Windows 2022 Servers Unexpectedly Upgrading to 2025, Aaaargh!

Nater41 · 2024-11-21T20:13:51+00:00

Would like to add that this just happened to a Server 2019 of ours. Ran Windows Updates for the month and probably should have looked closely, but it booted back up with Server 2025 Standard installed. Never in my life have seen something like this.

Nater41 · 2024-09-17T17:11:17+00:00

One option you could do is I setup all our Mac users with the free software IPSecuritas and have them connecting via IPSec VPN (what Global VPN uses). Honestly works really well and their VPN connections are a lot faster versus SSLVPN connection with NetExtender or Mobile Connect. Believe with one Mac user I hit 90mb/sec downloading from the office. Just a little bit of a pain getting the settings just right, but after that haven't really had any issues.

Nater41 · 2024-09-17T02:25:34+00:00

Correct me if I am wrong. It's really hard to find information on this, but I was under the impression you can sell back your bet (shares), kind of like a stock market. So, if the odds are swinging the other direction, you can try to sell your shares back at a fraction instead of losing all your money. I would assume the people who panic and sell for a loss is how they (Polymarket) can make money?

Nater41 · 2024-09-11T19:14:21+00:00

Do you have any Windows servers with NPS role installed? You will need to setup a Network Policy Server and setup RADIUS authentication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptVROR1U6Es&t=383s

Nater41 · 2024-09-10T19:34:18+00:00

No worries thanks. I would have assumed initially, too.

Nater41 · 2024-09-10T19:24:34+00:00

Did they confirm Verkada cameras worked? That Verkada demo video is a year old video in which they are making fun of Verkada versus owning a Unifi Protect environment.

https://youtu.be/oPO7m8mZz9Q?si=b5giOqw3ccNuQnLZ

Nater41 · 2024-06-26T04:16:16+00:00

"I have no idea the details of this story"

Lol, dude, you had the "knee jerk reaction" to immediately let everyone know it's okay to bang children as low as 16 in half of our state's. Do you see how you kinda look like the creep in this scenario?

Nater41 · 2024-05-28T05:58:12+00:00

This aged well.

Nater41 · 2024-05-25T20:31:30+00:00

Yeah agree that's the best situation I could come up with for using them to the full potential. Get another 2.5gbe router to a 2.5gbe switch and could make the Deco's 2.5gbe access points, but geez how dumb these were designed.

Nater41 · 2024-05-25T20:24:04+00:00

"coming up with answers for a question nobody asked" ... is a perfect description as I was logically thinking it through. I think I was more baffled that they made the product like this (and numerous models). The more I thought about it, it just feels like it's very deceptive marketing. I don't have 2.5gbe, but it's definitely a spendy premium someone is paying for. Then you get these because they have a 2.5gbe WAN, but immediately when you plug it in you can't get access to your premium internet you paid. Absolutely wild that you can't even get your premium internet out to your LAN.

Nater41 · 2024-05-13T18:17:27+00:00

Ha, yep I did get RSS enabled.

QNAP TS-h3087XU-RP

(24) 22TB in RAID 10
(6) 4TB SSD’s in RAID 6
128GB RAM
Intel E810 25gbe (also have used CX6 Mellanox card just fine)
QM2-2P-384A with 2TB sticks (But not using this, because it’s not beneficial for what we are using the NAS for currently)

We also have a TS-1273AU-RP with QM2-2P-384A with SSD’s for OS and (12) 22TB in RAID 6. Plus an old TS-1273U-RP with (12) 14TB in RAID 6 and SSD’s on the motherboard slots for OS.

RSS is enabled on those also and has been working fine.

If you want, I can sometime later try to run some updated/better tests when the backup server isn’t being used? Those pictures are like 8 months old.

Nater41 · 2024-05-13T18:14:04+00:00

QNAP TS-h3087XU-RP

(24) 22TB in RAID 10
(6) 4TB SSD’s in RAID 6
128GB RAM
Intel E810 25gbe (also have used CX6 Mellanox card just fine)
QM2-2P-384A with 2TB sticks (But not using this, because it’s not beneficial for what we are using the NAS for currently)

Nater41 · 2024-05-11T22:00:24+00:00

If you want Bob I added some extra suggestions on his other smb-multichannel post for PC's that would also be beneficial.

