Hi guys,

I have a new customer that has internet download speeds that vary wildly during the day. Sometimes endpoints (wired) get 89-90 Mbps, while other times of the day they get as low as 10 Mbps. Any time you test the connection directly off the Comcast gateway you get speeds of 80-90 Mbps.

This is how their setup is wired:

Comcast gateway (10.1.10.1 LAN) -> WAN port (configured to use Comcast static IP) of Luxul XBR-4400 router. The Luxul router's LAN IP is 10.1.10.2 and is their DHCP server. The router is setup to use a static IP address from Comcast on the WAN side so it's not getting a 10.1.10.X IP from the Comcast Gateway's DHCP server.

I've always setup my customers with unique IP addresses for their LAN. Is there a potential conflict with the LAN side of the Comcast gateway with the LAN side of the Luxul router?

If not, my guess is that the Luxul router is having some sort of weird issue.

Yeah I don't get it. All I know is that I get a "no root file system" error. Vultr would be perfect for this - super cheap..just can't seem to figure out how to get around this error.

@scottalanmiller Yeah I reached out to rackspace and the woman I talked to - "probably around $400 a month." yeahhhhh...a little more than I'm looking to spend....

It looks like 1&1 cloud might use vmware...

Hi guys,

I'm trying to get Shadowcontrol CMD deployed to manage my clients Storagecraft software/backups. I initially setup things on vultr, but it appears that kvm is not a supported platform.

Had the same issues as this guy here:
https://www.storagecraft.com/support/forum/unable-install-vps-instance

So now I either need Hyper-V or ESXI. It's annoying because I have azure credits, but azure doesn't provide console access which I need.

Anybody know of any inexpensive cloud hypervisors, either ESXI or Hyper-V? Thanks.

I've noticed that 2016 seems to be slower at panning/zooming. I've seen others complain about this as well. Maybe it's just an issue with my system.

Hi guys,

I have a customer that needs Visio and I've had less than stellar performance on my own machine with Visio 2016 and was curious if anyone out there is using an alternative they find works just as well. Thanks!

Ok guys...update from today:
After going through things more, apparently both adapters were "bridged" via a Microsoft virtual adapter in Windows giving the "switch"a 51.6 IP address. This makes zero sense to me. Considering both ports were connected to the same Cisco router - potentially there could have been some switch/loop issues.

Anyways, I ended up disabling the "virtual switch" & secondary NIC (for now). I also found out that there was another small switch that was connecting to another network (from another business) in the building that had a Comcast gateway with its DHCP server turned on - handing out addresses in 10.1.10.X range. Fun stuff.

Anyways things seem to be working well now.

@Tim_G That's a good idea. I'm pretty sure it was ignorance. I mean...they have a Windows server and installed the DHCP role, but did not configure it. DNS is somewhat configured correctly but all the endpoints are pointing to Comcast's DNS servers...soooo.

@Tim_G I could always disable the port on the switch and if the screams come in switch it back on. Like most clients I take on the customer has zero documentation on how things are setup/configured. Maybe I'll be able to have a conversation with the old IT guy and see if he's willing to share on why things the way they are.

@Dashrender The two IPs are on the same subnet. Yesterday when I was just gathering information remotely about different devices on the network via Advanced IP scanner that's when I saw same hostname/different IPs

When I tried to access 55.6 in a browser it loaded an IIS welcome page. That's the extent of what I know for now.

@scottalanmiller Maybe I worded that wrong. I was just implying that because they had separate IPs they weren't utilizing the both nics in an effort to team them. In other words I had ruled out bandwidth aggregation, and figured they were trying to accomplish some sort of network redundancy.

@dafyre

From my brief look at the server AD role is installed but I don't believe any of the computers are members of the domain

When I did the initial onsite visit I thought the secondary connection was some sort of iLO or iDrac connection (not sure if Lenovo has a version & what it's called), but I can now see it seems like it's performing redundancy which isn't a huge concern as there are only maybe 6 users of this server. Like SAM said I should probably do some more digging before I disable it.

Hi Guys,

I just picked up a new SMB customer. He has a 2012R2 server and apparently it's been configured to use both NICs with different IPs. I found this article here:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/josebda/2010/09/03/using-the-multiple-nics-of-your-file-server-running-windows-server-2008-and-2008-r2/

And it discusses a use case for this but I was troubled by this:

"It's important to note that applications other the file server and file client might not behave properly with this configuration (they might not listen on all interfaces, for instance). You might also run into issues updating routing tables, especially in the case of a failure of a NIC or removal of a cable. These issues are documented in KB article 175767. For these reasons, many will not recommend this specific setup with a single subnet."

My first thought is to go and disable the secondary NIC, but can you guys think of any use cases I'm unaware of that might discourage me from disabling? From what I can gather his server is handling DNS, but not DHCP (I'm planning to change that). It's also a file server/SQL server. I just don't see the necessity of having that secondary NIC other than possibly creating issues.

Hi guys,

Was ordering RAM for my new BDR build I'm going to use for my customers. Somehow I got a single stick of 16GB ECC memory vs 2 8GB sticks.

What I got:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5EM3XW3903

What I meant to order:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5EM3KB7221

Now I'm contemplating the exchange and started to wonder - is it even worth the extra $79 to go dual channel if this is being used as a backup target/temporary fail over?

Hi guys,

Historically I've always sold the BDR (using with storagecraft) to customers but moving forward I've decided to lease the equipment. I'm trying to decide between two different motherboards from Supermicro to base the systems on that I'll be building over the next few years and I wanted to get your opinion.

Option 1: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1WK-0010-002K8&ignorebbr=1

Option 2: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821&cm_re=MBD-X10SL7-F-O--13-182-821--Product

I've used option 2 in the past and besides being lower priced, it's also a more proven platform as it's been around much longer. The downside to this obviously is that if I'm leasing these systems to customers and in 3 years there's an issue and I need to find a replacement board it's more likely to be discontinued as the product came out in 2013.

Option 1 is a much newer board, has a lot of great new technology and I believe is more likely to be available in the next few years, but feedback on this board is slim to none and the price is twice as much.

The reason I like these two particular boards is because they have both intel & LSI sata/sas chipsets on the board providing a multitude of storage options.

Curious which you guys think makes more sense.

I just started getting this the other day after updating to 6.1/updating the access app on my machine. Very annoying. Who on earth thought this was something that was needed?

Hi Grey,

Again, I mentioned subscribing to calendars above. Last time I looked into this, it wasn't possible to on Android, but now that Microsoft has the Outlook App for Android, I can see this working. This is still extremely limited.

I have clients that have employees that share multiple calendars and want to create/edit/delete appts on their phones. On Google, when a user adds their primary email address they automatically get all the shared calendars they have access to and their appropriate permissions. My work around for clients that need access to edit/delete/create appts on their devices is to create seperate calendar/contact accounts and then add those accounts separately to their phone. This takes additional time and shouldn't be nessecary.

So we know Exchange activesync has never supported shared calendars on mobile devices. They've allowed for "subscribing" to a public calendar which only works on iPhone, but that's extremely limited. As more and more people work off mobile devices why hasn't Microsoft addressed this? I could maybe understand why this didn't work with Exchange 2010, but were on Exchange 2016 now. This is an area where Google has a huge advantage and it seems Microsoft has chosen not to compete. I just don't get it.