@obsolesce said in I think I am missing something about Hyper-V....?:

@phlipelder said in I think I am missing something about Hyper-V....?:

Cosmos Darwin: Storage Spaces Direct: 10,000 Clusters and counting

I'm curious to see how much permanent data loss has occurred as a result of using S2D.

Heh … I've seen many a disaster recovery situation where backups were either non-existent or failed with no indication of things being broken. We've been in them (BUE ugh) and have been called in on many more. If the backups have not been fully restored bare-metal or bare-hypervisor they are not proven thus no-good IMNSHO. Spot restores do not count.

Here's a bad one: Maxta

Slightly different situation but: Dell Stops Swonly Sales of ScaleIO Virtual SAN <-- Folks being left in a lurch.

Data loss responsibility starts with the folks managing the backups. Usually, they are not important and seen as a cumbersome expense until something goes blotto. Then all of a sudden the CxOs are throwing money at a proper disaster recovery setup. But, by then it's too late.

One of our hyper-converged labs:

The build process from the back:

Our secondary lab:

A pair of converged clusters being prepped for a client. One to Edmonton and one to the US:

While the secondary lab is sitting on a pallet in our shop area all of our in-production systems and our primary labs are set up in racks in a properly cooled room.

A friend of mine's home lab setup: JTPedersen.com Home Lab.

My point being: Rack it and tie it up nice.

@dashrender said in My first computer:

I bought my first computer when I was 12 (1988). It was a used 8088 with 640K memory (if memory serves), amber screen, two 5.25 floppies, no hard disk - $250. turned right around and went to Sam's club and bought a 30 MB drive for $300 - that was pre ATA (is that called Winchester?) My dad installed the drive, then I installed DOS 3.x on it.

I know I used computers before that, but I don't recall what they were though. I do remember playing with an Apple IIe in elemetry school, but we didn't have one at home. I think my computer was the first one owned by us in the house. Though my dad had a "portable" computer from the military that he brought home often. It was as large as carry on luggage today.

MFM was the precursor to parallel ATA and SCSI IIRC. The drives filled two 5 1/4" drive bays full-height and were xMB to xxMB in size.

@obsolesce said in Client Wants To Transition From Windows To Linux:

FTFY

Munich, Germany.

I'm thinking a well stocked conference room would be the cat's meow for a smaller-ish conference.

I'd be more than happy to contribute as we're focused on SMB/SME.

Picked up Timothy Zahn's new Thrawn Alliances book so am re-reading its predecessor then the new one.

He is a fantastic writer. Great book(s).

We use SharePoint extensively internally and support a number of clients that we put on to it (former SBS MVP here).

The permissions structure is similar to Group Policy or CSS where the shirt closest to your back wins permissions wise. Traverse is not something that we can do in SharePoint unlike other file permissions/shares setups. That's something to keep in mind when it comes to folder permissions structures.

We set up up dedicated subsites for our various needs.

We set up split DNS for the Internet FQDN internally and externally to make things simple for folks in and out of the office. But then, we host our own.

We set up WebDAV and use a shortcut \\sharepoint.domain.com@SSL@PORTID\DavWWWRoot for folks accessing externally. In the case of O365 the simple way to grab that UNC is to open in IE, use the Open in File Explorer option for a library, and pull the icon down from the address bar in File Explorer to Quick Access/Favourites. Right click the shortcut and Properties to get the UNC.

The simplest way to sell SP is to show folks the Check Out/In and Reviewer Approve/Disapprove and the Versions features. We enable mandatory check out/in and draft/final versioning on all libraries.

All users add Check Out/Check In/Server to their Office app's Quick Access Toolbar:

Having those three buttons up there eliminates most support calls as folks get used to checking them for a file's status.

@scottalanmiller said in Hot Topics for MangoCon 2019:

@phlipelder said in Hot Topics for MangoCon 2019:

I'm thinking a well stocked conference room would be the cat's meow for a smaller-ish conference.

I'd be more than happy to contribute as we're focused on SMB/SME.

Topic ideas?

As far as presentations go for me?

• SMB/SME IT Business Pearls - The ups and downs of building a SMB/SME IT Support Practice
• Server Systems and Fabrics: Building for workloads - Baselining and Building
• Server Hardware: Firmware horror stories
• Hyper-Converged: All things HCI focused
• What's in a Lab: Building on a budget
• Active Directory: Designing for Security and Flexibility
• Group Policy: Lock things down without user complaint
• Windows File & Print: Configuring for security and flexibility
• Remote Desktop Services: Baselining and Designing for user workloads (standalone and farm)
• PowerShell: Got lots of scripts to share and tools guidance
• Windows Cluster: Hyper-V, Storage Spaces, Storage Spaces Direct
• Windows Admin Center: Monitoring
• Monitoring: Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana S/U for Windows

The above is off the top.

I've done a lot of this one over the last year or two:

• Business and Personal Security: Protecting your data, resources access, and identity

How'z that for a start?

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@travisdh1 said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@JaredBusch said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

Take your finger or a pen and wave it under the light source.
If you see more than one finger/pen then it's flickering.

I can wave my finger in front of my face outside in daylight and see that.

Nope, you can't. You need a stroboscopic light source for that. And the sun ain't that.

