Best posts made by drewlander

@BRRABill Sounds like a situation I had to deal with last year where an organization was running Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen II pizza boxes. I tried reasoning with them explaining that 9 year old servers should not be production machines for mission critical systems. They didn't seem to care about business continuity until they started failing.

Has anyone tried Zentyal CS with Samba to replace AD and MS Exchange? If so, did you migrate MS Exchange data? Did you encounter any issues? Was the user experience pretty seamless?

I am installing Zentyal right now to test this out, but I am curious if others have production experience on this topic.

@scottalanmiller said:

Carefully worded.... there is no guarantee of uptime or performance, only a guarantee of "100% SLA". That is, quite literally, gibberish. It has no meaning whatsoever.

This is so funny. I frequently read contracts with garbage like this for new clients to help get them on track. Just yesterday I had a client send me their Rackspace contract. They're paying 550/mo for what they thought was a dedicated server, but what they got was "Dedicated Account Management and Business Development Team". So basically they've been paying 550/mo for a VPS running Windows Server 2008 to host Quickbooks for two people. sigh.

If you have the dough to spend, Aerohive is really good stuff. Maybe I just like the platform better, but I see now that UBNT has upgraded UniFi, so I might need to thoroughly check it out before I commit to that statement. I just installed the new UniFi tonight because I saw this topic and wanted to check my config before commenting at all. If you want to do it on a budget, but not compromise the quality of the hardware then id go with the UBNT AP like @scottalanmiller suggested. Also I dont really bother with AC at this point because hardly any of my devices support it anyway, and I don't need those transfer speeds.

Keep in mind however ( not that this is a problem on my home network ) I think I recall reading some restrictions on those UBNT AP's. There was and may still be a hard limit of 127 devices per radio ( 127 @ 2.4 and 127 @ 5). In the forums people commented on a soft limit of 32 devices per AP, but I cannot attest to that having any accuracy. I don't know if you still need to configure wLAN groups for ZH (Zero Hand-off) to work, but it used to be that way for sure. Also there was a bug if you had the heartbeat checkbox enabled on the AP, MAC computers would randomly disconnect.

As far as switches go I really dont mind using inline adapters and barrel plugs with ac adapters. Id rather see one inline adapter fail than an entire POE switch, personally. This is really something you need to evaluate yourself.

I dont particularly like using Out-of-the-Box guest network configuration on UBNT equipment. My preference is to configure my own vLAN's and firewall rules. Last I knew you could have 4 SSID per AP, so I configure three. One for the managed network devices, one of personal devices and one for guests. Each SSID can be tied to a vLAN ID and you can introduce bandwidth policing at the SSID level. In my case, the managed network would be uncapped, the personal devices would have a minor cap, and guest networking would be "usable for general purposes". In the firewall I would isolate all three networks and block communication between them.

Anyway... that is my experience with these things. Hope at least one thing I mentioned helps you.

thx
-d

@BRRABill said:

0 anxiety scale because that kind of stuff always makes me nervous. Anyway, no problem, I have spare drives on the shelf ready to go. I pull out the

In complete honesty I will admit that one time I was cold swapping a failed drive in a proliant dl360G5 and replaced the wrong one. Fortunately the server wouldnt even boot and I was able to power it down, sort it out and bring it back up. Since then I will never run a server without the backplane kit and hot swappable drive caddies with the status indicator LED.

@johnhooks
ClearOS looks pretty cool. I might tinker with this first.

@MattSpeller Based on what you just said I finally understand where @scottalanmiller is coming from. I concede that the writes are simultaneous to the disks therefore should not backlog the cache with exception in that queues and seeks will be based on your slowest disk.

@JaredBusch

So I tested ClearOS and its not bad. Compared to Zentyal the screens load much faster and config changes happen faster too. Must be something in the validations?? My biggest complaint is I cannot test everything without buying it. Zarafa. etc are not free even in the community edition. Id give it 3 out of 5 stars since I couldnt test all the functionality and because as you stated, this is a wrapper to manage all the packages and features they decide you should run in the distribution linux they choose.

Going back to my plan of testing LDAP\Samba4 and OX App on CentOS.

thx
-d

@scottalanmiller said:

wn all of the

I lease with buyout from HP and use un-managed colo. An aged asset becomes a liability for my business continuity. However I dont think I would lease equipment from Rackspace fwiw. My aged hardware becomes dev hardware upon replacement.

thx
-d

@BRRABill said:

My drive failed almost immediately. I mean, whatever happened rebooted the server.

