Topics created by Pete.S

Is this an onboard controller or an external? A typical external RAID controller (and some internal) have a BIOS that loads on POST which may show you whether it's active or not. Otherwise, most BIOS post messages display the IRQ info of onboard components during boot so you should technically see a SATA/SAS/RAID controller there. I'd suspect the drive or corrupt boot loader first. What OS is this?

It depends if you are using an agent or just rsyslog. Rsyslog can do tls and compression but not sure if you can cache until the remote server is back up, you would have to be sending over tcp for it to be able to verify. It can do tcp but I don't know if it has built in mechanisms to cache until the remote returns. The best way to handle it with just rsyslog is to have multiple syslog servers (Graylog) to send to and then they store in their backend (Elasticsearch in the case of Graylog).

@Pete-S said in DNS woes: If I understand correctly, DNS propagates everywhere anyway so what difference does it make? Or are the DNS records not cached/replicated? It does, and they do. Propagation, caching, etc. all happens with DNS. But that doesn't mean that you don't still want your master DNS to be screaming fast, globally distributed, highly available, etc. If your DNS goes down, most DNS providers (Google, etc.) will known almost immediately and see your infrastructure as offline as part of their security system.

@travisdh1 said in How well does webdav work on windows clients?: @dbeato said in How well does webdav work on windows clients?: @travisdh1 said in How well does webdav work on windows clients?: @dbeato said in How well does webdav work on windows clients?: Sometimes you can find slowness and some other issues with WebDav in Windows. If the WebDav Server is in Linux like NextCLoud it works well. There is a big difference in how the speed feels between Windows 7 and Windows 10. Windows 7 had some bugs that made it dog slow at times. SharePoint I think I found the issue Microsoft all around

We use ghost adapters to allow EDID hi res with no head attached, I wonder if there is one that forces 640x480? I'll search around...

@dave_c lol, thanks for the insight though. I love a good tool

@DustinB3403 said in How to adminstrate a handful of Windows workstations?: @JaredBusch said in How to adminstrate a handful of Windows workstations?: @Pete-S said in How to adminstrate a handful of Windows workstations?: @JaredBusch said in How to adminstrate a handful of Windows workstations?: Everytime I want to do something, I would make it a powershell script and save it. With remote powershell enabled on all workstations, it should be fairly effortless to maintain. Some individual tasks might take more time than it seems worth at first to figure out how to script it, but int he long run it will be the best solution. So you're saying I should keep the workstations as they are, but administer them as a group by using remote powershell? Yes. For example, somewhere on here, I have a Poweshell script posted that let's you install printers. Edit: Here is that post Post not found. fixed

@Pete-S said in Windows: Set screen to blank when locked?: Sorry, I should have explained more clearly what I'm try to accomplish. I want to screen to blank, which is what causes the screen to go into power saving mode. Not just setting it to a black color. Blanking is tech speak for when the graphics adapter would turn of either one or both of the horizontal and vertical sync signals and thereby communicate to the display that the screen is not in use and it can go into one of it's power saving modes. Lock windows computer =>> screen goes into power save mode right away. Computer don't go into sleep until it does so by it's normal settings. So then this might apply to this

@black3dynamite said in Pros and cons running local repository (for packages like deb, rpm etc)?: @Pete-S said in Pros and cons running local repository (for packages like deb, rpm etc)?: Cons would be storage space - amd64 repository for debian stable is around 60 GB. According to the information in this link, which is updated daily, amd64 is 330 GB. https://www.debian.org/mirror/size It's because that includes everything like testing, unstable, experimental and what not. Also source code. So it's a couple of different versions of the OS. The amd64 stable main contrib non-free are 60.1 GB today - as of right now...

Short of getting advisories from vendors, just putting something on the calendar is probably best.

So to answer my own question: "Which hosts belong in what pool when running local storage?" The answer is none - at least with xenserver. Don't use pools when using local storage.

