@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Also, my CIO is adamant about keeping the voice traffic segregated for "security reasons" as it will satisfy an item on one of our various IT audits (we are a financial institution that has a lot of audits).

That's fine IF he can prove that the audit is legit (normally they are fake) and find some regulation that the auditor is following. I'm not aware of any here, so he's need to produce this. This sounds like collusion to me. If this was an actual security concern, VLANs aren't an option, you have to encrypt the voice traffic. If someone is suggesting a VLAN to meet this audit requirement, something inappropriate is going on. No regulation makes you put in VLANs.

Good point. I will ask for the specific audit request on this and find out more.

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

@scottalanmiller said in VLAN confusion:

@dave247 said in VLAN confusion:

Sorry, let me change the term "VLAN" to "switch". Is it best practice to avoid having multiple networks running on a single switch? I just said VLAN because of the default VLAN..

The entire concepts of subnetting and VLANing are to run multiple networks on a single switch Nothing wrong with that in the least. Switches are expected to run multiple networks, that's just normal and exactly what they are meant to do.

So if I had 20 different /24 networks running on the same switch stack (for whatever reason), and all of them are on VLAN 0 (I'm just saying VLAN here because everything will at least be on the default VLAN), then there will be no traffic issues whatsoever?

No, no issues, not from traffic. Things like DHCP wouldn't work, obviously.

MY MIND IS BLOWN

@scottalanmiller said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@dave247 said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@scottalanmiller said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

@dashrender said in Forum Posting Etiquette:

I do like the idea of many smaller posts - but it also runs into the problem of many thing to respond to at once. While I'm no where near as fast as Scott, I can typically type two to three small posts before the OP (or anyone other than Scott) replies to my first reply. So unlike your

I like red.
So do I, but have you considered orange,
no but, ...

you aren't having a real back and forth because you run into the same problem as the wall of text issue. I real time conversation where all involved parties get the information simultaneously, in a forum you have people jumping in in the middle and fleeing, or someone who just throws out 5 ideas, each in their own post before any responses are made, and eventually many people just stop reading anything but the last few posts.

I'm not sure you can solve this problem, but it's just good to know it's there.

But smaller posts make it easier to respond. No matter how much time you have, making it faster and easier helps you. Wall of text in the same situation would mean no ability to respond at all.

I noticed this with how you post back in Spiceworks and I was like, what the hell is this guy doing. But having broken up posts to respond to is kind of nice. It becomes not nice when there are many of them peppered throughout the whole forum page. Then you have to scroll around like crazy to find what it is you need to respond to.

You still have to scroll a lot with a wall of text, too. The multiple postings doesn't really make for much more scrolling. And it can only happen if no one is actively responding on a thread, if there was an active discussion it can't happen. The effect that you see is generally created by someone kicking it off via a wall of text to which many responses need to be generated at once. So walls of text actually are the key source of the non-wall of text system that many people dislike.

Usually people do that thing where they break up a wall of text in one post and reply to sections. It's the best of both worlds. Example:

Creation vs Evolutoin debate

blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah

Well actually your point is invalid here because...

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Ah yes, you are correct here because...

blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blahblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

I can't argue with that logic

I'm putting Hyper-V on a decommissioned Dell R510 for a general LAB environment and testing, etc. I'm trying to scrounge up some spare drives (I have a lot) for a stable/reliable config. I have 8x 3.5" drive bays on this thing and my plan is to use slot 0 and 1 for two drives in RAID1 for the OS, then use the rest for a RAID10 array for storage (at a later time). Yes, I know usually you'd just do OBR10 but I'm not doing it that way.

Right now, I'm trying to decide which would be better: a set of 300GB 15K SAS Dell Enterprise drives or a set of consumer-grade 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drives.

I assume both will work fine but I've never really used consumer SSD's on a Dell server before.. input?

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dashrender said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@scottalanmiller said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Maybe I should see if I can install Hyper-V on an SD card.. I have an iDRAC with the card slot

No, don't do that. MS used to semi-support that long ago. Now they do not at all.

k then.. I guess I'll just leave the single SSD in and finish installing it to that. I started the install process to one Intel SSD then paused to come post my questions here.

FYI, this is a complete waste of a SSD drive. More IOPs wasted on something that can't/won't use it.

Why are you setting up Hyper-V today when you don't have drives to store the VM's on? Why not wait until you buy those 6+ large HDDs and make a OBR10 and install Hyper-V on there.

It doesn't need to be 8 drives, 6 is fine if that gives you the storage you need. Hyper-V install itself is pretty small, I'm guessing 20 GB or less.

Hmm... well, I do have 4x 6TB 7200RPM SATA drives I was planning to use for something else, but I guess I could just use them for this.

