Best posts made by travisdh1

@scottalanmiller said in Point of Sale System Recommendations, POS:

As many of you know, I have a new hotel and restaurant. Right now we have an existing POS system and we do not like it. We are nearing the point where we have the option to replace it. So we are looking for recommendations. We are not tied to only considering free or open source options, but obviously those have some advantages - especially considering that we have the IT skills in house to run something ourselves. But we are open to ideas of whatever makes the most sense.

I've worked with clients, and my wife is a retail store manager. After all these years.... they all suck.

None of them have been open source tho, so digging into those would be my first place to look.

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just realized that 2024 will be TWENTY YEARS since IBM shed its Intel server and end point business (sold it to Lenovo.) It's been a full two decades and people still regularly mistake laptops as being IBM devices today. That's like 4-5 IT generations later.

Ha. Was thinking about this the other day. Wasn't one of the big things with that was that Lenovo were a Chinese company?

Oh, I'll never buy one of those.

Being a Chinese company has nothing to do with why I'd never touch Lenovo and recommend any company that has them immediately replace Lenovo gear.

@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:

I've had nothing but issues with Veeam recently, and literally every time I had to restore a vm, I had to call support, because Veeam is unbelievably slow. If I got hit with ransomware, it would probably be cheaper and faster to pay than wait for Veeam to restore backups. Throwing more resources at it does nothing, Veeam just takes hours to do any restores. Backing up works flawlessly, but I can't rely on a product that simply fails when it's needed the most. My renewal is up in little over 3 months and I'm at the point where I'm willing to switch to another solution.

Any recommendations for image based backups for Vmware vsphere? Ideally with support for Wasabi object storage.

You might be able to change backup vendors, but with Veeam restores taking so long, I'd be checking my infrustructure first. Do you know it is an issue with Veeam and not iops/network/wan causing the slowness?

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just realized that 2024 will be TWENTY YEARS since IBM shed its Intel server and end point business (sold it to Lenovo.) It's been a full two decades and people still regularly mistake laptops as being IBM devices today. That's like 4-5 IT generations later.

Ha. Was thinking about this the other day. Wasn't one of the big things with that was that Lenovo were a Chinese company?

Oh, I'll never buy one of those.

Being a Chinese company has nothing to do with why I'd never touch Lenovo and recommend any company that has them immediately replace Lenovo gear.

Why is that my good man?

20 years ago it was because they were Chinese and nothing good ever comes out of China, well 20 years ago that was general mood.

They're still loading spyware via drivers. I'll grant that it's been around a year since I was forced to do a factory install to see it for myself, but at this point they've been so bad for so long they can't be trusted.

@voip_n00b said in DNS Filtering Service:

• WebTitan
• DNS Filter
• Umbrella
• Next DNS
• Webroot DNS

Leaning towards DNS Filter

I'd avoid using Webroot DNS. It's filtering seems to be overly broad, and the company I work for is moving away from it.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Installer for my fiber internet is here, hooray!

Whole new experience today. Goodbye DSL and cable!

Thanks
Another thing for me to run in Powershell.

Yep choco install speedtest. So much faster than loading an add laden website.

@dave247 said in best way to map various combinations of mapped drives to AD users?:

@travisdh1 said in best way to map various combinations of mapped drives to AD users?:

@dave247 said in best way to map various combinations of mapped drives to AD users?:

I could probably use group policy to make a mapping for each drive, then assign each GPO to the necessary user.. but I feel like that would still be a little numerous or something.

Also, I know usually this sort of things is group based access, but we have a small company and many people wear multiple hats and essentially we end up with multiple combinations of access for every employee which makes group based permissions and things challenging.

I think you're halfway there. Yes, use GPO, but instead of assigning users to each GPO, create a group and assign the group to the GPO. Once everything is created, all you have to do for who gets what is add/remove users from the group for the drive mapping.

