Posts made by Pete.S

@travisdh1 said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

I just got an ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 two weeks ago for my parents. The Celeron N4020 in it is not very fast, but it is light years ahead of the things @Dashrender is talking about. Thankfully those terri-bad CPUs are a thing of the past now. Performance isn't great, but it's not bad, and the touchscreen is nice.

I've had an HP Chromebook with the 360 degree hinge, and it's been a workhorse that goes for two full days of heavy usage on a single charge. For everyday tasks, that HP @Pete-S listed would be just fine.

Sounds good!

@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

Probook x360 11 G5

I love HP laptops, and Probooks are what I generally buy for my staff - but a celeron - man, I'd almost rather gut myself than use that, at least in the past - they were so bad = slow!

But at least it's not an A series AMD, that = kill me instead of being forced to use the device.

Hey, it's not a Celeron, it's a PENTIUM SILVER!

oh man, likely even worse... I was reading from HP's site... I'm sure they have many different models of this.

I'll test what the performance is like. Looking at benchmarks it's should be on par with a laptop from five, six years ago running an i5.

The primary objective though is great battery life. It's not going to be a daily driver.

@Dashrender said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

@Pete-S said in Experience with HPs small laptops/chromebooks?:

Probook x360 11 G5

I love HP laptops, and Probooks are what I generally buy for my staff - but a celeron - man, I'd almost rather gut myself than use that, at least in the past - they were so bad = slow!

But at least it's not an A series AMD, that = kill me instead of being forced to use the device.

Hey, it's not a Celeron, it's a PENTIUM SILVER!

I'm mostly interested how they hold up, build quality and how the touchscreen performs.

Computing performance is low-end but that is to be expected.
The ones I'm looking at have Intel N5030 (4 cores @ 1.1Ghz to 3.1Ghz), 4GB RAM, 128GB M2 SSD.

I don't have much experience with HP laptops to be honest so don't know how they compare to other brands.

@gjacobse said in Windows Batch: Select Drive:

At some point I plan to move a script to Powershell, until then:

In the script I am working on, it is set to ask for the drive to back up to, you currently enter x:.

Is there syntax that would allow for either x or x: ?

While right now using the x: works,.. just want to expand.

It would be very confusing to enter x when the script is asking for a drive.
Drive letters are always x: in windows. It's the colon than makes it a drive and not just a directory or file.

If you enter something like this in a script, you might want to put a check in the script that the drive is actually available.

I'm looking for a small low-end laptop with great battery life that can run windows or linux.

Right now I'm looking at HP's Probook x360 11 G5. It's physically like a small chromebook but has a real BIOS/UEFI and SSD drive and comes with windows 10. It has a 11.6" touchscreen on 360 degree hinge.

Does anyone have experience with these laptops? They seem to be common in education.

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@Pete-S said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@JaredBusch said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@dafyre said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@Dashrender said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@hobbit666 said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

My god how big is your NAS/Server?

It's in ATX tower case. 90TB is in Google Drive. Locally I have 4x2TB SSD in raidz pool.

OK, that's seemingly less crazy.. but still - what the heck is your monthly bill for that?

$12 flat, G Suite business. Unlimited storage.

How do you get that? They want me to buy a minimum of 5 to get that.

Buy just 1, they don't enforce 5 users minimum. You'll still get unlimited storage.

Except it is also Google, and who knows how long they will keep the offer or even the service.

G Suite is not going anywhere any time soon. They might as well kill Gmail if they are willing to discontinue G Suite. Unlimited storage has been there for years, and it's offered as a business service, it'd be pretty dumb to suddenly screw their business customers over. Microsoft and Amazon pulled that stunt before, although with non-business users, and I don't think it worked out too well for them. Everyone I've heard was using their storage services switched to G Suite.

G Suite has now been replaced / rebranded / reimagined to Workplace.
It looks like unlimited storage is gone from all plans except enterprise.

The $12 plan gives you 2TB of storage per user.

