@bnrstnr said in Non-IT News Thread:

@scottalanmiller Do you think that US parents are too paranoid about their children or do you think there are solid reasons for these massively different cultural behaviors?

Our culture has been driven by fear rather than rationality for a number of years now. We hear the stories of the < 1% of experiences, think we don't want that to happen to us/our children, and take every possible precaution to prevent it without evaluating the true cost. I say we because I am also in this category too.

Just wanted to start a discussion about this since I'm genuinely curious. If all hypervisors cost the same for equal tiers of features which one would you use and why?

Looks like Discord is setting itself up to compete with Steam (opinion): https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/discord-game-store-free-games-1202900484/.

@momurda said in How long to keep people's AD/Exchange accounts:

Yes i have a process i want to follow too but cant.
3 years after people have not worked here, they still have an email and i think it is stupid AF.

1. Sign up all the defunct addresses for catfacts, and then forward the account to their former boss
2. Protest innocence
3. ?????
4. Profit

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@JaredBusch I'd like you to give in to your urge to stab me in the jugular. 35.5 hours of being awake with no end in sight

At some point you become more harm to the efforts than good... you just need to walk away and sleep.. 6 hours.. then get back at it.

It has been proven via science* that the longer you work on a project without sleep that the amount of fukitol in your bloodstream increases.

I pronounce it Deh bee en.

@davedemlow This is great. Thank you. Out of band support like this is part of what makes me more confident in my decision to invest in Scale.

Apparently, in an incredibly intuitive way, you can bypass this by not setting a password on the account when you're creating it. Then you go back and set the password after the account has been fully created.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/skip-security-questions-setting-local-account-windows-10

It is a "Yes, and" answer. Certifications can be good, but experience is better generally. It is better if the certification codifies and formalizes your experience. On the flip side certifications for the sake of learning can be good, but paper without experience has limited value.

@scottalanmiller Your stance on IT job titles seems at variance with your stance on the English language. It seems that you want a level of flexibility in language that you're unwilling to extend to titles. My experience in SMB, and annecdotally, is that a SysAdmin is what most SMBs call your IT Generalist. The SMB job market has designated a skill set and assigned it a title. Whether it is technically accurate, or matches the enterprise is not really germane to an individual's ability to get hired in the SMB, or get paid in a manner commensurate with skills and experience. If I put down IT Generalist as my title/position sought I will get slated for helpdesk positions. The "correctness" of the title is no longer relevant to the discussion. You are fighting against the same things that I am with the language overall, and we're both losing.

Leo is essentially a hobbyist, and Paul is on the edge of hobbyist/prosumer/SMB. Mary Jo on the other hand has some excellent insights into what is going on inside MS outside of their desktop/laptop/services arena.

@blakerodier said in Support Tips/Tricks and maybe a Treat or two!:

Hey all. I wanted to talk about a topic that may be confusing for some users. Over-Provisioning CPUs for VMs.

Scale Computing’s HC3 system like any virtualization platform has physical limitations when it comes to CPU resources. Each node in a cluster has a physical limit to the number of physical cores and threads available to present to guest OSs. If you choose to you can allocate resources to your virtual machines based strictly on on the number of threads available on a physical node.

If you have two 8 core hyperthreaded processors in a node you will have 32 threads or logical CPUs you can assign for a 1 to 1 ratio on each node. In most instances there are CPU cycles that will go unused in a 1 to 1 setup. HC3 can utilize processor scheduling to allow for Over-Provisioning of CPUs meaning that for the same 32 threads that are present you could allocate 64 or 96 virtual CPUs and allow VMs to utilize idle cycles that would have been wasted in a 1 to 1 setup.

