One of the confusing pieces here is that Linux actually does things more clearly but the Windows world is so confusing that if you carry that confusion into the Linux world, it makes things harder. Windows rarely uses or discloses the names of their product components. So Windows Software RAID is used to describe part of the Windows OS. But what if you have software RAID on Windows that is not Windows Software RAID? Windows Admins typically have no good terminology to discuss this, even though it is common. They just.... don't know what's going on and don't document it. But in Linux, we have the terms on hand all of the time (MD, ZFS, whatever.) So the Linux side isn't as bad as it seems, but if you are used to a weird blend of generic names being used as if they are specifics from the Windows world and assume that the Linux world is just as crazy, then it seems crazy.

I have used omv in my test lab here and at home a bit. The test lab it worked well, but i just ended up using ubuntu and iscsi when i had to put something in production. omv just has a web interface, some plugins to turn on. Sort of like webmin lite but for only storage. Development seems active; they keep producing new builds.
At home i installed it as a vm for a bit but when i broke my Xenproject i ended up reformatting that drive and omv with it.

One more reason we really need Self Driving cars!!!!

@Minion-Queen said in CES coverage:

The Surface is still piece of crap.

This is mainly why I said this was to little to late.

The price is actually awesome, $149 to make this more or less a real laptop - sweat! but alas, the product is crap - battery problems, wifi problems, etc.

@scale said in IOT Security Challenge:

@RojoLoco said in IOT Security Challenge:

@scale said in IOT Security Challenge:

@BRRABill said in IOT Security Challenge:

I already have my submission ready.

It's a pretty box that you can throw all that insecure crap in, and then set on your curb.

Now, what will I do with my $25K?

That's exactly enough for a small HC3 cluster!

Or a small new car...

Sure, if you want to be boring.

I would actually buy a ridiculously big 4K TV and a new receiver, then put the rest toward my mortgage.

@scottalanmiller said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Nic said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@scottalanmiller said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Nic said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@scottalanmiller said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Nic said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Reid-Cooper said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Nic said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Reid-Cooper said in New Dell gaming laptop:

@Nic said in New Dell gaming laptop:

This article has more details:
http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/03/dell-launches-4-inspiron-and-alienware-gaming-laptops-with-intel-kaby-lake-processors/

GTX 1050 and i5 Kaby Lake.

With a 4k display, that graphics card isn't going to be able to do very high settings at 4k. 4GB also seems a little skimpy. Still, for $800 it isn't bad. Like @wirestyle22 said, do they need a laptop? Otherwise you could get better value with a Steam machine type box and hook it up to their existing TV.

You wrote this while I was typing. So that's a decent GTX card. But 4K display seems wrong.

My guess is either it's mainly for viewing 4k video content (although at 15inches, who cares?) or simply the 4k screens are a cheaper price point due to manufacturing scaling than a 1080p screen. Or just marketing.

Could just set games to quarter resolution, but that is annoying.

Yeah either that or just turn down/off anti-aliasing and drop a few other settings down depending on the game. I'm guessing @Dominica's parents probably are at that age where it frankly doesn't matter due to their age and eyesight.

A bigger issue will likely be scaling. Lots of games barf if you use Windows scaling to make things big enough to see. And especially games that they like.

As long as you're going in multiples of the resolution it won't be to bad. So if they set everything to 1080p instead of 4k it shouldn't look horrible.

I mean that the games actually won't run.

True, although GOG has done a good job of testing for the most part, for older games. Still there are some that just won't look good or run at larger resolutions. You could set the monitor itself to a lower resolution instead of upscaling the game though, no?

There are entire categories of casual games that don't even function on scaled resolutions. The underlying engines won't accommodate it. Hidden object games are a big one.

Yeah I never play those so I guess I'm missing out on that special area of troubleshooting 🙂

@Dashrender said in Ease of the "Cloud", Without the "Cloud":

It surprises me that the costs could be lower. I would expect the economy of scale and lack of local IT support (or MSP/ITSP) requirements I would be allow prices to be driven lower. Of course you didn't say it would be lower, just said "often for much less cost."

Scale is what makes it viable at all. Elastic scalability is an insanely expensive feature to deliver. And neither solution requires a local MSP/ITSP, that's part of the comparison. These are "plug and play" level products. But in reality, using a service like Amazon where the scale is really good you run into a heavy technical barrier to use that HC does not have (normally.) So if anything, cloud makes you have more ITSP requirements compared to HC. Cloud has a lot of hidden costs that HC does not have.

@alex.olynyk said in Azpen Tablet Only Powers On When Plugged In:

Model A1045DRI
Battery is at 100% when plugged in.
But when you unplug it wont power on.
Reset to factory defaults and still wont power on unless plugged in. Any idea why?

Unless there's any kind of reset switch hidden inside of the system, I'd suggest battery. Is it under warranty?

ScreenConnect can definitely be used in house, but it is not open source or free. So probably not what you are looking for, but worth mentioning.

@Lakshmana said in Pclinux OS Issue:

@Lakshmana what is the option here???

Just pay attention and select the right partitions for installing Fedora 25. That's about it. You can't take a backup or move the data elsewhere so you don't have many options.

