@BRRABill said in Linux: Using Top:

@scottalanmiller

But "respecting it" means nothing.

In WIndows, pressing a key for a function only does that function, or nothing.

I am taking about, for example, in top where

m

and

M

do two totally different things.

Right, an in WIndows it always does two different things. If you keep using it in places where both do nothing, you can make ANYTHING into "not sensitive". But that logic, nearly every letter on the keyboard does the same thing - nothing. So you just told me that WIndows isn't "key sensitive". See why that makes no sense?

@jmoore said in The Motivations of Sales:

I get that. I just know some are better at it than others. Just seems that it would be in a company's best interest to only have someone trained deal with salespeople if that were possible of course.

Right, but the theory is that the term for those people is "IT". Only the IT staff has the possibility of being this role, because if you had someone able to do this role that wasn't IT, they should be IT.

@scottalanmiller said in Always Virtualize Domain Controllers:

@black3dynamite said in Always Virtualize Domain Controllers:

It would help if Microsoft would also recommend to always virtualize domain controllers.

They do. They've been really clear on that from everything that I have seen.

Last recommendation seen on microsoft official docs - maybe the italian ones: virtualize the AD first instance, keep a phisical one as second instance...

don't understand the logic of this. but hey: their offical business support said I was not allowed to virtualise more than 2 VMs on hyper-v, even if there were linux 😕

Simplistically speaking, when it doesn't work.
If it works, then it's a backup.
If it does not work, then it's a waste of time and disk space.

@scottalanmiller is right. The bottleneck is always the customer router. And not so much bandwidth as much as packets per second. Your dropbox sync is killing your phone calls 50 to 1 over bandwidth 99% of the time. Your $50 linksys router can't handle a million pps.

Most ISP's are little more than Broadsoft resellers with no interconnects in their local market. Even on the WISP side speeds are so good now that bundling voice isn't relevant.

Never used this but take a look...

http://www.smikar.com/

@Dashrender said in What Does Calling an Application Mission Critical Mean:

@scottalanmiller said in What Does Calling an Application Mission Critical Mean:

Knowing that the business was not taking their systems seriously might be the most important thing that he gleaned from this.

While I see what you're saying... I just don't buy it. the chances that a person would read your post and turn around and return to management and instead of being in a panic over patching say - hey, this is your bloody fault.. now what are you going to do about making sure this doesn't happen again? the answer is only SAM would do that, not another person I know personally.

You base the value on what you see as people likely doing, and there is rational to that. I'm basing it off what they are empowered to do. I like to give more options, faster. How they choose to leverage that is then up to them, but the info that they need is in their hands.

@crustachio said in The Most Needed Skills in IT:

I enjoyed this section of the article:

The second big skill needed in IT departments today is an understanding of business – both business in general and the business referring to the specific business of their own organization. As I said at the beginning of this article, IT is a business enabler. If IT professionals do not understand how IT relates to their business they will be poorly positioned to valuate IT needs and make recommendations in the context of the business. Everything that IT does it does for the business, not for technology and not for its own purposes.

With that in mind, what are some recommendations to improve one's business acumen from an IT perspective?

Hypothetical scenario: Someone has worked at a small IT shop for years and is a comfortable sysadmin, but is considering an IT administrative position at a much more "corporate" environment. Their role will involve a lot more interfacing with other departments or agencies, as well as driving "big picture" projects and purchasing decisions.

What resources could they use to improve their understanding of how to fit in in the business realm, and to develop the proper understanding of IT in such an environment? Are there any particularly good books on this subject?

This is an area where university classes can be really beneficial, if you have access to the right ones. Classes on communications, business, accounting, psychology and such can be huge. There are three main areas that I can think of that really matter:

Understanding people Understanding communications Understanding business

And you might add on the more specific "understanding THE business" as well.

The more that you have any of these, the easier things get. Even if you are a great communicator, if you don't understand the business and its needs at all, you won't have much to communicate.

I don't know of any specific books around this. Maybe things like Open University or something would have resources.

@coliver said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@wirestyle22 said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@JaredBusch said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@EddieJennings said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@coliver said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@EddieJennings said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

I know there is a best practice that discourages an environment with only one domain controller.

Why? Do you really need two domain controllers? How many authentications are you doing? How much downtime can you afford? Would it be better to have a single domain controller on a VM that you can backup and restore in a few minutes versus having two running at all times?

Why = because a document from Microsoft said so and at the time when I made our domain I didn't know any better :).

What you're asking me is what I'm asking myself, which moves me to the conclusion that when it's time to make the VM for the accounting software, the old box should just go away. Especially since my tiny number of users would be able to log into their workstations with cached credentials until I can get the domain controller VM functioning again.

Who cares what some paper from the company selling you the licensing says.

What does your company need?

I have never used two domain controllers in the SMB space. Even before virtualization at my clients.

It is simply not something needed.

You don't think the downtime justified the cost for a SMB I'm assuming and load balancing isn't a concern

Rarely is downtime worth the cost of mitigating it in an SMB environment. They often don't actually understand what the true cost of downtime is and exaggerate it more often then not. If you're getting enough requests that you're hitting a performance threshold on the domain controller then you may be out of the SMB space.

And authentication often has a near zero impact for short durations. A DC down could easily go 30 minutes and literally have no one notice.

Good read, thanks.

Too many people become enthralled in learning the technology they want to work with and seem to forget the purpose for the technology in the first place. Active Directory is great, and knowing how to setup, troubleshoot, and administer it is fantastic. But what's the reason for it? Centralized management, which allows for greater control and efficiency in the business. It's a problem of being taught facts without understanding the context behind those facts, and that's a problem that affects the job industry as a whole, not just IT, although IT is usually the field where it's most dramatically seen. People going for finance or business management understand that their tasks are to suit the business needs, and the skills they bring to the table are to serve that purpose. But IT seems to go down this rabbit hole that the technology is king above all else, forgetting what the purpose of the technology is in the first place.

@StrongBad said in The Agony and Ecstasy of RAID:

Is this a #tbt ?

Sure feels that way.

@emad-r said in Automatically Add New Vultr Fedora Minion to Salt Master:

@scottalanmiller said in Automatically Add New Vultr Fedora Minion to Salt Master:

If you are using Vultr as your VPS or Cloud Computing IaaS platform, then you have some simple tools to make automating a Salt Minion installation even easier. Vultr allows for "boot scripts" which run upon initial VM creation, along with their automatically installed system keys. Adding a tiny script can make all of the difference between needing to set up a new VM and having the entire process be totally automated.

Here is an example script that you can use. Notice that this is for Fedora and uses DNF. You will need a similar script for APT, YUM or other package management systems.

#!/bin/sh dnf -y install salt-minion echo "master: you.salt.master" >> /etc/salt/minion systemctl restart salt-minion systemctl enable salt-minion

That's all that it takes. Select the script when building your VM(s) and look for them to auto-populate in your Salt Master's key request list.

But what will be the ID/name of this Fedora instance in salt master ?

LOL, I got confused. Was thinking we were on Sodium, not salt.

It'll be your hostname.

@jaredbusch said in Install NextCloud 11 on Fedora 25 with SaltStack:

@scottalanmiller why install a proxy when Apaches here and working what is the benefit to having a proxy on the same server. Let’s Encrypt perfectly with Apache

Security and flexibility typically. Here is the admitted marketing material from Nginx on security: "Security and anonymity – By intercepting requests headed for your backend servers, a reverse proxy server protects their identities and acts as an additional defense against security attacks. It also ensures that multiple servers can be accessed from a single record locator or URL regardless of the structure of your local area network."