Thanks for adding more technical content!

@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Licensing Verification Program: Is this a SAM Audit?:

Just got a customer with this Microsoft Licensing Verification Program / MLVP audit request. It sure looks like a SAM Audit. It comes from one of those "not really Microsoft" v- email addresses that are third party scammers traditionally paying MS for an email address. They never say that the audit is a SAM or voluntary, but the terms that they use and the email address don't match anything legit and look just like the scams that MS has been in on for years.

Anyone seen this new terminology yet? Is this the new name now that MS customers have caught on to the SAM scam and now need a new name so that it isn't so obvious?

Interesting - I don't recall seeing the word voluntary on any SAM letter I ever got.

Looks like the W80DM/W80B are only different by a mode setting.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=2ahUKEwjjt8Cw9KvpAhVCZM0KHVSLCY0QFjABegQIARAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsupport.yealink.com%2Fforward2download%3Fpath%3DZIjHOJbWuW%2FDFrGTLnGyphshNtpyhFJcLzNUPzFczti22pxVBo1IqAxPAwzS8JNbeQdHRoOZWBxnleU8UqMHndA34NOmQC%2Fa4gKhzUqY03VQpIS0pplusSymbolIfibhNUWtTrGnLb0V5E27UeeKMF7bwamVdkUrxJoeg51v9Yv773qI7wEZto6juv%2Ftc6zAsplusSymbol1QmKdDc&usg=AOvVaw3EzRHeUVCmVysaxByX5y0S

Which was was faster?

OK anyone reading this in the future,

Skyetel has the option to set the SIP Format as seen here. Following their instructions for use with FreePBX requires changing this to +1NPANxxxxxx from 1NPANxxxxxx, then FreePBX will drop the +1...

In my case, since I didn't originally make this change, FreePBX wasn't dropping the 1 (It was looking for +1, didn't find it so it did nothing) and therefore my number didn't match.

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Nope - I used Zoiper with their $1/m registration solution - still didn't work worth a damn.

Linphone also didn't always stay connected on Android either. Once Android went to sleep (black screen) it frequently wouldn't ring for us.

I found SIP clients on mobile devices to be completely unreliable.

And now is the time where JB tells me I'm full of crap and to use ABC client and it will be wonderful.

@Jimmy9008 said in File transfer drop:

@Dashrender said in File transfer drop:

@Jimmy9008 said in File transfer drop:

@scottalanmiller said in File transfer drop:

You left out the parts that tend to matter, like the storage. I'm guessing you've got a spinner in the chain there somewhere. If so, yup, that's as expected.

The servers are hyperv hosts. Each has one VM only (vm1 and vm2 referred in the original post). Physicals each have dual 2.1 GHz 22 core procs, 768 GB RAM, and 11 x 600 GB SSD in Raid 5 sitting behind hardware Raid. Dell card I believe with 8GB cache.

From host to host over the network, I get 1.6GB/s solid. From VM <-> VM, the transfer starts at ~600 MB/s then drops to ~30 MB/s on a 6 GB file with 1 GB left. Each and every time. The VMs are 2019 server both with 200 GB disk on the array, access to the 10Gbe network, and 10GB RAM assigned...

Dual 22 core processors (44 cores total)? Damn, those VMs cost like $5000 each in licensing (well per pair of VMs). Definitely expensive.
or did I miss something?

(hint - I made up the $5000 number, but it's definitely going to be WAY more expensive than the default 16 core setup at $800 for two VMs)

Currently only two test VMs. There will eventually be 100's of VMs.

Well, assuming Windows VMs then DC licensed out will be super cost effective.

@IRJ said in Recovering SQL Server 2005 Databases:

I am getting the shakes reading this. I know it's a customer, but fuck I guess their data isn't remotely important to them. I'm surprised it lasted to 2020. Maybe they will learn a valuable lesson from this and not fuck up again this bad.

Good luck this is going to be an annoying task. I would have told the customer good luck as they obviously don't value their data at all! That's not a customer I'd actively choose. This is going to cost them thousands of dollars in support hours. Too bad they didn't migrate 10 years ago when they were supposed to do that.

I guess this brings up another point. At what point do you tell a customer to pound sand? I'm not sure many MSPs or consultants would even take this job.

Not likely. Unless their costs is 10's of thousands of dollars, they'll likely consider it a full on win. They didn't pay for how many new version? they didn't buy how many new versions of Windows? They didn't pay for the manpower do to those upgrades, and now they pay for just over the cost of one, perhaps two of them at once, way later - time value of money and all, they very likely will consider it a win - unless the DB being down is costing them 10's of thousands of dollars.

