@tonyshowoff said in SQL security over the LAN:

but if the company is basically dismissing concerns over encryption by saying "it's up to you to secure your network" that's basically saying "what's encryption? We're morons."

I have a suspicion that this is true. I feel like there are maybe two sides to software development, there is the functional aspect of the SW itself, but then there is how it incorporates into the overall IT plan for a target business. It feels like all of this company's development resources go into the first category, and none in the second.

i recently saw the trailer for the live action aladdin.

@wrx7m said in Remote viewing software:

Screenconnect for Windows works well. We have it hosted by them.

You can also control mobile devices. My only complaint is that the Android app used to remote in to other devices, is not that great. The mouse control is the main issue. They recently updated it to be better than before, but it is still not great.

can you remote into phones? I constantly get calls from people out in the field that have problems with their iPhones, but have no way to help the remotely.

@JaredBusch said in What Are You Watching Now:

Veeam rep talking at the western chicagoland Suburbs SpiceCorp tonight.

Don’t use regular credentials to access the backup storage.

I agree, I created a special user account that is used for nothing else, and only that account has access to the backup storage. The worry was that a regular account could get compromised and also compromise the backups, especially with something like ransomware.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows Server 2016 License question...:

No cheap upgrades. Owning 2012 R2 doesn't get you any discounts on your 2016.

But it does entitle you to CentOS, Fedora, Suse, or Ubuntu for absolutely free!

so does not owning 2012 R2

I still have a long way to go, but I see NC as the next phase in our "shared file" evolution. It looks like I could simply recreate the same structure (or something very similar) as what we have in our file server, inside NC. If I went this route, then most things are similar to what we already have, but we get some added features, such as the ability to share files with third parties without resorting to email. We have times where the email attachment size limit comes into play, and this would allow that to all go away. NC would also give us versioning outside of my backups, which might be nice if we trained people to use them. If we went with NC, we would also likely enable remote access, which added to the multiplatform clients, would basically make the files always available for our users, even if they are not on premise.

One main benefit, is the ability to sync select files to the user's local disk. This should have a pretty good performance benefit, especially with half of my users at the site that is across the WAN.

so far I have just fired up an online demo, and played around a bit. With all I typed above, I could probably make this very similar to a basic file server, but I want to explore the other differences between NC and a file server, because there may be things we can do that are fundamentally different with NC, and they may be better in the long run, the use of tags being a good example. I also need to think about the concept of a user having any dedicated, potentially semi-private, shares versus everyone using a common share that is setup by the admin user (basically what we have now). Our current storage philosophy is based on how we used an old simple NAS that used to have no permissions, and only the most basic folder structure.

Most of our files are going to not change frequently, so after the initial sync, it should be minimal traffic. Once the 100GB was done, it would only be small changes of single digit MB mostly.

not to mention all the other things that NC can do that are not directly related to file sharing.

@Dashrender said in file sharing in the 21st century:

@Donahue said in file sharing in the 21st century:

I dont really want to dive any deeping into MS's pockets if I can avoid it.

What are you using for email? If using O365 you likely already have OneDrive for business

we currently have hosted exchange, not o365, but I want to switch. We pay way too much. I am not sure what I want to switch to.

I have sole discretion over that. Most of the time I try and warn people with at least a 30 minute notice, or more if I can. But there are times when I just reboot and don't say anything. A lot of it depends on how long I think it will be down. If it is just rebooting a VM, and it might only be down for a few minutes, then I may just go ahead and do it, although I do frequently warn people too.

But in my case, I have never asked for permission, I always use my own judgement.

thanks for all the responses guys, there has been a lot of good info that I have not thought of.

@Obsolesce said in file sharing in the 21st century:

@Donahue said in file sharing in the 21st century:

I mentioned this in another thread, but I currently have a file server which is a 2012R2 VM sharing roughly 6TB of data. I am looking into replacing this with something more modern, so far I am checking out Nextcloud.

But having read most of the threads on ML dealing with nextcloud, and especially reading about experiences such as @guyinpv had here and here, I think we need to take a hard look at how we share files now, and why we do it the way we do it, and maybe find other methods and philosophies that we could implement for a better overall experience.

In a lot of ways, I can relate to @guyinpv, as his setup sounds a lot like mine. We currently have our VM, with a single share that is applied as a mapped drive using GPO. Inside this share is a number of root level folders, basically one for each department. Inside each of these are the typical level of nested subfolders and files. All of the first couple levels of folders from the share root were created by me, and users are locked out of being able to make changes until they are a few layers deep into their department.

