This is part of the understanding of how Microsoft has changed things. The on demand upgrades since Vista means that every version of Windows has code for every version. Features are just turned on as you do things. The only difference is Enterprise, be it 7 or 8.1 or 10, which is very specific. Odds are if you need an Enterprise version of Windows, you already have the image. Same goes for Server, where one can change from Standard to Enterprise to Datacenter without having to reinstall.

A positive side effect of this is that now ANY media will work with ANY license. My VL downloaded media will install OEM versions. An OEM version will work with retail media.

@Brains said:

@PSX_Defector I am admittedly not the most knowledgeable when it comes to VPN. We would prefer for Windows to handle the connection to the VPN without additional software and configurations. What would you recommend?

@PSX_Defector said:

The other part to keep in mind is the bandwidth limits on these things. I found out the hard way my Peplink had a 20Mbps cap on how much data could flow through it. After I got an RV082, I hit the ~50Mbps limit on that one, then the RV042's 100Mbps limit. I had to go up to using a Mikrotik to support the large ass circuits I was getting from AT&T and TWC.

20Mbps cap??? Really? Wow. We would like one that can handle our new 200/15 Mbps connection.

Well, it was a Peplink 300, which is very very old and one of their first devices. It was replaced with the 310, which supports ~350Mbps.

http://www.peplink.com/products/balance/model-comparison/

You could go with a ONE or 310. The 310 supports more fun stuff, although I would seriously consider picking up a 305.

For your VPN client, I'm guessing you are using RRAS on Windows or have in the past. PPTP is the protocol used by RRAS and Peplink's VPN daemon. So if you are using it now, it's pretty easy to implement. Keep in mind PPTP is pretty weak security wise, you might want to still get an OpenVPN service behind the firewall to make a more secure method of connection.

@Brains said:

we really don't have too many VPN users, just IT Staff and the marketing director. Occasionally other users, but not often. So adopting a new protocol is not very difficult for us. I would like your best recommendation for configuration so that I can research it and integrate that into my report.

Roll your own OpenVPN server:

https://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html

Much more secure and pretty simple to deploy to a few devices. This would require a client to be installed on the machine, but that's easy enough.

@Brains said:

The Peplink 305s were over $1500 each from the distributors we called. Have you found them cheaper?

Nope, that's the price.

The 305 supports 1Gbps worth of total bandwidth and much more L2L VPN bandwidth. Plus a bunch of other fancy tricks.

If you are just needing some way to bond two pipes together, like with the RV082, then go with the ONE. If you need anything more than that, go straight to the 305 or 380 even.

@JaredBusch said in Health insurance plans:

This glorious plan pictured below costs me a measly $701.47 per month for a family of 4.

That comes to $8417.64 per year.

This year has only been well child visits.

Your coverage is fairly good for the price. Our company's deductibles are a little better than yours, 5K per individual and 10K for family total, but our company pays $2500 a month for that. Employee kicks in ~$700 for a family plan. Single folk pay nuthin'.

Health insurance is expensive. Our reliance on our employer to supply it has been the biggest problem. Insurance companies being dicks about individual policies doesn't help either.

But, to give perspective, your price ain't bad, especially in a more regulatory state. Texas is a rubber stamp at the Department of Insurance. Oh, BCBSTX you want to raise rates 50000%, of course you can!

@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

Our two existing VMware hosts are a DL360e Gen8 (hosted at "site 1") and a DL360 G7 (hosted at "site 2"). Each server has 192GB of RAM, and each has one MSA60 DAS for the guest VM storage (12-bays: 10 @ 1TB 10K SAS drives, RAID10, two drives as spares). Site 1 hosts 20 guests and site 2 hosts 5 guests (so far anyway - we plan to add more guests to each host in the future).

Better density than I thought, and not ancient equipment.

Your current DAS could be re-purposed as storage with the blade system. You will need a riser card to get a SAS connector. They got a blade interface for Infiniband, but not one for SAS. You will need to talk to the rep to get the right part. Otherwise, pick up a SAN with a fibre interface, lucky for you they are universal. I mix and match stuff all the time.

Move the 360e over to site two as a backup host, or even a primary host. Use the blades as your new site one infrastructure. Or consolidate down to the single site and have site two come back to get data. But you will have a fallback host just in case one dies or needs to be worked on. Although you will still be SPOF with storage.

But, all that said, I see plenty of big problems. Power requirements will eat you alive on that. You will need to get some different plugs to even plug it in. You will need to figure out if your rack will even vent the heat out of that thing.

You might be buying into a very large infrastructure expenditure without any way to use it. Even if it's free.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

It's obviously not a set of equipment meant to "improve" anyone's environment.

Speak for yourself. It would be very welcomed in my environment. With an extra chassis, 1TB of RAM per blade, and stack that baby out with 16 blades, probably can host another 500 or 600 VMs.

Hell, there's an option for this. If it's gonna be UAT, resell space on it. Stack it up, lease it out.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

Speak for yourself. It would be very welcomed in my environment.

Because..... you are willing to use blades, already have invested in that so for better or worse this fits your environment even if blades may not be ideal for you and you already own the storage.

Because I'm the perfect candidate for blade systems. High density computing in a small footprint.

If I went with even 1U units, I wouldn't have near the amount of processing power that the blade system would provide. A chassis is 10U. With a 1U unit all I could hope for is 10 to 20 sockets. With a blade chassis, I get 16 blades, 16 to 32 processors fully stacked. Not to mention the single management interface for networking, storage, and so forth. Fully racked and stacked cabinet, I get 64 blades. With 1U units, I get 42 at best. If I go IBM, I can get even more with a mix and match of i, z, and x86 all in one chassis. For HP, I can get x86 and Itanium blades. Cisco UCS, only 56 blades on a 42U cabinet total but with some integrated networking. All with a single storage fabric and super easy deployment.

