What about suggestions for skills to master when someone is just starting in IT? What are some things to know or helpful tools that will really help the newbie?

Honey Nut Cheerios have always been my favorite. They still are the best.

It's getting very real around here (the ebola threat, that is). A family in the town where I live has officially been isolated for 21 days because the dad was on a plane and potentially exposed to one of those who now has ebola.

I realize there have not been that many confirmed cases, but it is a bit scary nonetheless.

@scottalanmiller said:

My kids use iPads and love them. Why the Kindle Fire? If your daughter already has an iPad, I'm not sure what you are asking. Are you asking if this will be even better than that for her?

My mother has an iPad at her house, but there is no tablet in my house. My mother thought my daughter might like it to use at our house so that it is "hers."

@ajstringham said:

@NetworkNerd said:

I know this device is still on pre-order, but is anyone considering getting one for one of your kids? You get a 1-year subscription to the Amazon equivalent of the app store / play store.

My mom suggested maybe getting this for my daughter (almost 5) who loves playing games on an iPad and watching movies. That's really the use case here.

Don't forget to have her read books on it!

Exactly.

I know this device is still on pre-order, but is anyone considering getting one for one of your kids? You get a 1-year subscription to the Amazon equivalent of the app store / play store.

My mom suggested maybe getting this for my daughter (almost 5) who loves playing games on an iPad and watching movies. That's really the use case here.

@Minion-Queen said:

I could use a slow day. Actually can you explain this phenomenon to me?

I do not believe slow days exist. What is this nonsense?

So what was the resolution on this one? I'm sure others would like to know if it was the SIP provider, the Ubiquiti device, or something else entirely.

You could do the free trial of OnSIP: http://www.onsip.com/pricing. I know it is really hosted VOIP, but it should at least allow testing of SIP and RTP traffic passing through the router. It takes the PBX out of the equation completely though.

@JaredBusch said:

Or if the provider with the problem is not VoIP.ms you can always make a sub account on any VoIP.ms account and set that up as a trunk too.

I like the idea of getting a test trunk as well.

@FiyaFly said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@FiyaFly said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

@FiyaFly said:

@thecreativeone91 We ran a set of commands to ensure that the router would respond to pings:

configure
set firewall all-ping enable
commit
save

Is there additional steps needed?

From what I read that only enables the OS to respond it doesn't open of the firewall ACL.

http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/bug-in-firewall-all-ping-option/td-p/735073

From what I read the code is something like this

set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'action' 'accept'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'description' 'ICMP 50/m'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'limit' 'burst' '1'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'limit' 'rate' '50/minute'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'log' 'enable'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'protocol' 'icmp'

Okay, I see. You're right. Adding a rule to that set in the UI and we are now seeing pings to the Edge Router. However, we are still having issues getting inbound calls to our PBX (They time out) and cannot register a softphone internally onto a hosted system (backup plan)

Any other ideas for that part, then?

Does the SIP trunk show registered when you look at the PBX despite the behavior you mention here?

Yes it does. I have also ensured that ports are open and forwarded to the PBX.

If this is Asterisk (which I am guessing it may be), what happens in the CLI for inbound calls?

@FiyaFly said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

@FiyaFly said:

@thecreativeone91 We ran a set of commands to ensure that the router would respond to pings:

configure
set firewall all-ping enable
commit
save

Is there additional steps needed?

From what I read that only enables the OS to respond it doesn't open of the firewall ACL.

http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/bug-in-firewall-all-ping-option/td-p/735073

From what I read the code is something like this

set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'action' 'accept'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'description' 'ICMP 50/m'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'limit' 'burst' '1'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'limit' 'rate' '50/minute'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'log' 'enable'
set 'firewall' 'name' 'WAN_LOCAL' 'rule' '5' 'protocol' 'icmp'

Okay, I see. You're right. Adding a rule to that set in the UI and we are now seeing pings to the Edge Router. However, we are still having issues getting inbound calls to our PBX (They time out) and cannot register a softphone internally onto a hosted system (backup plan)

Any other ideas for that part, then?