If you can see individual fingers it's because the light is going on and off and on and off etc. If you try under the sun you will just see one blurry finger.

Unless someone is getting a headache from the things, who cares?

I am, so I care. Some people (most?) don't notice.

It was the same with CRTs. Some people could work fine with 60 Hz refresh rate. I though it was freaking horrible.
With LCDs it's the backlight that might be a problem on some monitors. Not so much anymore though.

Same boat here. My wife, Monique, is ultra-sensitive to flickering and light hue that heads into the ultra-white/daylight. My sensitivity comes and goes with my migraines.

We have swapped almost all bulbs in the house for Phillips LEDs of varying types with no flicker anywhere to be found.

There are a few that buzz which is really annoying. We'll need to take them back and get them swapped for new ones at some point.

The new Edison style LEDs are da'bomb! Their light is very gentle and warm with a nice even glow from whatever they are installed in. We like them a lot. So, we're starting to flush out the standard style LEDs for Edison in larger fixtures in the house.

Oh, and we saved a lot of coin swapping all of the 75 Watt halogen pots to LED floods. The electricity bill drop was very noticeable.

Veeam to StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with a BackBlaze backend connection to back up all that data.

We're getting ready to pilot this kind of setup. VTL integrates really nicely into a tape based infrastructure with little to no mods needed.

Edit: For on-site storage we set up either a Storage Spaces Direct cluster or a Converged cluster. In this case it would be Converged with close to 1PB of available storage (2x nodes + 1x 102 bay JBOD)

@jaredbusch said in Hot Topics for MangoCon 2019:

@scottalanmiller said in Hot Topics for MangoCon 2019:

@kelly said in Hot Topics for MangoCon 2019:

Reseller/VAR vs ITSP/MSP. What makes them different, and what value do each deliver.

I like this and it would be nice if we had a panel for it.

Certainly you and I would work that panel. Who else?

Can do. Our business, my wife and I co-own, is both VAR and a blended MSP.

Trying to get the Pi-hole link posted and this bundle of cuteness won't leave me alone!

Norma Jean the kitten is an affection junky. She just melts in when held and has an amazing purr.

She and an older brother of hers have managed to win me over to cats ... at least them.

@Pete-S said in Typical services and software in SMBs?:

Besides the obvious Microsoft/Google/xxx for mail and office apps - what type of services or workloads are SMBs interested in? What are they spending their IT-"budget" on? What kind of business problems are they looking to solve with IT?

I'm wondering because large companies have a lot of problems or opportunities for improvement, but a lot of those comes from the fact that they are large. So small companies wouldn't have the same type of problems.

Some of you work with SMBs all day so I bet you have a pretty good grip of the situation.

Heh, all of our clients are on-premises for mail and collaboration with some being hybrid with Azure AD and O365 strictly for Teams integration.

There's a strong on-premises market niche so we've stuck with it. :0)

I gather that the terminal client MSTSC has local resources unchecked?

Are the printers set up on the Session Host(s) that the users would be using? Are they allowed to choose the default printer via Devices & Printers (Control Panel) or are they not able to get into any Control Panel applets?

@NerdyDad said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@PhlipElder said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller Link please?

https://xkcd.com/936/

Thank you.

@Pete-S said in Typical services and software in SMBs?:

@PhlipElder said in Typical services and software in SMBs?:

@Pete-S said in Typical services and software in SMBs?:

Besides the obvious Microsoft/Google/xxx for mail and office apps - what type of services or workloads are SMBs interested in? What are they spending their IT-"budget" on? What kind of business problems are they looking to solve with IT?

I'm wondering because large companies have a lot of problems or opportunities for improvement, but a lot of those comes from the fact that they are large. So small companies wouldn't have the same type of problems.

Some of you work with SMBs all day so I bet you have a pretty good grip of the situation.

Heh, all of our clients are on-premises for mail and collaboration with some being hybrid with Azure AD and O365 strictly for Teams integration.

There's a strong on-premises market niche so we've stuck with it. :0)

Nothing wrong with serving a niche. But I'd say the customers are spending their dollars on mail & office apps - regardless if they're using on-prem or cloud services.

I'd always thought that the ones running on-prem was perhaps medium sized businesses that had enough scale for it to make economic sense.

SPLA cost for Exchange is a few dollars per month. It's not that expensive. Office apps are expensive and always have been no matter where the licensing comes from so that's an acceptable operating expense level for most clients.

2FA ought to be a part of this consideration.

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Are we in polite company because there is a joke or two in there ... shop humour though.

@scottalanmiller said in Ms licensing for a windows jump server:

@travisdh1 said in Ms licensing for a windows jump server:

@kris_k said in Ms licensing for a windows jump server:

@scottalanmiller The reason for having a jump server not connected to AD is to reduce the attack surface if the jump server gets compromised.

If I was in front of a computer right now instead of my phone, I'd insert a facepalm.

In what possible way could running RDS not joined to a domain make any difference security wise? If users are going to access any resources on the domain, it's just making life harder on IT for zero benefit. The only way this makes sense it's if someone doesn't trust the security of the authentication mechanism already in use, which is a whole other can of worms to open.

There are benefits to it being on a DIFFERENT domain. But not to having no domain at all.

Concur.

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

I don't know about you, but what the chicken is the kid doing in the background of pic 2?!?!?! 8*O