@s.hackleman said in Blockchain - Hot or Not?:

oney in bitcoin every week. I have a friend who went full in retirement and all, and preaches the gospel all the time. I'm not that crazy, but I first bought in at $268 a BTC, and as of right now we are at.... $1,178 and down almost $100 from last week, so I'm having fun. It is a way for me to play with some spending money on the side and learn and try the technology behind it.

I dont think its Hyped, its very interesting approach.

All the big players are betting on it, albeit small stakes but still, IBM, DELL, INTEL just to name a few, they have some sort of consortium for it, um imagine where we dont neet banks and you can to transactions and validate them on your machine.

It never really hits until you install Wallet and have to download 30 GB worth of data to begin (you can use a cloud wallet, but thats the new fancy way of doing it), afterwards you will get addresses and anybody can sent money to you in an encrypted manner.

Its very interesting stuff indeed, but IMO any opensource tech that branches out rapidly and turns to
many derivatives that is not really the best strategy to do any significant change.

You scared me .. I thought you have like split personality or something, till i saw the port... I know i know its in the title but still..

Hmm dc for 15 folks, If they are not bringing new people in the future, you can create alternative for this, especially since you can go around and install stuff on their machines, I assume they will be 15 as well.

Anything with LXDE interface, ex: Lubuntu and Fedora LXDE Spin

@scottalanmiller

I am the "IT Manager" = "lone IT guy in charge of an SMB" sometimes i feel like GOD and sometimes i want to hide and cry under my desk...

Hello,

I know sounds like very lazy question, but to spin it in another way:

What do I gain from learning XenServer that KVM cant do ?

Besides just learning another tool in my toolbox, which is always helpful (and I am pretty sure that I will install it shortly and fiddle with it), but is there anything specific XenServer can do ? that KVM cant.

I'm comparing the latest KVM with latest XenServer 7.1 Free edition.

Thanks.

anything .OVA or .OVF or equivalent, but not virtual hard disk like VMDK, or VDI
that contains the OS + definitions for it like 2GB ram ...etc
and have a server role (VPN/Collabora office/web application like os ticket )
also should work out of the box with minimal configuration changes.

The closest thing to containers before it came out.

I reckon this happens in College and Universites, they simply skip the basics and jumn straight to teaching RDBMS and how to develop web app with it via MySQL or Oracle or MsSQL and thats it, it skimps alot of detail on how they are supposed to stay up and operational, they simply wants you to teach you something that makes you get money fast, and the rest is somebody else problem.

Also in my Egyptian university, Oracle like pays them money or sponsor them, thus we get taught alot about Oracle 10g Database Express edition, however like I said no one sponsors the basics of how to setup everything properly cause perhaps its hard to make money from that as soon as you leave College, cause they assume everything will be ready for you. btw I majored in M.I.S but i rarely do any SQL work, currently More like an I.T Generalist.

@scottalanmiller

IT is expected to just "fix the issue" rather than to be involved in strategic planning. (+100)

And its very true when you have very limited budget to fix things, and I tend to have to rely on free and open source tech and what I have, cause I reckon you got used to be working with top of the line companies that understand there should be an initial cost for things to work smoothly in the foreseeable future.

I swear I learn alot with your replies, cause you give me the ideal way of how things should be, the best scenario for fixing the issue, but sometimes due to living in the developed/3rd world we have to make a bit of shortcuts, and there are other factors that we have to work with including stuff that you guys long ago dumped which is Piracy, but people here are generally are not accustomed to pay for software, they dont understand that notion, they just understands paying for hardware.

Also lately being the sole I.T where I work and kinda of limited budget gets me alot frustrated, I have to work with Asus AS1002T with 2x 2TB RAID 1 WD RED which is relatively good NAS for home, but not what I say amazing or business ready. But what to do when you explain the need of big storage system like SAN RACK and management tell you lets try with smaller one first and see how it goes...

I recall you blogged about this and made neat article about who makes the decisions I.T or management, and the conclusion was or how I understood it that it eventually management and we I.T have to live with the consequence the majority of time, and good companies/organization are the ones that make I.T more involved during this process.

To be honest, I am bit frustrated where I live and work, cause I have to always deal with shortcuts, it did teach me alot about how to do things in very cheap manner... for example KVM Virtualization instead of ESXi or using ESXi free and alot of scripts and OVA export and manual backups of VMs, Mumble/murmur (skype alternative) , using Win7/Windows 2008 instead of 2012 or anything beyond that due to reasons only specific people will know (Daz is the champ), but I reckon the world have grown past this, but what do at the end you have to learn and generate results, like it or not.

