We just got 50 / 50 Mbps fiber in our main office and will be moving to it this weekend. Check out the upload speed! This is just a guess, but I think my SIP and RTP traffic will be fine on this circuit.
But seriously, I was told when Charter runs fiber, it is capable of running up to 1 Gb speeds. I figured either Charter loves me (which is likely it), or they may not know they've left us with that kind of upload speed.
Has anyone seen something like this happen on a symmetric speed circuit?
We have been interviewing people for a part-time help desk / web developer position in the past few weeks. We narrowed it down to someone we asked back for a 2nd interview with more senior personnel who then approved of moving forward with a practical examination for the candidate. Today the person was supposed to be here at 3 PM. He did not show up and didn't leave a message with anyone. It looks like he tried calling my desk phone about an hour before the practical exam was supposed to start, but he did not leave a message.
Has anyone ever had this happen? Based on our two interviews, this seems pretty out of character for the person in question. I did call him around 3:30 / 3:45 to see if maybe there had been some miscommunication between HR and him but had to leave a message. I'm just hoping he is ok at this point. And if he is ok, I wonder what he will say if he calls me back.
@Minion-Queen said:
I could use a slow day. Actually can you explain this phenomenon to me?
I do not believe slow days exist. What is this nonsense?
The first time I tested Zimbra I loved it more than MS Exchange and wanted to use their web client to kill MS Outlook at our company. I'm excited to see they are dedicated to improving the product.
So if I understand correctly, you are saying 5 out of 6 computers can connect to your database. I'd start by checking the logs on your main SQL server to see if there may be some kind of authentication errors.
@Nic said:
So did you find out what happened? That reminds me of my interview with Spiceworks story. I got stuck in Houston due to weather, and they couldn't guarantee that I'd get a flight the next day. I went and rented a car and drove instead and got in at 3am for an interview the next morning. I think that story helped seal the deal
Yeah, I remember reading about your story - a very good one indeed. It certainly showed how bad you wanted to get the job and that it was important to make the interview.
In this case, I actually called the guy yesterday afternoon at 3:40 PM to see if all was well or if there was some kind of miscommunication with HR about the time (since we rescheduled once). I was only able to leave a message. There has been no word today...at all. I've been encouraged to call one more time to make sure the fellow is ok / at least find out what happened.
@scottalanmiller said:
Wait, the "Hoth Fiasco", did we miss something good?
For some frame of reference, here you go:
http://mangolassi.it/topic/3221/weather-in-the-usa/26.
There's a ton of goodness in this article, but my favorite part was that they are developing a way to run VMware bare metal in Azure similar to VMware on AWS.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/transforming-your-vmware-environment-with-microsoft-azure/
When I first saw this I thought it was another post that a free product was going away. I am thankful that is not the case here.
I was talking to our newest help desk guy this morning, and he mentioned something a user had asked him about when he upgraded the computer of the user in question yesterday. Since this help desk guy works only on his assigned tickets which our dispatcher assigns to him, he wanted to know if the user had sent in a ticket for this particular item. I mentioned I had not seen one submitted by the user and that the issue must not be that important since there's no ticket. My help desk guy then responds with "I guess it really is true what people say. They have to submit a ticket to talk to you."
I don't make people submit tickets to talk to me, but if there is something requiring action on the part of IT, they had better put in a ticket. At least they know proper procedure to get help from IT. In any case, I found this humorous.
So I'm having some problems with my cat. She's a Russian Blue and about 9 years old. She's in good health from what we know but has been pooping in random places all over the house in the past few months.
Let me start by saying we did have a miniature dachshund who died in Q3 of 2014. The cat was not extremely close to the dog, but they tolerated each other and played together from time to time. Maybe the loss of the dog is affecting the cat.
The strange thing is our cat always pees in the litter box. There's never been an issue. But she started pooping outside the litter box (most of the time in the same room as her litter box but at other times in random rooms of the house). It started as a now and then thing until it became an almost daily thing.
At one point I think she was genuinely sick and had some stuff in her stool that looked like she had eaten part of a plant in the house. My sister fosters cats and was able to get me some medicine, which seemed to help a little but was only temporary. The pooping outside the litter box continued, but she does not seem in any way sick.
We got her a new litter box to see if that would help. It did not really change anything. I made sure to scoop the box every day and made sure to pay more attention to her. The extra attention seems to have helped, but we still can't seem to eliminate the habit completely. It still happens here and there (maybe once every few days now).
