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

We should have a salt states file tag, strictly for salt states files. I'll populate it as I make them. I see you have a few on here that could be added.

I like that idea.

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

https://www.ringcentral.com/lp/smallbusinessphoneoffer.html - show this to your bean counters 🙂

I have this phone sitting on my desk for probably 3 years now, rock solid.

Yes, they are good phones. I have three of them I'd like to sell if anyone is interested.

@jaredbusch said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dashrender said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dave247 said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

If for home, I assume that the goal is learning ESXi itself? Otherwise, just use a different hypervisor. KVM seems to be the hypervisor of prominence today.

Well, I use ESXi/vSphere at work. I wanted to try out the free version of ESXi at home for S&G, but I may also experiment with other Hypervisors, depending on what will work with my system. I would like to check out KVM.

I would skip ESXi Free, it has so little value even for education. If you use ESXi at work, you already have the exposure to the real thing. The crippled free version is worthless.

I'm not sure I agree with this. If he has Essentials at work, then doesn't the free version of ESXi do everything but have the backup APIs?

Well, what is the goal? If the goal is to learn, ESXi Free wouldn't make sense since he already knows ESXi and the free version lacks nearly all the features that you need to practice on like vMotion, HA, Backups, etc.

If if you want to learn something new, a different hypervisor is needed. If you want to learn advanced features, a different hypervisor is needed. If you want to use it for production at home and want the best options for that, a different hypervisor is needed.

Also if you want to learn ESXi, VMWare has a thing for that.
https://www.vmware.com/try-vmware/try-hands-on-labs.html

Even better.

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus - Help desk + asset management + project management . Now, avail ServiceDesk Plus On-demand for Non- IT departments with enterprise service management feature. Check out here for better clarity https://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/enterprise-service-desk-management.html

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

I'm getting a lot of hardware experience though 🙂

Um,.... yay?

@dave247 said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@scottalanmiller said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@jaredbusch said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@scottalanmiller said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@dave247 said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@scottalanmiller said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@dave247 said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@scottalanmiller said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

@dave247 said in Best DNS choice for a financial institution?:

So then what good/safe/secure/reliable/free DNS servers should I be using?? All I know of right now is google and DNSwatch..

Google. It's what everyone uses. Unless you are going to pay for something, which is perfectly fine as things like Cisco Umbrella really do a good job, you just use Google. Google's DNS servers are screaming fast, insanely secure, and standard the world over. Google's only competition was OpenDNS' free servers and they were only competitive when they did free filtering and other tools. Without that, Google is still the best. So no reason to look around for anything else.

rips hair out google it is then

LOL, remember it is IT, "keeping it simple" is often the right answer.

Yeah I can't remember why, but for some reason I remember changing my thoughts about "just setting DNS to google" ... like it wasn't the best thing to do or something.

Best thing is likely a service like Umbrella. But for free, nothing will touch Google.

An alternative to Umbrella is Strongarm.io. They have recently added content filtering options to their service which was originally only designed to interrupt connections to malicious sites.

Yes. Probably much cheaper than Cisco, too. OpenDNS was great before Cisco bought them. I'd personally be pretty wary of using a Cisco service, my interactions with Cisco are pretty consistent that they lack integrity and so I don't see them as a company I would trust in any situation where they were involved in security. They don't seem to have a lot of ethics and that is a big deal when talking about security products - what good is their security if you can't trust the people who are the security people!

Definitely check out Strongarm.io. If you are going to be in Austin in two weeks, Strongarm will be hanging out with us on Sixth!

Same impression I get

Have you tried Strongarm? How do you like it?

What are you looking for from FreePBX? Other than a download link, which should be pretty clear, what more is there to find?

@scottalanmiller We have done this with any apartment we rented.

@dave247 said in Questions about licensing issues after converting physical SQL server to virtual:

Hi. New here..

I have a Poweredge R320 running Server 2012 R2 Standard which is running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (64bit). This server has always been a bit slow with often very high disk I/O. Performance has gotten worse over time and I believe it's due to the fact that it's disks are in a RAID 5, and the SQL DB has gotten larger over the years/had more use, etc.

Anyway, I wish to virtualize this system because our storage controller is RAID 10 with much better IOPs. We have 3x ESXi hosts, each with dual sockets and better processors than the R320 server as well, but I'm really only looking to improve disk I/O. This server is running a single Xeon E5-2440 0 (6 cores) btw.

I want to convert this system from physical to virtual (using vCenter Converter) and verify that there are no issues before we pay more money for licensing, assuming we have to pay to change # of CPU and cores. If there is an issue, I can just revert and we won't be out $. I am just unclear on if SQL Server 2008 actually knows when there's a hardware change and if it will stop functioning or something, or if the system will continue on without any issues.

Thanks. Also, hi Scott.

When you use the converter, it creates a VM with the same hardware specs.
So the VM will have the same number of sockets and cores as the physical box. There is no licensing issue there.
You will have to reactivate Windows, but again, not a licensing issue, just an activation.
Prior to running the converter, run a backup and shut down the SQL services so that no database files are open just to be safe.
I have done it live with no issues, but the butt cheeks were clinched.