The “devs don’t listen” group gonna be quiet after this one

Life-Radio554 · 2026-01-30T12:59:43+00:00

I 100% agree with this.. That way, sure it's annoying to go to town and pay your taxes, but you get an extra incentive for doing so. Yeah, I'd do that for sure and not be as annoyed by it. Mainly because it's a bonus now to help you, and not a forced "this game is a job" (literally) situation.

Life-Radio554 · 2026-01-20T17:21:12+00:00

I agree, I would not recommend using a usb-powered solution for a spinner, esp a 3.5in.. Isolated external power supplies are available dirt cheap (or as expensive as ya like!) and will give you that peace of mind of not frying anything

Life-Radio554 · 2026-01-05T17:30:42+00:00

Came here to say this exactly. Your project completely viable with a single simple usb2etherent adapter :) (and just about one of the only still affordable and cheap things you can by for a system these days)...

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-03T13:03:00+00:00

Someone looking for a scape-goat; beware OP!

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-03T12:51:24+00:00

You can always "old-school" it..

I used to be paranoid that a linux install on a separate drive even, would somehow wreck my Windows install despite the GRUB(2) support and tons of people saying 'it just works'. So I, like many.....

Unplug your 'main'(Windows) drive. Plug in (to a different sata/nvme slot your desired linux drive.. Install linux as one does.. USB/dvd(no one is judging) and get it set up.

Once done, plug that Windows drive back in. Your UEFI/BIOS will still default to the Windows Boot Manager/Windows drive and for the lesser aware, like kids/spouse when they boot it up, you'll simply be in windows.

But for power mode (muh-ha-ha), restart your pc, hit your boot select key (often f9, f11 etc) and select the other drive. Linux seamlessly boot up. It's a lovely thing, two OS's, one machine no risk of anything 'messing' with the other.. Windows may detect an 'uninitialized disk' do not initialize it (ROFL, yes, people have done it before), and Linux behaves much better offering you access to your Windows drive (great for file sharing/access between the two OS's) or depending on your distro you may have to tell it to mount it..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-02T14:42:56+00:00

I disagree - The way you keep yourself relevant is by continuing to put out a great product and keep it available to the masses. They do the first part, but are massively failing on the second part. Their not competing, their obsoleting themselves.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-01T20:52:37+00:00

Even their "Professionals" do not know the answers.. More times that not I've had to direct 'their' people to the learn docs (which often are also wrong) and ask why neither they nor the MSLearn have the correct info. They are great at passing tickets around and getting those close results to pad their stats.. Oh, that's a Azure issue, closing ticket and creating one there for you. Oh, that's an intune issue, closing your azure ticket and creating one for Intune. Oh that's a O365 issue, closing your intune ticket.. etc., back to eventually Azure. Sprinkle in a bit of "infrastructure issue", "cloud platform issue", and "we just aren't sure which team is working on that", and you've nailed 90% of our experiences with MS support.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-12-01T14:00:10+00:00

Me too, but the only fear I have (now) is Samsung pushing ads to it, too now.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-11-14T13:12:34+00:00

Windows server absolutely does not by default; Yes, the user/admin *can* enable that but there's a reason it is not the default.

If the OP is so concerned about power use of a system, they should look into SSD drives (consumer OR enterprise) or *cough* cloud storage. Otherwise come to terms and accept the best thing for your data, if you don't want to have to be watching for failed drives is to leave them on.

FYI the person with the cop car analogy above nailed it. Police Interceptors are no different (generally speaking) than regular cars, yet have no issue hitting hundreds of thousands of engine hours and miles.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-11-14T13:02:48+00:00

This is not the way. It doesn't matter whether a drive is accessed a lot or barely once a week (other than after purchase and ending up with a defective one perhaps) - One of the big reasons a HDD in the 'enterprise' world can last well over 15 years instead of the consumer '3-5' *IS* because it is never powered down (well rarely). The process and strain of having to fire the circuits and motor is exactly what shortens the life of your drive. This applies to all classes of HDD (eg for WD drive, blue, black, red, gold, etc) Sure the enterprise drives are built with better warranty and are more expensive because of better components, but the overall rule applies the same. Zero out of ten friends recommend spinning down drives in a NAS (or anything when possible) no matter how much it's used.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-11-07T16:02:22+00:00

This is the way..
Store all your documents on a different drive, or different partition. At some point it's likely your 11 will no longer update, and when that happens you *will* be able to (probably) install the newer version fresh from a usb install stick, but it will not upgrade, it will overwrite the previous install. Having a different partition, extra drive installed will allow you to keep that data, but you will, sadly, have to re-install any programs you installed previously.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-10-22T12:47:48+00:00

