Posts by J. Cook 2119 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007
By "no licensing worries" meaning "we are charging you a simplified amount for use of this service, because even our own licensing experts contracted severe migraines trying to figure out the exact combination of licensing that would be needed to run an RDS farm on-prem." /sarcasm
And also don't forget the internet connection required for those cloud PC connections... Your branch offices all have gigabit internet links, right? RIGHT? /sarcasm
The few places I've worked at that have frontline workers and shared workstations either all used roaming profiles, which loaded your profile in from a (hopefully local to the site) file server to the machine you were using for that shift, OR just had a local profile with the icons for the apps the frontline staff use on the 'public' or 'all users' desktop, so everyone had the same apps on that machine.
But yeah... cloud PCs. let's add points of failure (internet, cloud services, failing to pay the bill for either of the two previous items, etc...) to something that was at one point actually something reliable, because we aren't making enough money from people already...
Being out in rural country is still no excuse to leave an open wifi network.
I've been tempted to set up a honeypot access point for grins n giggles that re-directs everything to the rick roll video just to see who gets suckered, but I haven't had the time or inclination.
Heh. While my cubicle at work nominally has a 'trophy wall' with bezels from selected servers and storage appliances we've gotten rid of, I might have an active item to add to it in the form of a JACE2 building automation controller (and it's expansion box) and an "L-Vis" display that was programmed to control it. I'll need to get a power brick for it and some temperature sensors to wire into it, but it might be something amusing to have a blinkenlight display...
(said controller was replaced this week with something newer, supported by the manufacturer, and can be tied into the software that monitors our data centers...)
Oh yeah, that was the other thing- the licensing for VDI was.... breathtakingly expensive.
license for the thin client, license for RDP, license for HyperV/VMWare View, and a license for the VDI itself. 4 licenses for a single user.
(and it if was Hyper-V, IIRC the hyper-V instance was a "per vCPU" style license, so you'd have a 48 core server and have to pay for all 48 cores regardless if you were running 1 VDI box on it or 40-odd boxes.)
You know it's bad when the Microsoft licensing expert is confused about what the exact set of licenses and SKUs are needed....
That would be a "thin client"- just enough brains to boot up a bare bones OS image from a tiny (~4GB) flash module and run a dedicated RDP / X windows / Citrix client and not much else.
We tried that at [RedactedCo] several years ago, and never got past the proof of concept stage, although we did end up having ~100 of the stupid things that got put into asset recovery afterwards...
Oh gods, that gives me flashbacks to the old RSA servers we had on prem for a while; It was fun times getting access back to those when the administrator fobs all expired after I inherited the admin hat for them...
(It was convoluted, but involved physical access, the serial number of the box itself, and the vendor's support access account which had local admin on the machine, IIRC.)
Thankfully, we've long since migrated away from those, especially when I went to get support on one of them and they went "heck no, those have been out of support and EOL for three years now, but we'll get you set up on the virtual machine iterations of those and move your token databases over as a courtesy." A nice gesture considering a 20 pack of tokens was something like two grand at the time...
To play devil's advocate, it's legacy code that probably has exactly ONE customer that uses that exploit legitimately, and they are a multi-billion (or multi-trillion) dollar entity.
The better question to ask is "why hasn't NTLM been put out to pasture already in favor of Kerberos?
That's fine with me, just stop kvetching about why the IT maintenance budget keeps going up because some group of stooges in finance insist on such penny-wise pound foolish behavior.
(at [RedactedCo], for the longest time they kept denying me extra storage for the company's file servers, until there was a watershed moment in which we ran completely out of space and had to spend 5 digits worth of un-budgeted money to.... add storage I had been wanting for the last three budget cycles.
If anything, that also taught me that when I do ask for something, I automatically add ~20% additional capacity to what I ask for...
We tried a couple of those at [RedactedCo] for a digital signage type application that ran in IE of all things. The current name of those is just "JackPC" made by Chip PC. Neat concept, but the ones we played with could barely run the Windows Embedded they had, let along a web browser.
I will cheerfully admit that [RedactedCo] has had a few interesting issues with the various brands of storage we've have in the nearly 15 years that I've had the 'owner' hat for the storage systems.
We've had:
a Netapp FAS eat one of it's controller heads. (We had it set as an active /active pair, so the userbase didn't notice a damn thing.)
a couple Dell Powervault MD3000 arrays; One had a double drive failure on it, eating the raid volume and the backup data spool therein. We had another one that some chucklehead only allocated a single drive to the quorum volume that the database servers that connected to it used for cluster management, and no hot spares on the entire array. (To that appliance's credit, that one drive failed after I had virtualized one of the database cluster nodes that used it; That virtual machine ran as a 'cluster of one' for a few months as we decommissioned the last application from it.)
a Nimble CS1000 getting powered off the hard way when the entire data center shut down from low battery when the site was flooded and the substation in the sub-basement of the building was drowned. (that was a fun couple months, but I was very impressed when it came back up with only minor complaints!)
a brand spanking new Pure storage box that ate not one, but two controllers before deciding the third one was OK. (with some collateral damage of me having to replace a fiber patch cable when the field engineer slammed the insert/extract level over it and destroyed the connector- I was Not Pleased.)
