Posts made by scottalanmiller

@travisdh1 said in Need to Purchase a New Switch What Cisco Family?:

@scottalanmiller said in Need to Purchase a New Switch What Cisco Family?:

@eleceng said in Need to Purchase a New Switch What Cisco Family?:

@scottalanmiller Yes I meant Reseller / VAR

Then definitely DCW. I told them to watch this thread.

Was that supposed to be CDW?

No, what crazy person would recommend them?

Our shipment of Unifi goodies for the hotel just arrived. USG Pro 4, 48 Port Unifi switch, three APs (one indoor, two outdoor), some Fanvil phones, headsets.

And our new generator!

Been working all day. Finally escaping to go chill in the restaurant for a bit.

@dashrender said in VMware Workstation VM Backups:

@scottalanmiller said in VMware Workstation VM Backups:

@eleceng said in VMware Workstation VM Backups:

Sometimes they are not powered off when at home and work is done and changes are made.

That will cause problems.

The fact that they are VMware workstation is likely an issue here for running VMs. As Scott said, an powered off VM is just a dumb file, anything that can backup files can backup those files too.

Live is another story. You might have to buy an agent based backup. Perhaps someone knows a low cost/no cost agent based backup.

Or back them up from inside of themselves.

@hobbit666 said in New storage... what about file server:

WOW @scottalanmiller thats a lot to take in, will take someone a week to read and digest all that lol
But all good.

:) If it helps it to make more sense.... remember that business is all about offering something special. If you just do what everyone else does, business can't work. You have to go above and beyond to succeed. So since IT is just business, the same applies. our job is to be significantly better than if someone wasn't doing something special. Therefore if everyone is doing something, it can't be that.

@hobbit666 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

US tycoon McAfee found dead in Spanish prison

Anti-virus software entrepreneur John McAfee has been found dead in his cell at a Barcelona prison.

Just hours earlier, Spain's National Court had agreed to extradite him to the US to face tax evasion charges.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57589822

wow

Now at really, really unhealthy businesses will prioritize internal politics over profits. This is a huge sign of corruption and is a violation of SEC law if you are publicly traded, but every big business does it and it is all but impossible to prove in court. So you are pretty free to do it. If you are in that situation, then you do what the majority does because there's zero IT involved and you are just, essentially, laundering money.

While it is never a good idea to avoid the crowd only because they are a crowd (a crowd will still run from a tsunami)...

The general rule in business is.... if most people (companies) are doing it, it's a very bad idea.

The majority almost always do really, really poor IT (and business in general.) They don't have good decision making processes, they have loads of internal politics (and probably corruption), they will likely fail either by becoming orbital or totally failing, they don't hire well, they never evaluate if they are succeeding or not, etc.

So don't avoid things simply because the majority of people do it, but if you find yourself doing what the majority does... you should stop and ask how the majority were able to find themselves doing something smart. It can happen, but it's very rare.

@eleceng said in New storage... what about file server:

I would say 95% of the customers I deal with still stand up new offices that way and have shared drives for the user base.

Yup, of course. Remember that 85% of new companies fail, too. The average, and by average we mean 80-90%, of businesses are totally incompetent and clueless (and will almost certainly lose money and fail.) Likewise, as a business department, the average IT shop is terrible and does no research, lacks any training, and just does whatever a salesperson tells them to do or repeats a pattern they saw somewhere before.

So the expectation is that the worst patterns, like deploying legacy technologies, failing to take real backups, failing fundamental security, deploying IPODs and other well documented "anti-best practices", won't just happen, but will represent nearly all real world situations. IT, and business in general, is not a field that is filtered in any way, except by economics. So anyone who wants to claim to be qualified can do so, it is up to the customer to vet who they hire. And you know how little of that happens in this industry.

So companies, with CEOs that have no idea how business, let alone business infrastructure, should work, then hire random people with zero IT clue, and try to run their companies that way. And the entire IT reseller / vendor market has sprung up to prey on them. So because everyone does it, and all the money is made from selling crap to those people who aren't really evaluating what they buy.... so the entire market of vendors that you see are vendors selling to those people.

It's the "stupid rich" strategy as defined by CIA economist Scott Adams.

@eleceng said in New storage... what about file server:

Also, I never knew mapped drives were that much of a security risk.

Mapped drives, Active Directory and other 1990s "pre-Internet / LAN focused" legacy holdover techs are the only significant pathway for modern threats. They've become so valuable and easy as a target that the entire modern threat vector ecosystem is based around using them. Do other threats exist? Obviously, and lots of them.

But most traditional malware and essentially all ransomware rely solely on companies continuing to use these technologies decades after they were outdated conceptually. Companies that depend on these technologies tend to also be the ones that have poorly decoupled backups, don't take security seriously, don't update things, etc.

All of those techs can be secured and secured decently, but they represent huge unnecessary risks that very, very few companies actually benefit from. Most deploy them only because they are confused, and most only have them because they don't want to swallow the pill of modernizing.

@eleceng said in VMware Workstation VM Backups:

Sometimes they are not powered off when at home and work is done and changes are made.

That will cause problems.

@eleceng said in VMware Workstation VM Backups:

they just are not set to because I was not sure if that file type would work with standard incremental backup software (windows backup) without breaking things (being a dependable recovery point)

It's just a file. All files work if they are not open.

Anyone local want to do this? Won't take long at all. Installing some Unifi gear. Good first project to send a middle schooler on, lol. Customer just doesn't want to touch a cable. Needs no IT experience, just has to be basically competent to follow directions and plug things in. Needs a laptop that can be tethered to a cell phone hot spot. But basically everything is done remote, we are essentially just plugging things in for the customer. Thx.

We did it all remotely. Even people IN Tampa had no interest.

@eddiejennings We use DCW for everything now. They're great.

@stacksofplates said in Macbook Air for College:

Yes. Rosetta will translate any Intel based apps for the m1. You won't notice any performance penalties. It really is blazing fast.

It's like emulating a Nintendo 64 on a modern PC :)

@eleceng said in VMware Workstation VM Backups:

but the VM's don't get backed up currently.

That's weird. What causes them to get skipped?

If they get powered off, the simplest solution is to just make a copy of their disk images. While powered off, even a simple XCOPY script will do this just fine. Or something like Duplicati.

@eleceng said in Need to Purchase a New Switch What Cisco Family?:

@scottalanmiller Yes I meant Reseller / VAR

Then definitely DCW. I told them to watch this thread.