@jaredbusch said in Unable to connect to website:

@markferron said in Unable to connect to website:

https://ifap.ed.gov

hahhahahahahaha

Yes. I'm 12.

I cant believe that they used that.

@scottalanmiller said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:

@dave247 said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:

@scottalanmiller said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:

@dave247 said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:

@jaredbusch said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:

@dave247 said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:

I think I will go through xbyte even if my VAR tells me they can match their prices...

They can't. That is not how it works.

Well actually one time my VAR matched the exact refurb prices that I was going to get from xbyte like last minute. I got like 5x Dell N series switches brand new for refurb price - which was like $2,500 each instead of the $7k or w/e they were when I was buying them.

They can take a loss if they want, most likely they were just having xByte deliver them directly and not marking them up.

But here is a simple rule... if you need your VAR to match a better price somewhere else, your VAR is making you do extra work and burn other relationships up front to lock you in. You waste time and effort (that's money) and other vendors won't keep quoting you good prices if you don't then buy from them. Tricking you into raising the price from other vendors is how price matching works out for your VAR.

I don't understand this part: "Tricking you into raising the price from other vendors is how price matching works out for your VAR."

The vendor is convincing you to go get good prices from other people. Those people are providing good prices in the hopes of earning your business by being better. Your vendor then convinces you that even though the new vendor treated you better, to stick with them. Your old vendor (the price matcher) now knows that you aren't loyal and will shop around, so they know it's time to "drive to the bottom" and lower prices by lowering service. The new vendor (the one giving you a good price) gets taught that doing a good job for you gets them nowhere and getting you a good quote is a waste of resources, so they will stop doing so and just start quoting rack rates, because you are just wasting their time.

"Shopping around" for prices is a dangerous game unless you are just looking up public web prices. But a VAR, by definition, is not about price but about services. If you care about price, then using a VAR is a mistake every time. You want a pure reseller who isn't marking up to add services to the product. Yes, in IT we need to ensure our prices are good. But you can't get good prices by going around to everyone and getting quotes, it will feel like you are getting good prices, but the products are not directly comparable and the best prices exist only for loyal customers with good relationships.

At this point though, I'm thinking my VAR is really just a re-seller. He doesn't add too much value and when he does give his input, I think it's usually based on a bit of antiquated IT knowledge.. We've bought workstations, servers, firewalls and MS licenses through him but he also does consulting and services sort of like a MSP. My boss has in the past hired him to do consulting and things so we've paid him for "services" and things.... So going back to all the stuff I've seen you post on SW, we were buying stuff from the guy who was also doing the consulting... you know the rest of the story. However, I more or less halted this when I came on. I started asking questions, doing my own work and shopping around for better deals on hardware. I still go to him now and again mainly for MS licensing and the last thing was new Dell switches which I got refurb price.

@brandon220 said in Nextcloud Version Control:

The main concern is if a file is overwritten, that it will actually retrieve a previous version of the file. I know the functionality is there. Just wondering if it functions as intended or has issues.

Yes, that's versioning in any form, and yes it has worked for us. I've never seen it fail.

Alright, I took another approach at this.

Looking directly at the source for different kernels over at kernel.org I can see that the NVMe driver has SR-IOV support from kernel version 4.8.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/drivers/nvme/host/pci.c?h=v4.8#n2015

It's very interesting for virtualized workloads because SR-IOV means you can assign the NVMe disk to different VMs directly and bypass the hypervisor. This is the same for NICs at 10/25/40/100 gigabit. There will be a significant performance drop if you don't use SR-IOV.

@mattspeller said in Granite Park DFW Texas - Finding a Dell 120w charger:

And we've got this sorted! Thank you Scott for a prompt reply.

No problem!

@pete-s said in Web hosting + (or not) email: keep separate:

This is somewhat ridiculous. The entire premise of Microsoft's offering is vendor lock-in.
Of course you are hostage to Microsoft. Of course they will keep integrating their services until it's impossible for you to change providers. And when they raise their prices you will pay. It doesn't make sense to fool yourself into thinking something else.

If you want separate discrete services you have to stop using O365 because it's already a bundle of services - even without email.

Unless you only want email from them, then it's not too locked in. Just not very good.

@jaredbusch Ok thanks for the explanation

@dustinb3403 said in How Do You Stop Office 365 Low Severity Alert Emails:

As a general thought on this, automatic mail forwarding could be a compliance issue, so make sure to keep this in mind before you go turning off alerts that might be a compliance issue later on. . .

Automatic mail forwarding is a "every few hours" task. So these alerts are a ridiculous amount of crying wolf. It's created a "zero belief" system in MS alerts. At this point, there are no alerts, just spam, is how it is seen.

@i3 said in Journaling in Office 365:

Does anyone have any experience with using journal rules in Office 365? My specific question is can I have two different journal rules (destinations) based on the email address of a user or is it tied to the mailbox.

For example, I have 4 users each with [email protected] and an alias of [email protected]. Could I have two separate journal rules for domain.com going to one destination and domain2.com going to another destination? In other words, having two separate journal rules based on the email domain.

Yes, you can do so. Something similar as this:
https://vaultastic.mithi.com/docs/configure-your-email-server/office-365/configure-journal-rule-for-selected-users

@kelly Thank you Kelly

Mixed results.

Web based connections to the provisioning server work and the web based address books now work.

But TLS for the SIP connection is not working right.

But I ran out of testing time..
More to come.

