Posts by J. Cook 1195 posts • joined 16 Jul 2007
*gloats at being able to restore files off an LTO1 tape once a drive and machine and software were found for it.*
If it's important, back it up to multiple places, on different types of media.
(bring on the downvotes- You know I'm right about tapes!)
I've used Notes (casually, and largely as a tech doing installs and troubleshooting). I've used Groupwise back during the Netware 4.x / 5.0 days. I've used Outlook in all it's forms; We'll leave Outlook Express (later renamed to simple "Mail" for win10) out of this discussion.
They all that their good points, and at some level, they all suck various amounts of goat urine.
While I've never used the back-end of Notes and Groupwise, I imagine they are on the same level as Exchange.
I've yet to work with any application that does what those products do nearly as well and with that level of integration.
*nods sadly*
At [RedactedCo], we have some spreadsheets that our finance department uses that pulls in data from multiple sources, folds spindles, and mutilates it into a format that the analytical accountants can read through. Back in the early windows XP/7 days, we had to fit several of the computers that used these spreadsheets with more memory, because excel took all of it.
Part of the problem with the Foxconn deal in wisconsin was that the state gave them some monsterous tax offsets, and behaved pretty poorly in other ways. (like claiming eminent domain on some of the properties in the way of where the factory was going to be built, which included houses- that's not what that's for) And Foxconn kept changing it's position and scope of what they were going to build after they got those incentives...
I'm hoping my state didn't do the same thing.
If the DHCP server (windows, 'nix, etc.) doesn't support HA, you split the damn scope, like the best practices state. It's not that hard.
FWIW, Server 2012 R2's DHCP server does support HA, although it takes a bit of effort to set it up.
And also. LABEL THY PRODUCTION SERVERS. Even if it means you print a label out of paper and cellotape it to the front of the server.
[RedactedCo] uses it for two things: security (drive-by malware and phishing mostly, but overall security) and 'productivity enhancement' (i.e., keeping people from looking at social media sites (aka facebook, instagram, snapchat), pulling down content of no business value (i.e. porn, torrents, pirated software, etc.) or other things that the business deems necessary.
Obvious bias: I'm the owner of [RedactedCo]'s content security applications, which is ironic because I despite censorship in all it's forms; I can see why the business needs an internet filter, though.
It gets worse; that crap is also part of the windows 10 enterprise edition, which pretty much requires the company paying a pallet of money to microsoft every year.
We don't need the Xbox live services on our company's laptops. But we can't remove them because they are somehow baked deep into the OS, and are therefore non-removable. About hte best we can do is disable the services entirely.
Thankfully, we were able to use a Group Policy to shut off a lot of the other annoyances with windows 10.
.... is trusting Citrix to not break functionality within the netscaler between x.y.z releases; We went from 10.x to 10.8 or something a number of years ago, and it utterly trashed the remote access functionality bad enough that we had to rebuild it from scratch.
And for whatever reason, the virtual appliance won't let you do simple things like expand the /var partition to hold more logs, so one has to go through and manually clean out the logs folder on the regular in order to get access to the GUI again...
We went back to F5s and have'nt looked back, except to remember how shitty the netscalers were for anything outside of simple layer 3 load balancing.
THIS:
When [RedactedCo] originally built it's main data center, each cabinet that held a core switch also had a set of fiber and copper interconnects between it and the various server cabinets. For some reason, one of the fiber interconnect sets was 'value-engineered' out, so as a result, we ended up with a moderate quantity of extra long fiber patches going from the single LIU under the floor to the other cabinet with the core switch.
Attempts at fixing it over the years has been shot down every time during budgeting, because the business doesn't want to drop roughly 20 thousand usd on fixing it right and for good.
Then there was the incident with the backhoe that severed the one of the backbone fiber bundles for one of the buildings, because putting in direct burial rated fiber was also one of the things that was value engineered out. That did get fixed properly, and at twice the cost of what doing it right originally was...
Or even sooner, depending on the environment they are in. the "M-Tape" labels are even worse as far as their ability to stay stuck to things. The ones I applied fell off within six months of application. :(
I'm not certain what model we have at [RedactedCo]; They've held up well enough for us for the labeling we've done, although when we swapped core switches last year we used plain old beige masking tape and red sharpie to label stuff prior to moving things around. I do know that it's a specialized one specifically designed to creating cable labels.
