Best posts made by Jimmy9008

I'd start by looking at that list you have and moving the '10% company goals' on to a 'urgent list'. Stick the other '90% self imposed' on to a 'long term goals' list. Remember, not everything now. Plan a year or two and schedule those projects. Planning is a great way to help the issue you have.

Just booked our flights to Amsterdam, looking forward!

@scottalanmiller said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:

@stacksofplates said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:

So there's another way I don't think I've seen anyone mention. That's doing application level HA.

Her professor is making them focus only on platform level. The impression we have is that he's not familiar with HA at all and doesn't know nearly as much as we'd hope that students would already know!

This is the same in the UK. Lecturers get their content and generally stick to it, they teach. They don't have the skills to actually understand if the content is true, valid, good etc - because if they did, they would work in IT and not teach it.

Just told I am through to the final stage of an interview process. Fingers crossed.

@vhinzsanchez said in Windows file server query:

@black3dynamite said in Windows file server query:

Role-based access is the way to go. This site has a good example using role-based.
http://www.yster.org/role-based-access-control/

Thanks @black3dynamite, one of our directors would want to see the names themselves when checking for ACL. If I am to keyin the group, he can not see each individual. What I'm doing is the group is for Share tab and individual accounts in Permissions tab.

Why would the director be looking at that at all? They should be off playing golf or something... who is in which group/ACL is way below what a director should be doing. That is what the minions are for...

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@Jimmy9008 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just finishing off agreeing and signing a new job! Exciting news

Congratulations!

Thank you, found out I was successful an hour or so ago. Nice bump in pay, better benefits. Very happy. Just need to get the contracts all signed then hand in my notice to current employer.

Hi folks,

We are using dialer.exe/TAPI to make calls via our phone software Xarios to Mitel 5000. Every once in a while dialer.exe goes in to 'Not Responding' and I cant get rid of that without a shut down and clean boot. Today, once workstation is keeping 'Not Responding' within dialer.exe even after doing the above...

Any ideas whats going on here? I had a look in Event Viewer before with no luck. Dialer.exe seems to be an only program, should we be using something else?

Best,
Jim

@pmoncho said in Huge Mistake:

@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:

There's apparently a theory that you can "freeze a hard drive, and get it to read again"
Anyone ever hear of this?

Yep. Spinners only. I've been successful 3 out of 12 times. It only works when the drive heads or a platter is "stuck"

Wrap in saran wrap and Freeze for 2-3 hours, give a decent love tap along the side of the drive on the floor and plug it in to see if it will start.

Yep, I did this too. Problem is as it heats up the drive fails pretty quickly. So, if you have lots of data to get off the drive, with little time... good luck with that!

@scottalanmiller said in What % is normal availability?:

@jimmy9008 said in What % is normal availability?:

We have had our four Dell R630s coming up to two years now. Excluding planned maintenance (for example patching for the Intel vulnerability), the servers have not been unavailable (unplanned) once in that time. Over 99.99%+ for us.

In the world of anecdotes...

We had two 1999 Compaq Proliant 800 servers that ran NT4 SP6a. Both made it a DECADE without unplanned downtime. 100% update, for a decade! They were finally retired because.. they were ridiculous by the time that they retired.

:face_with_tears_of_joy: but it shows that hardware can be high uptime with well ran maintenance, no need for complexity. Our downtime comes from the developers/app builders rather than the hardware.

Turned down a job offer with a finance company. Better pay and benefits but I just did not feel excited for the position. Couldn't bring my self to sign the employment contract.

I've seen this many times, jump back in to properties after clicking 'Yes' to verify they are correct.

Figured out what is going on here.

Our developers recently built an API to our site. Somewhere in China is using the API to create a 7 days trial a few times a second.

The trial form uses SMTP to get our Exchange server to email them an activation link. Exchange routes the mail through Office 365, which has blocked the address as spam/attack. So, that is why no emails to other domains (legit customers).

So we're using Exchange 2013, does anybody know a way to drop/block any traffic our from the Exchange server to domain qq.com? All other traffic can flow fine, I just want to drop that traffic from our Exchange out.

Will add a rule to Office 365 too.

Best,
Jim

Hi Folks,

I have used the free Windows Veeam backup tool for a while, love it. Works perfectly. We have a Linux machine (CentOS 7) which needs to be backed up regularly, so I have turned to the Linux Veeam tool (I expect it would be just as good as the tool for Windows).

