Best posts made by PhlipElder

@pete-s If the runs are not fibre look into 10GbE certified ultra-thin patch cables. We've started using them for all of our data centre deployments as they save a huge amount of space. There's some really good but expensive VELCRO rolls for tying things up. We've picked up a box or two of VELCRO thin and wide plant ties each. Same stuff as the computer ones in black but a tenth of the price. So what if they're green. ;0)

PDU cables rated for 240V are freaking huge and a bear to manage. I'd bundle and run them straight down the middle then to the sizes and up to their position on the PDUs L/R. That's a bit more cabling to deal with, but it would keep the sides clear for the nodes to be pulled without messing around with getting the PDU cables out of the way. Think W for the cable bundles one left and one right.

EDIT: Make sure the PDU cables support a native locking mechanism at the PDU side at the very least.

@DustinB3403 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

https://xcp-ng.org/forum/assets/uploads/files/1559624678253-broadcom-packets.png

Oh man, this is so freaking true it's not funny.

VMQ enabled in-driver for Broadcom Gigabit controllers in Hyper-V would kill network performance for the guests. Disable it then a driver update would set it back on again.

@jaredbusch We always set up the full subnet in DHCP then configure exclusions for the parts of the subnet that would be divvied up to printers, servers, and other services/systems we assign addresses to.

@Dashrender said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/first-world-math-problems-25-photos-7.jpg?quality=100&strip=info&w=600

I didn't scroll down at first to see the comment - so I was like - uh.. what, did they buy a cardboard house?

My thought was that a house could be bought for $25K in some neighbourhoods.

Visio is great for this. There are lots of stencil kits out there that are free for various vendors.

@zachary715 said in Hyper-V 2019:

Noob question. Does MS offer a Hardware Compatibility List for Hyper-V? How do you determine if your hardware will be compatible with each version of Hyper-V?

www.windowsservercatalog.com <-- The hardware references are all in there.

@JasGot said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@PhlipElder said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

There's something special about walking about barefoot on a warm floor when it's -35C outside.

Our 60 yo old house is half on slab and half on crawl. Over the years, we've (wife and I) have added hot water re-circulation as well as heated floors, garage, sidewalks, and driveway. Not sure if I could live any other way now

Our main client in the region built a house that we helped to set up for automation.

They put in a heated driveway. No shoveling.

After one hard winter I wanted to break up the floor in the then house and set it up for heating and the drive as well. Most of the work would have been done by me so cost would be materials and time plus a certified plumber to plug in the natural gas and stamp everything.

It didn't pass the CFO business case test.

Main reason: Shoveling keeps me arse slim in the winter ... back then.

Now:

Keep in mind that I hand bombed that SoB our first winter in. We ended up not having as much cash on hand as planned so couldn't buy the JD we had our eye on.

A quad/plow was initially out of the question because my wife was leery due to young kids at the time.

45cm snow, third one of the late Spring, neighbour came over and finished plowing the last half I'd reached after about 4 hours of shoveling. He did it in ten minutes. After he was done I went in the house and said, "Eff it, we're getting a quad and a plow." Business case made.

@FATeknollogee said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

(BUE failed us so we moved to Storagecraft ShadowProtect which has been flawless to date).

What is BUE?

Sorry, I should have broken the acronym out. It's Backup Exec at one time by Colorado when it was an awesome product then Symantec when things went downhill from there.

@nadnerB said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@PhlipElder an RGE (Resumé Generating Event) waiting to happen

Dude ... I can't count the number of times folks told me RAID was a backup system for their data.

Now, folks are saying the same for cloud's distributed systems. #SMH

The cloud hosted PBX topic spurred some thinking juices.

We landed a 500/500 fibre connection at the shop this summer and have moved our voice over to their coax based setup which is a separate cost and SLA. I'd be more than happy to drop the extra cost of their phone POTS replacement and run our own.

It's been a very long time since I've ventured into or even thought about VOIP.

We have our own redundant systems built-up on Hyper-V, Storage Spaces, and Storage Spaces Direct (HCI) along with the requisite power protection.

