@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:

@jt1001001 said in VDI Options - Modernization:

@jimmy9008 We have a use case involving a legacy client/server app that we've determined we're going to have to go VDI for in order to secure it. One lousy app for approx 5 users that I hope we eventually move away from. We are currently reviewing Azure VDI for this and it so far will fit the bill though we had to go throught a lot of "hoops" to configure networking, VPN back into our infrastructure, etc. We have not yet presented budget numbers to the bean counters but Im hoping when we do they will see the $$$$$ wasted for 5 users and will force them to a new product.

What other products do you plan to look at? Still VDI or something else? Any experience of VMWare Horizon?

We have around 600 - 1000 users globally (mostly developers) on the VDI I need to replace. The company dictates that the VDI must be in the same datacenter as the rest of the developers environments, so I don't think Azure VDI would work for us because of that mandate.

If you have a solution that works, and at the moment VDI is a must, then it makes no sense to change the fundamentals of what you already have. That's just an unwarranted risk.

So keep Citrix and VMware as is. Just replace the hardware and consolidate it. You are only averaging 16 cores per physical server and 370GB RAM per server if my math is correct. You could easily cram 3 to 8 times as much into each server. 128 cores per server is nothing special today as well as several TBs of RAM. AMD is the leader and the way to go.

You could replace your 20 servers and have 384 cores and up to 12TB of RAM with only three Dell R6525 or R7525 dual CPU servers. You might want 4 or more though. But no need to go to blades when you only need a couple of servers. No need for complex hypervisor management solutions either when you only have a couple of servers.

Use vSAN instead of SAN for the VDI. With the proper drives these servers are certified for ESXi and vSAN. You should use U2 NVMe drives and avoid SAS. It will outperform your old SAN - by a lot.

Since you have 1 PB of data, storage for non-VDI workloads needs to be researched. I think I would want to separate VDI from the rest. Gut feeling would be to have completely separate physical environments for everything VDI related and the rest. Consolidation is good but overconsolidation can be too risky.

@jimmy9008

What I've seen large corporations do is to retire their VDI solutions and find other ways to fulfill whatever they were trying to accomplish with VDI.

So it makes sense asking what your trying to accomplish with VDI and looking at other ways to accomplish it.

Any centralized solution will have limited scalability by it's very nature of being centralized. That goes for your VDI solution too.

@dashrender said in printing notes section of Calendar Outlook on the web:

I have a user who wants to print what's written into the notes section of a calendar entry. Unfortunately, it's more than one page, and when you ctrl ^ P you only get the first page worth.

Outlook-on-the-web is pretty thin on printing features. I logged in and tried a couple of different ideas but couldn't find a way to print a long event description either. It is what it is I guess.

We use Zoho primarily and as a comparison Zoho's calendar lacks rich text formatting in the description but render links and will print multiple pages of description - if you pick print while viewing an event, not ctrl+p.

Gmail on the other hand will also print several pages of the description - if you pick print on an appointment, not ctrl+p. It supports rich text formatting but will drop the formatting when printing.

@dashrender said in printing notes section of Calendar Outlook on the web:

As a side note - I don't believe it's actually called the notes area - when I Google for this, the term note always leads me to the yellow sticky type of notes under OneNote within the calendar in Outlook on the Web, so If you know the better term for this area in a calendar entry that would be helpful as well.

You're referring to the event's description. That's what Microsoft calls it.

It even says add a description when it's empty.

@gjacobse said in Free Hosted Help Desk?:

"Free Hosted" doesn't mean it's the right thing. But in many cases - you can beat it to work for you. Just depends on the work and stress you want to deal with, what you want to give up and what you will never have..

I'd go as far to say that the "free" version is seldom the right thing. Often the reason to look for a solution in the first place is to become more effective and spend less time on something. Just stepping up to the first paying tier usually gets you a lot of features that will save you time for a very modest monthly cost.

@notverypunny said in Chrome OS Flex:

Anyone tried it out yet?

https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/

No, but I might when they have worked out the kinks.

Here are a list of supported PCs that Google have tested:
https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11513094

@scottalanmiller said in Free Hosted Help Desk?:

@dbeato said in Free Hosted Help Desk?:

@pete-s If for internal helpdesk, Zoho is okay but for a business that does manage other customers not so much.

