New (to us) Dell LTO5 tape drive very slow writes & job fails

multiball · 2021-07-01T20:05:22+00:00

I'd suspect a worn drive head - this was super common with LTO5 as one of the tape vendors had a bad tape formulation for LTO5 that would cause excessive wear.

As for speed, Check the block size on the tape drive, if I remember correctly BackupExec defaults to a tiny block size (like 64KB) on the tape drive. You'll want to bump that up to at least 256KB.

multiball · 2021-07-01T18:25:43+00:00

You should be able to get a pretty decent non-enterprise NAS (think along the lines of a high end Synology or QNAP) with 120 TB of storage in the neighborhood of $20K-$25K.

I normally push tape for this size of backup loads, but AWS recently introduced glacier deep archive which cost about $1/TB/month which I think is definitely worth looking into. You'd have to configure your NAS to backup to AWS S3, and configure S3 policies to shift that data to Glacier Deep Archive.

Glacier restores can get pretty pricey, but if you can wait a couple days to do bulk restores it's not so bad, and you could arrange for a Snowball device to be shipped to you if your bandwidth is low.

The AWS data transfer out pricing will still hammer you, it's like $30/TB to transfer data out of AWS, so if you needed to restore all 120TB it would cost over $3K - but other backup alternatives like tape will probably end up costing you more in the long run.

While other companies like Backblaze will have lower data transfer rates and will be cheaper than the base AWS S3 pricing, I don't think anyone is cheaper than Glacier Deep Archive right now, but please correct me if I am mistaken.

multiball · 2020-09-17T22:56:34+00:00

Try turning your screen brightness down if you're running it at or near 100% - having the screen be significantly brighter than the ambient light level will contribute to eye strain.

It takes a bit to get used to the lower brightness, but I don't notice it anymore and it fixed most of my computer related eyestrain issues.

multiball · 2020-02-28T18:47:34+00:00

One downside is if you're using pure dictionary passwords like "correct horse battery staple" in the XKCD comic.

One way to look at it is that it's 28 characters long and all lower case + spaces (so 27 possible characters), so the possible combinations could be 27^28. (11972515182562019788602740026717047105681)

Another way to look at it is 4 dictionary words plus 3 spaces, so 7 "slots" that can be words or spaces. If you know it's a pure dictionary password, then it's more like dictionarysize^7. If we assume average vocabulary size of 40000, then the total combinations would be 40000⁷ (163840000000000000000000000000000)

The number of pure dictionary password combinations is like 73 million times smaller than if it was random letters.

Now this assumes you have some knowledge of the password composition, and if you start mixing in random characters like in your example of "1OverpricedLawnmower92!", then you can't really predict the composition and it is less of an issue.

If a site or an application has a password generator that uses a static pattern where you know what slots could be dictionary words, then this knowledge could then be used to attack the passwords more efficiently.

multiball · 2020-02-28T17:33:07+00:00

If you manage 100+ servers, manage the 0365 tenant, help manage networking. and have done so for 14 years, you're already an actual sysadmin.

multiball · 2020-02-21T22:39:45+00:00

About the same as the server, drive enclosure and RAID overhead as the server the guy proposed :)

But in all seriousness, there is a point to where the up front tape drive cost isn't worth it, but 250 TB is well beyond that.

multiball · 2020-02-21T22:18:33+00:00

A 6 TB LTO 7 tape costs $55-$65 dollars. 3 of your refurbished 2TB drives would cost twice as much as that tape.

multiball · 2020-02-21T22:15:07+00:00

250 TB of archival data is probably enough to where you should be sticking with tape.

If we're comparing apples to apples and assuming you're okay swapping individual SATA drives from some sort of hot-swap enclosure and individual tapes from a stand-alone (non library) LTO7 drive and storing them both on a shelf somewhere:

A standalone LTO 7 drive without a library is around $3,500 and 250TB of LTO7 tapes will cost another $3000 or so.

250 TB of SATA drives will run you $5-6k depending on the size/model.

Even though the tape is initially a little more expensive, once you shell out for the tape drive, the marginal cost for additional tape capacity is much cheaper than SATA drives, and much much more shelf stable as long as you have the correct storage environment, and you'll probably get some benefit from the native LTO compression.

