I set up DirectAccess over the weekend, and it only took me about 40 minutes. Server 2012's implementation is absurdly quick and easy for a basic single-server deployment. It even creates the necessary GPOs for you. All you need to do is select the group of computers it applies to and tweak any related DNS resolution table entries. If you want to go into a more advanced deployment, it could potentially get a bit more involved.

It's location-aware and doesn't enable itself when it can see the corporate network. The moment I switched over to an external network, DA engaged. If you have software assurance on your computers, you really should be considering this. While I haven't tested any quirky legacy applications with it, typical file services and use cases seem to work fine. If you test it and don't like it, you can use the same wizard to pull out the entire configuration, GPOs and all.

Having used both, they're really for different environments. Pertino's good for accessing other computers directly. DirectAccess is good for accessing infrastructure. If you're in a workgroup setup, Pertino would be great. You get the unstructured cross-communication that you'd expect. If you're on a domain, DirectAccess shines. You get timely connectivity to your environment when you need it, and don't need to modify any of your other servers or devices. I'm sure that as both technologies evolve and mature, things may change, but for now, that's how I've experienced it.

You may want to consider looking for "Infrastructure Specialist" roles. Typically those are the server/networking/desktop admin type of jobs, with less management and less helpdesk. It's not a specialized role per se, but does prune certain aspects away. You'll typically find them in companies with IT teams of 3-5 people or so.

I forgot to mention... One trick is to use NFS and plop a replica of the Veeam server on the device as well. That way, should your hosts fail, you're ready-to-recover with basically any ESXi host with no messing around. Mount the datastore, spin up the VM, and Veeam's ready to rumble. Add 2 drives when needed to create another volume, and you can even do the restore and temporarily run your workload (albeit IOPS-bound) on the Synology.

For pure proxy (using local cache to offload WAN bandwidth constraints), HTTPS isn't usually proxied. In theory, it's session-specific, so caching it would be a waste of resources, and only serve to slow the user's experience down.

For filtering, I typically use a device or service that provides transparent HTTPS inspection. Personally, I've had good luck with Sopohos UTM and the late Forefront TMG. Squid by design isn't a filter, and they say as such. They then go on to mention that if you want to use it as a filter anyway, use SquidGuard. I guess the question is: What are you looking to achieve by using the proxy?

@technobabble said:

Looking for tool to do an internal audit of Microsoft licensing for a client. What do you guys recommend.

Take a look at the Microsoft Assessment Planning Toolkit (MAP). It's what's recommended by Microsoft. It uses WMI for scanning, so you'll want to make sure you have the firewall exceptions for it enabled.

@ejmillen said:

Dude youre getting a Dell Stuck around for a long time!! Still get that every once in a while

It would have lasted even longer if Steven didn't get busted for pot!

@FiyaFly said:

If you don't want to deal with a lot of customers/users, you will probably want to try to hit the engineer level in my opinion. I spend a lot of time on the front lines, as it were. I still don't entirely know which direction I am pursuing in the IT field, but I am keeping wide open to suggestions.

Even for non-customer facing, IT is a wide field. You can be a programmer, an engineer, system admin. When I was focusing on certs, I was intending to get a cert for A+, Network+, and Security+. That is where I intended to start, and that will almost certainly help you to get a foot up.

Hope this helps.

Engineering's still very customer-facing, whether it's internal customers or external customers. It just isn't about answering the phones and dealing with end users. I daresay that spending time on a helpdesk helps with some career skills, such as learning about different types of people and how to interact with them. It also gives you a solid foundation so that as you're designing systems, you have the insight to see how it would impact the end-users. Jumping right into Engineering/Systems makes you more of a 30,000 foot tech pilot with no idea how to land the plane.

If you're smooth enough, you could get them to pick up an Office ProPlus subscription through Office 365, which would get them to current by means of "upgrade" to the modern, yet legal version.

Multitasking is a great way to nibble at things without making solid progress in any of them. Humans are designed to work on one thing at a time. The key is breaking down things into manageable chunks that you can get through one at a time. That way, you can work on chunks of different projects, yet still be able to give each chunk your full attention. Some of what I say may sound familiar. It's part of the Getting Things Done method. For more information, check out http://gettingthingsdone.com. I've been a practitioner for 4 years, and it's turned my ability to handle workload right around.

