Posts made by srsmith

Good backups are just wasted money and not actually important, right?

Veeam is being used for backup - awesome! Veeam is good stuff. Slight issue is that it is running on a VM, to backup VMs on the same host, itself included. Not ideal, but with a good configuration backup, it will work. If something happens to the VM, install Veeam on the replacement, restore from the latest config backup, make adjustments if necessary, and move on.

Except...

• This same VM also runs other services that aren't related to backup functions
• The backups are stored on the same physical host
• ...on the same internal host datastore
• ...on a secondary virtual disk
• ...attached to the same VM

At least there is a backup copy job to another storage target, right?

• Target is a cheap Synology DS620slim at another site
• Storage pool is 6 x 2TB RAID 5 with spinning rust
• Frequently takes 2+ days for job to succeed, but fails more frequently than it succeeds
• Job omits the largest VM (file server), probably because someone said "the other file servers at the other locations are enough for the backup because of the DFS configuration"

What was the point in spending the money on Veeam, only to configure things in a way that ensures that you don't have a solid backup if something happens to the host or the virtual disk storing the backups?!

@scottalanmiller Apologies for lack of response, I simply haven't had the time to respond during the day lately, and I forget to check this site when I get home.

This issue has thankfully been resolved since posting. The MSP that installed this stuff was able to submit a ticket to Cisco, and the problem was resolved within 2 hours of doing so. This specific issue shouldn't happen again for a while since the certificates are good for 3 years I believe.

I appreciate your input though, as I have been seriously wondering if we might be better off getting rid of all the Cisco stuff that the MSP installed. Unfortunately, it seems like Cisco was their brand of choice: switches, routers, wireless APs, ASA firewalls, AnyConnect for VPN. I believe there is even an old Cisco UCS server at one location; thankfully, it looks like it is currently only used as a shelf for a Synology NAS stacked on top of a tower server laying on its side.

I believe this SD-WAN was put in place under the facade of being easier to manage and more reliable, which is the opposite of what I have experienced so far. Would it not be easier / simpler to use standard IPsec tunnels configured through functionality that exists in pretty much every decent router available today? Similarly, wouldn't it be easier / simpler to use something like Wireguard or OpenVPN instead of AnyConnect?

I'm not a fan of Cisco myself, and used to use EdgeRouter, EdgeSwitch, and UniFi hardware prior to us being acquired and "upgraded" to Cisco hardware. It was cheap, easy to manage, and reliable enough for our needs. I would love to go this route again, or use a similar brand, but I'm not sure the owners and upper management would even consider it since what we have now "works".

Knowing nothing about Cisco vManage, I've dropped the ball and am thinking we have a pretty major issue about to occur that I have no idea how to resolve.

Long story short, the MSP that managed the Cisco SD-WAN that we use was fired and everything they managed was dumped on me. Very little documentation was left, and nothing was really explained to me. Networking is not my strong point, and I am highly unfamiliar with Cisco stuff, so this is completely out of my comfort zone.

Fast forward to today. I was trying to figure something out, finally found working credentials for our Cisco vManage, logged in, and noticed that it says there are 5 certificate warnings. Looking at the details, it says that all 5 vManage, vBond, and vSmart certificates expire Feb 19 23:19:00 2023 GMT.

I can't find any record of us having any kind of support contract with Cisco; my guess is that we don't.

I am completely unfamiliar with this stuff, and how all of this was setup wasn't explained to me, so I had no idea that this was something that I had to do anything with. Once the certificates expire, will we lose all connectivity? If so, what can I do to fix this and prevent loss of connectivity? Or are we screwed and will experience a loss of connectivity no matter what I do at this point?

Thought I was going to actually be able to leave early on a Friday. Unfortunately, one of our main UPS units decided that is crazy talk and that I need to stay to replace the entire thing (discontinued, can't get replacement battery). Oh well, at least I won't have to come back in tomorrow to take care of it.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@srsmith said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Making rookie mistakes even though I know better

Sadly it is a thing that happens. It's how you deal with it after the fact and what you learn from it.

In theory though - the user should not have lost any mail - or at most - a few hours worth... In theory..

Absolutely - I owned up to my mistake, fixed it, and apologized to the user. Luckily, this was a user with a far lower volume of mail than say, our President & CEO. In this case, nothing appears to have been lost, except for possibly a couple of internal messages that may not have been delivered between yesterday and today. I also learned that before hitting the save changes button when modifying licenses, I really need to take 10 seconds to verify that the correct apps are selected in addition to the correct licenses. Much quicker and easier to do that than to deal with recovering a mailbox later while trying to keep the user calm and assured that they haven't lost everything.

After it was all said and done, the user didn't scream at me and was happy, so this turned out to be a minor inconvenience to them instead of a major issue.

