@wirestyle22 said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

Idk if you guys remember me complaining about Laura not wanting to move the power outlet into the center of the wall (when we were building our house), but after weeks of discussion I just gave up. I knew eventually that she would realize how wrong she was.

I put in a call to our electrician to get an estimate, but it's easily going to cost us 3-4x the amount we would've spent during the build. At least Laura will learn to listen to me next time (she won't)

It can be fixed pretty easily.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cable+installation+drywall

@wirestyle22 said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@Dashrender @Pete-S I've considered all of this. The reason I want an electrician to move the power outlet/ethernet is because it's an external wall and if I need to replace cables here and there (replacing the roku, tv, or other) I am worried I will rip up my insulation and a true conduit isn't to code in NJ. If I have him move the ethernet and power then there is no problem.

I wouldn't do it. If you want something else on that wall down the line, the outlets will be in the way.

Have some nice cable management installed instead. You can have it painted as well.

@JaredBusch said in SIP Registration:

@Skyetel said in SIP Registration:

We are worried about fraud risk with SIP Registration.

A valid worry as highlighted by the "admin" that posted here

Domain/IP whitelisting?

Enter domain names/IPs that are allowed to register in your account setup.
Domain names are resolved and only IPs that are whitelisted can successfully register.

On prem PBX can even have dynamic IP then (with DDNS).

Quite a few services use this layered approach so that it requires both a valid IP and valid credentials.

@scottalanmiller said in Alternative to Windows Journal:

You might have used Windows Journal, a cool and free application that has been on Windows for some time, but was discontinued about four years ago now and now is being pulled out of Windows when you run updates. Microsoft recommends moving to OneNote, which works great (but differently) for most people. But for a close Journal-like experience, Xournal came along, but lost momentum some time ago. A recreation of Xournal, called Xournal++, is open source, hosted on GitHub, totally free, runs on everything (Windows, MacOS, Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu, Android, iOS, etc.), is very fast and responsive, can ingest PDF, etc. It's quite nice and a great option for people who wish that they could just keep Journal as it is and/or want to use Windows Journal on other operating systems or tablets and phones!

https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

Found it today because a customer needed to replace Windows Journal and OneNote didn't work for his needs and Xournal++ turned out to be absolutely perfect.

Looks great! I have to give it a try with my wacom intous pro.

Do you add CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) records to your DNS records?

Is it important for FQDNs that have Let's Encrypt certificates?

I was under the impression @Jimmy9008 worked in an enterprise size company, not SMB.

Anyway, it's hard to estimate what is needed because it depends on what a company does. To run a typical office you wouldn't need to run anything on-prem at all and the rest could be SaaS.

@JaredBusch said in Windows DC reverted to old snapshot trying to finalize replica failover:

@Pete-S said in Windows DC reverted to old snapshot trying to finalize replica failover:
FYI, a bit jealous of you not even needing to know this.

Yeah, I have deep knowledge of some things and know almost nothing about other things.
Luckily I'm in the process of cleansing all windows server knowledge from my brain.

@DustinB3403 said in Proxmox install for use with a ceph cluster:

@scottalanmiller I can remove the card for sure, but its not a practical lab exercise for what I'm working on.

I would do this in my personal lab possibly to do that, but not here, in this lab.

You can just the change the controller to HBA mode. In HBA mode it will work like a HBA.
On older cards you have to flash the firmware, on newer cards it's often just a setting.
From a hardware perspective a RAID card is a HBA + more powerful hardware for parity calcs + larger memory cache.

Hang on a sec see if I'll find the link on how to do it.

A newer way to set HP controller to HBA mode:
https://ahelpme.com/servers/hewlett-packard/smart-array-p440-enable-or-disable-hba-mode-using-smart-storage-administrator/

This is a older longer way to do it:
Youtube Video

@Markferron said in 4G Failover questions:

With the recent hurricane that came through we've been talking about purchasing and installing a 4G LTE adapter for our firewall. We host a few sites on campus for our school that are dependent on a few static IPs we have from our current ISP.

1. Would we have to purchase a block of static IPs from whatever carrier we use?
2. If 1 is a yes all we would have to do is point that new additional IP address to our managed DNS?

Thanks ahead.

