@coliver said in how to know which active directory is primary and secondary?:
If you're looking at who holds the FSMO roles you can use this powershell command.
Get-ADDomain | Select-Object InfrastructureMaster, RIDMaster, PDCEmulator
I don't get why people insist on only using PowerShell to query things that can be more quickly queried with something like this:
netdom query fsmo
Am I missing something?
I wish I knew what it was like to be able to grow a thick dark beard like yours, lol. I'm nearly 45 years old, and mine STILL doesn't come anywhere close to filling in like yours does :P.
@DustinB3403 said in NLTest on DC: "ERROR_NO_LOGON_SERVERS":
Maybe my google-fu is good enough?
One microsoft "of go read this" and another topic of "check your ports"
I don't see any Event ID 11 messages in my System log, so that rules out that issue at least.
I noticed that the firewall was turned on, so I turned that off! (We don't have it "on" on any of our other DCs). I rebooted and ran the test again and got Connection Status = 0 0x0 NERR_Success. I was expecting to after a reboot (just like last time), so I'll wait at least 60 minutes and test again to see if I still get "success".
I'll report back later this afternoon! 
We've been running an OpenFire server here for years. And in that time, I've upgraded the server more than once. On one of those occasions, we upgraded to a version that was listed as the "latest release" on Ignite's website, but we had no idea that there were unresolved bugs in that particular version. We ended up having to revert back to an older version of the server in order to bypass all of the trouble we were having.
That led me to finding this site address:
https://issues.igniterealtime.org/projects/OF?selectedItem=com.atlassian.jira.jira-projects-plugin:release-page&status=all
You have to have an account in order to view that information, but it's free to register and gain access.
This is a perfect way to track the server releases to make sure that you're choosing versions that are 100% bug free. I've also noticed that they've stopped posting "buggy" versions as a "latest release". But it's still nice to have this link I mentioned so you can track the details of each version ;).
So I won the $60,000 makeover contest from HPE (https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1878399-getting-pumped-for-spiceworld-enter-to-win-a-60-000-makeover-from-hpe)
Since I've never worked with equipment this new (lol), I wanted to see what ideas people have. My initial thought is that it'd be great to build a VMware test environment that I can beat up and learn on. Up until now, I've learned everything I know about VMware in the enterprise in our production environment that I built myself and have grown and learned on over the last 3 years. It'd be great to use this new equipment to build a modern "lab".
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
Blades have been beaten to death in SW. Any vendor like this giving them away knows full well that that community is aware of their total lack of applicability and value. This isn't a mistake. Even the Fortune 100 struggle to find any value in blades. I've worked in shops of over 100,000 servers and THEY stated that at their scale they couldn't make blades make sense! I've seen multiple Wall St firms make the same decision. Costly, risky, complicated, fragile.... no benefits, all negatives.
I hear ya there. The hospital I worked for several years ago actually got rid of a bunch of their blade servers and replaced them with a huge redundant VMware setup.
Not to mention the fact that the enclosure is a 10U!
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
Can you ask HPE if you can remove the kit list and just pick out your own that totals $60k? If its not useful to you, then what is the point.
My understanding is that the parts list was listed ahead of time, not a surprise. So, in theory, only people for whom a blade center with some blades in it was useful would have entered. While I'm no fan of blades, @PSX_Defector is right that lots of shops use them and would like more of them. There are people for whom this would fit their business use case and they would like to win it. The issue here, I think, is that the winner turned out to be someone for whom it did not apply and now that we are examining it, it's not useful to him.
Yep, I was ignorant of what I was signing up for. I just saw $60,000 worth of free stuff from HP and thought "Oh snap, that'd be awesome to win that!". If I had done my research and really looked at the equipment ahead of time, I would've realized that it wasn't a good fit for us 
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
What's wrong with DAS?
So in the near 5 years I've been at my current company, they've had a dedicated server for their accounting department and the software they use (Sage AccPac). They've been in need of an upgrade for years and they finally pulled the trigger on it a couple weeks ago, and the upgrade was completed today.
Prior to the upgrade, I built a new Server 2012 R2 server (as a VMware guest in our ESXi environment). One of the guys who built our network (prior to me coming on-board) told me to build it with four extra drives, configured as follows:
"Backups" (Disk 1 / 500GB)
"Logs" (Disk 2 / 100GB)
"Database" (Disk 3 / 100GB)
"Temp" (Disk 4 / 50GB)
Building that was all fine and dandy, but as far as installing and configuring SQL Server, and then migrating the data from the old server to the new server, I was/am completely out of my league.
Our vendor (ADSS Global) ended up doing the upgrade for us today (which included the SQL installation and configuration), but the lady who did all the work was not a SQL Admin; she is just someone who's been trained to do the basics that specifically relate to their software. She even said at one point during the upgrade "I'm not a SQL administrator, so when I run into problems, I call our SQL engineer". Needless to say, when I told her about the drives I had setup in advance for the SQL data, she said "I don't know anything about that. I'm just going to install it like we're trained to do (everything on the 
drive), and you'll have to pay $165/hour to talk to one of our SQL engineers if you need more info".