Maybe you should list all of the drives that you have to work with, and we can guide from there.

haha.. sorry.. ok so I have 4x 6TB drives and then I have a ton of 2.5" 300GB 10k and 15k SAS drives, but the problem here is I only have a couple of 2.5" to 3.5" caddie spacers.. I'd have to really dig to find more.

So if I just wanted to use the 4x 6TB drives, would I create a RAID array and then create two separate volumes on that, one for Hyper-V and one for storage, or just have one volume and install Hyper-V to that?

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@dave247 said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

@networknerd said in Enterprise 15K SAS drives vs consumer grade SSD in a Dell server?:

Spend the $15 to get a USB drive to be the install target for Hyper-V, and then boot the server from that USB drive each time. Like others have said, keep the SSD to give yourself some fast storage to play with and not to run a hypervisor.

If you're only playing with a single SSD you could even leverage it and use the free version of Starwind to accelerate the VMs running on the spinning disk datastore (I think). Someone else may want to verify this specific point.

I do have plenty of extra USB drives. I was considering that also but I don't know if I want a USB drive sticking out of the back of my server.

You can get a really slim USB stick online for cheap.
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Low-Profile-Drive-SDCZ33-008G-B35/dp/B005FYNSUA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1506622655&sr=8-3&keywords=small+usb+drive

oh man.. yes, that would be a lot better. Maybe I will just install Hyper-v on my current USB just for S&G. I've never installed Hyper-v before so I don't mind having to do it again on a different, smaller USB later..

@scottalanmiller said in any help desk software suggestions?:

@Sodium has a mostly working helpdesk that is coming along pretty quickly. Might be worth playing with and getting a feel for where it will be soon before diving into something else. Fully free, even hosted.

Spiceworks is free and hosted as well.

osTicket you host yourself, but is free and runs on Linux. We've had good luck with that.

Awesome, this is what I'm looking for. Thanks Scott

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

I actually made a video on LAN sizes just the other day. I'm waiting on it to be edited.

I'm finally going through and watching all your videos. I'm also trying to read through all your posts on SMBjournal

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dave247 said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dave247 said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

Is there a reason that you want hardware RAID for home use?

Because I want whatever I install for an OS or Hypervisor to only see the volume presented by the RAID controller rather than multiple drives. I don't really want to use the fakeRAID on my motherboard like I currently am.

And software RAID is not available with your chosen hypervisor?

It doesn't seem that my motherboard will work with ESXi but I haven't finished looking into it. Regardless, I'd rather use a hardware RAID card this time.

ESXi requires hardware RAID, it is as simple as that. Hyper-V is acceptable to use software RAID in a lab or home use. KVM or Xen have enterprise software RAID, so you have no need for a RAID card at all for them, business or home use.

FakeRAID is never the right answer and is part of the software RAID family, not hardware RAID family, so as ESXi must have hardware RAID, FakeRAID can't work there.

Yep... that's why I asked about a hardware RAID controller in my OP

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

@dave247 said in Pfsense:

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

I actually made a video on LAN sizes just the other day. I'm waiting on it to be edited.

I'm finally going through and watching all your videos.

Remember to like and subscribe

Yeah I subscribed. Be prepared for me to come to you with questions and things..

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to mailbox@domain.com. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to fax@voip.ms with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.

http://www.goldfax.com/

oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to mailbox@domain.com. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to fax@voip.ms with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.

http://www.goldfax.com/

oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!

That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.

We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to number@rcfax.com, through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.

We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out

Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.

That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.

That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.

The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.

Scott, the person who hired my company's CIO was the owners of the company. There is nobody in-between.

I didn't suggest that it was. You have an endemic problem with the business approach. Not something that can be fixed. You have two options... stop caring about doing a good job because that's not the job they want done or leave.

Well I'm not going to stop caring because I have still been able to make a lot of difference here for the better, despite the CIO's bad habits.

I'm not leaving this company for a while as I just got the job a year ago as my first IT job as sysadmin and I've been getting a ton of invaluable experience with a massive range of IT things, big and small.

@dave247 said in Looking for a very basic solution for building/maintaining company intranet:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking for a very basic solution for building/maintaining company intranet:

For static internal pages, very little will compete with Wordpress.

Oh yeah I forgot about WP.. but all this stuff would need to be local and not online at all. ... I'm looking it up now and it looks like we can just download WordPress and use to generate local content.. awesome. This may do perfectly..

ooh looks like I'm going to get to set up a Linux server with LAMP... fun

@jaredbusch said in Need some guidance - replacing physical 2008 R2 DC with a virtual 2016 DC - keeping same name and IP:

@dave247 said in Need some guidance - replacing physical 2008 R2 DC with a virtual 2016 DC - keeping same name and IP:

@scottalanmiller said in Need some guidance - replacing physical 2008 R2 DC with a virtual 2016 DC - keeping same name and IP:

How I'd handle it....