@Pete-S said in Geekbench observations: @dafyre said in Geekbench observations: @Pete-S said in Geekbench observations: The relationship between the single-core and multi-core score should be about 80% of theoretical max on the multi-core score. So if single core score is 3000 and you have 4 vCPUs then multi-core score should be 80% of 3000 x 4 cores = 9600. If the host is under heavy load the multi-core score will go lower and lower. I think you are on the right track. This is largely in part due to how the underlying Hypervisor handles multi-core VMs. The way I understand it, is that in a multi-core VM, the Hypervisor has to wait for that number of cores to be ready to process before it signals to the VM that it can keep running. IE: In your example, a 4 core VM, the underlying hypervisor will have to wait to have 4 cores waiting for work before it will tell the VM that it's cores are available. I've read that before but I think it is some old feature of very old hypervisors called strict co-scheduling. It's not used anymore. Nowadays basically every hypervisor has their scheduler that puts vCPU on real pCPUs according to the time share principle. So every vCPU get's a piece of the pie. But it has to account for hyperthreading, more than one CPU socket (NUMA), power saving, VM priority and other things. The underlying principle is though that all VMs and their vCPUs should get their fair share of CPU time. Some hypervisors have different scheduler algorithms so you can pick other ways of scheduling that might be more optimized for your workload. Depends, SMP doesn't really allow for that, all cores have to be in lock step. Only is AMP is supported can the hypervisor do that. It requires the hypervisor and system above it together to do non-SMP processing.

The only scenarios I've seen are: PPPoE / DSL Jumbo Frames VPNs

@Pete-S click the menu (three stacked dots) by the post that had the answer so others know which solution worked best for you.

@EddieJennings said in Typical virtualization host server config?: @Pete-S said in Typical virtualization host server config?: We've calculated guesstimated 8GB RAM and 50 GB SSD storage per VM on average. How did you come up with your guesstimate? Do you have some workloads in production right now that you'd be virtualizing with whatever host your configure and buy? Yes, actually we have the hardware now but it hasn't been configured completely yet. We are still figuring things out. The workloads are running on physical servers (Windows) and it's latency that is our primary concern, not capacity. We are moving the applications to linux and making them multi-tenant and horizontally scalable at the same time. So that's why we are guesstimating based on the config of the physical servers.

Sounds like a good idea guys. I will do it that way.

I'd be interested in hearing what you try out and how you are using the solution.

Went to a store the other day where they had a large number of different LEDs on display. Checked them out and all Philips LEDs were flicker free but the noname ones were a mixed bag. Some were flicker free while others were horrible and some in between.

@wrx7m said in Load balancer inside firewall or not...: Wasn't pfsense in production, I guess I would say, "frowned upon"? PfSense is awesome. Avoid turning into a UTM so it can stay stable.

@Pete-S Not me. I have no need for top of rack quality gear at any clients. I generally avoid Dell network hardware just because HP usually has a comparable solution.

https://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/galaxy-playstore-alternative-t3739733

@tonyshowoff said in Thicket files in Windows - how are they "linked"?: @Dashrender said in Thicket files in Windows - how are they "linked"?: I recall seeing this ages ago. It happened when I would save a website onto my computer. I found that the directory had copies of the images (and perhaps other files) that the HTM file referenced. @Pete-S Indeed this has been true since at least Windows 98 when IE had the feature (maybe still does) "Read web page offline" and also as a part of the Save... feature, and other browsers copied that same implementation when saving the assets. In the end it doesn't matter where it came from, how it was created, etc nor whether 9x or NT. If there's a .htm(l) file and a directory with _files in the name they are treated as linked in Explorer, but not in CMD (IIRC). Thanks. I made the same observation - that it is the name that link the directory and file together and it is only in Explorer it is treated as a link.

Sweet.

