@coliver said in Dumb question - 2 Post Rack Part Names:

Really should ensure a two post is anchored.

Yeah.. tell me about it. . .

@scottalanmiller said in Out of Band Management - does it mean no keyboard at all:

@JaredBusch said in Out of Band Management - does it mean no keyboard at all:

@scottalanmiller said in Out of Band Management - does it mean no keyboard at all:

@Carnival-Boy said in Out of Band Management - does it mean no keyboard at all:

Well, I'm glad that's been cleared up. You can probably delete the thread now :)

I don't even know what the original thread was!

And that is why you have no concept of what you posted being completely wrong for the context of the thread.

Honestly, it is pretty straight forward if you read the first post.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/13595/out-of-band-management-does-it-mean-no-keyboard-at-all

The first post also contains links back to the thread that @DustinB3403 pulled this from.

I was responding the post quoted, though.

Which was in the context of the entire thread. If you want to cherry pick something, then clearly, state as much. You did not.

Start with old Desktop with Virtualization extension, something that you can install OS and dont have to remove cause of free space or you need it for something else.

Cause learning Linux or Centos or anything else needs environment, and virtualbox can work but it wont allow you play with KVM, and thats for me the big part of the fun.

Also you need to keep learning that means its is process some day you will leave it 4-5 days dormat cause your stuck in an issue the other day bulb lights up mainly due to reading this site and you get back on it.

@JaredBusch said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

@matteo-nunziati said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

@scottalanmiller just a question (sw not hw) why veeam rather than say.. altaro. Just curious!

There is no backup software on this device. It is a storage target. One assumes that @scottalanmiller will be using some base OS that lets you setup basically any type of connectivity.

Ok! Got it wrong! Thanks for clarifying

@msff-amman-Itofficer said in Help me with this Server Purchase (beginner in server hardware) regarding RAID ?:

@scottalanmiller said in Help me with this Server Purchase (beginner in server hardware) regarding RAID ?:

MD RAID

People rave about the new features of BTRFS so I thought can I do it for a new production server in 2017, perhaps I thought by now we will have more people tested it.

They sure do. Phoronix over the weekend: Btrfs Getting RAID 5/6 Fixes In Linux 4.12 Kernel

@NerdyDad said in Deployment Scenarios for the Dell PowerEdge FX:

Its a nice concept, but unless you can purchase more than 2 chassis for ultimate redundancies, your eggs are still in one basket, shared with the storage.

But in IT, eggs in one basket is a good thing, not a bad one. It's better to have your storage in the same basket as your servers, even when doing an IPOD. The worst option is to separate them.

Youtube Video

SuperMicro recommends against RAID on the SuperDOM / SATA DOM modules but fails to explain why:

https://www.supermicro.com/datasheet/datasheet_SuperDOM.pdf

Just a switch, not a server, but it was 12-15 meters above the ground on a steel construction for a 50t indoor crane. Lots of oil and dust, no railing and a dozen pigeons right above me.

Freaking experience. Did I mention that I'm a bit acrophobic? At least at 10 meters and above ;)

@StuartJordan said in My First Server: Build Basics:

Good post Scott and very relevant.

Thank you, sir. :)

Adding in @HPEStorageGuy as we were discussing this exact topic a few minute ago on SW in another thread.

I know a guy who built his own blade unit. Wooden blade enclosure and some simply power supplies and his own fans, then made it allow straight motherboards to slide in so that it make having a handful of systems running in a cluster super cheap. Pointless for production, but for a lab was very interesting.

@Jason said:

@gjacobse said:

@MattSpeller said:

@coliver said:

@MattSpeller said:

@coliver said:

I've had a low success rate with startech devices. They are cheap and when they work they work ok... but most of the time they don't. Even if one had been working fine come in the next day and it doesn't work at all.

Exactly my experience, but I will add that the more complicated the product is the lower it's chances of working properly. It's a sliding scale from "meh, yeah, ok" to "possessed by demons" to "complete and utter failure to chooch"

At a former job we bought a serial to USB from them for a PLC once... never again. It did funky things and inserted random characters into programs. We returned it for a replacement... the second one didn't work at all.

Oh sweet jesus those are the exception. NEVER buy one unless it's straight from these guys. Trust me, I spent years doing electronics engineering programming chips and bit banging

http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Cables/USBTTLSerial.htm

Yea,.. there is a lot of fakers that just won't work on those FTI drivers... ugh.

The driver has a verification software in the download you can check the chip with though.. in Windows 7 the fake ones would still work I believe.

Until FTDI decide to block them again heheh

Just installed this on the Hyper-V Server 2016 instance I setup a couple days ago.

