IT BS thread

Back when I sold consumer stuff in early college around 15 years ago, I remember Kaspersky was one of the better ones. Haven't kept up on the consumer market much since, though - I just run the built in MS Defender on my home PCs.

 

Ever since bad actors found out it is way more lucrative to spoof legitimate sites and brute force shitty business security it seems the number of real locally executed bad code has gone down. Internet security has gotten much better too of course, it is now extremely hard to infect a computer that is just existing on an active internet connection if it even has the most modest of firewalls. I pay to keep a real antivirus on my grandparents computer and my parents though... they cannot be trusted not to click false download buttons which really seems like the last bastion of downloading dangerous code. But even I am considering dropping that precaution since I removed all of their administrator rights as users on their own computers, makes it easier if they cannot install any software without putting in a password that they don't know. If it is important they can call or text me

 

Somewhere around 90% of attacks on the enterprise side are kicked off in some way by end users. We do regular phishing simulations - sometimes I do easy ones that really shouldn't trick anyone, but even those get people. I get the time breakdowns, and the time from opening the message to clicking a link is often only two seconds. We do mandatory trainings - it's just frustrating that a small amount of my end users clearly don't care. I wish we could bargain with the unions that if they fail so many times they're gone because they're a liability.

 

Our org hires a company to fire a barrage of fake phishing attacks at our users to see who needs additional training. It's very interesting, it's typically the urgent messages from other members of the org (spoofed poorly of course) that get em. I mean they're fairly obvious... wrong symbols in the name, wrong domain name, missing email signatures, misspellings...

 

Seems about right.

 

A place that I worked for did similar, but the emails looked a bit more legitimate. Someone figured out that the extended email headers contained X-Phishing-Test or some other obvious BS. Then we all just created a filtering rule to auto-forward anything with that header to the company phishing reporting address.

 

Not sure if this is the proper place to ask but hopefully it is.
I’ve got a Dell Poweredge R420 that I’ve loaded Truenas Scale on, everything seems to be going great except on boot (2+ minutes into boot) I get this screen, problem is the text is cut off, I tried switching between full and 4:3 aspect ratio to see if that made a difference and no joy.
In the boot process it seems that one or two of the screens have a few text characters cut off the side, but typing I can get 5 characters in before I start to see them.
Any thoughts on what might fix this?

 

Check the configuration settings on your monitor. It should have a way to move the horizontal position of the screen. I seem to remember trying to deal with that issue, both with Dell servers, and when setting up my FreeNAS box.

 

Rolled Windows 11 24H2 out to my PC and a few users near my office for a small test group before updating everything.

First quirk - every single one of them lost its Windows activation after the install - saying "there was a problem with your OEM product key." I had to put the generic KMS key back in, then they grabbed a new license from AD and were fine. Hoping that's the only issue because I could script a fix for that easily if I have to.

 

I appreciate you taking the time to help, found the movement setting on the monitor and it wasn’t enough, but I have an old Samsung monitor with DVI that displayed properly when I connected it.
I ended up getting it all setup just to realize I gotta flash the raid card to IT mode, and I also ordered an HBA card so I can have a small boot SSD in the back and not take up one of my front 4 drive slots. Hopefully within 2 weeks I’ll have all the parts in hand and have it properly configured.

 

Isn't software RAID pretty much on par with hardware RAID these days? I hear hardware RAID can be finicky, and if the card dies, you need to find the same exact card and hope it works, or you lose access to the array.

 

I would imagine so, I’m not terribly familiar with hardware raid, all of my experience with RAID has been software (particularly windows storage spaces).
Truenas doesn’t particularly play well with some hardware and it definitely doesn’t like the hardware raid card, so I have to flash the hardware raid card to essentially be an HBA so the PC sees each individual HDD instead of whatever virtual drives are setup (I’m assuming in bios?), and then in my particular case I’m running a second HBA in the back of the server to connect a boot drive. Eventually I’d like to have a JBOD to attach to the server with the other port on the HBA but that’s a project for later.

 

On my r710 I used a regular old SATA SSD connected internally for the truenas (or freenas in my case) boot drive. Not sure if yours has that same connection.

 

I use OpenZFS on my Debian system (basically what TrueNAS Scale is based off of). Started of with a RAID0 setup and recently upgraded it to a RAID1 setup. I think OpenZFS's RAIDZ levels behave a little differently than traditional RAID.

I don't have any experience with Windows storage spaces, but I heard it wasn't great.

 

I’ve got an internal SATA port that my optical drive is connected to, but your question made me double check and I’ve got an unused SAS-B port and a port labeled SATA A-D that is unused also. I think the SATA-E label is pointing to the SATA connector for the ODD just below it.
I’m going to do some research on these.

I used storage spaces for a while, had a whole kerfluffle with it and lost a little data (out of date backups) and swore to never use it again, and now I have it setup again with 3 1TB SSD’s and a 4TB HDD that has mainly my steam library on it. But I now also have a 12TB external I connected via USB and do backups to that just in case storage spaces gives me problems again.

 

Id just ditch the optical drive and plug an ssd in there.

 

Temporarily using the ODD cable to boot with a 500GB SSD, got everything loaded up, all 4 HDD’s are individually recognized and I got them made into a raid Z1 storage pool.

Got Plex installed, trying to figure out how to set it all up (haven’t YouTubed it yet) and I would like to get setup to sail the high seas with it.

RAM is still en route and based on CPU usage I saw while loading Plex and another app I’m going to need to upgrade the CPU fairly soon.

 

Maybe this is a good place to toss this out. I recently replaced a 30-foot long HDMI cable with a newer, better one. They both do HDMI stuff just fine, but the new one does ARC too. I hated to just toss the old one out though. So if anyone wants a 30-foot HDMI cable, it's available for $0. Shipping might be a bear though, so maybe someone in the SE PA vicinity?