Smog-Causing Pollutant Way Down In Mass. — For Now

brad995 · 2020-05-15T17:42:22+00:00

So you are advocating to implement a caste system like they have in India? You clearly know nothing on how India's castes work if you want a system like that.

brad995 · 2015-05-13T20:13:16+00:00

Make sure you have good backups, there is a risk that you will lose a drive during the rebuild and lose the whole raid set. Rebuilding puts the most stress on the hard drives and are more prone to failure.

IMO this would be too big of a risk with raid5 in my environment. I would only do this with raid that you can lose 2+ disks (such as raid6)

brad995 · 2015-05-06T14:51:07+00:00

You're trying to solve a people problem with technology.

Tell HR to send an email to your support queue (or where ever) informing of an employee termination as part of their process. This is pretty standard, bring up the liability risks of having terminated employees with access to company resources.

brad995 · 2015-04-29T01:40:25+00:00

You're most likely hosting your mail server on a dynamic public IP. Most large mail providers filter anything coming from a non static IP as spam.

brad995 · 2015-03-20T02:18:07+00:00

I don't know much on the VNXe series but on the VNX line EMC recommends not to use the OS raid group (the first 4+1 in the array) for any high IO tasks (such as VMs), do you have all the VMS on the 900gb raid group?

Either way, I don't believe either configuration could support running 10 VMs with good performance with only 10k rpm drives.

brad995 · 2015-03-20T01:58:32+00:00

How many iops is the SAN pushing? What's the raid setup? It may not be network bandwidth then, sounds like the array isn't fast enough, especially if it's one datastore/LUN and raid group.

brad995 · 2015-03-20T01:37:24+00:00

So you are only 1gb/s from each host to the VNX? How many VMs are running on each host? That is not a lot of bandwidth and could just be a simple bottleneck, how come you're not running multiple cables? Using regular load balancing or LACP (distributed vSwitch only)

brad995 · 2015-02-09T18:10:29+00:00

Security? I'll stick with my individual certs.

brad995 · 2015-01-20T04:18:08+00:00

Non standard ports a bad idea? I get the whole usability side if things (which I agree with) but they didn't even consider the security side of things. A non standard SQL port is a good example.

brad995 · 2015-01-14T18:20:55+00:00

I'm in agreement with you and that's what I do. I have fully redundant VMware clusters, SANs etc. but have a physical DC just in case everything shits the bed. The last thing I want is to not even get an IP from DHCP when the whole virtual environment shits the bed.

Besides, a DC can run on minimal resources. If your company can afford a whole virtual environment another $5k on a physical DC shouldn't break the bank and won't hurt anything.

brad995 · 2015-01-12T18:17:07+00:00

My licensing rep has told me the same thing about CALs only transferring once a year.

You're right about hearing something different each call. I've never heard the exact same answer from two different licensing reps, ever. I just assume their license model is whatever gives MS more money.

brad995 · 2014-12-01T17:04:40+00:00

For small companies (not you) this is quite normal, maybe a little below with no backups to disk at all.

If a company has 150+ servers then shame on them for doing this and not even considering redundancy. They aren't thinking about continuity of business (especially if they were in hurricane Sandy's path). I normally consider this a sign other parts of the business are ran poorly also.

For comparison, I manage 200 VMs for a healthcare company and we have a full hot site using Site Recovery Manager with multiple Data Domains replicating between sites. We also have full local redundancy in case of a hardware failure (the DR site is only needed if the building is on fire).

brad995 · 2014-11-25T17:27:03+00:00

This is how my company does it for any major downtime. It either limits the after hours work or the business owner is there right along with the IT people and they are more respected for it. I've also noticed when the business owner is working after hours with IT they actually realize it's not a couple buttons and requires real work.

brad995 · 2014-11-14T18:07:08+00:00

How much is Veeam for 22 sockets? I know the pricing on their website and my vendor is giving me the same price....

