@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:

@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:

How would people define this?

Just send a backup to the cloud, or only achevied by backing up to tape (or other media) and store somewhere?

"Just" sending to the cloud is the opposite, not air gapped at all. That's no different than any other "always attached" media. You have to have a mechanism that makes it so that the system sending the backup cannot alter or remove said backup. From the originating system's perspective, it must be immutable or not even exist.

This is what I've always thought about "cloud" or "replication".
Think the word if been missing I immutable . Now I understand that bit it makes more sense, as to me air gap would be things like tape

Just enabled it on Wasabi give it a go
Enabled to "Lock" so to delete anything you have to contact them.

Watching youtube while setting up some refurb computers

How would people define this?
Just send a backup to the cloud, or only achevied by backing up to tape (or other media) and store somewhere?

We're looking to backup 4-5 VM's on a vmware host. 1TB max.

@pete-s said in AMD Epyc Gen 4 will have 128 cores, 5nm tech:

@obsolesce said in AMD Epyc Gen 4 will have 128 cores, 5nm tech:

What's the price going to be for one of these?

The top of the line AMD Gen 3 today is the 64 core EPYC 7763 2.45 GHz base clock and 3.5GHz turbo boost. 256MB L3 cache and 280W TDP.

That one is $8K list so the 96 core will be north of that. So maybe $12K or so.

With these prices I feel the line in that snippet is a bit false advertising. I wouldn't consider a 12k processor a "General Propose" computer. That would be more a specific use case in workstations

96 Cores, yes please. Don't think i need them but wouldn't mind lol

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@hobbit666 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to work out where the "10 day delivery" option has gone from Aliexpress

Ha! More like 10 months if it is travelling by cargo container right now.

normally I would say agree but i've bought a lot on the 10day and they have turned up after 14days max.

I've used a Pci card with breakout cable in the past to test/wipe SAS drives
(reminds me I need to find it and do some more)

Trying to work out where the "10 day delivery" option has gone from Aliexpress

Lord of the rings extended in 4k

Yeah I'll keep an eye on this. I'm thinking we'll be asked soon

@scottalanmiller said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

@hobbit666 said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

Just one thing
If your saying you can't trust a vender to provide valid support for their products, why buy it?

No one said that they won't support their products. They can't do IT. Supporting their products is not IT, that's two very different things.

Compare to cars. If you operate a taxi or limo fleet, or a rental car fleet, you call on Honda to repair a faulty transmission. You never call on Honda to advice you on how to hire, drive, fuel, finance, or manage the cars, drivers, or customers.

The vendor is like Honday, and fixing the car is an engineering task, not a business management one. IT is like business management.

If you start thinking that building (or fixing) servers or software is part of IT, then it gets really confusing. Those companies and their employees have little or no idea that people think that they do something in IT... because to them they are engineers and manufacturers, not IT in any sense. IT is part of the internal management / business operations of a company, not a product that can be sold or repairs.

Again, calling a vendor for what the vendor does is absolutely okay (but shouldn't be common or you have a product problem.) But asking a vendor to do IT work is a huge problem that it is our task to protect against as IT.

Yeah i see now miss understood Realize now your saying don't ask Dell how are CRM system works lol

Does scott have a job? As the amount of stuff he replies to and the lonnnnnng explanations/arguments. It seems Mangolass is his job lol

Just one thing
If your saying you can't trust a vender to provide valid support for their products, why buy it?

@dafyre said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

@hobbit666 said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

I several times if we need to reach out we have failed in IT.

Not necessarily. If you've had to reach out for the same thing several times, then it may be time to hire for that position in house?

Not for the same issue for different kit over the years
Touch wood we haven't much for the new kit apart from after a power cut the switches didn't come up correctly. As someone else set them up they can sort it :D. But i have now worked out how the config works

@dashrender said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

So we need to reach out for help when needed. Yes I would say I have a broed knowledge in a wide range (part thanks to this forum) but some stuff I know we would need some external help with.

I believe Scott’s argument to that would be:
Of course not, not in house. They would hire it out through an MSP. This allows for the sharing of the MSP’s resources across multiple companies while getting all the advantages.

Scott’s said this before.

But he also said what i referenced that we Should. I several times if we need to reach out we have failed in IT.

@scottalanmiller said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

2. That EVERY IT department shouldn't be tasked with having complete scope. Of COURSE they should. Imagine if we said the same thing about doctors or lawyers!!!

Unfortunately we live in the real world.
No SMB will have enough people (or money) to cover everything in the IT world, from basic desktop support, server hardware/software, security, firewalls, pentesting, cloud, azure, etc etc etc.

So we need to reach out for help when needed. Yes I would say I have a broed knowledge in a wide range (part thanks to this forum) but some stuff I know we would need some external help with.

@dashrender said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

LOL - I considered mentioning that you - Scott - would say something exactly like this. I recall you for years saying - if IT has to reach out to vendor to get a solution - they potentially have already failed - or at least that's the way it felt at the time.
I don't agree with the failure point here because it should not be expected that a person supporting a product is better at support than the vendor who makes the product... Sure, there are times when we've all seen this happen - the vendor can't solve a problem and IT finds a way, but I feel that most of these situations are ones that involve things that aren't directly related to the product.

Agree with this you can't expect any IT Department or Team to know 100% of everything. So when someting goes wrong they will need help.
As above for me, if there's an issue with Dell you call Dell support if you can't fix we've done it a few times when a switch wouldn't recover after a fail over. Also a SAN that stopped replicating. Yes I bet I could of fixed these myself after digging around, but as we paid for support why not use it.

We've seen a sharp rise since covid for new employees getting laptops, where normally they would of had a desktop.

Laptop wise we normally budget for £600 and normally get i5-11th or ryzen5
If we grab something on a deal even better

What about XCP-ng? Would that be something to consider to run a business on?