I'm not sure what y'all are talking about. There are only 3 Star Wars movies.

I am not a financial wizard, nor do I play one on tv, but I think paid debts are actually considered positives on a credit score.

@Dashrender said:

@Kelly said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

@aaron said:

@Kelly said:

Ansible Tower is certainly pricey.

Do you have a need for Tower? Depending on your environment and people using it.

There was an open-source alternative that I came across once, but I think it was half baked.

I don't believe I do, but I'm leery of a company having a paid version of something I depend on that is out of my price range. If they take a feature I consider critical and move it to the paid product exclusively I have to start over with another platform.

That's the beauty of open source, they can't really do that. The license protects you.

I'm betraying my ignorance here, but how does the open source license prevent a company from changing their free feature set?

Because the open source code itself can't be gotten rid of. Once something is Open Source, it's always Open Source, at least that's how I understand it.

Sure you might have to find someone who forks the pre-updated code and keeps that feature you're talking about in a free version. And this doesn't put you in a that much better place, because you're still forced to change to that new fork.

There's a lot of dirty dishes in the open source world...

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

@aaron said:

@Kelly said:

Ansible Tower is certainly pricey.

Do you have a need for Tower? Depending on your environment and people using it.

There was an open-source alternative that I came across once, but I think it was half baked.

I don't believe I do, but I'm leery of a company having a paid version of something I depend on that is out of my price range. If they take a feature I consider critical and move it to the paid product exclusively I have to start over with another platform.

That's the beauty of open source, they can't really do that. The license protects you.

I'm betraying my ignorance here, but how does the open source license prevent a company from changing their free feature set?

@scottalanmiller said:

Did it rebuild successfully?

I don't know. I ended up setting up the necessary VMs on other hosts and started rebuilding this one since it has been having stability issues in the last few weeks.

So the RAID is rebuilding. I ended up having to run this to get the drives reconnected to each other and dom0:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 /dev/sd[bcef]

It is still resyncing, so I'm not sure if it worked or not, but md0 appears to be happy.

@DustinB3403 said:

As for trying to recover, can you not mount the array in XenServer without it wiping the array?

I can't access the array in dom0 right now.

I tried doing mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sd[bcef]. It says that md0 already exists. When I run cat /proc/mdstat it shows md0 as inactive with only sdb as a member.

@Dashrender Yes

So I had XenServer 6.5 go south (kernel panic) after installing SP1. I've used the 6.5 disc to "upgrade" so that I now have a functional host. The side effect of this is that dom0 does not see the RAID10 now, and I'm looking for some help to do what needs to be done to remount md0 without any data loss (if possible).

Here is some of the output from various configs:

mdadm --examine /dev/sdb (first drive in array)
/dev/sdb:
Magic : a92b4efc
Version : 1.2
Feature Map : 0x0
Array UUID : 3e6d21f5:0e381299:a38fdae2:571cbed3
Name : <machinename>:0 (local to host <machinename>)
Creation Time : Fri Feb 5 13:27:48 2016
Raid Level : raid10
Raid Devices : 4

Avail Dev Size : 7813775024 (3725.90 GiB 4000.65 GB)
Array Size : 7813774336 (7451.80 GiB 8001.30 GB)
Used Dev Size : 7813774336 (3725.90 GiB 4000.65 GB)
Data Offset : 262144 sectors
Super Offset : 8 sectors
State : active
Device UUID : b66b76cf:0bcf1d52:37ad3de5:911eb41a
Update Time : Wed Mar 30 09:52:03 2016
Checksum : b5080968 - correct
Events : 2943
Layout : near=2
Chunk Size : 512K

Device Role : Active device 2
Array State : AAAA ('A' == active, '.' == missing)

I don't know how to fix this, but there isn't a /etc/mdadm.conf file any more.
It looks to me like the array is fine, but there isn't an md0. Any thoughts or questions?

@aaron said:

@Kelly said:

Ansible Tower is certainly pricey.

Do you have a need for Tower? Depending on your environment and people using it.

There was an open-source alternative that I came across once, but I think it was half baked.

I don't believe I do, but I'm leery of a company having a paid version of something I depend on that is out of my price range. If they take a feature I consider critical and move it to the paid product exclusively I have to start over with another platform.

@scottalanmiller said:

Today, it appears that Chef and Ansible are the two big dogs left at the top of the heap... for the moment.

I've read some very favourable things regarding Ansible, but I've wondered how the Redhat purchase will change things for them. Ansible Tower is certainly pricey.