You mean make a group and apply each GPO for each drive to it, then add users? That makes sense.

Yep

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@GUIn00b said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Contemplating how to leverage 2 ISP's for supplemental bandwidth when needed using 2 separate routers that are both servicing the same LAN.

......So I'm gonna go post a new topic!

Get a DUAL Wan capable firewall, set it up either as Active/Active or Active/Backup.

You'll be banging your head sorting out getting a fault tolerant static IP address, though it can be done.

BGP..... that could be a whole series of topics itself.

@beta said in RAID 6 in my backup VM host on spinning rust?:

@pete-s How much are two 3.84TB enterprise SSDs going to cost me again?

Looks like $725.00 for a decent drive to me. https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/SATA-6GBPS/3.8TB/SAMSUNG/MZ7LH3T8HMLT_315446.htm?gclid=CjwKCAjwvuGJBhB1EiwACU1AiWcjFlCLGhxapMZf0wY3H-uXjzH65a1XOGuDj-i7Lm9muZiR77rxUBoCAt8QAvD_BwE

@laksh1999 said in Exchange Environment - Lab:

@syko24 said in Exchange Environment - Lab:

@laksh1999 - From the looks of it, you are trying to run setup.exe from C:\Windows\System32. Fix the path to wherever you installation media is located.

ex: D:\setup.exe

Tried from D drive got this error

That is telling you that it doesn't know about the /PrepareSchema option. Try running setup without that option.

Starting to juggle job offers. This is before my severance ends, so things are looking up.

@jaredbusch said in iPad 2 - are they still considered secure?:

@dashrender said in iPad 2 - are they still considered secure?:

OK Hive mind - I'm looking for opinions.

An iPad 2 - released in 2011, and not updated since iOS 9.3.5 in August 25, 2016.

Would you consider this a secure device today?

iPad 2 is no longer updatable, so no. It is not a secure device.

This

Accepted a job offer this morning, so I'm back to work tomorrow.

Slight raise to base pay, but I'll also get 5% of my billable hours. So if I keep my billable hours up, a big raise.

Only downside is that it's on-site in downtown Cleveland.

@pete-s said in LTO-9 Tape Drives:

@travisdh1 said in LTO-9 Tape Drives:

@pete-s said in LTO-9 Tape Drives:

@travisdh1 said in LTO-9 Tape Drives:

@pete-s said in LTO-9 Tape Drives:

@eleceng said in LTO-9 Tape Drives:

Noticed that the LTO 9 tapes have just been released (been waiting a while) and I need to purchase some and a stand-alone LTO-9 drive (not a whole library setup or magazine) but not having any luck finding one online to purchase.

i have a small office customer that has a huge amount of data to backup. We currently replicate to a Synology offsite (in the same town) but they want the tape to store out of state.

Has anyone seen any single stand-alone LTO-9 tape drives I can order or anywhere I should be looking?

Didn't know LTO-9 was out...good to know!

I'll question the use of a single standalone tape drive versus a tape library. Tape library is much more flexible.

Sure, tape libraries are much more flexible, but they still don't make sense if you can get by with a single backup tape. Which I'm assuming is why @ElecEng is looking for a single LTO-9 drive.

I don't really agree because the tape library is a tape drive AND a robot that can switch tapes, keep track of them and store them.

It will do it's job regardless if the human is there or not. Which mean the backup will always run, regardless if the person doing it gets sick, is on vacation or if it's a holiday. That makes sense even when everything fits on one tape.

And a tape library is a scalable solution. Meaning you can run more backups more often if you need and if your data grows and overflows into two or more tapes, it's no big deal.

While true, there is also a huge added expense. Just because something is better doesn't excuse not doing proper business planning.

I don't know how much added expense you can expect. I've always been under the impression that the actual tape drive is the most expensive part in a smaller tape library.

Had a look at Dells site and the difference between a tape loader with the tape drive and a tape drive is about $2K.

