Service Providers

Veeam used to make their own agent. But now uses Microsoft's own agents that they make specifically for this. So there isn't a Veeam agent anymore, but VMware makes one and Microsoft makes one.

In a situation like this one, the generic agent that needs to be installed on the guest (not the host) is called VMware Tools. If you don't deploy that, then you get the totally reckless straight snapshot behaviour from an "agentless" backup mechanism.

Even using the tools isn't fully safe unless you manually verify every workload. For example, most of my workloads aren't supported by the VMware Tools agent, and therefore, not by Veeam. I don't actually know any business bigger than a few people where the "agentless agent" fully supports their workloads.

But everyone does it because.... it's not ITs risk when the business loses data. They will just point fingers at the vendor and claim that they didn't understand how backups worked and their management will almost always believe that it is "too complex" for IT pros to have understood and accept that they didn't do their due diligence.

@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

Google+ class action starts paying out $2.15 for G+ privacy violations

Google exposed the private data of 52 million users in 2018 and got sued.
Who remembers the sudden and dramatic death of Google+? Google's Facebook competitor and "social backbone" was effectively dead inside the company around 2014, but Google let the failed service hang around for years in maintenance mode while the company spun off standalone products. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google+ had exposed the private data of "hundreds of thousands of users" for years, that Google knew about the problem, and that the company opted not to disclose the data leak for fear of regulatory scrutiny. In the wake of the report, Google was forced to acknowledge the data leak, and the company admitted that the "private" data of 500,000 accounts actually wasn't private. Since nobody worked on Google+ anymore, Google's "fix" for the bug was to close Google+ entirely. Then the lawsuits started.

And, let's hope, that there is some regulatory scrutiny over this!

A truly agentless backup is just an uncoordinated snapshot. You can do that, it'll work over 50% of the time. But it is very risky.

@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:

@scottalanmiller said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:

"agentless" agents

You mean agentless backups, things that run at the hypervisor level rather than having a specific piece of software (an agent) installed on each guest?

Sort of. I mean the ones that use a hypervisor-deployed agent instead of the backup-deployed agent. No working backups are actually agentless, that's a marketing scam. "Agentless" still require agents to make sure that applications have quiesced and that's why "agentless" aren't reliable unless their agents support every application running on top of them.

On Windows, for example, they use an agent to tell SQL Server to quiesce. It's not agentless or else the database would potentially be corrupt. That's why those tools are only usable when you are willing to be loose about restores working or you use very specificly supported applications or you build your own agent communications to work around them.

Hence why they scare me... 99% of people who deploy them don't know how they work and put their businesses at big risk because they assume that since they are called "agentless" as a marketing term that they can do magic and get backups that logically are impossible.

@gjacobse said in Non-IT News Thread:

@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:

Boeing delays rerun of Starliner space capsule test

The American Boeing company is attempting this week to run another test flight of its new astronaut capsule.
The CST-100 Starliner will launch from Florida at some point to showcase how it can ferry crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS). It will be the second test flight, and conducted with no people aboard. The previous demonstration in 2019 encountered software problems that very nearly caused the loss of the capsule. The Starliner will ride to orbit on an Atlas-5 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Controllers had been targeting Tuesday for the launch but scrubbed the countdown with two-and-a-half hours left on the clock, to allow for investigation of technical issues related to the capsule's propulsion system.

Starliner has been rolled back to the Assembly Building for additional check, and it is unknown when they will attempt again.

Launch of Boeing's Starliner capsule delayed indefinitely

If it is anything like the 737 Max, let's hope they table this forever.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Morning @scottalanmiller

Weekly Staff meeting that is also a meeting with a vendor over the Grafana system that they built for us... Whoo!

What did they build, the dashboards?

Pretty much.

LOL, um, okay. I mean, dashboards can be a pain, I totally get that.

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 That works! I haven't had to dig into logs in a while...

Today we're doing AD cleanup and deleting old things that are no longer needed. I just deleted ~300 servers from our Computers OU. I hope they aren't still in use, lol.

I'm not perfect at cleanup - but damn - 300 servers.

How many users you have to delete? 1000's?

ha ha ha. If only. We just migrated from Google to O365 for reasons that are above my pay grade, and we just killed just over 40k former student accounts.

40,000, holy crap. Over how many years do those accounts span?

i'm working in a school atm, it has 6 students.

So that would be like 800 years for you. LOL

That's one thing that sucks here. For all intents and purposes, no vacs at all yet.

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

just read i'm living in the 3rd highest vaccinated area in Oz.

Is that like hte US, where the third highest is still really low?

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Morning @scottalanmiller

Weekly Staff meeting that is also a meeting with a vendor over the Grafana system that they built for us... Whoo!

Using Prometheus as a part of Grafana....

That's a pretty common approach. It works well.