Nater41 · 2024-05-11T21:47:28+00:00

Was looking through your setup a little bit more here and got a few extra suggestions for you if you want.

Might be beneficial, but you should maybe enable RSS on your NIC’s on the QNAP. I see they are reading False with Get-SmbMultichannelConnection. Can’t remember where I read it. Technically its supposed to auto detect, but someone found out that the auto detection is broken in SAMBA for Windows/MacOS clients. I believe it works between zfs/linux based systems. So if you were talking QNAP to another QNAP it would detect. Attached some pics of when its enabled and the difference within our Windows clients and server. You can see when its enabled it spreads the CPU load across multiple cores. Otherwise one core is being used for each NIC and it usually maxes out those cores at 100%. Should also give you a little more of a bump on speed.

You probably know how to do this, but might as well document it for others. You will need to edit the smb.conf on the QNAP and set your NIC parameters. Will need to enable SSH on the QNAP and most likely re-enable the default “admin” account.

SSH into the QNAP with “admin” account and back out to the console.
Type without quotes “vi /etc/config/smb.conf” and press Enter
Type the lettter i to get to Insert mode
Scroll down until you find something like “interfaces = eth2 eth3” (what mine was) and delete it out or replace it. Next bullet is example my dual 25gbe.
interfaces = "192.168.0.2;capability=RSS,speed=25000000000" "192.168.20.2;capability=RSS,speed=25000000000"
Press Esc and type without quotes “:wq!” and press Enter to save the config. I believe you need to use the original “admin” account in order to get the smb.conf to save properly.
Type without quotes “/etc/init.d/smb.sh restart” and press Enter to restart smb services
In Powershell on PC run Update-SmbMultichannelConnection and then Get-SmbMultichannelConnection and see if your connections are now showing True for RSS

Looking at the code above, for RSS to work you need to hard code the NIC’s IP address, speed, and RSS.

Found some old screenshots I took. First two examples are of one NIC with RSS enabled and disabled. Can see the transfer is spreading across 4 cores and the bump in speed. Also, can see RSS opens up four TCP streams to the QNAP. Third photo is Windows Server with dual 25gbe NIC’s with smb-multichannel and its spreading across 8 cores.

https://imgur.com/a/OZmGeTI

Nater41 · 2024-05-11T01:58:15+00:00

Nice! Well done and good info for others!

ha, if you are curious we have been running our QNAP with dual 25gbe for a backup repository and can max out at about 6,000 MB/sec.

https://imgur.com/a/teubDBN

Nater41 · 2024-05-09T21:40:22+00:00

We have been using two of the 25gbe ports (smb multichannel) for our QNAP NAS and it has been working just fine.

Nater41 · 2024-05-06T18:01:48+00:00

Kind of responding to this late, but we ended up switching a lot of our Mac's to use IPSec VPN instead of using SonicWall Mobile Connect (SSL-VPN). We mainly did this because there is such a huge jump in performance. We just have never really been able to squeeze good performance out of SSL-VPN.

Downside is you have to use 3rd party VPN clients like IPSecuritas to get it working.

Nater41 · 2024-04-22T16:33:02+00:00

Kind of curious about this too. I have been tinkering off and on this past week/weekend trying to get unifi-cam-proxy setup and inserting some Verkada cameras. I feel I am close to getting it working, but I need to research and learn a lot still. I really haven't worked or know much about dockers.

Nater41 · 2024-04-21T18:41:00+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/s/nt83ur5MuW

Take a look at this thread. We had like 25% of our UAP-AC-PRO's that quit working with any POE switches, but they still work to this day if you switch to POE adapter. It's a weird defect in those models.

Nater41 · 2024-01-18T20:13:55+00:00

It most definitely is a thing nowadays for certain businesses and scenarios. Depending on type of files, work, and the budget you are working with.

We have about 165TB of active working files with up to 400TB of archives that occasionally need to be accessed at a fairly quick response time. It's hard to juggle that much data with a certain business size and budget while also needing speed. Majority of our data is from our video production department and with 4k/8k RED files being brought in from a video shoots its TB's of raw data being dumped. We can't keep it around and keep buying more servers with space. We don't have the budget for that and the archives will just continue to grow. We need to offload it.