OK, so after that long-winded preface, here's what I'm wondering:
I've heard legendary tales of SysAdmins who have done SQL backups all for free, but I'm still way out of my league on this topic, so I'd like some advice if possible...
@scottalanmiller said in SQL Administration Woes:
VMDKs are "volumes" in the modern sense. That's an LVM layer. A partition, volume, LUN, array... they are all "disks" but we don't call them that as it is confusing like we mean separate physical devices. Making a separate VMDK for each is identical to making an LVM volume for each... just managed at the VMware layer instead of inside of the OS.
Ah ha! moment Thanks Scott! That's at least the third time you've taught me something cool that should've been more obvious but I totally missed it until you shed new light on it for me! : )
I've successfully built a "base Windows 7 image" in VMware and have been able to verify that it's working great when deployed to various physical desktops (using Macrium PE). My current dilemma though is that I don't have a solid solution yet for creating the image and deploying it.
I've currently been using a Macrium PE disc (free version) to build an image and restore it to a physical box, but there's currently a couple of problems with this method so far:
I tried building the image using PING, but based on my experience with that software so far, it's not working (I can't even build an image, let alone deploy one with it).
If I go with a different software brand, the ultimate goal is to be able to have a bootable PE-like disc that will recognize ANY NIC in a physical box that we boot from. I'm also looking for a solution that's simple to setup and deploy. I know some people might love FOG for instance, but that is NOT an easy/quick solution to deploy/setup.
Any recommendations?
@DustinB3403 I'm not sure if all of our desktops support PXE booting or not (some of our workstations are old, so I don't know for sure).
As far as using the VM as the image, I don't follow what you mean :-S...
I could use WADT, but since I've never used it before, it seems like that might be a lot of extra work to get it up and running (especially since I'd have to build a server for it, even if it was a virtual server). I like the simplicity of our PC techs being able to boot from a PE disc, map a drive to the network, and restore the pre-built image.
@DustinB3403 Right, PXE booting essentially works the same way as how we're currently doing it. But it's a whole 'nother ball of wax. If I go the route of PXE booting, I'd have to make sure that all of our hardware supports it, and I'd have to still learn how to deploy using PXE boot (what would I use to build the image? what "server" would I use to host and deploy the image? etc)
@MattSpeller @DustinB3403 Thanks guys. It sounds like FOG is gonna be the next route to look into. I'm already getting a VM setup for the "server" and am gonna keep digging into their wiki.
We're currently using WSS 3.0 (it was setup before I started working for this company; over 5 years ago). The specific version of SharePoint that we're using is v12.0.0.4518, and our SQL version is 2008 (v10.2.4000.0). The server that this is running on is a domain controller, and it's configured so all of our staff can access it from outside the network (https://intranet.lakeimaging.com).
We would like to decommission the physical host that this is all currently running on, so we've been looking into options to migrate our SharePoint data to either the cloud or to another host in-house.
If upper management doesn't approve us to go with SharePoint in the cloud, I wanna be prepared to migrate this in-house, so I'm trying to find out more info about my options.
As you can imagine, one of the hot comments that has come up from management is: "Well, So-and-so setup our current SharePoint for free, so we should be able to either use the same version we're using right now, or we could go with a newer free version". Without knowing any details, I tried to tell them "Even if we go with a newer free version, I'm not sure we would be allowed to let our 250+ users access it without some sort of licensing compliance". Can someone confirm if this is true or not?
We currently have a paid VMware Essentials license and we're only using two physical ESXi hosts. As far as I can tell, I should be able to add one more ESXi host in our environment and also add it to our vCenter server.
Reason I ask about this is because I'm considering this train of thought: If one of our existing two hosts ever dies, I don't wanna be scrambling to get a new server up and running, and I don't wanna be screwed on resources since one of our existing hosts wouldn't have enough to host all of the guest VMs from the other existing host if it took a dump. I've thought about building out this third host with at least enough resources (physical CPUs, RAM and local storage) so I could safely restore guest VM backups from either of our existing hosts to the third host. And in the meantime, the third host could be used as a host to do testing on (so it's not just sitting idle while waiting for judgment day to arrive, lol).
Thoughts?
@JaredBusch @NerdyDad Jared is absolutely right. This is the scenario I read about in multiple posts online (including a separate thread on Mangolassi). Because SharePoint (WSS 3.0) was installed on a DC, demoting the DC would break the SharePoint functionality :(.
@NetworkNerd Yep, the servers are also out of support. The hosts are located in separate data centers (different physical sites across town, in a network that's all connected by fiber).
@NetworkNerd Great info to put things in perspective, thank you. A couple things to note here too: