Good read, thanks.

@DustinB3403 said in Should it take 10 hours to export 32GBs of VMs in XenServer?:

@scottalanmiller New job has had me busy.

Likely story.

OK so it's a complicated pivot table but it still a pivot

@coliver said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@wirestyle22 said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@JaredBusch said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@EddieJennings said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@coliver said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@EddieJennings said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

I know there is a best practice that discourages an environment with only one domain controller.

Why? Do you really need two domain controllers? How many authentications are you doing? How much downtime can you afford? Would it be better to have a single domain controller on a VM that you can backup and restore in a few minutes versus having two running at all times?

Why = because a document from Microsoft said so and at the time when I made our domain I didn't know any better :).

What you're asking me is what I'm asking myself, which moves me to the conclusion that when it's time to make the VM for the accounting software, the old box should just go away. Especially since my tiny number of users would be able to log into their workstations with cached credentials until I can get the domain controller VM functioning again.

Who cares what some paper from the company selling you the licensing says.

What does your company need?

I have never used two domain controllers in the SMB space. Even before virtualization at my clients.

It is simply not something needed.

You don't think the downtime justified the cost for a SMB I'm assuming and load balancing isn't a concern

Rarely is downtime worth the cost of mitigating it in an SMB environment. They often don't actually understand what the true cost of downtime is and exaggerate it more often then not. If you're getting enough requests that you're hitting a performance threshold on the domain controller then you may be out of the SMB space.

And authentication often has a near zero impact for short durations. A DC down could easily go 30 minutes and literally have no one notice.

@aaronstuder said in Cross Platform Encryption Tool?:

Is there a cross platform encryption tool?

Would support Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android.

Any ideas? Would love to use B2 on the backend for storage...

Why use anything else than GPG?
https://www.gnupg.org

@Mike-Davis said in Domain Controller and WINS Server Powered Down and Removed without Proper Demotion:

@wirestyle22 said in Domain Controller and WINS Server Powered Down and Removed without Proper Demotion:

We don't use DHCP at all

I would go the other direction then and check for WINS queries and then visit all the NICs that are still using WINS and remove the entry. This article explains it:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/craigf/2010/07/09/decommissioning-wins/

Thanks! This actually answered a few of my other questions too.

@matteo-nunziati said in PowerShell Code Cleanup:

@Tim_G never used PS seriousltùy, but as acoder I would you suggest to make your FW rules instances of a class and put them into an array. then for-looping them
this will fix the growing number of rules.

Thanks, I will look into this.

@TeleFox we have a quite old (few years) PBX which has been used in the years adding new and new phone lines with the company expansion. last batch of additions was 6 months ago: 5 new seats with new phones and headsets. PBX is Aastra with proprietary digital phones.

the company bought a new erp last december, against my advice they also buyed a generic "VoIP-ERP integration package". we are now implementing the ERP and the sysadmin at the ERP consulting firm pointed out to me that the package actually is a proprietary VoIP PBX based on asterisk.
the solution involves something around 10 or 15 people (depending on the layout of the customer care dept), company has somethin like 40 phones bwteen DECT and digital deskphones.

so we can:

throw away the new asterisk PBX (wasted 4k€), sorry 15 people throw away current Aastra PBX , redoing a lot of cabling and rebuying the entire equipement for 40 between wirede and DECT phones try to integrate the 2, especially considering than it is right to isolate the ERP asterisk thing as you would not to depend on an erp for your phone system (ok, redo VoIP wiring and equipement if you want but choose a different strategy!)

now both current PBX managing firm and the carrier have found a number potential solutions (basically a sip trunk between the 2 PBXes).

hope this clarifies!

@Dashrender said in Office365 Direct Send without Relay:

@JaredBusch said in Office365 Direct Send without Relay:

For only basic email traffic needs like scan to email, just setup a connector in Office 365.

0_1492696529257_upload-114c859e-4acc-44f7-98fb-1e15dd07b888

0_1492696555576_upload-097270f5-1ef9-441c-be47-52dedd9dbb0b

Exchange Online has various rate limits though. So if you think you will be even close to them, use postfix locally to send out and just add your local WAN IP to your SPF record.

Why wouldn't your local relay still relay everything through Hosted Exchange in O365? or would that be rate limited as well?

Exchange Online has limits. it does not matter from where the email originate. The software was actually setup to authenticate and send email directly with and Exchange Online account during testing.

This quickly hit the rate limits as the client was sending out large amounts of price notifications to users that has signed up for such.

So this site had a local CentOS 7 box setup and Postfix was configured to send mail out. The SPF record was updated and then a connector was also setup to make sure nothing was blocked for no reason.

