I'd say you just pretty much cleared it up perfectly. Looks like some good reference posts in future cases.

Hmm, what if you take the Linux out of Ubuntu or Android. What are you left with? Maybe that is a question worth answering. What if you took the MSDOS out of Win98? What are you left with?

Will you still have a functional system? Nope. But are you left with so much it is still almost a complete system?

If you take the wheels off a car, or take out the engine, is it still a car?

Food for thought. I can see either direction, but I still lean towards SAMs take.

@Dashrender said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:

You need a hypervisor license ($300) and a per VM license? Boy, that can add up quickly. Veeam small business the last time I looked was like $800 and $130/yr support/update renewal. Doesn't take many VMs to climb over that. And supports unlimited VMs on up to three hosts (basically it matches VMWares Essential package).

"VM Pricing (Only available with Standard and Premium Subscriptions): Each Zmanda Client subscription allows up to 5 virtual machines (VMs) running on one physical server. All VMs must have the same operating system as the client subscription purchased. For example, if you have 2 physical machines running 3 Linux and 3 Windows VMs on the first machine and 5 Linux VMs on the second machine, you need to purchase subscription to 1 Zmanda Client for Linux, 1 Zmanda Client for Windows for the first machine and 1 Zmanda Client for Linux for the second machine. "

But still, not supporting two major OS's from this decade is a huge reason not to go with them. In fact, I didn't even see that because I figured it was an "of course" thing.

@travisdh1 said in Benefits of Zmanda / Bacula vs XYZ:

We used to use Zmanda, used to. Support told me that "Those backups are fine." Reality was different. Testing saved my bacon, and we switched to using CrashPlan (the free one) after that support incident.

What happened to your Zmanda backups? Were they corrupted? I seen that they use zip or tar for compression and does deduplication. What's your experience with that?

I have never used a so-called Enterprise (paid) backup solution with Zmanda or Bacula. I think for this post I want to focus on Zmanda instead of Bacula... the wording of Bacula kinda pushes me away in that every little thing having to do with it is a "plugin".

The way Zmanda Enterprise is described on their website, it makes them look so fantastically perfect that it would make anyone want to shoot themselves for even the slightest thought of something more expensive like Unitrends or Veeam.

So what I'm wondering, is if Zmanda does it all, and more, than Unitrends and Veeam Backup, for a lot less money... then how are backup solutions like Unitrends and Veeam in business? (lets leave the other stuff like replication and veeam monitor out of it for this)

I know it's a software solution, so you'd still have to provide the hardware, capacity, etc for the backups and such... and licensing is still per device or cpu.

So what are the convincing reasons to not go with Zmanda for a large enterprise backup solution with lots of hypervisors, lots of physical Linux and Windows servers, databases, etc. Lets say all raw data would be in the mid-20's of terabytes. Tape backups would be in play, and eventual cloud backup. Backup copies (backup replication) wouldn't be a factor at this point.

All products do have paid support options. I don't know how good the support of Zmanda would be vs Unitrends or Veeam, as I've heard and lived through bad stories regarding all of them.

Can you convince me Zmanda is not for me, and another popular solution is better for the company? Can you convince me Zmanda is better for me and Unitrends/Veeam/etc... would be worse choice for the company? Why?

Management sometimes does quick searches and see open source!, or free!, or does everything XYZ can do and more! and think, hey let's present this instead!

Anyways, by looks and features alone, I don't see why I shouldn't be sold on Zmanda vs XYZ, unless there's more of a potential to be stuck without good working backups and/or retention, lack of support, or worse utilization of hardware and/or capacity.

Thoughts?

@JaredBusch Yeah that says v 7.3 too. I'll try that update plan I mentioned and let you know.

@JaredBusch I'll restore a backup of that VM and turn it on, on my test network... update it and update LIS if needed. I'll let you know if I run in to the same issue as you.

@JaredBusch said in CentOS 7 using old version of Linux Integration Services:

If I shut down the VM, I can make checkpoints and backups with no errors.

This is also happening on a fully updated Server 2012 R2 DataCenter + Hyper-V system.

