@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Spinning up my server 2019 VM with AD, thinking I need practice with Hyper-V as well..
thought?

Single host Hyper V operation is very simple. I wrote an article over at @StarWind_Software's blog a while ago which explains the basic networking stuff (the articles there are all great). Could be a good starting point.

More advanced topics include things like backups, MAC spoofing (required by VPNs, for example), VLANs vs multiple NICs (important for VPNs and firewalls for example), resource allocation, correct snapshot usage, different virtual disk types, underlying storage architecture (beware, that's the personal topic of @scottalanmiller :p) etc. IMHO, backups and the underlying storage are by far the most important things to learn.

I prefer the learning-by-doing approach. You could, for example, build a working VPN server. Try SoftEther on a Linux VM, a really cool and free to use multiprotocol VPN server. Let it authenticate inbound SSTP connections against your Active Directory. Or play around with Veeam B&R.

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I don't?Every Job Posting I've seen requires some knowledge of AD.

Yes, like how to attach a desktop or change a password. Takes seconds to learn. You've already done those things. Learning to deploy it isn't a bad thing to know, but not a priority. No one is ever going to hire you to set up a new AD system, just to do basic maintenance of an old one. You literally can learn that stuff in an evening. So put in your one evening and move on.

I did that already. Only thing I gotta figure out is how to add a Computer/device to the domain

• Control Panel
• Deployment Script
• PowerShell Add-Computer –Domainname my.domain.tld -restart
• ...

BTW @WrCombs: If you want to learn something really useful, learn PowerShell. Scripting helps you to automate repetitive and error prone tasks like user creation, group assignments and so on. You could build a script to assign users to groups. That script could also inform users and managers about new assignments by mail. That's what I do with our research assistants and students, for example.

Preparing a couple of new machines with FOG and PDQ Deploy.

Which means I'm going to get a coffee and let others do the dirty work

@nadnerB said in CloudFlare Numbers June 2016:

I'm seeing lots of numbers that I recognise, but I have no idea what half of them mean in this context.

It's basically about ML's CloudFlare frontend, which is caching some of MLs static content (like images, JavaScript and Cascaded Style Sheets). This will reduce load on the webserver. Problem is, that CloudFlare is NOT a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as you might expect it. Webservers are mostly struggling from dynamic content and database calls, not from serving static content like JS, CSS and images. A real CDN is just a bunch of load balanced webservers and databases, multiplying resources. CloudFlare is more like a server side cache. Still useful, but not a CDN.

A benefit of both, a real CDN and CloudFlare, is geolocation: Placing content / webservers near the user.

Those numbers above are basically cache stats.

Just curious: How exactly does your product differ from StarWind Virtual SAN in this context?

@scottalanmiller said in Programming Printers:

OMG I forgot how good this stuff was. Offix.com is going to love reading this.

There's always something to learn. Connecting that large old Centronics plug is actually programming in this case? Hell, if configuring is programming today, what am I as a developer? A supernatural being?

No, seriously, from what I understood he's talking about configuring things, maybe creating some macros to switch paper feeds or printing a form template stored on the printer (Lexmark and many other "big" printers can do this).

@MattSpeller Nah, that's ok. I don't expect anything less from @scottalanmiller

@dafyre said in It's 10K Day:

You blinked man. You can't look away.

13... in 2 minutes. Another 19. @scottalanmiller: unusual high page views right now?

You've hit the nail on the head. I don't know how many times I've contacted companies one way or another, only to get

a) A sales rep will call you ASAP - no, thanks
b) Let me help you understand how this will fit your budget if ... no, thanks
c) We will help you to grow ... no, thanks, we are doing just fine
d) We perfectly understand your situation... again, nope, you don't.
e) Our sales rep will have time for you on next Tuesday <- are you kidding me?
f) Our sales rep can answer all of your questions <- nope.

So if you ask me as a "hardcore techie" who has his own budget, these are things I don't want you to do:

• If you don't know what I am talking about, ask someone who may know. Thats ok.
• Don't call me back, don't send me your newsletter, get someone on the phone who can actually answer my questions. Anything else is a waste of resources on both sides.
• Don't try to sell me something I've never asked for
• If I ask you for numbers, you don't need to write me an offer. Give me a rough estimate on the phone.

The stupidest thing I've seen so far: Called someone and asked a technical question about a product. Got no answer but a 10K EUR offer just to start talking about a project.

@scottalanmiller said in Programming Printers:

@thwr said in Programming Printers:

No, seriously, from what I understood he's talking about configuring things, maybe creating some macros to switch paper feeds or printing a form template stored on the printer (Lexmark and many other "big" printers can do this).

Yup, I have a good friend who is a programmer (like a 10X big time programmer that works for places like Dell and major consulting firms and names his own price) and his father in law thought his job was a joke, even though he earned way more than him and got to work from home or anywhere that he wanted and was a third his age and never had to go to college, yada yada) because the father in law was a video game programmer himself.