@wirestyle22 said:

@Kelly said:

Unless you have more than 300 users I believe you'd actually want Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium. It gives you email and local Office without the enterprise features and is only $2/m/u. That gives you pretty competitive pricing on Office.

I have 500

So how much are you spending currently on Office/Email/File Server? You might be able to justify the $4.50/m/u by showing overall cost savings.

Unless you have more than 300 users I believe you'd actually want Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium. It gives you email and local Office without the enterprise features and is only $2/m/u. That gives you pretty competitive pricing on Office.

There are some caveats with SharePoint Online. It has issues with certain characters, file name lengths, you cannot have more than 5,000 items in a given view, etc. I haven't attempted to use it as a file server in about a year, but there were enough issues that we were not able to retire our local file server for all of our teams.

@wirestyle22 said:

@Kelly said:

@wirestyle22 said:

@coliver said:

Oh the difference between Office Web Apps and Office.

Office Web Apps (Word Online, Excel Online, Etc.) leave a lot to be desired. They are more akin to Google Docs then the full version of Office.

I wanted to know specifically what they are capable of doing and what they aren't but I don't see any of that listed. For my average user I'm sure the online version would be fine but I was asked the difference and I really didn't know from a features standpoint.

The largest, and starkest, difference is file access. Office Web Apps will open files stored in One Drive for Business (ODfB). I don't believe (unless something has changed recently) that there is a way to access LAN or local files without sync'ing them to SharePoint Online or ODfB. You also cannot use any macros or scripts, and some advanced functions are missing. There are some others that are oddly MIA as well. I'd have some of your users trial it and see if they can make it work.

My plan was to create an OwnCloud server on Vultr. There is no other way to access the files on that server without syncing to ODfB and having them use that as the primary file server? There is no way for me to use the OwnCloud server as the main server and sync to ODfB as a remote backup?

I just doublechecked, and there isn't any way in Word to open from a non O365 location other than files accessed on the net. It appears that DropBox has hooks that allow you to access those files if you have the client installed locally. There may be something down the road with OwnCloud, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

@wirestyle22 said:

@coliver said:

Oh the difference between Office Web Apps and Office.

Office Web Apps (Word Online, Excel Online, Etc.) leave a lot to be desired. They are more akin to Google Docs then the full version of Office.

I wanted to know specifically what they are capable of doing and what they aren't but I don't see any of that listed. For my average user I'm sure the online version would be fine but I was asked the difference and I really didn't know from a features standpoint.

The largest, and starkest, difference is file access. Office Web Apps will open files stored in One Drive for Business (ODfB). I don't believe (unless something has changed recently) that there is a way to access LAN or local files without sync'ing them to SharePoint Online or ODfB. You also cannot use any macros or scripts, and some advanced functions are missing. There are some others that are oddly MIA as well. I'd have some of your users trial it and see if they can make it work.

@Lakshmana said:

@Kelly Hi Verify this link

http://probably.co.uk/puppet-vs-chef-vs-ansible.html

Unfortunately that is a link from 2013, and with the pace of most open source products that means it is terribly out of date. I was also hoping to get feedback from people who are currently using it, and not just tech journalist articles, but thank you for the link.

I am just beginning to get my digital toes wet in this area, and I was wondering if those of you who use any of the Linux configuration management/orchestration tools would be willing to share what you use, why, and if you use containers how that affects your choice?

@NattNatt said:

Just started two giveaways for FFVIII and FFXIII-2 on SG...never been a fan and got keys in the Square Enix Easter surprise box...also got a 20% voucher for JC3 and the new Tomb Raider if anyone wants them?

What is SG?

@scottalanmiller said:

@Kelly said:

@JaredBusch said:

@Kelly said:

HSAs are good for anyone that has medical expenses. They lower your tax burden right off, and can be used for a wide range of expenses that might not seem to fit the category, e.g. chiropractic care, dentists, contacts, etc. It might not be useful for everyone to contribute the maximum allowable to it, but I think there can be value for just about anyone.

But for many that benefit is outweighed by the time spent managing your expense to setup the HSA and make claims against it.

Our bank gave us a debit card that charges against the HSA. All we have to do is save our receipts for taxes.

I've seen that done, that's a very nice process.

Yes, if I had to write checks to myself and manage the in and out much more the value would go way down. Since we're currently spending more than the maximum contribution each year the HSA is an incredible blessing for us.