recently? We've been told to run Autodesk Inventory Analyser on our network. I believe this is an Autodesk licenced version of a standard network analyser published by ClearApps. We can't see the results of the audit before sending to Autodesk, but can see from the prompts it gives whilst running that it collects stuff about the PC (processor, RAM etc etc). For this reason, I'm reluctant to use it. But we are unable to complete the audit without it.

I don't know what happens if we refuse.

I hate Autodesk. People have complained on here about Microsoft audits, but I consider this far worse. There is no way I'm running a third-party network analyser just to comply with an audit. We only have 6 Autodesk licences and they're all under subscription contracts and have to be activated, so I really don't know why Autodesk is insisting on this (other than the usual marketing reasons).

Cool. I'm going to use Open Broadcast Software. Now I just have to sort the hosting.

I think I'm going to use Google Drive and give anyone access who has the link. That should be secure enough.

I think the biggest problem with Sharepoint Foundation, in terms of cost, is the database requirements i.e. it will only run with SQL Server.

SQL Server Express is free, but is pretty limited and doesn't really seem intended for production environments. In particular the fact that databases are limited to 10GB, which seems pretty tiny for a typical Sharepoint site. So you quickly end up needing SQL Server Standard edition, which is pretty expensive. If you don't have SQL Server already, you probably need to budget for that at the outset, even if you're only planning on using Sharepoint Foundation.

I'd like Microsoft to provide something in between Express and Standard, but I'm not allowed to criticise Microsoft on ML so I'll say no more

Speaking as a non-techie, I don't particularly like the fact that with Sharepoint all files are stored in a database. We have another document management system that only stores metadata in a database, and the files themselves are stored in a flat file system. There's something about a flat file system that re-assures me. And it means that the database is very small, so SQL Server Express works fine.

It would be nice if Sharepoint had the option of working like this, if only to allow SQL Server Express to be used.

Not if the document management system doesn't expose the file system directly to users (which it shouldn't).

@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:

If I don't post it to be indexed and the person I shared it with doesn't post it to be indexed, will it ever be indexed?

No, it shouldn't be. That's the purpose of YouTube's "unlisted" option. It's hidden from everyone who doesn't have the link. Search engines can't index URLs that are hidden.

I don't like using grandfathered products.

So it's still with the enterprise plans (but called Intranet Sites), but no longer with the business plans. Is that right?

If so, I can add to my ever growing list of reasons why the business plans suck and should be avoided, even for small businesses.

It all feels a bit bait and switch to me. I wonder how many companies have started out with the business plans and then been forced to upgrade to an Enterprise plan for one reason or another.

"only problem this a physical server which is our only DC, WSUS, Exchanged DB, Sharepoint etc."

Why is that a problem? Why can't they just restore the encyrpted folders, and leave everything else as is?

To answer the original question: How can I come up with a real world number...

You can't. Business systems are too complex to come up with a single figure. And disasters are always too unpredictable. The exercise is a bullshit marketing job to convince someone to spend some money.

IMHO

I'm not sure what you mean by snapping? Do you mean VSS?

The issue happens if I take a backup on a 5.5 host and try and restore it on a 5.5 host. If I do that it will fail. But I can restore that same 5.5 host backup to a 5.1 host and it works fine. So the source of the backup doesn't seem to be an issue as much as the destination.

Crippling myself in what way?

@scottalanmiller said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

That's very true. I would never choose ESXi Free to deploy today. But that doesn't mean that you should rip it out for the sake of ripping it out, either.

Exactly. I'm experienced in ESXi, I like it, and at the moment it does what I need. If I was starting out again, I wouldn't bother learning it, mainly because I don't see it having any long term future. I'd almost certainly use Hyper-V because I'm a bit of a Microsoft fanboy. Or if I had any interest in hypervisors I'd probably rip it out just for fun, but I don't.