Best posts made by dave247

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@nerdydad said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

Computer Management -> Action -> Connect to another computer... -> Your Hyper-V host

Exactly - what he's not telling you is that Computer Management is a completely different tool. It's the Windows tool.

If you came from ESXi or even XS, you're in for some surprises. Unlike ESXi and XS, there is no single pane of glass to see all of the things related to Hyper-V. Instead you have to manage all the components the exact same way you would a normal server. Computer Management handles a lot of them, but not all. For example, you can't look at Device Manager that way anymore - MS removed remote access a bit ago.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH... yes. Shit. LOL

yeah - this is why I #$#%^@ hate Hyper-V

ugh.. I wish I knew this before.. Maybe I'll just use the free version of ESXi instead..

no - you shouldn't do that. If you bail on Hyper-V, you should look at KVM instead, so you aren't leaving often needed/desired feature that are free in KVM and Hyper-V and cost a ton in ESXi.

well I do want to gain some experience with Hyper-V so maybe I'll stick it out.. I just need to find a centralized guide on this or something.. The way to do things so far has been murky and illusive.. Part of the problem may be that I'm so used to VMware with ESXi and vSphere.

I have a thread.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/15767/building-a-hyper-v-2016-host-take-2

it covers all the things to get all the pieces working.
It assumes an Active Directory though.

Oh nice! I will comb thru this. And I do have AD running here. Thanks!

You will find tons of guides here on ML.

I think this has become my favorite forum. Much nicer than reddit, less BS than Spiceworks.. everyone is nice and thorough and we have SAM ruling with an iron fist

As a pretty green sysadmin, there have been times where I've needed to point things to an NTP server and I've been kind of fuzzy about the best way to go about this, despite reading various resources online... If my memory is correct, I think I've heard that best-practice is to point all your internal devices to the same internal NTP sever and then have that single internal NTP server sync with an external server. So like I would have all my equipment point to the DC and then have the DC sync with a trustworthy external time server. That being said, I'm a little unclear on the best way to do this.

I just ran w32tm /query /peers on my DC and it looks like it's pointed to pool.ntp.org. I have been checking various other servers and some things point to the DC where other things point to a list of time servers, usually, 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org, 2.pool.ntp.org and 3.pool.ntp.org. Sometimes it's a mixture of both.

I guess my question is this: Should I set up my domain controller to use a better time sever that what it's configured for, or is there a better NTP server I should be using. And then should I just point all servers and appliances in my environment to my domain controller for time synchronization?

I'm trying out Microsoft's Hyper-V 2016 server -- not the OS role, I'm talking about the actual Hypervisor without the "Desktop Experience" GUI. I got that installed and joined to our domain and then added an administrator and then I installed the Hyper-V management tools on my Windows 10 workstation and then I tried to connect to the server as that user. However I can't seem to get connected. It's constant errors.

Right now I'm stuck on "Enable delegation" as I get an error that says "Delegation of credentials to the server could not be enabled. CredSSP authentication is currently disabled.

I keep trying to google things but 90% of the stuff I find seems to be about setting up the Hyper-V role, not the straight Hypervisor. Then anything more explicit than that, such as with the CredSSP stuff, I just find about of stuff regarding PowerShell scripts.

I'm now trying to run Enable-WSManCredSSP commands according to this guide but it's not working...

I've been slowly doing this for hours now and I'm just ripping my hair out at this point. Is there a more straight-forward way to set up and manage Hyper-V without having to do a bunch of obscure steps? I just want to get to where I can install some VMs. See I've gotten used to the user friendliness of WMware where I can just connect to the hosts or vCenter via web browser and go from there.

Now I'm not crying about this because it's hard -- I enjoy learning challenges.. but right now I'm just drained and need some guidance. Otherwise I was considering installing some other free Hypervisor in hopes that it's easier to setup.

@dashrender said in question about setting up a new domain controller:

@dave247 said in question about setting up a new domain controller:

So going back to the reseller vs partner bit:

• If I go through a partner, they will help me get set up with hosted Exchange directly through MS, so I am subject only to MS?

• If I go through a re-seller, I basically get their version of that service, which means I am subject to the limitations they put on it (max mailbox size for example) and I am also subject to their pricing as well as the risk that the are responsible for paying MS to keep our Exchange active?

yep.

holy shit do I actually understand something???

So basically, what I should do, is swap as much of my manual static to DHCP reservation that I possibly can. Then I can update DNS in the DHCP scope and all should be well... sounds like a good plan.

I was a complete idiot and incorrectly typed "172.0.0.1" instead of "127.0.0.1" which would explain all my errors over the weekend.

smacks head

@tim_g said in Girl Scouts - Training Girls to Run MLMs, Change My Mind:

The real question here is: what do girl scouts do besides MLM, and is it significant enough to categorize them as not just a MLM?

I was thinking the same thing. My daughter is in GS and has been for a few years now. They seem to do a bunch of other stuff, but I'm not that involved. I mean, I go to a lot of her events, but my wife is the main one doing stuff. My daughter is a brownie too so I think depending on the bracket (or whatever) and the people running the troop, the various activities they do probably can very a lot.