Well, actually he meant that he installed a video game once. Like Curtis, he thought that "installing software", you know like popping in the floppy and double clicking on the install icon, was what programming meant. Programming is just too complex of a subject for many people. Once they can't grasp what software does, they tend to start imagining that programming is something that they have seen or could understand and weird concepts start to arise. Like changing the time on your analogue watch becomes programming. Write a poem is programming the paper. Putting soap in the dishwasher is programming the dishwasher. Driving a car is real time programming. Writing your diary in bed is embedded programming.

Oh I think @fuznutz04 made a pretty good statement about what programming is (not)

@NattNatt Trust me, IT is learning until you leave the building - with your feet first. Damn, another German saying

Whenever I click fullscreen on a youtube video for the first time, it will go fullscreen and stop instantly. Need to reload the thread. After the reload, i can view the video in fullscreen just fine.

Have seen this on different browsers and PCs / Android mobiles. Could be some JavaScript issue maybe.

Totally agree with your entire post. I'm an autodidact myself, never been in a trainee position.

The single biggest problem is HR, IMHO: They will fast scan job applications for formal problems and will put them in the "round permanent storage bin" the second where they see your missing higher education degree for example or missing certification. They don't understand requirements for candidates or that a senior tech with 15 years of experience is virtually always better than some fresh master in computer sciences who never got his hands dirty and bleeding from sharp chassis edges.

I'm not saying that studying is worthless, but learning doesn't end with your degree. It ends when you are being put in a box.

I'm fighting with this for quite some months now.

Site A:

• pfSense-latest running on an Intel Atom D525 (SuperMicro board) using Intel NICs.
• Wirespeed for plain transfers from the internet (e.g., downloading some Linux ISO)

Site B:

• Single Intel Xeon 2603v3 (just a testing machine)
• pfSense-latest running on top of Hyper-V 2012 R2
• 2 virtual NICs:
  a) WAN with static VLAN assignment on the vNIC
  b) Local nets with VLAN tagging from within the VM (due to the 8 pNIC limit in Windows/Hyper-V)
• Near wirespeed for plain transfers from the internet (e.g., downloading some Linux ISO)
• Decent performance on traffic routed over the box (wirespeed), way faster when doing inter-VLAN between VMs on the same host (~ 300MB/s for large sequential files, the SSDs on the host just can't write faster)

Uplink between both sites is 1GB/s dark fiber at the moment, will be 10GB/s sometime soon. I'm seeing near wirespeed performance for plain traffic between both sites (FTP transfer for example), but Site-to-Site VPN using OpenVPN is capped at 7 MB/s. IPsec is a little bit faster, maybe 8-9 MB/s. Switches on both sites are externally managed Cisco 2960-X's. CPU usage during VPN transfers goes up to 20-30% at 7MB/s on Site A. At Site B, it's hard to even see an increased load. I don't expect wirespeed here, the little Atom is getting old, but at least like 20-40 MB/s. RTT between A and B is < 1.8ms (peak).

Why VPN over dark fiber? The line is running through a junction point in a public building I do not have control of.

Already did the usual stuff like limiting MTU, configuring sendbuf's and so on.
Any ideas?

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

We are out of food around the house, but there are enough ingredients for making chocolate chip cookies. So that is the food for today. This is what happens on travel days.

So you still keep up to the American Way of Life? (SCNR)
BTW: Chocolate chip cookies would be a great ML swag. Need my postal address?

@StrongBad said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@Dashrender said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

If you only do IT stuff while on the clock at work, how do you grow and learn new things?

Unless maybe you have an awesome job that provides resources and time for that kind of stuff. But those are pretty rare. And it only works while you have that job, if you leave that job for any reason, it would go away. But you could make a home lab after leaving or losing the job.

Wasn't it Google who encourages you to spend a certain amount of your working time doing things you like, like contributing to open source projects?

My 0.02c: Whatever the future way will be (mod first or not), just keep it transparent.

IMHO, a good community can't live without at least a certain amount of moderation. At least not with thousands of members. Problem is, moderation is and will probably ever be a tightrope walk, keeping it transparent should pay back at some point.

About the product: Funny name, but I would have a hard time to explain my documentations cover sheet ("How to use Fck" or "About Fck".) to my boss

@johnhooks said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Here's a hint, don't type yes and forget to pipe it into something or you will have to force exit your session and open it again.

# rm -rf --no-preserve-root . /

(Kids: Don't try this at home)

As seen on a spicy forum a few weeks ago

Maybe the OP question itself is wrong and should be more like "are you willing to spend free time to learn?".

@scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said in Ubuntu Systemd Bad Entry:

MD RAID 10 is configured on this box for the storage space. So I can check that as well.

Should be the very first thing to check.