@jaredbusch said in Is xByte still recommended for server purchases around here?:

This is what I mean. A quality Synology is only $1000 and it has 4 network ports you can team for better than gigabit throughput.

Buy whatever size disks you need to make whatever level of rdundancy you need and be done.

The DS series is consumer quality so not a valid comparison to a real server. But if you don't need server grade quality and a desktop form factor works fine, then its good value.

The RS series is quality that is comparable to a server and also rack mounted.

But if the OP intend to run it past it's warranty, I suggest getting a server instead. Much easier to source spare parts.

Also better getting a real server if you need do things like swapping out fans or power supplies at a moments notice. The RS3618xs above doesn't have things such as hotplug power supplies or even redundant power. Synology might have a higher grade series for that though.

@beta said in Is xByte still recommended for server purchases around here?:

I was going to put 8 14TB drives (Dell drives bought with the server through xByte if I go that route) in RAID 6 for 84TB raw storage. Is that size array unwise for RAID 6?

It's not unwise but you have to take things like rebuilding time into consideration. RAID 6 will rebuild fast on a server with a standard CPU, about 24 hours with those drives, but only if the array is not in use. If it's in use it can take a really long time.

You can plan for that however and have two arrays. Use both but if one is needed to be rebuilt, use just the other one for backup.

Or split the storage into to two backup servers for more options on rebuilding, redundancy and updates/upgrades.

@gjacobse said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@pete-s said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@gjacobse said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@irj said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

Awareness training and actual testing is thr best way to handle this

We do MONTHly testing - and training during onboarding and as needed (Lunch and Learn)...

Do you receive spam from gmail to your public email addresses or to everyone?

They are received to one to several persons - never 'ALL-Staff'.

OK, well I guess it's really a question of how effective the spam filtering is and how you have configured it.

Just a couple of minutes ago I got one of those gmail scams but it was classified as spam. It was sent from google's servers so looks legit when it comes to IP reputation, SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc. It's only the content that is suspicious when you read it. No links or anything.

Maybe you should have a look at what settings you have in Trend Micro. Perhaps you can make a rule specifically for gmail.com addresses that have stronger spam/phishing detection.

@gjacobse said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@scottalanmiller said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

The problem is the process... why would someone be reporting spam and why is someone blocking it? That doesn't make sense. Get a good spam filter, configure, train people how to delete, done

"But this is the way we (they) have always done it... "

You mean they are "reporting" as in actually reporting it to someone? And not by marking it as spam in the email client?

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Far too time consuming.

@gjacobse said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@pete-s said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@gjacobse said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

@scottalanmiller said in Whack a mole: Dealing with Spam/Phishing:

The problem is the process... why would someone be reporting spam and why is someone blocking it? That doesn't make sense. Get a good spam filter, configure, train people how to delete, done

"But this is the way we (they) have always done it... "

You mean they are "reporting" as in actually reporting it to someone? And not by marking it as spam in the email client?

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Far too time consuming.

Outlook Toolbar.. Reporting

OK, but that just ends up sending an alert email to the designated phishing mail contact, which is IT right?

It would have made more sense if those emails had been forwarded to Trend Micro automatically and their adaptive algorithm would have learned how to detect them.

Right now Trend Micro doesn't have a clue what emails their user are classifying as spam or phishing attempts. Because that happens way after the email has passed through their gateway.

What should the email retention policy be for companies that are not subject to any legal requirements?

Are there any best practices in this regard?

@dashrender said in Volume Management Device (VMD) on HP devices:

Anyone seen this newer Volume Management Device BIOS/UEFI feature on newer machine?

Several of the new HP's I've purchased have this option and it's enabled by default - and when you try to install an image on it- the storage isn't seen by the system.
VMD requires the use of Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver - aka fake RAID.

That's not entirely correct. VMD is a NVMe hardware controller (secondary PCIe host bridge) that sits inside newer CPUs, starting with Intel's Scalable. It adds hotplug for NVMe, LED support and support for OS independent NVMe software RAID (Intel VROC). It also allows you to connect more NVMe drives to the CPU.

To use it you need a device driver. Just like everything else.

The BIOS has a UEFI driver embedded so it can boot.
Then the OS needs a driver as well. If your image doesn't have a vmd compatible driver it will not see the device.

Intel RST is a whole bundle of things. But what is needed on Windows I think is the Intel RSTe NVMe UEFI driver. Intel has a tendency to intertwine their software, hardware and drivers in a big mess.

On linux you have the vmd module in the kernel. ESXi also have drivers.