A Dell TL1000 1U tape library with a LTO-8 drive is roughly $7K and a Dell 114x rack mounted LTO-8 tape drive is roughly $5K.

Then you need to add tapes. 10 tapes is a just over $2K.

So we're talking at minimum of $7K regardless. And LTO-9 is going to be more expensive, both the drive and the tapes. New generation always are.

@travisdh1 I wouldn't call $2K a huge added expense. But maybe the client does. Who knows.

$2k is a huge added expense, when it's not needed.

@Grey said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Accepted a job offer this morning, so I'm back to work tomorrow.

Slight raise to base pay, but I'll also get 5% of my billable hours. So if I keep my billable hours up, a big raise.

Only downside is that it's on-site in downtown Cleveland.

Ohio? But, why, though?

I've lived here for 99% of my life, we're kind of stuck with the "golden handcuffs" of a 3% mortgage, but mostly because the wife doesn't want to leave the area.

Edit: Other conversations reminded me that I should mention one other aspect. I applied to many remote positions as well, but none of them made a job offer.

@jaredbusch said in RojoLoco needs your Linux brains!!!:

@rojoloco you install OS. Then you install Docker. Then you install the app inside docker.

That last step is basically a one line magic command if the developers created a proper docker install.

That's always a huge if in my experience.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@GUIn00b said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@GUIn00b said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Contemplating how to leverage 2 ISP's for supplemental bandwidth when needed using 2 separate routers that are both servicing the same LAN.

......So I'm gonna go post a new topic!

Saw the post. It's not a fun thing. What I did when I had this was I just separated things by machine. Some machines used one connection and some the other based on their workloads. It was "static" but let me use both.

You described basically what I want to do. For general user media consumption (YouTube, Facebook, Amazon shopping etc.) it can just be shipped out the Spectrum cable connection. But for my servers I more or less want those bound to the WAN with static IP. However, my static WAN has slower download speeds than the Spectrum cable. (Static WAN is 50Mbps up and down, Spectrum is 300Mbps down). So when it's time to do a giant update or download new ISOs or whatever, the 300Mbps makes a big difference in time spent waiting.

Separating things at each machine that needs the static WAN by giving them static DGW's is worthwhile for me, but it would be nice to have some load balancing intelligence happening so that large downloads come in through the fast pipe no matter the machine.

I've set up a LANcache for my Steam library which helps a lot for 130gig games and whatever. But when there's a 3-4gig update that isn't cached, the request is sent out the client machine's DGW. I think there's a way to do "Split Horizon" or something so I can setup a couple lists of domains that get allocated to one Gateway or another. Like one list of domain/hosts would be like the known Linux repo hosts would definitely be piped over to the fast download cable. But any requests for say some Linode hosted VPS's I'd want trafficked out the slower static pipe.

Yeah, I still haven't made a decision one way or the other and still have them operating with separate LAN's lol! Full disclosure, I enjoy the relationship between my a** and my couch way too much to be bothered. Potato chips not required but quite frequently present. That's just truly my happy place. So the idea of having to bend over to move a cable or something to get all this setup like I want is just a total buzzkill 99% of the time. But that's the key. 99% of the time. Not 100%. So.... someday. Someday....

Realistically for what you want to do you need a router that understands the traffic and is dividing it up. DNS or split horizon can't do the job. Dividing traffic along paths is actually quite difficult. Especially once you add encryption on the traffic.

That is the one and only reason VMWare bought Velocloud, and also the only reason to use their SD-WAN device. They can route traffic to different WAN connections based on pre-defined rules. You can have latency dependent streams (Zoom, SIP, etc) routed differently than "bulk" streams (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc).

Just hope you never have to contact support.

@gjacobse said in Does a script imply Automation?:

Simply thus

Does a script imply automation?

Isn't that the entire point of a script?

Where did that question even bubble up from?

As one of my co-workers quipped "They're not getting any malware now!"