Best posts made by Dashrender

I'm not sure where this belongs, please feel free to move it.

Today only Sangoma is having a 30% sale off 25 year term commercial add-ons for FreePBX.

Code is FREEPBX13

You have to do this from portal.schmoozecom.com

@MattSpeller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

@Dashrender said:

Why are you working weekends?

When I was younger I worked weekends because I was poor, the things I wanted to cost money, and I could make extra money working the weekends.. now, that's simply not the case.

And sure, while my job allows some flex time to work weekends, it's not a normal requirement of my job.

Is it of yours?

I go above and beyond. If I see a problem I try to fix it even if it isn't a benefit to me. My work ethic isn't appreciated though unfortunately. Salary is like indentured servitude.

Keep at it, work hard, and don't let your current situation dull your ass kicking attitude.

actually I disagree - if you feel stifled like this, you should leave, and leave ASAP. Don't allow your attitude to become damaged by a bad environment.

Ug, I know this isn't news... but damn SourceForge and their new droppers!

I just installed Filezilla - which the only download link I could get from their page was for SF - it installed Chromium, Opera and a shortcut for Facebook.

WTF!

@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:

@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:

@dafyre said in Don't Stay in School:

@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:

@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:

@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:

I'll definitely agree that anything past probably 8th grade, and perhaps much less than that, are really needed by the common man.

Probably a mix. Few 8th graders are anywhere nearly prepared to talk politics. Things like geography and history are necessary for even basic functional citizenship (unless we remove democracy, then we don't have to educate every individual to all of these things - democracy comes at an incredible price.) Math needs to at least go to algebra. Science we go way, way too far. Computing we rarely even bother to introduce in any meaningful way. English lit... way too far.

I definitely understand where you are coming from - and I'll fully admit to my general lack of knowledge in history - but would dropping the general requirements for history really change much in the world we live in today?

History gives us good examples of things that have been tried and worked, or things that have tried and failed... In technology, government, business...

of course - but do these lessons get learned by the masses today? At bare minimum, finding a way to improve delivery and retention of this knowledge is required.

If this were before the time of Google and online encyclopedias, I would agree with you. I think now, though, that teaching someone HOW to find that wealth of knowledge rather than making them retain it is better in some regards. Not that they should never be taught the history. But in the teaching, show them how to search for and learn from history.

My HS chemistry teacher said - and I'll never forget this - that he wouldn't bother making us memorize the periodic table - why bother? You can always look it up. The parts that you use frequently would become memorized from use, and the rest are just a lookup away. I loved that man for that simple logic!

Here is a tip I wrote myself a note about.
Thought it was a good reason to add a new thread - collect windows tips here.

When your window disappears is to make it active by clicking the entry on the taskbar, hitting Alt+Space, then M, then an arrow key. This attaches the window to your cursor, and you can move it back.

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:

For those judging...

It's a terrible tragedy, but hopefully the takeaway isn't that parents don't need to be responsible for common sense and just because other parents were also less than cautious does not make it completely okay. That this person uses "I did it too" as a defence is circular reasoning. It's like "if all your friends jump off of a bridge."

We can't know who is to blame. But this post sounds like someone trying to justify their own decision to allow a child into alligator risk water rather than any kind of justification for the other ones who also did. I've been near that water myself and don't go into it because of alligators. I've seen many a gator in that water and there are many signs about them (or were.)

Hard to say what the signage is there or what kinds of warnings are provided ... and it isn't like kids don't get taken by sharks in the ocean and we don't say "well parents shouldn't let their kids swim in the ocean."

The best outcome will be awareness and hopefully more parents will be conscious of allowing small children to go alone into alligator risk areas.

But if places like Africa are any example, it doesn't change parental behaviour even in places where losing children to crocs is common.

What worries me most about articles like this is that they risk downplaying everyone's responsibility in the hopes of "making people feel better." I understand that there is value in helping those hurt through a time of loss. But there is a value in making people realize that we can't just leave the safety of children to someone else, too.

