@prcssupport said in Xfinity (Comcast) is rolling out a metered connection trial in Chicagoland and I am part of it:

I'm involved in a project in my town to start and expand a municipal network. Do you have any more info, links and stuff to help with that?

I was not directly involved in the planning or implementation of HCS (the second link above), but I participated in the community meetings and talked to voters and such to get it passed on the ballot. At the time I worked for one of the towns larger employers and was sick and tired of the poor service choices available.

I am sure you can contact HCS and eventually get put in contact with someone that was part of it all to give you more information.

Edit: Highland, IL is a bit unusual due to the fact that until deregulation forced it, the only place to buy electricity was from the city. Most towns do not maintain their own utilities. The benefit this provided to the fiber project was that the city already had rights to poles and easements to run the fiber.

Edit 2: Highland, IL was severely under served for internet. For telephones service, the ILECs kept selling the town around until it eventually ended up with Verizon, and they don't want it. The infrastructure was never upgraded over the years nor was the CO equipment. There is not not even any 15 year old DSL available, because there is no equipment in the CO for it.
For cable service, the town did get cable internet from Charter back in late 1999 along with all the other towns in the area. But like the phone companies, never upgraded the network afterwards. In 2007/2008 when the HCS project was still in meetings with residents trying to decide a path forward, Charter sent people to tell the residents what a huge mistake it was and waste of taxpayer money. But for some reason, the next month the town was swamped with Charter vehicles working on the lines and within months DOCSIS 2 level of service was finally available.

Just updated the cluster to 7.1

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX External/Remote Extensions:

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX External/Remote Extensions:

@RamblingBiped said in FreePBX External/Remote Extensions:

Option #1 up and running. Now to work on the OpenVPN part of the equation... 🙂

I have set this up but then ran into the problem of the OpenVPN port being blocked. Slightly hard to change once out in the wild.

On which end?

The remote end obviously. As I have full control of the server side.

@BRRABill said in Windows 10 Upgrade - Small Office Domain - Win 7 Pro OEM Licenses (~100 Machines):

@BRRABill said in Windows 10 Upgrade - Small Office Domain - Win 7 Pro OEM Licenses (~100 Machines):

@Dashrender said

So you never enter the key? and Windows 10 wasn't previously upgraded on this machine and then rolled back? i.e. Windows 10 has NEVER been installed on this machine before?

Hmmm, now that you mention it, maybe I did install Win10 on it before.

But I think I have done it before. On my own machine in fact.

I will retract until I am 100% sure. 🙂

I had a reason to set up a new VM today, and used a Windows 8 key to do a fresh install of Windows 10.

So I think it does indeed work.

It works as long as your Windows 10 media is r1511. Prior versions would not work or activate on an old key until updated to r1511.

@scottalanmiller said

Look in /etc/fstab and you'll see where the mount details are coming from. Pretty sure that your RAID array just has LVM on it.

LABEL=root-zefrgy / ext3 defaults 1 1 LABEL=swap-zefrgy swap swap defaults 0 0 LABEL=logs-zefrgy /var/log ext3 defaults 0 2 /opt/xensource/packages/iso/XenCenter.iso /var/xen/xc-install iso9660 loop,ro 0 0

All operating systems, including Windows, include the base kernel, shell(s) and support applications and, in some cases, extra stuff like Solitaire and such.

Each Linux distro is the same. It is a full operating system on its own and includes all the same kinds of things.

@BRRABill said in Remotely Accessing Desktop of GUI-based Linux Clients:

@scottalanmiller said

Linux Mint is a full distro, like CentOS, Fedora, OpenSuse Leap, Ubuntu, etc. It is a distro that focuses on desktop usage rather than server or mixed. But it is a distro. The desktop of Mint is Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE, etc.

How does a distro "focus on desktop usage", exactly?

Well, for example, it includes an office suite instead of a NoSQL database. It has a desktop instead of only a command line. Testing is done of desktop usage rather than server usage.

How do you test a limo differently from a tractor trailer?