Was previously installed on this hardware under Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, so good to know there were no issues just because of Hyper-V Server 2016.

I was lazy and did not look for a newer version of OMSA, as I had a version on the local network already.

@scottalanmiller said:

You could, but it would require making lots and lots of shares potentially. As opposed to one or two shares with granular permissions.

Ah ok, makes sense.

It is not uncommon to only have servers approved to access the storage listed. So many shops will go in and add a server one by one to enable access. If your servers almost never change, this works pretty well and is extremely secure. You can do this in the firewall too, for even more security. But if you are using DevOps and creating and destroying VMs regularly you will want to automate this in some fashion.

@ryan-from-xbyte said:

In the interest of reliability and compatibility, we opted to only support enterprise level SSDs. We actually only recently supported non-Dell drives because of those same reasons. We started talking with Edge and found a partner who would co-developer firmware to limit the risk to our customers. If Dell makes a firmware change, we didn't want our customers to experience any issues with their drives.

That what made me reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally nervous about non-DELL drives.

Not that anything would happen, but the last thing you need is some change form DELL and then your drives stop working, or booting.

Total BS that they do that, but whatever. It's their company and there are other options.

Right now all my production Linux hosts are on VMs so I have snapshots of the backend infrastructure along with application-level backups of data as needed. Mostly these are EC2 instances running WordPress where I have a base AMI ready to go with offsite BackupBuddy backups. It's served me well in the few times I've had to use it - I can go from a launching an instance to all data recovered in about 15 minutes or less.

With that said, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Veeam's Linux backup works once it's released!

Awesome. Nothing like the feeling of unboxing your new server.

@JaredBusch said in Linux Lab Project: Building a Linux Jump Box:

@scottalanmiller said in Linux Lab Project: Building a Linux Jump Box:

First you would create users and SSH keys and then deploy them to the other boxes that you wish to connect to. This is the core of what makes the Jump Box a Jump Box. This is standard SSH key setup, nothing unique to a Jump Box.

Did you ever make a good write up on creating users and SSH keys? If so, I cannot find it.

I mean, I know how to make and use keys in general. But detail here would be good.

Write up for creating the users on the jump box and getting their SSH keys. Write up for pushing users and keys to other systems that said jump box will be allowing access. Write up for control of said access. Bob and Jill have access to Jump Box. Bob has Access to servers 1 & 2. Jill has access to server 2 & 3.

I know that @scottalanmiller has mentioned in another thread that he has a script to push this all out (question 2). I can only assume that the script has some controls to tell you which server so shove the key and user logon to (question 3).

I thought that screen looked familiar, lol.

@Dashrender said:

Why is a VPN a security risk? because they give you (generally) full access to the network?

Correct. They create unnecessary exposure. Direct access to all hosts (typically) for all protocols and ports. The protections of firewalls and proxies are bypassed. They are generally the least secure form of access because they are the laziest - just expose everything and hope for the best.

+1 for primary application platform on Ubuntu.

If you mean what I think you mean, I use Centos for General server stuff, basically a server that can handle anything or can be more than 1 thing, however for Ubuntu and cause of the snaps, I use Ubuntu for specific roles like :

File server
Or
RockChat server

For specific purpose roles.

@Dashrender said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

Just talked to MS guys. We don't even need the VDA since they are for testing we can just use the MSDN Keys and not worry about licensing.

Assuming you already have a KMS server, you shouldn't need to do anything. The Windows 2008 R2 Server (maybe original 2008 as well) KMS key will authorize Windows 7.

Yeah the MDSN and MSVLSC are seperate. The Volume licensing is for production and the MSDN is for testing purposes only. Granted I don't think it matters too much what key is installed. We have both accounts.

Fujitsu's own numbers suggest that the upgrade (which I checked, would quadruple the cores) would be expected to result in a 10 fold increase in petaflops.... from 10 to 100!! It could "easily" be three times the performance of the top ranked Tianhe-2.

Found it. It was on a random SQL server.

@Carnival-Boy said in Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server:

And I would call him an engineer, regardless of what @scottalanmiller says. The hardest part of the last job was installing the SAS expander card. This is probably trivial once you've done it a couple of times, but our guy hadn't done one before and it did involve a call to HP for help. It seems to be a bit like putting an IKEA sofa

You wouldn't call someone a furniture engineer just because they assemble IKEA stuff, right? My wife doesn't call herself an engineer, but she does that all the time. The definition of engineer is that they design the systems, that's the English word definition, right from Cambridge. Someone that just "puts in a card" isn't designing anything. In fact, they aren't even doing IT work (at that moment), it's just manual labour in the bench space.

https://mangolassi.it/topic/11651/comparing-the-roles-of-engineer-and-administrator