Same experience. Tried Zoho (as we use it for everything else) and it's only so so for external clients.

We use Zoho Desk but we are on the highest tier so we can have unlimited departments, full customization of every department and automate everything that the lower tiers can't.

While we're not doing helpdesk for other companies, I can't really see where it would fall short if you did. But maybe there is a feature missing that you needed and we don't use.

EDIT: @scottalanmiller Maybe I misunderstood - what do you mean by "external clients" Scott?

@hobbit666 said in Free Hosted Help Desk?:

Zoho offer some good free stuff.

Yes, they have Zoho Desk. I'm not sure what you get with the free version but it's worth checking out.

Zoho also have ManageEngine ServiceDesk but that is a different league.

They also have Zoho Connect which can be used for team task management and collaboration - if you just want to keep track of things. I think @scottalanmiller has experience with Zoho Connect.

@siringo said in Free Hosted Help Desk?:

Wondering if anyone is aware of a reasonable, free, hosted helpdesk system?

Doesn't need to be fancy, it's for a school so the staff can log jobs.

They won't be needing any in depth reports, maybe just be able to print out lists of completed, incomplete, unstarted jobs, stuff like that.

With thanks.

Doesn't really sound like those needs align with a helpdesk system.

Sounds like a task or project management system for a team would be better suited. There are millions of those. Asana just to name one.

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@pete-s yeah that is what I'm feeling as well. . . sadly. This really needs to be somehow capable with the tooling, even if I'm not able to implement it.

I haven't heard of BrightGauge before. Maybe it's big in the market, I don't know.

Regardless of that, it looks very capable on their website but that's because that's what marketing does - makes things look good.

The actual technical capability of the product is unknown until it's put to use. In your case unfortunately it looks like the product can't get the job done.

Maybe you're trying to hammer with a screwdriver or the hammer you have is just crap. In either case the support should be able to help you.

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@pete-s Thank you for the help, unfortunately it appears I'm limited to PostgresSQL regex like below or directly selecting the installed software from the list of thousands of items.

I have no options for a subquery, at least that I can see at the moment.

Yeah, well you're not going to find a regex solution. Simply because you need to look at several rows of information to determine if the computer has software or not. That's why it's not going to work.

If you could put have all the software into one column then you could use regex to find the rows that doesn't have the software installed. So if you had a string with "Microsoft,Libre,MyTax,Anti-virus " you could use regex on that and it would work fine.

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@scottalanmiller PostreSQL regex

It's easy to solve this problem with SQL - if that is a possibility.
You just need to use a subquery.

I'm assuming a table that contains one column with computer name and another with software installed. One row for each software installed.

For example a query to find all computers that have the software installed:

select computer_name 
from yourtable
where 
   software_installed='Microsoft' or
   software_installed='Anti-virus'
group by computer_name

Now we'll use that as a subquery to show all the computers that doesn't have the software installed:

select computer_name from yourtable
where 
   computer_name<>(
      select computer_name from yourtable 
      where 
         software_installed='Microsoft' or 
         software_installed='Anti-virus'
      group by computer_name
   )
group by computer_name

The group by is to show a computer name just one time, even if you have several rows that contains that name.

Note: Syntax errors probably included in my examples.

@scottalanmiller said in Need Regex Help:

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@scottalanmiller PostreSQL regex

Oh wow, I've never used regex in a database before. No idea of that syntax or where/when you'd use it.

It either used for string manipulation or string matching.

From the top of my head with syntax errors included.

For example manipulating strings (convert email to domain name)

select name, regexp_match(email,'.+@(.+)') as domain
from customers

For example matching to a simple regexp (all customers that have the has John somewhere in their name):

select * from customers where customer_name ~ 'John'

@fredtx said in Job offer:

I just received an offer yesterday evening, and have all weekend to think about it. Not sure if this should be a new post, but it's definitely related, and wanted some feedback from the community.

Currently work at an MSP as support engineer, and have been here a year. Gained lots of experience with different technology, including getting my feet wet with some azure ad stuff. I received offer for a growing logistics company as a network admin. However, I will mostly be racking and stacking at the new facilities the company is buying so it will require travel across the country every other month, depending how fast these new facilities are bought out. Their offering me a guarantee 85K with 10 percent annual bonus. At my current job, I'm getting guaranteed 65K with quarterly incentives, which make it close to 70K.

