Mellanox is a solid networking company with many years of experience in HPC and clustering. Nvidia with Mellanox interconnects are running on half of the world top 500 supercomputers and Nvidia recently bought them, outbidding Intel and others.

FS is a solid manufacturing company but not at all the same type of company.

If I'm looking for switches, I'd be looking at Mellanox for sure. FS for cables though.

I was also under the impression that most datacenters are going from 10/40GbE to 25/100GbE and leaving 40GbE behind.

@kamidon said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

@Dashrender said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

@kamidon said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

@krisleslie said in Spec'ing a new computer from Dell or?:

some of the systems they sell can come with 4-8 GB of RAM and NOT give you an option to add more ram (intentionally) because they removed the slot! So if you want brand new, BE WISE AND READ!

This sort of crap pisses me off.
This and: "Oh you want the i5? Well that only comes with 8GB of RAM sorry, you need to order the i7 to get the 16GB of RAM. Evil laugh ensues (probably)

yeah - I agree with that.

Sadly - sometimes it's due to the fact that they are trying for SUPER thin and SUPER light.. so making things modular costs both thickness and weight.

Yeah I get that, but I'm talking about the same model. A great example is the Latitude series, Dell does this crap with their different builds.
i7 and i5 latitudes are the same shape and size. It's literally the same chassis.

The whole i5/i7 is just a bunch of marketing that creates confusion. There is no real difference between i5 and i7 on mobile CPUs. Usually the i7 can run on a slightly higher clock frequency so it's about 10-15% faster when pushed. Which is not enough for the user to actually notice.

So it's better to take the i5, save a bunch of $$$ and buy memory for that instead. Seeing Dell selling new laptops in 2019 with spinning rust and 4GB RAM - that should be criminal.

BTW, if you truly need speed you should go with one of the workstation or gaming laptops. They have a different, faster category of CPU. Higher TDP compared to the everyday laptops (45W versus 15W). But still slow compared to the desktop CPUs, which should be the choice for speed.

Where can I learn more about how to use SSL certs in general and how setup up a CA and then SSL cert for intranet sites in particular? And also intranet sites that have split DNS (are both local and external)? In an linux environment.

I don't know enough about how SSL certs work as we for most part deal with intranet sites that are http only.

I know that many of you deal with these things on a regular basis.

@biggen
What happens if you just install it with the default partitioning (everything in one partition)?

1000 TB of storage is a lot. But if you think about it it's 62.5 x 16TB of usable storage.

So say 70 drives. That's 84 drives in RAID6. Probable divided up in a number of arrays but just to get a feel for how many drives you need.

84 drives is not a terrible amount. You can get 36 3.5" drives in 4U on a standard server. So 3 servers or 12U, that's just 1/3 of a rack. If you use SSDs it will be more compact and much higher performance but way more expensive.

So the question is not really hardware but how the storage is supposed to be used, performance criteria and how you should manage it.

Sound like this is something you go to Dell EMC to get a quote on and then to the bank to get a loan.

NTFS is utf-16. All characters are allowed in filenames on NTFS, except reserved characters like
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)
and chr(0) to chr(31).

If the backup system can't handle all allowed characters in a filename, then that is the problem that needs to be fixed.

There is no such a thing as unprintable characters. Just need the right font that has that character defined.

This is screenshot from Windows showing valid file and folder names:

In our case I'm thinking about two options.

OPTION 1
We'll put together a backup server with a large-ish disk array (maybe 100TB or so) connected with SAS to a tape autoloader. Backups go from backup clients to the disk array and when done it's all streamed to tape. The tapes are exchanged and put off-line. Each week a full backup of disks are taken off-site as well.

To keep the networks separated as far as possible we can put the backup server on it's own hardware and it's own network and firewall it off from the production servers. So if production servers or VM hosts are breached the backup server is still intact. If somehow it's also compromised we have to restore everything from tape.

OPTION 2
We put a smaller backup array, say 10TB or so, on each physical VM host. Backups are run on each host from the production VMs to the backup VM with the backup array. Remember our VMs are running on local storage so this will not require any network traffic.

When done, we stream the data from each backup VM to a "tape backup"-server that just basically contains the tape drive (with autoloader) and will write the data to tape. Firewall and tape handling will be the same as option 1. Since the disks with the backups are on each host, several backup servers have to be breached to lose all disk backups.

What do you think?

@PhlipElder said in Backup strategy for customer data?:

How many tapes in the library?
How many briefcases to take off-premises for rotations?
Where is the brain trust to manage the tapes, their backup windows, and whether the correct tape set is in the drives?
If the tape libraries are elsewhere then the above goes away to some degree (distance comes into play).

A 2U high autoloader will have two magazines with 12 tape slots in each. With LTO-8 tapes that means 720TB of data (2.5:1 compression) in one batch without switching any tapes. 24 tapes will fit in one briefcase so not much of a logistical problem. If you go up to a 3U unit it will hold 40 tapes and I think that might fit in one briefcase as well.