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pete-s said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pmoncho said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@scottalanmiller said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pete-s In the US they tend to say "as short as possible." Email is always a legal quagmire and the best thing to do is to delete is as quickly as possible. Which, of course, can't be that fast. So we are generally talking 1-2 years. But you rarely want to keep it longer not because it likely contains details of people breaking the law, but because a legal discovery request is extremely expensive and a great way to attack even otherwise honorable businesses. It's a huge cost you can leverage against someone that they can only reasonably mitigate by not having much email to go through.

Man - that would be so awesome. But even if management did agree that - you'd have people that would be looking for ways to maintain the data for a much longer period - like printing and saving in a cabinet.. shudder.

I like many of the replies I get about cleaning out email. "Why, its free!" "Why, my 50 GB of email is nothing when we have 16TB drives for $200" "Why do I have to remove email older than 13 years, it isn't hurting anyone" "Why would I do that, I may need it later (Medicare Newsletters prior to 2010)" and the list goes on and on.

Exactly!

But you do have a reply as to - Why - it's not hurting anyone - yes, yes it is.. it's hurting the company if we ever get sued and have to do a legal discovery through that data - not only is it time consuming - the information could be damning either for the thing they are looking for or something completely unrelated.

Then my next question is - if something is so important that you need to keep it - why is it in email in the first place? Why can't you get that data someplace else more related to whatever it is you're saving it for? (That said, I realize that other documentation for something simply don't exist).

Maybe because it's so difficult to get it out of the email system.

Let's say you want to make document in pdf or something of an email conversation that you want to keep.

The emails you received is in some folder somewhere or tagged with something and the ones you sent is in the sent folder. If you have a threaded view the email client show them together.

But is there an easy way to push a button and get that conversation with every email in the right order into one pdf document? Usually not.

I understand that - and keeping things like that for a short time - say 2 years is fine... but if it needs to be more ephemeral than that, shouldn't there be some kind of policy or whatever it's about created to document such an important thing?

Probably yes. If it's something important you need to keep for many years it sounds the information should be in some kind of contract, project documentation or similar type of document.

@pmoncho said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pmoncho said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@scottalanmiller said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pete-s In the US they tend to say "as short as possible." Email is always a legal quagmire and the best thing to do is to delete is as quickly as possible. Which, of course, can't be that fast. So we are generally talking 1-2 years. But you rarely want to keep it longer not because it likely contains details of people breaking the law, but because a legal discovery request is extremely expensive and a great way to attack even otherwise honorable businesses. It's a huge cost you can leverage against someone that they can only reasonably mitigate by not having much email to go through.

Man - that would be so awesome. But even if management did agree that - you'd have people that would be looking for ways to maintain the data for a much longer period - like printing and saving in a cabinet.. shudder.

I like many of the replies I get about cleaning out email. "Why, its free!" "Why, my 50 GB of email is nothing when we have 16TB drives for $200" "Why do I have to remove email older than 13 years, it isn't hurting anyone" "Why would I do that, I may need it later (Medicare Newsletters prior to 2010)" and the list goes on and on.

Exactly!

Then my next question is - if something is so important that you need to keep it - why is it in email in the first place? Why can't you get that data someplace else more related to whatever it is you're saving it for? (That said, I realize that other documentation for something simply don't exist).

Don't you dare get me started down this path. I had HUGE arguments about this with an ex-employee over the period of 10 years. The user could not/would not understand her email box is not a document database / DMS. The last I counted, she had over 300 different nested folders in her email.

Now that the user is gone, their mail copied to a shared mailbox for management to hunt/search and waste their time with if they choose.

It probably easier to have retention policy in place from the start.

If you know email retention is time-limited, you'd have to come up with some other way to store things.

But some people are just hopeless no matter what...

@wls-itguy said in P2V conversion:

I have two physical servers that would take a great deal of time to rebuild to virtual so a conversion from P2V would be ideal. What are you guys using to do P2V conversions?

I was looking for VMWare's converter but I don't think it exists anymore.

It's better to just reinstall on a new Windows (I'm guessing) and do whatever upgrades that are needed at the same time.

P2V is not a good generic solution. Consider it for quick and dirty band-aid solutions only.

@dashrender said in O365 - send as Alias:

MS has finally brought Send as Alias to O365.

https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/send-from-alias/

It's mind blowing that O365 didn't have that option since day one.

@scottalanmiller said in Need Regex Help:

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@scottalanmiller PostreSQL regex

Oh wow, I've never used regex in a database before. No idea of that syntax or where/when you'd use it.

It either used for string manipulation or string matching.

From the top of my head with syntax errors included.

