Best posts made by NetworkNerd

What would you do if you suddenly lost your job? Tune in this week for part 2 of our interview with Jon Hildebrand to hear his story. Get the full episode here.

And we are sure these are not in honor of the Hunger Games movies?

This week is part 1 of an interview with Paul Woodward, Jr. and A.J. Kuftic on making the transition to enterprise. Get the full episode here. Let us know what you think!

We're upgrading from Epicor 9 to 10 and implementing RemoteApp for users at our remote sites at the same time. Woohoo!

That's 5 new servers on Server 2012 (1 SQL 2012, 3 Epicor application servers, and 1 RDS server).

This week the Nerd Journey Podcast is officially over the hill. Have you developed the mindset of an enterprise architect? If not, listen to this episode for some great tips on how to get there.

@coliver said:

I think it would depend on how much data the users actually use per connection to Epicor. I know RemoteApp basically uses almost no bandwidth to begin with (64kbps comes to mind but don't quote me on that). Do you have a router/firewall over at this remote site where you can monitor traffic and see how much RemoteApp is actually using?

I can monitor to some extent with the ASA 5505 at the remote site and look for calls to the ip of the RDS box. As far as bandwidth monitoring, the ASA does not really give you much to see. I guess I could use a free monitoring tool from Solarwinds, but it's really only for a switch port's bandwidth monitoring.

This week we discuss all things related to presentations. It's interesting that this was released on the day AWS re:Inforce kicked off but not planned. I'd be curious to know what seasoned presenters think of the tips in this episode. Get the sound bytes here.

@scottalanmiller said:

@technobabble said:

I thought all RDP bandwith was minute. This surely explains a lot.
Varies wildly. Size of desktop, amount of graphical change, if audio is passed, if printing is passed, how often the screen changes, how much of it changes, what types of graphics are used, colour depth, full desktop versus just one application... all factors.

We've seen RDP top 10Mb/s. That's many T1s. And that was for a single connection and was rate limited by being on a 10Mb/s line!

That's nuts!

This week is part 1 of our interview with Ethan Banks (of Packet Pushers, Datanauts co-host). Ethan shares his early career progression and some great nuggets on what it means to be a manager. Get the full episode here.

@scottalanmiller said:

@g.jacobse said:

What is your resource load - 4GB may not be enough and you could be losing bits in the buffer.

4GB is way too much. Should not have gone over 1GB and should really be more like 800MB. Anything over 1GB is just wasted.

I would agree not to go over 1 GB RAM for a small install. And I'd do this too: http://www.scottalanmiller.com/linux/2012/09/02/improving-elastix-memory-usage/.

What do you do when a hobby becomes a career? Better yet, have you thought about turning a hobby into a career? Would it still be something you enjoy?

Check out part 2 of our interview with Ethan Banks to hear the story of how Packet Pushers began and what it takes to start and maintain a business. Get the episode here.

We currently have around 70 licenses of Office 365 ProPlus and various licenses of Visio and Project (just a handful of those). We're not using the hosted e-mail due to ITAR regulations that must be met.

But when we signed up for ProPlus back in March of 2014, for some odd reason I chose the option to pay for the entire one year subscription as users get added. I was smarter with the Visio and Project licenses and have them set to pay monthly. What I do not want to happen is to have 70 ProPlus licenses hit at once and the company have to fit the bill for the entire year's subscription at once. So I contacted Microsoft about changing the billing to month-to-month. They are telling me to turn off auto-renew for ProPlus and let the subscription expire. Then, I should be able to renew the subscription and pay monthly. They say I will not lose any user configurations / assigned licenses by doing this.

Has anyone else actually done this? I'm a little paranoid about the day the subscription expires as I know users will be unable to use MS Office until the subscription is renewed and each user re-authenticated. There's that and the fact that I do not want to lose all of my user license assignments.

It has been one year since the launch of Nerd Journey. This week we take some time to review the podcast's genesis and how it has changed over the first year. Get the full episode here.

I got an e-mail from VMWare about a big announcement on 2/2 (the VMWare Online Launch Event). After registering, there was a link to join CloudCred. So I went ahead and took a peak. There are tasks you have to complete and for which you get points. I actually completed a few and won a free pen. Apparently you have chances to win a great deal of free gear.

Check it out if you like: https://www.cloudcredibility.com.

