@matteo-nunziati I don't follow what you mean for "do you can afford for offline?" and I don't know what "NBD for backup" means.

@scottalanmiller I contacted xByte directly and the guy I spoke with (Ernesto) said he wouldn't recommend refurb (an R510) because "the hardware is 6-9 years old" (I guess I shouldn't be surprised by his comment...).

I'll definitely look into the R520 - thanks for the tip Scott!

The default onboard NIC on the R520 is a "Broadcom 5720 Quad Port Gigabit Ethernet". Should I just roll with that, or should I consider upgrading that? The options to choose from are "PCIe Riser Full Height" and "PCIe Riser Half Height". I'm not sure which one I would choose :-x... (other than the "full height" and go with the "Intel Ethernet I350 QP 1Gb Server Adapter").

@gjacobse said in What does your desk look like?:

@quixoticjeremy
My code never does / did..... which is why I don't code. Wished I could... I have so many project notes just sitting.... Ah well. can't do it all...

Code and I have an interesting relationship.

Code doesn't work: why didn't my code work?
Code works: Why did my code work? What am I missing...

@quixoticjeremy, the agent being python so it's platform agnostic to a large degree I would assume? Further fuel for the first person stating python would have been a better replacement for Java than JS.

Though, to play devil's advocate, can node.js not handle the same tasks that python is doing for the agent? On windows it appears it's just a wrapper around a slew of wmi calls.

@emad-r in my limited experience in VoIP, I've only used PJSIP. I don't know enough about IAX to give you an assessment of the two.

@mlnews said in XByte sale on R510s:

@danp said in XByte sale on R510s:

@mlnews said in XByte sale on R510s:

@danp said in XByte sale on R510s:

@grey I think he meant refurbished, in like-new condition.

It's a bit confusing. They are actually not used. But often have been tested.

Hard to believe that they would have brand new servers sitting in a warehouse for 5+ years. Would be good it someone from XByte could clarify.

They've clarified often. They never handle used gear.

From their website --

This means that many of the refurbished machines sold by xByte Technologies are not just refurbished, they’ve never been in production. Often times with a refurbished server, you receive the benefit of never used equipment at a significant cost savings by taking advantage of the realities of made to order manufacturing.

Unlike you, they use the words "many" and "often" instead of "never". But it's good to know that most of their stuff is the equivalent of brand new.

No, not working tried different OS and Versions.. I don't recognize

@wrx7m said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

@matteo-nunziati said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

@wrx7m have you ever considered this site for av comparisons? Just found the shadowserver foundation few months ago...

I don't believe I have. Thanks for the tip. Looks interesting.

unfortunately they don't track all AV suites... some results are still interesting

yeas it is a lot of time since developers have created a new gen of net tools but still I feel more confy with old stile commands

Alright, we've had some releases that fixed some back end stuff (mainly efficiency and scalability). I do have profiles/avatars basically ready for release but I'm running into one last bug that needs to be fixed before I can in good conscience release it to production. I will finish this off first thing in the morning followed by some other work hopfeully!

@scottalanmiller said in Installing Sodium Agent on XenServer 6.5:

@travisdh1 said in Installing Sodium Agent on XenServer 6.5:

@quixoticjustin said in Installing Sodium Agent on XenServer 6.5:

I think that while it would be great, older XenServer is going to be out of scope, at least for a really long time, with Sodium. There are a lot of barriers there and a really small use case. Now the current XenServer might be a different matter. Has anyone looked at that at all?

Yeah, while I had a system available I figured looking to see if it would "just work" made sense. But the version of Python is to old, and it's a huge hassle to get a newer version installed at best.

Time to update to XS 7 and test ;)

Yeah, if I had any way to get my own OS installed it would've already been. Another server at WholeSaleInternet.

@quixoticjeremy said in Sodium: Device Uptime:

@scottalanmiller said in Sodium: Device Uptime:

Uptime in friendly numbers, rather than seconds, would be nice, too.

What? You don't want to figure out what 4829383 seconds is in terms up of days, hours, minutes and seconds? Here I thought everyone enjoyed that math.

Can't we convert it to a Star Date?

The Defenders

@penguinwrangler said in Enterprise backup: Citrix XenServer, RHEV, oVirt, KVM:

@matteo-nunziati Yes, I treat them independently. Which I would love to have the Veeam Appliance which can control them but money is too tight for that.

Let us know when the money isn't so tight ;)

@RestoronixSean

Have not tried to work on this, I'm afraid.

We have plans to add an in memory database to ML in the future when more performance is needed, as well.

@penguinwrangler said in Nethserver:

Okay after much thought and planning, I am going plan vanilla CentOS 7 for this. You guys are right.