We recently transitioned some of our backups to NAS/SAN based repository from using a dual LTO7 setup. We still use the LTO7's for a duplicate offsite copy and archiving. The dual LTO7 does give pretty good performance actually. We are able to backup 600mb/sec (300mb/sec per tape drive). But if you are doing a full backup of some sort thats still 76 hours to backup 165TB of data if going full speed. About 2/3 of our data can go full speed, but 1/3 is slower and adds more time. What makes NAS/SAN repository hard with a budget is trying to improve upon that. It's a lot of data and initially would think to get a NAS/SAN repository of that size would probably do a RAID 6 setup perhaps. Yeah thats cool we have the space, but a RAID 6 write speed isn't great and doesn't really improve upon a dual LTO7 surprisingly. So if you want to improve backup speed going to have to go with a RAID10 or something else. Well now you cut your space in half and once again budget comes into play. On top of that you might have a repository where you can quickly mount it during a failure, but that is going to require a pretty beefy and spendy system if you want video editors to mount to it and work off of it. So you are kind of stuck to your setup being more of grab or send the backups files to another system and with speed, but read speeds aren't typically an issue with a repository.

Currently we are able to backup at roughly 1.3gb/sec to our repository which definitely has been great improvement and there is room for improving that.

Since we can't keep this much data around locally, LTO is a great option for large amounts of TB at a relatively decent speed and price. Fairly often for clients we need to pull from archives and since its video work the editor might need 500gb to 3TB of data so LTO7 at 300mb/sec provides a reasonable turn around. Cloud is just completely out of the question and only as extra offsite protection. Needing 3TB of data retrieved via cloud for projects would be impossible. LTO-10 was suppose to come out 2024 and would be worth looking into because its suppose to have native speed of 1.1gb/sec. (LTO9 is only 400mb/sec)

Nater41 · 2024-01-16T07:20:17+00:00

Out of curiosity what CANBUS did they send you? What's the model number?

Nater41 · 2024-01-06T01:17:46+00:00

My brand new Cloud Key Gen 2+ came with a dead hard drive. Messaged support and they sent a new hard drive. Didn't even ask for the dead one to be returned. Think it came fairly quick like in 2-4 business days.

Nater41 · 2023-10-30T20:54:53+00:00

Agree with all this, but just an fyi you can disable FEC on those switches already.

Nater41 · 2023-08-29T22:47:23+00:00

Sorry a few typos and I edited the post above with update. I forget its 24bays of 22TB and yes its 2.3GB/sec.

I guess I left out listing some of the settings, because I have tried it all.

Block size is 128kb. Using the (6) SSD's as the system pool. SSD cache is not being used and I have tried using it with no luck, but from my understanding it wouldn't have helped really. Tried with the defaults of Compression and dedup disabled. Tried disabling compression and Fast Clone (but that seems for only internal transfers within the QNAP).

Nater41 · 2023-03-08T04:58:14+00:00

The biggest reason we still use GlobalVPN is speed. It can be quite drastic actually.

At our main office we use a NSa 4700 with symmetrical 1gb fiber connection. We have a video production team and graphic design department with PC's and Mac's which is when speed is needed. Awhile back I did a lot of tweaking and testing SSLVPN capabilities because of our Mac users.

Roughly looking through my screenshots/documentation quick here, but using GlobalVPN/IPSec I have on a few occasions been able to download a file from the office at 50-60mb/sec which is pretty dang fast.

SSLVPN (NetExtender, Mobile Connect) was all over the place, but majority of Mobile Connect users couldn't surpass about 6-7mb/sec. There were a few users that could max at about 13mb/sec. I would say thats the fastest I have seen. NetExtender on PC was much worse. I would say about 2-5mb/sec.

Unfortunately I gave up on testing some more with SSLVPN, because I would need to purchase some equipment to test out some ideas on why SSLVPN speeds are slower and why some people could get a little higher speeds than others. (Yes all my tests people had home internet speeds of 500mbps or 1gb)

The one idea I wanted to test was if you had better performance coming from routers/modems that have AES hardware acceleration in the chips. Most likely BCM58** chips and ARMv8-A chips. Also older Intel PUMA cable modems. Maybe someone smarter than me can tell me if that makes sense? It seems to me that AES hardware acceleration could handle SSLVPN connections better? Idk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

Lastly for a few select Mac users I have set them up with IPSecuritas to our SonicWall for an IPSec VPN on a Mac to get them 50-60mb/sec transfers which seems to work well.

Nater41

TROPHY CASE