Well, I'd not do it if possible and fix things pointing to something that they shouldn't here. That's the root level fix.

To go after a proximate fix...

1. Set up the new DC. Do NOT use the old IP or hostname.
2. Get it all working with the old machines in place.
3. Create a CNAME to point the old name to the new server's A record. Remove the old machine.
4. If you must, change the new IP to the old IP.

Ok, let's scratch everything I mentioned. If I were to do this the best practice way, would I simply:

1. Set up the new 3rd domain controller new name (DC3) and IP address
2. Pass the roles from DC1 to DC3
3. Finally, go through and point all "primary DNS" entries on Exchange and EVERYTHING else to the new DC3

If I perform the above steps, I am assuming no systems will have issues authenticating since they will all be reaching out to one of the three DCs, right? Therefore, I can gradually point systems to the new DC as needed.

Otherwise, please help me understand what I should do. I am going to spend my day tomorrow researching this stuff so I'm better educated on what I'm doing and can come up with an action plan.

Thank you

The above is the correct way to handle it. You can export your DHCP and import it on the new DC. The same goes for the print server settings, they can be exported and imported. DNS self replicates.

It is also why you never use static IP addressing in a Windows AD network, IMO. I mean I never use it on any type of network, but in the AD world, this makes shit a pain in the ass.

Everything, except the DC and router get DHCP reservations. When Exchange was on site, I would give that a static IP also, just because Microsoft.

This means you only need to modify your DHCP scope to hand out the new info and you are done once everything renews.

omg yes, that makes total sense!! That would make updating the DNS entries SO MUCH EASIER... I'm actually pissed I didn't realize this earlier. We currently have all our static addresses set on the host side, not via reservation. This was done by previous administrators. When I came on board I suggested reservations (as I had been reading up on DHCP stuff). We never implemented it and I just forgot about it, but I'm going to now that I see what you're saying makes total sense.

Thanks JB

I have been educating myself on how server licensing works, etc, and one of the things I realized is that I'm not exactly clear on who I should be going through to purchase Microsoft licenses from, mainly Windows server.

Previously, we had been going through my company's Dell VAR, who also has his own IT Services LLC. He's sold our company pretty much all it's Dell equipment (servers, switches, SAN, Sonicwall, etc) and thanks to Scott Allen Miller's input and articles, I've realized how we're guilty of "getting advice from the salesman". Please, let's not go into it though.

I've since cut ties with the VAR and am trying to do things better. But now, I'm not exactly sure where I should be going to purchase Windows Server licensing. My boss had suggested CDW but I am assuming that is yet another trap.

Can I get some guidance on the proper channels I should be using for this?

@black3dynamite said in Trying to set up Hyper-V Server 2016, ripping my hair out:

I just don’t recall having any issue with connecting to Hyper-V 2016 when both server and workstation is on the same domain.

The issue you are having makes sense if the server is not on a domain.

Well they are in fact on the same domain and yes I have looked at all the links and taken all the steps that apply. I have joined HV01 to the domain and I see it listed in AD as a computer and I have dropped it in the "Servers" OU.

Guys, does anyone here have a 2016 Hyper-V and Windows 10 setup, both joined to the domain? Otherwise, is anyone willing to set it up as a test to see if you get it working? I really want to figure out what my problem is. I think I've literally tried everything at this point and I just can't connect. I even tried adding the Hyper-V Management tools from another Windows 10 system and got the same errors..

@scottalanmiller said in Trying to set up Hyper-V Server 2016, ripping my hair out:

@dave247 said in Trying to set up Hyper-V Server 2016, ripping my hair out:

It's not like I just blindly downloaded XS and installed it without doing anything else. I've tried to get information. I've read the information on their website. I don't have endless amounts of time to dump into a full blown investigation to determine if their platform is actually dead or not.

I don't have any more hair to rip out.

Of course not, that's why no IT department should be less than ... well a lot of people. No one has the time to investigate this stuff. IT should always be a team. And IT should not investigate all options, there isn't time for that. Quickly determining projects that aren't currently viable (too early, too late, bad idea, bad vendor, etc.) is an important piece of that. Rule things out and move on. ESXi is easy to rule out of rthe average SMB due to cost and licensing overhead, as an example. Rule out, move on.

lmao. And we have vSphere 6.5 in my SMB environment...

Ok I swear I thought I downloaded the correct ISO. It was directly after I had a conversation with Scott over the phone about my VoIP debacle, and we got into servers and he told me about Hyper-V being completely free and blew my little fucking mind. SO I rushed out to Microsoft and downloaded it, and I know I KNOW I went to the right spot because I was specifically careful to download the file under "Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016" and not the one for regular Server 2016.

If this was my problem all along then I'm going to owe you all an apology and a beer.