@siringo said in New server q's:

How important is the CPU? Would I need a blazingly fast one or something slower but with more cores?

We don't know. THat totally depends on your workload. 99% of companies don't need fast OR lots of cores.

@siringo said in New server q's:

Software RAID. Gee I'm outa touch, that used to be frowned upon. Are we talking software RAID as supplied by Windows OS or is it specialised by the OEM????

Software RAID has never been frowned on by anyone that knew anything about RAID. Software RAID was the only thing that there was in the early days and the highest end enterprise systems have always been exclusively software RAID. Only in the Windows and VMware worlds did hardware RAID ever get a foothold and only because they were deployed on smaller systems that lacked resources and those platforms lacked (and still lack) viable Software RAID. There has never been a time that software RAID was bad.

However, if you are considering Hyper-V, that rules software RAID out right there. But not because software RAID is bad in any way, but because Hyper-V never figured it out to a point that you'd put it into production. But as long as you avoid Hyper-V and VMware (which you should do anyway), then you have enterprise software RAID options and you are good to use whatever makes sense for you.

All enterprise software RAID is part of the OS, it will never come from a third party, ever. Not that it couldn't, in theory, but market pressures says it won't. NEver has, never will. The best RAID has always been built into every OS platform for production except Windows and VMware, so there's never been any market for a third party to compete. It just doesn't make sense.

I understand why you'd deploy Hyper-V because there's probably no benefit to doing a good job and a lot of risk in not doing what everyone else does. The sad state of politics over results. Education in the US is the same, they could care less if things are done well, only care if it makes someone else look bad or funnels money to wherever they are laundering it. So in your case, you aren't dealing with anything resembling IT best practices or standards or really anything you could consider production. Again, not that Hyper-V is bad, it's just.... done. And done by years, last release was three years ago and no more are coming. That's not ancient, it's just really, really old to be deploying something whose future came to a full stop years ago.

Hyper-V in your environment is technical debt. But likely they will run it long, long after it is safe because, really, who cares, and likely you will not be around to deal with any issues it causes. But it is technical debt that never should have existed (it was never a GREAT choice, only an acceptable one) and should have been discontinued immediately as the "new" deployment choice as soon as the product was discontinued as a production release. So now it's nothing but debt, problems for their own sake without any benefit. LIterally, zero.

But you probably need to do it. So you have to work within those confines of not deploying production level systems. Hyper-V has no production level software RAID so since that is the choice, obviously you rule our Software RAID because you are stuck with a system that lacks it. That Software RAID is the better technology and costs a lot less is completely irrelevant because your issues have nothing to do with RAID types but with the availability of implementations given your pre-chosen deployment systems.

Likewise, you used to have no option of hardware RAID on big RISC and EPIC systems because hardware RAID wasn't just not considered good there, it was never offered. GIant systems have never had hardware RAID options, not ever. They were always limited to small x86 and AMD64 systems. Even ARM based systems have never had RAID hardware offered. So in the past if you chose those big iron systems (and still today with mainframes) you ruled out hardware RAID because it didn't exist. So with choosing Hyper-V, you rule out software RAID because while it exists, it doesn't exist in a production viable form.

All of that is to say...

Knowing that software RAID is excellent and that hardware RAID exists for the last two decades for questionable reasons, that you were given bad info and so forth is good to know. But it ultimately doesn't change what you are going to deploy.

You have to deploy hardware RAID on Hyper-V because those choices were made for you ahead of time not based on what is good, but on something else. It is what it is.

Your statement that software RAID was frowned upon was wrong (as far as actually storage engineers goes), that it was bad was always a myth. Now you know the truth. But the truth isn't relevant here because it's not part of your decision matrix, if you even have one.

Either you deploy what everyone else does and you are stuck with their decisions. You can't rethink individual decisions without reconsidering the whole - nothing in a system can be changed in a vacuum. Or you start over and follow best practices and good decision guidelines and you'll come up with systems with absolutely no resemblance to what they had before. I doubt you want to do that, so all your choices are already made for you as each depends on the last like dominos.

@Pete-S said in SSH jump server access control?:

So someone could potentially move laterally efter they have logged in to the target server. But other servers will probably only accept connections from jump servers so it would be hard. Which is on purpose of course.

If that's the limitation you/they are looking for, outside edge IP detection to network access as a whole, then it's a totally different game and I think it makes total sense. THAT you can control with SSH itself no problem.

@pattonb said in ps2 to usb adapters:

Has anybody had success using ps2 to usb adapters ? ( specifically for keyboards)

It's been DECADES, but this is how they used to all be and it was 100% reliable. Early USB days every computer was PS/2 and they just shipped these tiny USB adapters to make them work. I've probably used thousands of them. I can picture it in my mind so clearly. I know I have bins of the things in storage somewhere.

@bbigford said in Misc go-to FOSS options:

Server OS: I've bounched back and forth with CentOS before Stream (the split between 6 and 7 was weird), Ubuntu Server (seems to get a lot of hate, no idea why), Fedora Server (also seems to get some hate, not sure why), RHEL (only when the customer absolutely requires the support and can't convince them otherwise), Debian (not used a ton, not sure why, pretty barebones)

We moved to Ubuntu. The hate mostly comes from using the LTS release rather than the current one. Current is very good.

