@Carnival-Boy said:

In 2011, we bought an HP Proliant DL180 with 6 x 1TB SATA drives running Windows Server 2008R2 and Veeam B&R. This server is used exclusively to run Veeam (and store the backups Veeam creates). It's been fine, but I now need more storage as our backup sizes have grown in the last 5 years. There are no free HDD slots (there are also 2 x 250GB drives in the remaining slots which run the O/S). What should I do?

New HP 2TB drives are about $280 each. Hypertec equivalents are cheaper, but not by much. I don't have a maintenance agreement on the server and it wouldn't be cost effective to take one out. I'd rather the use the server until it dies, but I'm slightly reluctant to invest too much in new drives.

Can I get normal hard drives and install them in the existing caddies containing the existing hard drives?

I could use RAID5 instead of RAID10 to get a bit more storage out of the existing drives. I could replace the two 250GB drives with two 1TB drives, which would increase my storage, but not my much. This is likely to only be a short term solution.

I'm not committed to keeping the server, so open to any suggestions.

$280 for 2TB? What a rip-off. That's 3-4 times the market price. I would just get bunch of 4TB or 6TB drives from Amazon or Newegg and be done with it.

Try to get a real credit card from your bank. Or perhaps buy a prepaid one. Debit card is a big no-no. Never use it for any purchases whatsoever. Not online, not in stores. If crooks get a hold of your debit card, they have direct access to your money. And getting fraudulent charges reversed is a real pain. With credit cards, you don't deal with money directly, and most card issuers will correct fraudulent charges without asking any questions.

@MattSpeller said:

@marcinozga said:

I was going to get one, but $199 price puts me off. Even at $99 it would be too expensive.

$200 isnt bad considering what it does. Granted, I don't know how well it works or if it's remotely useful. But for the electronics and R&D, yeah, $200 isnt bad.

Well, it's basketball. $200 just doesn't seem right. And if you look into limitations it's not that great anymore:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R13YXTE7CKHHCK/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B015CXWLFG&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=3375251&store=sporting-goods

Also 100000 shots battery life is just poor. I don't play much these days, but I used to do hundreds of shots a day, perhaps well over a thousand. That's not even a year. And then what? Another $200 for another ball? I don't think so.

I was going to get one, but $199 price puts me off. Even at $99 it would be too expensive.

pkg or apt-get?

I think you're trying to work these issues backwards. You have performance problems, you suspect where the problems are, so you're trying to solve them by throwing more hardware at it. You need to step back and really figure out what's going on there. Monitor entire setup for a few days and see if there are obvious bottlenecks, like CPU, RAM or disk IO.

And like Scott said above, it really sounds like you have some bad code there.

yum install sqlite-devel

works

Ok, how do you get code highlight here?

yum install sqlite-devel ?

@scottalanmiller said:

So this is being discussed in a few thread and offline as well and the question arose... if people are not local admins in how they run on their desktops, and you don't want to heavily restrict software deployments, how can this be handled in a secure yet productive way.

I have some thoughts but as a non-Windows Admin, especially a non-desktop admin, I'm sure that a lot of people will have better insight than me. But I am familiar with a few good options.

1. Allow Admin Escalation. If you have a user who is qualified, trusted and authorized to act as an admin (e.g. would be trusted with IT, but that is not their duties) then allowing escalation to admin would be okay. @Minion-Queen gets this. She isn't allowed to run as a local admin for using her computer, but she had an admin account so that if she wants to install something she does not have to go through IT to do it (but can, that's what IT is for.)
2. Use a product like LANDesk. Using this you can a web page where users can click to install any pre-selected application. This is very smooth and way easier than a normal software installation. It does require prepping the applications, but it is a nice middle ground with application verification and really, really easy end user capabilities and can be used for ANY end user and can have approval workflow when necessary (manager approves license or whatever.)
3. You can make something like LANDesk using Chocolatey (or other tools) that are locked to a private (or the public) repos and enable using that locally or through a custom interface. Lots of options.
4. Have IT do it through scripts or GPO. Not as "all on the end user" but makes the system pretty easy and quick. Can be automated through a portal as well, bringing us back to #3.
5. Just have a good ticket system and workflow for IT to do it. This is simpler than it sounds in most cases.

I haven't met users that I can trust yet. They either install malware eventually, or worse, install bootlegs at will. 5 is probably the best option.

Use Veeam for all. You can run script to dump MySQL database before backup runs. Regardless of what you choose, file level restore with most Linux setups don't make much sense, unless your VM is really huge. Restoring entire VM takes just a few minutes, digging through files to do individual restores can easily take much more time.

I have a similar unit, a bit older though: http://ark.intel.com/products/83255/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC5i5RYH
It's a great home lab machine, I run esxi with 5 Linux VMs right now. It's quiet (although a bit louder than 27" iMac), power efficient and stays cool. Mine officially supports 16GB of ram, I also use M2 SSD, I can add regular SATA SSD if needed.

@Dashrender said:

@marcinozga said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@marcinozga said:

We've had on average one person a year fired because of their browsing habits. One person was even watching Netflix 8 hours a day, surprisingly that person still works here.

That's horrible, why would you fire perfectly good employees that are being productive because of perceived browsing habits? Those managers should be fired, that's as clueless as you can get. If those people are doing a good job and earning their keep, firing them because of a metric that has nothing to do with their ability to do their job or their productivity would be tantamount to intentional sabotage - and should trigger an investigation over discrimination.