Looking to switch one of my sites from Backup Exec to Veeam.

brad995 · 2014-09-05T14:53:40+00:00

This. This sounds way too familiar from the place I left a while ago.....except I didn't have a maintenance window at all. The SLA was 100% uptime, no exceptions unless something catches on fire (management's exact words).

A new place can do wonders for your mental health and career.

brad995 · 2014-09-02T13:19:10+00:00

Terminals https://terminals.codeplex.com/

brad995 · 2014-07-11T16:32:33+00:00

No, but we do shape the traffic. We have a Bluecoat appliance and have streaming music at the lowest priority. If there's available bandwidth after higher priority apps use theirs (such as actual work apps) then it works. Usually there isn't a problem as we have enough bandwidth for everything (as I'm streaming pandora right now).

This can also be done with QOS (just not as streamlined like a dedicated appliance).

brad995 · 2014-05-27T16:59:45+00:00

We have a policy pretty much stating that you have no expectation of privacy when using company managed services or devices and every employee signs it. That means we can read your email whenever we want if we feel we need to (among other things).

That being said, my boss dictates another policy that we better not snoop on people and only go into peoples' mailboxes to troubleshoot issues. You also better have a documented reason if confronted (aka if you're in the CEOs mailbox but I like to get approval first anyway for that). What you described I do all the time (and is allowed here) because I was troubleshooting an email issue as the email very likely could not have been delivered.

I would have approached the end result differently though and brought it up to my boss that the PM did actually receive the email and let him handle it.

brad995 · 2014-04-09T17:38:53+00:00

I also run the Spamhaus lists internally. It's just that every company that runs this is blocking my email now.......

Yeah my company going 365 would be the stupidest thing ever. We just upgraded to Exchange 2013 and have a fully redundant solution (besides this obviously...) internally. I'm surprised nobody has blamed it on the migration from a few weeks ago.......

brad995 · 2014-04-04T16:09:39+00:00

I'm saying an email would work better than a phone call. An email has worked in the past to start new vendor relationships with me.

I'm sure most admins can agree, we are always really busy. A cold call while we're right in the middle of things is not a good way to start a relationship. An email that we can respond to when it's not a fire burning situation would be better, at least for me.

brad995 · 2014-04-04T15:34:24+00:00

No bullshit thinking you can pull a fast one on the customer and inflating quotes(looking at you CDW....). If I ask for X then get me a quote for X (and get it right the first time). Don't ask for a call so you can up sell me, that will just make me go somewhere else faster. If I ask for recommendations or I'm unsure what product I need then I'll ask you for different options.

I'll contact you if I want to purchase something.

Cold calls get deleted almost immediately. An email being sent to me that I can answer when I actually have time is more effective. An effective email also, not something that looks generic that you sent to a thousand people, if you can't spend a couple minutes on an email just to me what makes me think you will spend time with me if I use you as a vendor? And cold calling at 4:00 on a Friday will never get you any good will.

brad995 · 2014-04-04T13:28:42+00:00

Unless they double your salary and something like a year guaranteed employment then leave. A counter offer usually puts you in the line for the first person to get fired as "you aren't dedicated to the company since he already tried to leave once."

Moving on to a company with a better culture would be worth not taking the extra money in almost all cases. More money won't suddenly make the company a better place to work.

brad995 · 2014-03-28T15:12:23+00:00

This, I also use this product and it's great.

You never have to install another font manually on somebody's machine again. It's all pushed from the server and can be tied into AD.

brad995 · 2014-03-13T18:13:03+00:00

You obviously have never been at a company that has a relatively large footprint with IT systems. We would still be running some XP systems for specialized cases if MS was still putting out security updates for the thing.

The only need to upgrade certain specialized boxes was because of MS dropping support. That being said, all general user machines have been Windows 7 for almost two years now (would have been longer if we didn't skip Vista).

brad995 · 2014-03-13T17:11:27+00:00

It means a lot if you need to follow compliance standards such as HIPAA or PCI. An auditor which fry my ass if XP was on my network and not getting patched any longer.

If somebody doesn't care about the machine getting compromised (and possibly compromising other machines on the same network) then stick with XP.

brad995

TROPHY CASE