@larsen161 said in Managing Android mobiles:

Btw, don't buy your phones and voice/data contract together.

This would suit me as I'm not involved in the negotiations with the phone company at all. Which is why we've ended up in the stupid situation where a provider is discussing Android phones with people in our organisation and no-one from IT is in the room. It would be great if I could just purchase phones as needed exactly the same as I currently purchase other IT equipment.

Unfortunately, politics. Whilst I like to keep the IT department as lean as possible, and thus am more than happy to devolve power wherever it makes our lives easier, other department heads like to grow their empires.

We're still handing out new 5s's, which seems like false economy to me. I have a 5 which works fine but is frustratingly slow.

@IRJ said in SEO for dummies:

Unix based systems are the king of web servers and case actually matters on these systems.

Not so much these days since sites run CMSs and don't rely on the underlying OS. Wordpress, for example, as I've mentioned, isn't case sensitive, despite the majority of Wordpress sites running on Linux.

@Dashrender said in ESXi recovery woes:

If backing up a 5.5 and restoring back onto a 5.5 still fails, then the only option you have (currently) is to do what the vendor said, backup the DB separately and the restore in the prescribed fashion.

I think you're right.

@Carnival-Boy thanks for reporting this! 🏹

I did play warhammer 40k briefly as a kid. I was lucky enough to have a friend who was well off that was heavily into it. He gave me a pretty damn impressive army to start off with. I played it for a few months and never played again. Time and finding people to play was difficult.

I am trying to learn how to tie my own flies now, but I dont even have time for that.

@Carnival-Boy said

I see to recall @scottalanmiller saying recently that you don't need to encrypt a laptop hard drive because you should never store anything on it - everything should be cloud only. I'm kinda on board with that, but I don't understand how you do that. Like, he recommends LibreOffice (I think?) but how do you open a Word document stored in Sharepoint in LibreOffice without downloading it onto the laptop first?

I think part of the completion of that thought is to only use data in applications that are cloud-data-aware.

So, you would only use Office documents. (For example, I asked "what about text files", and he said, just put it in Word.)

You would only put pictures and things in a picture-aware app (such as Flickr.)

Adobe stuff in Adobe apps.

Anything that still falls through the cracks you'd have to download locally.

At least I think that is the drift...

@Carnival-Boy said in Creating training videos for users:

The main problem with hosting on YouTube is you get adverts and suggestions of other videos, which doesn't look too professional. For example, at the end of your excellent AetherStore video I got a My Little Pony video suggested (disclaimer: my daughter uses my Google account).

Ah, you only get the adverts if you use other's content. Music/visual, etc. Or if you are trying to make money from advertising.

Suggested videos, you used to be able to turn that off per clip, I think Google forced it back on for everyone annoyingly, I'm sure their view counts across the site went up though.

I've now got a Vimeo account as video is something I want to do more with but I'm really annoyed that after paying for the upgrade, they had 3 periods of downtime in the magical forest within the week. Youtube with their suggested videos, no downtime.

@Carnival-Boy said:

What do you do about any machines that aren't on the network - either at the time of the audit, or generally?

I went through one a year or so ago. Agree, you install the software and then let it analyze the network, then upload the results. I have one or two machines off the network and provided that information via the support portal. One was an off-site employee and the other was using the home-use rights allowed under the license.

We passed with flying colors. I thing we got tagged because I'm not using network licensing and had a few machines go belly up and didn't get a chance to upload the license to their cloud servers, so probably hit one too many activations. Plus I was doing a ton of machine swaps at the time during our upgrade.

If you are licensed properly, no fear. Just go through the motions and you'll be fine.

I've run Veeam both (in the past for over a year) on a VM on one of my hosts and now on a physical server. The latter is recent and I'm doing B2D2T and my LTO hangs off the physical server. Just was a free box. Whether physical or virtual, definitely keep the backup config in a different location. With that, it really doesn't take long to get it back somewhere else. My target is still a NAS using CIFS, but that will change probably when I redo my storage and hosts. You get a decent performance boost by using it as a iSCSI target vs CIFS. Mine works fine with the latter, so YMMV.

@JaredBusch said in Tell me about how HP deal registrations work:

@Carnival-Boy said:

Exactly, Breffni. That's why I wrote earlier "So one of my main criteria for a "good VAR" is that when I order something, the right product turns up at my door at the right time."

In many ways, I find the Account Manager more important that the VAR. A good account manager will do lots of chasing for you to make sure everything is ordered and delivered prompty, and know the right people to talk to if you have any queries or problems. Several times I've ditched a VAR because the account manager leaves and I don't like his replacement.

The account manager IS the VAR for all intents and purposes. If they suck you tell them to piss up a rope and get you one that has a brain or you will take your business to a different VAR.

And good VARs work hard to maintain good account managers, keep them with their clients and give them the tools to be successful.

Microsoft is telling me that the reason you can't run both is that the virtualised version of Office (ie the C2R version) could cause the MSI version of Office to crash if used together.

This is a concern because although it allows me to install an Access 2013 MSI and an Office 2016 C2R, I suspect that I may still get crashes.

Every show in atlanta, large or small, is expensive, and is had definitely gone up substantially in the past 5 years. And it's such a huge PITA to get to any of the larger venues that I don't even bother. The mid level venues here have the best shows, but they are getting a little spendy. There is a Jimi Hendrix tribute show coming up, with an amazing lineup (Billy Cox, Buddy Miles, Zakk Wylde, Dweezil Zappa, etc), and tickets are up around $90 if you want to be anywhere near the stage. I blame 3rd party ticket sellers and promoters... greedy bastards.

@Carnival-Boy said:

So what should I set for cores? 1? 2? More than 2?

Now that gets out of the area of "easy to answer." LOL This comes down to your workload. The rule of thumb is start with one, test, increase, test and repeat. Stop when you start to lose performance and go back to the one that was best.

Not all that helpful, is it?

For a SQL Server, I'm pretty confident that the right answer is not "one". I would start with two and see how it performs. Chances are two is going to be the minimum that you would consider using. Watch those two and see how they are utilized. If load gets high (that's load factor... the run queue length) then more vCPU might be in order. Not super common (by VM count) to go over four vCPU, but there are certainly cases for it.

@Carnival-Boy said:

"in my support boundaries"

Love it, going to use that somewhere.

@Carnival-Boy said:

Or is it possible that there are several Geolocation databases out there

This is my guess. Geolocation is hugely inaccurate and problematic. For years when I worked in London Google was convinced that I was in Germany.

I have my personal domain on O365. But I like Outlook OWA

Google Photos. Free. Unlimited.

SSL and TLS protect people from spying on an existing communications channel, but does nothing to protect the end points. It's just a service that has to respond to any incoming request.

Nadella is making Microsoft the company that it always should have been. So far I really like that guy.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to grab an older system and set it up to be your remote logging server for your ESXi infrastructure. It would at least give you something to look through while researching this issue.

Have you asked on the ESXi forums if anyone has any input on this?