For the Fallout 4 fans: https://www.windowscentral.com/northern-springs-mod-fallout-4-offers-so-much-more-official-dlc. I may need to reinstall for this one.

@wrx7m said in Apple ID on Company-Issued iOS Devices?:

Looks like I haven't setup DEP before. That is weird. I tried the apple ID account that I use for the annual renewal of the Apple cert for Meraki and it wouldn't let me in with that. It won't let me associate the account with DEP. Stupid Apple.

Yeah, Apple is the least cooperative major services/systems provider.

@nic said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@kelly There's also the New York mod that's on the way:
https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-new-york-mod-shares-progress-with-lovely-new-screens/

That looks really cool. Your link also led me to this one: https://www.pcgamer.com/6-big-upcoming-fallout-mods-to-look-out-for/. Just wow.

@bbigford said in Apple ID on Company-Issued iOS Devices?:

@mattbagan said in Apple ID on Company-Issued iOS Devices?:

It took me 6 months to setup DEP and VPP. It was a pain. So many hoops to jump through. With DEP, you do not have to worry about having one master AppleID. Users can use their own. The whole point of DEP is to supervise devices better so you can clear that damn activation lock.

With Jamf we did it in about 2 hours.

Jamf is expensive, but it makes life so much easier once you have it set up.

Just got notified that my my state's Department of Real Estate that my training on Colorado's new data privacy law is now valid for continuing education credits for real estate agents.

@obsolesce said in Microsoft Teams Free:

Also, looks like it's coming to Linux

I'm hopeful that Microsoft is recognizing that they will have more success not tying to an OS.

@phlipelder said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@obsolesce said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@phlipelder said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@obsolesce said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

Drove by this going to/from Vegas. Finally looked in to it. Pretty interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Woah … $2.2B cost.

Ya insane, and it's not even producing close to the output they planned for.

Maybe dust and stuff... Both times we drove past, it seemed like it was very hazy, I'm guessing dust and sand in the air. It was very windy.

I've asked both inside the industry and government for the numbers for the windmill farms that are being put up around the province. No one will come clean about install and maintenance costs. :S

I did a rough calculation based on the Wikipedia article that ~640GW/h per year is $12M and ~336GWh is $6M in annual revenue based on the cited $200/MWh per year number? So, $18M/Year on a $2.2B "investment" am I on or off with the numbers?

Then, there's the stats that blew me away on the volume of natural gas the plant consumes to heat things up prior to producing solar energy.

One has to wonder if there was ever a plan for the plant to be profitable.

Interestingly I just heard a presentation from our regional power co-op on how they handle demand and where clean energy factors into it. They were pushing pretty hard into clean energy initiatives (one of the municipalities they serve has a requirement of them being 100% renewable by 2030) until they started comparing their existing clean generation capabilities and the storage needed to keep the load normalized to the demand curve. They would need thousands of batteries that cost $1.5 million each and have an effective lifespan of 6-15 years. Battery storage and disposal would make more hazardous waste than most forms of electrical generation.

@scottalanmiller said in Risks to Geo Blocking:

@kelly said in Firewall rules for outgoing traffic:

There are days where I question why I even bother trying to persuade...

I never want to persuade, that's not a good goal. The goal should always be to find what is true. Persuading is necessary only when your position isn't correct but you want someone to accept it anyway. Working towards truth is a better goal - put forth ideas and see if they make sense.

I do take issue with you calling into question my use of the word persuasion and contrasting it with the word truth. This is why I question the value in discussing things here on Mangolassi that have been designated as "the right way". The rhetoric does not appear to allow for an honest discussion.

Stirling, Scotland

@scottalanmiller said in Risks to Geo Blocking:

Now MaxMind claims 99.8% for country detection, 90% for state. They are also listed elsewhere as the most accurate database.

If you'll check above I referenced them as a source to use for Geo IP. One of my assumptions...

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@pchiodo and I earlier this week, it's rare to see me all suited up.

And with your beard trimmed. You no longer look like someone that was just let out of a parking garage...

Are you doing the domain version of Method 1, or setting this via local policy? If you're doing a domain version of it, the only way I've had this work is to have another GPO copy the file from the UNC to a local drive using a REPLACE command, and then have the wallpaper setting GPO point to the local place. There is something about how the GPOs check for changes that cause it to not work properly.

@jaredbusch said in Non-IT News Thread:

@travisdh1 said in Non-IT News Thread:

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

CNN says Stop Feeling Guilty About Kids Watching Television

Just reading the headline makes me think "Duh, what else would CNN tell you"

Except, that is Scott's made up headline to get you to click it.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/20/health/screentime-guilt-parenting-strauss/index.html

His headline isn't too far off of the original CNN one: "Parents, stop feeling so guilty about TV time".

@ccwtech said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

@dustinb3403 said in Desktop photo for all PC's in the domain:

The easiest way I've found to get a GPO to update, is to one, set it to "update" and in cases like screensavers (backgrounds etc), literally just name the anything else.

"bg.jpg" the new one gets changed to "bg1.jpg" etc.