Pros: 20K more than what I'm getting now. Will be my first time employed with an internal IT team vs msp team. It's a fast growing company, so may have some opportunities to implement some stuff in their environment.

Cons: Lots of their infrastructure is managed by various 3rd parties such as msp. Seems like I would be a "rack monkey" as my friend describes it even though my job title is "network admin". Would be away from my family every once in awhile for weeks at a time. Also a pro for me because I'll be visiting new states I haven't been to.

FYI: I will ask my current employer if they would counter, which I highly doubt they will. Also I have another interview lined up Monday with another company, which will require no travel. So I've got some options, and negotiations to do this coming week.

Thoughts?

Go for it. Sound like there is growth opportunity in the job and in the company.

I don't think it's actual bench work as in crawling behind racks for days at end and pulling fiber. You'll have other guys doing that - if the volume is large. If it's just a few things, well, who cares?

@dashrender said in O365 - send as Alias:

MS has finally brought Send as Alias to O365.

https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/send-from-alias/

It's mind blowing that O365 didn't have that option since day one.

@gjacobse said in Windows Path Variables:

I have a confusing issue with Windows Path Variables. I have a script - that had been working - but is now not. Troubleshooting the issue has left me perplexed.

My original script was:

robocopy "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default" "d:\_folder-it\Chrome-Default" /xa:sh /xjd /r:5 /w:5 /tee /np

However, it errors with;

2022/02/11 11:08:45 ERROR 3 (0x00000003) Accessing Source Directory C:\Users\MYUserName\%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\
The system cannot find the path specified.

I've been using the common variables so it doesn't make much sense...

Am I just missing something really simple?

Probably a permission and account issue. For instance what user or system account is robocopy running under?

Always try it by changing things such as instead of running robocopy do a dir of the directory and save it to a file or something similar. You'll find the problem by testing and excluding.

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@dashrender said in Need Regex Help:

Is there anyway to pull the data out so you can use the tools you want?

I want to use BrightGauge because I dont want to have to handle the data on an on-going basis. But yes I could export the data, and filter it down to show me just the "These don't have that" in excel which, that is actually already done.

But its still incredibly annoying to have to review.

The end goal is to have a list of systems that are simply lacking one piece of software or another, and to not have to view everything other piece of software with it. So that the lacking software can be installed.

You could pull the data same as BrightGauge does, have a script do something to it and then send it into BrightGauge but it's another level of difficulty.

Have you contacted support? They might have another way of accomplishing it.

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

@pete-s I can't use grep for this specific function as I'm limited regex or known string searching only through BrightGauge.

If you can't make scripts to massage the data in BrightGauge, I don't think it's possible.

@dustinb3403 said in Need Regex Help:

Hey all,

I need some help with some regex, which I admittedly never use in my day to day.

The goal is I want to search a list of software across multiple systems and key in on 3 specific names and only list the systems that specifically don't have any of those 3 names.

IE

Computer Name | Application
bobs-pc | Microsoft
bobs-pc | Libre
bobs-pc | MyTax
Sarahs-pc | Anti-virus
Sarahs-pc | MyTax
Sarahs-pc | Libre

The output I would like to list

Bobs-pc since it doesn't have Anti-Virus and Sarahs-PC because it doesn't have Microsoft.

Anyone able to help me sort this out?

You can also use grep for that. An inverted search (-v) will give you all the lines that doesn't contain your search string.
grep -v searchstring file

And if you have multiple search strings:
grep -v "search1\|search2\|search3" file
or
grep -v -E "search1|search2|search3" file

Or maybe not when I closer at your file.

You will actually not be able do this with grep or regex or any other simple utility in a simple way.
You will need a script for this.

@dashrender said in Centralized Log Management:

i.e. I fork ES - I update it with my own code - call it "ES of Mine" I publish ES of Mine - don't I have to give all of my new code away because I used ES as the base?

No, you don't when you're not providing the software. Amazon is providing the service, not the software. So they don't need to adhere to GPL and similar licenses.

That's why Richard Stallman (open source guru) calls SaaS, service as a software substitute.