Posts made by dave247

@dafyre said in Looking for a good security camera system:

@dave247 said in Looking for a good security camera system:

My company has a super old security camera system from like early 2000's. I'm considering purchasing a new system and installing it myself to save us money. Literally anything we could buy (even from Wal-Mart) would be better than what we have. That said, I still want to try and find a nice solid system that has an intelligent and feature-rich user interface and good functionality. I say that because pretty much all the systems I've seen at other jobs have looked and operated like junk.

Basically I need something that would be HD and allow for 25 or more cameras connected via network cable and have a central server that would be located on-prem in the server room.

Any suggestions for where to start looking?

The other guys here can speak to the cameras themselves.

I've used two pieces of software for handling the recordings and such as of late. The first is Avigilon Control Center (https://www.avigilon.com). It's ok, based on Windows, and licensed per camera.

The second, I use personally to handle motion detection from a single camera at home. ZoneMinder (https://www.zoneminder.com/) is Free / Open Source

Cool thanks, I'll take a look at these

My company has a super old security camera system from like early 2000's. I'm considering purchasing a new system and installing it myself to save us money. Literally anything we could buy (even from Wal-Mart) would be better than what we have. That said, I still want to try and find a nice solid system that has an intelligent and feature-rich user interface and good functionality. I say that because pretty much all the systems I've seen at other jobs have looked and operated like junk.

Basically I need something that would be HD and allow for 25 or more cameras connected via network cable and have a central server that would be located on-prem in the server room.

Any suggestions for where to start looking?

Why not just use PowerShell?

@jaredbusch said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

@dave247 said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

@jaredbusch said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

@dave247 said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

Why don't you do some reading or ask at the pfSense forum?

Obvious troll is obvious. But I will answer anyway.

2. No, I will not ask a bunch of tinkerers about a business essential question.

LOL ok. The forum is on netgate's website and the platform is open source so you're going to probably get a mix of knowledgeable people as well as "tinkerers" no matter where you ask. You just have to weed out the responses but I'm sure that's a better place to start than this forum...

I responded to a single thread there.. Yup. useless.

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/163406/downgrade-to-2-5-0

Good lord, LMAO. I'm sorry. I love that you took my advice and went over there only to discover it is indeed absolute stupidity.

Yeah so idk maybe just don't update pfsense for a while? Is there a pressing need to upgrade to the new version? I know its ideal to just have things kept updated and on the latest version but its not worth it when the system updates are such a gamble and there's no real support.

@dustinb3403 said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

@dave247 said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

@jaredbusch said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

@dave247 said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

Who dual boots OS's these days? Just use VMware Workstation or VirtualBox...

Obvious troll is obvious.

Gamers. Not everything runs under wine

I'm not trolling... I was genuinely wondering why you'd dual boot. I always used to hate that, shutting down one OS to bring up another. I'd rather have both available at the same time.

Sure, except you're having massive performance hits from running them at the same time.

Dual booting provides the full performance to whichever OS is running at that time.

Yeah I didn't know it was for gaming purposes when commenting.

@jaredbusch said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

@dave247 said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

Why don't you do some reading or ask at the pfSense forum?

Obvious troll is obvious. But I will answer anyway.

2. No, I will not ask a bunch of tinkerers about a business essential question.

LOL ok. The forum is on netgate's website and the platform is open source so you're going to probably get a mix of knowledgeable people as well as "tinkerers" no matter where you ask. You just have to weed out the responses but I'm sure that's a better place to start than this forum...

@jaredbusch said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

@dave247 said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

Who dual boots OS's these days? Just use VMware Workstation or VirtualBox...

Obvious troll is obvious.

Gamers. Not everything runs under wine

I'm not trolling... I was genuinely wondering why you'd dual boot. I always used to hate that, shutting down one OS to bring up another. I'd rather have both available at the same time.

@jaredbusch said in Install Windows as a Dual Boot after Fedora:

So, the internet is full of the reverse. Installing Fedora or Ubuntu or any other Linux after Windows is installed.

But I have Fedora installed first and I want to install Windows as a dual boot to a separate disk.

Booting to the USB and installing windows to that disk is easy.

What I'm not sure about is fixing grub afterwards.

Google and the older Fedora docs tell me this.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/23/html/Multiboot_Guide/GRUB-recreating.html

Boot to a live image and run this:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

Who dual boots OS's these days? Just use VMware Workstation or VirtualBox...

@jaredbusch said in Any pfSense users? Are upgrades smooth?:

Site has a box running pfSense for their main router.