Trying to do this without the user touching GPO. I'm still fuzzy on how to set the GPO to update?

You only change the file copy GPO. I would have a different file name in your source file like 20180907_info.jpg. That way the GPO will process because it detects a change event. You can have the same destination file.

Conference center wifi is frequently terrible. Plan according. Power is hard to come by. Plan accordingly.

It means exactly what it says. You have two NICs with default gateways configured on both. It is just letting you know that things may not work as intended. I see that all the time when I'm doing network work, and fiddling with my DG so that I can route traffic the way I need to for testing.

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Watching Now:

@dashrender said in What Are You Watching Now:

if that robot had those charts and was able to make a new way through - why could no one else?

They presented it like it had maps that were lost long ago but it's kind of just a cop-out to make it easier to write lol

And the main plot device of Episode VII. And it was a poor plot device in that movie too.

We had to have one, but it was because of CJIS (FBI) requirements.

Fundamentally they're for when you compliance requirements force you to treat DC employees as untrusted.

@dustinb3403 said in Star Wars - What do you like about the new movies, and what is not so great?:

All of the movies suck. Nothing good about em, and they are all plainly obvious where the story is headed / going to end.

Rogue One was obvious since it ends right before Ep IV starts, but it was the most coherent story of any of them with the best characters imo.

@scottalanmiller It doesn't seem like you're interested in discussing my comment in good faith. Your progressive inflation of costs in response to my posts is an interesting rhetorical technique, but not a great way of doing a discussion based on the merits. If you have a basis for the costs you're postulating, then let's discuss them.

Scenario: SMB that depends on AD. Has one VM host. Typical SMB configuration would have DNS and DHCP running on the same Windows install as AD. At that size you could go either way for IT support, but for the sake of discussing costs on the lower side we'll say that they have someone in house with sufficient skill to install and manage Windows, AD, DNS, and DHCP. We'll set their wages at $25/hr. We will also assume that they are currently maxed so that any emergency is an additional cost, and not just absorbed by their daily responsibilities. (Feel free to dispute my assumptions with justifications)

Second DC:
Server license: MSRP $699.99 (probably find it for less, but we'll go with this)
Hardware: $1,000 (If all you need is a failover DC then you could run this on old hardware, a desktop, etc. for easily less than $500, but we'll go for an upper bound)

So, the upper end of costs for a second DC in my scenario is $1,700 and then say, 8 hours of labor (probably less), so another $200. Total cost to purchase and implement is $1,900 at the most.

If we assume that this is a typical SMB, sans the @scottalanmiller touch, then DNS and DHCP are also running on the DC VM. If the hardware suffers a catastrophic failure what is the cost to restore it? We won't factor in any replacement costs because those are the same whether we have a second DC or not.

So, backups. Here is where we may differ a bit. If there is a backup solution that is up to the task of backing up AD and restoring it without any additional issues then I would postulate that the business would have room on that hardware to run a second DC running as a Core install. However, if we are wanting to see the most extreme comparison would be, we will assume that there is a good backup of AD to restore, but not the hardware to run a second DC. This keeps our costs for a second DC still at $1,900.

VM host suffers hardware failure taking down AD. From this point it is speculation. If there aren't sufficient resources to spin up a second DC then there isn't anything to restore the back up to either. This means that there is no AD, DNS, or DHCP until something is put into place. Since every business class edge device can handle the latter two, we'll assume that they get moved over by our on site person. The time to do this is extremely variable. Let's grab an hour as the lower bound. So $25 to get DNS and DHCP up and running so that there is external access, plus employee labor impact. DHCP will continue to be fine during that one hour unless a lease comes up. DNS, however, means that most modern devices will stop functioning right away. A business of 10 employees averaging $15/hr means that there is a cost of $150 for that down time.

At this point, all internal services are down until AD is restored. Another variable that is difficult to account for. The most prevalent one of these would be printers. Impact will vary from business to business. If we say that of those 10 employees, 2 require (whether from felt personal need, or actual professional need it doesn't matter) a printer multiple times per day. How does 5 times sound? There are work arounds. Our enterprising technician goes to each machine to edit their hosts file to allow the users to print. Between getting all the information, figuring out the changes, coordinating with employees, and actually doing the work we'll say it takes an hour, so another $25.

So, our loss of our only DC has cost the company a minimum of $200. These costs can skyrocket depending on the number of employees, their pay rates, and the numbers of internal services. If this is our baseline then almost $2,000 is probably more than a 10 employee company should spend, so I agree with you. If the curves fluctuate much at all (lower priced/repurposed hardware), more employees, more costly employees, more internal service, then the cost/risk ratio approaches 1 very quickly.

Yes, you can defray or reduce almost all of the points of impact, like configuring your DNS scenario the way @JaredBusch suggested, but that is not a common approach. Implementing it and other things to negate potential impacts of down time (scripting system capable of pushing out a new hosts file to clients reducing down time to less than 1 hour, etc.) have their own costs inherent to them, and are also not common in SMB, so I don't think that including them in the comparison of the two approaches.