Topics created by Mike Davis

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.

@scottalanmiller said in Unmanaged switch horror stories:

@Mike-Davis said in Unmanaged switch horror stories:

The discussion came up because we were copied on an email from one user to another where they told the user to run out and get a cheap switch so they could hook up their network printer and their computer.

Well yes, bypassing IT for any purchasing, especially core infrastructure, is ridiculous.

Right, this has nothing to do with the type of switch.

@Mike-Davis said in Ubnt ER - random quick disconnects RDP:

yes. published a remote app. Users need access to that from machines that may not be company owned. Put RDPguard in place to ban IPs of multiple failed login attempts.

If there is a VPN, then we presume that there is no UDP traffic. Most VPNs are TCP.

If you were using a high availability platform, like a Scale HC3 (just as an example off of the top of my head) you could easily get by with just a single RDS instance and a single file server instance, which would potentially reduce the licensing needs for Windows (this depends on how you want to use it), and if RDS were to be on a node that failed it would be automatically migrated to a working node. And the same for the file server. So you get automatic, instant recovery for failure without needing a complex load balancing scenario or external high availability tools.

RDS and file servers are ideal roles for platform high availability like Scale HC3 provides.

@Mike-Davis said in What should be in Powershell 101 and Group Policy 101 Sessions at MangoCon 2016?:

In the WPA2-Enterprise deployment session, I'll hit on how you push the cert and SSID to your domain joined devices to have the connect automatically to your WPA2-Enterprise SSID.

I like this idea.

@Dashrender said in reasons to have a local DC in a remote office?:

@JaredBusch said in reasons to have a local DC in a remote office?:

@Dashrender said in reasons to have a local DC in a remote office?:

@scottalanmiller said in reasons to have a local DC in a remote office?:

@Mike-Davis said in reasons to have a local DC in a remote office?:

@Dashrender I forgot about that. I guess if the DC did go down, I could talk someone in to changing the DNS settings on their computer so that screen connect would work, log in to the ER and change DNS if we thought the VPN was going to be down for any length of time. (or just enable SSH on the ER from the outside interface.)

Why not have local DNS point to the DC, but the secondary point across the VPN? No need to change anything.

He mentioned that Google was his tertiary DNS entry is Google. blips causing DNS flipping to your other entries seem to be common (Not like every day common, but common enough to be a problem). My not stated suggestion is that google should be removed from the line up.

I have dhcp hand out primary DNS as the main office DC. Secondary is the local ERL.

In the ERL I again set dns1 as the main DC but secondary as Google.

I also set static host mapping in the ERL for the local domain just in case.

Interesting, manual, but definitely a solution. And even if the ERL is going to Google for DNS, the internal mappings solves the local problem, I assume.

It was the least amount of work I could come up with and still have users with internet access when the VPN was down.

@Romo said in HP Microserver RAID controller:

@scottalanmiller said in HP Microserver RAID controller:

@Romo said in HP Microserver RAID controller:

@scottalanmiller Yes,Intel RSTe

Oh yeah, that's awful 😞

That's why I always use MD raid, fake raid is awful.

Well yes, of course. But the SmartArray software RAID isn't bad. Has some benefits. Might even do blind swap. But that's just the Microserver from HPE.

@Dashrender said in Hyper-V replication licensing:

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:

@Dashrender said in Hyper-V replication licensing:

I definitely see what Scott is saying here and what Dustin is saying here. Clearly there appears to be a need for a term of what crazy SMB owners think of as HA, probably at best meaning redundant internet and servers and perhaps power (but often not because if power is out in an SMB, it's likely the whole business is down anyhow).

But what they normally want is just "to waste money." Nothing more. No need for a special term.

Do you really see this as a conscious choice or just through their actions?

Definitely a conscious choice. The conscious choice might be to be "lazy, uninformed and not care what gets done", but that much is conscious. That that results in wasting money is as clear as the nose on their faces. They don't, I feel, normally (but certainly many times) decide to throw money away just to do it, they do it because being lazy and not caring results in that and since they are actively not bothering to care, it's conscious.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of places throw money away to brag. It appears to be a common SMB trait to flaunt the ability to waste money. I see that a lot, too.

@RojoLoco said in NTG lab - blazing server:

@ChrisL said in NTG lab - blazing server:

@Mike-Davis said in NTG lab - blazing server:

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

I'M LOOKING IN THEIR WINDOW RIGHT NOW.

Are you using google goggles?

No, I don't use outdated technology, @RojoLoco.

Sent from my Motorola Razr

@s.hackleman said in end user computer backups:

I have used Mozy over the years and have been quite happy.

I use Crashplan at home. Have used Mozy and Carbonite over the years also.

It would have been nice if it was just that easy. WDS wasn't running because the second drive wasn't showing up because it was never set online after the machine was P2Ved and a few other things after that...

@njbair Thanks for joining the community to share your appreciation. I'm glad I posted the steps I took to resolve the issue because if you would have asked me today how I fixed it I'm not sure I could have remembered.

We had a thread here about a year ago about some Fail2Ban style service for Windows servers. Not able to search for it at the moment.

oh okay! thanks guys. @Mike-Davis @gjacobse @dafyre

@Mike-Davis Interesting. The note file creation was what tipped it off for me at my last company.

@Mike-Davis have you noticed any new features have appears that should not be there in the E1 version?

Dropbox seems logical. Simple, not expensive, and doesn't require the customer to run an entire server just for this one little thing that probably doesn't happen that often.

@Mike-Davis said in ubnt guest wireless or separate VLAN?:

My understanding of how Ubiquiti handles guest mode is that it drops packets destined for internal networks. What I don't know is like I think some others were getting at - what if the user tries to go to another local subnet outside the subnet their on. I guess I'll just keep the VLAN thing.

My understanding is that it totally drops those packets too. In some ways, that makes it more secure than a VLAN because just hijacking a physical switch is not enough to grab the packets.

@Mike-Davis said in How To Find A Good Account Rep:

@Breffni-Potter said in How To Find A Good Account Rep:

"So let’s say that you moved in to a new roll"

thanks for catching that. Looking back I did type this while I was sitting on an airplane and was hungry.

That's just how you roll.

Thanks to those of you that offered a suggestion. I built a second RDS server and applied my group policy and browsing was fine. I then started to think about what I needed to do to move it in to production and replace the one that had the browsing issue. Then it hit me.... I have load balancing on my SonicWall. RDS is mapped through the firewall on https. Therefore requests that went out over https could go out over either interface, but always came back on one. This is why it would sometimes work. This is also why most other sites would work, but https (in this case Office 365 which always goes over https) would only work once in a while. Adding a route to force all traffic from the RDS server out over the interface that traffic will come in on fixed the problem.