@syko24 said in Printer suggestion:

@zachary715 said in Printer suggestion:

For this volume we get the Brother HL-L6200DWT. We have primarily Brother printers and have been very satisfied. Printer and ink costs seem to be among the lowest we've found.

Agree that the HL-6200 model is solid

The best were the HL-5370DW. We just had two that FINALLY gave out around 150,000 pages. We still have about 5 or 6 around and they simply work. Never have issues just replace toner and the occasional drum.

The HL-5400 series had issues with their fusers, mainly if you were a decently high volume printer (1000+ pages per month). Less than 500/month we haven't had the same issues.

We have two HL-L6200 currently. The first one we bought kept creating creases down the middle of the page. Apparently it's an issue others have experienced as well and Brother exchanged it. The new one hasn't had that issue yet and it's been in place over a year now.

The only complaint I have is how the toner acts when it gets low. Many times when the printer says it's time to replace toner, the quality is still fine so you can reset the counter and keep printing. Unfortunately if you do that, eventually you'll start seeing toner slowly seap out onto the pages and if users aren't aware of what it is and let it continue, it can create a mess. We just train our users to change toner out at the first sign of this.

For this volume we get the Brother HL-L6200DWT. We have primarily Brother printers and have been very satisfied. Printer and ink costs seem to be among the lowest we've found.

@JaredBusch said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller I have a SMB client running a pair of Dell servers from like 2010. Because everything is virtualized and replicated and backed up, I’m not planning to replace anything until one of them fails or can no longer handle the workload.

The guests are Fedora 29 systems, server 2012R2 and server 2016.

This is pretty much how we have been, except we did plan to upgrade these before failure (hopefully). This has just been my first big encounter with something like this so it freaked me out a bit. Starting to look like everything will restore from backups though and all will be well, which is pretty much exactly how we structured it.

I've learned though it's one thing to put a plan together that sounds good, and it's another to have to execute it.

@zachary715 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Rebuilding RAID array after a failed drive occurred today. First one I've encountered in a few years. Timely. Thankfully RAID 10 and moving quickly.

After replacing the drive, I was getting messages showing that the firmware was one behind the rest of the drives, therefore I decided what the heck, might as well update the server firmware while I'm here. Wrong decision. Firmware upgrades got stuck on the RAID card, and now my server will not boot. I went from a simple drive swap to ultimate panic mode. So far I've recovered one critical VM to an older spare server we have and everything is running fine with it. Now I'm recovering our file server.

I just bought Veeam 2 months ago after our Backup Exec crapped out. If it comes through and saves me here, I might literally be the happiest man on the planet.

Server also went out of service life last year. Called Cisco and they said they couldn't do anything for me. Was already planning on getting two new servers in the next few months to replace the two I have, but it seems that will be expedited now.

Still need prayers file server successfully restores and everything goes smoothly

Rebuilding RAID array after a failed drive occurred today. First one I've encountered in a few years. Timely. Thankfully RAID 10 and moving quickly.

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@zachary715 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Working on a File Server Migration.

@dbeato I've got mine coming up on New Year's Day. How are you doing yours?

Since this customer did not need DFS, I setup File Migration Toolkit and migrated it via Robocopy, It finalizes the migration after the amount of delta copies you want and then closes the shares on the sources server and enables it on the new server. The permissions are also migrated as well.

Yeah last time I did it was with Robocopy, but that was going physical to virtual. I've been reading about being able to just detach the .vmdk that hosts the shares and attach it to the new server. From there, permissions should follow and I'd just have to recreate the top level shares. I've tested this and it seems to work, but wanted to see the route you were taking. Thanks

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Working on a File Server Migration.

@dbeato I've got mine coming up on New Year's Day. How are you doing yours?

To manually accomplish this, you'll need to shut down each VM guest on the host. Once they're all safely shut down, put the host in Maintenance Mode and then proceed to shutdown. If you're just rebooting it, it won't take but a minute or two. Then when it boots back up, bring the host out of Maintenance Mode and power all your VM's back up.

Now you tagged vCenter Server but you mentioned hosts. Just beware that if/when you shut down your vCenter VM (appliance or Windows based VM) you'll obviously lose access to the web console to proceed further. You'll need to login to the web client for the individual hosts or use the old Windows based vSphere client (if you're running ESXi 6.0 or older).

We installed a 10 camera Vitek system at our office back in September and it has worked well so far. Cameras record up to 4k. Has a dedicated NVR which has a built-in switch with POE. 10 cameras + 16channel NVR = $3k-4k

The security company who installed it recommended Vitek from their experiences with them. Had never heard of them beforehand.

Wow that is a large batch. It seems like there haven't been many updates at all for last month or two though. Surprising to drop that many at once.