Best posts made by NetworkNerd

There's some stuff here that may help you - https://suitecrm.com/wiki/index.php/Installation. But my guess is you may have already read it and found it lacking.

The MSA60 is not a SAN. It's DAS. I don't see IPOD as what the environment has at all. The way I read it was each server has a MSA60 attached.

@Shuey said in VMware Essentials Info?:

@NerdyDad That's one of the reasons I want to build out this nice brand new DL380 Gen9 (local storage which will be more dependable than the old crappy MSAs, and I can put 256GB or more of RAM in it). And if either of the existing hosts takes a dump, I have backups of every guest VM that I could easily restore if need be. The existing hosts are a DL360 G7 and a DL360 G8.

You mentioned the MSAs are out of support now. What about the servers themselves? My assumption is yes, but I wanted to ask.

Is this just a single-location business, or do you have gear at other locations?

I'm in an environment that did not previously have internal IT, and what we have is a potpourri of different AV software (Trend Micro, ESET, Microsoft Security Essentials, etc.). Well, we're deploying our standard corporate AV and realized we do not have the uninstall password for the version of ESET installed on several machines here. Has anyone had success with following the steps in this article (http://support.eset.com/kb2289/?locale=en_US) and not completely messing up the target Windows 7 / 8.1 computer? I just wanted to ask before we give it a go.

@Ambarishrh said in Unknown ESET Uninstall Password:

Just saw this link Reset your settings password using the ESET unlock tool

I called Support yesterday, and they mentioned the unlock tool was an option as well as the uninstaller.

@scottalanmiller said in Caching Needs and SSDs:

@NetworkNerd said in Caching Needs and SSDs:

I saw this earlier today and see a recommendation to not run SSDs without a PERC card that has caching:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2005543-help-with-replacing-slow-server

That makes sense as you would not want to couple expensive high speed SSD with a cheap, slow RAID system. Bad use of funds.

I know of a company that just bought a new Dell PowerEdge with local write-intensive SSDs to use for running an ERP system and SQL Server but only got the PERC H330. Oops for them. Of course, in their case, they may not notice compared to how much better things will be compared to their current hardware.

@scottalanmiller said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

@NetworkNerd said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

We're in the process of moving all files on a specific volume from one server (old Server 2003 machine) to a volume on a new file server (Server 2012 R2). We tried robocopy on the source server but actually found the admin accounts we were using to run the robocopy do not have access to all subfolders of the volume.

What kind of admin account doesn't have file access?

That would be the kind that some consulting firm setup before you got here.

@Dashrender said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

@NetworkNerd said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

@Dashrender said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

@NetworkNerd said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

f our projects after moving servers will be to clean up permissions and remove the full control.

I used robocopy a year or so ago to do just this. There is an option in robocopy that allows robocopy to run as the backup service to copy the data to the new location. This solve any issues I had with my admin account not having access to files on the volume I was moving.

robocopy /b = backup mode (if you don't have permissions, restart the copy of that file using the backup account)

This may be the missing link. Not that we shouldn't fix permissions, but we really do need to get the data transferred. I will give it a try over the weekend and let you know how things go. Thanks!

Why do you assume permissions are broken?

My boss has files on the server that I have no business touching. She can (and does) use Windows file permissions to prevent my casual looking at those files. I don't see a problem with this.

There's not a problem with using permissions to keep people out of folders as you mention, and it goes right along with the JITJEA principle. Our real issue is that the folks who setup permissions on the server set individual user permissions instead of assigning the permissions to groups. That's where it seems messy and broken to me. But I completely agree with you that there are things I don't need to stumble upon and see, and that's a good thing.

A few weeks ago I was tasked with installing SuiteCRM for a proof of concept. Since the environment was primarily Windows, we went with a brand new Server 2012 R2 VM that was fully patched (environment had no license to use Server 2016). We tried following the documentation for SuiteCRM but found it to be less than helpful. No matter what we did (whether trying to use TomCat or IIS), we couldn’t get the install.php page to launch to complete the install. We certainly were not opposed to running this application on a Linux box, but there is beauty in uniformity, especially when your administrators are stronger with Windows support. So, for a week or two this project was put on hold while we tried to find a way around the road block.

At this point I could only surmise we were missing something small, perhaps something about which the documentation was not clear. Then I happened to see the following posts in which posters agreed the SuiteCRM documentation just is not that helpful. In the second link below, @JaredBusch started a great how-to for installing SuiteCRM on Fedora.

https://mangolassi.it/topic/13667/suitecrm-install-guide-anyone
https://mangolassi.it/topic/13731/how-to-install-suitecrm-7-8-3-on-fedora-25-minimal

You can read the rest of the story here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/06/12/how-suite-it-is-suitecrm-and-bitnami.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

In the words of @Lost_Signal773, HA is something you do and not something you buy.

That's from @John-Nicholson

Edited my post above

@Dashrender said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

@NetworkNerd said in When Robocopy Fails because of Folder Permissions...:

f our projects after moving servers will be to clean up permissions and remove the full control.

