Best posts made by crustachio

@scottalanmiller yeah I started looking at Mellanox really excitedly and then stopped when I realized I was out of my depth.

@scottalanmiller said:

@crustachio said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Getting today's pics uploaded to Flickr. Did about seventy pics today. Not a tonne, but not bad, either.

Didn't know you were a Brit.

I try to write in the Queen's English as much as possible. Having worked in global finance and finding out that those outside of the US often think that American's are illiterate not realizing that they have "intentional alternative spellings" changes how you think about your writing style. Americans pretty much all know that everyone else has different spellings and know that they are taught American spellings in school. Even Canadians are often surprised to learn this and truly just think most Americans have no idea how to spell. So... I try to avoid the Americanisms.

Interesting perspective. So you're an American who doesn't like foreign stereotypes about American spelling, but you prefer to reinforce those stereotypes by adopting the foreign spellings of valid American English words?

I'm muddling through this myself. My week in a nutshell:

Everyone loves ELK! I should love ELK! ELK!

I hate ELK.

Graylog! It's a Splunk killer! Easy! Pretty! Graylog!

I hate Graylog.

Everyone still loves ELK! I should still love ELK! ELK?

I still hate ELK.

Icinga! Opsview! Fluentd! AlienVault/OSSIM! ELK!?

Wait. Why am I doing this? I just need syslog. Add parsing/searching/dashboards later.

I love syslog-ng!

/week

Moral of this story:

Define your needs before diving down the logging rabbit hole. As nice as ELK, etc, can be, they take a lot of work and planning to produce the polished niceness that you see on display all over the webs. I promise that writing filters, learning grok, and parsing complex non-RFC-compliant-syslog is not something that can be done in an afternoon. Instead of jumping to the end of the line, start at the beginning (solid syslog server) and add layers as needed. Lord knows every one of these tools can be weaved in with the others later.

@gjacobse said:

@crustachio
I only have one minor request..

Could you plug it all up and take a photo of it? Power, USB drive and such..

Thanks.

Sure. What should I be wearing?

Pricing remains this same if you're only using 2 physical CPUs per host with up to 8 cores each. But with higher core count CPUs (and let's be honest, anyone running a virtualized datacenter will be using more than 8 cores per CPU), you have to license per-core, in 8-core bundles (EDIT: 2 core bundles, not 8 core bundles, my bad).

See here: http://www.vladan.fr/windows-server-2016-what-is-the-difference-between-standard-and-datacenter-edition/

http://www.vladan.fr/wp-content/uploads/images/cores.jpg

We're about to get bit by this. I just stood up 3 new hosts in a VSAN deployment (working on the 4th). Dual Xeon E5-2690V3 12-core CPUs per host = 24 cores per host = $9,232.48 per host for Server 2016 Datacenter licensing. Times 4.

That's 150% of the cost of Server 2012 for our deployment. And it is really making me wonder if we should move to 2016 at all. Almost all of the new features are aimed at cloud convergence and/or Hyper-V, none of which is applicable in our environment. Heck, they're even locking out features like Nano Server to Azure based deployments only. The only reason to upgrade as I see it is to avoid earlier sunsetting/EOL for 2012. No significant feature changes that validate paying 50% more.

I'm curious to see what kind of SLED contract pricing is available. Reports say the 2016 pricelist will be published Oct 1.

@Minion-Queen said:

Please stop talking about lunch. I am hungry!

OK, how about breakfast then? Eating a few hardboiled eggs

something something jumbo frames

9GB disk array!! The future is now!!!!

I actually just started test UrBackup last week myself, kind of in the same boat. Works pretty good, not nearly as pretty as the paid competitors but for standalone physical boxes it makes for a nice free incremental backup tool. Biggest downside I see is there is no dedupe or compression facility whatsoever and therefore you have to rely on the storage target's filesytem level capabilities for that. But still, beggar's can't be choosers.