@IRJ said in Recovering SQL Server 2005 Databases:

2. A data breach can cost them the entire business. This isnt just a web server, it is a database server. You work in healthcare and if your company did this and got breached you would be fired and the company would likely shutdown or be severely fined in the millions.

You're likely right that I would be fired - but it wouldn't be my fault - because I constantly tell them they need to upgrade, but I don't control the pursestrings. I can't make them spend money.

@IRJ said in Recovering SQL Server 2005 Databases:

@Dashrender said in Recovering SQL Server 2005 Databases:

@IRJ said in Recovering SQL Server 2005 Databases:

I am getting the shakes reading this. I know it's a customer, but fuck I guess their data isn't remotely important to them. I'm surprised it lasted to 2020. Maybe they will learn a valuable lesson from this and not fuck up again this bad.

Good luck this is going to be an annoying task. I would have told the customer good luck as they obviously don't value their data at all! That's not a customer I'd actively choose. This is going to cost them thousands of dollars in support hours. Too bad they didn't migrate 10 years ago when they were supposed to do that.

I guess this brings up another point. At what point do you tell a customer to pound sand? I'm not sure many MSPs or consultants would even take this job.

Not likely. Unless their costs is 10's of thousands of dollars, they'll likely consider it a full on win. They didn't pay for how many new version? they didn't buy how many new versions of Windows? They didn't pay for the manpower do to those upgrades, and now they pay for just over the cost of one, perhaps two of them at once, way later - time value of money and all, they very likely will consider it a win - unless the DB being down is costing them 10's of thousands of dollars.

1. I dont know how many MSPs would even take this work. They were sure lucky to find one.

2. A data breach can cost them the entire business. This isnt just a web server, it is a database server. You work in healthcare and if your company did this and got breached you would be fired and the company would likely shutdown or be severely fined in the millions.

3. Not verifying backups on a database server. Extremely poor execution of system adminsitration. Perhaps it was designed by an engineer 15 years ago and never tested again.

4. I bet you money this isn't VLANed in any way. I bet if one of their workstations get breached, they are fucked city. Who knows maybe they are running Windows XP or Windows 98 on their workstations. We have to assume that is a possibility at this point. Maybe its even internet facing :face_screaming_in_fear:

AND - all that is of course true - but none of it became an issue during this time, so short of the, what I assume is a hardware failure they got away with it - soooo someone could very easily have all the thoughts I mentioned above. I never said it was right, I just said it was likely their thinking. Even if not directly thinking - oh man we saved so much money by not following those crazy best practices, etc...
I'm on your side @IRJ.

@notverypunny said in MSTP with multiple instances - Yea or Nay:

@scottalanmiller said in MSTP with multiple instances - Yea or Nay:

Are the VLANs needed? What are they for?

Traffic isolation / functional separation / security. Servers / Management / endpoints / VDI / Wifi / telephony etc etc etc

One would ask if any of those are needed today?
Functional separation I could see if you have two desperate networks but need to use a single ethernet fabric. I have that, my Guest WiFi has it's own firewall and own internet connection, yet we share the APs. it's on it's on VLAN with no routes between prod and guest.

But on the prod side, in a LANLess world, is that really needed? Of course, few of us likely actually have LANLess set ups.

Microsoft would disagree with your "big no." They publish their Windows VMs directly on the internet with RDP.
Of course that said - all the flaws found in it recently, definitely seems to make it feel more risky.

I suppose it's more risky than SSH because it's not open source, fewer people can put eyes on it to verify how good the coding is...

As for internal - I still use it regularly.

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@coliver said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.

In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.

This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.

My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.

The other solution is to not design an IPOD.

Exactly. Buy a correctly sized Scale box - no IPOD... sure, huge upfront cost, but who knows over the long term compared to Azure. etc etc etc.. We don't have any of the other needed information to know if going to Azure was the right move or not... but it's done, so we move on.

Literally everything is cheap compared to Azure. LOL. Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload.

Their serverless offering is on par with the rest. It's a million requests per month and 400,000 seconds of compute for free. After that it's only $0.20 per million executions and $0.000016 per second. That's not really expensive at all.

Here you used serverless pricing to say that you could use it to get the cost of Azure below having infrastructure of our own. How do we make it cheaper, if it's an additional cost rather than a replacement one? Wasn't the point of this to say that going all cloud would allow us to remove the cost of our own server? If not, what were you saying?

Nope. Never said that. I was replying to you saying "Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload."

I said their serverless offering is on par with the rest. And it's cheaper than running serverless yourself if you use the free tier. You're grasping at straws here.

I was pointing out that even when you leverage serverless type stuff, because I know what it is and had already considered it, it wasn't enough to overcome all of the costs.

Responding that the serverless portion is on par with other providers is fine, but doesn't address the point that when taken together, it's not really cost competitive.

