One of the ways these encryption malware thingies work is by essentially attacking all the "drive letters" attached to the system.

One of the ways to be able to recover from encryption attack is to have your backup on a "disconnected" backup service, something that isn't a "drive" on your computer.
The most common of this is going to be a simple cloud backup tool. Something like CrashPlan, BackBlaze, SpiderOak, Carbonite, etc.

But there are some cases where it's not very practical to use cloud backup. Perhaps there is too much data, the files are too large, the bandwidth isn't available, etc.

This leaves the average person with a couple options, something like, connecting and disconnected USB drives or whatever, leaving them detached for the most part.

What is the best local type of backup that is immune to an encryption attack yet doesn't require manual intervention such as connection/disconnecting USB?

The attack this weekend worked over SMB, attacking the entire network, so I don't think having a network drive (to avoid a local drive letter) is an adequate solution any more.

So what are all the options for backups that can be done on a local network and be immune to an encryption attack?

@stus This continued to affect systems across the world all weekend long.

Another article with ongoing details:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/05/15/nhs-cyber-attack-latest-authorities-warn-day-chaos-ransomware/

Do your updates gentlepeoples.

Has anyone been affected you know of? Make sure them backups are in order!

@JaredBusch said in Rackspace email:

@guyinpv We have talked plenty around here about Zoho being a solid choice for the smallest businesses for exactly those reason.

I don't think it's fair to limit to "smallest businesses".
They seem quite powerful to me, with a million possible tools, and even certain social email features that nobody else has.

Starting a conversation based on an email (instead of reply-all hell), or delegating and sharing emails folders, seems pretty unique to me.

Since this thread is just about email, their email system has been just as good to me as gmail or hotmail or yahoo, if not more so. There is a feature/support box built right in to the program and I've had my own feature suggestions added to the interface.

In any case, when talking about free email with a custom domain as a hosted service, they are pretty much one of the only options, if not THE only option. And you still get a ton of stuff for free.

Found these guys recently: https://vpsdime.com/

Never seen 6GB of RAM for $7/m! And that's dedicated RAM. I'm definitely considering it if I ever need to a run memory heavy app but don't need as much on rest of specs.
I just don't know anything about them as a host.

Myspace demanded Flash to be installed. Whaaa? What is this, 2015?

No love for Zoho?
Entire free business suite including email for 25 people is free. With a referral, jump that up to 50 users. 5GB/user.

Since it allows one custom domain, you're pretty much set. It's what I use for my personal business.

And even the upgrade of $2/user/month is pretty standard, but they have a lot of stuff available in their suite of tools.

I think they recently added full support with Exchange, so Outlook is ready.

Nothing wrong with their mobile email and calendar app either.

My weight steadily went up with each major event in my life. Namely, job change from outdoor/active to indoor/tech, marriage, kid1, kid2.

Currently 5'10" and about 60lb overweight. Now we're preggers again so need to not add any more!

My problem is simply food volume and calories. I feel far too stuffed after far too many meals, but at this weight you really feel the hunger!
Spending hours and hours a week away from family doing jogs and gyms and stuff just doesn't work very well. So diet is key. And not eating too much for a desk job is very important!

I've enjoyed the Strava app for tracking walks, hikes, and bike rides.

@travisdh1 said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

@guyinpv said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

@momurda said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

@guyinpv From the storage tab while a vm is selected in XenCenter, Click on Attach Disk. choose the disk from your list of SR.

The only thing in this menu is "Local storage" and "Removable storage".

The VHD files I have are not located on the local storage media, they are on my NAS backup device.

Somehow I have to get the VHD files off the NAS and imported into the existing VMs.

I'm not sure how to do this off the top of my head in XenOrchestra (me=fail). How I got my XO back was by using XenCenter. Have the VHD files available on the local machine, and then go to file -> import inside of XenCenter, and select one of the VHD files. You'll then get the normal vm creation questions, but without the storage creation. You should be good to go after the import.

