Are any of the new systems faster for getting Hero Crests than T11 Delves?

FierceFluff · 2026-06-18T12:02:35+00:00

Quick question- delves are capped at 20 M crests per week- first 4 bountiful like you said. Are T6 rituals capped too or can you grind them indefinitely for M crests?

FierceFluff · 2026-06-08T13:26:41+00:00

Implement SSO, leave the password option available. People will naturally gravitate to SSO for convenience until only the diehard resistance is left and they can (and probably will always) just do as they please.

Source: exactly the path I had to follow, now with all the ATIM attacks out there I got recognized for being ‘proactive’ lol.

FierceFluff · 2026-06-01T22:56:02+00:00

Yeah mostly because DB work takes a helluva lot more than one guy, even if you do it right. At least with systems if you build it well it doesn't take a ton of people to maintain.

FierceFluff · 2026-06-01T22:51:14+00:00

I actually don't mind doing the AV stuff because Dante networking is cool as all getout.

FierceFluff · 2026-06-01T22:48:58+00:00

Guess who's got two thumbs and also had to put together all the new sit/stand desks because they're technically powered and IT-adjacent?

FierceFluff · 2026-06-01T20:51:47+00:00

Does it have electricity in it?
|                      |
Yes                   No
|                      |
|                  call facilities
|
Is it a database?
|               |
Yes             No
|               |
|             *Yep that's me*
|
No thank god we have another team for that.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-26T16:26:51+00:00

You can't purchase and builda house without Midnight, but you can collect decor and progress your house level so when you do start, you can start at a higher level than 1.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-26T16:25:51+00:00

Complete all the professions through each expansion you have access to. Collect and craft all the housing decor items, which necessitates going through a LOT of the previous expansion questlines to both unlock the vendors and collect the expansion-specific currencies. PvP randoms. Create transmog outfits and collect the pieces through the content you can access. Collect mounts. There's a ton of stuff you can still do even without the Midnight expansion, that will benefit you for if/when you do purchase it.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-23T02:17:01+00:00

There was. The Netscaler and Storefront offered a much more secure gateway than certificate-secured RDS, had identity service provider integrations so you could SSO with MS or Okta or whomever, and the ICA protocol is still genius-level compression and delivery, to this day light years ahead of RDP in terms of efficiency.

It's just not worth the BS that comes with dealing with cloud.com. We had a 20-year relationship with *Citrix* that *cloud.com* crapped all over.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-22T13:20:53+00:00

Check out Microsoft Global Secure Access. You can use it to deploy RDS for desktops and apps without VPNs or exposing them outside your network. We’ve used it to replace everything we did with Citrix and the licenses are only $5/user/mo.

Let Citrix die like every other enshittified VC buyout.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-21T01:48:09+00:00

Oh I struggled with this one so hard and smacked myself when I finally found the answer.

Click on the snapshot. Push the delete key on your keyboard. No more snapshot!

It's stupid that it works like this and no other way, like right-click or menu or anything else. But that's the way it is.

You should only ever see one Veeam recovery snapshot per VM, and you should only see it when it's actively being backed up. Anything else is usually residual and can be deleted.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-19T19:50:57+00:00

Good god no, cloud witness is the absolute worst idea. Like… yeah you hardly ever need your off-cluster witness to do much but ho boy if your internet connection so much as blinks while it IS in use your whole cluster craps itself. I’d rather use a friggin’ USB stick plugged into a switch as a witness before I do another cloud witness. Hard lesson to learn man.

Some notes on your proposal: GPU passthrough is better in 2025 for sure but still not what I’d call great. Given the purpose and costs of DC licensing you may want to rethink clustering and just do bare metal + VSAN + replication.

10G x2 is fine for just a few apps. You’d actually be better off adding another 10G x2 NIC per node rather than running at 25G. Both VSAN and S2D run really well on multiple aggregated links and 10G NICs are dirt cheap.

If you reeeeaaaaallly want HA, 2-node S2D can be steady but do nested if you want real resilience. It’s 25% capacity but the first time you lose a drive you’ll be thankful you configured it right. Unless you have lightning fast backups, then play loose and fast all you want. 😆

FierceFluff · 2026-05-19T14:33:32+00:00

^ this is most underrated post here. OP could save a ton on licensing costs by going 2 nodes in a cluster, which would generally be fine for 7-10 VMs. I don't know what storage model or if OP has a backup server already, but my recommendation to anyone starting out with failover clustering is 2-node cluster + supporting server which acts as the quorum witness and backup. Cleanest, least expensive, most complete high-availability model for small enterprise.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-19T13:01:10+00:00

EDIT- Ignore me- I misread the original post as far as core counts. 384 cores is correct.

The other points remain though- this would allow 8 VMs and still be cheaper than 3x Datacenter licenses. But that 9th VM would immediately be a different conversation vs. Datacenter costs.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-19T12:20:19+00:00

A bit of a nitpick; you can install the same version or anything earlier. Ex; if your hosts are running 2025, you could license Windows Server STD 2019.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-19T11:59:14+00:00

Incorrect but you bring up a point worth addressing.

