Best posts made by Brains

Oh I have a good one. This ingrained the practice of asking one simple question "What has changed recently?" and the practice of reevaluating the situation to avoid going "Down the rabbit hole"

This was many years ago. I was working as an on-site IT Tech going to various homes & businesses throughout the day. I arrived on-site and fixed their issues. As a good measure I went ahead and updated and cleaned temps . Lo and behold, the computer booted to a black screen with blinking cursor. I did EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING to attempt to repair the boot. Bootsector repair, chkdsk /r , + various other fixes. I was still green in some ways and did not stop and step back to reevaluate the situation. I spent 2-3 hours attempting to fix the boot on this lady's laptop with no success. Eventually I figured it out. The Hard Drive had been upgraded recently to a 320GB. Unfortunately, the laptop only had 28 / 32 bit LBA (forget which one is applicable) and the previous tech had installed this large drive without paying attention to this limitation. So once the windows update wrote data above the 137GB mark, the drive was not bootable. I partitioned the drive into 120GB partitions and defragged and voila! It started booting again

wow thats sad.

We have a lady at our office with a very nice articulate speaking voice. I finagle her with Starbucks occasionally and she updates the holiday message when needed.

@Josh The production server crashed, caught fire, and Scott had to perform another Ice Bucket Challenge on it

Thanks all. It looks like I wont have to open any ports to the controller

@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral Spamming My Users:

Yeah, a reseller vendor would be a real possibility. RC needs to watch out for that. Could be someone trying to discredit them, or someone without a concern about them being discredited.

lol. Considering their Support quality and propensity to just stop responding to support tickets, I dont think RingCentral is worried about being discredited.

@Dashrender said in Former Verizon-Now Frontier Communication....why is the review so bad?:

It's time for all cities to install their own fiber and allow the ISPs connection to that. Think of the power grid, one grid, but power/internet can come from anywhere.

The big issue with this is that you now have two people to complain at when you have issues, the city and the ISP, cause you have no idea where the problem is.

Naw, our politicians enjoy their salary from the ISPs too much to allow that to happen. Can't go around doing whats in the best interest of the citizens, it would be unheard of

@wirestyle22 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@DustinB3403 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

What the %^&# is going on here, I have no clue how to respond without calling this guy an asshole for even asking a question like this.

MBBS -- Magic Black Box Syndrome is now officially a thing thanks to @Brains

The sad thing is I'm infected lol

Ahh i finally have a claim to fame

@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:

@Brains I'm going to start signing things SWJ instead of SAM.

Thats not far enough Scott. We need to create a post to generate a list of quotes about SpiceWorks Jesus to include in your signature. Walking the NAS Sea or turning Water into Hardware Upgrades (im bad at these)

Hey everyone! I am having a horrible time trying to find a good device with the above qualifications for under 1k. Does anyone have any recommendations or should I just go back to a software VPN server?

We do have quite a few port forwards setup, our current RV082 is maxed out at 30 (I think), so this may be a deciding factor as well.

We have seen some peplink (availability scarce) and mushroom networks (seems good but I don't have any first hand experience) devices that seem like they will work. What are your thoughts? Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Thanks for the questions, here are the answers.

• We don't need site-to-site VPN, only client VPN.
• We would like to not have to use a 3rd part software client. We would prefer to use built-in windows connection

I recently upgraded our WiFi to all Unifi UAP-AC-LITE. I can give you some real world testing if you want. Just send me a message.

Haha I took my A+ when we still had to memorize the IRQ Assignments. Kids these days have now idea how much easier that test is now. Still worthless, but at least it taught me all my IRQs when I was 17.

So we are pushing forward with our free upgrade to Windows 10 in our office. All machines are domain joined and have Windows 7 Pro OEM licenses. We would like to upgrade each machine instead of pushing a new image to limit the impact to our users. Hardware is all compatible (we will replace/upgrade if we run into one we missed). We've tested all applications with Windows 10 and have manually upgraded a few machines for testing / feedback. We have our Windows 10 GPO configured to fix all of the issues we have encountered due to our environment.

Unfortunately since we are a small company we do not have any subscriptions to Microsoft's nicer products (SCCM, etc), but I could maybe swing a purchase if I can demonstrate cost savings.

Regarding GPO, this is the first time I have had to deal with transitioning GPO settings to new Windows templates. What is the best procedure for ensuring everything that needs to be moved to the new templates is done properly?

• How did everyone here do it in their small business environment?
• Do you think I could just shudder let the windows updates loose via our WSUS server on a controlled basis? shudder (I feel dirty even typing that)
• How much hands on per machine would be required and what level of technical skill would it need if we did allow upgrade through Windows Update? shudder
• Did you run into any strange problems?
• Is there anything that I should be aware of or plan for that might not be obvious?
• GPO Update Recommendations?

Thanks in advance for any tips provided. I appreciate all the help that can be provided

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller They are voting with PENCILS? Seriously?

https://twitter.com/DrunkNC0nfused/status/745228217364152320/photo/1

Well it would make sense to use a pencil if they were using a scan card system.

But seriously, talk about making it easy to change votes around...

I can't believe that... really. Here, like in every country (at least I thought so), you have to use a ball ben or something that can't be erased like a pencil.

at least you have some sort of paper ballot. We are stuck with closed source code, politically affiliated voting machine companies that do not produce any verifiable paper record (Some do, a lot dont)

Im in the process of upgrading all of our servers to hardware based LSI Cards. They are not cheap, and are a little UI unfriendly, but we have not had a single problem with them and when I had questions during configuration (Because their UI sucks), their support answered immediately and gave me all the information I needed. LSI Cards are nice, the central RAID management is awesome and reduces maintenance costs

@scottalanmiller wow, I have been fighting with AIX 4 for the last 4 years at my job! If I had only known.... Too late now though, its going the way of Office Space in a 6 months.

Not sure if this is something I should already know or not, but never encountered it before, so I wanted to check in. Is it possible to create 2 RAID volumes with LSI RAID Controller Cards?

Example - 5TB available space in RAID10 configuration
(4) 3TB WD Blacks
Create 1 bootable RAID volume ~350GB
Create 2nd RAID volume ~ 4.65TB

Reason being, my motherboard isnt UEFI, and I need to have over 2TB addressable on my file server partition. My understanding is that GPT disk can't boot without UEFI, but Windows can use GPT disks without UEFI as long as it is not the boot volume.

Any clarification or corrections you experienced people can provide?

@thwr said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

@Brains said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

In Texas and from Memphis, so..... BBQ! Had some Big Beef Ribs for lunch (Thursday Special - $9.99 w/ 2 sides). They are great ribs and are pasture raised, no hormones, etc, etc

Sounds great, just sad you had to mention that hormone thing

sad as in none of our beef should be pushed full of drugs with side effects?

@IRJ said in Block GPO Inheritance:

This might be a little easier....

www.grouppolicy.biz/2010/02/how-to-find-and-use-wmi-values-for-group-policy-filtering/

great reference site for a whole host of questions!

@tonyshowoff said in What did you have for lunch or dinner today?:

Left over pizza, earlier tonight (it's 1am) ordered Pizza Hut, but they screwed up. I asked for American style pizza, so it would come with tomato sauce, but these thrifty Russians used barbecue sauce, which is what they typically use. Oh well.

TIL Russians usually use BBQ sauce on their pizza.