Existing users are usually grandfathered in, I know lots of people still on old G Suite plans. I proactively upgraded to enterprise for $20/mo few weeks ago. Still unlimited, and still really good value, and no minimum user requirements.

I was actually looking for a new account, which is why I noticed. I kind of assumed that old users would be grandfathered in but enterprise sound like an option. Thanks!

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@JaredBusch said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@dafyre said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@Dashrender said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@marcinozga said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

@hobbit666 said in The Skinny on Plex: How Are People Using It:

My god how big is your NAS/Server?

It's in ATX tower case. 90TB is in Google Drive. Locally I have 4x2TB SSD in raidz pool.

OK, that's seemingly less crazy.. but still - what the heck is your monthly bill for that?

$12 flat, G Suite business. Unlimited storage.

How do you get that? They want me to buy a minimum of 5 to get that.

Buy just 1, they don't enforce 5 users minimum. You'll still get unlimited storage.

Except it is also Google, and who knows how long they will keep the offer or even the service.

G Suite is not going anywhere any time soon. They might as well kill Gmail if they are willing to discontinue G Suite. Unlimited storage has been there for years, and it's offered as a business service, it'd be pretty dumb to suddenly screw their business customers over. Microsoft and Amazon pulled that stunt before, although with non-business users, and I don't think it worked out too well for them. Everyone I've heard was using their storage services switched to G Suite.

G Suite has now been replaced / rebranded / reimagined to Workplace.
It looks like unlimited storage is gone from all plans except enterprise.

The $12 plan gives you 2TB of storage per user.

Is there a go to tool for making a portal for employees or teams?

Something where you can have links to the web apps and tools you use as well as present news.
Basically the start page on every employees browser.

When I'm writing "portal" it sound 90s-ish so maybe what I'm looking for is called something else.

@DustinB3403 said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

Colocating may not be a viable cost option for the customer and tower servers often way more than a rack server

Are you saying rack servers are cheaper than tower servers?
From what I can see Dell's lowest cost servers are always tower servers - T40, T140 etc.

I actually saw one place sell Dell T40 servers for $250 (Xeon 4 core CPU, 8GB ECC RAM and a 1TB drive), otherwise they're around $400.

The cheapest rack server with the same config is $1100 (R240).

@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

@Pete-S Actually these racks are meant to hold servers - I was looking at the 3U model (in case we wanted to mount anything else down the road) and it's rated to hold over 100 lbs....and the R640 is 48 lbs so I should be more than fine.

Yeah, I see that now. I thought they looked like the wall mounted rack brackets that are made for switches and network gear.

@JaredBusch said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling.

WTF does the orientation have to do with it? Cooling is handled by the fans forcing air to move in a designed direction. In the front and out the back. The orientation of the server means jack shit.

Ah, good to know.

@Pete-S said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

Hi Guys,

I have a client that's moving into a new building. The IT closet was supposed to be large enough to house a proper 4 post rack, but now it looks like things have been downsized considerably and I now have to look at wall mounting the R640. Historically I always use 4 post racks with Dell's rack rails so I'm a little out of my element and I'm not seeing a lot of people talking about vertically mounting these servers.

I've been looking at two different racks at racksolutions.com:

1. https://www.racksolutions.com/wallmount-rack.html

2. https://www.racksolutions.com/wall-racks.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiAk53-BRD0ARIsAJuNhpvM0JnX3ZfdWs8ccBpNznxFSfk9mokI6HvUTDQCJiAJ9q3jPsrTo6AaAgJAEALw_wcB

The problem is...neither one of these solutions show up as compatible with Dell's servers. Has anyone wall mounted of these servers before? Can I just use some cage nuts/m16 screws the the generic bracket (option 2)? I just know that the front fascia is designed for Dell's rails - don't recall if there is space for screws on either side.

Sorry but I think you can dismiss the entire idea. Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling. The racks you're been looking at are switch racks. They can't handle the weight of a server.