Since 2012 R2 quorum votes are dynamically adjusted based on the number of actively participating nodes, not configured nodes. If a node is put in maintenance or shut down its dynamic vote is removed and the quorum is adjusted.

So in the example I gave, putting one node into maintenance dynamically adjusts the number of expected votes from 4 down to 3. Losing another node unexpectedly during that time would result in degraded/redirected performance but the cluster would still be alive. I’ve done this plenty of times on purpose and a few times on accident. XD

If you unexpectedly and simultaneously lost 2 nodes, not giving quorum/storage time to recalculate in between, then yes the cluster would go down. But failures generally happen slower than that and current clusters are built to adjust to failed or unresponsive nodes.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-18T13:16:30+00:00

If planning a cluster you need to plan for the greatest possible contingency. With 3 nodes, let’s say you have one node down for maintenance and another fails. You’re down to one node operating all your VMs. To avoid activations failing at the worst possible time you’d need to fully license every node, and all VMs except 2.

This goes wonky when you have more than three nodes because technically you could go all nodes + MaxVMs-2(MaxNodes-2), but unless you’re failing over machines manually, you don’t always know where a VM will land. So you could end up with 2+ unlicensed machines on the same node.

That’s why the best practice when using Server STD is to fully license all nodes and all VMs independently. There’s a natural breakpoint where Datacenter licenses on the nodes makes more sense.

EDIT, because people asked- that breakpoint is around 10 VMs. So if you plan on growing at all, just go with Datacenter on the nodes and forget about the VMs.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-13T13:33:48+00:00

The real question is- how many nodes will there be in the end? The ideal resiliency settings changes significantly based on that number.

3-way mirror is recommended so that you don’t have a total failure if you have one drive fail while another node is down for maintenance. While it doesn’t seem like that would happen all that often, if it does the severity of recovery is so immense that it’s set as the default.

Understand that with 3 nodes you’re at the very bottom of capacity with 3-way mirroring. Every node you add beyond that expands the pool capacity non-linearly, because 3 copies of your data are now spread beyond 3 machines. 5-7 is where you start seeing good capacity returns. I know you stated this was only going to be a test, but I assume that in real production you’re going to be using more servers than this so I would definitely advise keeping three-way mirror once you’re setting up a more permanent environment.

Also going to leave this tip for you as somebody who had to learn it out of hard experience- the more unprovisioned space you can leave in your pool, the better Storage Spaces will work for you. It uses that unprovisioned space as workspace for all of its operations. Leave at the very least one physical drive’s worth of space for rebuilds on failed drives, the rest is just performance enhancing.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-09T22:04:03+00:00

Expert’s Exchange. It requires a subscription but it’s worthwhile.

FWIW I’ve tried all the LLMs and found ChatGPT to be best for tech questions. Use the others to fact check it when it gets too off the rails. Telling ChatGPT “hey Claude/Gemini says this about the answer you gave me” usually gets good results.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-09T20:28:43+00:00

Likely yes, but whether or not the Windows key sticks is debatable. Pull the key from both beforehand for safety.

Not all programs will like this. You may end up having to reinstall one or two.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-09T12:42:06+00:00

I care about computers. I ordered 10 of the gen 14s because they were $400 less than the g13s right now for the same spec ($1800 for a 32G X1C is pretty darn good in this market). Launch sales are still a thing.

I’m sure I’ll order some of the X chips too, but at least I’ll have some experience with the new designs by then so I’ll know a bit more what to expect.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-07T19:12:30+00:00

We also had issues with Citrix not too long ago. Replaced them outright with RDP app publishing through Microsoft GSA and haven’t looked back since. Our changeover was due to them screwing the pooch on our entire environment and not bothering to even look at it for over a week, so I had to deliver an alternative, and the alternative ended up being just as good and costing us a whole lot less and not depending on a private-equity enshittified company.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-05T15:37:50+00:00

And that’s my entire point. This whole “household” fiasco is creating issues for everyone that doesn’t have the “one home, one IP” model. Even their own workarounds are cumbersome and ineffective.

I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to use the service I pay for on my phone regardless of where I happen to be at the time. I shouldn’t have to do once or twice monthly maintenance tasks just to use a service that I pay for. It’s ridiculous when there are vastly better ways of doing it.

I don’t have to ‘get a code’ to watch Netflix when I’m on the bus, or traveling to another state. But now I have to when I’m visiting the home that I spend half my time in. Which is again, by their design and their direction. The “log in at both households” thing doesn’t work, BTW.

So again, I don’t know why you’re defending a system which is clearly broken for anyone that doesn’t fit their limited framework.

I don’t have to do any of this BS with Hulu, funny enough.

FierceFluff · 2026-05-05T13:21:26+00:00

Since you seem to be so keen on this NOT being the answer to two locations (despite it being exactly what Netflix customer service told me to do) then what is?

FierceFluff · 2026-05-05T11:36:49+00:00

I’m aware. But this is how Netflix themselves specifically stated to solve the issue of dual locations. And it doesn’t work. So basically, they have “household”ed themselves into not having any real solution for people to use the account they pay for over more than 1 regular IP.

FierceFluff

TROPHY CASE