Best posts made by scotth

@gjacobse You'll find out very fast who your favorite people on the planet are.

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

must be look at old stuff week?

pulled out my old CRO on Saturday, hadn't turned it on for close to 20 years...

OMG! We used an O-scope last summer to measure the strength of the signal coming from a fuel dispenser to a fuel site controller and found that it was too weak to talk to the older equipment. We contacted the manufacturer and they altered the comm section of the board to boost the output. 1st time I used one since the 90's. We had to read the book. Ghaaaaa! Actually, it was kinda fun. Total geek moment.

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@pmoncho said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scotth said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@pmoncho said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

We're relaxing and trying to recover after a day spent a Cedar Point. Back in the hotel and looked at my step counter, 18093. A normal day is ~5600.

Did you get hit by any of the storms yesterday?

Around 3:45 PM. We got into the park at 9:00 AM, so we still had a long day riding rides and roller coasters. Very few lines this time of year as it's the first week Cedar Point is actually open during the week.

Wow,

I haven't been there since I was in high school. I would like to get there again.

You definitely should. Halloweekends is a great time to go if it is still warm with no rain.

Halloweekends when we went was so busy as to make it not worth the trip (paying for the expensive fastpass would've helped, but we didn't know ahead of time).

We're fastpass fans. My oldest daughter just responded, nope. I'm working her over with my son-in-law's help. This is going to be fun.

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scotth said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scotth said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scotth said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

If you do need HA, and you only need the capacity of one node, then you want to be looking primarily at @StarWind_Software
BEcause they focus on the two node scope for their HA / HC systems.

@Oksana @KOOLER @Stuka

This is actually my target for our desired upgrade. I'm currently running ESXi on two DL370 G6's. I'm getting prices for drives to populate the both drive cages so that I can re-purpose the current servers into backup targets. I won't have time to address this until later this spring but I intend to read up on it and talk to vendors during this time.

Good time to update to Hyper-V, too. Starwind is really well integrated with Hyper-V.

We are planning to look at all flavors. I have to admit out loud that I'm really looking forward to try the new XCP-NG on my home lab. I keep thinking that I could try it at work as well. Much research coming.

That is a good option, too.

I updated by host to 7.2 right after I ran the XO install script. I didn't pay attention to what Citrix was doing.

YOu are fine. XCP-NG will be your future step.

And to think that I started on XCP in the 1st place.
I think it was actually 4.9 beta or some such.

I have mostly HO, some O27(?)-3 rail and some N Gauge. All Lionel and I believe, all before the company got twisted around in the late 60's / early 70's.
I had a board when I was much younger, but took it down and boxed it up. It's been sitting on a shelf ever since.

Where and how to start.....

Being self taught by creating multi-boot machines and learning Linux the hard way (we had to compile PPP into the kernel before we could dial into our ISP), I can say that of the 3 partners in IT that I've been exposed to, the current one is the most prepared and only because he had prior experience working for a small ISP / MSP of a sort.

His 1st week at our shop, I sat down with him to fresh load a new firewall. My intention wasn't to overwhelm but to expose a task to him in a way that would allow us to destroy and start over if need be. He was overwhelmed and I had to step back to examine whether he was lacking talent or if my methods were so very poor. Turns out it was both.

Fast forward several years and we just built a storage box and are going to experiment by creating NFS shares and building a VM server to connect and well you know the rest. I finally have the resources to maintain a proper lab.

I, by no means am an expert in IT, but I've found that after many years and many issues, that I wonder if it's possible to develop a 'feeling' for systems rather than needing to constantly needing to Google log messages. I catch myself constantly deciding that something doesn't 'feel right' even though the issue isn't glaringly obvious.

I can say that most of the folks that I've met on a personal level are nowhere near ready to enter into properly managing a server / network environment and I wish that they were taught more than how to install a Windows server.

/MiniMildRantOver

No action today at work. Came in at 12:30, powered everything down (Everything!) gave it 45 minutes to nap. All is back up and reading five-9's. I haven't done that in over a year.
Yeehaw

@thwr said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@thwr said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scottalanmiller said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@thwr said in Small Shop Hyperconverged Options:

@scotth: I will deploy a hybrid SW two node cluster soon. Many other solutions use KVM under the hood, which means that you will have to either script something or do agent based backups.

With Hyper-V, you just use Veeam (or whatever you prefer)

I use agents regardless

And I don't know why, as it conterfeits some of the virtualization fundamentals, IMHO. But I don't want to start this discussion now.

It doesn't. That functionality is in no way part of virtualization or its value. It's just one of the many myths than people have mistakenly add to virtualization.

Even Veeam with Hyper-V/VMware.... there is no universal agentless capability. So if it was an intrinsic part of virtualization, that would imply no virtualization product has been made yet.

Don't you agree that adding agents to each and every guest VM adds to costs and complexity compared to a "simple" hypervisor based backup?

Permit my ignorance please but, Veeam is lightweight, free, and bang -- full / incrementals over two-one week periods, out of the box.

