Best posts made by Mike Davis

A church wants to stream a video feed (and audio) of the main sanctuary to two different monitors located in another part of the building. No recording necessary, just a camera and a couple of TVs. Is analog the best way to go about this? I'm thinking with any IP camera I would have to have a small computer and all that complexity hooked to each TV, so I would like to avoid that.

If I get a CCTV camera with a BNC connector, a splitter, a converter to go from BNC to VGA/HDMI for each TV, will that work? Is there a better way to go about it?

Can anyone recommend a camera with a mic and a zoom lens? Can I run a separate RG6 cable and then just put a RCA adapter on the end of it for audio?

A client has a ESXi host with a Windows Server 2012 R2 file server on it. From there they used the Microsoft Windows iSCSI initiator to connect to a FreeNAS box. It's been running (much to my surprise) for a while now, but recently started having fits where it would throw a few hundred errors in the event log:
Event 9 "Target did not respond in time for a SCSI request. The CDB is given in the dump data."
Event 27 "Initiator could not find a match for the initiator task tag in the received PDU. Dump data contains the entire iSCSI header."

It looks to me like some network issues. Is there any reason to look at anything else?

They have already been told that using the Microsoft Windows iSCSI initiator is a bad idea and are scrambling to build a new server.

So I tried RWeverything that @JaredBusch recommended, and couldn't find the key. I decided to download ShowKeyPlus since it only displays the key and is way less complicated than RWeverything.

The problem became obvious at that point. "OEM key not present in firmware"

I guess we'll have to try to answer the question about injecting a OEM key on VL install another day...

I have smaller clients that have Microsoft Server Essentials. (formerly SBS) It backs up their workstations by default. I usually put in a cheap drive in the server as a backup target and let it run. I backup the server data to the cloud, but not the workstation backup folder. On a small scale it works pretty well. Everything is contained in the server dashboard so it's clear that it's running, etc. It does some pretty good dedupe so it doesn't take up much space. This seems to work better than redirected folders. I think this was put in place more for users screwing up their desktop than recovering from a crypto infection, but it would work.

I wish this functionality was available on Server Standard. With good dedupe, the backups wouldn't be terribly large. On the other hand, on most of the large networks, we have standardized hardware and images to deploy, so the nuke and pave approach would probably use the same amount of time.

Another consultant I work with says he's working with a bank that wants to move their email to google apps, but wants to make sure their email stays inside the USA. My google foo is failing me. Does anyone know the answer to that one?

According to this article, it looks like Office 365 has this capability:
https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=25

I think I finally got to the bottom of this. Telnet to smtpout.secureserver.net on port 80 and I get:

554 p3plsmtpa12-03.prod.phx3.secureserver.net :SMTPAUTH: ESMTP No Relay Access Allowed From <the static IP of the Verizon connection here>

So there we have it, it connects to godaddy and godaddy tells it that they have blacklisted the IP and closes the connection. If you do that same test from a different IP it allows you to type commands.

You realize you're saying, "I bought a new computer and I don't want to remove the factory operating system, but I want to install a new operating system."

You need to root your phone to install customized versions of the operating system. With that out of the way, you can take a look at a guide like:
http://www.techworm.net/2015/09/how-to-install-and-run-kali-linux-on-any-android-smartphone.html
to get an idea of what you're in for.

Is this what I should be looking at:
PTZOptics 12X-SDI GEN-2 PTZ IP Streaming Camera with Simultaneous HDMI and 3G-SDI Outputs - White $1,599.00
https://www.amazon.com/PTZOptics-12X-SDI-Streaming-Simultaneous-Outputs/dp/B01BI71RTG/r

• 12X Optical Zoom for properly targeting your subject
• IP Streaming with RJ45 input - Dual Streaming with H.264, H.265 & MJPEG (simultaneous high and low bit rate streams)
• Simultaneous 3G-SDI, IP and HDMI Video Outputs for connection flexibility and std VISCA RS232 control
• Full 1920x1080 Video Resolution and 10 IR / 255 RS232 PTZ presets
• Low Light: 0.5 Lux with Noise Cancellation via the latest 2D and 3D noise reduction

I know the Display port 1.2 support multi stream, but is anyone actually using it?

I'm picking up a computer with an ATI FirePro V4800 and it says "With two DisplayPort outputs and one dual-DVI output, Multi-View enables up to six displays with independent display resolution, refresh rate, and display rotation settings"

@FiyaFly Well, it inconsistent is how it was behaving.

Does anyone use laptop recovery software? How did you settle on what you're using? This would be for HP EliteBooks, so they have vPro options.

@IRJ said in old MSP wants to know what they did wrong:

Good luck!

It would be pretty neat if you documented the whole process. This is the kind of stuff we see on Spiceworks everyday

You mean a list of the stuff that was wrong and how I fixed it?

I have a running list. I have screen shots. I have photos of the server literally being held together with duct tape.

I was thinking a phone call or letter hinting at legal action may be enough. If they have to go to court, it would be hard not to sue for breach of contract when he charged them patching systems that haven't had patches available for 2 years.

@Dashrender I think it's the fact that they have so much more hardware to them. They have adjustable springs in them to balance the load they are carrying and they pivot and move up and down.

It's kind of like the difference between those cheap keyboard trays that just slide back and fourth and go off track all the time, vs the nice ones that slide and swivel and don't fall apart if your chair bumps them.

I would probably spend the money on the entire desk moving up and down, but if you are in a cube farm (that's where this was installed) you may not have that option.

@DustinB3403 said in Print Services - Migrate from one server to another:

GPO's push the printers out to our clients.
I could just recreate all of the printers on the new server, and update the GPO

I've pretty much done that. Add to that an email to users to check their default printer the next day because it sometimes changes when the printers get remapped.

Don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but there is a trigger for "no data received for 5 minutes." Since all my windows boxes are running the Zabbix agent, I just stopped the service on one and waited. Sadly, no email, but I can see the trigger worked on the dashboard.

I think were @Dashrender is going is that if you use the Unifi guest service and it's using your production DHCP and DNS servers, and then those devices get hacked, they can take down your production DNS/DHCP servers. If they are on their own VLAN and using their own DHCP/DNS servers, yuo are mitigating some of that threat.

The first thing to check is your DNS. Are you using the server's DNS server as your primary DNS server setting on your client? If not, you can have weird issues like you are having.

If you check your logs, you'll probably see events that say the domain controller can't be reached, but it won't tell you why.

You'll have to trouble shoot when it's happening. Like Scott said, when you're having the problem, can you ping it by name? Can you ping the domain name? What does nslookup give you when you put in the server name. Those are the basics of troubleshooting your issue.

I'm building a very small network where I need a router and 4 LAN network ports to start and no more than 8 total. I was thinking about a Ubiquiti ER-8 or the pro, but from what I read, it doesn't look like either one has the switching chipset and it looks like if I were to try to use it as a switch, it would actually slow things down. Is that true? Am I better with a ERlite3 and a EdgeSwitch? I don't need PoE on any ports, and noise is a concern.