I think you should consider hosting the sites on a server in colocation instead. They will have have peering to multiple network and that takes care of failover automatically. They also have redundant UPS, cooling, security etc.

@Pete-S said in 4G Failover questions:

@Markferron said in 4G Failover questions:

With the recent hurricane that came through we've been talking about purchasing and installing a 4G LTE adapter for our firewall. We host a few sites on campus for our school that are dependent on a few static IPs we have from our current ISP.

1. Would we have to purchase a block of static IPs from whatever carrier we use?
2. If 1 is a yes all we would have to do is point that new additional IP address to our managed DNS?

Thanks ahead.

I think you should consider hosting the sites on a server in colocation instead. They will have have peering to multiple network and that takes care of failover automatically. They also have redundant UPS, cooling, security etc.

I'd like to add that the cost is often low as well. Much lower than most people would imagine, considering what you get.

Not the exactly the same thing but you might want to look into how to create a VM from scratch.
Meaning a script that will set up a VM with vCPU, memory, storage, network etc and then boot it from iso and have it do an unattended install, create what users you want and install the packages you need.

I think the days of the "golden image" are kind of over.
Even if you wanted to use a golden image you could at least have it built unattended.

@travisdh1 said in 4G Failover questions:

@Dashrender said in 4G Failover questions:

@travisdh1 said in 4G Failover questions:

@scottalanmiller said in 4G Failover questions:

@Dashrender said in 4G Failover questions:

holy crap - it cost you $250 a month to run it at home - WTH?

How can it not? Ever priced out the power costs on a server? It's not cheap.

Yeah, power alone can make moving a server to a colo make a lot of sense.

Sadly, every place that offers 1u of colo space I've looked at has a max power draw of 120w and my current home lab box normally draws around 130w.

Time for a more efficient server?

Maybe in another couple of years. It's a Dell PowerEdge R620, 2 Xeon E5-2660 8core 16 thread CPU, 24 4GB 1333MHz RAM modules, 4 Cruicial MX500 500GB drives, Broadcom 4port BCM5720 Gigabit ethernet adapter, and a single 750 watt power supply. It's currently only drawing 112 Watts, so who knows, maybe I could "get away" with it.

120W is a very low limit, just 1 Amp. Colocation America has 2 Amps , so 240W, which is low but still more reasonable.

@Pete-S said in 4G Failover questions:

@travisdh1 said in 4G Failover questions:

@Dashrender said in 4G Failover questions:

@travisdh1 said in 4G Failover questions:

@scottalanmiller said in 4G Failover questions:

@Dashrender said in 4G Failover questions:

holy crap - it cost you $250 a month to run it at home - WTH?

How can it not? Ever priced out the power costs on a server? It's not cheap.

Yeah, power alone can make moving a server to a colo make a lot of sense.

Sadly, every place that offers 1u of colo space I've looked at has a max power draw of 120w and my current home lab box normally draws around 130w.

Time for a more efficient server?

Maybe in another couple of years. It's a Dell PowerEdge R620, 2 Xeon E5-2660 8core 16 thread CPU, 24 4GB 1333MHz RAM modules, 4 Cruicial MX500 500GB drives, Broadcom 4port BCM5720 Gigabit ethernet adapter, and a single 750 watt power supply. It's currently only drawing 112 Watts, so who knows, maybe I could "get away" with it.

120W is a very low limit, just 1 Amp. Colocation America has 2 Amps , so 240W, which low but still more reasonable.

BTW, your server config is not the most power efficient so there are things you could change if you wanted to that would drop the power requirement a lot.

In no particular order:

• drop from two to one CPU
• replace CPU with E5-2600 V2 series. They use 22nm tech and have about 25% lower energy consumption in the same socket. Up to 12 cores.
• use low voltage CPU models, for instance E5-2650L V2 (10 cores)
• replace memory so you use fewer modules with higher density, for instance 16GB or 32GB
• use low voltage memory modules DDR3L
• replace the power supply with the titanium model

@Dashrender said in vSAS - Value Serial Attached SCSI:

@Pete-S said in vSAS - Value Serial Attached SCSI:

@scottalanmiller said in vSAS - Value Serial Attached SCSI:

@Pete-S said in vSAS - Value Serial Attached SCSI:

The value part I'm guessing is just how they will price themselves towards other SAS drives.