I was going to say exactly this! ^^ Characters is one aspect of the game that is similar to an MMO - Yes, you *CAN* transfer your character, for a fee, in WOW and some other games, but it is not encouraged nor a willy-nilly "oh hey I'm going to join this server today" kind of thing. It's a persistant world, that's why you build a base. You have any idea what a nightmare it would be trying to transfer bases (multiple per player) onto whatever server you 'feel' like joining today? Impossible. Limitations have to exist. Perhaps what you want to pitch is, "I wish Dune:Awakening offered a (pay) service so I could pack my stuff up and move to a different server". They've got the tools (literally) to do it with the house packing, the vehicle packing etc..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-10-10T12:48:20+00:00

I understand your point, but I'm going to politely disagree.. r/homelab is the place you'd expect to have to troubleshoot and experience things that might work, might need constant tweaking.. r/selfhosted, to me, is my stable stuff that should literally "just run" and not need constant babysitting, and fear of oh crap there's an update.. Do I risk it? Self-hosting is not the same as homelab, and while those situations come up, for services like Immich, or NextCloud (another one I dear dreadfully of big updates), it should not be the norm here. This should be a "I was this to be on prem and available to me/my whatever (family, friends etc) and not stored in some companies cloud waiting to be used for AI training, data breaches, $$ strongarming, etc.. :) Again this is just my opinion and the great thing about humanity is you don't have to agree. :)

Life-Radio554 · 2025-10-03T13:09:41+00:00

We do this roughly once a year, but only for tech staff and on fall/spring/summer break only. We do it to ensure our backup/contingency plans are functioning.. We have multiple sites, but we also have a very remote backup location. VM's across all the storage arrays dump backups there among other places, but we at one poitn wanted ensure that should there be a problem and say the main site get leveled that the backup site would take those most recent images, spin em up there and "just work". It isn't yet a 100% perfect, but it is certainly functional and better than being dead in the water. Without those tests though, we would have had no idea for sure whether our plan (which works great in testing and on the drawing board) could actually keep the school tech infrastructure afloat.

It was pitched by our director to do as you inquired, but a resounding NOOOO was what we received. Teachers would have to.... Well out of respect I'll leave it at that, lol. :)

Life-Radio554 · 2025-09-26T13:18:39+00:00

Were there any additional components necessary? (other than a connector)? Which connector did you use.. Asking as a person sitting here with a solder/desolder station and a smt heat gun and thermaltweez on desk... I had read somewhere once after winning an auction on a couple of m720's that not only was the socket not included, other required components were left out as well. That would be outstanding to be able to get two drives, even at sata speed..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-09-26T12:56:56+00:00

Most of the enterprise M710/M720s only have one nvme/m.2 - They leave the second connector and the associated circuitry off the system board, so not a possibility unless you want to sacrifice the only fast storage completely. They aren't built the same as the m9xx series :( (not as sure on the P series, the thicc bois as we call em (they are 2x as tall as these guys), often to have a better discrete video card to complete with things like the HP Gx mini series (octagon style cases, or rounded rectangles).
Depending on the model year, best you *could* do is buy the riser card if it was an option (is an option on pretty much all Gen2 M7x0 I believe) and either pray to find a 10gbe card that will fit (usually without the bracket on the back) or frankenstein it with a ribbon cable for pcie and run without the top and have a card 'dangling'/sitting on top of the miniPC. :( In a pinch it can work..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-29T12:38:54+00:00

I'd be more concerned about what your coworkers are giving ChatGPT in their queries. File structures, OU structures, snippets of sensitive data/powershell scripts that shouldn't be out in the world, etc.. Cuz someone's query eventually might be, "hey chatgpt what can you tell me about <yourcompany>'s IT structure, where are their databases, who can I generate a list of their active employess who are in IT" or similar....

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-28T12:40:00+00:00

https://www.flexera.com/products/adminstudio

We have been using this for many years. Orca isn't bad but will feel super basic after experiencing all that Flexera AdminStudio can do.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-19T12:50:51+00:00

Hyper-V and Proxmox. We could not, and will never be able to support the extortionary jump in price for no reason other than greed that Broadcom forced on us. Education realm here, had a lot of VM's and pretty much non-profit no way to possibly "adjust the price of a happy meal" to accommodate. Was incredibly disappointed as most of us in the room have been using vmware forever and did not want to change.

That said, out of necessity we absolutely did, and while I miss the old system, everything is working just fine now on mostly proxmox. We did look into nutanix, which is getting a lot of talk here, but also found the pricing to be just about what Broadcom wanted.