@scottalanmiller said in Alternative to Azure AD - JumpCloud:

@coliver said in Alternative to Azure AD - JumpCloud:

@Dashrender said in Alternative to Azure AD - JumpCloud:

How do you get unified authentication in Linux?

IIRC Active Directory was in response to *nix based distributions having this ability a decade prior.

That's correct. Not just as a general concept, as things like NIS are quite old. Sun released NIS in the early 1980. It was replaced with NIS+ in 1992. LDAP was already popular on Linux by the late 1990s. Even kerberos was already in use on Linux at that time. By the time that Windows did AD in 2000, they were explaining it in terms of Linux to make people understand how it worked. It wasn't just that it was "like" what UNIX had, but that it was LDAP and Kerberos right from the UNIX world, just a Windows version of those exact services.

Good to know I have some of my IT history correct. I first learned LDAP on some old Gentoo boxes that my father picked up from the dump.

@Mike-Davis said in Anyone else familiar with US-Cert Traffic Light Protocol?:

@IRJ said in Anyone else familiar with US-Cert Traffic Light Protocol?:

I get their emails everyday and have to act on them as part of my job. All their emails are classified at a different level.

What kind of stuff have they sent that was actionable?

Zero days and other CVEs

And a lot of people set it to "always do" something bad, then it doesn't ask again.

Yes that is what ive done.

@aidan_walsh said in Android OS: ConnectBot:

@gjacobse IIRC thats an optional extra for creating an account to sync your auth details between devices.

Yepp. And also, generating SSH keys, I'd imagine, but I may be off base on that. I have the paid version, and it's cheap, so I bought it since I use it so much.

That's what I get for posting before I'm totally awake. This is what I get when I run the command on my group:

BackupTarget> show member Name Status Version Disks Capacity FreeSpace Connections ---------- ------- ---------- ----- ---------- ---------- ----------- 16TB online V7.0.7 (R3 16 11.34TB 6.72TB 2 97085) syr-8TB online V7.1.2 (R4 16 5.66TB 3.69TB 3 02088) 4TB online V7.0.7 (R3 16 2.83TB 1.84TB 2 97085) BackupTarget>

I think the command is showing the free space on the volumes after creation, not before since I think I have mine fully provisioned.

Just type:
show
and it will scroll through all the things under the show command and you should be able to figure out the size of your member. This is just the first of like 4 pages:

BackupTarget> show ______________________________ Group Information ______________________________ Name: BackupTarget Group-Ipaddress: 192.168.100.21 DateAndTime: Thu Apr 20 03:32:04 2017 TimeZone: America/New_York TotalVolumes: 3 VolumesOnline: 3 VolumesInUse: 3 TotalSnapshots: 0 SnapshotsOnline: 0 SnapshotsInUse: 0 TotalMembers: 3 MembersOnline: 3 MembersInUse: 3 TotalCapacity: 19.83TB VolumeReserve: 7.58TB VolumeReportedSpace: 7.58TB SnapReservedSpace: 3GB SnapReservedSpaceInUse: 0MB ReplicationReservedSpace: 0MB FailbackReservedSpace: 0MB DelegatedSpace: 0MB DelegatedSpaceInUse: 0MB FreeSpace: 12.24TB TotalDisks: 48 OnlineDisks: 45 SpareDisks: 3 OfflineDisks: 0 FailedDisks: 0 Collections: 0 Snapcols: 0 CustomSnapcols: 0 ThinProvFreeSpace: 122.49TB TotalSpaceBorrowing: 0MB Connections: 7 _______________________________________________________________________________

Step One: Install something other than Windows Home
Step Two: Be more secure

@travisdh1 not that I know of

@Kelly said in Jamf- Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV management solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Jamf- Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV management solution:

@Kelly said in Jamf- Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV management solution:

We're using Jamf, and it is pretty decent. With recent changes to permissions in macOS, a solution like Jamf will be the only way you can actually control certain settings. Apple is no longer content with merely ignoring professional users, but is now actively trying to eliminate them.

I think that that actually started long ago.

10.12.x is much worse that what came before. There are a significant portion of system level settings that you cannot touch even as root.

Wow, that's just crazy.

And another +1 To backup storage. That's actually what ~70-80% of our customers do with their SANs when swtiching to StarWind HCA or even VSAN.
Another interesting approach which I see less often is to use 2 existing SAN boxes as a storage capacity addition to the new HCI, with some of that storage actually mirrored between the SANs through the HCI storage virtualization layer. This is where customers can actually keep both backup and testing workloads without breaking the SANs into islands of resources.

@xisco yes, xenstore-utils was installed - i suppose it was installed by ubuntu setup