@emad-r said in Disk imaging tools:

@thwr

my thoughts for this is I have researched alot but I never really worked on enterprise big enough to justify this.
Especially in this day age Windows installer can be created to USB drives, and if you select fast USB drive the installer will take 10 mins + you can do this on 10 laptops easily , and cost of 8GB USB drive is peanuts.

Thanks for your exhaustive post. I do have a very strong Unix / Linux / BSD background, so I'm probably more aware of most of your points than the average Windows admin. Heck, I build scripts on top of losetup and mount -o offset to alter an sdcard image just for fun

Like I said, a fresh installation at this point is not an option. It's not even worth discussing this. Just took the job over from someone who retired more than a year ago. My major goal is to stabilize the current situation, fight the largest fires and to implement a whole new system at the same time. The old system just needs to run until I've implemented that new system and all data and services have been migrated / reimplemented.

Thanks guys. I was just looking for some opinions. Used gparted / clonezilla etc. in the past for.. what, decades?

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

We have a full 1 kV power test on Monday, so we had to shut everything down and unplug every single outlet.

Do you at least get fun stuff like lightning coming out of outlets for the test?

IDK

We have a full 1 kV power test on Monday, so we had to shut everything down and unplug every single outlet.

Want to move a fair amount of desktops from HDDs to SSDs, everything Windows.

Please note: I can't reinstall the hosts at this point because there is no software deployment or base image available and I don't have the time to build something myself at the moment. We use a lot of very specific scientific and engineering tools, which are not covered by any out of the box solution.

What's everyone's favorite disk imaging / cloning tool? A plus would be a tool which is able to image to a smaller sized partition (e.g. 1TB disk that only uses 150GB, imaged to a 250GB SSD.

@hobbit666 said in I can't even:

@zachary715 thought that wasn't too bad a price till I noticed it was monthly lol

10$ hardware for free
60 months * 10$ service fee

Genius

@hobbit666 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

On the train to work I need to win lottery and retire or become part time self employed consultant lol

Hehe

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just thought about ways to setup our public /24 subnet.

I could use it as-is and D-NAT to internal services or setup a small routing net (/30) and create smaller chunks that get routed instead to, for example, VMs with public IPs.

No reverse proxy? Thought that was the way to go. Of course for those oddball services that won't work, which I guess is what your really facing here.

Theres only a single website - and alot other services.

@nerdydad said in Passwords Last Changed:

So here is something that I just whipped up real quick one liner.

get-aduser -Filter * -Properties * | Select CN,PasswordLastSet,EmailAddress | sort PasswordLastSet | export-csv \\your_desired_location\passwords_unchanged.csv

First part grabs all of your users in your AD and all of their properties. Its piped over and only pulls out the users name, their email address, and the last time they changed their password. The next pipe sorts the list based from oldest to newest of the passwords. With that list sorted, it is then piped to a csv spreadsheet to be done with what you will.

Part of the NerdyDad's PowerShell Script series

Take care with this one. I had a problem once because the PasswordLastSet attribute is one of the few attributes that isn't replicated between DCs by default.

Wrote a powershell script a bit ago (hell, I need more time for my blog...) that querys all DCs: https://www.windrath.com/2016/07/powershell-total-badpwdcount-adusers/ - you could adapt it to get the newest PasswordLastSet value

Just thought about ways to setup our public /24 subnet.

I could use it as-is and D-NAT to internal services or setup a small routing net (/30) and create smaller chunks that get routed instead to, for example, VMs with public IPs.

Recovering a website from a bare metal OpenBSD installation.

Wait, I've posted some YT vid where someone prays: "Thou shall not use RAID-5 on spindles. Use RAID-6 instead! You'll see a huge performance boost!" without @scottalanmiller instantly raging? SAM, are you ok?

"Why You Should NOT Use RAID 5 Storage ( But Use RAID 6! )"

Youtube Video

@tech1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dustinb3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@tech1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Dreading about what to wear tonight.

Usually the correct answer is nothing, or something kinky. . .

hahah I am not about to show up to dinner with the in laws naked to a restaurant and traumatize couples.

Youtube Video

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@coliver said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Learning about System Center Configuration Manager

It's a super complex piece of software but is very powerful. We're going to be deploying it to production this summer.

Yes, and if you're not careful, it can wipe & reload a large portion of your infrastructure for you!

Old News: https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2014/05/16/emory-university-server-accidentally-sends-reformat-request-windows-pcs-including/

This could happen with every software that's capable of reimaging, but at least SCCM 2012R2's grouping functions are everything but intuitive. It's meant to be used at very large scales, not for SMB, IMHO.

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@coliver said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Learning about System Center Configuration Manager

It's a super complex piece of software but is very powerful. We're going to be deploying it to production this summer.

Yes, and if you're not careful, it can wipe & reload a large portion of your infrastructure for you!

Old News: https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2014/05/16/emory-university-server-accidentally-sends-reformat-request-windows-pcs-including/

Yup

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Learning about System Center Configuration Manager

My condolences

Just kidding. What scale are we talking about? 20 users? 20000?

@minion-queen said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

We have a community guideline that it's not allowed (but generally if I miss it for a day or so I let it stand) Shit and Bitch I allow unless you are calling someone specific that

I'm so glad that my English is so bad, I've never understood MLs guidelines. And IF I swear from time to time, it's most probably a translation typo. I guess

@scottalanmiller said in What does Quad9 do the Pihole does not:

@thwr said in What does Quad9 do the Pihole does not:

@jaredbusch said in What does Quad9 do the Pihole does not:

@thwr said in What does Quad9 do the Pihole does not:

Just from reading I would say he's using Quad9 as upstream DNS for his PiHole (which is used by clients)

I know that. I mean, what is the service Quad9 doing.

It's another "privacy" friendly DNS driven by IBM, Packet Clearing House (PCH) and Global Cyber Alliance (GCA). Placed as an alternative to Google's DNS

"Privacy friendly" is what we are worried about. It's from the US gov't so we really don't trust it.

I'm sure you've noticed the quotes around "privacy".

@jaredbusch said in What does Quad9 do the Pihole does not:

@thwr said in What does Quad9 do the Pihole does not:

Just from reading I would say he's using Quad9 as upstream DNS for his PiHole (which is used by clients)

I know that. I mean, what is the service Quad9 doing.

It's another "privacy" friendly DNS driven by IBM, Packet Clearing House (PCH) and Global Cyber Alliance (GCA). Placed as an alternative to Google's DNS