Best posts made by Mike Davis

I usually go and enable the AD recycle bin right after that. It's one of those things you don't think about until the day you need it ...

I know there is no love for QuickBooks here. In case you do have to support it, it seems that KB4073701 causes it to crash with the error " A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

Event Viewer shows:

Faulting application name: qbw32.exe, version: 26.0.4013.2607, time stamp: 0x5a2ff09e
Faulting module name: Features.dll, version: 26.0.4013.2607, time stamp: 0x5a2ffd98
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00363bb5
Faulting process id: 0x16b4
Faulting application start time: 0x01d3abdc3a2c3af9  

Uninstalling KB4073701 allows QuickBooks to run. This only seems to be an issue on Windows 7 64 bit machines. Windows 10 doesn't have this patch.

By that logic, I see no reason why banks and credit cards can't sell your information. Oh, wait, never mind.

@Texkonc said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device:

Is it backups or a DR appliance that you can run your vms on in a seconds notice. Post states backups but titling the device DR.
Which is it? Backups as in Unitrends appliance type backup or DR where there is missing replication component and can have your vms up in seconds?

That's more a function of the software than the hardware. Veeam takes dumb storage and turns your forever incremental "backups" in to a point in time recovery point that you can mount for an instant recovery. (I never thought I would put that many marketing terms in one sentence. That kind of hurt.)

Bring a bunch of business cards. If you collect them from people, write on the back why you might contact them again. For example if you talk to them and find out they own a MSP as well, you write that on the back, so when you get back you don't contact them thinking they were the VoIP guy you talked to. It's cool to meet colleagues in other parts of the country where you don't want to post stuff publicly, but since you're not competing, you can share numbers with them. It's nice to be able to hand them a card.

Set your out of office reply and someone else cover your phones. It sucks to have to talk time out of a conference to take a call or pound out an email. Your time there is so limited, you need to make the most of it.

Travel light and make sure you have room for swag on the way back.

I knocked it down to 20MHz channel width and ran it for 14 hours with no pings over 20 ms. Users have been on it for 2 work days now and everything is working fine. I wish I understood the science behind it so I could know definitively if I moved the second antenna higher on the building if I could get more bandwidth out if it, but at the speed it's running now, it really doesn't matter. They have more than enough bandwidth and it seems to be solid, so I'm going to leave well enough alone.

I put RdpGuard on a couple servers. In a matter of minutes I had 17 IPs banned.

I resinstalled and added the sa account this time. (I don't know if the user installed it the first time.) I did a named instance, so when I logged in I had to choose .\sqlexpress as the server. Once I did that I was able to just right click databases -> restore and select the files I had copied to the back up folder from the old server. Then it worked like it should.

Congrats. Do we need a NDA to hear more about what your daily tasks are like?

For a small business with a few computers and two credit card machines, if you put in a EdgeRouter X, put the LAN on one port, and then then each credit card machine on it's own port and don't route between the two, can you skip all the PCI compliance questions about WEP/WPA2, computer patches, etc since the credit card machines are not on the same network?

PS. I know the EdgeRouter X is software based and not hardware, but it has more ports at a lower price point and I don't think the client would notice the performance difference.

I have a Windows 10 machine where it looks like the guy that set it up used a generic KMS product key to install windows 10 on the box. They don't have a windows 10 license in their KMS server so I need to install the product key from the bios. Google tells me there are tools to retrieve the key. Can anyone recommend on that won't infect the system?

We have a FreePBX outside a SonicWall firewall and a Yealink on the inside of the firewall. From other extensions, when you dial that extension, 9 times out of 10 , you get the message:
"The person at extension xxx is unavailable. Please leave your message after the tone. When done hang up or press the # key."

On the Yealink we have enabled STUN.

On the SonicWall we have disabled SIP translations.

We suspect the SonicWall because the phone was working before it was moved to that location.

What other things should we check?

So I ran in to the following scenario. Small non for profit bought a new server to replace the ebay special they have been running on for the last 4 years. They had a Windows Server Essentials VM running on VMware ESXi free. The new server is running ESXi free.