@coliver said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@scottalanmiller said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@coliver said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@scottalanmiller said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@coliver said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@scottalanmiller said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@coliver said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@travisdh1 said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@dafyre said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

@scottalanmiller said in Why the SMB Still Needs Hardware RAID:

The most common RAIN approach that I see is taking all disks in the pool, noting their nodal presence and using mirroring to distribute the data so that data mirrors never go to the same disk and/or the same node. So a little like a networked RAID 1E but with more flexibility and the option to add nodal separation and performance testing so that data moves to where it is used.

Are you aware of any open source RAIN systems?

Gluster and Swift

I think Ceph and Lustre may be two others.

Lustre is RAIN, but is closed. Gluster was the open replacement for Lustre.

Just a quick search showed that Lustre was GPL 2.0, not sure if that is new or not.

Oh wow, must be new. It was crazy expensive in 2006 when we were really investigating it. That's awesome.

Ah looks like it went open source in 2010.

Oh cool, so I remember things well then. I'm just out of date. Gluster probably forced their hand, why would anyone consider Lustre when it was closed source? The answer was probably... they wouldn't and didn't.

Yep, I'd assume that was the case. Especially when it is a such a specific, and at the time, niche market.

And when Gluster went directly after them, even in name.

@BRRABill said in Mixing Linux & Windows Server in a SMB:

Right, wrong, or indifferent, people think the gold standard is what Microsoft presents.

And that's something we need to fix conceptually. Like @dashrender and I were discussing offline... it's like Intel and AMD.

At the end of the day, AMD made the best ever Intel IA32 processors. And then Intel ended up making the best AMD64 processors. They both made the best of the competitor's technology.

The idea that "original" is related to "better" doesn't work in general and especially not in IT. Samba, for most of its history, has been on top. And AD itself is a copy of "Linux originals" if you look at it that way. So you can think of AD as being the copy if you want.

@JJoyner1985 said in UNIX: What Is a Tarball:

So, do you think the reason I am seeing a lot more gzip in use with tarballs is due to the familiarity of gzip and the negligible difference in the compression between it and bzip2? Basically, bzip2 doesn't make enough of an improvement with sufficient regularity to entice people to move away from gzip, or is there some other benefit to gzip that my training material hasn't covered?

That's correct. The difference between the two is generally small enough that people are not concerned. And lots of systems still don't have bzip2 installed by default so if you want scripts or whatever to work universally you often use gzip because you know that it is always there and predictable.

@guyinpv said in Suggestion for decent, free, ticketing with simple needs?:

I already have an account on Freshdesk which is an actual ticketing system, but I have it set up more for public support at our ecommerce, not internal tickets.

Can you not just create another Freshdesk site and use that?
So have:
https://mysite1.freshdesk.com (public)
https://mysite2.freshdesk.com (internal)

En inglés, pero sencillo.

https://community.spiceworks.com/help/Active_Directory

@BBigford said in SQL understanding - power outage:

@scottalanmiller said in SQL understanding - power outage:

@BBigford said in SQL understanding - power outage:

Here's what the person I heard it from said:

"likely easy to talk on the phone (i'm on a conference call, but have time this afternoon).

The term is quiescence, that you are looking for. This means that writes have been halted, and all data in buffer has been flushed. Part of the challenge here is this needs to be done not only at the app layer, the OS layer, the storage layer underneath that (and even at the drive level, as cheap consumer SSDs and SATA drives will have write buffers not protected).

Modern SQL commits writes first to the transaction log then to the database, and in the event of a power loss can "replay" the transaction log. The problem is if the log is large the can take a REALLY long time, and if you have systems underneath that ACK'd writes at the SCSI layer out of order (Consumer level SSDs) this might not properly recover."

Not really sure what data is sitting in the buffer during a power outage though. Meta data waiting to be written to tran logs? So then when a power outage happens and that buffer gets flushed, there's an inconsistency in those tran logs that were mid-write...

That's where atomic commits come in. They make sure that everything is quiesced before anything goes to the database. ZFS does the same thing for different tasks. This really isn't an issue in a properly designed database - unless you've added a caching layer yourself that doesn't honour the flush commands from higher up the stack. Then it is on your own head. You could always put your database into RAM and cause it to fail like that if you wanted.

I found out what he was talking about. Commit to tran log > Application acknowledge transaction > written to DB. The data that gets flushed shouldn't matter because most applications wouldn't acknowledge something that isn't commit. So if there was a power outage then the tran logs could just replay, app acknowledges, and so on.

I was missing something, and only thinking of tran logs and the database. Didn't think he had been talking about the front end.

Ah, okay. Yeah, if the application doesn't wait for the database, it's just being reckless.

Dominica uses it because the blue light keeps her more awake and she often just wants to fall asleep when using her phone.

Just finalizing the conversation here that we feel pretty confident in the changes we've made to the update script.

You can update by downloading a new copy of the script or manually making the changes to the file.

The script will now reset any custom git changes that don't match the source, then the script will proceed, and make the necessary changes to enable the feature so you can import your config files.

@momurda said in Mitel phone won't log off ACD group:

I used to love Mitel systems when i had to use them in the past. They can do anything you could think to do with a phone call. I am actually donating the old Intertel Axxess system here and about 35 handsets(look like the ones you have in your pictures) at the end of the week.

Have you tried doing this both off hook and on hook?

No I haven't. you have 35 handsets, eh? do they work?