That is not necessarily always going to be the case... For instance, in looking at some stuff, I see that I can build a NAS with 16TB usable cheaper than I can build a NAS with 12 TB usable.

but no one would accuse you of overbuilding in that case.

If you put in a server with 96GB of RAM when you had 1 VM using 4GB, that's over building. If you needed to add more VMs later, adding RAM would be cheaper down the line, or it might be time to get a new server.

I have a one man shop of an accountant that wants a secure way for clients to upload files. Even through he has Office 365 and OneDrive, it doesn't look like there is a way to use it like that without the client setting up their own Microsoft account and sharing the file. Dropbox will allow clients to upload files from his website. Is there any reason not to use Dropbox?

I'm working on a network that is getting cryptolockered. How do I figure out which machine it's running on? I can't find one of those .txt files with the removal instructions to check the owner. All the encrypted files have maintained their ownership from the original creator.

It was set up by internal staff. The sad thing is, it doesn't even look like it was still in use. Lesson for all admins out there.

I have a client that seemed to create a cloud mailbox while AD sync was off. Now there is a conflict. In the portal I can see the cloud mailbox that actually contains mail, and the AD account. The UPN of the cloud account is the domain.com suffix and in the portal, the AD UPN is the domain.onmicrosoft.com suffix. In the portal the cloud account has both addresses and on prem AD has both addresses. Any idea how to straighten that out?

Seems like I have to do this:
Add ImmutableID from AD user to Cloud user:
$guid = (get-Aduser <username>).ObjectGuid
$immutableID = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($guid.tobytearray())
Connect to AD Azure (Connect-MSOLService when AD Azure Powershell Module is installed)
Set-MSOLuser -UserPrincipalName <clouduserUPN> -ImmutableID $immutableID
It’s possible that the clouduserUPN must be changed to the <tenant>.onmicrosoft.com format. It should be changed by DirSync to correspond with the AD UPN.
See also http://www.joseph-streeter.com/?p=423
Then perform a sync as described in the previous section.

From:
https://dirteam.com/dave/2014/08/15/fixing-office-365-dirsync-account-matching-issues/

The problem was once I moved the user to a test OU in the local AD that was not synced and then forced a sync, I still couldn't set the immutableID and was getting the error:
Set-MsolUser : Uniqueness violation. Property: SourceAnchor.
At line:1 char:1
+

This was because when o365 saw the account was no longer coming from AD, it moved it to deleted users. I found the user with:
Get-MsolUser -ReturnDeletedUsers |fl
and sure enough, the immutableID matched the one I was trying to set.
I purged the user with:
Remove-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName [email protected] -RemoveFromRecycleBin
Then the Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName [email protected] -ImmutableId $ImmutableID
worked.

Bring another wireless router with you and try that next time. I had a much cheaper HP Photosmart printer that behaved the same way and I don't know what the problem was between the old AP, but I put in a new Ubiquiti and it worked fine ever since.

If I had a single Windows Server Standard license, and two hyper V hosts and set up replication for the two VMs on host 1, am I good as far as licensing goes?

How good is the fail over for replicated servers? Is it like in a VMware cluster where you can have the VM spin up if it senses it went down on the other host?

@JaredBusch The last time it died no one noticed until they tried to print to one of the print shares on it. As soon as we push those printers out as local printers I don't think anyone will notice.

The first thing I check with something like that is make sure all your domain controllers are syncing the sysvol. If not the computers that hit one DC will get the updated GPO and the ones that hit a stale DC may not get the policy.

Seems about right. I remember getting a Fluke LANmeter about 15 years ago and seeing all the traffic on our network in real time. I was amazed at all the broadcast traffic. Then I went in to the SNMP view on our switches. Even on the 100Mb/s switches percentage wise, the traffic wasn't measurable.

Backups are failing on a Hyper-V host. I ran:
vssadmin list writers and they are all stable, except this one:

Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer'
Writer Id: {66841cd4-6ded-4f4b-8f17-fd23f8ddc3de}
Writer Instance Id: {51bed8ad-30e7-4657-abb3-8161879e3d1d}
State: [7] Failed
Last error: Timed out

I shutdown all the VMs, rebooted the host, brought the VMs up and that didn't fix it.

I ran this to re-register the VSS DLLs:

Re-registering Vss Dlls

cd /d %windir%\system32
net stop vss
net stop swprv
regsvr32 /s ole32.dll
regsvr32 /s oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 /s vss_ps.dll
vssvc /register
regsvr32 /s /i swprv.dll
regsvr32 /s /i eventcls.dll
regsvr32 /s es.dll
regsvr32 /s stdprov.dll
regsvr32 /s vssui.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml3.dll
regsvr32 /s msxml4.dll
vssvc /register
net start swprv
net start vss

I still have the same result. What should I try next?

I talked to a couple of the Colocation America employees at MangoCon. They are pretty much across the street from Google.

The only thing I read is that it can only expand to 16 times what you start it at. If I understand correctly, if I want my server to be able to hit 80GB, I'll need to start it at 5GB.

I have a friend that exported a VM from ESXi and the VM had a snapshot. He gets a -flat.vmdk file and a -delta.vmdk when he exports, but when he uploads those files to the datastore, it drops the flat and delta and only leaves him with his base disk. Anyone ever run in to this? It seems to me if he uploaded the -delta and renamed it server-000001.vmdk that would work, but I haven't had him test this yet.

Are you maxing out your 1Gb ports? That's what would push me to 10Gb.

it looks like I need to configure active agents. working on that....

I got it working. For some reason I needed to use the 32 bit agent on my 64 bit systems.

You download the agent from:
http://www.zabbix.com/download.php

extract the zabbix_agentd.exe to a folder like c:\zabbix
in the c:\zabbix folder create a file called:
zabbix_agentd.win.conf
The file needs to contain:
Server=xx.xx.14.212 #the IP address of your Zabbix server
ServerActive=xx.xx.14.212 #the IP address of your Zabbix server
Hostname=yourinternalservername #the name here has to match the name that you configure on the Zabbix server

once you save the file you run:
c:\zabbix\zabbix_agentd.exe --config c:\zabbix\zabbix_agentd.win.conf --install
net start "zabbix agent"

If you open services.msc you should see the Zabbix service and it should be running.

After my laptop hibernates and I wake it back up, WmiPrvSE.exe is pegging my CPU. If I kill the process, my laptop runs like normal. I thought I could use Process Monitor to figure out what is making the WMI call, but I think I'm missing something. (screen shot below) How else can I figure out what is calling this exe?