Best posts made by wrx7m

@Pete-S said in IOPS for SSD?:

@wrx7m said in IOPS for SSD?:

This is the storage config for the server-

I'm not sure about the state of NVMe support on VMware and Dell. But it might be an option.
I mean I'm sure it supported but the question is what options you have for redundancy.

NVMe drives have ridiculous IOPs and transfer rate and a single drive will normally outperform an SSD array.

I'm interest in this myself as I have a customer that are looking at ESXi on Dell R740 servers with the same type of CPU that you have but with less storage capacity overall.

The SSD array will be a significant upgrade and probably more speed than we would need. However, with the second tier, we need significantly more storage and the IOPS are less of a concern, as it is for file storage.

I can look at prices to see what the cost difference is. I don't think I even considered nvme for the servers.

@Pete-S said in IOPS for SSD?:

I'm interest in this myself as I have a customer that are looking at ESXi on Dell R740 servers with the same type of CPU that you have but with less storage capacity overall.

I just looked at the cost. You have to select a different chassis- "Chassis up to 24 x 2.5 Hard Drives including 24 NVME Drives, Max of 8 SAS/SATA" , which adds about $1300 bucks,
However, the 960GB nvme drive is only about $50 more than the 960 GB 12Gbps SAS drive I was looking at.

The problem for me, is that I can't get the storage density I need when using 2.5" drives. Also, it would cost quite a bit more if I could.

@Pete-S They dropped the price to 1061.24 since I posted. lol Interesting. Yes, but that is a max of 12 nvme. I may have misunderstood that option with 8 SAS/SATA. I am guessing that the max of 12 would allow for more SAS/SATA, although it doesn't mention it. My issue was also with the available drive capacities and cost per TB for spinning disks in the 2.5" spec.

@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:

@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:

How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?

By having a company policy put in place that they are to be left powered on. Logged off, or locked, yes. But not powered off.

This is my policy. Reboot when you leave. Login when you come back in. Let's just say that only about half of the people do this. For the other half, I have a PDQ deploy schedule for every night at 8 PM, that works with PDQ inventory to reboot client systems that have an uptime of greater than 5 days.

@notverypunny said in MDT Resources:

-- MDT to install certain free software and (VLC, foxit reader, citrix plugins)

For this you could use something like Chocolatey, Ninite or PDQ Deploy. Again, after the fact.

@siringo said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

Hoping someone can help?

Have a problem with password expiration and Remote Desktop Services/Terminal Server users and their passwords.

RDS/TS users don't receive password expiring notifications when they log in. This is a hassle as obviously, they won't change their password before it expires and also, it's impossible for them to change is once it expires unless they have access to a domain joined PC, which several of them don't as they are 3rd party contractors.

There are a powershell scripts and free tools around to service this need, but powershell scripts can become railroaded and free tools don't always offer enough functions.

Wondering what others have done to solve this problem?

Thanks.

If you have to expire passwords, I have good success with Netwrix's password expiration notifier. They have a free and paid version. Obviously, the paid version offers more features, but I used the free one for a few years until I ditched password expiration policies.
https://www.netwrix.com/netwrix_password_expiration_notifier.html
The paid version is actually part of another product:
https://www.netwrix.com/active_directory_auditing.html

@siringo said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

@wrx7m said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

@siringo said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

Hoping someone can help?

Have a problem with password expiration and Remote Desktop Services/Terminal Server users and their passwords.

RDS/TS users don't receive password expiring notifications when they log in. This is a hassle as obviously, they won't change their password before it expires and also, it's impossible for them to change is once it expires unless they have access to a domain joined PC, which several of them don't as they are 3rd party contractors.

There are a powershell scripts and free tools around to service this need, but powershell scripts can become railroaded and free tools don't always offer enough functions.

Wondering what others have done to solve this problem?

Thanks.

If you have to expire passwords, I have good success with Netwrix's password expiration notifier. They have a free and paid version. Obviously, the paid version offers more features, but I used the free one for a few years until I ditched password expiration policies.
https://www.netwrix.com/netwrix_password_expiration_notifier.html
The paid version is actually part of another product:
https://www.netwrix.com/active_directory_auditing.html

Thanks @wrx7m for the reply.

Due to a number of reasons i've decided to a PS1 script to assign new passwords.

You should post your script on ML

@syko24 said in Envelopes in Brother Printers:

Is it common that you have to open the back cover on a Brother printer in order to send envelopes through? Is this common on most laser printers? The below video shows and example of what I am talking about. A client called asking me why the envelopes come out all crinkled when they print. I sent them this video. I kind of feel like that is a pain but if that is common in all or most laser printers what can you do right?