Making rookie mistakes even though I know better - I ended up removing a user's Exchange mailbox

I was reviewing and updating our MS 365 licensing yesterday so that I could make any necessary adjustments before the pricing increases that went into effect today. I noticed that one user had both MS 365 Business Premium and Standard assigned, so I removed the Standard license. However, I was either trying to do too many things at once or was interrupted by a drive-by request, and Exchange Online ended up getting unchecked under Apps for them. Obviously, this is going to remove the mailbox. I didn't realize this at the time, and the user called me up today saying that they couldn't send or receive emails. At first, I thought it somehow got irrevocably deleted when the Run Tests: Deleted Mailbox tool told me that the original wasn't recoverable. That's when it dawned on me and I said to myself, "Idiot! You didn't make sure Exchange Online was still selected under Apps when modifying their licensing yesterday".

Just another example of one of those "wow, that was stupid - I'll only ever do that once" moments...

Finally have a temporary solution for this issue. The MSP has put a temporary workflow in place that can be manually run on one or more work orders to generate the documents and attach them as notes to the record. Not ideal, but it works for now and surely beats having to manually create the documents by copying / pasting the data.

@travisdh1 said in Dynamics 365 issue - no idea how to fix:

have them open a ticket with Microsoft

Thanks again for the suggestion - since the MSP has determined that this issue isn't caused by our environment, user permissions, or templates, they did precisely that. Now we wait to see if this is a issue with an update or from something else going on...

@travisdh1 said in Dynamics 365 issue - no idea how to fix:

It's worse to attempt to support than even Quickbooks with all of it's known issues.

As I also have to support that here as well, I am starting to have a similar mindset about Dynamics the more I dig into it, especially with some of the customizations that have been done to our environment over the last couple of years. What it even better is that there is no documentation on what has been done with the system.

@travisdh1 said in Dynamics 365 issue - no idea how to fix:

If nobody is available at the MSP to support it, have them open a ticket with Microsoft. It sucks not being able to interact with Microsoft directly, but with nobody left at the MSP that knows your particular instance of Dynamics there is probably nobody that knows what might have happened where.

I hadn't considered that - if I don't hear back from the MSP on this issue soon, I'll suggest that they do that. I do have a global admin account on our tenant, but when it comes to Dynamics, I have no idea what I should look for or where, so this might be the best option - thanks!

We're experiencing an issue with Dynamics 365 that I simply cannot figure out, so I'm hoping someone here can give some input.

Some quick background:
Prior to my company being acquired by our parent company, their MSP setup and configured the current Dynamics 365 environment. This MSP is still active, but it sounds like most of their Dynamics support staff have left and they have yet to fill those positions, leading to an unfortunate lack of support. The employee from our parent company who was the primary individual that worked with the MSP to get Dynamics up and running has also left.

On to the issue:
The "Word Templates" dropdown that used to be available when viewing a Work Order in the Field Service module has disappeared. There was a similar issue where the "Excel Templates" dropdown when viewing Leads in the Sales module disappeared over the weekend / Monday, but it magically came back on Tuesday. To my knowledge, no one did anything to the templates and no customizations were made that would have caused this. I do see the templates listed in Settings -> Templates -> Document Templates, their status shows as Activated and I was able to find and download them using Advanced Find.

Having never looked at Dynamics prior to our acquisition, I'm very green when it comes to supporting it. I still have a lot to learn, so I simply have no idea where to go from here to get this issue resolved. It is starting to become a big deal for the employees that need this functionality, so is there a Dynamics 365 guru around here that can provide some guidance on fixing this?

Since I can't get my modded Skyrim SE setup working via Proton on linux, I decided to finally check out Valheim. Very glad I did - enjoying the game quite a bit. I'm only 25 hours in, and despite being terrible at building and dying way too many times, I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Also got The Forgotten City - was a huge fan of the Skyrim mod. Can't say too much about this one yet, as I've found myself playing quite a bit (too much?) of Valheim instead.

Maybe it's time to give Skyrim a rest after 10 years so that I can check out other games like these?

On today's episode of "Monday, Part 4" - Non-rookie makes completely stupid rookie mistake which ends in ruined hardware

Simple task at hand - upgrade the small 256GB SSD in my laptop to a 1TB SSD so that I can stop carrying around the 1TB portable HDD that will inevitably get lost or dropped / damaged. I've done this dozens of times, no big deal as long as some care is exercised. Well, today was different - I ended up breaking the plastic connector on the motherboard, as well as the pins that used to be attached to the motherboard. The little plastic latch piece that locks the ribbon connector from the drive into the motherboard connector also broke off. No chance of me fixing it that I can see, and I'm pretty sure this level of stupidity isn't going to be covered by the warranty, so yeah - nice 15" paperweight that I have right now.

How is everyone else's day going?

Off to a great start on this fine Monday:

• QuickBooks server won't let anyone sign in and last night's backup failed
• Ceiling tile above me completely discolored from the rain we had over the weekend, leaked all over my desk and ruined my keyboard (thankfully, not the monitors)
• Went to move into another office for the day, found the carpet soaked, with no visible sign of a leak

We'll see how the rest of the day goes, but so far, I am not amused...