As far as guest operating systems we have the given with Microsoft but also Ubuntu has been a go-to for our Grafana/InfluxDB/Telegraf graphing, monitoring, and history setup.

What would all y'all recommend for us?

We're in Alberta, Canada so that may play into the final setup I think?

@WrCombs said in Huge Mistake:

So let me start this off by saying if I hadn't listened to my boss first thing this morning, this mistake wouldn't have happened. but god forbid he say he was wrong.

Edit I took ownership of the fact that I had Moved to fast and didn't verify what I was doing, before formatting the drive- The plan changed and I made the mistake, trying to resolve the issue.

Okay: so, Went and picked up a PC from a customer: the plan as it was said to me was

• Pick up PC

*Bring back to office, put 2 new HDD's in and pull over the information after we image it.

*take it back and install it at the site again.

So, what actually happened?

Brought the PC back, boss told me to stop, he has an idea.
Reformat one of the Hard drives we have here, on that PC and then have the FakeRAID we use rebuild the information, then test the PC to run a terminal and verify it works properly.

So I added the other drive to the PC. Little did I know (nor did I check) the Optical drive was set to boot first (which is where I added this Drive to the PC ). It came up as C: and the PC I wanted to load as C: loaded as D:

so when I opened cmd and typed in
format d: and pressed enter, I wiped all of the customer data from the Drives..

it wasnt until I noticed a program we don't use on aloha PC's was when I realized what I had done.

My Tuesday Fuck up in a nutshell. -- Let's all take a moment to give me shit for this colossal screw up.

we already downloaded a Software to Recover lost partitions and I have that running right now .

BTW, the one time where I made an assumption after setting up a new laptop for the lead partner at one of our client accounting firms, I found out they were storing data in places they should not have been.

Their profile and key data folders were transferred but apparently not the ones where they kept their data. #SMH

The old system had already been repurposed so no chance of getting much of anything off the spindle in it.

I spent a good half an hour to an hour against the outside back wall of the shop breathing. Just breathing. Slowly.

Lesson learned.

We image everything. Absolutely everything before we touch it.

We use ShadowProtect on a dedicated system we call the Data Mule that also has GDB and all of our other utilities such as DoD Erasure.

We fee in the backup time to everything we do.

EDIT: They realized that it was plain dumb to not be copying that data up to the server once in a while so that it did get backed up. If the spindle had died, they would have been in the same position.

Toronto can get pretty cold during the winter though definitely not as cold as Manitoba (I grew up there with coldest temp I've experienced being -56C).

I suggest looking into community groups that are from the same geographical area. There should be a few around since TO is one of the largest cities in Canada.

It's a big place. My preference would be to find a place to live on that's close to GO (commuter train) or subway to avoid driving. The 401 can be really fast but mostly at a snail's pace.

Since *NIX is it, look into the various city's job boards (TO is a Megalopolis) as *NIX is not that uncommon there. The smallish city of St. Albert where our business is runs a lot on *NIX. Mississauga is one place that's fairly heavy in tech. Guelph is another. Canadian distributors that may be hiring are SYNNEX Canada, Ingram Micro Canada, Tech Data Canada, and maybe ASI Canada.

If any recruiters reach out make sure to vet them first. Be cautious around big promises.

Things to do: Visit the Tower, catch a Blue Jays game, catch a Raptors game, catch a Maple Leafs game. Check out the various districts like arts and music.

One of my favourite times in TO was spending an entire day going about barefoot (the city is that clean) with my sandals strapped to my belt. They'd go on when entering a building but otherwise they were off. Subway, to trolley, to city bus from park to park, area to area, my buddy and I had a great adventure.

It's a great city.

EDIT: MeetUp is a great resource.

@Dashrender said in Covid: Antibodies 'fall rapidly after infection':

@PhlipElder said in Covid: Antibodies 'fall rapidly after infection':

Until the companies making vaccines have their indemnity removed there ain't no way we'll be anywhere near one of them.

Don't believe everything you read as far as "experts" go either.

"Cases" "Spiking" have nothing to do with virus movement through a population as is being inferred. That's a lie. It just means more testing with test results being positive.