I'm running some CentOS 7 proxy servers. One of them is running on Server 2012 R2 DataCenter + Hyper-V as well.
Backups via Windows Server Backup and checkpoints work just fine while the machine is running.

Here's what mine shows... not exactly the same as yours, but may be some help? I don't mind taking a checkpoint and updating if it may help get some info if needed.

@scottalanmiller said in What Makes Parity RAID Safe on SSDs:

@Dashrender said in What Makes Parity RAID Safe on SSDs:

@Oles-Borys said in What Makes Parity RAID Safe on SSDs:

@Tim_G

I would go RAID 5 on SSD when i am short on budget, but i need SSD performance.
In case I am capable of going SSD RAID 10, i will

I'm a little confused by this. Personally I would primarily go RAID 5 on SSD, and only consider going RAID 10 when I need the max performance from the array possible. The IOPs difference between HDD and SDD is staggering. Could you need more than RAID 5 SSD gives? Sure, but that seems more like a fringe case.

Did someone say fringe case?

Lol, really?

said in CentOS 7 using old version of Linux Integration Services:

snapshot functionality is how all backup systems

I thought the newer CentOS and Ubuntu versions already came with LIS pre-installed or built into the kernel or whatever?

This came up before too, where I work, considering opening a position for an IT Intern.

We decided not to, because it would be a waste of their time, and didn't think they would learn anything from it.

This would be because they would be doing the stuff nobody else would be wanting to do... you know, here go do this 500 times because we don't have time to do it ourselves... or whatever, you get my point I think.

It's not that we don't want to them to sit down with us, and we show and teach them all about being an IT systems architect or engineering... it's that we wouldn't have time to do it. We always joke about doing things in our spare time, because we don't have any lol. But we just can't afford to not do our own work to train an Intern and actively be involved in such a way they would benefit from it.

@scottalanmiller said in Considering going back to school:

@IRJ said in Considering going back to school:

@coliver said in Considering going back to school:

@IRJ said in Considering going back to school:

I could see this degree not being helpful to get your foot in the door, but If you were looking at my resume and saw 12+ years experience and a recent degree you would see that as a negative vs 12+ years experience with no degree?

I think the point was, it depends on the college. There are several, often for profit, colleges that are degree mills. WGU being one of them.

Right and I understand that. There is no point getting a bachelors in a real school for me. I have no desire to go to a real school.

Then you have no interest in a degree, it's that simple. There is no legitimate shortcut to going to school for a degree. If you don't do the work of a degree, that means you didn't earn a degree so anything that "lets" you say you have a degree on a resume is seen as dishonest. And if you had real skills and value, why would you feel the need to do that? So think about how an employer would see it - it makes no sense to them.

I don't see how getting a real college degree in Computer Science will be beneficial in any way if you plan on pursuing a career in IT. Sure, you'll be able to code your own custom accounting application from scratch or design your own functional calculator program... but you'll be knowledgeless or useless as far as managing servers or IT systems engineering/administration is concerned. I suppose a B.S. in biology or aviation would be just as useful for an IT sys admin.

But I suppose that's where experience and certifications come in... with the B.S. or M.S. in aviation as proof that you can stick to something random to better yourself and get things done, thus making a better Sys Admin than someone who hasn't done that.

Is that basically the gist of it?

That's the one I started using with my new blog. Seems great and I don't know how any others could get any better, especially if you pay for premium.

I seen Jetpack discussed a lot. But the major turnoff of that for me was that it seems to be the Walmart of plugins. I'd rather use a plugin that has a much narrower focus.

I see no reason not to stick with Yoast.

@Dashrender said in RAID for Four Disks:

OK I had to do some digging before posting.

I recall seeing @scottalanmiller post many times that SSDs don't suffer UREs, but perhaps he was meaning that they are so unlikely in current use patterns we can ignore them.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/07/flash_banishes_the_spectre_of_the_unrecoverable_data_error/

This post talks about this topic exactly. But I'll shorten it for this post.

