Not a bad idea, the price is good and would make it easy to have a hosted ticket system. I like it.

I agree with @JaredBusch reasoning for not pointing at DC's only in DNS, though his newly proposed solution is pretty cool - assuming the ERL will flip back to the primary as soon as it's available.

As for the secondary DNS server, assuming you have a standard Windows license, it's really kinda six of one, half dozen of another if you should setup a second VM as an additional DC. I see both sides, can't say that one way or the other is really better. I suppose it's a matter of resources.

@BRRABill said:

@scottalanmiller said

I have a feeling that that doesn't actually count.

Hmmm, you may be right. I just realized all the product keys are the same. Hmmm.....

Well, whatever. I am doing all I can. 🙂

Doesn't it balk then?

@JaredBusch said in Tell me about how HP deal registrations work:

@Carnival-Boy said:

Exactly, Breffni. That's why I wrote earlier "So one of my main criteria for a "good VAR" is that when I order something, the right product turns up at my door at the right time."

In many ways, I find the Account Manager more important that the VAR. A good account manager will do lots of chasing for you to make sure everything is ordered and delivered prompty, and know the right people to talk to if you have any queries or problems. Several times I've ditched a VAR because the account manager leaves and I don't like his replacement.

The account manager IS the VAR for all intents and purposes. If they suck you tell them to piss up a rope and get you one that has a brain or you will take your business to a different VAR.

And good VARs work hard to maintain good account managers, keep them with their clients and give them the tools to be successful.

@chrisnbrooks said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

Thank you for voicing so eloquently what some of us have been trying to wrap our heads around. I personally come from a frugal era of IT and will always scout free solutions before coughing up the cash or subscribing to a (shudder) recurring licensing fee. We used to buy our modem banks by sniping eBay auctions, and that was at a tri-state telecom. I realize you need to spend money to make money, but unnecessary expenditures should still be avoid if possible, imo.

You're welcome 🙂

@BBigford said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@BBigford said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@BBigford said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@BBigford said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

@BBigford said in Hyper-V with Smart Card not working:

saves from pasting a lengthy document, plus a few images.

Posting images is fast and easy. And what takes five seconds for you to do, saves each reader of the page many seconds for forever.

The re-formatting of 5 pages into copy-paste took longer than just attaching the document. I did a straight copy-paste in the OC.. haha it was real bad.

I know it takes a bit if you are coming from a huge rich Word doc. But it is what it is, Word docs are definitely not something we are comfortable hosting. That puts ML on the hook for malware hosting. It's a huge deal. The whole site could get blocked in a split second because one newbie doesn't scan a document that they upload.

If it were only PDFs, it could be considered. But there are so many ways to host and link those things today that I'm not sure that it is a big deal. You can link it when really necessary and, whenever possible, it's best to get text and/or images instead.

It is what it is. I added stuff to the OC and will spend some time formatting the copy-paste. There's some good stuff in there for readers, and can explain what is going on and what I'm seeing... I thought it would be helpful.

If you output to text from Word, does that help?

I'm doing this from a Chromebook now and just did it within Google Docs. Doesn't have the ability to export our mess with output since it's a pretty basic tool. I'll have to try that a bit later when I jump on my laptop. I added the images.

Check out this tool:

https://word-to-markdown.herokuapp.com/

Completely locks up on a Chromebook trying to paste. Switched to a Windows 10 workstation with some more horsepower, all rendering/copy/paste goes through quickly. Copy to Clipboard appears to not work at all. Formatting looks terrible. But I'm done spending more time on that.

Well that sucks, it looked interesting.

@KOOLER said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

So the good options are....

If you want high availability from your storage, which doesn't make a lot of sense since you have only one blade chassis, so no failover should it have any issue, you would likely get an HA SAN which would either be something like a 3PAR or something like a dual Proliant Starwind cluster. @KOOLER

If you don't want high availability, but are just going to add reasonable low cost storage to make the blades have some place to store VMs, then a single Proliant based SAM-SD running CentOS or FreeBSD is perfect.

Easy! I'm pushing really hard to release now pre-built ESXi, KVM and Xen Virtual Machine based appliances to get this done free of charge and with as small traction as possible!

That's awesome. Can't wait to see that in action.

I see new, greater, horizons of automation happening here.

We all know Microsoft's servers like to aggravate @scottalanmiller just because they can.

@Mike-Davis said in Online Deals for Cyber Monday on Gaming PCs:

I'm not a gamer at all so bear with me. Do all games get loaded in to RAM where it doesn't matter that these machines don't have SSDs? In the CAD world, it made machines 30% faster to put a SSD in them.

No but portions do. SSD will reduce load time between scenes but not affect gameplay.

We use twilio for what we do. Not really that expensive for US numbers.

@scottalanmiller said in Cannot Send Emails Out on Vultr:

@stacksofplates said in Cannot Send Emails Out on Vultr:

Why not just change the SMTP port?

You can't. SMTP uses port 25. Changing the outbound port only works if you control every posssible email destination.

Ah duh. I was thinking you were just sending email to yourself for some reason. Never mind.

@Lakshmana said in Issue Started in terminal for Wifi Drivers at Xubuntu:

@thwr I have seen usbmodswitch as the alternative for the USB stick.but many dependency need to download the same whether the full package can be downloaded from any sites ?

usbmodeswitch should do just fine. I'm not absolutely sure, but I think I've used that before with some Huawei-based UMTS stick.

@gjacobse said in New Laptop needed:

$718

Use the drive that is in it until you find a good deal on an SSD.

@scottalanmiller

While my main drive wasn't to get the rPi to learn some basic programming, I am hoping that it will help 'encourage' it.

I am planning to load Linux on my laptop as the primary, and take it from there. But I also am pushing myself to use the CLI more in the rPi than before..

@NerdyDad said in Suse Enterprise Linux for the Raspberry Pi:

I'm seeing it as a good entry level device to finally learn Linux Server administration at an affordable device. Granted the hardware isn't something that you're normally going to normally see in an enterprise environment, it would give me nearly identical experience managing a linux server in an enterprise environment.

The hardware doesn't matter at all. Like SAM suggested, go for a VM. There's no difference.

There are actually pitfalls in using a Pi, for example there isn't any RTC (realtime clock and battery). This can give you very weird results during reboots because next to no application expects a filetime to go backwards, which can happen without a working clock (depends on timing, network availability during reboot, working fake-hwclock package etc).

I think we fit in that SMB space as far as an IT department. We currently have less than 500 employees, but have about 120 users in our AD. Of those 120 users, 6 of us are in the IT department. 2 of these guys wear hats that encompass other departments as well. Typically, I spend half of my time doing user support and the other half is doing server-side support. Server administration for me might not be interacting the servers directly, but managing projects that would eventually impact the servers at some time in the future.