And finally, a Nexsan E18 that one day decided that several of the drives had packed it in (along with one of the controllers burping)- the support engineer set up a zoom meeting, and walked me both through using the super sekret page on the device's web interface to un-fail the drives and re-sync the RAID array, with zero data loss, and getting this very paniced admin out of the 'oh shit oh shit oh shit' anxiety attack that was occurring. :)
a "small business" Qnap appliance decided that it would shut down and never power back up after we rebooted it in order to install firmware updates. While I was able to transfer the disks over it's replacement and didn't lose any data from that adventure, we are looking to move that data... elsewhere.
The one appliance we didn't really have a problem with was the Data Domain, outside of the usual "I'm going to take an hour to re-hydrate a ~800 GB database backup" process and the "you want how much for the year four support renewal!?!?!" shenanigans.
I used the DPReview site when I bought my ancient Kodak 6490 nearly 20 years ago; on the strength that the asic on it was (for that class of camera and pixel range) one of the better ones for the price.
I got a LOT of good pictures out of it, and for a 4 megapixel camera it really did quite well.
Sadly, I'm once again in the market, as my Candy Red Pentax K-x bit the dust last year. I looked it up on DP review after getting it and was pleased that the kit lens on there was considered "decent enough" that I never bothered getting anything else for it.
Any recs for a reasonably priced DSLR in either the Canon or Nikon camp?
Yes. It's called Windows 10 Enterprise, and you need to have an Enterprise Agreement for it; Coupled with System Center Configuration Manager, it allows for staged updates to a testing farm, then general deployment.
There's also Windows 10 LTSC (formerly LTSB) that is specifically intended for specific purposes; it doesn't get updates nearly as often as the normal channels.
Ah, Token Ring. Fond memories of that.... Well, that's all of them.
The implementation I worked with was Token Ring over STP. (although the wall to machine patches were standard Cat 5 UTP patches...) The place also had a MAU switch/hub in the same rack as the STP based one, probably for historical reasons, or the one or two things that still needed it. (It's been a LONG time since I've been to that place, and I'm quite certain they've ripped it all out at this point.
Well at least it looks good for a little while, until someone in the company decides that the company town needs to generate revenue instead of being a cost item on the books.
And then there's the company store, which is usually the only store in the company town, and the only place that'll accept company scrip, which they pay instead of actual currency.
The US has seen this story a couple times in it's history, and it usually ends in bloodshed. Hell, there was even a song made about it.
I can only assume you are being sarcastic, because such devices exist now, just not as a factory feature. There's a few dealerships that are of the 'buy here, pay here' variety that cater to people with poor credit, and as such, when you buy a vehicle from them, you also agree to have a tracking and immobilizing device installed (at your expense, tacked on to the purchase contract) that will allow the dealer to remotely immobilize the car if you fall behind on your payments.
At least one dealer got sued when they either forgot to disable it on a paid off vehicle, or there was a mistake that kept immobilizing someone's car...
And that's not including their support, either.
I opened a ticket for an (admittedly self-inflicted) group policy issue that's causing the App store and store Apps to be blocked for no apparent reason.
the support tech I got latched on to something else entirely and refused to let go of it. Yes, I know putting the user and computer object into a testing OU where almost all policies are blocked(1) fixes the problem- I'm not moving all 1700 users and 700 plus computers into that one OU to fix a single problem that realistically only affects one person, and will cause widespread chaos and havoc to the rest of the environment.
So, I get to spend several painstaking days slowly and methodically re-building the policy set back into that one OU to figure out what the exact setting is that breaks it, because there's f#%k-all worth of documentation for what the app store and apps 'bought' through it require as far as policies and permissions are concerned.
1) except for two very, VERY specific ones, one of which isn't applicable
And all apologies to fans of Queen and the best comic book movie ever made*.
(* No, seriously- It's over the top, there's COLOR instead of 50 shades of brown**, and enough wonderful scenery that even Brian Blessed (Giant Ham (WARNING: TV TROPES LINK)) couldn't fully chew, and lots of cheese to go with the ham. A fantastic movie for just turning one's brain off and watching the spectacle. )
(** I would have liked the 2013 movie Man of Steel better if it had been in color.)
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