I'm glad a parent said this - I would have been filleted saying that as a non parent!

You could use something like Veeam's free EndPoint Protection product to backup to a local NAS device.

And something like CrashPlan to backup only the data from the machines to the cloud.

In case of full DR, you could restore the Veeam image to a VM on whatever platform you like, and for a complete site loss, you'd have Crashplan for the data.

Is it me, or are we beating a dead horse with these questions and how many people get it wrong?

Scott is of course correct. So if you can recover the files directly, great - frankly that would be a ton easier anyhow, just slave up the drive to another system and pull the files, import them into something else, you're done.

But it's country.

Just got out of a power outage post mortem.

I get to replace the UPS in the remote network closet with a UPS that works on the network. Yeah!

Who should I talk to about the trade in stuff?

I currently have an APC 1000XL. I want at least 1500VA and talks to the network.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

One of the buildings we cover has a satellite dish that connects them to another building we have. Every time it rains it loses connection. Haven't ever supported a site that has a setup like this where environmental problems were this much of an issue. Should an interesting learning experience.

What is your distance between buildings? could you upgrade to something different and eliminate the drop outs?

Unsure yet. I only heard it mentioned. Have not actually been to the site yet.

If you know the locations, you might be able to use Google Maps to see your distance with the measuring tool. Could show some LOS issues as well maybe.

If weather is what causes the issue, I would hope there are no LOS issues.

But as mentioned, it might be time to upgrade the wireless equipment. UBNT makes some pretty inexpensive stuff for this, They also make some more expensive stuff for this if needed. They have an awesome lineup.

The ZT gateway would be a second gateway device.

You'd add a rule in your default gateway device that points all traffic destined for your ZT network to the IP of the ZT gateway.

Assuming ZT network = 10.0.100.x/24
Assuming local LAN = 192.168.50.x/24
Assuming LAN DG = 192.168.50.1
Assuming ZT gateway device LAN IP = 192.168.50.2
Assuming ZT gateway device ZT IP = 10.0.100.1

you could add something like this to your default gateway.
route add 10.0.100.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.50.2

Within the ZT network you'd also have to add a route
route add 192.168.50.0 mask 255.255.255.0 10.0.100.1

I've met all of the original cast of Star Wars other than Harrison Ford.

Though hanging out with Weird Al for a bit is currently the best one I can think of at the moment.

OK 30-40 mins in and XenServer is now booting from the SD card for the first time.

While not related - the kill 1 vs 10 reminds of me of something I think was quoted as coming from google - if we have to choose between killing grandma crossing the street or a family on the sidewalk, we've already failed.

I thought I'd just share my SIP issues.

I'll start by telling you that we have:
Axxess digital system with 60 phones, Building 1
Mitel 5000 VOIP with 35 phones, Building 2
Mitel 5000 VOIP with 20 phones, Building 3

Building 1 and 2 are connected via private fiber at 1 Gb.
Building 2 and 3 are connected via VPN

We have SIP provided by Cox Communication with an onsite Edgemark Session Border Controller (SBC) appliance.
IP to the SBC is limited only to the Mitel 5000 in building 2 (same building, same subnet, same VLAN, flows through two switches)

About 2 weeks ago one of my operators tells me that she's getting an alarm 145 on her phone. It would be there for a few seconds then gone.

I looked alarm 145 up and found this: A145 ALARM - SIP Peer Out-of-Service Mitel 5000 HX Ver5.1

OK a SIP related problem. So I started with my PBX vendor - please look over the logs and tell me what you see. They tell me they see no problems - sigh, OK, then they suggest I call Cox.

I call Cox, they open a ticket and call me back the next day.

Cox reports that they see some error, nothing big, but they believe that they are related to the fact that network side of the Edgemark is set to 10 half duplex and they want to change it to 100 full. I schedule for them to make this change at 6 PM that night. They call me at 6:10 and tell me the change is made and the error they were seeing were gone - Great, or so I thought.