Sounds reasonable. Then I just have to figure out how to copy the files onto the server local storage. There is no general "file browser" in XC where I can just copy files from the network.

@momurda said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

Oh i thought you got nfs working earlier

I did but that was just my ISO collection, lol

I did try to connect the folder where my backup is, also as an NFS store, but it doesn't really work that way. XS treats these connects like an SR. All I want to do is copy those VHDs back to the server's own local storage, not setup a new SR.

Maybe I'm missing a step here?

@momurda said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

@guyinpv From the storage tab while a vm is selected in XenCenter, Click on Attach Disk. choose the disk from your list of SR.

The only thing in this menu is "Local storage" and "Removable storage".

The VHD files I have are not located on the local storage media, they are on my NAS backup device.

Somehow I have to get the VHD files off the NAS and imported into the existing VMs.

@scottalanmiller said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

@guyinpv said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

@marcinozga said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

@guyinpv said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

"CouchPotato (CP) is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader. You can keep a "movies I want"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these movies every X hours. Once a movie is found, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the torrent to a specified directory."

That doesn't sound illegal at all.

Just because the software is there, it doesn't mean you have to use it. Opera browser has built-in torrent client, yet that doesn't mean it will be used to download illegal content.

Ok, but the very paragraph they use to describe their software is literally illegal. "movies I want" list that automatically downloads the movies?

I just found it funny. People will use software and networks for whatever reason, but CouchPotato literally describes their software as something to do illegal things with.

Technically, there are torrent services for free, public domain movies too.

"Judge, what I meant by 'Batman Returns' is an indie open source movie that's freely available from some media company in Australia. ..... what's that, no such film exists? Oh, I guess I was wrong. Maybe it was 'Batman Le Runes', a French film......"

@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

kerberized it

I got it to work using the IP finally.

Now that I was able to connect my backup VMs share, I went ahead and imported the OVF file. This successfully recreated 3 of my VMs.

But wait, there's more!

It only imported ONE of the VHD files to one of the 3 VMs?!?! fml

So now I'm stuck having my 3 VMs but only one of them can boot cause the other two don't have their drives attached.

I've done my obligatory 3 hours of Googling to try and find out how I can attach the other VHD files to the imported VMs, with no luck.

Just for reference:

1. I created the backup by highlighting the three VMs and clicking the VM->Export menu. This created three VHD files and one OVF file.

2. I imported the OVF file. This created three VMs, but only one of them has a drive attached. The other two boot with essentially "no boot media", no drive.

Now I have what must be my two missing drives, the VHD files, but don't know how to connect those to their respective VMs!

@marcinozga said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

@guyinpv said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

"CouchPotato (CP) is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader. You can keep a "movies I want"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these movies every X hours. Once a movie is found, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the torrent to a specified directory."

That doesn't sound illegal at all.

Just because the software is there, it doesn't mean you have to use it. Opera browser has built-in torrent client, yet that doesn't mean it will be used to download illegal content.

Ok, but the very paragraph they use to describe their software is literally illegal. "movies I want" list that automatically downloads the movies?

I just found it funny. People will use software and networks for whatever reason, but CouchPotato literally describes their software as something to do illegal things with.

@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

But the NFS worked before?

Ya. I guess I only ever used it just for this, connecting the NFS. I wouldn't care about it if I could just connect using the IP instead but why wouldn't that work either? Does NFS only work using hostnames?

@momurda said in XenServer 7 install not working for SD-Card setup:

You might need to check your Management Network dns settings on XS.

Settings are pretty uncomplicated; static IP, using main router for default gateway as well as only DNS provider.

Supposedly, the way to get NETBIOS support in 'Nix is by installing winbind and making an edit to the /etc/nsswitch.conf file to enable wins for lookups.
I'm hesitant to do this just because I don't want to manually tweak anything with the default install of XS.

"CouchPotato (CP) is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader. You can keep a "movies I want"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these movies every X hours. Once a movie is found, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the torrent to a specified directory."