Youtube Video

Maybe common for brother printers, but I haven't seen that. Usually, Tray 1 is for one-offs and envelopes, and is located on the front side (usually vertical when closed), above the horizontal tray 2.

I'll add my two cents.

I use this analogy to explain it to my boss. Virtualization is kind of like an apartment building or hotel, where the building and utilities are all shared by the rooms. The building is the physical server and utilities are the resources (CPU, RAM, Storage, Network). The rooms are the VMs (guests).

One of the reasons you would virtualize is to get more bang for your buck out of the hardware, whose resources are often idle or severely under-utilized for the majority of the time. Like others have mentioned, you have savings on physical hardware, power, cooling, density (physical space for servers), etc.

Other reasons include

• Portability of VMs (guests), as they are just files. This extends life-span of the VM OS, as it can run on any hardware just by simply migrating it.

• Snapshots of VMs to roll back to a point in time. For instance, prior to installing updates or making other significant changes.

• Faster server provisioning (using templates).

@Pete-S FS.com is where I got the SFP transceivers. I also got Extreme networks stacking cables, sfp and sfp+ transceivers and fiber from them. I got extras of all and was still way cheaper than oem. Been running for several years without issues.

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

About a year ago I had this thread discussing starting to use tape for backups. Well, it never got implemented and now I am just getting around to being able to make this work. However, I am running into issues that didn't come up in our planning and I think I need to modify the plan and or scrap it and come up with something else.

Right now I have a Veeam inside a 2012R2 VM running on Hyper-V 2019. My tape drive is connected via SAS to the host. I am trying to get Veeam to talk to the tape drive but I ran into a glaring problem. I cannot seem pass through a tape drive to my VM. Am I right about this? I can't pass through the entire SAS controller, it would have had to been the drive itself.

I see two options moving forward.

1. Run Veeam physically and not inside a VM
2. scrap the idea of tape and convince my management to consider cloud options.

Thoughts? I am in the process of completely reevaluating how we are setup and what exactly we would do if we encountered issues that required us to need these backups.

Or you can use a VTL with Veeam. AWS and Starwind have their own. There are others, but I am not familiar with them.

More info on VTL-
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library
https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.

Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.

Yes, but what he does today would probably change if he the tape up and running. Otherwise why invest in tape? A single tape drive is something like $3K-$4K and simple 2U tape library in the $7K-$8K range.

Definitely a considerable expense. However, if he is only filling up 5% of the tapes every week, what's the point in using tape?

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

someone takes them home and puts them in a closet?

Well, you can't beat the RTO of that solution with anything cloud related.

lol - maybe, maybe not.

I guess it depends on if the guy who has them in his closet is on vacation or not.

Or goes rogue lol

@VoIP_n00b said in Want some Wasabi with that Azure Cloud?:

@IRJ said in Want some Wasabi with that Azure Cloud?:

As far as Wasabi, I think it has proved to me not to be an enterprise solution over the outages. The pricing is so low in comparison to AWS and Azure, that it isn't much of a surprise they cut corners.

Have you used them?

I used them. They were great for several months. I redirected my off-site backups from AWS S3 to Wasabi. During September and October, I could not get any files into (or out of) my buckets, so I was forced to switch back to AWS S3.

@travisdh1 said in POoE issues with Unifi switch:

@wrx7m said in POoE issues with Unifi switch:

I don't deal much with shielded. They look kinda messy. Isn't the shielding supposed to be in the connector with the rest of the cable?

Nope. You connect ONE side of the shielding to ground. Managing them is a pain. Also, if shielding is required, just us fiber imo.

I would imagine that the endpoints would determine that. If there is only an RJ45 port, then you are kinda stuck, right?

Without using a CM tool, what is the easiest way to automate modifications to several config files across 7-8 servers? I was looking at sed, but am not sure if there is a better tool that isn't a CM.

More specifically, I have several Fedora servers running squid proxy. From time to time, I need to modify the config file to whitelist a particular domain. Because I will soon have a few more servers, I would like to automate these type of file updates so I don't have to manually go into each server's config and copy and paste stuff in to certain sections; some information is specific to a particular server, where as this section would be universally necessary on all servers. So, I would be inserting lines in specific sections.

I intend to move to some sort of CM for this stuff in the future, but I need to get these going sooner than I could learn the CM tool.

East DC was less affected by this. The West DC had way more issues.

@pmoncho said in Netgear Insight Managed Switches:

I only have a three switches total so stacking is not that important to me

It isn't just for management. In most cases, a stacking style will have much greater throughput between switches.

@Emad-R said in Excel freezing:

take the data
create new excel file
paste that date, no format, or reduce formatting as much as possible.

I have also had people do this to fix weird issues. It has fixed some.