IT BS thread

any of yall have any experience running ubuntu off of a flash drive? more specifically, how to get it to save settings and files to the flash drive? it starts clean every time i reboot it.

 

Anyone have fun with Avast today? I got into work and had 2 messages about random reboots and BSOD. Within 30 minutes I was up to 20 PCs with the same issue, which all turned out to be due to an Avast update gone awry. They patched it a few hours later, but by then my day was already shit.

 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence

 

i thought that was a dumb spin off of the FB live deal... dont killl me haha. just started looking into the linux stuff earlier this weekend. originally got the bootable usb and was confused why it wasnt saving any settings and what not. googling it brought up the live stuff, but for some reason it didnt click with me. ill give that a go. do you use anything linux?

 

I use Debian (in which Ubuntu is a derivative of) as my main OS.

 

do you work in a place that uses primarily microsoft or apple? do you ever have programs that simply dont play well together or have you been able to find a decent work around for these situations? im just worried switching fully to a linux based system will make things too difficult to move between windows applications and files to linux at home. (work is 100% windows) only reason im looking at a switch is that my home computer is XP and my work computer doesnt share files that play well with my home computer.

 

At work, we have some sort of frankenstien Windows CE/Python thing going on.

I would suggest using Linux on a spare pc if you have one. Install, experiment, reinstall, etc until your comfortable enough to trust your data with it. Linux has many ways of doing things, some like Windows, some ways very different. These days it's rare I need windows for anything at home.

 

Fair enough. Thanks man.

 

Use the Ubuntu live ISO and create a bootable flashdrive with UNetBootin.
**Edit I misread the question

 

Hello IT people,

For anyone who has taken the CCNA exam, would this book be enough to study for it? THis is a the book we used in my advanced networking class, but I'm not sure if this alone would be sufficient.

Thank you,
Leonard

 

i used 2 different books back when i did the CCNA in 2010. i let mine lapse since I never work on network gear anymore. if you've never taken a cisco test, they are hard because the information is hard. microsoft tests are hard because they have tricky questions and the MS way is not necessarily the way the real world works.

 

The CCNA is broken down into 2 tests. Get the Cisco press books for each exam or get the one for the composite exam. Honestly if its your first go at the CCNA take the 2 exam route.I used the books written by Wendell Odom but any Cisco press is good.

 

Anyone dealling with outsourcing companies such as TCS, IBM, HP, etc?

 

At one time, I probably could have passed a CCNA with minimal studying. Now, though, I've forgotten too much. Couldn't write an ACL or configure a routing protocol from memory anymore. My understanding is a good chunk of the exam is a virtual lab so you can prove you can actually apply the knowledge and know the commands.

I believe by going the two exam route you will walk out with a CCENT as long as you pass the first one.

 

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/28/15080436/us-house-votes-to-let-isps-share-web-browsing-history

 

What would you do?


Just going to throw this out there to see what happens. I have kind of a different decision that has 2 choices and neither one is terribly satisfying.

Scenario: I will soon be replacing 180 industrial computers running a video monitoring process. They run in the nastiest environment you can think of for a computer, hot / cold / vibration / dirt / crappy power. I tell my users that when computers are little they are taught that if they are good they go to a data center, and if they are bad, the become process monitors. This is computer hell.

So, here’s the problem. 99.99% of the time everything runs just fine and nobody cares about the monitoring video, but for that .01% the users care a lot. These Windows 10 based (yeah I know) industrial computers will come equipped with two 1TB SSD drives that can be configured one of two ways:

Option 1 - Hardware RAID 1 (mirrored)

Pros

• Mirrored – one drive fails and everything keeps working

Cons

• No way to know if the first drive has failed. These computers have no driver to communicate to Windows the status of the RAID. We will find out about a failure only after the second drive fails and the corresponding loss of data. That data loss may or may not be a big deal.

​

Option 2 A primary drive running a backup to the secondary drive

Pros

• Nagios will alert us if either drive fails.
• A backup of the data if the primary fails.
• An easier restore if the primary fails

Cons

• 50/50 chance of the primary failing. The MTBF of the monitor will be lower because there is no mirror.

​

The Cons are just about equal. Nagios will notify us in either monitoring failure situation. Option 1 with mirroring will provide a longer MTBF and that’s one of my priorities. Option 2 has quicker recovery times because of the backup.

Which one would you choose option 1 or 2?

 

What about software raid?

 

I've considered it, but it does slow down the write speed which is an issue. There are four 4k cameras running at 15 FPS. And if one faction of users get their way there will be eight 4K cameras. Read time isn't an issue because when things go sideways the users download the video and analyze the problem frame by frame.

(As I think further, the current system uses spinning drives, 360p cameras and older CPU's and it can't keep up. But, I've not have accounted in my head for the speed of SSD's and the i7 processors - Hmm)

 

Why not store the data on servers instead of desktops?

 

For the most part these computers are not connected to any network and have to run autonomously. They do connect at the end of the day when the equipment returns to the shop. So we will know if there is a problem when they check in. Often when things go sideways we have to send someone into the field to retrieve the hard drive so the users can figure out what went bad. We did discuss downloading all of the data every night, but there are bandwidth problems between the shop and the datacenter and 99.99% of the data we don't care about anyway. (suffice to say that the .01% stuff can be very expensive and even the crappy system we currently have has paid for itself many times over by allowing the users to fix problems so they don't reoccur.)