It's advertised as VMWare's gaming platform, but it seems like a pretty neat way to educate yourself about VMWare products with the potential to get free stuff.

Has anyone else used this?

Maybe we should create a MangoLassi CloudCred team.

Are you having career conversations? If not, why not? If you are, what should they be like? What are your responsibilities and those of your manager before, during, and after? Get the full scoop here.

I just joined. Did anyone read this - https://www.cloudcredibility.com/rules? Apparently we can challenge or get challenged by other teams. I thought that was interesting. But this should be fun I think.

Make sure you complete this task - https://www.cloudcredibility.com/tasks/detail/1919. It's 200 free points and a change to with some cool stuff (potentially a free ticket to VMWorld).

It seems unlikely for candidates to get constructive feedback after participating in an interview after which they were not offered a job. But sometimes, you get feedback in these situations that changes your outlook and direction. The same thing happened to Keiran Shelden, and it completely changed his approach moving forward.

In this week's episode, Keiran tells the story of a CEO who took an interest in him and was willing to provide some feedback even after saying no. Has this ever happened to you? If you received feedback after being turned down for a job, what would you do with it? Would it push you to try harder next time or make you determined to prove the person who gave the feedback wrong?

http://nerd-journey.com/nerd-journey-046-career-advancement-keiran-shelden-pt-1/

I should also add it appears that after their big announcement tomorrow, there will be many, many tasks in CloudCred for those looking to get a VCP-DCV. I thought I would mention it.

Have you ever put your health at risk to finish a project? If so, has the pattern ever led you close to burnout? Hopefully you, like our guest, have learned something from these experiences. Check out part 2 of Keiran's story here.

@Carnival-Boy said:

And how is your performance? I assumed you had more users based on your specs, so I'm guessing (hoping) you're flying. I hadn't heard of a Fusion IO card, but RAM seems really cheap at the moment so I'd probably always spend money on that rather than anything else, although SQL Server Standard is limited to 64GB. I think the Fusion card only kicks in when SQL can't get data out of RAM so wouldn't get used that much, depending on how big your database is (how big is it, by the way?)

For our existing, out-going ERP system, most of our reports are written by me in ASP (classic ASP) directly accessing the database. I also use ASP for writing data a lot of the time, avoiding the ERP client entirely. I love classic ASP, but really need to retire it and learn something a bit more up-to-date.

I'm planning on running the application server and SQL server on the same VM, rather than splitting them like you did. I'm not sure what the benefits are of splitting them?

Anecdotally, I hear that Microsoft have done a great job of improving performance over the last couple of versions of Dynamics NAV. The new version is supposed to considerably faster than the previous one. So hopefully everything will be fine. Their goal is for everyone to run it on Azure so they have a stake in performance that perhaps other ERP vendors, like Epicor, don't have. Whilst the worse the performance is the more revenue they would get from Azure as people have to purchase more resources, if it's slow it would create a negative image of Azure and put people off going down the cloud route.

Performance was very good on Epicor 9, but it seems a little slower overall in Epicor 10. I have been monitoring that very closely, and I am seeing that we still seem fine in terms of the number of IOPs the server has compared to its workload, even with an increased number of users.

The real reason for splitting was encapsulation. There may be times when we need to reboot the application server but want to keep the SQL server running for people to be able to access our intranet system using the classic ASP pages my boss has written.

The database is about 36 GB now (maybe a little smaller but very close). It dropped in size by a factor of 5-10% in the upgrade. Epicor split their database into multiple schemas in version 10, and I know that made updating some of the ASP pages tough for my boss. And the custom fields that were part of normal tables for jobs, orders, etc. are now split off into user defined tables, causing many, many additional join statements to be added to code (which I feel pretty confident is slowing some things down, especially since the user-defined tables did not get indexes applied to them like all the other tables). I think we may still have some tuning to do. We have a 4-core SQL license, and thus far we are not pushing it, but I think we had some oversight in the upgrade regarding SSRS. That is the new engine for all reports, whereas they were Crystal Reports that ran mostly on the application server in the previous version. In this version the SQL Server takes a hit. I have beefed up the RAM to 50 GB this weekend with 40 GB of that reserved. I set the SQL memory limit to 40 GB as well.

But we have another problem going on right now with our web server being on the fritz and still physical. We have to find a way to get that moved very soon and are working on creative solutions.