Sorry for being a bit late to the party. I'm quite a fan of Webroot. The low system utilization is quite impressive. It's quite unobtrusive. The IE plugin's a little slow, but if you have a gateway filtering device, it's less needed. What really impressed me was how quick they are to react to new threats. On average, they protect against new threats within 3 hours of my submissions.

@Carnival-Boy said:

Out of interest, why is your client moving?

With mailboxes that large, I can only imagine the Outlook sync has issues at best.

@scottalanmiller said:

http://opensource.com/business/14/4/open-source-community-beats-tech-support

Company's tend to like support because it gives them someone to blame, not because it actually provides support or makes them more money. It is generally about middle managers playing politics trying to protect themselves, not about doing what is best for the business - either in cost or in ability to support the products. How often do you see commercial support actually being worth the money (outside of hardware support contracts?)

I couldn't imagine running an LOB application or anything mission-critical without proper support. If it goes down, the company's losing thousands of dollars per hour. I'm not going to put a post up somewhere in hopes that someone'll give me the appropriate answer in a reasonable timeframe.

OWA isn't the same thing as Outlook. At least give Outlook a try. At this point, you don't know if it's a limitation with OWA, or if there's something else going on.

@technobabble said:

Looking for tool to do an internal audit of Microsoft licensing for a client. What do you guys recommend.

Take a look at the Microsoft Assessment Planning Toolkit (MAP). It's what's recommended by Microsoft. It uses WMI for scanning, so you'll want to make sure you have the firewall exceptions for it enabled.

@Dashrender said:

An RPO/RTO question is a lot more difficult to answer than one might expect. I'm sure that Alex and Scott have a linty of questions that can make it easier, but for a company that hasn't ever looked at these questions before it's likely they have no real understanding of how to answer these requests.

When I first started with my company I was told that we could live without our brand new EHR for 6 days (the downtime the vendor told us we'd suffer if we had a total server failure). The vendor at the time refused to provide installation media/files (they built then shipped the servers to us) and all we had for backups were SQL level backups.

I approached the board with a plan to provide better options, but at that near day one the board stated that 6 days of downtime considering the current setup was acceptable. Of course I nearly passed out that this consider I'd been supporting their phones for the past 4 years and they were nearly unbearable when their phones wouldn't sync for a day to their calendars.

Fast forward a year and a few minor outages later, the tune changed and we could now only afford one day of downtime, so they approved the purchase of Appasure, and we reduced our downtime to a few hours.

Back to the point at hand, if the Docs in technobabble's case haven't experienced downtime in the past they will have unrealistic expectations of either uptime or tolerable downtime.

For RTO, the easiest way to ask it is, "If X fails, how long can the business be without it before it severely impairs the business?" For some folks, it's a few hours, or even more than a day. For others, it's less. For RPO, it's, "If we need to roll back to backups, how far back can we recover to in an emergency without causing undue data loss?" Most folks are ok with the previous night's backup, but not quite everyone. The longest it's ever taken me to determine RPO/RTO has been about 30 minutes.

Does it work normally with Outlook?

@StefUk said:

hi I m doing a migration for a client that is moving from google apps to office 365. So far so good but I ve just checked their mailboxes size and some ( about 8-10 out of 45 ) are about 35-40 Gb in size. They want to move to the mid size business not the E plan ...
as far as size is concerned they are aware they will need to reduce the size of the mailbox soon ( as 50Gb ) limitation.

Is there anything to watch out for when migrating such a massive mailbox ? I m not sure how much time it will take or if it would be easier to do it staged ? any pointers much appreciated !! ;o)

Pity, if they went EOP2 or E3, they'd have unlimited archive storage.

Oh, heck no! There's no way I'm dealing with tickets off-hours unless it's a major work-stoppage emergency. Emergencies happen, sure, put those fires out. Sometimes after-hours maintenance comes up, and sure, I'll do what's needed.

Except for timelines (which I try not go give), my word's spot-on.

If it makes CBeyond suck less, I'm all for it!

@technobabble said:

@Nara
RDS

In that case, why not an RDS Gateway? Combine it with RD Web Access, and you have an easy portal for users to access their RDS sessions with while still keeping things secure.