I was fortunate enough to attend Epicor Insights this year, and they had some sessions dedicated to performance tuning for SQL which I found quite helpful. One of the things they said was that most folks using a SQL database for Epicor do not have their max degree of parallelism set to something other than 0 (the default), which means people running large processes in the Epicor might be utilizing all processors on the SQL server and essentially bringing other areas to a screeching halt. I've seen that happen here and there. To improve performance they recommend setting the MaxDOP to something nonzero.

We use SQL 2008 (not R2) 64-bit on Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition running as a VM with 4 vCPU and 32 GB RAM. If I read the articles below correctly, the large CXPACKET wait time we have from gathering some statistics means setting the MaxDOP to something like 1 or 2 could show a significant performance increase.

http://shaunjstuart.com/archive/2012/06/setting-maxdop-on-multi-core-processor-servers/
http://shaunjstuart.com/archive/2012/07/changing-sql-servers-maxdop-setting/

So what do you recommend I set MaxDOP to be? I was thinking start with 1 and see how things go. For those who have tweaked MaxDOP for your environment, has anything suffered because of you setting it to a nonzero value?

That's so cool. When is it they offer free tours of these again?

@NetworkNerd said:

@Dashrender said:

Back to the OP - I'm totally not surprised they want to charge a fee to ex filtrate that data - it might not be that simple and could possibly require a lot of time from one of their employees to make a copy onto a drive for you - even worse how is the data access (are they just a bunch of PSTs, one per person) when you get the drive full of data?

I believe it will be one PST for each mailbox.

Let me correct this statement. After talking with Mimecast, what they send us (should we choose to have them exgest the data if we were to leave) would be in EML format.

@scottalanmiller said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Do you pay to access the archives normally? I'm assuming that this is a fee that your CEO sees all of the time but never mentally applied to what it would mean at large scale?

We just pay the subscription fee to use Mimecast's services on a per-mailbox basis. It's very cheap per mailbox per year, and everyone gets the ability to do an archive search on their mailbox as well as spam filtering for the organization as a whole. Several folks here use the archive quite frequently for searching of their own mailbox, and we have used the archiving many times for e-discovery (which probably takes 10% of what it would if we did not have Mimecast), checking to make sure messages were delivered as expected, etc.

So instead of having them do some special transfer, you could, in theory, grab all of your email through normal means and download it?

In theory, we could. That's something I had not considered. The cons of us doing it internally would be that the files would all be in EML format. The platform does not lend itself to extracting PST files easily.

@Dashrender said:

Back to the OP - I'm totally not surprised they want to charge a fee to ex filtrate that data - it might not be that simple and could possibly require a lot of time from one of their employees to make a copy onto a drive for you - even worse how is the data access (are they just a bunch of PSTs, one per person) when you get the drive full of data?

I believe it will be one PST for each mailbox.

@scottalanmiller said:

Do you pay to access the archives normally? I'm assuming that this is a fee that your CEO sees all of the time but never mentally applied to what it would mean at large scale?

We just pay the subscription fee to use Mimecast's services on a per-mailbox basis. It's very cheap per mailbox per year, and everyone gets the ability to do an archive search on their mailbox as well as spam filtering for the organization as a whole. Several folks here use the archive quite frequently for searching of their own mailbox, and we have used the archiving many times for e-discovery (which probably takes 10% of what it would if we did not have Mimecast), checking to make sure messages were delivered as expected, etc.

@scottalanmiller said:

Egress of data often has a charge when there is volume. Amazon S3 has an engress charge, for example.

How long must you retain what Mimecast already has? Three years? Seven years?

I believe for the most part the retention requirement is 3 years, but I am going to confirm that with our QA Manager.

@alexntg said:

The example you give isn't all that different from having lots of data in a system made by a company that went bankrupt. When considering any solution (hosted or otherwise), an exit strategy should be a consideration.

Very true - I think that is something we often leave out of these decisions.

I think those who know me know I really like Mimecast. The time has come to shop around a bit, see what else is out there, and present to management so as to either renew with Mimecast (what I would like to do) or move to another provider. We use Mimecast for spam filtering, e-mail archiving, e-discovery, and e-mail continuity in conjunction with our in-house Exchange server.

I've done my due diligence to find out just what is entailed in leaving them and moving elsewhere. My biggest concern in potentially leaving is getting the archived e-mail data. They archive EVERYTHING. That means likely we do not have all the mail data on our Exchange server, and we sure don't have all of the archived mail for users no longer with the company. When I mentioned in passing to the CEO that there will be a per-GB fee to exgest our mail data, he was pretty upset and offended. He said he felt like we're being held hostage by them as a tactic to force renewal.

Now, I do not remember reading about the fee to get data back if we moved away from them when we originally signed, but I think I can understand why they charge a fee.

Has anyone else had to combat the mindset of being held hostage by a cloud provider with management? I'd appreciate any advice.

I have seen references to The Bulletproof Executive in Spiceworks (Duffney, I think). Supposedly you can eat the right things to fight fat and not exercise (and not sleep much), I'm not sure I buy into it: http://www.bulletproofexec.com/.

Awesome!

