IT BS thread

A few jobs ago we just had a hammer and large screwdriver as well as a concrete floor haha.

 

Rofl!

SECURITY QUESTIONS FOR SINGLE, CHILDLESS PEOPLE.
BY SHANNON REED​

Out of all of your friends’ children, what is first name of the one you find most annoying?

What is the make and model of the car you were driving when you realized you don’t actually like to share with anyone?

What is the name of the sports team whose statistics you think about whenever talk turns to finding a good preschool?

What is the middle name of the ex-boy/girlfriend whose profile photo you look at from time to time so as to comfort yourself that you made the right choice in ending that relationship?

When you make a Top 10 list of the places you got to travel to because you didn’t get married and have kids, what ranking is Paris?

What is the age your mother cites when saying, “I thought that by the time you turned ____ you’d be married”?

What was the name of the street of the Starbucks where you met the blind date who made you resolve, “Nope, that’s it, no more blind dates”?

What is the name of the town you got the hell out of when you graduated from high school?

What is the color of the fur of the cat who will be the first one to start chewing on your leg after you die alone at home and leave all of your pets without any food or water for days?

What is the ratio of the amount of times you have casual sex in the last year compared to the amount of times your married best friend assumes you’ve had casual sex?

In one word, sum up your most depressing New Year’s Eve. (Examples: “Measles.” “Robocop.”)

When taking a road trip on your own, what is the first name of the celebrity who you pretend is in the passenger seat with you?

Should you decide that you do want a child, what is the name of your friend or friend’s partner whom you would choose to father/carry that child, in a Big Chill-like scenario?

What is the title of the song that was playing when you realized that your family’s genetic line was going to end with you and your siblings?

 

What do you mean triple wiped? A DoD wipe is a 7 pass, so you do this 3 times for a 21 pass wipe? There is the Gutman wipe pass which is 23 passes.

 

I go with a 9x pass personally. I know the DoD spec requires 7, and that's what I'm required to meet.

I'm just a wee spot anal about it, and once you get to 9 you're effectively up around the "maybe the NSA could get something, maybe not. how many years do they have to work on it?" level, so I call it good there.

On crap desktop drives that I really don't need to be overly anal about, I 'triple wipe' meaning run a random 1/0 bit level, format to zeros, then re-run the random again. At that point I spot caring.

 

SO!

Random IT question for y'all

Anyone ever use USB temp gizmo's with monitoring software? I'm looking at a couple in the lower end range price wise (a few hundred$).

Looking to just have a simple thermal monitor, send me a text if this room gets over 80F ambient, nothing fancy.

Anyone?

 

I found using a sledge hammer aimed in the middle of the drive tends to shatter the platter(s).

 

I have no experience with that stuff. I have a fan controller for my rad fans with an audible alarm but no software monitoring.

 

A lot of the new servers have the ability to tell you the intake air temp. You might be able to just use that instead of using a usb device.

 

F#@! Yeah! I just pop the covers and give the platters 5 or 6 whacks with a drilling hammer. the problem is finding time to do it. I have 10 old PC's in the server closet that need this done. I wonder what a pound of Tannerite would do....

 

It sounds like you'd have to mix technology and at least do some custom scripting and it might be cheaper in the end.

1) get the temp monitor and it might need to do some kind of file dump or append to a file the current temp it reads. else you need to do some fancy memory hacking to get to the in-memory temp read. Or the device might be accessible directly through your script if the app is given proper permissions

2) have the script run every XYZ seconds (cron) to read that file and perform the contact/alert when the temp runs above your threshold. Or you can get fancy and have the script run as a daemon, constantly monitoring that output for faster response.

hth

 

I ended up MacGuyvering together a couple heat pumps from greenhouse company and a thermostatic switch.

Whenever the temp gets to X, the switch flips on the two air units. They shovel about 150-200 CFM, one drawing in ambient air (around 70 degrees) and one in the upper back corner of the room sucking hot air out. They stay on until the ambient temp in the server gets down to a specific temp and then shut off, until the ambient hits (temp x) again.