Blades are inappropriate for lots of folks, especially the ones who have just one system right now. For service providers, like us, we need heavy density because cabinet space costs money. Power, cooling, and such are just side benefits.

You are looking at the wrong number. Your fault is a 0xC00005. Corrupted system file.

Run setup and it should fix it. And quit loading warez.

Really? Webcams and shit IP cameras? Do you want the old people at church to get a seizure from the 10fps and heart attacks from the configuration of the software? It's like none of you ever worked in AV.

Simplicity is needed here. Turn it on, point and shoot.

https://www.epiphan.com/products/pearl/

Throw in a nice Canon camera, run some quick VGA and/or HDMI cables and you are good to go.

Yeah, ain't as cheap as the other solutions, but do you really want the word of God to look like shit?

@Dashrender said in Suggestion on Domino to office 365 Migration:

I know NTG can handle migrations from Exchange to O365 (and from Rackspace). Don't know if they have any experience with Domino to O365.

Hopefully @Minion-Queen doesn't look at my resume and see all the Domino experience.....

@mroth911 said in Used Scale HC3 Equipment for Sale:

Model Number is HC1150 3.48tb raw 1.74 TBU- 64GB Ram.
It cost me 29,997.00 Open for offers.

Five dorrar!

@mroth911 said in Used Scale HC3 Equipment for Sale:

Can I get SIX

You breaking my balls. Five dorrar fifty.

@Texkonc said in ODBC password:

@Grey said in ODBC password:

I've done that and then the ODBC tool doesn't update after changing it.

Did you reboot 3 times?

No, that's run iisreset then reboot three times.

@Shuey said in Free SharePoint?:

I'd prefer to go with option 1, but I've never virtualized a DC

Do it offline, not hot. That's about the only major thing to know about P2V of DCs.

Really though, you might want to rethink the plans here. First off, it's trivially easy to deploy a new DC, so why keep around an ancient install when you can clean up your environment. Second, you are running "critical" services on the same box as your DC, not to mention you have SQL Server installed on it as well. That is strictly verboten by Microsoft. Dumb is dumb. Now is the time to fix it all up.

What are you running in Sharepoint? Flat repository? Full workflow? Customized templates? This is what makes the determination of where you need to go with it. Most of the people I've seen with this kind of setup are using it as a glorified file system with a minor amount of workflow in it. Would take me about an hour to migrate it to even the newest version or 365.

@Harry-Lui said in Need advise, restoring domain controller and email server.:

This morning, I noticed the exchange server have only 5% of free space left, I tried to free up some space by deleting old administrators users inbox, but exchange will not let me saying I don't have the permission to do so. Following https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/386021-cannot-delete-ad-user-insufficent-rights-or-protected-from-accidental-deletion

Strange, because you later say:

I'm in the process of restoring Exchange to the yesterday's 7pm backup now, which will take several more hours before it finish.

Which usually fixes the disk space issue. I'm guessing you are using Veeam or some other VM level backup rather than the proper application level backup which truncates the logs on the Exchange EDB.

On the plus side, assuming your restore works correctly and most of the stuff is in place, you might not need to do much more than that. But knowing the Exchange part of this, I'm guessing you also didn't backup your AD correctly either for an authoritative restore.

You are in for a rough night my friend. First and foremost, if the user objects have not been deleted, don't start now. Exchange ties into the GUID, so not having it will cause your restore to pretty much be useless. If you already deleted them, you are looking at some really messed up stuff. If you have good backups, you might have to straight up restore to a previous point in time completely, that means nuking everything. If you had a block level backup, you might be almost OK then, assuming you don't have too much of a delta between the machines.

Contact Microsoft, even at the worst paying $500 will help you out immensely when you need to do some more advanced AD stuff to restore.

@Mike-Davis said in Checking on patch levels with multiple clients. ninite pro?:

@black3dynamite said in Checking on patch levels with multiple clients. ninite pro?:

Maybe a combination of WSUS and PDQ Inventory would help.

I'm not really considering WSUS because I would have to log in to every server to check on every client. Some of them don't even have a server. I'm looking for a single pane of glass.

Use a hosted WSUS instance and you will be fine, just open some ports to allow it through. I have thousands of VMs, they can talk to any of my hosts in any of my datacenters. Just have to configure the client side to talk to your WSUS server, which isn't that bad.

Remember though that WSUS is a pull system, not a push. You can lead a machine to water, but you can't make them drink. So configure it on the client side to force it as best as you can.

https://ark.intel.com/products/88179/Intel-Pentium-Processor-G4400-3M-Cache-3_30-GHz

This is a Pentium, not an i3. Slightly different, but perfectly capable of running Windows and most of Office without much fuss.

"Office" use is subjective. Are they putting around on a website all day or crunching crazy piviot tables run from a local Access database?

Real simple:

start /B /W wmic.exe /interactive:off ComputerSystem Where "Name='%computername%'" Call UnJoinDomainOrWorkgroup FUnjoinOptions=0

You can either do an Enter-PSSession or use psexec.exe to execute. Put a reboot command in a batch and call it a day.

Make sure to create a new glassbreak account local to the PC, so that every machine has a specific account someone can perform work with.

@storageninja said in Looking for virtualization advice:

Something I learned from being a group admin for Spiceworks for years is that enterprise types lurk heavily in SMB forums.

Hey, shush your mouth. I don't lurk, I troll.