One restriction that is built into HC3 is that it will limit any individual VM to the number of threads available on the lowest capacity node in the cluster. If you have 2 nodes with 32 threads and 1 node with 16 threads, any one VM will only be able to allocate 16 virtual CPUs. This prevents any 1 VM from being unable to run if a livemigrate to another node happens and the VM tries to utilize all virtual CPUs. When deciding how to over-provision it is best to start with conservative numbers and build up if there are no issues. If you start seeing high CPU spikes or high wait times it may be important to turn down the amount of over-provisioning being used.

Available means physically (or logically I guess since they're hyperthreaded) on the nodes? So if you have identically spec'd nodes there shouldn't be an issue with over provisioning?

-ordering my first Scale cluster tomorrow

Outlook for Android just left beta today. You might give that a whirl.

I realize that y'all aren't the market for this discussion, but IT staff would be stakeholders in a discussion about this, so I figured I would posit the question here. Do you think that there would be a market or interest in having a third party come in and handle project planning and coordination for IT that is not associated with an MSP or a vendor? The idea would be to have someone come in for larger scale transitions and changes so that it wouldn't affect IT's current staffing/workload ratios, they would handle as much of the coordination and communication for working a project through the stages, and then hand it off to internal IT at whatever point is deemed appropriate by the company.

@nadnerB said:

hands out chill pills
Wow, one thing is painfully obvious here.
You all live in the wrong part of the world.

There was a time in my life where I seriously contemplated emigrating. Not because of anything wrong with the US, but because I liked the parts of AUS I'd been to, and the people I'd met.

@davedemlow Support was able to get things sorted out. One of our issues was that the target for the import was a NAS running SunOS. Never could get that running.

Final steps:

• Exported VM (VM-E) from Xenserver
• Converted VM-E using Starwinds V2V converter to qcow2 format
• Created an import shell vm (VM-I) and exported it to the same location as the above converted exported VM-E
• Renamed export VM-E to match the guid of the VM-I
• Imported renamed VM-E into HC3 cluster
• Success

It is a bit convoluted, but it works. Thankfully I don't have to move too many VMs other wise this would be a very time intensive process.

Good fun here...

And you all are not my intended audience. Many of the comments appear to be coming from a peer level of evaluation. Most likely I won't be able to talk to peers until in person or maybe during a phone interview. The problem is that a CV has to pass between 2 and 3 layers before it would hit a person who would care about the things you're mentioning, depending on the position applied for. (This resume was aimed at management/project management, so that affects how it is written and who the intended audience is.) The first stage in many companies requires you to make through an applicant tracking system that is generally keyword based. This requires many buzzwords. The second level is often HR. They are also very keyword based. The next level is usually a hiring manager/team. If you're not hiring into a an IT team under an IT leader it needs to be oriented towards the decision maker. If they are not in IT they don't care what tools I used. They want to see that I improved the systems at a previous employer in a way they can quantify and wrap their heads around. By the time I get to the people who would want those questions answered it is frequently face-to-face where they can ask those questions and I can give them clear, thorough answers that I can't in a resume format.

The question was asked above, how do you judge the success of a resume. It is difficult. However, after doing the rewrite that included the section I excerpted I immediately had 4 follow-up contacts with 2 leading to interviews. Significantly higher than before. Perhaps my original resume was so much garbage and the second is mediocre. I don't know, but I have been more successful in my search utilising the newer one. If any of you are interested in getting the two to look at for your own benefit feel free to pm me.

Fundamentally repealing Net Neutrality is the right thing to do...if ISPs were not monopolies or duopolies in the majority of the country. If freedom to compete actually existed in the market, then removing regulations would spur growth. Unfortunately competition does not exist currently, and won't exist after repeal. The FCC is addressing the wrong problem with this.

So I have four hosts that we had OpenStack Cloud installed on (before my time). They were running Ceph locally to provide storage and redundancy. I'm trying to evaluate whether moving them to XS is feasible without any capital expenditure. As far as I know the machines do not have RAID cards, but several mismatched drives (1-4 TB). Is there any way I can achieve a reasonable amount of redundancy in this scenario?