For about the last 6-12 months we have been putting Nitro Reader on our new PCs as an alternative to Adobe because I think Nitro is better overall. But I feel like in the last few weeks, we've been prompted to change people back to Adobe Reader. Somehow Nitro is taking longer to open large PDF files. The open time for Adobe Reader seems to be sometimes 5-7 seconds less than it takes Nitro for larger PDF files. I've stood and watched people in other departments try to open large PDF files and seen this happen consistently. We're talking about opening files in a SMB share on a server with 15K SAS drives.

I personally really like Nitro Reader and have not experienced this issue. But then again, I am not really opening large PDF files as people in HR / AR / AP / Quality might be.

Has anyone else experienced the issue I mention here?

@JaredBusch
I don't see the option in embedded FreePBX either. You may have to edit amportal.conf as per this article: http://www.freepbx.org/forum/freepbx/general-help/day-night-indicator. Let me know if that works. I've had people ask me about this but never messed around with it.

LastPass Enterprise is wonderful. You have a master account for the company that can manage other LastPass users (invite, delete, force reset of master password, etc.). But even better than that, the Enterprise Edition allows sharing of passwords in your vault with other LastPass users at your company.

So, as a LastPass user at Company X, suppose I am in the finance department. I can create a shared folder in my LastPass vault that I share with 2 different people - the CFO and the person in Accounts Payable. I create the shared folder and add each person (selecting from the corporate LastPass user pool) to which I want to give access, selecting whether they get read-only or read / write access to anything in the shared folder. I can give the CFO full read / write access but give the person in Accounts Payable read-only access. It's great for sharing passwords across teams. That is the major value I see in it.

You can do two-factor authentication with Yubi-key, etc., but I have not done it.

It's kind of funny because I use this at work but do not use the personal edition at home. And I'm not sure why, now that I think of it. You can actually link your personal account to your Enterprise account in the event you wanted to do it as a way to separate work from personal but have them all in one spot. I've not done it but know you can.

Try syncing /var/spool/hylafax/ as well as /var/www/db/. The latter directory contains fax.db, which will be everything related to virtual fax configuration (at least when using Hylafax as part of Elastix, anyway).

@JaredBusch said:

Interesting. Have installed the controller on Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 all without a firewall problem. Default Windows firewall only, no third party firewalls.

I'll agree and have never had a firewall issue installing the controller in Win 7. Maybe it was the SAM-firewall that caused the problem?

The biggest problem I have ever had is manually setting the controller ip / host name in an access point after moving the controller to another machine for one reason or another. But I am with @JaredBusch in that I still love their equipment.

I'd recommend Spiceworks as well, but I seem to remember it having issues pulling Office 2013 keys properly. Maybe that has been fixed at this point.
I actually like Product Key Explorer for pulling MS keys as well.

I actually started down that path in Q1 of 2013 when we deployed Elastix at my main site but ran out of time. Back then the T32G was not part of the configurator, but I did find this gem, which may help you:
link text.

I got as far as adding the T32G to the phone database on the server so that it would show as an option when Elastix detects the phone. But that's as far as I made it.

There's a particular site we support which has its own domain. Things have been that way since we acquired it a couple of years ago. We've had talks about killing that domain altogether but have not done it because it has not been a priority. The remaining 5 sites we have all operate on one domain, but the only domain controllers are at our main site (call it site A). I know it sounds ridiculous already, but bear with me here.

The site in question (call it site X) is its own entity but is owned by the same owners as the company where I work (site A). As it stands, site X has a Server 2003 SBS that is acting as the master domain controller for and a Server 2012 DC that is completely virtual on the ESXi host at that site for redundancy. Site X has its own file server as well as some VMs running Engineering applications on Windows 7. All of these are on site X's domain.

As far as workstations at site X go, we have a mix of stations on site X's domain and those on site A's domain. The only things site X really does not have to stand completely on its own would be the Exchange server and company intranet (both hosted at site A and part of site A's domain). Since site X has been operating more and more on its own within the last 6 months, they really have no need to access resources at site A other than the two I mention here (no access needed to file servers at site A, etc.).

Based on the fact that site X has become so operationally independent from site A, I could see the case for keeping the domain for site X, moving all workstations over there not on that domain to it, and just creating a domain trust between it and the domain for site A. It would be a great deal easier since we would not have to change domains on all the servers at site X. But, there is simplicity in having everything on a single domain.

I realize what we have is a complete mess, and we need to change everything one way or another. I was looking to get some insight as to which way to go here (keep site X on its own domain vs moving everything to the same domain as site A). Let me also throw in that we know site X as an entity is about to change its name (some point in the not so distant future). The site is not being acquired but changed up a bit to give it a fresh look to customers (and I think because of some legal battles that happened post-acquisition).

What would you do here, and why would you do it? What are the reasons you've had multiple domains in place?

It's interesting I happened to see this thread today. We too have a Lanier copier similar to @Dashrender mentions above, and we were not able to do scanning to SMB because of Server 2012 R2's SMB version as well. We went with the Windows FTP server approach to get around it. Scan to FTP seems to work very well for pretty much every printer / copier we have that supports it.