Posts made by AdamF

@scottalanmiller said in UNMS Cloud:

Yes, we've been using it for a little while. Maybe four months.

Yeah I just put one device on it. Looks awesome to me. I just need to migrate my devices now.

Is anyone using UNMS cloud? I host my own UNMS server, but UNMS cloud is now free if you have 10-5000 devices.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@fuznutz04 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@fuznutz04 Time to get FIBER!?! $$

Issues are with the carrier, not the medium. Comcast Fiber has the same problems as Comcast copper.

Yeah, I would be inclined to agree, but I have fiber at that location as well, just another person is using it. It is fine, and has been for years. Comcast cable in the area is terrible, but fiber seems rock solid.

@fuznutz04 Time to get FIBER!?! $$

Dealing with a Comcast issue at my office. Comcast guy onsite. They were onsite yesterday and replaced the modem. Same issue occurring today.

@JaredBusch said in DynamicDNS service:

@fuznutz04 said in DynamicDNS service:

I personally have used afraid.org. Are there any other good ones?

That is who I use.

I use afraid.org, but if I remember correctly, that is updated via my Edgerouter. Their site looks like they have some Windows clients as well. Not very nice looking clients, but clients.

@Pete-S said in DynamicDNS service:

@JaredBusch said in DynamicDNS service:

@Pete-S said in DynamicDNS service:

@fuznutz04 said in DynamicDNS service:

A few of our employees are connecting to our PBX, and for whatever reason, their public IP changes frequently.

Why do you need dynamic DNS for that?

To let them through the firewall.

OK, I understand, but why do you need to do that? You connect to public SIP accounts without the provider whitelisting your IP. You also connect to web servers without whitelisting. What's different with the PBX?

So I am using FreePBX in this case. If the FreePBX responsive firewall would work properly, this would be a non issue. BUT, it frequently bans people. Randomly so it seems. The only sure fire way to have them stay connected is to whitelist their IP.

What is a recommended DynamicDNS service? Preferably free and easy to use. A few of our employees are connecting to our PBX, and for whatever reason, their public IP changes frequently. I on the other hand, with my ISP, have had the same public IP for years now. Is there and easy to use (for the employee) free service that the employee can use? Perhaps an app runs on their computer to detect the change and then updates the dns name accordingly?

I personally have used afraid.org. Are there any other good ones?

@JaredBusch I had Windstream do this to me once. Such a stupid move on their part.

Signing paperwork for new Comcast service at our new office location.

woo hoo! Data caps removed from my home internet plan. Now to download ALL THE THINGS.

Windows: "No, I will not allow you to delete these partitions because reason xyz!."
Me: "Oh really? Breaking out the big guns."
Me: (inserts ultimate boot CD USB stick with linux partition tools)
Linux: "oh you want to delete these partitions?
Me: "Yes"
Linux: "Done"

@EddieJennings said in MangoCon 2020 Hotel Details:

Don't be tempted to stay at Holiday Inn Las Colinas. It's a bit of a walk

Agreed. I think I stayed there last year and the walk was a bit exciting at night.

@scottalanmiller said in DuoLingo Challenge:

@fuznutz04 said in DuoLingo Challenge:

@scottalanmiller How are you liking Mango Languages? I started it and it is different from DuoLingo, but I like it. It provides variety.

I like it a lot. Totally different system. I use Drops, too.

Agreed. I use the same. I'm also looking for another way to talk with other natives. I have used Tandem before but it is only for iOS or Android. I wish they had a web app.

@scottalanmiller How are you liking Mango Languages? I started it and it is different from DuoLingo, but I like it. It provides variety.

following this thread. Time to test this out on a spare box. I've always steered clear of this due to the feedback on here, but initial research looks like it has some pretty awesome features. The builtin backup features are nice too. And it has an API for even more automation. I like that. Time to spin up a box.

@scottalanmiller said in Greenfield HA environment choices:

@fuznutz04 so what I'm thinking that I am hearing is, and correct me if I am wrong...

1. You perceive platform updates as carrying risk and headache.
2. You want to do platform updates at the riskiest times (prime production) rather than waiting on a greenzone. I assume because you work during prime production and sleep during what would be the greenzone.
3. You run fragile applications that we generally would not consider production ready and don't care about uptime protection on them in general (but don't want unnecessary downtime, either.)

---

This is what I think that I am hearing, both in your descriptions of why you want this feature, as well as your perception that the other company's non-HA solution was "great". You are looking at it as a feature to make IT management easier, so the application availability isn't the factor of concern here.

To that I would say that...

