@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:

@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:

@kelly This is only the IT team. I'm not giving it to anyone else. Different departments within IT. Desktop Support, Helpdesk, Health Information Systems, etc

Oh, that makes much more sense. I totally misunderstood your aim. Well, you can disregard a bunch of what I said

In that case I would look at which one has the most API integration for your tools. It is great when you can have all your logging alerts in your chat agent as well.

I have ~1600 sq ft 4 bed, 3 bath, $1100/mo.

This is moving more towards the power user end of questions, but I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to pin a group sms to one of the screens? I know you can do a single person via the Direct Dial widget, but I was wondering if there is a way to do it with a group.

Just finished a game day for a friend's birthday. We made it three more games into Pandemic Legacy: Season 2.

I still don't know why there isn't a TTRPG session at SpiceWorld.

Code Geass on Crunchroll.

@black3dynamite said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

If the domain controller is down, will that prevent users from accessing DFS file shares?

It will prevent them from resolving the DNS name of the DFS share at a minimum. Access going down will probably depend on the AD policy for how long the user authentication token is retained and when they last accessed the file share.

@scottalanmiller said in I’d rather be....:

@kelly said in I’d rather be....:

Why the bikini shots? It isn't very professional imo, and adds nothing positive to the thread or tone of the overall site.

That's the bridge of the americas, spanning the Panama canal. Picture taken from near the BioMuseo.

And? The picture is not about the bridge, nor are the other bikini pictures scattered through this thread about what is in the background. I'm not objecting to bikini pictures in general, I just think they're inappropriate for an IT forum. If I want to see something like that there are plenty of other places on the internet for posting and viewing such. Just my perspective, and you can do with it what you will. I'm actually surprised that @Minion-Queen is ok with them.

@jaredbusch said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@kelly said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@obsolesce said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@kelly said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@obsolesce said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@kelly said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@obsolesce said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@pmoncho said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@obsolesce said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

@kelly said in Handling DNS in a Single Active Directory Domain Controller Environment:

just challenging the "most commonly correct approach" statement

It seems you are mistaking the "most common approach" with the "most common correct approach". I haven't been around the SMB as much as JB, but I'm assuming the most common approach to SMB DC implementations are incorrect. Meaning, 2+ DCs are being used when 1 should be used. Perhaps two DCs are used because so many other things are done incorrectly, it's thought 1 should't be used due to so many other things not properly in place, but that's besides the point in my reply here.

IMHO, SMB's use 2 DC's (me included) because it is drilled over and over in our heads by outside forces, including the application developers and the OS companies themselves. On top of that, we are completely stupid if we don't have a second DC if the hardware is available. So to follow "Best Practices," SMB's just do it. It doesn't necessarily mean that things are done incorrectly though. It mostly means, we (aka I) have an extra DC there sitting, waiting, getting monthly updates and then gather more dust for years on end all in the name of protection and risk reduction.

That is why coming here and having extensive discussions about general topics has helped me changed my own thoughts about system/network design in SMB's.

Then I assume you have an extra everything if it costs less than $5k, correct? Especially if other things depend on it... such as redundant ISP, all redundant switches, definitely redundant LoB services, etc... if not, why choose only a DC over things that would be way more beneficial to have HA? If you have extra hardware, extra software, etc... that would go unused and be wasted otherwise, then sure, it could make more sense, but could still cause the same amount of benefits and negatives.

If the FSMO role holder goes down, it will take way longer ceasing those roles to DC2 and fixing all these troubles, than it would to simply restore a DC VM from backup. I understand IT may not be there, and some shops only have one IT employee, if any, but there are ways to become non-dependent on AD/DNS/DHCP etc so that an SMB can run for a while during the absence of someone coming to fix it.

If the cost of the outage and the simplicity of bringing it back up again is worth the redundancy. Seizing roles takes almost no time. Certainly less than restoring a VM.

If cost were not in the equation an organization would be foolish not to have a second DC. If the cost of the outage compared to the cost of the second DC approach zero then it would be foolish not to have one. That is my point. Yes, vendors have pushed more software on companies that don't need it, but I was contesting that a single DC scenario is the most commonly correct deployment, and using math rather than anecdotal or speculation to look at the two costs.

I could hurt a 10-man shop, or it couldn't. But generally, setting things up correctly from the start, means a single DC implementation for an SMB is best practice, unless there are other factors requiring you to have two.

I'm getting the feeling that I'm not communicating very well with you...

So why is a single DC best practice? @scottalanmiller indicated it was cost relative to ROI. My contention is that the ROI has the potential to be realized sufficiently quickly so as to not make it a best practice. A good baseline maybe, but not a best practice.

Because the cost isn't what you make it out to be, and it depends on a lot of things, and at what point in time you are "snapshotting" the infrastructure to make the call of whether or not a single DC is worth it.

You're right. The cost of the second DC is significantly less than I quoted in my first post. Assuming that I have zero extra hardware I could purchase a "server" for less than $500 and a Server Essentials license for $350 (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1B4-003A-00063). $850 goes poof very fast when there is a hiccup if you have a single service reliant on realtime AD authentication or DNS for internal resolution.

Server Essentials is a single DC environment still like SBS isn't it?

Not exactly like SBS. I had to do some digging. It has to be FSMO role master, so it would be the "primary". It also suffers from a 25 user limit.

Has anyone else tried it yet? I just switched over and I'm still getting used to it.

https://support.apple.com/business

DEP is your starting point if they haven't changed things in the last year or so.

Amazon is increasing their Prime fees by 20%: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/amazon-prime-increase-strays-from-bezos-charge-less-promise.html.

And in other news, searches on Google for Amazon alternatives spike (just speculating).

If your set of sites you're dropping is very low then you could just put in a DNS record on your on-premise DNS server (assuming you have one). For example if you don't want people to be able to get to myshoppingsite.com then you could create a CNAME record on your server that sets myshoppingsite.com to send all traffic company.com.

I would strongly recommend against using this method if you need to handle more than 10 sites.

@momurda said in Non-IT News Thread:

@kelly Im talking about per month. if you goto starbucks you pay 5/day, at least. 25-30 days in a month, more than Prime membership for a year. Even if you pay only a dollar a day for coffee, that is still more than the cost of Prime membership.
Also, Dunkin Donuts and McDs dont count as coffee.

That makes more sense. In your reply you stated per week.

Because of some mental health issues with one of our children we're looking at getting a camera for the main part of our house. I don't need the typical features since this isn't there to catch people or animals when we're not home. Key features would be audio quality capture, WiFi, and ease of use/management. Have any of you worked with anything that might fit these requirements?

Went to see Avengers: Infinity War. It was good, but it is a part 1 of 2, so if you don't like waiting for a year for the conclusion of the story you might want to wait.

@wrx7m said in Password manager options for multi-user?:

@Kelly _ i have been going back and forth between Thycotic and Beyond Trust on which to go with for PAM/Application control

Thycotic has a free demo, so worth a whirl if you haven't. I personally haven't used the second, and only minimally the first.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Dealing with "fanatical" support at Rackspace. Their support is pretty bad. You only need to advertise it as fanatical when it's very much not.

Fanatical means they want to burn their customers at the stake.

Starting the discovery process for helpdesk alternatives for a client, and I ran across this: https://us.itarian.com/. They have a ton of free tools, but that makes me leery. I love me some free software, but I'm curious how they keep the lights on. Have any of you looked at their stuff?

In Pennsylvania you have to go through Intercourse to get to Paradise. This is Amish country.