@jasgot said in Good deal on 14TB drives - BestBuy:

Anyone know what drive is inside?

WD Red. NAS.

Anyone know what drive is inside?

Does anyone have a preference for Alarm Monitoring? I am looking for an alternative to our local company.

We are AlarmNet compatible, use Lights and Scenes and TotalConnect 2.0

Currently paying $35/mo , looking for less; a lot less.

I found
and they look suitable, has anyone ever used them?

@dafyre said in Need to split this string in PHP:

@jaredbusch Is the Jitsi version always the same length? If so you could do it with some substr() magic.

Probably not, version 12.10.5550 is one char longer. (Assuming they will get to bigger versions someday.)

@jaredbusch said in Need to split this string in PHP:

I have this bit of information.
"Jitsi2.10.5550Windows 10"

I need to split it into

$brand = "Jitsi";
$model = "Windows 10";
$firmware = "2.10.5550";

Jitsi is fixed, so easy to substring.

But the model and firmware not so much for me this morning.

I don't know what you are working on, so this may not work, but if you knew all known firmwares, you could put them in an array and then when you have a hit, all that remains is the OS.

@gjacobse said in Does a script imply Automation?:

Here is process one from when I started.
...
Now do this on several PCs back to back.
After the sixth or so time through I was over it.
...

Things like this are the driving force behind thousands of our scripts.

We have one that does about 4 man-hours of work all by itself. It's on a USB, and 100% of the info it needs in order to personalize a new PC is read from an onboarding database that includes the Service Tag assigned to the new employee (we only use Dell) in the info for each user.

That's about as close as a human triggered script can get to being called automation. (And it is triggered by plugging in the USB and powering on the PC)

In my opinion

Great discussion, it really shows how we have all come to interpret the same things differently!

Here is another daily occurrence in our business:

Customer 1 who does not understand automation:
"Hey friend, check out my new automated house! When I see my wife pull in, I press this button on this little keyfob and the garage door goes up, then I press this other button and the hall light by the back door turns on for 10 minutes."

Customer 2 who does understand automation:
"Hey friend, check out my new automated house! There is a motion sensor at the end of our 700 foot driveway. When this motion sensor sees motion, it causes our driveway camera to take a picture of the car pulling in. Our Raspberry Pi does License Plate Recognition on that picture, and if it is my wife, it runs this set of commands: Turn on Driveway lighting, Open Garage Door, turn on Hall light, Play the chorus verse of “My Girl” by The Temptations on the SONOS system throughout the house, and sends my wife a sms saying "Welcome home! I've missed you!" All the while, I never even woke up from napping in my Lay-Z-Boy!"

I'm going to try and demonstrate the difference between a script and automation in a super simple way. This scenario can certainly be expounded on, but this is a super simple way to show the difference between a script and "automation" using the same script.

Here is a Script we have. It is just a script. There is no automation. This script does not run without our input. This script does not run if another event is not triggered. This script does not run on it's own.

The Script. We run MyDefrag.ps1 to start it. When it dies, it is dead.

# Sleep until 19:00
$a = Get-Date -Format HH:mm:ss
$b = [datetime]"19:00:00"
Start-Sleep (New-TimeSpan -Start $a -End $b).TotalSeconds

# get volumes on local system
$v = get-wmiobject win32_volume

# Now get the C:\ volume
$v1=$v | where {$_.name -eq "C:\"}

# Perform a defrag analysis on the C: drive
$dfa = $v1.DefragAnalysis().DefragAnalysis

# Sleep for 24 hours
Start-Sleep -Seconds 86400
# Run Optimize (Defrag) if File Fragmentation is more that 6%
if ( $dfa.TotalPercentFragmentation -gt 6)
    {
    Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter C -Defrag
    }

Now we are going to make it "Automation".
Install NSSM so we can turn this script into a Windows service that starts at boot time with no human intervention whatsoever.