Look for hosting the servers in a colo. Or move to other smaller servers, like Dell tower servers.

Also to add insult to injury, the wall also need to be able to handle the weight.

@frodooftheshire said in Vertically wall mounting Dell R640 Chassis:

Hi Guys,

I have a client that's moving into a new building. The IT closet was supposed to be large enough to house a proper 4 post rack, but now it looks like things have been downsized considerably and I now have to look at wall mounting the R640. Historically I always use 4 post racks with Dell's rack rails so I'm a little out of my element and I'm not seeing a lot of people talking about vertically mounting these servers.

I've been looking at two different racks at racksolutions.com:

1. https://www.racksolutions.com/wallmount-rack.html

2. https://www.racksolutions.com/wall-racks.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiAk53-BRD0ARIsAJuNhpvM0JnX3ZfdWs8ccBpNznxFSfk9mokI6HvUTDQCJiAJ9q3jPsrTo6AaAgJAEALw_wcB

The problem is...neither one of these solutions show up as compatible with Dell's servers. Has anyone wall mounted of these servers before? Can I just use some cage nuts/m16 screws the the generic bracket (option 2)? I just know that the front fascia is designed for Dell's rails - don't recall if there is space for screws on either side.

Sorry but I think you can dismiss the entire idea. Servers are made to be horizontal for proper cooling. The racks you're been looking at are switch racks. They can't handle the weight of a server.

Look for hosting the servers in a colo. Or move to other smaller servers, like Dell tower servers.

@JaredBusch said in Who do you use for content delivery? (If that is even the right phrase):

@Pete-S said in Who do you use for content delivery? (If that is even the right phrase):

CDN doesn't host, just cache. So if storage space is the problem CDN wont help.

I read his post as too much data transfer. But, after rereading it, you are likely more correct.

Yeah, it's what I think might be going on.

And to be honest the only real scenario I could think of is that they have huge amount of data (hundreds of GB or TBs) and the provider doesn't have a plan big enough. Or the data is stored in a database, like a CRM for instance, and the database is grinding to a halt with too many huge files in it.

@JasGot said in Who do you use for content delivery? (If that is even the right phrase):

We have a client that has a website hosted elsewhere.

Their hosting provider has told them they will not allow them to upload any more media to their site for visitors to view because there is simply too much data.

For many reasons, they CANNOT move their hosting.

I suggested they upload their media to a CDN service and change their links to point to the service for their many large media files for visitors to download.

Who do you use/prefer?

It's might even not be possible. I assume they are not editing html on their site.

@JaredBusch said in Who do you use for content delivery? (If that is even the right phrase):

@JasGot They are a CDN. By default they will cache static page information to save you the bandwidth. For free.

CDN doesn't host, just cache. So if storage space is the problem CDN wont help.

This thread went to hell in handbasket.

@scottalanmiller said in Linux: GeoIP Blocking:

@gjacobse said in Linux: GeoIP Blocking:

Makes sense-
And stepping back almost ten years and PRE-Mangolassi/NTG, why it wasn’t working on the Untangle Box I had running.

Now, I have more experience, exposure and use with Linux.. and logically- even then I knew that if someone wanted access bad enough, they’d find a way... nothing is secure unless it’s off, unplugged, and non-physical.

GeoIP blocking isn't totally bad, you just have to be realistic and weigh the value vs. the effort and risk. If it's for a system only you access and you are confident (or accepting) that you won't be blocked for showing up as something unintended then whatever, go for it. We've got systems that we lock down 100% and just pinhole to management systems with a whitelist. GeoIP would be less restrictive in that case. So you can totally make it work.

But if you are talking a website and you might be turning away customers without realizing it, it's generally pretty bad. I've had lots of companies refuse my business (Target, Office Depot, Volaris) because they mistakenly (or intentionally) felt that wherever I was made me a person that they didn't like and wouldn't do business with.

Geo blocking sucks when you are traveling.

$400K per year doesn't sound impossible to me. It's roughly the same as outsourcing it at $200 per hour full time.