I ended up using scp in ESXi to copy straight from the old host to the new host. It was less than straight forward because of spaces in the filename. The command ended up being:

scp 'Server 2013_1-flat.vmdk' [email protected]:/vmfs/volumes/5636b7f0-e5b4c691-871b-94188238d4a4/"'Server 2013'"

In order for that to work, a few things had to be done. First SSH had to be started on each host:

Then you have to open the firewall for the SSH client. If you don't when you run the scp command you'll get a time out error.

Once you have done that, should should be able to ssh from one host to the other as a test. For example:

ssh 192.168.43.7

and you should get prompted to accept the RSA key fingerprint and then for a password.

To use scp is pretty straight forward
scp sourceFile user@host:destinationPath
and then you get prompted for the password.

To figure out the exact path:
cd /vmfs/volumes
ls
cd yourDataStore
at that point, your path will change to the actual path. My issue came in that I had spaces in the filename. When you tab out the filename, it puts a \ in to escape out the space. Unfortunately, you can't just copy and paste that path to your scp command line. You need to use a double quote outside a single quote as shown in this example:

scp 'Server 2013_1-flat.vmdk' [email protected]:/vmfs/volumes/5636b7f0-e5b4c691-871b-94188238d4a4/"'Server 2013'"

With that command underway you will get real time statistics like this:

Server 2013_1-flat.vmdk                        17%   75GB   19.1MB/s 10:53:54 ET

Additional notes before someone asks:

I would have considered moving them to HyperV, but they had a SATA drive that contained workstation backups that needed to move over to the new server. In addition it was going to be way quicker to physically move that one drive over to the new server.

The VM was on a bunch of small 136GB SAS drives and the new server has two 1TB SATA drives in a mirror, so I couldn't just move all the drives over and do a local data store copy.

In the past I have used vmware converter or used the vSphere client to download all the files to a windows box and then upload them to the new host. On a small VM without much data, it doesn't take too long. In this case it was going to take hours and two stepping it would have meant getting up in the middle of the night to start the second step.

Well the Ubiquiti is in place now and the Server 2003 box is no longer their firewall, so that's a huge step in the right direction.

I configured a Zabbix box a few months ago and am finally circling back to get email alerts working. It's running Zabbix 3.2.3 on CentOS 3.10.0-514.6.1.el7.x86_64

From the command line, I can use sendmail to kick out emails, so I don't think it's blocked anywhere. Under Zabbix -> Administration -> media types, I have it set up to use my Office 365 SMTP server and in o365 I have it configured to accept emails from the IP of the Zabbix box.

I have triggers set up for the different hosts, but I'm not getting any emails. Does anyone know how to troubleshoot the setup?

I have a client with a MX64 and it looks to me like under Security appliance -> Appliance Status -> Uplink you would configure your WAN interface for the public IPs.

Then under Security appliance -> Addressing & VLANs Add a static route to take all the traffic for each VLAN and tell it which one of the public IPs to use going out.

I have a client that only has Windows 7 machines. Since Windows 7 doesn't have all the tools to manage Hyper-v 2016, I was looking at 3rd party managers. Does any one have one they really like? I was going to try 5nine today. Are there others I should look at?

I'm going Hyper-V. It has more features than even the paid Essentials Edition of VMware. Since pretty much all my production machines are Windows, I'm more comfortable in front of a Microsoft OS.

It's not worth it to get ride of drive mappings for two reasons. The first is that many crypto infections are run by humans that gain access to a system and then start encrypting it. This is the worst case because they will knock out your backups if they have access and then start encrypting stuff. The second reason is that new variations of crypto locker seek out network shares and don't rely on drive mappings.

The not mapping network drives thing was a short term fix that lasted until the hackers read about it and changed their code.

Just when I thought our world wasn't celebrated enough:
https://www.cafepress.com/+,95971728?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=pla-google&utm_campaign=172807090-d-c&utm_content=13657944490-adid-68313751570&utm_term=pla-70742206810-pid-95971728&gclid=Cj0KCQiAtJbTBRDkARIsAIA0a5PJuKa0BlDwLJuAWRKgztX_Vy1pSIkZFgq0YKPDQQLfJuAGSd5GM68aApqWEALw_wcB