Like I said, it was a couple years ago. Make sure to go through their documentation well.

@scottalanmiller said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video: @dave247 said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video: .... haven't had the chance to dig in as I am a freaking "IT generalist" where I work. Youtube Video I have a video for everything these days. yep I just watched that one.. guess I can't call myself a Systems Administrator anymore (jk I totally am)

@matteo-nunziati said in windows server updates: critical/cumulative/security: ok, I'm still confused about the terminology. Please, can you confirm and/or fix my interpretation? critical: not a security fix, but something seriously broken is fixed here. security: a security fix, something seriously broken is fixed here and a security hole is closed. cumulative: just use this if you have missed a lot of stuff and you have a long queue updates otherwise. Download this bulk huge fatty thing and align with upstream. all other types... really too many types here, do they really worth? Now the second question. Having an hyperv server 2016 should I need to install critical fixes? I mean: if I do not notice any misfunction should I patch? to me it is right to patch as you never know when a critical bug will hit your usage. Also, as a general rule I patch manually and I always require recommended updates only. Then I choose what to install. any opinion/correction/suggestion?! thank you. I do at least Critical, security, and definition updates to all servers, hypervisors included. For Windows10 desktops, I do everything. But I do it all through WSUS.

@fuznutz04 said in MySQL configuration best practices: @emad-r What is your practice for log rotation? For example, the error log. If that grows (obviously indicating other issues) , and needs to be rotated, what procedure do you use to rotate logs? Currently the third party vendor uses this: expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M In our MySQL instance.

@black3dynamite said in Remote Administration of FreePBX: @scottalanmiller said in Remote Administration of FreePBX: Also gives you (if you use GIT like we do) a record of when the port was opened, why and when it was closed again. How does that work? You commit your change to your local file system on your workstation. Then you commit it to the GIT repo. When you do this, GIT stores your change as well as the previous state of the system and you add a comment when you commit. This gives you a chance to say "Opening port to work on PBX" or whatever. Then when you are all done, change the firewall back, commit it, comment again saying you are done and closing it and it closes itself.

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

Location matters very little. I would stick to the standards.

Suggested edit: We assume that not only does buying the most expensive, most famous products will be judged well compared to less expensive or less well known ones. We can also assume that but that those in Management see buying products is seen as beneficial to not buying products; even though often the best IT decisions are to not buy things when no need exists.

@aaron said in You Cannot Virtualize That: @scottalanmiller said in You Cannot Virtualize That: @aaron said in You Cannot Virtualize That: said in You Cannot Virtualize That: We are long past the point where running systems non-virtualized is considered acceptable /me looks around at servers I think it's ok to not virtualize Doesn't BB cluster their entire farm? I thought virtualization was an effective necessity at that scale. You manage the servers without them being clustered in any way? I thought that the pods were nodes in a single farm Oh they're clustered. I was thinking of a specific pod not being virtualized by itself. As in they aren't running a hypervisor. And we do have virtualized stuff around too. That cluster is really the virtualization, the nodes are below that level. We had another thread discussing this previously. Clusters are not always virtualized at the node level because the node is like the CPU, not a server and the entire cluster is really the computer and the cluster manager is the real hypervisor. Workloads run on the cluster, not on the nodes. Each node remains replacable as just part of the overall "Computer" which is, virtualized.

@StuartJordan said in My First Server: Build Basics: Good post Scott and very relevant. Thank you, sir.

I'm building out a Starwind SAN for this. It's partially done. But I've been traveling.

@Jimmy9008 keep in mind that resulting availability and risk aren't the same thing. Any five nines system is expected to hit six nines nine out of ten years. It's the average over the operating lifespan, not over a set interval. Otherwise any normal interval that you select would have 100% uptime. So there are two ways to look at it reasonably... Resulting Availability Over Operational Lifetime Expected Availability Over Operational Lifetime The first is what an individual system actually provides. The second is the average of all systems configured identically, over all of their operational lifetimes. The first you measure. The second you project with simulations. In extremely large systems, like BackBlaze, they get close approximations to the later through measurement because they look only at small components (like hard drives) of which they have substantiation numbers to create a reasonable approximation to a full number. When I was on Wall St., we had 80,000 servers in our pool and so we had actual risk and availability numbers for the industry in datacenters like ours. But it still only told us about a handful of server models, and only under our exact conditions. And it still took a decade or more to produce meaningful numbers, and those numbers only applied to the servers of the past, not the ones being installed new.

This one has been intended for years, but never bubbled to the top of the writing list.