@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:

If you were writing a book on systems administration, or you wanted to read one, what topics do you feel would be best to cover? This isn't like specific to an OS particularly, but more general. If you were thinking about a book or guide to overall systems administration or engineering, what would you cover or want covered?

Examples:

• Taking Backups
• Scheduling Reboots
• The Role of the Filesystem

Big picture.

It's easy to get lost in details. I would want to delve in to what the job actually entails and how one would go about organizing it.

And then from big picture down to technical solutions and then how-to's.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

@scottalanmiller said in Windows and NFS:

@brandon220 said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S The locking is also what I was referring to. I will most likely set the share up for both and do some testing.

There should be locking from the filesystem so that either Samba or NFS has the file at any given moment. It's the filesystem's job to make sure that two processes can't access any given file at the same time. That the processes are NFS or Samba shouldn't matter. NFS or SMB can have another partial lock on top of that, for sure. But that should be on top of the file level lock.

That is an incorrect assumption. Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_locking

Which part? I read the part of NFS, but that doesn't seem to apply. That would cause problems, but not corruption problems, right?

Just that comparing windows and *nix you see that there are different file locking mechanisms in play. That is what could cause corruption. Samba has to support Windows mechanisms while it's file system is residing on unix.

For instance from Samba 3.0 documentation (for historical context only):

Record locking semantics under UNIX are very different from record locking under Windows. Versions of Samba before 2.2 have tried to use the native fcntl() UNIX system call to implement proper record locking between different Samba clients. This cannot be fully correct for several reasons. The simplest is that a Windows client is allowed to lock a byte range up to 2^32 or 2^64, depending on the client OS. The UNIX locking only supports byte ranges up to 2^31. So it is not possible to correctly satisfy a lock request above 2^31. There are many more differences, too many to be listed here.

Samba 2.2 and above implement record locking completely independently of the underlying UNIX system. If a byte-range lock that the client requests happens to fall into the range of 0 to 2^31, Samba hands this request down to the UNIX system. No other locks can be seen by UNIX, anyway.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows and NFS:

@brandon220 said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S The locking is also what I was referring to. I will most likely set the share up for both and do some testing.

There should be locking from the filesystem so that either Samba or NFS has the file at any given moment. It's the filesystem's job to make sure that two processes can't access any given file at the same time. That the processes are NFS or Samba shouldn't matter. NFS or SMB can have another partial lock on top of that, for sure. But that should be on top of the file level lock.

That is an incorrect assumption. Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_locking

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

@scottalanmiller said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

It had to do with different file locking mechanisms in NT and unix. In the windows world you could do different kind of file locking that didn't have an equivalent in the unix world. I think one of the areas of incompatibility was opportunistic file locking and also that windows could lock larger regions of a file than unix.

Those are filesystem functions, though. They happen before Samba or NFS has a chance to access the files. Unless the issue is something like one or the other not honoring the locks and using a cached copy and writing back from that, but only some portions of the file?

The smb client will request a lock on a file or part of it (record locking) to Samba. When unix doesn't have an equivalent way of locking the file, the file locking happens in Samba only and not on the Samba host's filesystem where the file resides.

Looking at the link below it seems like byte-range locking (record locking) in NFS wasn't introduced until NFSv4 and NFSv2 and v3 were stateless protocols and as such couldn't do mandatory locking.
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/

So I'm guessing that Samba and NFS prior to v4 couldn't coexist without the possibility of file corruption.

To be honest I haven't spent much exploring this in the past because in most cases we would just use Samba for everything in mixed environments.

So maybe there are other reasons to avoid NFS and Samba on the same files but file locking is what I remember being an issue.

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

@scottalanmiller said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

It had to do with different file locking mechanisms in NT and unix. In the windows world you could do different kind of file locking that didn't have an equivalent in the unix world. I think one of the areas of incompatibility was opportunistic file locking and also that windows could lock larger regions of a file than unix.

