I keep an eye on /r/sysadmin and /r/netsec. Any other good ones I need to be aware of?
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submitted by Mr_Ron_Mexico
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What other tech-related subreddits do you subscribe to?
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Anyone know of a good free .ost to .pst converter?
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BPOS North America Issues
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Best simple open source ticketing software?
I was wondering what your opinions are. I am in a ~60 person office with 20 people off site and not having ANY sort of system is getting to be unsustainable. I took an hour or so today and plopped osTicket on a test box and it works pretty well. It was easy to set up and it looks like it will be pretty easy to maintain once I get a knack for it.
Anyone have experience with putting this into production? Any better alternatives? I am no 'nix guru. I can toss Ubuntu server with a LAMP stack running on a box no problem but advanced setup may be a bit over my head.
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restore LVM volumes, different server
This is kind of a strange situation, but basically, I need to somehow mount some xen guest images (which were made from LVMs) and look into their directory structure. kpartx can do this...
That's easy; except for the fact that my restore area is NOT the same server in which these LVM images were created from, meaning I don't have access to the system which had the physical disks. All I have is a backup of the entire system (a image which I've extracted into a directory structure).
I'm not sure what I'm trying to do is even possible. Anyone have any idea about this at all?
Bonus: the disks in which the original LVM configuration were created was in a software RAID.
EDIT: just to clarify this:
a image which I've extracted into a directory structure
it wasn't an image of the disks (or md device in this case). It was a filesystem backup...
So w/o the disks, I'm SOL. Luckily this wasn't that important.
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Monitor net.tcp services
The developers here have created a whole suite of products that the company uses for time tracking, integration to erp etc. They developed it all wcf.net and my team (sysadmins) hosts them on a server 2008 NLB cluster of 4 nodes.
Recently we have noticed some of the services stop responding and we are able to restart them by touching the web.config file.
We use nagios to monitor most of our stuff and from what I can tell there is no plugin for monitoring net.tcp connections. We are monitoring the services via HTTP but hose never seem to go down.
Anyone using a monitoring system that does application level net.tcp monitoring?
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Do they still make those hardware ramdisks?
I'm doing a bit of experimentation with my server at home. I have software RAID5 (mdadm) set up on it right now, and obviously writing is pretty weak. If they still make them, I'd like to get one and set it up as a write-cache for the array (if possible). I believe it would have to be a hardware ramdisk (vs. an SSD) so it's battery-backed.
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SAN Recommendations (or what I need to get HA/Clustering working)
I'm not going to lie---I'm clueless when it comes to High Availability Clustering and SANs. I've been learning a lot about it lately though, and am trying to formulate a plan to migrate to it in the future. I have about 10 rack mounted servers right now providing a variety of services, but mostly File/Print Sharing, Computatation, Calendar/Meeting, Database and Anti-Virus/Windows Updating. They're all Windows Servers, mostly Windows 2003 but slowly Windows 2008 R2.
One of the features I want to use is Failover Clustering, but it has some requirements that I don't feel educated enough to decide on. My understanding is that Failover Clustering requires a SAN or iSCSI volume to work with (although I don't know why---I'm assuming it acts as a shared disk of some kind for the servers to store data on). Is there any way I could enable this feature on a conventional server that I have lying around? If not and I HAVE to buy a SAN---what are some good ones? We're mostly Dell and would like to stay that way, but the SAN solutions I've been looking at are like $6,000 which is probably outside of our budget.
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Trying to deploy a Windows 7 image on a network
How would I go about creating an image with Windows 7?
How would I deploy the image?
Tools, links, etc would be helpful.
I have been trying to use WIM to create an answer file and then installing an image through VMWare, but it doesn't seem that the settings are being imported with the answer file, and the computer does not restart into Audit mode to sysprep.
I have autounattend.xml on the USB drive, the USB drive is active in the VM prior to the process starting, but I just cannot seem to get it to work.
I've been using this guide: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd349348(WS.10).aspx#BKMK_2
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can windows (2003) DHCP server offer different gateways to different computers?
Hi Guys,
In the office here, we originally had 'half' of one side of the building, and recently acquired the other side. We've linked both together now, and were running both sides through an internet DSL line in side A, and via dhcp telling them to use the gateway there for that internet. DHCP is currently issued by the DSL router for side A.
however, internet here sucks, so we got another DSL internet line in side B, with the plan to let all side B users use the internet at this side, thus taking the load off side A's DSL.
so what I've done is manually configured my desktop (in side B) to use the gateway for Side B instead of the one that DHCP gives out, which lets me use the new line. This works fine, but i don't really want to manually configure IP addresses for all of side B just to do this.
Ideally, i'd like to be able to set DHCP this so that all computers at this side of the building get given the gateway for side B , and the others get given the side A. If i was splitting into different subnets, this would be easy as i could just have 2 different DHCP servers, but with no budget for routers either side of the link , I don't think that will be possible, so i'm trying to see if there's another way to do it.
Will the server 2003 DHCP server let me do this ? We've got server(s) in side A that it is disabled on, but i could enable it if it will help solve this problem. Or , are there other ways to do this that I am missing?
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Recovering corrupt dynamic disk
Edit 2 (Resolved): The tech from Microsoft did some Disk Probe wizardry and managed to get the entire partition back! I wish I could explain what he did exactly other than change a few raw values on the disk for documentation sake, but unfortunately I can't. Definitely could of been a worse situation.
Edit 1: Called Microsoft Gold support, got in touch with a tech. He's currently remoted to our server using Disk Probe to look at drive.
Backstory:
Yesterday I was doing network maintenance in our server room and towards the end I decided to reboot the server switch. We have a Windows Server 2003 server that is connected to an ISCSI SAN on the same switch, however when the switch rebooted the server lost connection to the LUN on the disk. When I tried to reconnect the drive, it showed up as a Basic unformatted disk when originally it was a Dynamic disk formatted as NTFS.
The event viewer shows the following error: INTERNAL Error - The specified plex contains disabled subdisks (C1000078).
I need to find a way to recover the data from this "lost" disk as it contains user data over the last day. Is this possible to do short of sending it to a forensics shop?
TlDR; Rebooted a switch, corrupted a LUN on the SAN, need to recover dynamic disk.
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Virtual Desktop
What are your options on the migration my desktops to a virtual environment. My boss is really heavy on moving to it and i am not even sure how it works. Can anyone give links or basics how it works and if anyone has used it before and how it went.
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Nagios/Icinga Windows Servers...what do you monitor?
Just finished setting up my first Icinga/Web server, and I'm configuring it to monitor my mostly windows network. Just curious what services you are all monitoring (with the appropriate check_command, if you don't mind).
Thanks!
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Anyone headed to Microsoft TechEd next week?
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"or simply..."
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Just got 4 hours notice to change the domain admin account password due to a termination. FUN!
I'm pretty sure it was set up by original IT as main account for automated processes (scheduled tasks, antivirus, backups etc). Not sure how deep the tendrils go though...Sorry, this is a real broad question, but any advice on things to check/expect? Any horror stories about switches/file permissions etc? It's a pretty flat network with ~13 servers (Ubuntu and Windows 2003/2008), no Exchange, Non-IP phone system, Sonicwall NSA, HP switches, 1 file server, 2 domain controllers, 1 VMWare Esxi Host. Nothing clustered that I know of. Just wanted to see if you guys had any surprises changing the main domain admin password on a network.
EDIT: Didn't realize it, but after telling me to change the domain admin account, my boss and the administrative secretary both left for the weekend! They either trust me or they don't understand the multitudes of shit that might happen. Thanks for the tips, sounds like it's going to be a case of seeing what breaks...already finding scheduled tasks I didn't know about that use the account credentials.
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Can somebody recommend a SharePoint migration consultant?
My company is currently in the process of migrating out SharePoint 2007 environment to 2010 and are running into some obstacles we can't seem to get past. We are seeking a consultant to come in who has experience with this to assist us with the migration since this will be a one time thing for us and it makes more sense to get it done quickly with a professional than it does to waste time and money on doing it ourselves.
If anybody can provide a recommendation I would greatly appreciate it!
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is there an official/unofficial irc channel for /r/sysadmin?
I checked the FAQs but didn't see one. I'd be happy to set one up if anyones interested!
EDIT: We're up and running at ##/r/sysadmin on irc.freenode.net!
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What's A Fair Sysadmin Salary Given My Situation?
So I've been working for a medical clinic for about 4 years now, I'm 23 now. I started doing help desk support and basic admin. duties with my co-worker the Sys/Network Admin. Over time as the company grew and I became more aware of our network, applications, etc, I was able to learn much more from my co-worker, certifications, and generally when things messed up. I guess I was lucky, because in a short amount of time I gained tons of experience.
I live in a major metropolitan area in the Mid-West where I feel the IT sector is quite strong. Currently, I'm making about 40K/year, and this is hourly. When I first started working here, I made about the same 38-40K with overtime. And now as I have stopped working so much overtime, I'm basically making about the same.
We are mostly a windows shop, 7 locations, about 100 users, 15-20 servers running both linux and windows, a full VoIP network, and complete Cisco infrastructure, except for VoIP which is Asterisk based.
On the side, about once or twice a year, my partner and I will work to construct the entire IT infrastructure of a business we work closely with. This includes, network cabling, setting up network devices, computers, servers, domain, phone systems (VoIP), etc, etc.
I feel that being as young as I am and having the position I do in the company (Network/System Admin) I work for, I've gained so much experience in such a short amount of time compared to those much older than I. I love staying on top of new technologies, and thinking about all the ways I could make the company I work for a better one.
Generally, I'm becoming more business savvy in the way I see IT. I'm starting to become aware of how IT can help business offer their customers better services, how IT can help employees work more efficiently, and so on. I feel like I could be a great contribution to any team that chose to have me, and I generally get along with almost everyone.
I'm not asking everyone to disclose their salaries, but I'm at the point where I feel like I'm not being fairly compensated for skills that I have, but important, what I give back to the company.
If anyone could give me some advice, I'd really appreciate it.
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Database design and three dimensions
I'd like a couple of pointers from those who know SQL relational databases. I am but a young padawan when it comes to database work, but here I am doing it. For what it's worth, I've been doing all this work with SQL Server 2005.
I'm working with a bunch of engineers who designed this website and database [knowing neither how to design a database nor code a website]. So, I'm working on an office schedule for employees, and I'm getting confused on the design portion. What we need is to list who is in what place at what time. That is, User1 could be in the office, User2 could be in Testing, etc. More than one person could be in the office, and more than one person could be in testing.
The current design puts the user's initials as an actual column in the database with the code for what position they're working in the column. Other columns include the Date that corresponds with the shift.
Is it good design to actually have the columns be usernames? I've been working on this for a minute now, and I'm trying to come up with an alternative. That way, when a user is added or deleted from the system, it doesn't have to create, destroy, or alter a column name.
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