We tried limiting her food to some extent, but that did not really help either. The other day @NetworkNerdWifey saw her sniffing around the baseboards in our bedroom. She yelled at the cat when she saw the near attempt to poop in the floor, telling the cat she was only to poop in her litter box. That prompted the cat to run to the box and poop.
What does this cat want from us so she will only poop in her litter box? Now we know she is not pooping in her box on purpose.
Any advice is much appreciated. If this continues too much longer, I am shipping her off to live with my sister and her foster cats.
There's almost no need for QoS when you have this kind of upload speed. It would be tough to saturate that baby.
Did anyone else take advantage of the free Linux course offered by EdX a couple of months ago? I have been working through it slowly as I can, but I am struggling to get the time to do it. How far did you get?
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@NetworkNerd said:
As a gift to her, I was torn between standing up a home PBX and building a VSphere test lab. But then I realized she would not appreciate either one. Oh well...I'll think of something else.
Go with the home PBX... nothing says I love you more then inexpensive calling and dedicated voicemail in your home.
And a dedicated line for the child too!
Maybe when she is 16 we can go there. At 5, her phone calls aren't many.
It was a normal day like any other. I was helping a user with some MS Office related issues via TeamViewer and was giving her laptop a tune up to maximize performance (things like disabling unnecessary startup items, cleaning out temp files, disabling MS Office add-ins, etc.). I thought I would go ahead and see if there were any driver updates to install. She was using a pretty new Latitude E5570 running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.
I'm a fan of letting Dell's support site download Dell System Detect and auto-detect driver updates. There were about 6 driver updates needed (all "recommended" per Dell's support site), so we went ahead and installed them. I had warned the user the machine was going to reboot after the last one installed (a BIOS update).
The computer rebooted after all updates finished, and the user was able to login successfully. But, she had to step away from her computer for a while. Not long after this, she had to go and meet with a client and do a presentation from her laptop. I got a text from her as she was on her way to meet with the client letting me know she couldn't get a USB mouse working with the laptop after the updates. The touchpad seemed to work fine, however. She made it to the client site and tried a couple of different USB mice with no success. I jumped in just before the meeting with TeamViewer and picked up on the fact that Plug n Play did not seem to notice USB devices any longer. In fact, inside Device Manager, there was no USB Controller. It had vanished. You could scan for hardware changes in Device Manager, and the system would pick up on the fact that there was an unknown device connected but would bomb when trying to find a driver for it. Time ran short, and the user had to make due with just the touchpad for her presentation.
Fast forward a couple of hours when we get to do another screen share for me to try and solve this one. After all, I caused the problem in the first place (or so it seemed). She tried several other USB devices at her house with no luck (same symptoms as before). No amount of rebooting or shutting down that she had tried did anything to help. I couldn't find anything in the application or system event logs that was helpful but figured it had to be a driver issue. I tried reinstalling the chipset driver to see if that would do the trick, but that was not it. And then, it hit me in the face. There was a separate listing on Dell's support site for the Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver. One could only suppose whatever version she had didn't install properly (even though we saw no indication of errors with the previous update). I installed the version of this driver previous to the most recent, and it worked like a champ. The USB Controller was back, and things began to work as expected. The version of the Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver we used ended up being Version 4.0.0.36, A00 with the problem driver being Version 4.0.6.60, A04.
So, the moral of this story is, just because you can update drivers doesn't mean you should. And it doesn't mean the latest version of the driver will work like you think.
@Mike-Ralston
I would add my good friend Rufus to the mix as an option - http://rufus.akeo.ie/.
I'm sort of a middle manager at our company if you will. I am the Help Desk Manager with 2 technicians that report to me directly. I report to our IT Director. My boss has asked that I start having one-on-one meetings maybe once every 2 weeks with the technicians. Though we have tons of interaction daily, we don't often take the time to get out of the help desk for a little while and just talk.
When you have one-on-one meetings with your employees, how does it normally go? When I have had them with managers, it's normally an opportunity for the manager to give the employee feedback on what they are doing well and things on which they could improve. We were recently at Epicor Insights and had the chance to hear Jack Welch speak. One of his main points was on employee engagement and to make sure you are loving people as much on the way in as you are on the way out, providing constant feedback along the way so that the employee knows where he / she stands. No one should be surprised when they get a raise or when they get fired. So we want to get a little better about giving our employees feedback in addition to the day-to-day interaction.
What do your one-on-ones normally consist of?
@scottalanmiller said:
We thought about making a "bat phone" kind of thing that is like a hotline to grandpa.
That makes sense. And it would not be a bad thing for safety reasons - train the girls who to call if you or Dominica were hurt and could not get to the phone.