@scottalanmiller said:

LOL, yeah, the scale that people think is big is nuts. I'm used to databases with pure SSDs, and 2TB of RAM and trillions of daily writes alone and that's virtual! And that was years ago. Nearly every post in SW is like "What year is it?" People are actually asking these questions today as if it was 2005 when the question was legit.

Amen. It's been hard for me to get my manager out of this mindset as well, since he did server admin before me, almost all of which was physical (he dabbled with some Hyper-V and VMware Player instances).

Last week I retired 5 old physical servers after some P2V. Just for fun I tried to install a logging server on one of the stronger/newer physical boxes, just to play with. Between boot media issues, controller drivers and various other physical-specific frustrations, I spent hours trying to get the darn thing even working. Experiment over. Opened vSphere, deployed Ubuntu, done in 5 min. I'll never go back!!!

@scottalanmiller I imagine the hacker world operates like anything else: Don't work any harder than you have to. It appears the well of ransomware victimes is still deep and easily accessible, so why spend time actively exploiting what is, by comparison to the whole spectrum of ransomware victims, a niche case?

If and when the gravy train slows down for ransomware perpetrators, I imagine they'll get more vicious.

The web panel sidebar feature is awesome... It means I can keep ML's mobile view open in a little sidebar on all my pages and see new posts in real time without having to tab switch constantly

@dustinb3403 Right, you have to pay a license for each endpoint managed in B&R. Or you can manage them locally on each server - they will still backup to a B&R repo and you can see their job history in B&R, but you can't manage the jobs themselves from there.

@crustachio said:

@IRJ

@IRJ said:

@nadnerB said:

Sooooo, Backups?
Also, you might want to remove the Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing! post.

Updraft Plus is a free backup tool and it saves the backups on your Google Drive. I love it.

+1000
I snap my site to Dropbox like 3 times a day just because. It's great.

I have it set to just a month right now. This site isn't particularly huge. Entire archive is under 400MB. It's pretty static so I don't need long term retention. But I just love how UpdraftPlus just works. The email notifications are a nice peace of mind as well.

There was a decent Spiceworks thread on this awhile back. Seemed like the consensus was PaperCut. I also remember ThinPrint sticking out as an option worth considering.

@scottalanmiller said:

Getting today's pics uploaded to Flickr. Did about seventy pics today. Not a tonne, but not bad, either.

Didn't know you were a Brit.

@scottalanmiller that's why the N4032's are pretty attractive. You can get them in standard 10Gbase-T copper configs, good port density, stackable, all around decent performance and price isn't insane. Good middle of the road option based on my research.

Getting ready to P2V 5 old production servers that I've been putting off for too long. During an online day. That's right, I'm the IT Cowboy.

ETA: Me.

@wrx7m said:

@scottalanmiller said:

We are using Dells. @art_of_shred or @Mike-Ralston would have to tell you which models, they have physical access to them.

Interested in the model numbers. I am pushing for some Extreme switches and have been planning an upgrade and expansion for about a year including the, "It is going to be about $25K-30K" remarks several times to my boss. Get it all ironed out and just under the 30K mark after some back and forths with the vendor and Extreme and then I get the, "Wow. That is a lot more than I thought." when submitting the proposal. Waiting to hear back from the owner next week. Might have to go back to the drawing board.

Not sure what your requirements are, but my shortlist of 10GbE switches for our baby VSAN project is:

• Dell N4032
• HP FlexFabric 5700
• Juniper EX4550

I was excited about the Brocade ICX/VDX stuff but I read lots of buggy firmware horror stories and the port licensing model for 10GbE really made the price jump (note- I did not run that through any major vendors to see how much padding is in those license prices)

Yes, Cisco stuff is conspicuously absent from my list. I don't particularly trust the 3850X for storage switching and the Nexus stuff gets pricey fast, plus I just don't like Cisco much. But I am no storage switching expert so take my thoughts with, like, a hogshead worth of salt.

Odd, but I wouldn't count on it taking that long. My refunds get issued as soon as the label gets scanned at the carrier facility.