Those are filesystem functions, though. They happen before Samba or NFS has a chance to access the files. Unless the issue is something like one or the other not honoring the locks and using a cached copy and writing back from that, but only some portions of the file?

The smb client will request a lock on a file or part of it (record locking) to Samba. When unix doesn't have an equivalent way of locking the file, the file locking happens in Samba only and not on the Samba host's filesystem where the file resides.

Looking at the link below it seems like byte-range locking (record locking) in NFS wasn't introduced until NFSv4 and NFSv2 and v3 were stateless protocols and as such couldn't do mandatory locking.
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/

So I'm guessing that Samba and NFS prior to v4 couldn't coexist without the possibility of file corruption.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows and NFS:

@Pete-S said in Windows and NFS:

It had to do with different file locking mechanisms in NT and unix. In the windows world you could do different kind of file locking that didn't have an equivalent in the unix world. I think one of the areas of incompatibility was opportunistic file locking and also that windows could lock larger regions of a file than unix.

Those are filesystem functions, though. They happen before Samba or NFS has a chance to access the files. Unless the issue is something like one or the other not honoring the locks and using a cached copy and writing back from that, but only some portions of the file?

The smb client will request a lock on a file or part of it (record locking) to Samba. When unix doesn't have an equivalent way of locking the file, the file locking happens in Samba only and not on the Samba host's filesystem where the file resides.

@black3dynamite said in Windows and NFS:

@brandon220 said in Windows and NFS:

@black3dynamite I know it can be done... I have read conflicting documents and articles where it goes both ways. Some say there is a risk of both systems accessing the same file via different protocols and causing corruption. I will most likely try it.

Yeah, I’m not sure about the corruption part. Maybe it’s something do with a specific samba and nfs version, filesystem that was in use, and SELinux.

It had to do with different file locking mechanisms in NT and unix. In the windows world you could do different kind of file locking that didn't have an equivalent in the unix world. I think one of the areas of incompatibility was opportunistic file locking and also that windows could lock larger regions of a file than unix.

Samba would anyway have to support and keep track of these locks and only pass the compatible file locks to the underlying OS. As long as everything was accessed through Samba everything was good but if you had both NFS and Samba accessing the same file you could get corruption. Simply because Samba could have some kind of lock on part of a file that the OS didn't know about.

I think NFS also had a buggy implementation of file locking in general.

If any of this is true today I don't know. It seems unlikely though.

@EddieJennings said in Zoho Assist problem:

@Pete-S said in Zoho Assist problem:

@EddieJennings said in Zoho Assist problem:

@Pete-S said in Zoho Assist problem:

@EddieJennings said in Zoho Assist problem:

The times I've poked around with Zoho Assist, it does install an agent like LogMeIn Rescue.

Did you try with linux?

Yes. I know that it will not work in a Wayland environment. If I have, I'll do some testing and verify which distro worked.

That would be awesome, thanks!

I didn't have any issues with Debian-based distros: Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS. I had some minor issues with Fedora and CentOS with the agent crashing. I didn't take the time to dive into troubleshooting.

The actual problem I saw was when running the agent it thru an error immediately. It was ubuntu but not 20.10 that you used in your video so I'll will go back and repeat with that version.

But I wonder though why they don't just package the agent in a deb/rpm file instead?

@EddieJennings said in Zoho Assist problem:

@Pete-S said in Zoho Assist problem:

@EddieJennings said in Zoho Assist problem:

@Pete-S said in Zoho Assist problem:

@EddieJennings said in Zoho Assist problem:

The times I've poked around with Zoho Assist, it does install an agent like LogMeIn Rescue.

Did you try with linux?

Yes. I know that it will not work in a Wayland environment. If I have, I'll do some testing and verify which distro worked.

That would be awesome, thanks!

I didn't have any issues with Debian-based distros: Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS. I had some minor issues with Fedora and CentOS with the agent crashing. I didn't take the time to dive into troubleshooting.

Great work on the video Eddie!

Youtube Video