Based on my research and conversations I have had, I think we have a very narrow idea of what a file share should be like, because all we know is how windows operates. As far as we treat the system, there is no one that "owns" any of the files, even though windows records an owner. No one has any sort of personal or private files that they "share" with other users. The files exist in the share that we created, and both users likely have equal permissions to said file.

I would like to expand my horizons, because I don't feel like I fully understand how other companies might use something like NC. If we are to take full advantage of what NC offers, it may require a fundamental shift in thinking by us and I want to get started on that now.

How do other people use NC? Specifically, how are folder structures or other structures, and how does that relate to user accounts? What does the anatomy of a cloud based solution look like when done well? I think I would like to use the sync client in windows, but I have only just started to play around with an online demo.

I think it's best to instead figure out what the business needs and and goals are for file service needs, and then find the appropriate technology to meet those... instead of picking out a cool featurful technology first, and the seeing if you can squeeze the businesses needs into it.

For me, it's not so much a reason to try and use cool features, its a way to catch up my thinking of how this should be done, instead of sticking to the same old rut. What the business needs is a way to not be penalized so much for having half of my users being forced to access so much stuff across the WAN. Perhaps the issue is sometimes bandwidth, and other times it is simply latency (probably the latter more often), but having a local copy that can sync can take advantage of local speed. Most of our current machines, and everything I will deploy from here on out will have SSD's, probably PCIe M.2's.

Another need is a way to share files with third parties, which NC can do, and standard file shares cannot.

I will probably just be reading all day about Nextcloud. Some small fires might pop up, but I doubt it.

I think I realized that recently. It makes @JaredBusch's comments about why I needed a 1Gb WAN make more sense. I probably needed improved latency at least as much as more bandwidth. I think I had a lot of extra backend issues that were causing more latency than just network latency too. Resolving those may have been enough, but at this point we have what we have.

@DustinB3403 said in Where do I start with replacing the whole MS AD stack:

@Donahue said in Where do I start with replacing the whole MS AD stack:

@Dashrender said in Where do I start with replacing the whole MS AD stack:

@Donahue said in Where do I start with replacing the whole MS AD stack:

@JaredBusch said in Where do I start with replacing the whole MS AD stack:

@Donahue said in Where do I start with replacing the whole MS AD stack:

Ok, DHCP is switched over. It's currently just pointing the DNS to the existing DNS servers.

Right. Now you can work on setting up your DHCP reservation, and migrating all the static IP junk to reservations.

Once that is done, you can work towards changing DNS.

yeah, that will take awhile.

really? Your DHCP server doesn't have an option to just add an existing lease to the reservation table?

It's easy to create reservations. It's another thing entirely to migrate over devices from static to DHCP, while also changing their ip.

You could just create reservations in the new DHCP server and have the existing windows DHCP server not renew requests.

I think you missed the point.

I have several VM's that are not syncing with domain time correctly. They keep jumping forward about 6 minutes, and then jumping back. This is happening repeatedly. Is there a way to force these domain members to stay on domain time? The DC is not doing this and is set to get it's time from pool.ntp.org

thanks for the info guys, I will take a look. I like the idea of using a VM.

A while back I had been requested to do some initial testing and workup details for rolling out IP cameras to our two locations. I tested two setups, one was Unifi video with their G3 camera, and the other was a Dahua Starlight model and Blue Iris as the NVR software. I worked up some numbers for space requirements using various encoding codecs and whatnot, but then the urgency faded and I haven't done anything with it in about a year. I have been asked to refresh all this because it has renewed interest.

Do any of you guys run IP camera systems, and what do you guys use? I am looking at 20-30 cameras per location, probably as two isolated systems. The software that I liked the function of (Blue Iris) really doesn't run well when virtualized because it is designed to take advantage of hardware acceleration. This means I would likely buy a standalone computer and run it all as physical if we proceeded with our original plan.

QS in my thread was meant to be Intel's feature, Quick Sync. I generally only use acronyms in the context of that thread, or if they are used industry wide. If there is doubt, I tend to stay away and just spell it out.

I am going to try fedora for the first time (to run zoneminder). What do you guys normally use, workstation or server?

I am trying to create some simple hyper-V machines on my windows 10 laptop. So far, very unimpressed. Using windows admin center, I cannot even get a console to see what is going on in the VM. If I use hyper v manager, it's a little better, but the whole experience is not nearly what I was expecting.