@Dominica said:

I really think you need to move on to CYOA on this one, now that the CFO has the impression that you approved everything, your ass very well could be on the line, even though it had nothing to do with you. If I were you, I'd set the record straight ASAP.

Ok, I just did that. I just let the CFO know the conversation happened after the lease was signed and really all I could do was verify the machine would seemingly do the job from a technical standpoint since IT had previously been left out of the process.

Podcast Tuesday is back! This week John and I talk about work / life balance and hero worship in IT. Check it out, and let us know if something resonates. The full episode can be found here - http://bit.ly/2voxwXp.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?

You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.

Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.

This week we tackle LinkedIn etiquette (as recommended to MBA students) and why raising your impact radius / investing thought leadership is important. Get the full episode here.

This morning I got a call from one of our sites, and the person mentioned they could not get to our webserver. The sites are connected via site-to-site vpn, and name resolution was working as expected. I tried from offsite to test and from another remote site but got the same issues. Everything at the same site as the webserver was able to access it fine.

And then I tried to get into our Barracuda 410 web filter. It was effectively bricked (web GUI inaccessible) and needed to be rebooted. After the reboot, everything was fine, but I couldn't help but want to listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkitLUbeEg.

I'd love to make a sound byte of that play when someone has a web page blocked by Barracuda.

The last reboot was probably a year ago, but all is well now.

On this Podcast Tuesday, have you thought about what factors might cause bombing an interview? And how should you dress for an interview? We provide some answers to these questions this week. Get the full episode here.

How about for building a system image that you intend to deploy later using SmartDeploy, etc.? We use VMWare Player to build and make edits to the image, and that is about all we do with type 2 hypervisors.

The presentation featured in this post is from the October 2018 Dallas VMUG UserCon and is the extended edition of an idea born from a vBrownBag presentation at VMworld 2017. After giving that presentation in 2017, I quickly realized there was enough content to make it a full session. As I allude to in the video, this talk has been given by others at VMUG UserCons across the country throughout this year. But since this has been my first and only attempt at it, I have the full video and newly developed slide deck for anyone who wants it available here.

And many thanks to @NerdyDad for coming to the session!

One of my Elastix servers (on-premise) uses Broadvox / NBS / Fusion for SIP trunking and has been working like a champ, but we have an oddity. We setup an IVR to use as a hotline so shop workers can call and leave a message for a supervisor if they will be late to work that day. This line doubles as a news line for bad weather and general announcements. So within the IVR we have about 9 options, each going to a different supervisor's e-mail. It has been working fine except for one small problem.

There have been a handful of people who call the hotline, and even though they are pressing 1 on their cell phone to get to John Smith's voicemail box, for example, the key press on their end never gets to the PBX somehow (no matter what they dial or how many times they dial it). It's like the key presses on the cell phone side just are not getting to the PBX (i.e. issue with DTMF). But, the HR Director believes this is limited to a specific mobile carrier (T-Mobile).

I feel like @scottalanmiller used to have this same kind of issue when trying to dial into a conference bridge for NTG.

Is this a misconfiguration on our PBX or some kind of shortcoming of the cell service provider? I would guess it is the latter but am not 100% certain. Has anyone else seen this happen and found a resolution?

The long-waited part 2 of our interview with Joseph Griffiths is now available. Listen for his mic drop moments! Get the episode here.

@scottalanmiller said:

I am doing the same thing in a year, around March, 2016. Two weeks on a cruise, totally out of contact. I think that I will need to be sedated. @Minion-Queen might need to be too.

Whoa! You're going to disconnect for that long? Yep - you may need to be sedated. Repeat after me, " I am not a workaholic."

What if you had a ton of free VMware product documentation at your fingertips? What if I told you there's a way to use it more effectively to find what you want?

This comes after Christmas, but consider it my gift to the community. I hope it helps someone find answers faster and that by reading this you learned something new.

http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2018/11/30/the-extensive-guide-to-using-vmware-documentation-like-a-pro

What we have here is a mess that I am looking to try and clean up a little. Simply put, we need a workstation on our internal production LAN to communicate to a DVR on a separate subnet (same physical network infrastructure) and run the software that can monitor security camera feeds.

At a particular site of ours, we have Charter Business coax with two usable public ip addresses. We started with one public ip address and then added a second public ip address not too long ago. We have some security cameras at the site which required a public address with static NAT configured so our security monitoring company could monitor the camera traffic.