Installed, updated, and setup to backup to our NAS. Backup ran successfully. I am able to restore the backup using the recovery disk from Veeam and the backup file from my NAS. Seems smooth... the problem though, the software on the Linux server (DGraph) stops working when restored from the backup.

The machine boots fine, I can access the desktop, but when trying to run DGraph I get errors. I expect the application isnt happy about being backed up by Veeam when on, so I tested some more.

I reinstalled DGraph and got it working again. Then, I ended the DGraph process (or service - whatever its called in Linux?)... then I ran the backup. I guess if the application is offline when the backup is made, the backup must work fine. But upon restore DGraph still does not work.

Not sure what is going on, even with DGraph off before the backup the application fails. Any ideas?

In Windows, if the software isnt running I have always seen a backup work successfully. Not posted on to Veeam forums yet, wanted to see if any ideas from here.

Any other tools I should try other than Veeam?

Best,
Jim

Hi folks,

How do you decide what is a fair salary for an IT position?

I am finding it to be quite difficult to get an idea as many job listings that require a similar skill set often say 'salary depending on experience'. So, you cannot really get any data. Plus, I have never quite trusted the data shown on sites like PayScale. Its probably quite skewed towards data being provided by those on lower salaries anyway.

I also expect each area varies quite drastically in salary. It doesn't feel right to judge say a Sysadmin salary for somebody working from Kings Cross or Old Street to somebody in Greenwich...

How do you begin to decide whats fair?

Best,
Jim

@travisdh1 said in Hyper-V Failover Clustering:

@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V Failover Clustering:

@travisdh1 The issues stem from the hypervisors being rebooted out of order, causing a server to start up before the DC which was on the other hypervisor.

Looking at different ways to try and remediate this from occurring again.

You never put a DC into an HA environment as all of that functionality is built into the DC itself, and trying to force it can create problems.

Best thing to do is have a DC on both hypervisors. Either another VM, or add the role to a current VM on the host.

I agree with one DC on each host. Otherwise, that is a lot of additional complexity to have a cluster and shared storage just for this one issue...

Some folks are having a bad day. A real bad day.

I'm not worried. This is a good thing. We need to be strong though to the rest of the world - Cameron resigning makes us look weak. It also adds political worries to economic worries which exacerbates the financial issue we are seeing. He should not have resigned and should have said something strong and confident about the UK economy instead.

Folks,

Is it just me who is starting to really hate Windows 10? We have WSUS setup, tested the anniversary update on a few PCs, all looked good. (Some things like people pinned items move/change, but only small things)... Thus, approved the update.

A developer has updated his PC as the 'Install' notification popped up and the machine is now very much screwed up. IIS feature, off. ALL pinned items - gone.
usernames for applications he runs, reset to default like never used - a total mess. I'm in the progress of restoring to yesterdays endpoint backup for him now as he does not know where he kept his 'iis stuff'. BAH!

So, how crazy would I be to decline all future Windows 10 feature/annual updates in WSUS entirely? Just allow security updates...

[just peeved/venting]

Thanks,
Jim

I've read this problem has been blamed on failure of 1 UPS... Anybody have any detail on that?
I'd be surprised if a company like BA runs servers somewhere protected by only 1 UPS, including the backup servers/systems.

I read that a power surge and a faulty UPS rendered both the live systems, and the backups systems unavailable... that's insane if true.

@NattNatt said in So we are leaving..............:

@Jimmy9008 said in So we are leaving..............:

The market is having an initial shock due to UK actually leaving. In the long run we will do better than fine.

No way in hell will the Middle East want to see the UK economy (and property) crash, as they would lose hundreds of billions. No way will German car manufacturers want to lose the 20%-30% sales from the UK, the French car manufacturers too. Supermarkets such as ALDI and LIDL are heavily invested in the UK and would want to keep that income coming in. Others too.

Large companies will force the EU to keep trade with the UK, as without trading with the 5th largest economy the EU will not have the funds to survive and bale out Greece, Italy so on so forth. Without the UK 'footing the bill', they probably wont be able to anyway.

*6th Largest. France overtook us this morning...

Haha, but i'm sure you get my point. Lets see how well they are doing when they have to support Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia and Turkey on top of bailing out Greece whilst trying to manage a messed up Spain and Italy. Germany and France are screwed if they do not keep working with the UK.

Markets are just a bit unstable as they didn't actually expect the leave vote to win. It will come back when places in the EU realise how much they will lose by 'shunning' investment with the UK.