Does the SIP trunk show registered when you look at the PBX despite the behavior you mention here?

@art_of_shred said:

What about block-level deduplication? I guess that doesn't apply to the Windows model.

The block level data is on a Drobo, so that is not an option in this case. If it were NetApp or something like that, it might be a different story.

I was just reading the following article: http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/05/21/introduction-to-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012.aspx.

This point in particular stood out to me:
Portability: A volume that is under deduplication control is an atomic unit. You can back up the volume and restore it to another server. You can rip it out of one Windows 2012 server and move it to another. Everything that is required to access your data is located on the drive. All of the deduplication settings are maintained on the volume and will be picked up by the deduplication filter when the volume is mounted. The only thing that is not retained on the volume are the schedule settings that are part of the task-scheduler engine. If you move the volume to a server that is not running the Data Deduplication feature, you will only be able to access the files that have not been deduplicated.

I was just reading the following article: http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/05/21/introduction-to-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012.aspx.

This point in particular stood out to me:
Portability: A volume that is under deduplication control is an atomic unit. You can back up the volume and restore it to another server. You can rip it out of one Windows 2012 server and move it to another. Everything that is required to access your data is located on the drive. All of the deduplication settings are maintained on the volume and will be picked up by the deduplication filter when the volume is mounted. The only thing that is not retained on the volume are the schedule settings that are part of the task-scheduler engine. If you move the volume to a server that is not running the Data Deduplication feature, you will only be able to access the files that have not been deduplicated.

After attending Rick Vanover's session on Server 2012 deduplication at Spiceworld, I am excited to give it a try on my Veeam backup repository. But I need to make sure I have this straight in my head before running down that path.

I am running my Veeam backups to a Drobo B800i SAN each night and have 3 LUNs on the Drobo attached to the Veeam server (VM running on my ESXi box). The Drobo connects directly to the Veeam server via iSCSI Initiator, so these LUNs on the Drobo are not VMWare datastores like they might be if the storage were first connected to a VMWare host and then presented to a VM. Is the way the Drobo presents the storage to the VM the equivalent of a raw device mapping?

So, if I activate deduplication on these three volumes containing Veeam backups, will it work as expected to decrease storage usage and allow more backups to be saved to disk (the Drobo) since these are NTFS volumes? If so, what kind of system resource hit do you think that VM will end up taking to run deduplication jobs if I am keeping about 30 days of backups on the Drobo (forward incrementals with synthetic fulls on weekends)?

Furthermore, if you do have a deduplicated volume, what happens when you copy files on it to a volume somewhere else that is not deduplicated? The Veeam backup files on these volumes get copied to an external hard drive that goes offsite each day.

Thanks in advance.

@nadnerB said:

PRTG is good. It can be made overly complex.

I'm using basic Spiceworks scans. With netwrix disk space monitoring running every night.

Haven't really considered network monitoring. I might put that down for consideration next year.

Is Netwrix pretty good? Do you use it for any file server auditing or anything else?

This morning I got a call from one of our sites, and the person mentioned they could not get to our webserver. The sites are connected via site-to-site vpn, and name resolution was working as expected. I tried from offsite to test and from another remote site but got the same issues. Everything at the same site as the webserver was able to access it fine.

And then I tried to get into our Barracuda 410 web filter. It was effectively bricked (web GUI inaccessible) and needed to be rebooted. After the reboot, everything was fine, but I couldn't help but want to listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkitLUbeEg.

I'd love to make a sound byte of that play when someone has a web page blocked by Barracuda.

The last reboot was probably a year ago, but all is well now.

@JaredBusch said:

@NetworkNerd said:

I've heard great things about PRTG but have yet to try it.

It is too complex for the amount of time I have to spend on it right now.

I saw a demo of it at the DFW VMUG, and it looked like it needed to be labeled "some assembly required" to really get it setup and going.

I'm testing the Spiceworks Network Monitor in Beta, and thus far I like it. I will not disagree it is resource intensive. Other than that we were using Spiceworks alerts.

I've heard great things about PRTG but have yet to try it.