@stacksofplates said in Documenting rack, servers, drives, CPU, RAM etc: @dbeato said in Documenting rack, servers, drives, CPU, RAM etc: I use https://www.draw.io/ and I know a tool that @stacksofplates recommended for Cloud Diagrams. Draw.io recently implemented one that looks almost identical to the one I was using so I've been playing with that. The other was cloudcraft.co. For rack diagrams, phpIPAM isnt too bad. And you get the benefit of IPAM software with it. Draw.io is in NextCloud too.

I should have noted that grep likely wouldn't like complicated RE patterns. Sed, however, supports the full gamut and is installed by default on pretty much every linux variant; not sure if pcregrep is. It seems everyone likes the link I posted for the RE builder so I'll paste two others that I use: https://regex101.com/ http://leaverou.github.io/regexplained/ Cheers!

@scottalanmiller said in PVLAN (private VLAN) in the switch - are you using it?: PVLAN, or Port Isolation as I think most of us know it, is one of the better uses of VLAN tech. The idea is for extreme environments (not really SMB generally) when normal security measures are not enough, that you make an individual VLAN for every single device on the network so that you control via central firewall a second layer of access for every single port that there is. There are certainly legit cases for this. And I've worked for one of those places. But it's super rare. It is a lot of work, requires gear that supports it, and adds a lot of complication that you have to consider. It also adds a good deal of security. In the SMB, most places have over the top security already and zero day threats rarely threaten OS level firewalls. So PVLAN, while legit, rarely has appreciable value to an SMB. But when you need that "second firewall per device", then yes, it's definitely the way to go. Makes sense, but I'm thinking it doesn't have to be that much more work if you can apply automation to switch management as well. I think you can do port isolation on the virtual switches in VM hosts in the same way as the physical ones. I understand that at least VMware has had it for a long time so assume other have it now as well.

Cheap meaning low cost, of course.

@black3dynamite said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @obsolesce said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @black3dynamite said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @scottalanmiller said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @black3dynamite said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @obsolesce said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @black3dynamite said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @scottalanmiller said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: @pete-s said in Automation with Ansible, Salt etc - at what point?: Ansible seems to be the least complicated to get started with so I guess that'll be as good as anything. Syntactically yes. Salt has the simpler architecture, because it is clients reaching the server, not the server reaching the clients. That’s the main thing I like about salt. But damn, if the minion service is hosed for whatever reason can be a real pain. SaltStack can do agentless as well, like Ansible. Ansible uses winrm to manage Windows. Can Salt do the same? Because Salt agentless uses SSH, so I would need to setup ssh server on Windows. https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/ssh/index.html Why would you want to do that, though? The agent is the key reason to be on Salt in the first place. I'm all good with using the agent. But until I figured out the problem I'm having the agent on my Windows machines, Ansible will be used. I've got the agent deployed across 700 win7, Win10, win server, and Hyper-V servers at work. All working, installed via chocolatey. What is the issue you are having? Edit: 50-100 of those 700 are Linux. Its probably something stupid on my part but It's only happening on some of my Windows 10 1803 machines. They are installed via chocolatey too. The service gets stuck in a paused state. It is working great on the other Windows 10, 7, servers, Hyper-V and Linux. I think that means it has no contact with the salt master.

The place that I see them most is in DCs that allow questionable public access rather than having dedicated, screened DC workers only getting access.

@donahue said in My first computer: @travisdh1 said in My first computer: @scottalanmiller said in My first computer: @travisdh1 said in My first computer: @scottalanmiller said in My first computer: @pete-s said in My first computer: Which reminds me of IBM's PS/2. What a train wreck that thing was. Guess what made up the entire computer lab in my high school... Yep IBM PS/2. They actually network booted. That's crazy. that must be all that IBM ever managed to sell. My theory is that some company bought a whole bunch of them, realized they were terrible, and donated them to the school for a tax write off. They had all apple IIe's at my computer labs growing up. I was always told it was because apple basically gave them to schools for near free, maybe at cost or something, and that it was part of the strategy to get people on one particular platform at an early age. It was always inconvenient because the files were never compatible between our home PC and the ones at the schools. That and the Apple ][ were just awful. I still have the one from my elementary school.