Just yesterday, VMware released a patch to vCenter that enables functionality supporting vSAN 6.6. This patch is build 5310538 and version 6.5.0d of the vCenter Server Appliance. If you are chomping at the bit to play with all the new features of vSAN 6.6, applying this update is a must.
In the spirit of this update's release, I thought I would show how to patch an existing vCenter environment. In this example, we have the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) with an external Platform Services Controller (PSC). The reason for implementing in this way is to utilize Enhanced Linked Mode with future vCenter instances at other sites.
Before You Start, Check Backups
Before installing any patches, it is wise to have a good backup of all PSCs and the VCSA. One option is to take a configuration backup of the PSCs and the VCSA, but an image-level backup would also work. There is also the option to take a snapshot of each of these VMs before applying the patches, and then remove the snapshots once all functionality is verified.
Assumptions
The steps here assume all of your PSCs and VCSA can connect to the internet to download updates from a VMware repository. Other methods for patching vCenter such as using the ISO will not be completely covered here but follow a similar method. This article also assumes the VCSA is not using vCenter HA.
Building Blocks
The version number of the PSC or VCSA can be checked using the VAMI (VMware Appliance Management Interface). This can be accessed via port 5480. So, we would visit https://mypscorvcsaaddress:5480, and login with the root credentials. Then click on the Update menu in the left-hand Navigator window. Notice from the screenshots here that the build number indicates we are running vCenter 6.5.0a.
Start with the PSCs
If you are using an external PSC with the VCSA, you may have more than one in your SSO domain. Make sure and repeat the steps here for all PSCs before updating the VCSA. Once inside the VAMI's Update menu, look in the area labeled Available Updates. In the case of this PSC, automatic checking for updates has been disabled.
Since this PSC has internet access, we can manually check for updates by clicking Check Updates and then clicking Check Repository.
This will contact a VMware repository (address set by default upon install of the PSC or VCSA and shown in screenshot below) to check for any additional updates to vCenter.
After a check for updates, we can easily see the patch for 6.5.0d is available and that we pulled it down from the repository URL. If you were updating via an ISO, that would be indicated here as the update source. Click Install All Updates to continue.
At this point, you will have to accept the EULA to begin the install.
Once the install completes, you will likely be prompted to reboot as seen here.
After clicking OK, notice what the Update menu looks like. The updates have been installed but not applied.
To reboot, go to the Summary menu, and click Reboot.
Once the PSC has rebooted, it will run a health check to ensure all is well. The Summary tab should look similar to this.
Now, go back to the Update menu. Notice the new version has been installed and is running successfully. Checking for updates again shows we are on the latest update possible version of vCenter now.
Remember, this process must be followed for ALL PSCs in the SSO domain before proceeding to update the VCSA!
And Now for the VCSA
Since the PSC had been patched successfully, I wanted to see if I could login to the VCSA since it was on a different patch than the PSC. I found that whether logging in as the SSO administrator for vCenter or a Windows user with vCenter access, I could login to vCenter successfully. I even tried rebooting the VCSA to see if that would make a difference, and even after a reboot, I could login to vCenter with no issues. It seems a minor patch level difference between PSC and VCSA may allow normal functionality, but certainly a major version difference (i.e. one on 6.0 and the other on 6.5) would prevent everything from working as expected (especially since the upgrade from 6.0 to 6.5 creates a new VCSA).
Similar to the process followed for the PSC, visit the VAMI for the VCSA, go to the Update menu, and check for updates. Install the update that is found, and reboot the VCSA once it completes.
At this point, make sure the proper version of vCenter shows to be running after the reboot of the VCSA as seen in the screenshot here.
Then test to make sure login to the VCSA works (with users like the SSO administrator and Windows users if Active Directory has been setup as an identity source). Keep in mind it will take longer to be able to access the vSphere Client login page after the reboot than to login to the VAMI. Be patient, and wait for the web server to initialize.
When you reach the vSphere Client login page, you have the option to download the Enhanced Authentication Plugin. Even though this is a minor patch to vCenter, one may need to update the version of the Enhanced Authentication Plugin for SSO to work properly. Test, test test!
What Does This Mean?
This means vCenter is now running at the latest patch level with vulnerabilities patched and bug fixes applied. We could have patched using an ISO or via the CLI, but using the VAMI is a very simple way to patch vCenter and all PSCs. Remember to remove any snapshots you may have created before the install!
For more information on patching the VCSA, check out the vSphere Upgrade Guide starting on page 203.