Again the only costs that were mentioned was directly related to serverless. You interjected your own ideas here and made a mountain out of nothing.

Then I apologize. Their serverless offerings are good value similar to the industry and I read into what was being said inappropriately.

No it's fine, I'm not trying to be combative. I maybe could have worded things better.

We should do a serverless seminar. It would be great to have a solid talk on real world example use cases of where regular companies would have their best chances at trying it out.

I'd definitely love to see an SMB (on the smaller side) example of that - how you deal with file shares, windows server apps, etc.

@travisdh1 said in Apple Mac Going to ARM RISC:

Microsoft has traditionally failed at this because they have to support every piece of hardware made for the past 10-15 years.

And legacy software - Apple just flips their nose at their customers, LOL
I say that last part somewhat in jest, as a complete NON-mac user, I have no knowledge on what was or wasn't needed to be repurchased after the processor changes.

Try running a chkdsk on the system drive, who knows, there might be some corruption.

Do you have Feature update 20 04 install? If so - remove it and go back to 1909. You mentioned you reinstalled - if you did that from an ISO you got from MS, you'll need to locate a 1909 ISO instead.

There is a known problem with printers, including the Print To PDF printer in Feature Update 20 04

@scottalanmiller said in "Microsoft print to PDF" feature in windows 10 not showing drivers when activated:

@Dashrender said in "Microsoft print to PDF" feature in windows 10 not showing drivers when activated:

@Osvaldo said in "Microsoft print to PDF" feature in windows 10 not showing drivers when activated:

@scottalanmiller the client wants Microsoft...

Interesting - I have honestly never seen/heard that before.
quite the opposite - for example, my EHR "requires" Adobe Reader - and as such when someone doesn't have it, certain other people freak the hell out because they have no idea that it doesn't matter. This of course is perpetuated by the EHR vendor themselves who claim they only support systems with Adobe Reader, not other PDF viewers

Same here. It's always "the built in PDF stuff isn't good enough", sans explanation.

Well, in their defense, Windows 7 didn't have a built in PDF viewer when we went live with this EHR - so there was no built in. Also, back then IE was the preferred browser.

But that said - they still haven't updated their requirements. I'm sure they do that so they only have to deal with one PDF viewer for support purposes, but still - definitely sucks.!

@DustinB3403 said in Windows Domain routing question - dual-nic:

GW 192.168.1.9

what is this? If this is the IP of the LAN side of the server, that would be wrong. It should be the internet gateway IP.

Also, assuming there is a firewall at the internet gateway, you'll need a route on that device as well pointing the 10.x network to the LAN side IP of the server.

Providing a picture of the network layout could be helpful.

@Pete-S said in How can we recover data from Hard Drives were on RAID 10 without controller?:

@Dashrender said in How can we recover data from Hard Drives were on RAID 10 without controller?:

@Pete-S said in How can we recover data from Hard Drives were on RAID 10 without controller?:

I think he meant that RAID10 can only handle 1 drive failure with certainty, while RAID6 can handle 2 drive failures with certainty.

Rebuild is not much different really. On RAID6 all drives in the arrays are read concurrently and one full drive of data is written to the new drive. On RAID10 one drive is read and one full drive of data is written to the new drive. So the read intensity and write intensity is the same per drive, there are just more drives that needs to be read when rebuilding a RAID6 array.

Sure, it can handle two drive failures - but at what costs? I mean if you're SSD, then sure, great, hell, the argument is there for RAID 5, but then, back to only able to loose one drive, so meh. But RAID 6 is so bloody slow compared to RAID 10, etc. If that's the only reason you're going RAID 6, I'm not sure the logic is there to support it.

To me it's simple. If you need speed you are on SSDs. Period.
If you need storage space then it's 3.5" HDDs with RAID1 for a small array (<=16TB) and RAID6 for a large array.

aww, so you're just against RAID 10 or RAID 5 period.

@Obsolesce said in Force Microsoft Store apps to update:

@JaredBusch said in Force Microsoft Store apps to update:

I've been hitting a bunch of machines lately that need updated and one thing I noted was that the Store apps were seeming to never update by themselves while I had the device.

I could manually log in and open the Store app, and then click through to the updates and then tell it to update. But man that is a pain..

A little searching and I found this gem. Execute this, it takes a while to return, and then the Store apps begin to update in the background immediately.

Get-CimInstance -Namespace "Root\cimv2\mdm\dmmap" -ClassName "MDM_EnterpriseModernAppManagement_AppManagement01" | Invoke-CimMethod -MethodName UpdateScanMethod

Why don't you just turn on the update apps automatically option?

There's also a policy setting.

I thought that was ON by default?