How many switches do you anticipate needing in the colo?

@AdamF said in COLO Switching & Power:

@travisdh1 Thanks for that info. I've used HP switching before, but that was probably 15 years ago. I know Juniper is fantastic, and so is the price tag.

If my environment was really big, I might choose Juniper, for sure. For small, both our full CoLo deployments and our "might as well be colo" scenarios, we've found the Unifi system just gives us the visibility that we need.

@AdamF said in COLO Switching & Power:

For those of you that have workloads in a COLO facility, what are you all using for network switching? Ideally, I'd like to upgrade a network switch I have to a new switch with dual power supplies. (1 power supply goes to PDU 1 in the rack and the other goes to PDU2 in the rack) Any product recommendations for a 24 or 48 port managed switch with dual power supplies?

What products/solutions are you using for single corded equipment for power redundancy? An automatic transfer switch of some sort?

We used to use Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches in CoLo. Now we use their Unifi switches.

After scouring countless sites and articles, only thing that could fully read the drives was UFS Explorer. $700 later and many, many crashes, we are starting to have a reliable process of recovering the data. We have to use UFS Explorer and recover as raw disk images. Then attach those raw images to new VMs manually. Then do a Windows recover to each one.

@Obsolesce said in Not much luck with Linux Distro's:

@CCWTech gotcha.

Yeah I've been on Mac the last few months. Still trying to learn to like it, there's a lot of minor annoyances or quirks and quality of life differences that make it harder to get used to. I still prefer Ubuntu over MacOS for work, and Win11 strictly for personal use.

Two years on MacOS and my opinion is... it's nowhere near the polish of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is SO much better. Every little task is faster, easier and more obvious on Ubuntu. And everything looks better. MacOS is generally stable, but not completely.

The hardware is fantastic to the point that I put up with it and am thrilled with how well it works. I just wish Ubuntu ran on this hardware And that I could get Final Cut Pro on ubuntu.

@CCWTech said in Not much luck with Linux Distro's:

@Obsolesce said in Not much luck with Linux Distro's:

@CCWTech gotcha.

Yeah I've been on Mac the last few months. Still trying to learn to like it, there are a lot of minor annoyances or quirks and quality-of-life differences that make it harder to get used to. I still prefer Ubuntu over MacOS for work, and Win11 strictly for personal use.

Not sure what changed, and maybe I am speaking too soon, but after trying Nobara I reinstalled Fedora, and no crashes in 2 days...

Could just be that tehre is a new driver since then.

@scottalanmiller said in Practical RAID Decision Making:

The latest on the StorageCraft Blog from me: Practical RAID Decision Making. A whole lot less on the nitty, gritty details and a lot of practical, high level thinking to guide you to quick, simple decision making around spindle-based RAID levels.

I just found this link and discovered that ArcServe bought StorageCraft and removed my writing credits violating my author agreement!

For later when people find this...

https://mangolassi.it/topic/18166/windows-10-goes-to-sleep-outside-listed-sleep-times/53

@Dashrender nice

@JasGot said in Is the domain .Local a real problem in a private lan that has no public facing services?:

@scottalanmiller said in Is the domain .Local a real problem in a private lan that has no public facing services?:

Nothing in the Windows world uses it. Mac uses it, and some isolated Linux stuff. Really minor in most cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

That what I had read also. Thanks. They are keeping .local during the transition!

If it causes any problems (unlikely), there are workarounds too. It's never a show stopper.

@WLS-ITGuy Typically we use the time to rebuild. Any VM should, in theory, be quick and easy to rebuild. If it isn't, it's the perfect time to make it so.

If you absolutely have to convert rather than move through application migration, then there are disk conversation tools that change the format. There's very little needed for the migration.

@EddieJennings said in ZFS Pool Online but Cannot Import:

You may want to seek out Jim Salter's content concerning ZFS. This is the community he's started since leaving the ZFS subreddit.

https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/

Like everywhere else, not one single thing similar to this issue

Nothing in the Windows world uses it. Mac uses it, and some isolated Linux stuff. Really minor in most cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

@JasGot no, it's fine. Almost nothing ever uses that and it was best practice for a long time.

Just a quick update. We are imaging the drives, converting the images to qcow2, mounting to an Ubuntu desktop and UFS Explorer is, so far, able to see the data in them. Not ideal, but it's working so far.

https://www.ufsexplorer.com/articles/how-to/recover-data-zfs-volume/

hating ZFS more and more each day, lol

@IThomeboy80 said in Not much luck with Linux Distro's:

You may want to go with other Linux distros (i.e. Ubuntu or Alma Linux)

Ubuntu is what he started with.

Alma isn't for desktop use (or IMHO production use of any kind. It's an LTS only kludge for bad software shops.)

@travisdh1 said in ZFS Pool Online but Cannot Import:

@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Pool Online but Cannot Import:

One big thing we've learned about ZFS risks is that it forces a situation where we are dealing with enormous pools of block data in order to do anything and the ability to copy, image, move, backup and so forth is heavily curtailed by the fact that we are forced to work at the array level before ZFS merges the RAID, LVM and filesystem layers together into a single monolith that, if it fails, leaves you so dramatically exposed.

Yep. Just because LVM and MD are separate things, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you've got devices that can change where they are in the /dev system.

Really, it's a very important good thing. ZFS merging that all together adds so much confusion and risk exposure, it's nuts. There is a reason that no production storage ever has done that.

One big thing we've learned about ZFS risks is that it forces a situation where we are dealing with enormous pools of block data in order to do anything and the ability to copy, image, move, backup and so forth is heavily curtailed by the fact that we are forced to work at the array level before ZFS merges the RAID, LVM and filesystem layers together into a single monolith that, if it fails, leaves you so dramatically exposed.

Current status... getting additional drives mounted so that we can take block level images of these devices so that we can more safely experiment.