That doesn't sound illegal at all.

Well that didn't go so well....sort of.

I bought a couple 64GB SD Cards. Just for fun I thought I could install them by utilizing the mirror function of the Dell SD Module. I turned off the server, popped one old SD out and put in one new card.
Booted up the machine and strangely enough, it did not immediately want to mirror the cards. Apparently I had removed the card in slot 1 and the BIOS had that slot set as primary. I'm not really sure why that affects the mirroring but ok.

So I changed the BIOS to make slot 2 the primary card. Now when I reset, it properly asked me to fix the mirror and I said yessaroo. This appeared to work, as it later booted into the existing XS 6.5.

I thought, cool, now I just need to pop out the other original card and stick in the new one, and it will mirror back again and the upgrade will be done. This time, however, it didn't work. I booted up and it acknowledged the need for a mirror operation, which I said yes. I left it overnight but nothing ever came of it, it didn't mirror, I don't know. And XS could not start at all after that, it was borked.

Oh well, I can just do a clean install of XS 7.1, and that's just what I did. The install went through perfect, it detected the new SD cards as valid to install to, all good.

Now I reconnected XenCenter and found 4 updates to do for about 85MB.

After the updates I tried to connect my NFS share on my Synology which houses the backed up VMs as well as my ISOs. This was no bueno.

If I try to connect the SR with "nas1:/ISOs" it threw an error saying "DNS lookup failed: the given servername could not be resolved."
If I tried to connect using the IP instead, I got a different error "The SR failed to complete the operation ... Check your settings and try again."

Grrrrr. I checked my network settings over and over on both the Synology and XS, many tweaks to test but I could not get it to connect.

I can't even ping any hosts directly from the XS CLI. I'm guessing that somehow XS 7.1 is not configured for support for resolving WINS hosts or something? I have no idea, but it won't ping any hostnames on my network at all. But it will ping domain names and IPs.

Regardless of resolving hostnames, it's still strange that it wouldn't connect the NFS using an IP either.

Back to the drawing board.

I'm not saying I won't get a Roku. It just doesn't seem clear whether it's necessary. This project is only for funzies to play with setting up a media box.
If the video card isn't up to snuff, I'd have to buy one anyway, so I'd probably put that money toward the Roku then and not a video card.

I was just hoping to build this box with an old tower and not have to buy anything right away.

@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

You'll want to know what your Plex PC can manage for outputs and determine whether you even want to go down that road. But for the cost of a Roku these days, I'd spring for that and be done with it. Much, much simpler and quieter.

You're suggesting the Roku completely replaces building a Plex box. How is that? I still have to store all my files somewhere and I'm trying to not have to use my main workstation. Is Roku's media management features as good as Plex? Does it scan for meta data and find previews and cover art and all that stuff?

I guess I'm not see how Roku alone is a complete replacement for Plex. I thought Roku just connects to various streaming services? Is it also a media management app like Plex?

@NashBrydges said in What's the current "standard" for a media server setup these days?:

@guyinpv You can plug the PC directly into the TV via HDMI (you'll want to make sure your video card also sends sound via the HDMI...not all do) but the noise is very quickly going to become annoying. It's hard to beat the silent Roku. Not to mention the Roku can take some stream and direct play them, relieving the stress from your PC for any transcoding work.

Good point about audio. Is this a requirement? I mean, can't I just run the audio out on the PC over to an audio input jack on the TV? Or is audio-over-HDMI a necessary standard for TVs?
My TV is about 6 or 7 years old plasma 40". It has HDMI and even USB ports but not a "smart" TV by any means.

I am leaning toward Plex and Roku.

I don't think Roku is actually necessary though, at least right away. I should be able to just plug the tower directly into the TV with an HDMI cable right? Or is Plex only accessible over the network? Even then I can just use the network without Roku.

In any case, assume I go with Plex. Is the Linux install more or less stable and easy to use than the Windows install? It just needs to be easy to manage and easy to add media over a network share or whatever. Local storage.