@magroover Thanks for being humble enough to share your story.

@guyinpv I left a W2 job over a year ago, but it was a process that took 3 years. I'm glad it took that long. There is a lot I had to learn - and I'm still learning. Having been through the process, I would recommend a few things.

• read the book "Quitter" and some of the others by Jon Acuff

• meet with a mentor from score.org

• define your new business. "getting whatever work you can find" is a bad approach. You need to have an elevator pitch. You need be able to tell people what you do and why they should hire you.

Some costs are variable, but there are many fixed costs such as health care that you have to be able to pay each month. That's covered in the Quitter book. I would suggest reading the book "Miserly Moms" as well. She outlines all the fixed costs like health care and your mortgage and then looks at variable costs like your grocery bill and suggests how save money on those expenses. At the prices you're talking about, things are going be very lean.

Your original request was for tools to automate monitoring and management of systems. Solarwinds has this - for a price. Even if you choose something like building your own Zabbix server, it still costs money to host the thing.

@Dashrender said in GPO - Install software based on User - Without user involvement:

Many policies can't be applied to users and have to be applied to the computer. that said you might be able to set the Item level targeting to limit it to specific users.

This is your problem.

If you want to deploy the software based on user, you need to deploy it under User Configuration -> Policies -> Software Settings -> Software installation.

You tried to deploy it under Computer Configuration, and filtered by User, so it gets totally ignored.

@dafyre It's Zabbix Server 3.2
Zabbix Agent Version 3.2.0.62444

Windows Server 2012 R2 patched up to date. It has the RDS role and RDS gateway role installed on it.

@dafyre It looks like: Triggers 1 vfs.fs.size[C:,pfree]

Even after a reboot, Zabbix is still seeing the same thing. It's not kicking out emails, which is also odd.

Perfmon shows it steady with 37% free. So it must be Zabbix.

The thing is, I'm on the server and I can see free space and it's not changing. The Zabbix graph thinks it is though. I'll launch perfmon to see if it's changing faster than I can see it.

@scottalanmiller I would agree, except I don't think anyone was on at 3:00 AM, and there is only one user on now, and that is another Admin.

@dafyre It's a remote desktop server. I have one user on it now. I'm going to bounce it in a little bit when they are finished.

The plot thickens. This is the 12 hour graph:

You can see when I added space, but it still keeps going up and down. I'm going to restart the zabbix service.

That's the odd thing. When I checked it, it was sitting at 12% I just gave it more storage.

The alert was just set up for the drive.

Last night I had a server that Zabbix seemed to think was fluctuating between 8% and 20.55% free disk space. This caused the trigger to generate 700+ emails. The emails started when Zabbix came out of maintenance mode. If it had went over 20% and stayed there we would have got one email per hour, but since it kept toggling back an fourth, it was kicking out two every minute. Has anyone ever had anything like this happen before? I'm still investigating.

What do you have in:
%windir%\Windowsupdate.log

Here you go:

@echo off
rem tweaked from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9329749/batch-errorlevel-ping-response

setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion


   SET bHOSTUP=0
   ping -n 2 192.168.0.24 |find "TTL=" > NUL && SET bHOSTUP=1
   IF !bHOSTUP! equ 1 (
      CALL :HOSTUP 
   ) else (
      CALL :HOSTDOWN 
   )

GOTO EOF

:HOSTUP
echo Host UP 
GOTO EOF

:HOSTDOWN
echo Host DOWN
GOTO EOF

:EOF
exit /B

Good points. Now that I think about it, in this case it's pointless since they have a 1GB uplink to the main switch. Since all ports go in to one switch and there is only one 1GB uplink nothing is gained in terms or redundancy or bandwidth.

I was looking at a system that someone else built and I have doubts as to how the network is set up due to the problems they are experiencing. It's a HP Proliant ML350 G9 running Hyper-V with 4 ports plugged in to a 3COM 3CRBSG2893.

I don't have access to the system (yet) but is it possible that this configuration could work if they selected "Switch Independent" mode when they set up the NIC teaming?

On one level I'm wondering if any of that was even necessary since they only have 30-40 users.

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.

It's cool that your goals are clear to you. That's the first step. So now, you're in a great spot to ask yourself, "What do I need to do today to get where I want to be tomorrow?" You can map out your self learning plan and look for opportunities for growth.

I've been using scanstate and loadstate from the Windows Automated Installation Kit to go from 7 to 10 and 10 to 10. I like it better than easy transfer because it's command line and scriptable.