Works pretty slick for $250 in parts rather than $9000 for a new 2-ton A/C unit

 

Hey guys, looking for an ESXi VM and virtual network lab build advise.

I'm a total newb, so figured KISS, it would be best to copy someone's working example (at least the ESXi VM side), so found a guys build at his own blog here.

But seeing the date of the build, I'm itching to go a little further, but still at a reasonable budget. With that in mind, if I don't copy his build some of the Qs I have:

- He has me convinced on AMD- for the 8 cores over single core performance. With that in mind, is a mobo with the 990fx chipset $130 more worth it over a 970fx? I am going of an IOMMU wiki page listing what mobo's support passthrough (AMD IOMMU). If 990fx is more for overclockers, I don't plan on going down that path.

- Running 4-6 VMs at the same time, should I go with x2 500GB Samsung SSDs, possibly RAID1 for reliability? (will boot ESXi via thumb drive) I know this is counter 'budget build', but the way I see it, I can always 'recycle' them into my various laptops when/if this build evolves into something else.

- Seems like all of the mobos I have looked at have only four RAM ports supporting 32gb, some with less RAM. Do you guys see 32 GB of RAM being a bottleneck in the near future?

- Most of the IOMMU supporting boards I'm looking at support five drives and software RAID (or at least have a PCI available for a RAID controller), can I setup a NAS (maybe via a VM) internally, avoiding the need to purchase a seperate NAS if I want to make this lab do more than just lab stuff (HTPC, media storage, personal cloud etc)? Smarter/easier to just use a standalone NAS for when that time comes? If I do want to turn the machine off (long idle times), maybe that is reason enough to have a separate standalone NAS unit that has good idle features?

* Edit- did some more searching, maybe I'm being overzealous with an AMD 8 core? If I go the Intel route, I found another great write-up on an Intel build that seems well budgeted and hits a lot of goals I listed above (32GB RAM, passthrough, future NAS goals) plus a nice extra, low idle power (or does the newer ESXi versions negate the need to have power consumption inherently in the hardware?). The lab will see a lot of idle time, will likely be on 24/7 if it picks up NAS duties, idle power consumption should be something I respect.

Any VM and virtual network lab advice out there? Trying to absorb like a sponge, but its been a beating to the brain trying to figure out a white box setup that isn't going to give me a months worth of trouble shooting, parts exchanging etc just to start actually lab'ing.

 

I've been running an ESXi white box computer for a side business for a couple of years so I might be able to help.

Before I start answering your questions, my first question is what is the use for this ESXi box? If its just for learning then save your money and run a test system on pretty much any old box you have. I ran my side business for quite a while on an old AMD quad core with 4 gig of ram.

To be honest I haven't read the guys blog. When I came time to build my production machine I went to the VMWare web site and bought one of their recommended mother boards. Well, first I spent untold hours jacking around with unsupported mother boards and Ethernet cards, proving to myself I can spend $200 dollars worth of my time to save spending $5. Then I bought a Tyan mother board with 4 built in gig Ethernet ports, a hyper threaded Xeon quad core processor, 16 gig ECC memory, 256 gig Samsung SSD, and 500 gig spinner. The total package cost around $800.

The SSD will make your server crazy fast. I run 1 256 SSD and 1 500 gig spinner. I reserve the SSD for the website I host and I use the spinner for the router. The router makes a ton of writes to the disk and doesn't need the SSD's speed so I save the wear and tear on the SSD. As for RAIDing the SSD, I guess it depends on your tolerance for failure. Personally I back my server up to an external NAS.

So the question is again, what is this system for? Are all the VM's going to be running the same OS or different ones? (If they are all the same ESXi will share the code so you can over subscribe the host without a speed penalty. Also ESXi will not use the RAM if it doesn't need it. My web host runs fat, dumb and happy at around 1.5 gig used even though I've allocated it a total of 8 gig. When it gets busy the VM will use more memory and then "give" it back when the load is removed.) How much RAM do the VM's need? I haven't figured out how to use 16 gig of ram so to me 32 seems over kill. YMMV

Wow, there's a lot in that question. You absolutely could put a NAS VM in this box. For me I have a separate NAS because Murphy rules and having all of my eggs in one box scares me. Once your ESXi box is up and running, there really isn't any reason it needs to be shut down. You can start and stop VM's all day long without impacting the others. I literally cannot remember the last time I brought the ESXi host machine down.

Truth be told for a lab host system I wouldn't get too carried away with the hardware. Like I said I ran a production ESXi host on an old hand-me-down system for a long time before I popped for the nice machine. And, when I did buy a dedicated host I didn't go crazy. As for power savings I bought the high efficiency power supply knowing it would be running 24/7. What surprised me is how efficient the new CPU's are compared to their predecessors. My system runs at about 1/3 the power consumption of the old AMD.

Buying what is on the VMware's supported list will save you grief. That said ESXi will run on pretty much any relatively current hardware.


(side note. I was hosting my client's web sites on RackSpace.com and paying about $120 / month for so so performance. One client has a huge WordPress site that would take over 20 minutes to backup and forever to download. On top of that the site was sluggish for the users and I was looking for CDN sites to speed things up. That experience was why I bought my own server, I'm lucky to have a 100 mbps internet so hosting it locally is an option. In the 2 years I've been running the ESXi host I've saved well over $3,000 in web hosting fees.)

 

^^ Good info there

 

If this is just for testing or a non-critical environment I wouldn't worry too much about it, throw it on spare hardware you have laying around. If you hit performance issues or hardware compatibility issues then buy new stuff.

+1 on following the hardware compatibility list if buying new equipment though.

As far as backups go, the tolerance for data loss and requirement of uptime always determine what frequency of backups or redundancy I implement. I always like to ask myself: "If this box takes a shit do I need it to be up in < 1 hour, hours, or days?" And also if the box dies do I need my last backup to be an hour, hours, day, or days ago?

Being brutally honest with the answers to those questions determine the scheme used on the box for redundancy.

 

THIS

I'm in a shop where 95+% of our shit is cloud-based now. The uptime and replacement time factors for me are way wacked out now. If the local internet connection (fiber) goes out...go home in hit up a fresh instance via AWS.

The only thing requiring physical tools is the initial intake, the physical scanning of documents into the system, and for that we have a small army of 1099s that get paid cash for all the work we can throw at them.

Once we get that, the rest is hands-off and done by the servers. Really the only things that could stop us, from a daily work perspective, would be AWS going offline or the local Cox loop (fiber internet) going down.

And if either of those happens....well, it's either WW3 or something else beyond our control.

 

I'm not a big fan of the cloud, but my history is in banking and data security critical applications.

If the IT architecture to interface with the cloud is setup well then all is good.

Then again if the IT architecture for a standard IT shop is setup well then all is good too. There's just too many people or shops that fail horribly at architecture, and communicating with the business to set expectations.

Far too many companies want platinum level service for a bronze level price tag and then are surprised when things don't work smoothly.

But now I'm just getting off on a tangent.

 

I don't much about the ESXi builds, but using an Intel chip could be better performance with less wattage.

 

Awesome advice, thanks all.

So brutal honesty, its just a personal lab, no web hosting, with deliberate deletion of VMs and new ones being made for lab work (various OSs- 2012 server, Linux, Kali, XP- whatever scenarios various acquaintances and books throw my way) and the sky isn't falling when there is down time- just eats into my learning time.

Sounds like a run of the mill 4 core Intel i5 model with emphasis on power savings (is hyperthreading important as well?) is enough. Would an i7 be overkill?

Sounds like I can put all the VM's OS on a 256 SSD (though maybe will still get the 500 just to make it useful for a laptop later), and use spinners for the rest.

Murphy, he thinks he is a great friend of mine, he is always coming in, invited or not-- external NAS sounds like the way to go. With the prices out there for 4 bay pre-builts, do you recommend its a good exercise to build one? Its not time critical to have the NAS up and running.

For PCI options, I suppose I should look into NICs, seems hit or miss on built in ones, but what about displays- I looked over on the ESXi forums and having a VM use multiple screens (vs multiple windows in one screen) looked difficult.