Yes, but the 8.1 / Server 2012 R2 OS doesn't require constant contact with microsoft, a raft of telemetry problems that can't be turned off, and oh yeah, random updates that break stuff, random apps that just decide to roll over and die* with MS's tier 3 team's response being "oh, you'll need to do a full bare metal rebuild and hope it doesn't happen again", oh yeah, and forced updates/upgrades regardless if you like it or not.
I'll take the funky UI of 2012R2 / windows 8.1 over that any day, every day. the OS core is solid, reliable, and understood well enough that I can get around the stupid UI issues incurred by trying to overlay a mobile interface on a desktop machine.
What apps I do use are all 'classic/legacy' apps- none of that Metro crap.
* Seriously- the CALCULATOR app is a 'Modern' app, and in multiple cases at [RedactedCo], would randomly break for our users, with nothing short of a full bare metal re-image correcting it, which was Tier 3's response after a lot of troubleshooting with MS support... You know it's bad when the god level support tier can't figure out why one of their own apps (which should be a stupidly simple thing) decides to crap it's pants at random.
Hell, I'm actively pondering a copy of 8.1 or Server 2012 R2 for my workstation when the install of 7 on it finally rolls over. (unless someone's figure out how to port full graphics capabilities through to a VM running on kvm or virtualbox or something.)
... and a number of them would break when the termination error got fixed by someone trying to be helpful. :)
Based on what was described in the article, I'm going to suppose it was a very, very specific timing issue with the various I/O buses and the SCSI card.
SCSI was and still is considered voodoo if you are putting gear from different vendors on the same bus. Thankfully, we are largely past that in this modern day and age.
... which is why I don't do multi-player, unless it's co-op or player vs environment (PvE) rather than player vs player (PvP). getting killed within 5 seconds of starting by someone who's playing in adult diapers and an IV feed of caffiene who's doing it for the lulz because they are waiting for their ultra-super-mega hardcore raid to start makes me want to box the game back up and demand a refund.
I can understand it. a lot of AD instances didn't need or have internet access at the time, and using .local was an accepted practice. (yes, I am talking about win2K to server 2003R2/2008)
We recently did a windows 10 migration and implemented Skype for business on-prem; the contractor we hired to assist with both was gobsmacked that we were still using .local for our upns. (granted, it's a simple change to make, but there's some planning and forethought that has to happen before doing a bulk change like that.)
Besides, how many users are still logging in with DOMAIN\username or just username? More than you might think.
... and prior to Lync, it was OCS (Office Communicator Suite)2007/2010...
Skype for Business is based on the same source code and has the same complex architecture.
Part of me wishes that we had paid the Cisco tax and gone to Jabber - it certainly integrates better with Call Manager and (rumor has it) slightly easier to set up and maintain...
THIS TIMES INFINITY.
I mean, HA and DRS ain't worth a lick if the guest OS craps itself because the cluster manager wants it on a different host.
(They also react very very poorly to their storage dropping out from underneath it, too- Ask me how I know.)
*wanders off grumbling and muttering curses at ISE*
Remember, these are the same chuckleheads that thought putting a full-featured scripting engine into a document viewer intended for rendering postscript on a computer instead of a printer with zero thought or planning about the security implications surrounding it was a good idea...
(No, I'm not letting that one go. Ever.)
At least M$ decided to not change the settings for LDAP Channel binding and LDAP signing, which would have definitely been a 'hair on fire' emergency on the scale (or worse) of the infamous CredSSP Encryption oracle fix.
https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security-guidance/advisory/ADV190023
Apparently, enough large companies complained loudly enough to their TAMS and other high ups within Microsoft, so while it's still good security practice, they decided to not break stuff with this patch update. Either that, or someone in the update chain is learning that Breaking Stuff In the Name of Security is not necessarily a good thing.
... I read one story (don't know if it's true or not) of some guy answering the door for a couple of holy solicitors glad only in underwear, a rather large python, with both of them covered with oil.
While I'm not going to try anything like that stunt, (or answering the door naked for that matter) I'll cheerfully mess with people's heads if they are being aggressive with their proselytizing.
Now where did I put that ceremonial kris and the goat skull....
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