Actually, my wife has gotten stuck with being the troop's cookie manager two years in a row. She has to collect all the money from the parents and submit the orders online. She hasn't said anything to me about things seeming fishy, but she does have a lot of complaints about their website, plus a lot of parents are idiots about submitting and picking up their orders.

I'm also thinking that if it is a full blown MLM at this point, it probably didn't start off that way. I'm sure various levels of greed and corruption have gradually fueled changes that swung the cookie sales portion of the GS into the MLM arena of things.

I feel like pretty much anything that starts off with good and pure intentions and is successful is inevitably pushed more and more to the point that it becomes an obscene version of it's original self.

@obsolesce said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

@dave247 said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

@jaredbusch said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

@dave247 said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

Where is everyone searching for quality IT job postings these days?

Word of mouth. I've never gotten a good job from a random posting.

I suppose the correct answer to myself is a wide net of every combination, including word of mouth, job posting sites like Indeed, Monster, etc, direct job postings on the website of the company, LinkedIn, etc.

I managed to get my first IT job using my state's job network website. I got a call-back from HR and had some awesome back and forth and landed a great gig. My friend and past co-worker got an amazing job from a head-hunter on LinkedIn. Another friend got a job from a company website post...

The last several good jobs I was either offered or have started were directly from LinkedIn, and some of them are $300K to $500K jobs.

Can I ask what kind of IT jobs those were and the general requirements? That seems a little hard to believe unless you're talking about jobs in the major US technology hubs... but I have limited knowledge and experience in this area.

I have a few servers that are now available for whatever I want, since I've virtualized them to our vSphere 6.5 environment. We currently have a single SAN unit for our vm datastore which connects to two switches and then to three virtual hosts (SAM's Inverted Pyramid of Doom thing).

Anyway, I am trying to experiment with a different design as well as set up a new test environment. I want to install Hyper-V 2016 Server on my most powerful spare server, then I want to use my other two servers as mirrored or a distributed storage cluster.

I am not 100% on what is best practice on how exactly to set this up, so I'm hoping for some input. I mean, I'm a sysadmin at my job, so I understand how to install and configure stuff.. but I've not set up a completely new environment from scratch before.

Any advice is much appreciated!

@scottalanmiller said in Can I get some direction on setting up Hyper-V server with a storage cluster?:

I'm late, but yes, @StarWind_Software is the way to go here. It's free and native to Hyper-V and does exactly what you are looking to do.

Hi Scott. Yes, thanks. I am going to work on setting up vSAN. Looks like it will be a fun learning experience for me.

@scottalanmiller said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@dashrender said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

I do like the idea of many smaller posts - but it also runs into the problem of many thing to respond to at once. While I'm no where near as fast as Scott, I can typically type two to three small posts before the OP (or anyone other than Scott) replies to my first reply. So unlike your

I like red.
So do I, but have you considered orange,
no but, ...

you aren't having a real back and forth because you run into the same problem as the wall of text issue. I real time conversation where all involved parties get the information simultaneously, in a forum you have people jumping in in the middle and fleeing, or someone who just throws out 5 ideas, each in their own post before any responses are made, and eventually many people just stop reading anything but the last few posts.

I'm not sure you can solve this problem, but it's just good to know it's there.

But smaller posts make it easier to respond. No matter how much time you have, making it faster and easier helps you. Wall of text in the same situation would mean no ability to respond at all.

I noticed this with how you post back in Spiceworks and I was like, what the hell is this guy doing. But having broken up posts to respond to is kind of nice. It becomes not nice when there are many of them peppered throughout the whole forum page. Then you have to scroll around like crazy to find what it is you need to respond to.

My company still uses fax as we send and receive a decent amount per day. We email documents as much as we can but we still have to use fax.

Currently, we have one fax line coming through POTS. When we get faxes, our printer/scanner/fax system just converts the fax to pdf and mails it to the company fax email group. When people need to send a fax, they are manually printing, scanning and faxing.

I know there are solutions that let you send a fax right from your computer but I haven't dove into the research yet. We are also in the process of getting a new voip system (old one is very old and messed up) and I would like to make use of that with our fax situation so users can get faxes to their email.

Also, let me just say up front that I don't want this to devolve into everyone criticizing why we are still using fax or something.

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

We've signed up with egoldfax so thanks to the user who suggested that.

@tim_g said in Looking for a very basic solution for building/maintaining company intranet:

@dave247 said in Looking for a very basic solution for building/maintaining company intranet:

@dave247 said in Looking for a very basic solution for building/maintaining company intranet:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking for a very basic solution for building/maintaining company intranet:

For static internal pages, very little will compete with Wordpress.

Oh yeah I forgot about WP.. but all this stuff would need to be local and not online at all. ... I'm looking it up now and it looks like we can just download WordPress and use to generate local content.. awesome. This may do perfectly..

ooh looks like I'm going to get to set up a Linux server with LAMP... fun

@scottalanmiller has you covered!

https://mangolassi.it/topic/13112/using-saltstack-to-install-high-performance-lamp-on-fedora-25

https://mangolassi.it/topic/13115/installing-wp-cli-the-wordpress-command-line-with-saltstack

https://mangolassi.it/topic/13177/deploying-an-nginx-reverse-proxy-with-ssl-on-a-lamp-server-with-saltstack

Awesome. I don't get to touch Linux too much at work, so this will be a fun project. Thanks!