So the next day, my operator reports more Alarm 145's. Hmmm... So I call Cox again. They report no errors on their side. So I call the PBX vendor and ask them to look again. They say they will look into and get back to me.

Now keep in mind that no one in the office has reported any issues with the phones, the only reason we are looking at anything is because of the Alarm 145's on the operator console.

So 3 or 4 days go by, we're now in the second week 2/8/2016, and I get an email from a user with a picture of her phone with and error on it.

Destination is not Responding

Now we have production impact. We've probably been having it since the first reports of the Alarm 145, but no one was complaining.

As it turns out, this only happens when making outgoing calls, and appears to happen randomly.

This information was provided to the vendor and a global email was sent to the company asking people specifically to report any weirdness with the phones. Well that just opened the flood gates. Within 5 mins of sending that email I had around 10 people telling me it's been happening for days.

No one bothered to mention it because after a try or two or three, they could usually make their phone call, and well, heck I'm done calling now so what does it matter?

Moving on - I reported this additional information to our PBX vendor. The PBX vendor collected a new set of logs and sent them off to the PBX manufacturer.

Now by Wednesday, the PBX vendor and I agreed that they and Cox needed to get together to try to solve this problem. I called Cox and told them to contact the vendor directly so they could work on this problem. Cox presented no issue with this request. Come some time on Thursday the manufacturer suggested a change - that change was made which made the Destination is not Responding problem much worse. Now when trying to dial out, it would take an average of 4 tries to make a call. That change was undone within 30 mins and things settled back down.
Now this was happening on a Friday. This report was provided to the PBX manufacturer, who responded after we closed with a recommendation to enable SIP logging.

Note - Cox never called anyone in response to my request that they work directly with the vendor to solve this.

Monday SIP logging was enabled and a request was made to me to grab the logs as quickly after someone had the issue. No problem - within 20 mins I had sent three sets of logs (three different people reported the problem in short order, I grabbed a log after each call). The PBX vendor sent those logs to the manufacturer - who didn't respond, and as far as I know still hasn't responded.
So yesterday, at the end of the day I called Cox and told them that they will put a tech on the phone with my vendor at 7:30 Tuesday morning. The plan was made and it was kept.
Shortly there after I get a call from the PBX vendor telling me that Cox is looking into it. At 11:30 my PBX vendor calls again, says Cox needs me to inform them (Cox) of when errors are happening so they can watch the logs specifically at those times in an effort to work on this.
I schedule for the PBX vendor to be onsite at 1 PM and we'll conference Cox in and see if we can make the issue happen.

**This is important: ** I don't recall the exactly timing, but at somepoint before this, Cox had discovered that there were rejections in their logs for invalid authentication on calls.

Once we were all conference together, the very first test call I made failed with Destination is not Reponding - I give Cox the phone number I was trying to dial and they locate the record. We make calls for another 30 mins, most succeeding, a few failing.

We were off the phone by 1:50 and Cox is currently still trying to find why authentication is failing on some calls and not all or none.

I'll continue the story as there are more details.

Used is definitely required here.

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

Up until my experience with an almost fully virtualized infrastructure, I would rather have reliable servers.

However, after my experience with virtualized infrastructure, my mindset changed.

It should not change. Resultant reliability is the only value.

Right. Mine changed because the reliability of the single systems we had (on the budget that we had to work with) resulted in systems being not reliable as they should have been.

The resultant reliability of having two VMware servers with replicated storage was increased, because the perception was that the system was more reliable because things did not go down near as often as was happening otherwise.

That's not perception - that's reality. You found one option, an option through redundancy that provided you with reliability.

The lack of redundancy does not mean lack of reliability. You're continued stance on perception seems to imply that not having redundancy would mean you would have less or no reliability.

I'd argue, in the case of virtualization, redundancy is often a major player in reliability, but not a sole requirement.

@Minion-Queen said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

the sounds are soothing

so are the sounds of the dieing in AOE