Not Fedora? That will have a lot more recent updates and more packages.

@pmoncho said in Is Tintri Heading for Pure and Nutanix Territory Financially?:

@scottalanmiller

I get that they gamble. I am an investor but the mentality to throw good money after bad doesn't make sense to me. Initial stages (GOOGL, AMZN, FB, NFLX, etc) and a few years I understand. Companies going on 10+ years, burn immense amounts of cash, high debt and everyone is paid in stock options are the ones I cannot wrap my head around. Good money after bad IMHO.

Depends. Ones like Nutanix with zero plan, that makes no sense and that's why we are concerned here. Others, like Amazon, that are obviously and publicly trading profits today for market growth, but could be profitable at any moment if they wanted to be make total sense.

Why not Wave?

Have not used it, I'm afraid.

@quixoticjeremy would be nice. I'm ready to be using that one regularly.

Welcome @Delete

Congrats

@jimmy9008 said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

Read the post, interesting. Don't agree on every single point, but yes - corruption does exist.

•Taking kick backs from salespeople in order to ensure a sale

I don't agree with that one, personally. Once I have done analysis, research, reviewed products, and have selected the best product for my organisation based on our needs - i'd then contact sales for whatever company I've decided to use. At that point where I ask for a quote, should they decide to take me to dinner, buy me drinks, or even something a little bigger - hell yeah! The decision is made already, that sweetener wont help - but they don't know that. Their problem.

They don't know the sale is already approved by me, so if they feel they have to 'ensure a sale', let them!

Well I didn't say that you PERSONALLY were doing this. But actually doing the due diligence that IT is paid to do in the SMB isn't as common as it should be and if SW is any indicator, it is rare.

@tim_g said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@worden2 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@irj said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@worden2 So this is one of those get certified while getting a degree schools like WGU?

Yes and no. I don't think my college is going to start employing "course facilitators" instead of professors, and simply point students to the material and expect them to grind through it. On the other hand, as a 2 year college we're not diving too deep into theory and abstracted concepts because of the time scale we're at. Does that clarify it? I do know one of our graduates is doing the WGU thing right now as part of a BS and is getting their MCSA as part of it. Personally, I think we use the certs as external validation that we're staying relevant, but when I see the A+ and other certs not keeping up (the latest A+ cert finally eliminated floppy drive questions!) I worry we're slipping behind as well.

Certs are not in any way a validation that you are relevant and certainly not ones that are not even in the right field. Certs have a place, a good one, but they are VENDOR TOOLS, not industry ones. It's not appropriate to be using them in an academic setting in any way unless, as you had originally stated, using them as a guide to the "level" of knowledge, but never as a guide to the actual knowledge.

How do you teach IT or Systems Administration without teaching students about any technologies they would be using on the job? You can't administer a System (which is from a vendor) if you don't know anything about it.

So if a course wants to teach Linux or Windows Server administration... Well surely covering many of the things the "vendor tool" covers is a great start... Competencies, measured skills, etc.

Well the first thing is that a course in college should not be teaching Linux or Windows administration, that's a trade school's job. They should be teaching concepts of administration. Now, that said, they need operating systems to use for that. But teaching concepts instead of specifics is the core concept of academic work and is very different than teaching to a vendor cert.

Remember collegiate academic work isn't for the purpose of teaching on the job skills, but to teach someone the fundamentals and concepts so that those specific skills will make sense. You aren't teaching them which button to push, but why a button like it needs to be pushed.

Example... you don't learn details of NTFS and ReFS, but you do learn file system concepts so that when someone tells you the details of NTFS and ReFS you can immediately understand them and understand other IT concepts when the market changes.

This is a problem I see with most college grads. Instead of learning IT concepts, they just memorize the motions to go through to accomplish a task. They are only trained to follow a script, they don't understand why they do things or what they do means.

Planet Sub

@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:

It's dumb to ask for advice or opinions and then ignore them entirely, I agree. However it's also impractical to assume that all things are equal either, as we know that's not true.

The difference is... learning from processes that regularly and reliably result in desired results vs. learning from processes that rarely, if ever, achieve desired results.

@jaredbusch said in FreePBX for Family?:

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX for Family?:

@jaredbusch said in FreePBX for Family?:

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX for Family?:

@aaronstuder said in FreePBX for Family?:

What are some advantages to using FreePBX and not going direct to a VoIP provider?

SIP Provider Failover Free Extension to Extension Calling Maybe more Control? Voicemail, Call Forwarding, etc?

Extension to Extension is big for me. The whole family can call each other this way.

Except when you setup direct to VoIP.ms it is still ext to ext.

Oh really? And you don't pay per extension?

They are just sub accounts.

Interesting. That's pretty handy.