For example manipulating strings (convert email to domain name)

select name, regexp_match(email,'.+@(.+)') as domain
from customers

For example matching to a simple regexp (all customers that have the has John somewhere in their name):

select * from customers where customer_name ~ 'John'

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@scottalanmiller PostreSQL regex

It's easy to solve this problem with SQL - if that is a possibility.
You just need to use a subquery.

I'm assuming a table that contains one column with computer name and another with software installed. One row for each software installed.

For example a query to find all computers that have the software installed:

select computer_name 
from yourtable
where 
   software_installed='Microsoft' or
   software_installed='Anti-virus'
group by computer_name

Now we'll use that as a subquery to show all the computers that doesn't have the software installed:

select computer_name from yourtable
where 
   computer_name<>(
      select computer_name from yourtable 
      where 
         software_installed='Microsoft' or 
         software_installed='Anti-virus'
      group by computer_name
   )
group by computer_name

The group by is to show a computer name just one time, even if you have several rows that contains that name.

Note: Syntax errors probably included in my examples.

@gjacobse said in Free Hosted Help Desk?:

"Free Hosted" doesn't mean it's the right thing. But in many cases - you can beat it to work for you. Just depends on the work and stress you want to deal with, what you want to give up and what you will never have..

I'd go as far to say that the "free" version is seldom the right thing. Often the reason to look for a solution in the first place is to become more effective and spend less time on something. Just stepping up to the first paying tier usually gets you a lot of features that will save you time for a very modest monthly cost.

@dashrender said in printing notes section of Calendar Outlook on the web:

As a side note - I don't believe it's actually called the notes area - when I Google for this, the term note always leads me to the yellow sticky type of notes under OneNote within the calendar in Outlook on the Web, so If you know the better term for this area in a calendar entry that would be helpful as well.

You're referring to the event's description. That's what Microsoft calls it.

It even says add a description when it's empty.

@dashrender said in VDI Options - Modernization:

Now with that said - I'm amazed management is willing to spend over a million dollars updating that PITA of a VDI solution instead of paying developers to make a new system that wouldn't require that VDI knife to do to the job - with the expectation that the long term costs would be much lower.

But 1 million dollars is not much if you have 600-1000 employees using it and it will get the job done for 5 years.
It will be from $17 to $28/month per user.

If you make big changes it will impact the business in other ways such as cost for training, lower productivity while getting up to speed etc.

What I've seen is that companies replace their VDI solutions by doing things differently, but it's done over several years.

So when companies have the long term goal of getting rid of their VDI solution they would one by one remove the reasons for it's existence and as a result get fewer and fewer users on it. Eventually they can retire it.

@dashrender said in VDI Options - Modernization:

I know Gene's company is using VDI for access to their EMR - which is cloud hosted.. I can't really understand the gain there.

Cloud hosted doesn't mean it's accessed by a web browser. It might be a Windows application of some kind.

So insert VDI to allow access to the application from any type of client device. And without having to install something locally on the client and without having sensitive data stored on the client.

Accessed by a web browser also doesn't mean that nothing is stored locally. I'm not talking cached files here but client side databases and local storage as defined in html5. Another reason you might insert VDI into the chain.

Fax will die for sure, just like telegrams and telex have died before fax.

It's said that it's the US health care system that has kept fax alive on borrowed time for years.

Fax machines have actually been dead in many parts of the western world for a decade or two already. With dead I mean that companies, hospitals and government simply don't have any fax numbers anymore and can neither send nor receive a fax. But it's different from country to country and dependent on the laws mostly.

@dashrender said in VDI Options - Modernization:

They are using a web based EMR - there are no local DBs

Many people are not aware that the web browser has a built in database engine (IndexedDB) that webpages can use. It's a persistent database storage space on your local drive. It's stored among your browsers files.

It not something that you install or are normally aware of.

Sites can also use other storage mechanisms on your local browser, besides cookies that are familiar to most, there is also a cache, session storage and local storage.

These storage spaces are not encrypted so if a webpage or a webapp decides to put sensitive information there, well, it sits on your local drive then.

A small switched PDU that might fit the bill is Tripp Lite PDU15NETLX.
https://www.tripplite.com/support/PDU15NETLX

You can control two outlets over the web interface, SNMP etc.

It might even be possible that it has the auto-probe feature and that it can be used directly to power cycle the modem without having a script. How much control you'd have I don't know. I have no experience with this product.

"In the event a critical device is no longer responding over the network, the included self-healing Auto-Probe feature can autonomously detect abnormal behavior and reboot modems, routers or media servers to restore healthy operation."
https://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/tripp-lite-offers-pdu15netlx-mini-pdu-with-auto-probe-technology-40023268