Go right ahead. Did that drive fail after replacement while it was in a degraded state? Id say your controller is failing if that happened.

On a side note, I pretty much only use RAID 1 mirror w 1 hot spare (3 disks total) these days in what I do. The apps I deal with and code for (mostly) are OLTP with tons of tiny write transactions. Using a small stripe size and only two disks, this setup benchmarks 13x faster write speeds for me than a RAID5 array with 4 disks, all day, according to AS SSD. The way we coded our software and designed the database everything uses GUID's for PK. GoDaddy premium dns provides round-robin load balancing ( I don't manage that part). In Proliant servers (dl360 G7 for example) I like to install both backplane kits and split the RAID1 mirror between backplanes. This is just to show as example that there's really not a one-size-fits-all solution for server configurations and redundancy. The software I develop (or run) dictates what I am able to do with the hardware.

@Dashrender said:

e had a reverse osmosis for drin

Im not an expert, but I think you are going to want an RO with Remineralization if you intend on drinking the water.

@Dashrender said:

rpose is. A repl

I need to see exactly what they are doing with that SWF, that aside I like this solution and discussed it with Dashrender but we agreed it probably requires a few modifications.

1.) This app needs to log IP Addresses
2.) A client should be able to target a file to system user if the system user has a targeted an active file to the client.
3.) The new user email template should not include a plain text password. It should have a username and a link to the forgot password landing page so the user can request and reset their own account if their account is created by a system user.

I have no experience with ownCloud but I am not interested in creating a central point of management for dropbox and sharepoint or whatever it is they are advertising. If the state requires a patient record I need a secure file exchange service to handle that transaction, and that is specifically what this app does.

-d

@scottalanmiller said:

@drewlander said:

On a side note, I pretty much only use RAID 1 mirror w 1 hot spare (3 disks total) these days in what I do.

Never use a hot spare with RAID 1 unless your controller really lacks basic functionality. Instead go to a triple mirrored RAID 1. This is far safer than RAID 1 with a hot spare because instead of needing to rebuild while lacking mirroring the data is always hot and ready AND you get a 50% read performance boost for the life of the array. So faster and safer, no downsides.

That's a pretty strong leading sentence. I want that spare inactive because the servers run SSD. Also I am not sure the gains on reads would be worth the hit on writes in an OLTP app that processes high volume micro transactions. We both know HDD's read faster than they write, and reads are not generally where people suffer with disk I/O issues (at least not in what I do). Id be happy to try it and compare random writes on a RAID1 3-way mirror cs RAID1 2 disk mirror, but I don't think I even need to do that to know 3x random writes takes longer than 2x random writes. Rebuild in degraded mode would be slower, but I would sooner prefer generally faster transactions with a day of slow rebuilding over a generally slower application from day to day.

-d

@scottalanmiller , that is how I understood the ownCloud product when I read up on it.

@scottalanmiller said:

concerns remain the same, t

Any experience with LSI fastpath using SSD arrays as cache on the front end for a larger array of SAS spinning drives on the back end? LSI says its super fast, but that is their job to tell me that. I have been debating implementing one server like this to see how it goes.

@Reid-Cooper said:

nd want to talk

No. If I wrote this it would be written in MVC for PHP. I was looking for an open source solution, found one and feel it needs some tweaks but its a good solution overall.

Thats what I thought too. So if I wanted to make a major upgrade to these servers it would be better for me to use the SSD I already have for cachecade RAID1, then buy 4 2.5" 6Gb/s 15K 300Gb drives for a RAID5. That sound right?

@scottalanmiller said:

he web logs for MangoLassi would tell us almost nothing. It would show only one connection for each tab that you have open rather than info about each page that you go to. That's why we rely on the application itself for stats. Only the app knows when it has shown a p

I noticed this right away when I came to MLIT because the views tick at each view instead of unique views.

@scottalanmiller Ah yes. I forgot that its a "hot data" caching system. I dont know if that is particularly useful for me.

@dafyre I havent felt out the product yet, but I did install centOS into a vm last night, then installed nethserver and owncloud to check it all out. I still like this ProjectSend open source solution though.