Made it back to Minneapolis -- back in the office already

@jaredbusch said in Ubiquiti UNMS - First impressions:

@dashrender said in Ubiquiti UNMS - First impressions:

@jaredbusch said in Ubiquiti UNMS - First impressions:

It is not a controller. it is a management system.

I'm sorry, what's the difference?

As @Kyle-Caminita said offline, it is ISP Network equipment monitor/management.

Just like the hardware is enterprise grade. This is an enterprise grade management system.

Just free.

This.

UNMS pretty much will monitor and manage the "carrier (ISP)" side of UBNT equipment. When said and done you should be able to make changes and have UNMS push them out; however, I do not believe there is the intent to hold the end device in a state.

UniFi Controller is just that, the brain and management for the UniFi "enterprise" line of products. The UniFi items have limited brain power and must be configured remote. Obviously you can do CLI and local config hacks but they are just that hacks.

If using everything in an enterprise you get some separation of responsibility for the systems. A single role can't configure the finance VLAN from router to access point. Now, if you carry multiple roles as is common in SMB that doesn't much matter.

edit: words and things

@eddiejennings said in What happens at MangoCon gets posted here for all to see 2017:

The world's newest gerund: computering

Kelly ( @computering ) broke @JaredBusch with her lesson in the art of computering

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dustinb3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Alcohol attacks like a virus killing the weaker cells first. Make your brain more well rounded for the conference guys

I'm confused by this.. lol

Drink more, it'll come to you

Kill all the weak cells. #onlythestrongsurvive

@black3dynamite said in LastPass just double their price:

Who's using the paid version of LastPass?

I am. Love the mobile access

One of @JaredBusch

Headed to get lunch up at Genesee. Tired of arguing with people that sudo is too hard

Ok maybe I am slow but I am piecing this together.

The .exe is probably a self extracting zip file. Inside is a bunch of installers and a batch file to run them.

Just stop doing this now. Grab PDQ Deploy or ninite or any other number of tools. Use sodium for the inventory portion.

Ok, so a little background. the storage situation at my organization is our weakest link in our network. Currently we have a single HP MSA P2000 with 12 spindles (7200 rpm) serving two separate ESXi clusters. We have a 2 node cluster for our operations (Exchange, AD, SharePoint Foundation, and other miscellaneous applications) and a 3 node cluster for development machines. Development is our core business, in simple terms we do SI work for Oracle Retail applications which includes custom development. Some in the organization argue this data may be even more important than the aforementioned operations systems, thankfully IMO my boss (the CEO) disagrees with that opinion. Also, when presenting this same information (rolled up better to speak CEO), my bosses response was whatever I think is the better solution. The company really does stand behind me in what I suggest, I just don't want to add additional risk.

It is not uncommon for us to max out the disk i/o on 12 spindles sharing the load of almost 150 virtual machines and everyone is on board that something needs to be changed.

Here is what the business cares about the solution: Reliable solution that provides necessary resources for the development environments to operate effectively (read: we do not do performance testing in-house as by the very nature, it is much a your mileage may vary depending on your deployment situation).

In addition to the business requirements, I have added my own requirements that my boss agrees with and blesses.

1. Operations and Development must be on separate storage devices
2. Storage systems must be built of business class hardware (no RED drives -- although I would allow this in a future Veeam backup storage target)
3. Must be expandable to accommodate future growth

Requirements for development storage

• 9+ Tib of usable storage
• Support a minimum of 1100 random iops (what our current system is peaking at)
• disks must be in some kind of array (zfs, raid, mdadm, etc)

Proposed solutions:

#1 a.k.a the safe option
HP StoreVirtual 4530 with 12 TB (7.2k) spindles in RAID6 -- this is our vendor recommendation. This is an HP renew quote with 3 years 5x9 support next-day on-site for ~$15,000

Pros
Can purchase support
Single-vendor -- "one throat to choke"
Integrated solution
Cons
Less performance than solution #2 out of the box
More expensive to upgrade later (additional shelves and drives at HP prices)
All used hardware

#2 ZFS Solution ~$10,000
24 spindle 900Gb (7.2k SAS) in 12 mirrored vdevs
Based on Supermicro SC216E16 chassis
X9SRH-7F Motherboard
Intel E5-1620v2 CPU
64 GB of RAM
No L2ARC or ZIL planned
Dual 10gig NICs