Because they weren't productive. Management was spot on every time, employees in question were spending too much time browsing stuff unrelated to their work. 8 hours a day on Facebook instead of finishing your engineering project usually leads to termination.

But you're firing them because of lack of work, not because they were surfing the web.

I guess the hard part is - how do you set real workable metrics on work to ensure people are working but not having unrealistic expectations.

These are of course management is paid to do.

They weren't productive because they browsed the web. We cut the internet from one person once, that person was able to finish all work on time when internet access was removed.

@scottalanmiller said:

@marcinozga said:

We've had on average one person a year fired because of their browsing habits. One person was even watching Netflix 8 hours a day, surprisingly that person still works here.

That's horrible, why would you fire perfectly good employees that are being productive because of perceived browsing habits? Those managers should be fired, that's as clueless as you can get. If those people are doing a good job and earning their keep, firing them because of a metric that has nothing to do with their ability to do their job or their productivity would be tantamount to intentional sabotage - and should trigger an investigation over discrimination.

Because they weren't productive. Management was spot on every time, employees in question were spending too much time browsing stuff unrelated to their work. 8 hours a day on Facebook instead of finishing your engineering project usually leads to termination.

@scottalanmiller said:

@wrx7m said:

I agree with you but how do you know what people are accessing if you aren't monitoring it, at least passively?

I don't want to know what they are accessing. I know of no positive, but tons of negative, results from that. Having that information available doesn't itself cause problems, but it makes problems really easy to have - like not looking at how well people do their jobs and instead looking at what web sites that they go to.

I truly believe that 99.9% of the time, having this information has only negative value. And IT should never want this, management might require it, but it would never be in IT's interest to have to collect this.

We've had on average one person a year fired because of their browsing habits. One person was even watching Netflix 8 hours a day, surprisingly that person still works here.

Employees are paid to do their jobs, not to browse the web. If the management has a need to have that info, then we should provide it.

@coliver said:

@MattSpeller said:

@marcinozga said:

you're free to die.

We are only just now getting the right to die on our own terms in Canada, it's been quite the curfuffle as you'd expect of such a serious thing.

I think we have one state that approved that in the US. More to follow I'm sure. I think they call it the Die with Dignity movement.

If a Republican becomes next president, I wouldn't expect much progress there.

@tonyshowoff said:

@iroal said:

@BRRABill said:

@iroal said:

Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will no waiting, and of course It's Free

I do not know one way or the other.

The only real person I ever heard speak about it was a co-worker who moved from the US to England. They hated the system over there for elective type stuff.

A real example.

Last night I feel bad and with Flu, using Internet I get a date with my doctor this morning, doctor told me It was just a cold, She gave me the prescription for the medicaments.

I go to the pharmacy and bought the medicaments with a 80% of discount thanks to the prescription, I spend 2 €.

Of course visit the doctor is free.

I love this system.

A decent amount of Americans would respond one of these, if not all:

• You're lying
• That's socialism, we believe in freedom
• Yes but your taxes must be crazy!
• If that's true why do people come to America for healthcare?
• That's communism, we believe in freedom.
• Healthcare is not a right, it's a privilege (I see this one not that often, but often enough to where it's disturbing)
• Hey, if you can't pay, you deserve to be sick (I guess they forget about children and disabled)
• There's no such thing as free! My taxes! My taxes! (meanwhile they pay far more in health insurance, if they have it at all, than they would've paid in taxes).

I see this stuff all the time.

I work with bunch of rednecks and this is exactly what I hear. The problem with Americans, well, mostly with said rednecks, is they much rather have rights to own guns than right to have free healthcare. Too bad when they get sick, of their meth lab explodes and they storm the ER, average person has to pick up the tab, indirectly of course. I'd say, exercise your freedom, you have the right to refuse the medical care and you're free to die.

I have $4000 deductible. my employers pays first $1500, the plan cost me nothing. My wife has $1500 deductible, paid entirely by employer, plan costs her about $40 every 2 weeks. Last year we both had $0 cost plan, $2500 or $1500 deductible paid in full by employer. There are small copays after deductible, in $20-$50 range. Two years ago there was no copays, just deductible paid by employer of course. We already warned the employer that if insurance gets any worse, we're moving back to Europe.

@Dashrender said:

@marcinozga said:

@Dashrender said:

@marcinozga said:

@Minion-Queen said:

@BRRABill said:

@Minion-Queen said:

This is only me using the insurance. If husband or son ever need to use it well the costs go up from there.

Also assuming nothing serious happens, which is kind of the definition of insurance.

that's true. However my deductibles for visits, surgery etc. is still crazy. It's just not worth having.

How is your deductible so high? Max out of pocket is $6850 for individual per year, including deductible. Your insurance is screwing you and most likely breaking the law.

How so? In Omaha, a family plan is often $10,400 deductible for a high deductible plan. Then the cost of insurance on top of that.

https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/ - individual $6850, family $13700.

Different areas have different numbers. But it's definitely not illegal for there to be a $9000 family deductible as someone else was implying.

I must have missed the family part and assumed it was individual.

@Dashrender said:

all that said - it would be really nice to just have collision type insurance - catastrophic insurance. If you run into something medical that will cost more than say $10K. the insurance pays it.. done.. anything less... suck it up, life's not cheap!

It is, in Canada, and most, if not all of EU.