Yeah - it's impossible to know what to trust anymore - there is so much information all from seeming experts...

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Give this guy a Kewpie Doll!

This is my biggest problem with the whole schmozzle we've been seeing since January.

A friend from church, a doctor, was telling us back in December/January that they were being told death rates of 30% or higher and that our healthcare system was going to be overwhelmed with folks.

A neighbour who is a doctor studies vaccines and was telling us all sorts of horror stories about how they are made and how the indemnification means very little testing.

I've lost all trust in "The System".

@wrx7m FSLogix is now included with Remote Desktop Services CALs. That User Profile Disk (UPDs) setup is a step up from the native UPDs.

We've been using UPDs since they were included in RDS. It makes the need for roaming profiles of some sort for larger farms moot. We locate the UPDs on a decent performing file server and make sure to set up the defaults with data growth in mind.

Let's say we set a default size of 30GB for the UPD. We can then mount the template file and shrink the partition in there down to say 5GB. Then, when a user comes close to running out of space we can increase their partition size within their UPD very easily.

We still redirect Desktop and My Documents plus the subfolders to provide some security to the user's data.

We have yet to deploy a RDS Farm using FSLogix. That's next on our RDS To Do List to thrash the setup.

EDIT: When migrating a user to a new farm they get a new UPD and thus the need is there for a bit of post logon configuration. We usually do this when setting the user account up in the new collection.

@jaredbusch said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@phlipelder said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

I searched through his feed and could not find it.

https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1470787395805192199

Thank you sir!

Just goes to show you, my search foo is dismal at best.

Merry Christmas all! Have a fantastic New Year's Eve celebration and all the best in the New Year.

@pmoncho said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:

@Dashrender said in Windows RDS User Profiles - Migrate, Recreate or User Profile Disks?:

Cool, then you should have it easy.

FYI - Published apps still create a full profile on the RDS box, Just the desktop isn't presented to the user. If the application allows them to browse around, they could typically see the drive letters, the mapped printers, etc... that's why you still need to lock all that stuff down.

Thanks for the info. I will keep that in mind. I was debating about using UPD's like @wrx7m and that was my interest in this post.

Also, still planning out where to put Connection Broker, WebAccess and Licensing but that is another post.

For local profile management, UPDs are a lot cleaner. If we are not putting them on a file server across the network then a second partition/VHDX is set up for that task to keep them separate.

With the inclusion of FSLogix with RDS CALs/SALs now it's a no-brainer, IMNSHO, to set the project up on the FSLogix version.

Storage management is another reason why UPDs on a network or separate partition make sense. Keeping a local profile on the C:\ of the session host is messy and can cause issues down the road with users coming and going.

As far as the Broker/Gateway/Web put those roles on one VM but separate from the Session Host.

@nadnerb said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

The lack of a light on the bottom drive # 8 is interesting.

That looks like a serious hardware failure. BTDT

I sure hope the backups were tested to bare metal/hypervisor so known good.

@kamidon said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

@black3dynamite said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

@scottalanmiller said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

I had a HP DC5850 that replaced my dx5150 which I had used for years. The DC5850 made it nine years, I think, as my main desktop. That had the AMD Phenom-II processor, 6GB of RAM, but the key was that it had an early SSD and was so fast that the old CPU didn't matter. Now 6GB of RAM would kill me, but 8GB will essentially work.

AMD Phenom was my favorite.

Oh but that Sempron though!

Let's see,

• Intel 486SX
• IBM/CYRIX 6x86MX (these were real performers ... not)
• Intel Xeon Processor 2400DP
• Intel Pentium III
• Intel Pentium D
• Intel Celeron

The Pentium Pro was a significant size larger but I don't have one anymore. I'm not sure where it went.

@rojoloco said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@phlipelder said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@dafyre said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@phlipelder said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@dafyre said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@nadnerb said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Let me heal thy flesh wound?

I am more concerned with what looks to be a Bigfoot on his chest ...

EDIT: Oh wait! It's a CHICKEN!!!

Chicken!

Nah, CHICKEN!

Me with chicken:

...and yes, that Halloween party was nuts!

Hypnotized Chicken.