Thought I would circle back on this one and give a review of OrangeComputers.

I purchased an R710 from OrangeComputers a few months ago. They were very willing to work with me on price and upgrade components for a very reasonable price. I believe they even upgraded the controller from a Perc6i to an H710 for little to no cost. The server arrived within about 2-3 days, very well packaged, and all firmware up to date. The condition of the server was great, and it has been running 24/7 ever since I booted it with 4-5 VMs on it.

In summary, after 3 months of usage, I would recommend this company for refurb servers, as long as warranty is not a huge issue for you. Their warranty is 90 days standard, but you can pay a little extra and get a 1 year warranty. If you want a 3 year warranty, then these are not the guys to go with. For home use, or even small business, I'd buy from them again. Their pricing is excellent.

We sell Carrier Services and usually size based more on the number of calls not the number of people. 30 simultaenous calls should be easy on any good (read: true business class) Internet circuit. @scottalanmiller has the bandwidth nailed on the head above. We di try and get users to get the best Upstream bandwidth which for cable modem installs around here is very difficult (Time Warner only offers 5Meg UP even in Business Class which is pathetic).
For our needs internally we needed well over 100 simultaneous call paths. We went with a dedicated circuit to a Rochester based cough carrier cough and a backup trunk over an Internet circuit. While bandwith has never been an issue lets just say I can't wait for the contract for the cough carrier to expire so that we can port and go to the Internet for our needs and dump them!

@adam.ierymenko if you run your own controller do you get all same features as you would with using the hosted controller?

I forgot about this topic and found it mentioned in a conversation. This thread was a great resource that never got linked anywhere useful. Now to figure out how to make it more referenceable.

@jt1001001 said in Internet woes, Comcast interconnects?:

Can't you get a fiber circuit from someone? We were able to get WindScream fiber in our one dsl branch office. Yes I know Windstream ranks right up there with comcrap but the speed made the difference and we got them to waive construction costs.

Fiber circuit, sure, if we pay to run it 30 miles. A T1 would only be ~5 miles. Both would be a lot more expensive as well.

We used to have a WISP around, but they were bought out and filed chapter 13 bankruptcy 4 years ago.

Well, I am only about 3 chapters in, but over all I am very happy with this book.

It includes the whole book as a PDF so I can read it on my iPad while I travel 🙂

@aaronstuder said in RHEL Download Subscription Free:

What I love about the Free Subscription, is you can run unlimited non-production VM's 🙂

Well, I'm in the Debian and Gentoo corner, so that's not an issue at all for me 😉 I could get support from Canonical or some 3rd party company, but I didn't need that in the past, erm, 10-15 years. You can solve next to everything if you have an idea what's going on - or more precisely: how to diagnose a problem.

@FiyaFly said in Scripting changing VLANs on Managed Switches through SSH:

Can you think of an easy way to get the information from the switches as to current configuration in an automated manner to create and update the tables accordingly? SNMP is an option but I'd have to think on the best way to output and parse the information.

SNMP should be available via a pre-parsed module in Python, I would assume. Not something that I have written myself (obviously not the module, but I've not written something that uses the module) but I would be pretty surprised if this didn't already exist in such a way that you just have to query the resulting array rather than needing to parse a text dump.

Of interesting side note, the Linux md RAID system also implements Intel Matrix RAID and DDF (Disk Data Format) software RAID formats commonly used by consumer FakeRAID systems. Because of this, Linux md can sometimes convert FakeRAID into enterprise md RAID if you really know what you are doing 🙂

Thanks for the info! I'll surely look this up during our next refresh.

@DustinB3403 said in New Laptop Considerations:

@thwr said in New Laptop Considerations:

@DustinB3403 said in New Laptop Considerations:

@thwr said in New Laptop Considerations:

@DustinB3403 said in New Laptop Considerations:

@thwr None of the laptops you mentioned here have the dedicated GPU.

The use case for this laptop is very much along the lines of consumer use.

Sure I'll use it as my daily driver for work etc but 98% of the time, all consumer use.

What kind of GPU are you looking for? Gaming or CAD (e.g. FirePro / Quadro)?

Gaming usage. I'm not a CAD kind of person.

Ah, now this is a whole different story. Forget about 99% of the business and workstation class notebooks - they are almost always Quadro or FirePro.

What's your price point? Like 550$?

It is at this point, since I've got a hell of a deal sitting in front of me for it.

I wasn't really looking until the deal was here.

I guess you won't find something better (if you don't have a contract like I do where I can get something for EDU discounts). The 960M is Ok, and given the price...

