Welcome to the MangoLassi Community!

Just in from Microsoft:

*Beginning April 14, Microsoft Lync Online will become Skype for Business—combining the natural, collaborative way Skype enables people to speak face-to-face with the security and control of Lync. *

Only the first level, but neat nonetheless.

http://www.dailydot.com/geek/super-mario-64-hd-remix/

@coliver said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

Hopefully it won't affect my software raid.

Your unofficial software RAID?

I'm not sure I understand?

XenServer doesn't support software RAID. Xen does, XenServer does not.

Mac users beware, security update pushed out today. Be sure to update and reboot.

Kim Jong-un will personally flush your data for you.

I hate that it greys out the purge option so that it looks like you can't.

The Phoenix Project

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.

The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced.

With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow, streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.

In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

There was another thread talking about this sometime this week. Windows has no licensing for an end user to deploy to a cloud. Cloud providers can get provider licenses that are billed to MS per hour and allow for cloud-based VDI. But you can never take your license and apply it to someone else's cloud. Not without some serious complications that make it completely impossible. Same basic things that make Windows Server impossible on a cloud.

UnixMen has an article on installing the OpenVZ Web Manager allowing you to graphically manager Linux containers on both CentOS and Ubuntu.

Datamation has an odd article on the State of VoIP on Linux that leaves out all of the main players. Were is OpenSwitch and Asterisk?

Red Hat has released RHEL 7.1 today and CentOS could be available as early as tomorrow, Friday the 20th. Beyond normal patching, the big update is Group Policy support!

From CloudatCost:

03/19/2015 10:30 AM
CloudAtCost will be performing storage maintenance starting tonight. This maintenance will be for the purpose of adding additional storage at our Kitchener datacenter to accommodate our overwhelming growth. This maintenance will resolve disk io performance, occasional power on issues, server hangs and other performance issues.

We will begin tonight at 8PM EST and will continue through the weekend.

NOTE: No downtime will be expected.

New article from the Atlantic explores how browser selection reflects on employee value.

More bad news for OpenSSL.

SharePoint Client Browser for SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premise

SharePoint Client Browser is a CodePlex gem if I ever saw one. This tool greatly helps speed up development of SharePoint 2010/2013 and SharePoint Online instances by showing the hierarchy of your entire site collection structure -- including hidden lists, items, or documents -- in an easy-to-navigate (and visualize) interface. You can work directly with site collections, create new ones, add tenants, and so forth. You can also open PowerShell and run queries against your remote site collection. Anyone developing with SharePoint will want to play with this tool.

Simple Azure Virtual Machines Manager

The name of this next gem, Simple Azure Virtual Machines Manager, says it all. It really is a simple Web portal for accessing your Azure VMs, enabling you to quickly shut down, start up, and connect to your virtual machines. Because Azure VMs are pay for use and much of your work within Azure is likely to involve dev/test, you don’t want to accidentally leave VMs on indefinitely as if they are production VMs in those scenarios. Having a way to jump in and stop VMs, and to give folks who don’t have full Azure Portal access the ability to shut down VMs, is a good thing.

VeraCrypt

Data security is fast becoming an increasing concern for users and organizations alike. If you’re among the many who are looking for an easy, effective way to ensure the safety of your data, check out VeraCrypt. This disk encryption software is based on the well-known and trusted TrueCrypt. Not only can VeraCrypt work with volumes created with TrueCrypt, it has addressed some TrueCrypt vulnerabilities and added several enhancements to improve the security of your data.

ScreenToGif

ScreenToGif is a fun but practical tool. It allows you to quickly record your screen actions and save them as a GIF looped animation. It has a variety of intuitive options (screen size, frame rate, and more) but also allows you to go through your screenshots and edit them to choose or alter transition types. Where this can be very helpful is when you need to demonstrate something for users within your environment. Rather than taking screenshots or making a whole video, ScreenToGif provides an in-between method for training folks on how to do something quickly and easily. It's a great little tool for IT admins.

AD Magic Restore

You never know when you might accidentally delete an object or attribute from your Active Directory and want it back. AD Magic Restore to the rescue. AD Magic Restore is written in PowerShell and has the ability to collect data on AD and restore granular data back to AD. Note that AD Magic Restore runs only on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 2012.