I've very recently come into a situation where my company is able to receive a lot of free equipment (over the amount to be untaxed -10k in most states?), and I need some advice. Can someone who is experienced with large hardware acquisitions and tax laws PM me?

Thanks!! Happy monday!

I think both have their place. The key philosophy being the moment that your job becomes easy, it's time to start looking. Some companies have pretty cool job rotation programs that keep you fresh, so linear progression seems like it might make sense. Additionally, if my overall goal was more of a management role at a company that I liked, I would put in some years for that.

On the other hand - I was at my last job for 6 years. A job I liked. I moved on a whim because I had this nagging feeling that I hit a ceiling. When I started my next job, it confirmed that feeling x 1000. Year 1 of new job was professionally more beneficial than 4 at my last job.

Regarding happiness, a job isn't like a wife. Happiness and loyalty only get you so far. It's one of the most important things, but not the only important thing.

Hi Jimmy.
Have you taken a look at 'system administrator' job postings for your location, or locations where you can see yourself living? If your market is on the smaller side, jobs might pivot toward Windows administration or Linux administration. My city, for example, is extremely Windows. Our main industries are medical/engineering/manufacturing - meaning lots of desktops running Windows and lots of Windows infrastructure managing it.

If I drive 4 hours away, there's another town (Silicon Valley of Montana), with new startups dealing mainly in web/analytics/big data/SaaS. 3 of every 4 job postings there are for Linux sysadmins.

Know your market. If you're in a big city, I don't think you can do any harm with either. Follow your heart. But smaller places tend to be dominated by two or three industries that may not give you that freedom.

@Nic

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

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

Clash Royale anyone? We could start a tournament.

I'm hooked on that one. It's got surprising depth for a silly F2P game.

Indeed. Supercell games make you feel competitive without dropping a ton of $.

Clash Royale anyone? We could start a tournament.

DDoS depends on public addresses acting as a clients pounding your DNS server with thousands of recursive queries at once. If your DNS server isn't public, then it isn't a open resolver, and a client on the internet can't query it directly.

In our case, we have a local DNS server, available to the internet, as a backup to our ISP-hosted DNS. This server is typically vulnerable. But it's set with a higher cost so it won't be used unless ISP goes down.

@IRJ

So right now we have 3 Internal DCs that have DNS. They are not public servers. What exactly should I do in this case?

I think you're safe

If you want to avoid a separate server, I think BIND lets you configure what domains to respond to recursively versus iteratively? Not sure though.

This isn't a general best practice to be used in every case. You're only susceptible to DDos attacks for domains that you're publicly authoritative for. You can use this site to determine if you have open resolvers for your domain: http://openresolver.com/.

It is true that AD requires recursive queries to work. Here's MS's note on securing DNS: Disable recursion on DNS servers that do not respond to DNS clients directly and that are not configured with forwarders. A DNS server requires recursion only if it responds to recursive queries from DNS clients or if it is configured with a forwarder. DNS servers use iterative queries to communicate with each other.

If you do have (and require) your internal DNS to be a public resolver, a solution I've seen is to:

1. Disable recursion on the servers that are publicly available. The DNS servers will start using root hints instead of forwarders.
2. Create a new DNS server (not publicly available). Enable recursion and set the 'outside domain' forwarders to an outside resolver (ie- ISP DNS). Set the 'inside domain' forwarders to your original DNS servers.
3. Move all AD-connected resources to point to this new server.

Montana
We should keep this up. Post your state's night picture and others can try to guess the state.

Haha that's a cool idea.
Here's my state. And no it's not during a blackout, we're just one giant dark zone

In court law, politicians have no say. A judicial decision, made by interpreting current laws, creates a new law. It's one of the only beautiful things left in our judicial system. Then politicians try to create new laws to nullify it.

But that's off topic. So "Which came first, laws or lawyers?" Laws did. Just like English came before translators, video games came before cheat codes, and the computer came before the instruction manual.

I've always been of the position that lawyers interpret law, but do not make the law. However, in that process an evolution occurs: if a lawyer successfully conveys an interpretation of a law that is contradictory to the subject of the person who wrote it, it is often re-written. In that sense, the lawyer was party to changed law.

A judge can also make a law. There is no more judicial restraint in America. They're not bound by staying within the literal writings of laws like lawyers are, but they do take a lawyer's interpretation, sprinkle in some political activism, and boom, you have a new law.

In a lot of cases, laws are influenced before they're ever written. They exist in the air and on the tongues of lawyers, judges, politicians, everyone. The person who actually sits down to write it is honestly the least important person in the equation.

I was it the park playing kickball last night and groups of kids (kids like 18-21 years old) would walk right through the field. Pretty rude, but you gotta admit it's pretty adorable too, everyone standing in a little circle pointing their phones at the ground chasing cartoons.

You can tailor the application to grab what you want, if all settings is too verbose. Here's one we use for basic app servers with only 10 sections.

@DustinB3403

@DustinB3403 said in IT Documentation Helpers:

@Jstear said in IT Documentation Helpers:

For existing systems, check out SYDI

I think I've used SYDI before, sounds very familiar....

SYDI is fantastic. We run and store a SYDI report every time we make a server change.

The developer just released an update to reign in the Google apps permission set.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/12/12162868/pokemon-go-iphone-google-account-privacy-update

@scottalanmiller said in Who here plays Pokemon Go?:

Took like one hour before my nephew got into a screaming fight with his mom because he is now refusing to look before crossing streets. Even when told to look he will just ignore people and stare at the phone while crossing.

Exactly this, and other health issues caused by constantly looking down at your phone. All it takes is an unaware kid trying to catch a pokemon while crossing the street in front of an unaware adult driving arouond looking for a pokemon. We've already seen the positive benefits of this app, but we shouldn't overlook the risks. Surrendering your peripheral vision has serious consequences.

Thanks for the info! I'll surely look this up during our next refresh.

We have 3 clusters in 2 sites. SAN backends, and somewhat complicated networking to accommodate iSCSI HA. We got into VMM for it's logical switches (which are ugh), and for VM template deployment. I see that 5nine can use templates created from VMM and has the same sort of library idea. Does it allow for light touch deployment like answer files? Also, the ability to move VM's between clusters can't be done without VMM. Can 5nine do that?