IT BS thread

What's a dumb switch? A hub?

 

No, still a switch, but with 0 configuration options. It's just a switch, that does not support any advanced features. A hub blasts everything to every single port, flooding your network. A switch sends a broadcast and then sends traffic to whatever ports needed. It's really hard to fund a hub now days. They are obsolete.

 

Yeah last hub I had was probably 15 years ago. I have an 8-port gigabit switch now. Has no config options, but I suppose my router can handle the options for my network.

 

Right, so you have a dumb desktop switch. They are fine for home and basic use. Smart switches have configuration options like vlan settings, port naming, snmp support, port mirroring, monitoring, , etc. Amount of features/options usually directly correlates to the price.

 

NAT was never cool.
It was a hack, pawned off as a security "feature", to delay the adoption of IPv6.

But better than nothing i guess since IPv6 is probably still 10 years away from mainstream deployments and isn't nearly as easy to setup as IPv4.

Sounds like the last people to touch that customers network need to have their IT cards revoked.

 

IPv6 is WAY closer than that. I work for the largest shipping company in the world and our hand is basically being forced toward IPv6. It will take longer for smaller businesses (or IBM) to make the switch.

 

"Unmanaged" switch. Pure L2 no other options to change.

 

Well today marked a first for me... ESXi 6.0 host was actually experiencing a broadcast storm (of sorts...) in the vSwitch. Anytime I uplinked it to the network down went the firewall. Literally did the "unplug one at a time" until I stabilized the network. All 4 NICs on the stupid host were toxic. Reboot of the physical host fixed it right up.

GAH

 

Ok, this may get a tad long winded, but here we go.

My program is setting up an entirely new sampling system that consists of a glorified linear position sensor (Think magnetic measuring stick), a Panasonic Toughbook, and some other erroneous things. The Toughbook is showing the measurements/inputs that we are doing on the LPS (linear position sensor) and we also occasionally (a couple of times a minute) may need to touch the screen of the Toughbooks to select certain fields we want to populate. well, the magnet we are using to work with the LPS is fairly strong by my standards, and is basically attached to the end of a stick that you hold onto. Well we've redesigned the wands (sticks with the magnets on them) and its now basically a magnet at one end and a stylus for touching the Toughbook screens at the other. the wand is maybe 6" long from tip to tip. In my past ive stuck lesser magnets to the old CRT monitors and screwed them up and ive always heard that magnets and hard drives don't play well at all. what im wondering is, with the newer monitors and HD's of today, whats the probability that the magnet will ultimately do damage to the toughbooks if say, the magnet touched the screen or got dropped on the keyboard/touchpad area?

Its a rare earth magnet that's approx. 1cm thick and maybe 1cm in diameter.

 

Decided to start deploying Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB instead. Microsoft says not to use it as a general purpose OS, but I don't really care. Much better than going into PowerShell and trying to strip the bloat out of the other editions (some of which you just can't). Also doesn't have Edge, which makes me happy. Edge likes to try to force itself as the default PDF viewer which would be fine if it worked, but when a user tries to print a PDF from Edge, it consistently does something strange and sends a print job with "NA" pages and halts the queue. Pretty tired of dealing with that one too.

IMO, it's what the Enterprise and Education editions really should be to begin with. I see no negatives of not getting feature updates that the current branch does. Not like I can easily deploy them anyway, since they're essentially an OS upgrade.

 

If you have solid state disks that removes any fear of magnets there. My laptop (ASUS UX-305UA) has magnets in the panel to hold the screen closed? They're fairly soft though.

 

yea, theyre solid states. and yea I know computers have magnets in them in general, but theyre more than likely well placed and not that strong. ive just heard that magnets have been used to wipe hard drives in the past. that could only apply to disk drives, but I really don't know. I'm hoping you knowledgeable fellows would have a better idea haha.

 

Magnets only affected CRT screens because they affected the electrons as they moved. LCD screens work very different and should not be affected by a magnet. If you have a solid state disk you don't have to worry about hard disk failure.

You said these are touch screens? Capacitive? Then the magnet will have zero affect on that as well.

Sounds good to me.

 

should be resistive. capacitive wouldn't work well with our set up. (wet, latex gloves, etc)

 

Tomato tomahtoe. Should be.

 

fair enough. I dig it. gracias senor.

 

https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=hard-drive-destruction

 

What's funny is anyone who knows what is up knows it's mechanical damage caused by magnets not data destruction because it moved 1s to 0s and otherwise. I get their point of debunking the whole "magnet erases hard disk" but I'm pretty sure some critical thinking for someone who gets how they work would solve that one pretty fast.

 

My boss, the CIO, just said to me “uhm, yeah, it would be greeaattt if you managed computer repair.” (that means fixing computers that have some sort of physical failure) Now, at a previous gig I had the same assignment, computer repair, but that was a long time ago and things change. The guy that actually fixes our computers has left and we are using this as an opportunity to reevaluate the whole process. I know how repair works here and how it worked at previous gigs, but my sample size is small and I’d love to hear your stories of what works and what doesn’t. Do you fix it in house or outsource? Good things or bad about either model?

 

We don't really do much of it. Anything important is still in warranty (we get 3 years on all desktops and laptops) so the manufacturer deals with it. Barely anything is beyond 5 years, so even the oldest laptops and desktops are still relatively reliable at that point.

That said, HP Probooks are evil. The ones we have gotten in the past two years are incredibly unreliable. I really wish they didn't come in at lowest cost because I'd much prefer to go with Lenovo. The stuff we have from them is just about bulletproof.