@scottalanmiller said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@dave247 said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@travisdh1 said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@pete-s said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@dave247 said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@pete-s said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@dave247 All enterprise SSDs have power protection caps so that is an expected feature.

If the raid controller cache makes an improvement or not depends on the workload and the size of the cache.

I think the 3.84TB drives have 4GB cache internally. That's large compared to the RAID controllers cache. What do Dell recommend?

I haven't asked Dell what they recommend. The H730P has 2GB and the H740P has 8GB though.

Give them a call. A little more than 3 years ago I spec'ed a computer with 4 SATA SSDs in two RAID1 arrays and I remember that they were adamant that I get the H730P controller. Machine was an R630.

Of course they were, they're job is to sell you thing, or more expensive things, than you really need.

That's kind of what I was thinking.. though I have had many times where vendors like Dell just don't do that. Sure they want to sell you stuff but it's not good to constantly take advantage of people either as it will catch up to you one way or another. Case and point, I over-spec'd a system a while back and my Dell VAR suggested I go with part X because it was just as good as part Y only a lot cheaper.

A VAR might just want to do a good job. But it's more complex than people say. It's never about "more expensive", but it is generally about better margins. Which are impossible for end users to determine.

The cheaper hard drives might have had equal or better margins than the expensive ones. We say "expensive", but that's dumbing down something that doesn't need dumbing down, and implies that we can easily tell when we are being led for profits based on the resulting price, which is incorrect.

There is every reason to believe your VAR was just doing a good job for you. But the result of a lower price doesn't tell us in any way if they or Dell themselves did something purely in your interest, or also in theirs. And there is always the possibility that the more expensive drives offered something that would have been beneficial to you.

Yeah I see what your saying. Actually the parts in my example were the new Intel processors. I selected a Xeon Gold and he suggested I go with Silver as they also perform well and just because they are "silver" doesn't mean they are a less better version of the Gold. And in actuality, the reason I chose Gold was because I was trying to get more Ghz but I understand that's not all there is to a CPU. It was my first pass at a build.

@fateknollogee said in Average Rate for Emergency Service:

@jaredbusch said in Average Rate for Emergency Service:

0_1537821572384_e882d8de-fc1a-4b6c-9d45-85102fa67fac-image.png

@JaredBusch Just curious, what app is that screenshot from?

Are use manage engine service desk for my Helpdesk. I actually would like to migrate to something else but have not been given the go ahead to do so because of cost of my time to do that.

Because I'm annoying and like things that are text based I like graphviz. However if you want some really nice looking stuff I've used cloudcraft.co. It's AWS specific but has blank shapes as well.

@jaredbusch Thanks. I'll try again using a minimal install.

Hetzner Cloud lets you mount your own image, so I can test with a minimal install.

I'll create a snapshot, and always start from that.

I personally have refused to comply with GDPR. There's a weird irony in that so many non-EU companies (specifically American) felt the need to comply just because, as I saw on SW oh no, the EU gonna come after you somehow! yet when the EU implements a pain in the butt copyright law, suddenly "well, those laws don't apply to us." So I moved my company location from Czech Republic to Russia, and I'll sell to EU citizens anyway. I say, bring it on:

0_1537911046859_VMKrIq7.gif

Turns out that it needed the -Credential flag, which Microsoft doesn't document as a requirement. This worked find...

Add-Computer -DomainName "mydomain" -Credential mydomain\myusername

@nerdydad said in What do you utilize your COLO for? What defined a use for your environment?:

@scottalanmiller Each rack is locked up and only the tenant and the owner can enter the rack.

Still, you can get at them. It's silly and risky. What's the upside to doing your own bench work, off site. Over having bench professionals who are on site and ready to handle things immediately?

And you are asking third party people to deal with the security of other third party people. It's just a lot of risk, but what is the benefit?

@dustinb3403 said in Small colo infrastructure for SaaS:

@pete-s said in Small colo infrastructure for SaaS:

This is how @dustinb3403 suggested replicating VMs between hosts:

0_1537834749485_colocation_network_vmreplication.png

While this is accurate, it also misses on the fact that he would still have his NLS server sitting, collecting backups on whatever schedule.

Other than that it is accurate. In Scott's proposal you are making the shift from migrating the entire workload (which is essentially instant) to migrating the database only.

In his case, the load balancer is the weak link in the chain. Granted these don't fail often but it isn't something you have control over either unless you provide your own for the COLO.

2 haproxy VMs (one per host) and keepalived for failover

@jaredbusch said in Postfix having trouble sending to IPv6:

@fuznutz04 said in Postfix having trouble sending to IPv6:

@dustinb3403 said in Postfix having trouble sending to IPv6:

@fuznutz04 said in Postfix having trouble sending to IPv6:

@dustinb3403 said in Postfix having trouble sending to IPv6:

That would indicate that IPv6 isn't supported.

Not supported on PostFix itself, or in the actual server network config?

Just taking a guess, I would say via the networking.

So I will try this with both IPv4 AND IPv6 listed and see what happens. Specifying IPv4 only works, but I will try both.

Thanks guys.

The point here is does your server have routable IPv6 available to it?

✔ The postfix instance seems to have IPv6 enable.

✔ Your DNS seems to return IPv6 information.

:question_mark: Does your router have IPv6 enabled?

:question_mark: Does your ISP support IPv6?

This server is a Vultr box. Not using the Vultr Firewall. I just noticed in the Vultr manage page, that IPv6 is available, but no subnet has been assigned. That will do it!