Pros
Better performance out of the box (twice the spindle count)
Non-vendor specific parts means upgrades require less investment

Cons
Self-supported
I am the support contract
Multiple vendors and suppliers to acquire parts
Combination of new and used hardware (the chassis) to get this price point

Alright, tear me apart tell me I am wrong or provide any other useful feedback. The biggest concerns I have exist in both platforms (drives fail, controllers fail, data goes bad, etc) and have to be mitigated either way. That is what we have backups for -- in my opinion the HP gets me the following things:

1. The "ability" to purchase a support contract
2. Next-day on-site of a tech or parts if needed

With the $4000 saved from not buying the HP support contract I can buy a duplicate Supermicro system, and a couple extra hard drives, and have the same level of protection.

Note: this is my first time posting an actual give me feedback topic, I tried to include all information I felt was relevant. If more is needed I can provide.

@minion-queen said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Current status: standing in my kitchen trying to figure out what I need to make scrambled eggs (i need more sleep).

Just add water

@scottalanmiller said in How to access SAN?:

@dashrender said in How to access SAN?:

The use of this device by people who don't understand it is very dangerous to your data. You should really consider hiring a firm that can train you on how to use it if not manage it completely for you. You might find that it's better to just give up on this probably older piece of gear and get a new NAS or but a SAM-SD for your storage needs.

Anyone qualified to work on it will demand that it be removed. No amount of training makes that device production ready. Just have someone access the data, copy it off and decommision that junk. Have a storage engineer spend four hours of time assessing the needs and telling you what makes sense to buy in the future.

So much this. I am stuck with two of these things until our vmware platform is completely down.

We have the iSCSI model. Just to reiterate how bad these things are: last Thursday one of the units controller A dropped the flash card. While it was failing over to controller B it locked up. Had to.completely down the platform and reseat all cards and controllers. I know I have good backups, that is the only reason I can somewhat sleep at night, that and all "production" applications are already moved to XenServer.

Take the advice of others, get some chain and make it a boat anchor.

@dafyre said:

In your Dev environment, you have 3 servers... with 288GB of Ram, 64GB of RAM, and 16 GB of RAM... Assume RAM compatibility... What happens if you balance out those three servers and get them at least close to having the same amount of RAM?

Does that help you at all? If that is a good idea, then why not look at converting them to XenServer and switching to Local Storage? You could then replicate the VMs to each of the three hosts, or you could set up HA-Lizard.

The two smaller servers pre-date my time with the company and were likely back of truck specials. Both of these are slated to be replaced next year with a single server with similar specs to the big server. The smallest one is already maxed out and the other one doesn't make sense to upgrade just to retire.

I also don't need HA on these (I don't have HA today on these) so I think this is an opportunity to move to different platform.

Sitting at the airport waiting for my 6PM. Thanks @scottalanmiller @Dominica for the ride and time wasting this morning.

Edit: Phone did odd thing. Adding @NDC as he was with for this and contributed to the fun!

@scotth said in Pi-Hole Upstream DNS Providers:

Steve Gibson's GRC DNS Benchmark

I don't know if this is the defining app for public DNS servers but it may help.

I have used a version of this previously
https://github.com/cleanbrowsing/dnsperftest

@wirestyle22 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@travisdh1 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@dafyre said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@nadnerb said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@quixoticjeremy said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@donaldlandru it's amazing how it is all common sense.

For it being "common" sense it sure isn't very common.

Common sense is only common if taught commonly

See: Critical Thinking skills.

I think all users have the "door effect" @scottalanmiller mentioned. Only in most cases the "door" is a computer!

What is the door effect?

I don't know either. A quick search and I think this might be it https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/

Summarize your week with one meme/gif:

https://imgur.com/EK0MSdL

Another day of

Here we go Korora and drink

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Apparently we had a power outage at the office. So I'm driving there now to turn back on everything so my boss can connect to the VPN And run queries against the production database server.

That sucks.

Someone else may have caught this. I just saw it on reddit

Well at least the Museum responded nicely

"Hi <Lady>! This event is taking place during the actual solar eclipse, and is centered around watching the eclipse happen in real time. We are also celebrating with an eclipse-themed sleepover on August 11 that will focus on the science of the eclipse and other sun-related activities. That event might work better for your kids!"