@scottalanmiller said in Rolling Out Scale Driver Updates with Group Policy on Windows Server 2012 R2:

@scotth said in Rolling Out Scale Driver Updates with Group Policy on Windows Server 2012 R2:

We are just starting to plan our hardware refresh. I'm seriously considering Scale. I like the info that I've seen so far.

We love ours, it has been great.

I'm still pulling down information..... I need a vibrant DR plan in place or decided on before I commit to a platform. It always seems to be overlooked as an afterthought.

@scottalanmiller said in IT is the Opposite of Doctors:

@dafyre said in IT is the Opposite of Doctors:

Also Good Management: You rolled the dice with good reason, but had a bad outcome. What did you learn from the outcome?

Hopefully... nothing. In a good roll, most of the time, you know what the bad outcomes could be. I've been through some big time disaster post mortems and the "what did you learn" ended up "that we calculated correctly and bad things happen some times - our decisions were spot on."

When taking risks, we know that there is risk. It's like wearing a seatbelt, just because you have an accident and get hurt doesn't mean that you should question wearing a seatbelt next time just because it failed to fully protect you this time.

Sounds like the motorcycle helmet argument. But I digress.

I'm currently on book 10 of 10 -- The Crippled God -- of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson.

Fantasy / Military

It's actually quite good.

Without checking under the hood to see what is or isn't supported by XS 7.0, we installed it on an HP Elite 8100 I5 with 16 Gb RAM. Barely ran in safe mode, completely dumped otherwise and got stuck in a reboot loop.
We gave up and threw on 6.5 and it sails and runs great.
Just wanted to put this out there in case anyone is thinking of using one of these boxes for a lab.

Yesterday I installed on our XEN lab and it went in ok.

The interface is interesting. I didn't run the wizard but did click through the choices -- not too terrible to get used to.

I did change the update choice to stable and ran the update today. After restart, IPV4 had no binding when I did a show config, but the web interface answered in my browser. It wouldn't log in.

I ran renew, up, down and got the message that the interface wasn't configured for DHCP. I disabled IPV6 and still couldn't bind IPV4 to the XN0 interface. I didn't try a different NIC. I'm re-installing now and will run the wizard 1st and see what happens.

Praise be to labs.

@Kelly said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@scotth said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

I'm currently on book 10 of 10 -- The Crippled God -- of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson.

Fantasy / Military

It's actually quite good.

I started reading Willful Child by him, and it seemed really bad. Is this better?

I'm not sure how to answer because I've never read Willful Child.

This series has been a little tough for me because he jumps around entire books to connect groups and scenes in the story, ie. books 1 & 3 are connected, books 2 & 4 are connected and wanders from there.

The characters are really hard to follow in each new scene because he completely throws you into each situation as if already developed but soon catches you up.

Many times, I grew tired and was going to read something lighter, but I kept going back and stuck it out.

There are lots of under / barely developed characters. I guess you could say it's in the flavor of Game of Thrones.

Overall, I'd give the series 4 - 4.5. If I ever do a re-read, I'll give it plenty of time.

There's a kind of 'Cliff Notes' on Tor.com -- http://www.tor.com/2010/07/07/the-malazan-re-read-of-the-fallen-gardens-of-the-moon-part-1/

These reviewers to a summary by chapter through the series. This I haven't checked out more than tagging the site.

Enjoy

@DustinB3403 said in XenServer 7.0 issues on HP Elite 8100, 6.5 Flies.:

Isn't this a desktop?

Why would you operate on a desktop footprint? I'm glad 6.5 worked for you, but it's still odd that you'd go down this path. I hope it's just for testing.

@DustinB3403 We needed to create a test lab. At this time we have no spare servers. For our purposes, these boxes work fine.

C:\Users\Public\MicTray.log

I found this cruising /r/sysadmin.
Device42 IT Coloring Book

I'm running XenServer 7.2, Xen Orchestra Community (nice script, btw - I used Jarli01) and am fine with it so far. I played around tossing in a few distros and with a little more futzing around, I'm going to move my storage to a Linux distro, at least I'm leaning that way.
My default SR is local and I want to create reliable storage for a backup target. I have a decent box here, two 4T drives and have run Linux on it before.
Any faves, honorable mentions, quirks, hazards?
TIA
Scott

Last night, I fired up KillSwitch (Comodo Task Manager on Steroids), killed the process - MicTray_64.exe (can't really remember) and the log file was released for editing / viewing.
Sneaky.

@kelly said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@scotth said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@kelly said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

@scotth said in What Are You Currently Reading Outside of Tech:

I just started into the Honor Harrington series by David Weber.
Pretty good, actually.

It is very good at the beginning of the series, one of my favorites. Now Weber is Jordaning it.

I started it because I saw 10 books. Hopefully, it stays interesting for a while.

You can download most of David Weber's books (and a few other Baen authors) for free, and legally at http://ebooks.thefifthimperium.com/. Up until a few years ago he included all of his Baen published works on a CD that came with the hardcovers.

Sweet.....Thanks!