+1 to everything, very good effort and explanation and helpful experiment.

@DustinB3403

Sorry for the delay in replying, it seems alot have happened since I posted this and went to sleep.
I know the main topic didn't have much detailed information.

Btw I will try both:

Veeam Endpoint Backup
And UrBackup and its alternatives

And like you said in realistic scenarios we have to go step by step, and I wish I had more experience and more tools/funds/assistance but in reality, I will need to provide users with PDF guide and a link for the software hosted locally .

Also I fully agree this is the best of the worst approaches.

Many Thanks.

@PenguinWrangler

Thanks will check it out.

@Dashrender

No server really, we want to rely to agent/software that will backup to NAS directly and this software should be installed on other Wndows clients as well.

I am looking for stuff like Genie9 GenieTimeline.

@Dashrender

Files like Desktop/Documents
And also locked ones like Outlook.

Hi

What software do you use for the above, and I like my tools cheap like me

@scottalanmiller said in Linux: BtrFS:

vanced features are planned, but are not yet available. Key among these are parity RAID features including RAID 5 and 6, but also potentially the first implementations of RAID 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 and the only other RAID 5.3 (aka RAID 7) implementation outside of ZFS. Object based mirrored RAID, inline deduplication and encryption are also planned for the near future.

I hear alot lately more about those filesystems, but as far as I recall ZFS requires alot of RAM as it the same with BTRFS? and is this only when you need to configure RAID with it?

I head alot of people like them for the ability to snapshot, and self healing, I understood the self healing part, but for snapshots, imagine I will run KVM server ontop of BTRFS, will it makes sense to snapshot the volume ?
or just the VM, which is better ?

And yes I use Centos latest, I noticed they have switched to XFS even in the boot partition, does it support volume snapshots?

Thanks

@scottalanmiller

Hey .. okay dont kill me but this dicussion got me thinking and I think I have solved it.

But it got me thinking why I am using Windows in the first place, and I searched and found 2 tools:

FreeLan
And SoftEther

I didnt like FreeLan cause the configuration was with notepad/text editor

But SoftEther Worked, very simple and great to setup (v4.20) and after connecting to the VPN using it, If I have duplicate IP address on both network, it will default to the VPN IP, for example if am connecting to VPN site, and I am connecting from work place that have the same subnet of the VPN like both 192.168.1.x it will and then I want to connect to 192.168.1.1 it will show me the VPN site... however when I did this with Windows it showed the local site.

Anyway I really loved how there software download and guides are very easy to read and understand, everything is pretty much guided. I was surprised that the server software detected that I am running VM and told me to enable Promiscuous network mode.

So will most probably use this and their client is easy and I reckon the VPN will be more secure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftEther_VPN.

Thanks for all the help and bashing it helped me to move away from Windows solution.

@scottalanmiller

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for pursuing this with me.

The purpose is to be for end users, whom are very I.T unskilled to connect to company resources, like NAS + and perhaps RDP to there workstation if needed.

Resources I reckon is only NAS + Router/Modem + 3 AP + Server with VMs on it that host useful webapps

No interaction needed between users it just one to one access for end users to there resources.

Network Design will I implement it so its FANTASTIC, I mean its HUGE, they are So WINNING right now :), but in summary everybody connects using 3 AP that is configured to be on the same network no VLans or anything, everybody is on the same subnet.

I am also reading on ZeroTier, but since we have server, I was thinking of using it, instead of relying on the hosted solution.

@scottalanmiller
OK, based in your experience, do you know other VPN setup/software/server that plays well
with Windows VPN client ?

Or better way to put it, what is the easiest VPN client that you have used ? or simple to setup and secure.

@scottalanmiller said in WTF I AM DOING WRONG (VPN edition) ?:

If you don't have AD, though... why would you ever use Windows as a VPN aggregator? This is backwards... if you were going to split these roles you'd have the VPN on the router and DHCP on the Windows machine.

To be honest, setting up VPN in windows server is easy and Like i said i dont know much about VPN, I tried OpenVPN but I didnt like the interface, for the client and the server.

I need to have solution that provides a very easy client VPN setup, and Windows VPN build in client is relatively straight forward.