Now, when Charter gave us another ip address they gave us one on a different subnet than the first public ip. At the time, we needed something in place quickly and ended up putting a Cisco RV180 we had laying around in place configured with the second public ip and configured with the proper NAT to get the monitoring working properly.

So what we have in place now is this:

• Cisco ASA 5505 configured with 1 public ip using NAT with PAT (outside interface connected to Charter modem), inside interface is 10.0.1.0/24  (production LAN), device setup for DHCP and DNS

• Cisco RV180 configured with 1 public ip using static NAT (WAN interface connected to Charter modem), inside interface is 10.192.0.0/24 (subnet for cameras only), DHCP is off

• All cameras as well as the DVR are on the 10.192.0.0/24 subnet (configured this way by the vendor who put them in place). The DVR as well as all cameras are configured with static ip addresses.
  The wiring for the cameras goes through some of the same L2 switches used for our production LAN (could not physically separate in the beginning).

I'm thinking we have a few options. I'm leaning toward option 1 but want to make sure that will work on the Cisco ASA.

1. Take out the RV180. Setup two new interfaces on the ASA.

Make a new inside interface on Ethernet0/6, for example, and set it as 10.192.0.254. Connect a switch to this port that has cameras / the DVR connected to it.

Make a new outside interface on Ethernet0/7, for example. Set it to the public ip for camera traffic, and connect that port to the Charter modem. It will be plugged into the Charter modem instead of the RV180.

Setup the static NAT for access to the DVR on the new outside interface.

Setup static routes to send anything on 10.192.0.0/24 to the proper outside interface with the public ip for cameras and anything on 10.0.1.0/24 to the outside interface already configured. Setup static routes on the correct inside interfaces so devices on the two subnets can communicate. Would that work? Will ACLs give me trouble here (like the implicit incoming rules for the inside interface)?

2. Figure out how to route traffic between subnets using the RV180 and ASA 5505. I do not have high hopes for that.

3. Get a PCI NIC for this workstation and set to a static ip on the camera subnet while the NIC on the motherboard remains on the production LAN.

I wouldn't call myself a routing and switching guy, so any advice is much appreciated here.

In my last post, I gave advice on using VMware documentation like a pro. But in this post, let’s take that one step further to expert level. There’s something amazing about the VMware documentation site that people may not have explored. From the VMware Docs home page, there’s an option to build custom docs. Let’s click on it and see what happens.

Get the full story here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2018/12/07/tips-and-tricks-for-building-customized-vmware-docs.

If you happen to be one of the many chomping at the bit to try out the new features of VSAN, I just got an e-mail about a free 6-month trial of VSAN 6 for VMUG members. If that is something that interests you, I recommend signing up for your local VMUG and then asking about this offer.

This is part 2 of 2 of my 1-year check in at VMware. John grills me on what it was like and what I have learned. Get the full scoop here.

One thing I never saw in this thread was an estimate of call volume (how many folks are on the phone at the same time) and how many actually phones are tied to your current system?

With 150/150 fiber, you certainly have the bandwidth to support a massive amount of SIP traffic to and from a 3rd party SIP provider at very little impact to your internet bandwidth. We're talking 100 Kb per concurrent inbound / outbound call. Companies like Intelepeer and Nexvortex can give you unlimited concurrent calls without a per-concurrent call fee. They normally apply a set rate to each minute of usage domestic and international calls and charge a small fee per DID you have. Both of these providers (and probably many others) can provide a month-to-month model so you do not have to worry about lengthy contracts. One thing I really like about Intelepeer is the fact that you can call their NOC and talk to a live person within seconds (not always the case with NexVortex).

And it's all correct in that you cannot guarantee the call quality when using a 3rd party SIP provider over your existing internet connection. But with QoS at your gateway, I bet your call quality will be quite good. We've run 3rd party SIP since 2013, and the CEO told me not long ago when we were looking at new SIP providers that he had forgotten we even ran VOIP because it worked so well.

What is it like to spend a year co-hosting a podcast? I decided to do a write up on the experience, the interesting challenges it has presented, and some of the things I've learned along the way.

You can get the full story here.

@scottalanmiller
Just promise me if you discuss calculating costs of downtime and how it plays into what you should spend to mitigate it that you'll work in a good analogy something lines of "that's like shooting yourself in the face today to avoid a headache some day."

That's my favorite SAM analogy.

This the first post in a series where I'm exploring the idea of shipping logs from a Pi-hole to Wavefront for analysis. This post explores how to install a Wavefront proxy on a Ubuntu VM and ensure it is sending data to Wavefront.

The full post can be found here.