This one was fun. IT leader: “Wow, I think this developer is great.” HR: “Really? What do they do?” IT leader: “They built this excellent application.” HR: “Well, are they better than the other developer who built ten applications?” IT leader: “That depends on what you mean by 'better.'” After all...that 1 application happened to be called Google.

@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.

@s.hackleman said I see where he is coming from. Asking a question on this forum can be intimidating. For me personally I love it, I like being proven wrong, I like going to head to head. I have never won a debate with @scottalanmiller, and I like that, I learn from it. From what I have gathered in life a vast majority of people don't like this feeling, and take it personally. Same here. In fact, there was a little bit where I slowed in asking questions, because of the BS some people posted against me. But that didn't last long. I said "F IT" and just posted what I wanted to. I'm here to learn and grow, and if people don't like it, they can ignore me. Most people here are happy to help.

I usually just power off the server, yank all the drives out, mix em all up and put em back in. I also enjoy testing my backups quite often. I'll have to try your method next time!

As with any system, you should always swing back around and re-visit issues. With the help of the group here, and other resources i hope to go over the GPP and see what I can clean up and improve.

@Dashrender said: Interesting question. I still wouldn't say that we are cloud based as a core, because I read core as what I'm doing inside my own walls. It appears that to you core means what your LOB app is. If you asked the owners / doctors what the core function of your IT was... would they think that it was the LOB or that it was.... other stuff? The core is what runs operations, not what IT uses.

How goes your project?

@DustinB3403 said in It Gets the Job Done: "It gets the job done" could easily fit the bill in the scenario I provided. All solutions work, and are OS agnostic. Barco Clickshare, AirTame, Mersive Solstice, ChromeCast etc etc. They all work and meet the requirements, some are more expensive than others. But all work and meet the requirements. How much better do "I" have to do than just using "whatever everyone else uses and bought" (no one was ever fired for buying ibm) as the saying goes. Right? That's my point - that you are defining "working" incorrectly. There are two ways to do it. Does it "meet the minimum" or is it "at least attempted to be done well?" No one, outside of IT, ever accepts "doing nothing" as working. It's unique to IT to accept zero evaluation as a guideline for success. If we use normal standards, we'd evaluate if the solution was acceptable based on it being good relative to other options, not evaluated in a vacuum. Imagine a chef getting "pass/fail" on making a hamburger in school. Sure, it was uncooked and unedible, but technically ground meat made it onto a piece of bread. No one, ever, would accept that as "getting the job done" of being a chef. He might not manage to make the best burger, but he'd be expected to try and do better than just slapping meat on bread. If he didn't, it would be considered a fail.

It's amazing how many of these bloatware security issues have come up in the past two weeks since we had the comment made of "is removing bloatware worth it" in that one thread.

LOL, indeed.

Tab Mix Plus

Excellent topic To add fuel to the fire (though it might have been mentioned already below) It simplifies the transition between models and makes of laptop. I like to "generic windows-ify" all my installs so that you use all the MS stuff to manage wifi etc. Then the only transitions you need to coach users on is to new windows versions.

Going to have a play once the VL has been added.

@Obsolesce said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom: @scottalanmiller said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom: Peer-reviewed my behind… This post represents a complete and total spew of utter garbage. Really??? Emotional reactions to “the problem”?? “An IPOD”?? Even suggesting (though not “our best option” dumping all your brand new equipment and moving to a single host?? Please focus on removing your introspective nears and pathetic sarcasm to a minimum. You couldn’t smell the manure stink more had you forcefully shoved your head inside an elephants rear end…. Do the world of Actual IT Professionals a favor and take your biased disinformation to a place where no-one else can be poorly and deceitfully guided by it. Sincerely, – The World of Truth and Reason Emotional reactions such as this guys whole post... nothing but emotion, zero rationale. It sounds like someone wasted a million dollars of company money and is trying discredit reality. It's called "reverse rationalization" in psychology context. Humans want to believe that we are rational, logical creatures. But most of our decisions are emotionally based and made faster than we can rationalize them. Then, when our decisions are questioned, we go back and our brains try to remember there being logic that we used to make the decision. If there is logic, we recall that logic. When there isn't logic, our brain freaks out and either constructs false logic to make it seem rational, but that often makes it seem even more crazy to outsiders looking at us spouting gibberish. And if our own brains realize the gibberish or this is pointed out, it can actually trigger the fight or flight response when all logic shuts down and we just panic.

@hobbit666 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge: Might be suggesting a 3rd party review of the solution so look out for an E-mail NTG @Minion-Queen waits with baited breath.