@obsolesce said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@srsmith said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

@obsolesce That does sound like a really nice update, I'll have to download it and attempt to check it out later. Although, I'm pretty sure my GTX 970 is going to scream at me - it already struggles at times with the current version, and I imagine it will only be worse with the new visual features they added. Might be time for me to seriously consider buying a pre-built so that I can get something like an RTX 3070 so that I can actually run smoothly with these new features...

FWIW, it runs flawlessly on max graphics settings with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q.

Finally got around to checking out this update for a bit and I am pleasantly surprised - it is actually running very smoothly with the "Enhanced" preset. While I've only been able to get about an hour into the game so far, I am sure that this is another quality update from HG - they have been constantly improving the game with every update since release. I'm still hoping I can grab a 3070 so that I can run at max settings, but this will do for now.

Side note: the game has run flawlessly so far on Manjaro using Proton - no workarounds necessary. I just told Steam to use Proton 6.3.4, launched the game and it didn't seem to care at all. It seems to be harder to get modding tools running than it is to get the game itself...

@obsolesce That does sound like a really nice update, I'll have to download it and attempt to check it out later. Although, I'm pretty sure my GTX 970 is going to scream at me - it already struggles at times with the current version, and I imagine it will only be worse with the new visual features they added. Might be time for me to seriously consider buying a pre-built so that I can get something like an RTX 3070 so that I can actually run smoothly with these new features...

Saw that the Witcher series was on sale on GOG over the weekend. Since I've never played the games, but keep reading rave reviews about them, I picked up the enhanced / GOTY edition of the 3 main games. I'm just getting into the first game, but so far, I like it.

@JasGot said in Email Signature management:

I use CodeTwo for many things.

I just headed over there to get On-Prem to Office365 migration licenses and saw they have a centrally managed sigs tool for O365.

Have a look, I hope it helps guide you......

https://www.codetwo.com/email-signatures/

This is what our parent company decided on for our O365 tenant. It makes it quite easy to have a consistent signature for everyone on the tenant, as long as you designate them as a sender in the CodeTwo management app.

A couple of minor "issues" with it that I have found so far:

• To manage signatures, you need to install a ClickOnce app - there doesn't appear to be a web-based signature management portal
• Once a user is designated as a sender, CodeTwo will automatically assign them a license the first time they send a message. If you later remove that user from your O365 tenant, or remove their Exchange license, the CodeTwo license remains assigned. You need to periodically use the "Reset license count" button in the CodeTwo admin settings panel to free up licenses and have CodeTwo automatically start assigning them to users again. There is no way to remove just a single license assignment.
• If all of your CodeTwo licenses are already assigned to users, any additional users will not have a signature added to their messages, with no notification to the user. For example, you have 50 CodeTwo licenses, but have designated 52 users as senders in the management app. The first 50 users who send messages will be assigned a CodeTwo license, and the remaining 2 will simply not have signatures added. I don't know if a notification is sent to the account / subscription administrator, as our parent company's MSP handles that part.

Despite the above, I would hate to go back to manual email signature management. CodeTwo makes it nice and easy to keep things consistent, saving everyone time.

@scottalanmiller I remember being enthralled by the original when I got a Dreamcast. I never did play Shenmue II, so maybe now is a good time to grab all 3 of them on Steam.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@srsmith said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

On bold with Spectrum VOIP. Called in, been on hold for 11 minutes so far, no humans at all. WTF. Must be some serious issues there. Having to call them for a customer that's gone months without working phones, and they can't port out because Spectrum keeps refusing the port request.

I was dreading this same situation happening to us recently. We switched from Spectrum Business Voice to Mitel MiCloud Connect and needed to port some, but not all, of our numbers. I submitted the request to Mitel and they submitted to Spectrum when we were ready to go live. The port was scheduled for a Tuesday morning, and I got a bunch of emails shortly after the scheduled time that it was completed successfully. I was really surprised at how quickly and smoothly it went, especially with not having to call them.

Spectrium Business Voice is part of Spectrum, not related to Spectrum VOIP. Spectrum VOIP is a little local Plano, Texas VoIP vendor, no relationship to Spectrum.

My mistake - when I read Spectrum, I immediately thought of the Charter owned pile of trash that we are stuck dealing with. Based on what you've said above, this SpectrumVoIP sounds like it is just as terrible to deal with...

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

On bold with Spectrum VOIP. Called in, been on hold for 11 minutes so far, no humans at all. WTF. Must be some serious issues there. Having to call them for a customer that's gone months without working phones, and they can't port out because Spectrum keeps refusing the port request.

I was dreading this same situation happening to us recently. We switched from Spectrum Business Voice to Mitel MiCloud Connect and needed to port some, but not all, of our numbers. I submitted the request to Mitel and they submitted to Spectrum when we were ready to go live. The port was scheduled for a Tuesday morning, and I got a bunch of emails shortly after the scheduled time that it was completed successfully. I was really surprised at how quickly and smoothly it went, especially with not having to call them.

Putting the finishing touches on a new router configuration for the shiny new fiber internet connection that Spectrum finished installing and activating today. Remote workers shouldn't have anything to complain about anymore, since this connection provides 5 times the upload bandwidth that we are used to.