What they claim is that they stripped out a bunch of the higher end features that people assume are on the SAS drives, but aren't on SATA. But no one should assume that, it was a false assumption. Which is exactly what NL-SAS was, too. So once said and done, these are just Toshiba SAS drives.

The only thing I can think of that they can strip out is the dual port interface.

But still SAS is legacy tech. Don't know why they even bother.

Can you hot swap NVMe? Is their a backplane solution for NVMe? These might be reasons... plus cost is still a reason assuming NMVe's are noticeably more expensive.

Yes, you can hostswap NVMe. Yes, backplane is what is commonly used, for instance 2.5" U.2 drives.

NVMe drives are not really more expensive unless they are being marked up by the middle man.
For instance we pay exactly the same price for 1.92TB Samsung PM883 SATA as for the 1.92TB Samsung PM983 U2/NVMe, about $360.

It's the same class of drive from the same manufacturer but the NVMe version is much faster (540K IOPS vs 98K on random read).

@JasGot said in MSDTC issues:

Well, we found how to fix the symptom, be we do not know why it is so.

This network is 10.1.10.0/23

The only users having trouble were on the 10.1.11.0 portion of the network.

There are no configuration mishaps anywhere in the workstation, servers, switches or routers.

It's just weird.

But the MSDTC errors have stopped, and the staff who were suffering are happy.

It sure does sound like a netmask error.

10.1.11.0 defined as /24 somewhere. Or even 10.1.10.0 set to /24 somewhere.

Since it was different users I would guess DHCP. Maybe dual DHCP servers on the net. I've ran into something like that and it was a real headache, very intermittent.

Wireshark to the rescue when having problems like this.

@DustinB3403 said in Powershell variable help:

In the line below, the shell will just expand $Search to what it is.
You need to enclose it in " if you have spaces and whatnot in $Search or the shell will interpret the line as commands or options of some kind.

 New-ComplianceSearchAction -SearchName "$Search" -Purge -PurgeType SoftDelete -Confirm

@scottalanmiller said in How much RAM do we need?:

@Pete-S said in How much RAM do we need?:

How low could we reasonably go without running into a performance penalty?

Often the case is that there is a penalty but no one has noticed. "Slower than it could be" is not the same as "too slow." The amount of RAM you need is the amount for the company to be happy. Generally you can go a bit faster than that, but people either might not notice, or they do notice but it isn't enough to ultimately matter.

You're right, it makes total sense to look at it from the users perspective and not from a technical perspective.

As long as the server has enough RAM to work, then how much you allocated depends on how fast you want it to be.

We're adding SMS notifications and have to pick between these two vendors.

• SMS-Magic
• Clickatell

Any preferences?

We're leaning towards Clickatell - just from gleaning on their websites.

@dbeato said in Ticket versus Projects:

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

@scottalanmiller said in Ticket versus Projects:

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

Is there a similar tool that we can use to keep track of our projects?

Zoho has a few. Zoho Projects, but it's not cheap.

Zoho Connect has a Task system that is Kanban based and works for projects for cheap. That's what we use.

Thanks, I've looked a little at Zoho Projects but I'm going to check out Zoho Connect as well.

Regarding projects I've also had a look at Asana. We have MS Project for making big complex stuff for one project at a time but really need something to plan and schedule many smaller projects.

We have Zoho Projects here, it works mostly like Kanban. Tracks the time separately from the Zoho Desk and CRM. So you have to do a sync between them for certain things. It has Reporting and Gant Charts (I don't use those). It has Invoicing and Expenses as well.

Looks like we're going to go down the same exact path - Zoho Desk, Projects and CRM.

@Pete-S said in Redirecting feedback from Linux command:

Then when you run fwconsole you can pipe stderr to grep and remove what you don't want.

Something like this should do the trick:

fwconsole ma upgradeall 1>> $logfile2 2> >(grep -v what_you_don't_want >&2) 

• stdout is appended to the $logfile2 with 1>> $logfile2
• stderr is output with process substitution to grep with 2> >(grep bla bla bla) which then pipes it's output back to stderr with >&2