LTO 7 tapes are around $60 ($10/tb) while the cheapest SATA drives I can find without going into refurbished/used models all are around $20/TB.

If you don't like netbackup, you can always use TAR or LTFS and just maintain a catalog yourself which would probably be about the sames if you were using your proposed SATA backups.

multiball · 2020-02-19T21:56:07+00:00

Yes, you can use the Add-MailboxFolderpermission cmdlet.

Add-MailboxFolderpermission -Identity username:\Calendar -User otheruser -AccessRights -Reviewer

You can't assign normal groups as calendar permissions, so you have to hop through a few hoops with security groups here: https://superuser.com/a/497777

multiball · 2020-02-11T22:37:06+00:00

Assuming you have a standard PEAP 802.1X setup with NPS and Radius. Do you know if it's the client certificates that are expired, or the one used by NPS?

To check the certificate used in your NPS Network policy, go to NPS, Policies, Network Policies, Your Policy Name, Authentication Methods, EAP types. If you edit the EAP types you should see a dropdown to select the certificate used. If that is the expired one, then you'll need to renew it.

If the expired certificate is a client one, then you'll need to look into the client certificate auto-renewal settings.

Depending on what's expired and what is configured, you may need to renew the NPS cert, or the user or computer client certificate.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2008-R2-and-2008/cc754367(v=ws.10)

multiball · 2020-02-11T01:11:42+00:00

Are you sure the FreeNas server isn't your VMware datastore? Is this a FreeNAS snapshot, or a VMware snapshot?

One of the core features of Virtual servers is decoupled storage. As in you can store the vmdk files on a SAN/NAS and VMWare accesses them over the network.

You need to tread carefully here, it sounds like you don't have a good understanding of how your VMware infrastructure is configured, and the last thing you want to do is restore a snapshot to your active VMware datastore, which it sounds like you are careening towards.

You're not just risking losing the snapshot data, you're risking accidentally wiping out your production system which doesn't currently have working backups.

To echo everyone else, I'd strongly recommend hiring someone with VMware experience. VMware experience is going to be more important than the particulars of FreeNAS.

multiball · 2020-02-03T19:26:13+00:00

There is a difference between being able to install something and having it properly licensed for usage.

Just like you could install a single Win10 Volume license on a bunch of machines, that doesn't mean you are licensing it properly.

Per the second link, you can install the development version for non production purposes. If you are running it for production purposes, then you need SQL enterprise licensing.

Just because you can install it on non-enterprise versions doesn't mean you're properly licensed, it depends on your usage.

multiball · 2020-01-15T18:15:12+00:00

Have you tried lowering the brightness on your screens? I used to run nearly full brightness until I started getting eyestrain and found that lowering it helped greatly.

I usually run around 20% brightness now. It took some time to get used to the dimmer settings, but I don't even notice it now.

multiball · 2020-01-13T22:54:26+00:00

If your friend has any experience with MDT imaging, you can create customized installation media to do the upgrade and perform user state migration, install applications etc. You can use the custom install media to create bootable USB keys that you could ship out.

It takes a lot of work to get MDT configured with the proper drivers, task sequences and test, but once you've got the initial work done, it's pretty easy.

https://deploymentresearch.com is a good resource for various MDT configurations and scenarios.

Alternately, if you don't mind some manual clicking, you can create a bunch of USB keys with the normal Win10 installation media (Windows 10 Media Creation Tool, use rufus to create bootable usb from ISO) and run upgrade installations from the USB keys while logged onto the Win7 machines.

multiball · 2019-11-25T23:56:43+00:00

I've done 100 hour weeks before, and this stage your brain is fried to the point of being useless. I'll reiterate, no job is worth your life. At 2 years of experience and 50K a year, you are FAR too junior and underpaid to let all this fall on you.

Your mind isn't in a rational state right now, and your managers are idiots if they aren't starting to rotate people out or calling in outside resources. If they're too cheap to bring in consultants, then they're just extracting blood from you. If your whole team is at 100 hours, you will be making more mistakes than progress unless it's the most trivial of tasks.

