@siringo said in Simple comms. What to do?:

I have a site where the two main servers (Windows) are located about 15 'cable' metres from the switch (switch A) they plug into.

Each server has 3 NICs.

I'm wondering what others would do?

Would you run 6 cables from the servers to switch A

or

place a switch (switch B) near the servers and run 1 cable from switch B to switch A?

Thanks for any help.

Introducing new hardware (a switch) may be a stopgap, if the end intent running cables. Don't add a hardware failure point. Less is more as they say

thanks everyone for the help, it is greatly appreciated.

Thanks everyone for the help.

I've been speaking with the client and the app that is consuming excess resources will be removed as it's not a business requirement. This should solve the problem.

Once again, thanks to everyone who contributed.

@siringo said in Sell the business??:

Thanks everyone for the input, it has helped with a few things.

There is documentation to hand over, it does need some updating which is what I'm doing.

Let's forget selling the business, I've thought more about this and realise it is something that won't happen.

Wondering what others think of this? How much responsibility should the client take / should have taken, for them not to have ended up in this situation?

it's completely on them. They choose their IT support.

@Pete-S thanks for pointing this out, it does look good, I'd like to test it out.
I'm suspecting that since it's a file copy operation from Windows, there'll be nothing like auto-reconnect, retry on reconnect etc etc?

@Dashrender said in VPN hardware suggestions.:

I'm curious - how is that an HR problem?

Employee didn't complete assigned duties.

@kmac76 said in Hosted VoIP???:

My point is - buying a dedicated Voice, or even Voice/Video, or even Voice/Video/Meetings solution is an anachronism. Personally, I view Microsoft Teams, either with Microsoft-provided PSTN access for smaller businesses, or self-provided SIP Trunking, i.e. "Direct Routing," as the best platform. Not all the corner case voice features are there yet - Cisco's platform does that better - but Microsoft's platform addresses much more critical path items that Cisco never will, whereas Microsoft will close voice gap/mostly has.

Huh - I think your idea is sound, the problem is cost. I looked at the cost of Teams with PSTN access and it was outrageous compared to splitting the PSTN access out of Teams. Heck Teams is "free" if you have M365 already.
I looked at Teams PSTN access last year it was around $20/user/month, and there is zero extension to extension calling - i.e. you want to call the person next you, you have to dial their 10 digit number. Not to mention I didn't look into what it takes to manage physical devices (desk phones) connected to Teams.
My host PBX solution and PSTN access costs me around $12/u/m, that's a significant savings.

@Obsolesce said in Is Open Source Really So Much More Secure By Nature:

@Dashrender said in Is Open Source Really So Much More Secure By Nature:

@DustinB3403 said in Is Open Source Really So Much More Secure By Nature:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Open Source Really So Much More Secure By Nature:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/microsoft-says-solarwinds-hackers-stole-source-code-for-3-products/

An entire risk that exists only for closed source.

I hope on of the products is Microsoft Teams so they can fix the glaring functional issues with it...

Is Teams really a product though? I think of it more as a service... I mean I know they have clients for desktop and mobile... but the web version definitely feels more like a service.

I did a 2-day conference over Teams last week. It actually went very well.

It has improved a lot. It's still trails other solutions, but what from MS doesn't. It's at least starting to catch up with the level of behind that most of the rest of the MS ecosystem is.

Got this sorted out. In the end it was just a few simple changes that the 3rd party anti spam people had to put in place.

Thanks everyone for the help.

@hobbit666 said in Firewall for small Windows network:

@scottalanmiller said in Firewall for small Windows network:

We do too, but for customers who want US to do that for them, we charge. But of course, they are free to do it themselves as well.

It's just that we host the controller for free.

But just above you stated that your customers get Unifi for free?

We do not charge for the use of the Unifi platform since it is a pre-existing cost that is already covered and their portion of it would be less than the cost of the overhead to charge them.

Right, he said they don't charge just to have the equipment in their Unifi Controller. After that the customer has to decide between 3 options, manage themselves, enable auto updates or pay NTG to do updates after testing new firmware.

@travisdh1 said in Windows Servers Archived onto Linux, suggestions/help pls:

@siringo said in Windows Servers Archived onto Linux, suggestions/help pls:

@travisdh1 said in Windows Servers Archived onto Linux, suggestions/help pls:

zpool status -l

Thanks for the help everyone, just become very busy.

I get this:

a219e156-04f1-4f8e-8250-975dd9386f01-image.png

What does that tell us?

That you went with the default setting, so are only using a single drive.

Oh, great. Thanks travisdh1, we got there in the end. Now I know I can add the extra disks.

@siringo said in Meshcentral Agent creation?:

OK, all fixed. All I'm going to say is that I need to slow my typing down & take more care.

LOL - that leaves a lot to the imagination...

@black3dynamite said in Looking for a single music app!:

I haven’t used foobar2000 for awhile but it might be worth checking out.

yep, it works for concatenating the files quite well. just fiddling around with it now.

Sorted this out.
For some reason the install was setting Allow Global IP and Allow Default Route.
Once I unticked these and ticked All Managed IP it all began working.

OK - ran into this post while trying to get directions on making Teams skip the lobby for meetings.
https://www.magenium.com/Information/Articles/how-automatically-admit-attendees-microsoft-teams

seems like a bug, at least the post offers a work around.

*edit - tested this last night - and it does solve the problem. I did have to run it twice to hit all of my users oddly.

Official Guide here for Server 2012 R2 But should be the same process
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-r2-and-2012/hh831385(v%3Dws.11)
You also need to setup a Failover Cluster for this as well
https://www.dell.com/support/article/hk/en/hkbsd1/sln312477/how-to-configure-dhcp-failover-cluster-on-windows-server-2012?lang=en

The last upgrade I did (8.1 -> 10) worked great except that Webroot got uninstalled. Which takes 90 seconds to fix, so no biggie.

@wrx7m said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

@siringo said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

@wrx7m said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

@siringo said in RDS Users Dont Receive Pwd Notice:

Hoping someone can help?

Have a problem with password expiration and Remote Desktop Services/Terminal Server users and their passwords.

RDS/TS users don't receive password expiring notifications when they log in. This is a hassle as obviously, they won't change their password before it expires and also, it's impossible for them to change is once it expires unless they have access to a domain joined PC, which several of them don't as they are 3rd party contractors.

There are a powershell scripts and free tools around to service this need, but powershell scripts can become railroaded and free tools don't always offer enough functions.

Wondering what others have done to solve this problem?

Thanks.

If you have to expire passwords, I have good success with Netwrix's password expiration notifier. They have a free and paid version. Obviously, the paid version offers more features, but I used the free one for a few years until I ditched password expiration policies.
https://www.netwrix.com/netwrix_password_expiration_notifier.html
The paid version is actually part of another product:
https://www.netwrix.com/active_directory_auditing.html

Thanks @wrx7m for the reply.

Due to a number of reasons i've decided to a PS1 script to assign new passwords.

You should post your script on ML

It's not mine, it's one I found in the Technet Gallery. I tested it and it works pretty well. You can assign a specific password to a specific user.

It lives here:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Reset-password-for-all-412fbc72#content