I used robocopy a year or so ago to do just this. There is an option in robocopy that allows robocopy to run as the backup service to copy the data to the new location. This solve any issues I had with my admin account not having access to files on the volume I was moving.

robocopy /b = backup mode (if you don't have permissions, restart the copy of that file using the backup account)

The backup mode parameter worked like a champ. Thanks again for the help.

Here's something interesting. A couple of days ago I logged into Wordpress only to have Jetpack get confused about whether there were multiple copies of the site on the public internet (asked me if my DNS records had changed, mentioning the domain epelican.projectstatus.in). At first I thought someone had hacked me and mirrored my content elsewhere, but that was not the case. After some research and ruling out the possibility of a hack, it turns out someone bought a domain in India and pointed an A-record for that domain at the public ip of my site.

Why would someone do this? Has this ever happened to you?

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@networknerd said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

@scottalanmiller said in When Someone Points Their DNS at Your Site:

Maybe they had that A record before you had that IP address?

I guess that's possible, but I thought it odd that Jetpack only picked up on this earlier this week. I've had the ip since May. I wish there was a way to see when an A-record was first published, but I don't think you can.

How would JetPack see it? They'd have to be out there scouring DNS records, which is pretty hard to do.

JetPack alerts you if multiple DNS records are pointed at your site because it gets confused about what statistics it needs to collect in conjunction with the hook into Wordpress.com (i.e. when traffic enters from one DNS record verses another DNS record).

@donaldlandru said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

@scottalanmiller said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

Webroot is still my go to choice for third party AV.

You have a preferred vendor to buy Webroot through?

We had really good pricing from SHI when I was in charge of IT Purchasing at my last company.

@ghani said in Upgrading from ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 6.5 . what are the steps need to follow ?:

@aaronstuder said in Upgrading from ESXi 5.5 to ESXi 6.5 . what are the steps need to follow ?:

version

currently VMware latest version 6.5 on IT industry

Make sure you're installing 6.5U1 and not just 6.5. Are you using a Windows vCenter or the appliance? Remember that Windows vCenter support will be disappearing soon - https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/08/farewell-vcenter-server-windows.html.

I'd start with this series of posts by one of the Technical Marketing Managers at VMware - https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/05/vsphere-6-5-upgrade-considerations-part-1.html. I believe there are 2 other articles he has written about it.

@dbeato said in KnowBe4 E-mail Exposure Check:

@networknerd Yes, it works well. I get monthly emails of exposures with the emails of our company posted online so we can remove them.

Are you also KnowBe4 customers or just using this free tool?

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Spend the $15 to get a USB drive to be the install target for Hyper-V, and then boot the server from that USB drive each time. Like others have said, keep the SSD to give yourself some fast storage to play with and not to run a hypervisor.

If you're only playing with a single SSD you could even leverage it and use the free version of Starwind to accelerate the VMs running on the spinning disk datastore (I think). Someone else may want to verify this specific point.

I do have plenty of extra USB drives. I was considering that also but I don't know if I want a USB drive sticking out of the back of my server.

You can get a really slim USB stick online for cheap.
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Low-Profile-Drive-SDCZ33-008G-B35/dp/B005FYNSUA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1506622655&sr=8-3&keywords=small+usb+drive

oh man.. yes, that would be a lot better. Maybe I will just install Hyper-v on my current USB just for S&G. I've never installed Hyper-v before so I don't mind having to do it again on a different, smaller USB later..

It never hurts to practice so you have the install down cold. That way if this is used in production at some point (I mean Hyper-V and not your lab gear), you will be ready for a complete re-install if absolutely needed in a DR scenario.

@mike-davis said in site to site VPN only works with Keep Alive:

It's really odd. I had a continuous ping going as I was changing settings. At some point I checked the box and all the sudden I started getting replies. I kept checking and unchecking boxes until I found that that was the thing that was doing it. As soon as I turn it off, the connection drops, even though there should be a continuous ping going across the connection.

Man, this sounds really odd like the issue I had with a Cisco ASA and a Meraki device, especially the part about the tunnel dropping. I know it's not the same scenario here, but this one peaked my curiosity and gave me a touch of deja vu.

I wonder if Sonicwall Support can explain it?

Re: OSSEC - Anyone tried it?

I never saw in the thread referenced here what folks chose as their distro for running OSSEC. We're considering using it, but it looks like the virtual appliance they have is version 2.8.3 (updated in 2015 sometime) and runs CentOS 6.7. What distro do you / would you use to run OSSEC if you were deploying it today?

Here's the link to the downloads page if anyone wants to read more on the various install packages available - https://ossec.github.io/downloads.html.

@scottalanmiller said in Distro Selection for OSSEC:

Running 6.7 isn't a very secure way to go about things. That means that they are not patching... like more or less the most basic thing you do in security!!

Well, I think they just aren't patching the pre-built OVA. They have later releases of the OSSEC server version from what I saw. And if I were deploying it, I would just install the bits on my own Linux server rather than use the OVA.