What's really odd about companies that INSIST on stealing software is that if you look at any product, with the right talent you can put together the same software that is probably free and open source. With every paid solution, there is a developing entity out there that is thinking "I want that software but it's too expensive. How can I do the same thing but charge a fraction or better yet, make it free?"... An example, CentOS vs. RHEL.

Those same companies that steal think it is just cheaper and easier to steal. Ironically, it isn't. If you factor in all the legal proceedings from getting hit by an audit, it is neither easier nor cheaper in the end.

@scottalanmiller said in Cisco vs Pfsense preformance for VPN:

@BBigford said in Cisco vs Pfsense preformance for VPN:

One thing Cisco has going for it is that the software is designed for that device, so that it can reach optimal performance.

Kind of. While that's true, it's like old arcade machines, designed to do one task well, not to scale up. The thing that this causes is for them to push low end hardware to its limits. So because Cisco can design for the device, they do. Because they do, they can spend less on having less hardware power.

This is why Ubiquiti does for $95 what Cisco struggles to do at $3,000. Cisco hardware gets expensive to be able to handle the throughput needs. The hardware advantages of generic commodity hardware is orders of magnitude faster than the custom Cisco ASICs at the same prices. And VyOS, pfSense and others are written to that commodity hardware pretty heavily, it's not likely they are being emulated. The software advantage here is only 20% at most. But the hardware advantage is easily 10,000% or more.

That explanation was better than mine. Considering I failed to include any backing content.

Ooooo here's an interesting one. You can't use Hyper-V and VB on the same system, if your BIOS is already setup correctly...

http://www.fixedbyvonnie.com/2014/11/virtualbox-showing-32-bit-guest-versions-64-bit-host-os/#.VypelXpGP1g

Something like this, or via PowerShell...

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter

You'd be surprised at how many GIS places I've worked for that would love that feature. Having said that, every place uses Google Maps. If I need something, I will install it and configure it or have them access something via the web. Don't start including services into the base install.

As bad as it is to question if telemetry would be on a *#$&ing server (I thought things like the Maps service would be obvious... but I digress), I was genuinely questioning if Cortana would make an appearance in WS2016.

@scottalanmiller said in Oh, soft phones...:

Using your phone as a cell phone means you hit the outside line for every call instead of using the network.

What about when you have unlimited minutes on every phone within the US? You made a good point when you're international though.

@scottalanmiller said in Oh, soft phones...:

@BBigford said in Oh, soft phones...:

@scottalanmiller said in Oh, soft phones...:

Using your phone as a cell phone means you hit the outside line for every call instead of using the network.

What about when you have unlimited minutes on every phone within the US? You made a good point when you're international though.

Do you have unlimited bidirectional minutes on your SIP trunks and unlimited lines?

I don't have a good answer to that one... That's getting out of my comfort zone as I don't touch that stuff day to day.

Care to take me to school on that question?

@scottalanmiller said in Oh, soft phones...:

@BBigford said in Oh, soft phones...:

@scottalanmiller said in Oh, soft phones...:

@BBigford said in Oh, soft phones...:

@scottalanmiller said in Oh, soft phones...:

Using your phone as a cell phone means you hit the outside line for every call instead of using the network.

What about when you have unlimited minutes on every phone within the US? You made a good point when you're international though.

Do you have unlimited bidirectional minutes on your SIP trunks and unlimited lines?

I don't have a good answer to that one... That's getting out of my comfort zone as I don't touch that stuff day to day.

Care to take me to school on that question?

Well, normally you have trunks coming in from somewhere to have a connection to the PSTN and you have to pay for that termination. That's not free, even if you are a phone company (although then it might be basically free.) You have to pay for it in some form. Typically you pay for lines, minutes or both. No matter how you pay for it, it is rare that using it when unneeded does not incur a cost or risk of some sort.

Sometimes incoming is free but outgoing is not, though. So it differs. But if anything is "unlimited" then likely there is a line limit so you use external lines up for internal calls. That can get costly quickly.

We don't do anything free, we still have the company pay itself to look good for metrics to the board, works out better in accounting as well I guess. Mostly just metrics.

Per minutes or calls, we're paying for the line only. Now it's really getting confusing because after 10 years we're absorbing the cell company we put up about $20M in cash for. It's simply not viable in the market to compete with smaller companies over about 6 states. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon are the ones everyone is going with. But we aren't getting out of the game, we just aren't selling service. The Big 3 are still paying a ton of money (pretty much 90% of our worth) to our company for traffic. If you make a call within about 500 miles of here on one of those carriers, it touches our network most of the way.

That side of the network is one thing I would love to learn. I do all of the internal stuff for the company (internal networking & systems), whereas that is all customer facing services.

@scottalanmiller said in It's a turrible day. Just turrible!:

@Dashrender said in It's a turrible day. Just turrible!:

I had a friend who worked for a place like that. He was hired on before he learned that. They wanted him to steal the latest version of Lotus Domino, he refused, they really needed it so they did break down and buy it. From that point on, they started looking for his replacement and he was fired 6 weeks later.

Hopefully he documented and reported to the attorney general's office. You cannot fire someone for refusing to commit theft. It's both illegal in the first place and then illegal again.

It sure would make the company BBQ really awkward if he still worked there...

@coliver said in SMB NAS:

When the QNAP array did work it was slow. Seriously slow, we had some quick drive in a RAID 10 array and it was struggling handling even a light load.

It seems like every model I look at, compared to Synology, has a less powerful CPU (maybe half the cores and half the frequency as well), half the RAM, for about 5-10% more in price. Doesn't make sense to buy them in the last couple years, IMO.