It has an update pending.

I have not actively used pfSense for 7 years. It has generally always worked, but again, that was 7+ years ago.

Why don't you do some reading or ask at the pfSense forum?

@siringo said in Simple comms. What to do?:

I have a site where the two main servers (Windows) are located about 15 'cable' metres from the switch (switch A) they plug into.

Each server has 3 NICs.

I'm wondering what others would do?

Would you run 6 cables from the servers to switch A

or

place a switch (switch B) near the servers and run 1 cable from switch B to switch A?

Thanks for any help.

If it's just two servers and there's no expectation for growth, I'd probably just run cables to the switches.

In my server cage at work, we have a bunch of servers, so I have everything going to a 2-stack of switches (with dedicated UPS) and then fiber trunked to the main switch stack that everything else in our environment connects to. This helps keeps thing neat and clean with regards to cables in the server room and everything on the server LAN can still function if there is an outage somewhere else. It all depends on how you want to have it set up with regards to pricing, redundancy and availability.

@scottalanmiller said in Net+ Study Help - Subnetting:

@irj said in Net+ Study Help - Subnetting:

@scottalanmiller said in Net+ Study Help - Subnetting:

@itivan80 said in Net+ Study Help - Subnetting:

@scottalanmiller They need to start revising these questions. I mean if they want to get it as close as possible to real life scenarios. Just a thought.

That, too. Like this is not a skill anyone would ever need. Ever.

Especially considering the hundreds of free online calculators. The ones that can do this in their head are network guys from 90s, and the only reason they can do it in their head is because they've worked with it back when there was a lack of technology like VLANs.

Good point. That's so true. Even if you are "good" at this, never ever ever should you try to do it manually. There is zero value to taking that risk.

Yeah, excellent point. I've thought the same. I mean, I get it, they want you to try and get your brain to really understand it but in any real world situation, always use a subnet calculator and double-check it a few times, lol.

@justin867 said in Domain Controller Question:

@dashrender said in Domain Controller Question:

What exactly is failing? So far only Print Server, mapped printers is showing access denied

Here's a thought - do you have local DNS? Yes That might be the whole issue here.

If your local DC doesn't have DNS, and you can't get the central DNS servers, that would explain why you can't get to some functions.

But beyond that - I think we need more details on what exactly does and doesn't work. Is printing the only thing affected? Yes Do you have file shares? Yes can you get to the internet? Yes
Can you log into the Print Server server? - Yes
Please tell us about your server setup - is it a single VM host with two VMs (a DC and a Print Server)? DC and Print Server is separated What OS is are the servers? 2012

Can you access the web interface of the printers?
Are the printers mapped via GPO?
Have you tried re-deploying any of the printers (just as a test)?

@jaredbusch said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

Of course backups can be encrypted. Anything physically attached to the network is vulnerable to malware/ransomware. The point of all this was clearly explained in my original post.

FFS, think a little.
They cannot be encrypted if the datastore is not accessible to anything except the application making the backup.

Thanks for your rudeness, Jared, it is so helpful.

Yes, I do understand what you are saying, however if a system is connected to a network and other systems, it is not air-gapped / truly segregated from the environment and therefore not 100% safe in a total ransomware situation. All applications have vulnerabilities and a skilled hacker (or insider) or well-made ransomware could still potentially get at it.

Additionally, I am not looking at this as any kind of main backup method - I am just trying to mull over ideas for a very last-ditch, fail-safe, "shit hits the fan but we have offline backups though" setup.

@jaredbusch said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

What is the point of all of this? Crypto does not affect backups. That is why they are backups. They are static.

If you are worried about your backup being encrypted, then don't use a common access. Only give the the Veeam credentials with write access to the backup storage location.

Use Veeam to write to B2 or something similar.

Of course backups can be encrypted. Anything physically attached to the network is vulnerable to malware/ransomware. The point of all this was clearly explained in my original post.

@scottalanmiller said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

Yes, its not perfect or ideal, but given that I have stated that I already have thorough backups and am only seeking to add offline/air-gapped copies as an added precaution, I don't think its that big an issue.

The biggest issue is the hardware. How do you plan to connect and reconnect drives because no business class system that does RAID is meant for this to happen. So you either use business class devices that get abused and aren't expected to remain reliable. Or you use consumer gear to get the hotswap portion but don't have overall good hardware.