You asked - is it all about the bits, yep, it sure is. As you can see in that graphic, even consumer SSDs are 10x less likely to hit a URE than an enterprise HDD. And there are two levels greater than that. You can see where Scott got the 12 TB basically means 100% likeliness that a resilver will fail. You'll notice that a 600 TB array has about a 50% chance of failure, 300 TB has 25% 100 TB is around 8%.

I think the new question we need to ask ourselves, what level of risk are we willing to accept?

Oh man, that clears it right up. Thanks for that! So SSDs just straight up are much more resilient and can pump through way more bits before a URE or whatever. (I keep thinking it was something else, not URE, but I guess it is URE...)

Anyways, good info here, and summed up real nicely.

Maybe you can clear this up for me because I'm not the biggest hardware/raid buff and don't have that extremely deep level of hardware knowledge to the atom.

I typically go RAID 10 with spinning rust and RAID 5 in most SSD cases.... unless where the performance gain will actually make a difference and it's just that damn important to have the extra level of protection vs RAID5.

Anyways, to get to what I'm not clear on...

The biggest argument I've seen everywhere on RAID 5 + SSD's vs HDDs is that URE doesn't matter because SSD's work so fast (basically speaking, and maybe URE isn't the correct one to use, I can't remember at the moment). But doesn't the same exact amount of bits get processed?... Just faster? Everyone says a RAID 5 rebuild of high-terabyte drives will take FOREVER (with HDDs) and the changes of a failure go up. But I'm thinking to myself... wait, who cares about the time... isn't it about the amount of bits moving? Isn't it because of the massive number of bits moving that increases the chance of URE or whatever... not necessarily the time it takes to move them?

That said, wouldn't it mean that SSDs and HDDs with equal capacity experience the same number of bits moving during a rebuild... but the SSDs do it faster? Therefore, the chance of a bit flipping or <insert issue here> is the same in both. Oh, I'm not talking about mechanical failure, that's obvious. Let's keep that out of the equation in this particular thought experiment.

Thoughts on that SAM? Or am I just drifting off the road?

Is there a specific reason I missed why you arent using the vm integration service time sync with the host?

Could you install the latest hyperV LIS on the linux vms, enable the guest time sync, and use windows/microsoft time sync on the host if its not on the domain?

Hmm, I'm not getting what the issues are. I have been using hyperv server 2016 full force in production environments and I haven't noticed less manageability at all.

Are you domain joining them? That can help simplify setup. But even without. Maybe im just too tired right now and not reading correctly.

@aaronstuder said in CentOS 7 File Server (samba). Do you know easy GUI to manage ?:

Webmin
http://webmin.com/

http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/Samba_Windows_File_Sharing

I recommend Webmin as well. It makes administration of Linux a lot simpler and faster for typical administrative tasks. Especially if you aren't efficient with bash, and don't have time to spend hours on google before every task you want to perform, that you don't remember the commands for.

It's still faster and more efficient to Putty in (using SSH) and do things that way. But I understand that may not be for everyone, especially those who are specifically looking for GUI options.

I don't care what others say about it, I just know that it works, and works well, makes things tons easier, and it has never messed anything up. Even when I install it on ancient versions of Linux, it still performs well. The worst thing I have come across when installing Webmin, is I had to disable https (once)... but that case was a minor issue as it was internally protected anyways.

@scottalanmiller said in What does your desk look like?:

@BRRABill said in What does your desk look like?:

@scottalanmiller

Aren't you afraid a monster or something is going to pop out of those double doors?

BOOOOO!

Second floor.

Some monsters have wings.

@scottalanmiller said in old MSP wants to know what they did wrong:

@Dashrender said in old MSP wants to know what they did wrong:

The first time I heard of a pizzabox was in a datacenter talking about IBM 1U servers. Right or wrong, the term has two meanings today.

Just like cloud has two meanings, and blades do. We work in IT, wrong is wrong. There isn't room for sloppy. Just using terms mistakenly doesn't make it okay.

You can say it has two meanings, but where does thinking like that stop? Soon you can say anything and we have no terminology for our field. Just because lots of people repeat something incorrectly doesn't make it okay nor does it make it a term for that thing.

I do get your point and you are right, but it doesn't have to be so black and white.