@RojoLoco said in SMB NAS:

Definitely don't go with any WD NAS. We have a Sentinel DX4000 here, and it is SSSLLLLOOOOOOOWWWWWWW.

Yeah I told our rep we won't be going with a WD NAS. I love their drives, but their enclosures are not very good.

@scottalanmiller said in SMB NAS:

@BBigford said in SMB NAS:

@scottalanmiller said in SMB NAS:

@BBigford said in SMB NAS:

@coliver said in SMB NAS:

#NeverQNAP. Can this be a thing? I'm making it a thing.

I haven't used QNAP in a while, but I still see them get great ratings. I just stopped using them because they had worse performance on paper and cost more than, say, Synology.

Great ratings from consumers and people who don't enact their SLA. The two week SLA means that no one in a serious business is using them in a serious role... so you have to understand the context of the ratings. Ratings don't tell you very much if you don't know if the ratings are comparative or not.

I was only using the ratings as a reflection of the product itself, not the turn around or customer service. I've had zero interaction with QNAP since I've never had to send one back. If something as small as a 2-bay unit failed, I wouldn't expect much since it is not something that has an agreement for overnight or something. That would exceed the cost of the unit by far I would think..

Even their big rack mount units costing quite a bit of money have a two week

Did not know that, good to know. The last rack NAS I put in place was a Synology RS3614xs+, seemed like a good performing unit after it was all configured. SLA was pretty minimal should we have had a problem.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/RS3614xs+

@Jason said in Oh, soft phones...:

@Dashrender said in Oh, soft phones...:

why do those customers feel like they are locked in?

Because changing phone numbers can be very bad for a business.. heck, It could shut some down..

I would setup two phones. Keep the old number but don't advertise it anymore. Let the people who use it still use it call in, but advertise the new number with customers, the website, Google AdWords, and tell vendors about the update. After a couple solid years of doing that and the old number no longer ringing for an extended period of time, make the switch. If you needed a completely separate system for the old phones for a while, so be it. That's how I'd get away from those hostage takers.

@scottalanmiller said in A thread for ranting...:

@BBigford said in A thread for ranting...:

Painful doesn't feel that way. She thinks Timid is worthless and complains to a point it jeopardizes his job.

It's an HR problem. If she does that and it doesn't jeopardize HER job, the fault is with HR, not with her (directly.)

Since I've started in August, I see people getting fired all the time. It's people with that mentality. As soon as the CEO gets wind of it, you're done. That's a good thing in my experiences here though, if you're a good employee you stick around. But for those that are inappropriate, over the line, and over the top, he'll tear you off like an old band-aid.

I know @scottalanmiller knows a lot about my situation, I'm actually starting to look for other employment already. The money is great here, but there are certain things beyond Painful that I'm having difficulty looking past. I feel like I'm suffocating here. The last job I felt trapped in, it was a rural area and I hated it (my home area in north Idaho). There is very little work up there. So I said screw it; quit my job, moved to southern Idaho (Boise is the capital and has lots of work in tech. Tons of people work for Micron but you need a degree). Also decided to go to school down here in a great program. Not out of necessity, but because I've always wanted to get a degree and at 28 I finally am.

I know this is a public forum, so I'm trying to keep this as work friendly as possible...

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise SSD selection:

@BBigford said in Enterprise SSD selection:

I just found this on Spiceworks... Looks like you can just add the Synology box as a target for DFS and use DFS as normal... Can you do the same with a Linux box?

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/838604-dfs-with-a-synology-nas-unit

Synology IS a Linux box. that's just Samba behaviour that you are seeing with the Synology.

Yeeeah that was a stupid question. Disregard please.

@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:

You want to use then as a NAS or a SAN? As a NAS you can back them up using any normal method, it's very flexible. Many agents can even be installed if you don't want to back up over the share.

But you mentioned LUNs and that changes everything.

So you have to be crystal clear if we are talking SAN or NAS functionality as it totally changes what works and what does not. Basically the machine cannot reliably back itself up if it is a SAN.

I started considering a separate LUN but then quickly got away from that because of my most recent post to @Dashrender , it would make zero sense to use the SAN storage for this little amount of users (roughly 150) and wasting that space on trivial storage like documents/software repository/etc. (in my opinion)

The grass always looks greener on the other side. My latest experience is it looked so green I couldn't tell if it was painted on or just perfectly maintained. So I took a breath and headed on over to greener pastures.

While on the way over I stayed optimistic, but typically like to play out scenarios anyway.

*What if people are hostile, but I love the work?

*What if I love the people, but hate the work?

*What if I hate the people AND the work?

Okay so they pay better than any other place I've applied to but I'm not happy about... well pretty much anything after being here roughly a year. In that year, I've got a good enough feel about how things are done.

The grass looked greener, because it was AstroTurf.

I'm in school full time after "taking a break" for many years, and it's very expensive (I'm paying as I go, out of pocket... So far, no debt), so I need to maintain a well paying job. I have no kids and I'm unmarried. I have a mortgage, and my girlfriend of 3 years lives with me. I do have money set aside, but paying for school out of savings while having no income would hurt.

My gut tells me to stay here, and search for other ventures. But it's hard to find a job that pays this well, and is 100% flexible with my school schedule. Another part of me says to quit immediately and work harder at searching for another job, that way I'll be freed up.

@scottalanmiller said in Protecting a NAS - Backups:

Nothing that is replication and/or fault tolerance is a backup. Those are discrete ideas and have to be handled separately.

Right, it would be getting more into an area of undelete rather than backup control.

I think we're just going to end up virtualizing the file servers (they are old physical boxes that should have been virtualized years ago), keep them on Windows since we can continue to protect them with DPM, and call it a day.

Not trying to reinvent the wheel, but when the wheel can be repurposed to do something more efficiently...