@scottalanmiller said in Need some guidance - replacing physical 2008 R2 DC with a virtual 2016 DC - keeping same name and IP:

How I'd handle it....

Well, I'd not do it if possible and fix things pointing to something that they shouldn't here. That's the root level fix.

To go after a proximate fix...

1. Set up the new DC. Do NOT use the old IP or hostname.
2. Get it all working with the old machines in place.
3. Create a CNAME to point the old name to the new server's A record. Remove the old machine.
4. If you must, change the new IP to the old IP.

Ok, let's scratch everything I mentioned. If I were to do this the best practice way, would I simply:

1. Set up the new 3rd domain controller new name (DC3) and IP address
2. Pass the roles from DC1 to DC3
3. Finally, go through and point all "primary DNS" entries on Exchange and EVERYTHING else to the new DC3

If I perform the above steps, I am assuming no systems will have issues authenticating since they will all be reaching out to one of the three DCs, right? Therefore, I can gradually point systems to the new DC as needed.

Otherwise, please help me understand what I should do. I am going to spend my day tomorrow researching this stuff so I'm better educated on what I'm doing and can come up with an action plan.

Thank you

So this is an issue I've been having for a while, unable to solve. Also, I don't really know if it's truly a problem, per se, but I know I do not have this problem on my 2012 R2 servers which are NIC teamed.

I have a handful of 2008 R2 Enterprise servers and they have Broadcom NICs (3 of them have Broadcom 5720 QP) with NIC teaming enabled.

A while back, I did a scan with Wireshark to look for duplicate IP addresses and the results I got back all pointed to duplicate uses of IPs on the servers with the NIC teaming. Further inspection revealed that each teamed interface had a different MAC but the same IP was assigned to all interfaces. So, it kind of is and isn't a duplicate IP... more like, multiple MACs on the same system sharing the same IP.

Anyway, I also have NIC teaming enabled on all my 2012 R2 servers and I do not have this issue at all. I have tried upgrading the NIC firmware and software drivers several times. I have also called Dell support and went through a lot of steps to solve the problem but they could not fix it. The only thing I haven't tried is to install a non-Broadcom NIC, which I will do eventually.

In the mean time, I just wanted to see if anyone here has seen this before or if it's even really an issue. I only assume it's an issue because it was my understanding that all the NICs in a team will have the same MAC and IP. That's how it is on 2012 R2 anyway.

Screenshots:

ALSO: The rest of the interfaces have different MACs as well. I just highlighted the first two I could find in Wireshark.

@scottalanmiller said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@dave247 said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@scottalanmiller said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@dave247 said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@scottalanmiller said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@dave247 said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@scottalanmiller said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

@coliver said in Best way to secure DHCP so that not just anyone can plug their PC in and get an IP? (Windows DC with DHCP):

I should say that I'm not really judging you or your experience, etc. This whole audit thing is just bizarre to me.

This is par for the course. Most security audits are scams. If your team knew security, you'd not need an audit. So by the nature of paying someone to do an audit, they pretty much assume that they can take advantage of the situation. All of the money is in that scam.

Well I'm at a bank, and the banks are under the various banking cartel systems and so we have imposed on us the need for these audits and stuff.

I worked for a bank and we didn't have that. We had internal auditors, and we'd kick them out for incompetence. They'd literally demand that we do things like shut down the connections to the NY Stock Exchange claiming it was an "unneeded link."

Well, I'm still new to banking and IT (only 1.6 years now or something) so I am still learning how it all works. I'm sure it's all FUBAR but hey, I got a family to feed.

That's why I'm pushing you to figure out where you fit into the equation. At some point, you just follow orders and don't worry about it. Sure, post here, ask what a good solution would have been so that you learn options or whatever. But in a case like this, boss says listen to auditor, auditor tells you to burn the company to the ground, you burn it to the ground because your job is to follow the boss' orders.

It is what it is. But it sounds like the bank has decided that the boss' whims are a higher priority than security or efficiency. It is what it is. BUt that's what they want.

Here is an early Christmas present: Additionally, the auditors have suggested having phones on their own VLAN for security. SO now I'm trying to set up LLDP.

Of course they did.

Any chance these auditors happen to sell support services, too?

YES HOW DID YOU KNOW

I've been having tons of network issues lately and one thing I lack is good network visibility. I've asked about snmp here in the past and people have recommended Zabbix. I am considering spending my weekend setting up something to monitor my switches, and if Zabbix isn't too difficult to set up and get going, I will give that a try.

I've already set up a Debian Linux server a while ago and have nothing going on it currently, so I could use that for Zabbix.

I'm just asking this because 9 times out of 10, a project like this will have multiple rabbit holes and I worry that I will get half-way thru Zabbix install only to get stuck with some insane complex issue with a Linux dependency or something...

Nevermind.. looks like I got it working.. took a while but I have switch info coming into Zabbix now. Now to add everything else.