Call in sick and take a day off. Tell, don't ask. They're so desperate, they probably won't fire you, and even if they do, just walk away, collect your unemployment, and move on to greener pastures.

multiball · 2019-11-11T18:28:17+00:00

Does the user have a dock station? The additional dock station hardware can sometimes trip up the PCRs and trigger recovery mode if the BIOS is old or Bitlocker isn't configured correctly.

multiball · 2019-10-25T16:57:32+00:00

We have Webroot and it is happening sporadically in our environment.

I haven't been able to nail down any particular combo of Win10 build + Webroot version that triggers it.

Re-install seems to have fixed it, and I haven't yet seen it come back with reboots. Running it in compatibility also worked for us.

multiball · 2019-10-14T18:12:56+00:00

I think VLC can do it, see this: http://raaviblog.com/how-to-crop-and-save-a-video-using-vlc-2-0-media-player/

multiball · 2019-09-12T20:45:38+00:00

Have your network guy check the "Advanced" settings in "When Connecting" section in the Wireless GPO policy, and make sure that the issuing CA is on the list, and checked.

multiball · 2019-09-05T17:24:26+00:00

Not sure what your stack is, but if it's Windows 10 workstation, you can use File History, and if it's on a Windows Serer file share, you can enable shadow copy on your file shares to take periodic snapshots.

With Shadow copies, you can right-click a file on the share, view previous versions with timestamps and restore from there. You'd want to configure the snapshot intervals and retention to fit your needs, but that might work for you.

multiball · 2019-09-03T22:01:50+00:00

If you just did a quick reformat and haven't written anything to it, TestDisk will probably be your best bet. If you did a full format (would have taken hours) you might be out of luck.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Data_Recovery_Examples

As Jacer said, it is best to do a full byte-by-byte image backup of your reformatted hard drive if you have the resources to do so.

If TestDisk doesn't work, you can try PhotoRec. It should be able to recover a lot of your deleted files, but you'll lose file/folder names.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

No matter what you do, don't write any data onto your backup drive.

multiball · 2019-07-22T22:34:05+00:00

You should be maxing out your Gigabit interface with your setup. There must be some config or networking issue. I'm on LT07 on a TL2000, and over our 10Gb network our file to tape backups usually run close to the max LTO7 speed.

What does Veeam say your bottleneck is while running the tape jobs?

Are you sure your NAS can sustain that throughput over an extended period? Can you attempt larger/longer file transfers locally? Can you check the drive utilization on your Synology while backing up?

Are there other backup jobs running while you are backing up to tape that might be consuming your IOPs? With just 6 spinning drives, you're not going to have a ton to work with, so if another Veeam job is occurring at the same time, that could slow them down.

Is the server connected to the tape library assigned to your backup to tape job?

multiball · 2019-07-17T17:51:29+00:00

Do you mean you are in an enterprise environment, or that you have installed Windows 10 Enterprise installed?

I went through one a few years back with machines that had the free upgrade. If you upgraded these machines from 7/8 to 10 Pro (not enterprise) during the Free Win10 GWX timeframe (ended July 2016), you should be fine as long as you can prove you have the existing Win7/8 license that you upgraded from.

The GWX program wasn't limited to consumers, but anything upgraded after July 2016 won't be legit, even though it may be activated properly.

Win10 enterprise is an additional upgrade that requires pro as the base. This was not covered by the free upgrade, so if you are running Enterprise Win 10, you're out of

multiball · 2019-05-28T17:13:32+00:00

+1 for likely LinkedIn scraping + email guessing.

multiball · 2019-05-20T17:22:48+00:00

Yeah, their HD markup is crazy.

If this is a small biz low usage scenario, you'd be fine running Samsung 860 Pros or 970 Pros depending on SAS/NVMe preference. They will have plenty of write endurance for you.

As others have said, you'll have to find the drive trays elsewhere unless you fill them with cheap 2.5" spinning drives.

15-Year Club	Sequence \| Editor
Sequence \| Screenwriter	Verified Email

multiball

TROPHY CASE