Register the Script as a service with NSSM:

nssm install [serviceName] [PathandScriptName] [arguments]

Now our script starts when Windows boots and runs defrag every evening at 7:00pm if needed, without any human intervention.

@gjacobse said in Does a script imply Automation?:

This is from a Teams Chat with the other three Service Desk / IT people ....

I agree with this.

@gjacobse said in Does a script imply Automation?:

Simply thus

Does a script imply automation?

Define Automation.

In our world, Automation and Remote Control are often used interchangeably, when they are not the same. So it is important to understand what is meant by "automation".

We have written thousands of scripts over the years to do programmatic tasks for us, but only a handful are "automation".

@eleceng said in CAL Counting:

These will be device RDS CAL's and pretty much the same account logging in all the time. But we may have technicians from time to time login and open an additional session so we may need extras to cover that.

Will they be using the same systems thin clients as the non-tech users?

@dashrender said in CAL Counting:

exactly - if they are, then the techs will be covered by your device licenses - if not, you'll need another device license for every machine they will attempt to log in from.

Or get User CALs for the techs that roam.

@eleceng said in CAL Counting:

But we may have technicians from time to time login and open an additional session so we may need extras to cover that.

Will these technicians be logging in from the already licensed devices? Or from elsewhere?

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I hope not to do an in place upgrade

No. But I find it satisfying to see your responses to so many of my google searches for AD and IIS issues!

I bet I run into your posts on other sites at least once a week....

Bringing a 2013 Exchange server back to life so it can be replaced with 2019

@pete-s said in Backblaze published stats on SSD vs HDD reliability:

Interesting read but unfortunately they don't have enough SSDs and have not had them long enough to draw any real conclusions.
And their use case is for boot drives - which isn't really applicable to normal server workloads. And they likely use lower spec consumer SSDs too which makes it even harder to draw any conclusions for servers where you normally see standard enterprise SSDs.

They made that clear, and were up front about it.

The other factor we listed was drive days, the number of days all the drives in each cohort 
have been in operation without failing. The wide disparity in drive days causes a big 
difference in the confidence intervals of the two cohorts as the number of observations 
(i.e. drive days) varies significantly.

Your response makes it look like you are disputing the article. I don't see anything disappointing at all in that article. They made it perfectly clear this is what they know now, based on different drive day cohorts. Then they said it would be a a couple of years before they had enough data to form a more clear understanding.

Over the next couple of years, as we get a better idea of SSD failure rates, we will be 
able to decide whether or not to add the AFR to the SSD versus HDD buying guide checklist. 

They never mentioned a use case, only a test case. And they explain why they think the boot drives are a reasonable measure of the drive in the real work load.

In our case, describing these drives as boot drives is a misnomer as boot drives 
are also used to store log files for system access, diagnostics, and more. In other 
words, these boot drives are regularly reading, writing, and deleting files in 
addition to their named function of booting a server at startup.

Great article!

@skyetel Well, that returned a rather lengthy list!

@skyetel said in Additional Skyetel IPs:

@jaredbusch said in Additional Skyetel IPs:

Do not see any DNS changes yet.

Try now

Not yet...

> na.skyetel.com
Server:  cdns01.comcast.net
Address:  75.75.75.75

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    na.skyetel.com
Addresses:  52.8.201.128
          50.17.48.216
          52.41.52.34
          52.60.138.31

> server 1.1.1.1
Default Server:  one.one.one.one
Address:  1.1.1.1

> na.skyetel.com
Server:  one.one.one.one
Address:  1.1.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    na.skyetel.com
Addresses:  52.60.138.31
          50.17.48.216
          52.41.52.34
          52.8.201.128

Okay. Let's look again at the idea of a script to kill and restart the software. Once you have a script working that can kill the software on demand, and start the software on demand. move the script to a GPP.

Use GPP (Group Policy Preferences) to create scheduled tasks that uses the "On workstation lock" and "On workstation unlock" event to trigger your script.