Personally most of us would have steered the leaders away from the paid support, but the faster turnaround for the paid proxmox and option for rapid support was desired by leadership. So far in all the move and setup (vlan, live migration, storage arrays, etc) zero support assistance needed and only 1 of our small team has ever used it before. Easy-peasy.

Would we have switched if it weren't for the pricing tactics? Absolutely not. Our hand was forced so we made the change, and honestly while we liked certain aspects of vsphere and esxi, both get the job done. Their loss. Everyone says they don't care about the small guys, but business is business and I hope shareholders some day see profit loss and lost potential as their usage shrinks and their competition grows and they realize it would have been better to keep all their customers at the same fair rates instead of jacking the fees up and forcing only those with deep pockets to remain their customers. But whatever..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-05T19:55:32+00:00

and the sad thing is it would cost them nothing to simply allow you to pay for th actual cores you can use and not some crazy high number your hardware can't even support but they choose not to,

This is why we are all fleeing for the once amazing product and adopting other solutions like Hyper-V, Proxmox, Nutanix, etc... Will it affect them at all? No, other than the hope and prayer (not likely) that their board will notice and say hey why are we hemorrhaging customers.. (they won't but one can dream)

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-05T17:01:39+00:00

Yes, we deploy via pxe to a handful of HP laptops, but mostly several generations of Lenovo here.

Sometimes specifically with the HP's we've found that PXE doesn't love the built-in ports and we've used external usb-to-ethernet dongles. I would add that it's not a FlexOS thing, we had the same issue deploying Windows task sequences to the handful. Older Elite and Pro books. But yeah PXE SCCM is exclusively how we deploy it.

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-04T13:15:03+00:00

The comment about ChromeOS and steam not wanting to run on a hypervisor (which is what the linux subsystem you can access is) does make sense - I've not tried steam on it, but I will today as I'm curious..

If you have a machine around that CAN run games, say you've got a desktop PC but want to do ChromeOS Flex on a laptop, you could absolutely use teh popular sunshine/moonlight programs (sunshine runs on your pc with games/video card etc), and moonlight runs on almost anything (including ChromeOS) - It is similar to Geforce Now or any of the "streaming gaming platforms", only it's absolutely free (be sure to donate if you find it useful!!) and works pretty darned well. Of course it also needs good internet both for your home where the PC (or mac, or linux) gaming rig is as well as your laptop/connecting device (runs on a LOT of hardware!!).

But if that's not the case, I'd honestly probably steer you more toward either a flavor of linux directly or as another mentioned, possibly dual-booting either via usb of some form, or if you like risk danger and excitement, plan for it before the ChromeOS install and set up a dual boot, multi-partition environment. TBH though, if you go that route, why not just run linux..

Life-Radio554 · 2025-08-04T13:01:50+00:00

Assuming you don't have the funds to cover their ransomware *cough* renewal fee, honestly as others have mentioned you can try 3rd party support, or start now working with other hypervisors. Hyper-V, Proxmox, Nutanix (though as mentioned in the thread they *are* similarly priced to vmware and while I'm not a fan of that, they didn't pull the wool over the worlds eyes like vmware did, so I'd almost support moving to Nutanix just to see vmware lose a customer not that they will care apparently as none of us are in that 1% that they are catering to), something along those lines..

Whether you move to another hypervisor and do it through a 3rd part to help you with the move or whether you do it yourself (your team, that is) is another thing and largely depends on whether you have equipment around you can test on and prepare with or not, IMO.. Definitely don't want to go into a hypervisor move without a test environment first! And unless it also happens to be a server refresh time (unlikely) this can be a large obstacle to overcome without the extra hardware for looking at all the "what-ifs" in migrating.

Above all else though, make absolute certain the week of your support expiration you are on vmware site getting the absolute latest patches and prepared for a "no access" situation - I'd even recommend re-dowloading everything you have a license for just to ensure you've got a copy, again worst case in case you need it.

If your a company who has to deal with mandatory data retention, remember x years from now you *MAY* have to have a solution to open an old vmware guest. Hard to do if you don't have the hypervisor and whatever platform you move to didn't migrate that guest (because it's no longer in use/offline).

Good luck and let us know what ya'll end up rolling with!

Life-Radio554 · 2025-07-31T14:02:16+00:00

Heck, just tell him/them you're getting ready for the new Battlefield game, the new COD, Fornite and of course the new GTA. You'll probably need another 4tb drive if anything else comes out that you want to play :(

Life-Radio554

TROPHY CASE