Tapes have barcodes that the autoloader will scan so that's how the machine know which tape is the right one.

If you are going to swap several tapes at once, you can get additional magazines that holds the tape and just swap the entire magazine. For daily incremental backups you can swap one tape at a time - if you have less than 30 TB of data change per day.

You can also monitor that tapes have been replaced so you could set up that as a prerequisite for starting the next daily backup. We'll just have to see how long things take and how much data we need to backup on average before putting procedures in place.

I haven't actually used tape since the late 90s so it will be exiting testing this. For off-line storage and archival storage the specs are just so much better than harddrives. Bit error is 1 in 10^19 bits (enterprise HDDs are 1 in 10^15). That's actually 10,000 times better than HDDs. And 30 years of archival properties.

200 Mbps is not bad. I'd be happy with that.
You'll probably find out that the speed will vary a lot from day to day and hour to hour.

Best performance will be when you use the same ISP and are physically close.
It's also possible that the ISP will throttle your connection automatically depending on what port/protocol it sees. If so then running on another port sometime gets around that.

Shouldn't the first question be - how big are your pipes?

Then - how much of that will run over IPsec?

And - what features do you need?

@JasGot
If you use something like Firefox you can use url modifying add-ons.
This one for instance called URLRedirector looks like it will do the trick.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/urlredirector/
(github)

I'm sure there are others that will do a similar job.
Maybe this one as well:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

@scottalanmiller said in How do I install gparted on RHEL 7.7 with GUI?:

GParted is not part of RHEL itself. But it is available from the EPEL.

yum install epel-release -y

Then you can install GParted.

yum install gparted -y

It didn't work to install epel-release like that because it couldn't find it. But with the info you gave me I managed to find this which had info on RHEL 7.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL#How_can_I_use_these_extra_packages.3F

So I did:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
subscription-manager repos --enable "rhel-7-optional-rpms" --enable "rhel-7-extras-rpms" 

And then I could install the gparted package. Thanks!

Is it possible to remotely activate rdp on Windows 10 Enterprise?

I don't remember for sure but I think it's rdp sessions are disabled by default.

However when it comes to envelopes, the obvious question should be to ask - why print on envelopes?

Why not use envelopes with windows instead?
It much faster.

Or a small label printer and use labels instead?
Also faster, especially when doing many envelopes.

The real reason for virtualization is to lower cost.

Instead of having 10 real servers, you use 1 real server and put 10 virtual servers on it. Sure that 1 server is a bigger, more expensive server but not 10 times as much.

If it wasn't cheaper, it wouldn't have been used as much.

I'd turn a request into an investigation instead.

Investigate how they work and with what kind of files. Look at what they are doing today. Speak with the people doing the actual work, not managers. Look at servers to see how much storage they use today and what they think they want to do. Maybe they need to edit video in other formats in the near future that are much more demanding. Not only storage but also bandwidth requirements. Calculate yourself what is needed and formulate a road map.

They are not experts at what you do, they are only experts at what they do. They don't know what they need.

If it's not worth the time to investigate, then it's not worth to know at all.

So to answer your question:
"How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs?"
You don't, because they can't. You have to help them.

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change

How much data are we talking? How are you currently getting tapes offsite?

If he uses LTO-8 tapes it's 12TB native/ 30TB compressed per tape.

PS. Transfer rate btw is 900 MByte/sec, 700 MB/sec was LTO-7 tape.
You need 10Gbit sized internet pipes for cloud backup to even compete with that.

I think the phone will ask for several files. The mac.cfg is not the real name. It's actually the real mac address of the phone, so for instance 001565c010b1.cfg
So yes you need individual files. But I think it asks for a model related file as well.
Yealink has more details on it.

You can also provision your phones over http/https.

@Jimmy9008

I don't know Jim, but it does sound like you want to find one IT support guy that somehow has the skill of five specialists.

@scottalanmiller said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

@Pete-S said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

The H330 is like for labs or testing. Shouldn't be found in a production environment. It's a fine card for what it is, just not a production use card

Begs the question why when ordering a server for a specific purpose, they would even ship that out.

People mix up the H330 and the HBA330.
Both are LSI SAS3008 cards but with different firmware.
It can do one million IOPS and transfer 6GB/sec but it doesn't have any cache.

Entry and mid-level servers come with the H330.
HBA330 is primarily a Host Bus Adapter and it's what you order for running vSAN or any type of software raid.

Both have their place in production servers. It just depends on what they are used for.

I struggle to find a place for the H330 in production. The combination of low performance, but high cost and hardware risk just make it a crazy component. Dells makes it because the cost to do so approaches zero, and it earns them profits. But I can't think of any real world scenario in production where someone should buy it. It's an awesome lab unit for testing platform systems, so that it exists or is purchased in general make absolute sense, but deploying to production - feels like something would have to be wrong.

It's the kind of card you'll buy when you:

1. don't know what you're doing
2. know exactly what you are doing