It can be done, everyone suggests doing it, and there is a reason that it's considered a horrible idea that should never be done. Trust me, there are simple, better ways to do something similar, rule this out and never think about it again. RAID is close to, but not the actual correct tool. The idea of copying the data to another drive is good, but RAID isn't a file copy and that's the underlying problem... this is triggering a disaster recovery mechanism designed for something totally different.

yeah good points.. I just wanted to entertain the idea by posting here and have you guys sway me... a more attractive idea that I had been mulling around was basically a Veeam copy job to a repository with a scripted on/off network connectivity switch on a schedule. That or I just manually plug and unplug the network cable as I mentioned above. LMAO hey it would technically work.

@dashrender said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@scottalanmiller said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

I would even think an SSD setup would be more stable in this situation since write time and life time would be a lot better. I only mention spindle drives since its a big blob of data.

SSD is faster, and that helps, for sure. But the real issue is the physical connections and the RAID mechanism, not the drives themselves. Physical drives are a perfectly valid media for your use case. It's RAID being used as an archival mechanism rather than as a disaster avoidance mechanism that causes the problems both in software and in hardware.

Maybe I will just have to set up a network repository and simply plug the network cable in to let backup file copy to sync, then disconnect. That would probably be the easiest way to be honest.

I just wanted some mechanism that forced us to always have a full backup of data sitting offline/air-gapped... but F it lol

Yeah, it’s called tape. And it’s $8k price tag.

Yeah I'm not doing tape and I think the alternate mechanism I proposed is roughly fine, depending on how its approached.

@scottalanmiller said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

To do basically the same thing, what you want is a NAS with local storage (with or without RAID, in this case you are without RAID even though you are using RAID, so no need to have RAID at all) and having a hot swap drive in a mechanism meant to handle this, like a USB style drive, and a script that does a file copy of just the backup, not a block mirror of the drives, to copy the backup to the second drive.

Actually, I just remembered that with the Highly Reliable system, they had Windows software RAID 1 which did a good job in this kind of setup. Yes, its not perfect or ideal, but given that I have stated that I already have thorough backups and am only seeking to add offline/air-gapped copies as an added precaution, I don't think its that big an issue.

@travisdh1 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@travisdh1 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

In its simplest form, I am looking to add offline/rotated backups to our 3-2-1 backup chain. I just want an offline copy as a final failsafe.

My thought is to get a server or NAS appliance with 2 x 15TB+ drives in a RAID1 which would act as a backup repository for ALL backups, and then have a 3rd drive with which to rotate out with one of the RAID1 pairs. Basically we'd pull out 1 drive and insert the free one and let the mirror complete and then swap it out again the next day, back and forth. This way, there would always be an air-gapped drive with a full copy of all our backups.

The only issues are mirror write-time for ~10TB and actually making sure the mirroring is automatic.

My company used to have a BNAS appliance from Highly Reliable which did just this, and it seemed to do an ok job, except mirror times were pretty long. This was 5+ years ago though.

Any ideas? I'm just trying to get the ideas flowing. I'm sure I could probably do a custom server build for something like this if I have to.

Whatever you do, mucking with the RAID is not what you want to be doing. That is something that would guarantee data loss due to someone entering a setting wrong.

I wouldn't call it mucking with RAID. Its just drive rotations.

Each time you add/remove a drive from the array, you chance clicking the wrong drive, the wrong action, etc. I'd call it unnecessary, mucking about where you shouldn't, and very risky as a few of the more friendly terms.

Not if you follow the correct steps and know what you are doing. Its not anything terribly difficult.

Why do you feel like the removable drives need to be a part of the RAID array?

Because the RAID1 mirror would write the changes to the swapped disk.

The idea is to have Drive 1 and Drive X in a RAID1 mirror, where Drive X = both drives 2 and 3 which would be swapped out daily.

@scottalanmiller said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

@dave247 said in offline, air-gapped backups / backup rotation (looking for hardware & ideas):

I would even think an SSD setup would be more stable in this situation since write time and life time would be a lot better. I only mention spindle drives since its a big blob of data.

SSD is faster, and that helps, for sure. But the real issue is the physical connections and the RAID mechanism, not the drives themselves. Physical drives are a perfectly valid media for your use case. It's RAID being used as an archival mechanism rather than as a disaster avoidance mechanism that causes the problems both in software and in hardware.

Maybe I will just have to set up a network repository and simply plug the network cable in to let backup file copy to sync, then disconnect. That would probably be the easiest way to be honest.

I just wanted some mechanism that forced us to always have a full backup of data sitting offline/air-gapped... but F it lol