@thwr Correct 🙂

@BRRABill said in What is Linux Mint:

@scottalanmiller said>

Thenstart asking questions!

OK.

So, what is Mint, exactly. I thought the "Mint" part of it was the desktop. Like that is what made Mint "for the masses".

But then you can install all these other desktops. So, what gives?

Could you just install those desktop GUIs on other distributions and get the same thing?

You can basically do everything with every distro. Some distros are specialized in some way, like Kali (based on Debian) SystemRescueCD (based on Gentoo) or Knoppix (also based on Debian) for example. Other distros, like OpenSuSE or Debian are more general purpose distros without much of a focus.

You can use the very same pen testing tools you are using in Kali in Mint without much of an issue for example (expect for dependencies).

Some Desktop-focused distros, like Mint, tend to have more up to date packages regarding the desktop experience and tools like Libre/OpenOffice. On the other hand, you'll find more up to date server packages in distros like Ubuntu or Debian. Gentoo is another special flavor where you have the option to compile everything from source with a package manager in front (portage). It can be optimized to any degree (make flags etc) and they tend to have the most up to date packages.

Linux guys tend to call distros "flavors", because they are just that: flavors. They are all running some customized version of the very same Linux kernel behind the scenes.

Could be worse... I guess. 😛

This seems like a lot of work when he could just look at the phone if it was his phone. What is the real objective here?

Thanks

@scottalanmiller said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

@thwr said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

@scottalanmiller said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

@thwr said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

Don't know if KVM or Xen can do active standby VM's (mirrored VMs) like VMWare, at least Hyper-V can't do that (as of 2012R2)

Do you mean shared memory where there is full fault tolerance and absolutely zero downtime and zero crash consistency issues? Then no, no one does that except for VMware right now. It's the biggest feature that I think makes VMware worth it for shops that need VMware. But it is a massively expensive feature both in terms of VMware licensing as well as in terms of performance hits, OS licensing and system overhead. Doing memory mirroring across nodes is very, very painful in terms of system resources.

Exactly. It's like a RAID-1-ish VM.

Yeah, that's a VMware exclusive. Not very applicable to the SMB market, but when you need it that's my top pick for "when to look at VMware." It's the most significant (to me anyway) "only on Vmware" feature. Most other things that VMware does well are soft benefits, like better memory management, but you might be able to offset that by just buying more memory on another platform. It's not a pure win. But their shared memory fault tolerance is an absolute win. When you need it, you either leave the commodity server world completely or you use VMware.

@John-Nicholson can talk more about that as well.

Hyper-V 's memory management is also awesome, IMHO. But you are right, the gap between VMware and the other major players is getting smaller and smaller with every release cycle. It's next to non-existing as of today. Remember very well when people laughed at me a few years ago for choosing Hyper-V to replace an existing VMware vSphere EP environment. I have yet to regret it.

The cluster is back online and we are spinning up workloads now. Very excited.

This battlestation is fully operational!! We have the first seven nodes of lab power online now from California! Very excited for all of the cool, new projects that we will be doing shortly.

As a non-inline, backup or archival unit, I would trust this system if you get it working nicely. Likely FreeBSD or OpenSuse will be ideal. If you get it running in that capacity, then sending backups to it will be a great use of it. As long as it is not a dependency for any running system, it would be viable.

@travisdh1 said in CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker):

@scottalanmiller said in CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker):

next up the RUH... Renegade Unethical Hacker.

RUH means never having to say you're sorry?

But you will RUH the day that you messed with one?

@scottalanmiller said in Export WordPress Theme:

@stacksofplates said in Export WordPress Theme:

Why not just make the directory for the existing theme a git repo and clone it to the other?

I don't have access to the other server.

Ah that makes it more difficult.

@Son-of-Jor-El said in Over Investing Early Can Be Big Time Failure:

Interesting convo. I can't get into too much detail but in the solar industry it is ESSENTIAL to have the investors lined up. If you don't, you die.

Even with them lined up, you still want to spend money wisely.

The Linux versions of OpenJDK remain available I saw.