1. Platform updates on systems like KVM are trivially easy, insanely fast, and not a problem at all. You probably only see this as a concern at all because you were running Hyper-V (or VMware) where system updates are problematic. KVM and Xen aren't like this. So if you use them, I think your entire premise for this evaporates.
2. I would simply not do this. Even if I have HA, I wouldn't do it because prime production time is never the time to test your failover systems. Everything fails and HA is a highly risky operation even under ideal conditions and there is no vendor that is completely reliable. Doing off hours maintenance isn't just trivially easy, but it is easily scripted during production hours. Why take on cost and risk that is unnecessary? Just do an update and reboot off hours.
3. This is real and we can't easily work around it. But the decision that these would require off hours support for safety was made at the time of acquisition.

Also, the cost to have an MSP do this for you, if you didn't want to do it, would be far cheaper than the cost of HA. And fix the problems way more thoroughly because it would address everything, not just one piece.

All good points here.

1. Platform updates being risky - I agree with that piece for Windows. We've all been in situations before where a simple update takes forever, and there is not progress on Windows. In all my cases with Windows, it always comes back, but compared to a KVM host update, it can sometimes be a night and day different.
2. Updating during normal business hours - I must have misspoke here. I never do this. I always do update after hours as much as possible.
3. Fragile applications - Yep, this is true in some cases. It's not what you want as the person supporting the ops piece of the puzzle, but sometimes that's what you are working with at the moment.

Taking time to think about this more, the real want for HA stems from fear of the unknown and time to resolution in case of disaster. Example:

I do an update to the host and it bombs for reason X. How fast can I get my backups restored on another host?
A host crashes - Same question. How fast can I restore to another host?
My team is small, can anyone restore properly in a timely fashion?
Would a simple failover system (let's not call it HA, just an automatic failover to another host) be a good solution to be able to keep the VMs running until the failed host is fixed?

All of the points brought up by you and others definitely make me pause and take a step back and really think about what the source of this post really stems from. So thanks for that. Time to think on this a bit more.
(also, now following the Proxmox thread as well )

@scottalanmiller said in Greenfield HA environment choices:

But if you want support, which is always a good idea in production, just ping @Oksana on here.

Is Max still around? I think I met him at Mangocon last year.

@Obsolesce said in Greenfield HA environment choices:

@fuznutz04 said in Greenfield HA environment choices:

I've been thinking a lot about what choice to make if I were to go for a high availability system for VMs.

In a past life, I worked for a medium size software hosting company. They were setup with a full Hyper-V failover cluster, including the standard SAN, etc. It was setup before I got there, but it worked great. The hyper-visors were setup correctly (meaning they used Hyper-V server, NOT the Hyper-V role), they used Cluster Failover manager, etc. Doing system maintenance was a breeze, because I would failover all the VMs to the other hosts, perform updates to the node, and then move them back. This was back when I was using Hyper-V server 2012. As of now, a ton more features are available , including cluster aware updating and Windows Admin center which allows you to manage the whole lot from a web browser. Not too shabby.

So, If you create a cluster with Hyper-V server (not the ROLE), and plan to have only Linux VMs on the cluster, thus eliminating the whole licensing downside to MS, what are the main pros and cons of going with the MS solution, VS something else in the Linux world? I'm not leaning one way or another at this point, but I've been so engrossed in the Linux world for the past couple of years, that MS Hyper-V wasn't even a thought in my mind. But now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not really thinking about any big downsides.

Can't wait to get some good discussion going on this.

Greenfield environment? Totally situational IMO.

What are you running on all of the Linux VMs? What kind of HA do you need? Hardware-level HA? VM level? Site? At what level? App level? Service level (can ping the site, but web app doesn't work)? Network level (everything is up, but nobody can access it)? Etc...? All of them?
Would it make sense to run these services and/apps in the cloud in a likely native HA environment with minimal effort and upfront costs?
It totally depends on what you got going on.

Just wondering.... can you give a specific use case other than just wanting some HA VMs? It's kinda hard to answer generally (for me).

Sure thing. Basically, VM and hardware level. There are plenty of environments and workloads still in existence that are not HA on the application layer. So the ability to provide extra protection from downtime, etc, if the cost is within acceptable budgets, can be worth it.

Example:

• Windows VMs with software that is not designed for shared databases, shared web hosts, etc.

• PBX - Lets say I host a PBX for my company. I want to do maintenance on the node hosting this. I want to do it during the day. I want to live migrate that VM to another node. I don't need application level failover, I just need to move it and not have downtime.

• Any other software/workload that for one reason or another, cannot reasonably be moved to a "true HA" solution.

We all know that the BEST scenario is to build your applications against best practices, allowing for HA type functionality. But what about those businesses who are not ready to make that investment? That's what I was thinking about.

@scottalanmiller said in Greenfield HA environment choices:

@fuznutz04 said in Greenfield HA environment choices:

I was thinking about Starwind.

They make the best VSAN storage layer. Insane performance.

Any idea on pricing?