As for the SAN-less solutions out there you can look at StarWind Hyper-Converged Appliance in case you are looking for something that is very easy to implement and will easily work with any hypervisor.
Another option that you may want to explore is VMware vSAN, that one will be good if you would like to stick to VMware and you are fine with having one node as a witness.
S2D is also an option that is worth your attention, that option should fit well if you would want to stick with Hyper-V as hypervisor and you have multiple VMs licensed with Microsoft Windows.

@scottalanmiller said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@thwr said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@scottalanmiller said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@thwr said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@scottalanmiller said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@thwr said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@scottalanmiller said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@thwr said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@dafyre said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

@thwr said in Free Programming Courses - July 2016:

No need to fiddle around with gcc toolchains, makefiles and whatnot.

This is one of the reasons I enjoyed developing with Visual Basic in Windows, and Gambas in Linux... I didn't have to muss around with Make files, etc... The system handled all that for me in the background.

I've switched to almost exclusively developing for the web now.

Yeah, it's odd. I'm asking myself why there are so much Java courses for students, but only a very few for C#. The .NET ecosystem is the best thing I have seen so far: Very well documented, very few bugs, runs on different platforms (ARM, x86, PPC..) and operating systems. Must be because Visual Studio wasn't always free. On the other hand, mono got its own compiler for many, many years now.

.NET is Windows centric and not appropriate to teach at university. It's also not nearly as common as Java. It's a good system for sure, but it is not academically apropos. Java is far from the only good option, but .NET is only appropriate as a side elective and as university should not be focusing on specifics, it's not really appropriate at all. If you learn Java, C# is a few days of work away from you.

.NET isn't so Windows centric anymore. Large parts of the framework are open source now and mono became a very good runtime today. In fact, I'm doing lots of stuff in C# on my ARM boards. Visual Studio is free for students and small companies. MonoDevelop is also ok. Not comparable in any way, but ok.

That's extremely recent and it's not really ported yet and Mono is... weak. I have high hopes, as I love C# and F# (heck, I wrote the certification tests for C#!!) will get wide adoption. But I'm not holding my breath.

You did? Hell, maybe I should get one just to see your test 😉

Yes, only one, not the entire series. One of the Previsor ones. I've written about a dozen certification exams over the years. I once had a job require me to take my own test in an interview. They were idiots. I told them ahead of time that I wrote it and then they nearly shit themselves when I scored the highest core ever. I wasn't sure if they thought that I was an idiot and could not pass my own test or if they thought I was lying. In either case, I wasn't too impressed.

I guess that I wouldn't want to work there anyway. I've always refused to take any test myself. "Thanks for the coffee, but no, bye". Got an offer from MS once, they sent me a test in a wordfile with some very, very stupid questions like "How many windows do you see when you open this developer tool?" REALLY, WHO CARES? Anyway, told them that if they send me that test by mail and I'm given like 4 hours for it to complete, I can easily cheat them by just using Google (or Yahoo). The lady on the other side didn't understand that.

Well I had to be somewhat impressed that they were paying hundreds of dollars per candidate to basically have me evaluating their candidates. But it also meant that I was way, way above what they were prepared to be working with. They wanted someone for a position that I would be hiring and mentoring. But you have to give them some credit for picking me as the person that they wanted evaluating people, even if indirectly 😉

Sounds basically where we are all aspiring to be one day

I didn't say introducing the #3 server caused this - I just mentioned that after I added #3 to the pool a while back, it had a similar event. The first time it happened, I let it slide, waiting to see if it would do it again. Yesterday at 10am, it had the same type of problem (isolated itself and rebooted) so today I decided I'd better pull it so that it wouldn't do that during business hours. At the time it only had two VMs running on it, and they weren't at all taxing the system.

They are all identical systems - Dell R610's with the same CPUs, the only difference is that #3 uses 48GB of RAM while the other two are 96 GB. I even upgraded all of them to the exact same firmware revisions before putting them into production and after testing them. #3 is just a bad egg. Not sure what the problem is, but it's powered off right now and I'll take a look at it if I get time to this week.

@BRRABill said in Linux: Symbolically Linking Files:

So to confirm, if I had first removed the /var/log folder, that command would have worked as I wanted it to, correct?

Correct. Since /var/log is a mount point for you, though, that is not as simple as deleting or renaming. You have to stop it mounting first. Then you can rmdir /var/log. Then you can symlink.

@Danp said in Stopping XenServer From Writing To A USB Boot Drive:

Here's one to watch from the Citrix forums: http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/379454-booting-xenserver-off-usb-safe/

P.S. Which one of you guys wrote this? 😉

That was me.

Those guys know the nuts and bolts of XS, though they aren't real responsive to threads all the time.

On ML that would have have 500 posts already and been forked 6 times. 🙂

Picked up my copy today.

So I haven't done this with XS7 as of yet.

The guide I followed on XS6.5 can be found here, everything is performed through the console.

Xen Orchestra has a guide that just uses the web console to create a local ISO SR.