@bbigford said in Misc go-to FOSS options:

@scottalanmiller said in Misc go-to FOSS options:

@bbigford said in Misc go-to FOSS options:

TSQL: Defaulted to MySQL until some devs spun off concerned with the Oracle acquisition and started defaulting to MariaDB

Again, it's about workloads. Doing a website, MariaDB. Doing a robust application, PostgreSQL. Doing a traditional workload with only one application touching it, SQLite.

Where does MariaDB fall down with a more robust application compared to PostgreSQL? Wondering when you start to lean toward PostgreSQL.

Basically anytime that I need to be doing anything other than a cached read of a site. Basic websites like WordPress are built around MariaDB. If I'm building my own code, it's always SQLite or PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is faster, more robust, and has more features. MariaDB is targetted at read heavy websites and blogs.

@siringo said in Another new server question:

So my question is, would you run the host OS instance and the VM OS instances on the SSDs (or VD1) and the storage for the VMs on spinning media?

There are VERY VERY VERY few cases where you'd use spinning media, ever. Consider that spinning disks are easily 1% OR LESS than the speed of a cheap laptop hard drive. So when would you want your expensive server to be an itty, bitty fraction the speed of a cheap laptop? Never, basically.

Spinning drives are ONLY for super low performance, archival storage and special cases like that. Backups, perhaps. But even then, super rarely.

@pmoncho said in Another new server question:

I second @notverypunny with separating the Hypervisor on its own RAID 1.
If using Dell servers, BOSS card is one possible option.

If that was free and didn't lose us storage, I'd agree. But it costs money and lowers usable storage. Except in extremely special cases where performance or reliability have to be absolutely maximized (and NO situation like that would ever, ever, ever consider Hyper-V, Windows, or making decisions based on politics over business value - so it cannot in any way apply here) I would not do that, even with spinning disks. That's why "OBR10" was something we talked about so much a decade ago. The need to split file systems just isn't a thing today.

https://smbitjournal.com/2012/11/one-big-raid-10-a-new-standard-in-server-storage/

That was a full decade ago.

@notverypunny said in Another new server question:

Someone is no doubt going to chime in to say that Hyper V is basically a dead product at this point and suggest KVM, possibly xcp-ng or proxmox.

We covered that thoroughly in his first post on the subject. He's aware. There's no business or technical decision here, it's purely politics.

@Dashrender said in Windows 11 versus 10:

While we all agree the original release of Windows 11 and the 8th Gen Intel CPU requirement was garbage, it's now believed to be understood why this was put out by MS.

MS is including VBS (Virtual based Security) in Windows 11 22H2, which requires an 8th Gen Intel CPU.
Presuming this was MS's intention to include this on day one, but it wasn't ready for mainstream use - makes sense why the requirements where what they were.

That doesn't mean it should be required, only required for that feature. That, in no way, makes it better or "understood." Of course new CPUs have new features and we are limited by that. Windows 10 could get that feature and be in the same boat, but without artificially screwing people with old hardware.

So absolutely in no way is that WHY Microsoft made the limitation. That limitation is 100% to sell more hardware, period. That's not even plausible marketing BS to say that they made that limitation "because" of some unreleased new feature. That's not the case.

@Dashrender said in Windows 11 versus 10:

but I would say that things aren't any easier today than they were in Win11 vs Win95.

Um, what? you need to go use Win95 again to remind yourself how clunky it was.

We use Vultr and they use private keys.

There is a utility called stress for that. I've never used it myself. But here is a guide, should be easy.

https://www.linuxshelltips.com/create-cpu-load-linux/

@Pete-S said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

@EddieJennings said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

There are many things you can do, but we'd need more detail about what data is to be backed up. Also, we'd want to know where these remote servers are compared to this to-be backup server.

Thanks Eddie.

Well, the servers are basically web servers (VMs) with not much data, say 5-10GB, in each for a full backup. Backups will run a couple of times per day but they can be incremental.

The purpose of this is to backup the customer's data and not the server instance.

Remote servers are a mixture of on-prem VMs, hosted webservers, cloud instances and such.

We typically script that then backup over SSH or NFS. But you can use backup software, too. But it's hard to beat straight scripts for performance and reliability.

@Pete-S said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

I was thinking perhaps pushing the backup from each server would be better, instead of backups being pulled by the backup server.

That's what we do.

@Pete-S said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

Perhaps taking everything that needs to be backed up, compress it and send it.

Yes, that's also what we do. We do a 7zip typically before sending. All the renaming, dates, compression done when the source computer can do it. Then the smallest possible send over to the storage system. Then the storage server handles the cloud uploads for the offsite backup.

@Pete-S said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

I have a server with lots of storage that sits in a datacenter doing nothing.

What is the easiest/best way to turn this server into a backup storage that I can use to backup remote linux servers?

I generally just install Ubuntu latest and keep it pretty vanilla.

@JasGot said in Hard disk encryption without OS access?:

We have a customer who is being told they have to ensure all their data is encrypted when at rest. They are being told by their franchisor.

The software product they use for running their business is the only app on the server and the software vendor will not allow access to the server OS.

I know the hard ball way to deal with this, but I am looking to know and consider all of our options.

Moving away from the current software vendor is a nearly insurmountable task.

The software is running on Red Hat. Not sure which version.

Move the install to production (e.g. virtualization) and encrypt the VM storage at a higher level. Easy, clean, done.