Stop. That's the answer. If you get the feeling that you need a physical server it is time to stop and think about what chain of logic (or emotions) is bringing you to this thought, because something has gone wrong. There really are no reasonable cases where you are going to have cause for even entertaining, let alone selecting, a physical install today.

There are extreme edge cases, like the worlds top 1% of low latency trading applications, where physical is warranted, but these are rare and you would never be in a situation of wondering what should be done when that comes up. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you are special and that all IT knowledge does not apply to you, keep your servers physical.

There are loads of misconceptions around virtualization that might be at fault from thinking that there is a direct association with consolidation, that virtualization requires special licensing or other costs, that a SAN or other external storage device is needed, that virtualization has significant overhead, that your application is special and can't be virtualized, that just because you don't know why virtualization is important that it isn't for you or that you are not big enough (or small enough) to use virtualization. The list of misconceptions could go on all day. I've even seen people believe that login timeouts or other factors so unrelated to virtualization that they could never be anticipated being believed to be reasons to deploy physically.

These things are all myths and ones that are generally shot down in classes, forums, sessions and publications every day, yet remain persistent. Dealing with individual myths is difficult, if not impossible, as you can see some myths are simply unreasonable to anticipate. What is better is to understand that physical deployments are simply not reasonable and should not be considered. When you get that feeling... stop. If you are so uncertain that you feel that you need explanation reach out and ask for peer review to help you understand why virtualization makes sense or, more importantly, why not virtualizing is a bad idea. But if you lack peer review or your peers cannot figure out the reason, do not accept that as justification for going physical. Dig deeper until you have the reason, because going physical is simply not a reasonable solution at the end of the day.

Youtube Video

Comparing the idea of a database, which is a file, to database engines and database management systems.

Youtube Video

When someone new to IT or interested in an IT career asks advice for getting their foot in the door, invariably lots of people are going to tell them that they need to get the CompTIA A+ certification. But the A+ is not an IT certification at all, but a bench certification and the knowledge in it is either so basic that anyone interested in an IT career should either already have it (and never need to certify on it as it is so basic) or it doesn't really apply to them (because it is a bench skill.)

The A+ also suffers from being horrendously out of date, testing skills that would have been applicable often a decade prior. In entry level bench work, this is sometimes (but not often) useful, it IT is essentially never is. Bench work in entry level shops often involves local computers stores and consumers attempting to keep ancient hardware limping along that is not financially viable. Businesses, driven by financial decisions, are far less likely to do this and those that do, turn to consumer bench services for support.

Making the mistake of lumping bench work in with IT work leads to a feeling that the A+ will be beneficial to an IT career. But deep questioning of people who feel that they benefited from the A+ often expose that those that feel it helped them or that it was requires went into and often are still in bench careers, rather than IT ones (or jobs that are primarily bench.) If your interest in a career in IT, the A+ should be seen as both non-applicable as well as overly rudimentary, not to bench antiquated. Starter IT certs are more advanced and there is no reason not to jump straight into them instead. Having a higher level cert, meant for IT professionals, that is up to date will do dramatically more for your personal growth, your own education and your ability to get your foot into the door of a real IT position.

Before posting this video here, this is already my most popular video!

If you've ever had to download Oracle's Java products, you are likely aware that you have to go to their web page, in a web browser, click accept to their license terms and then download the product. This, obviously, cannot be done on a server because you need a GUI to do this. A bit of a pain.

There is a way to handle this from the command line. Find the download link that you want to use and use this wget command to prefix it...

wget --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie"

So for example, for the latest Java 9 download, this is the full command to run from your server's command line:

wget --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/9+181/jdk-9_linux-x64_bin.rpm

There you go, handle CLI based Oracle Java downloads.

Any reason that they aren't just giving you an extension for home like usual?

Youtube Video

In this myth busting SAMIT episode, I'll dig into the question of whether or not VLANs are needed for VoIP, and if not, why does everyone tell you that they are?

Why not back up through normal MS SQL means and restore using its own tools?

If you have installed Ubuntu (or likely many other Linux distros) as a VM you may find that it defaults to, and will not let you change, from an extremely small resolution such as 800x600. This can be pretty annoying. There is a pretty simple solution, however.

First, we need to edit our GRUB configuration:

sudo vi /etc/default/grub

Find the line that looks like this:

#GRUB_GFXMODE=

And modify it to something like this (choose a resolution that makes sense for you.)

GRUB_GFXMODE=1600x900

After doing this, save the changes. Then we have to apply them to the live GRUB system.

sudo update-grub

Then just reboot and, in theory, your resolution will have changed.

If you need to change the hostname of a Windows box from the command line, the wmic tools make this a breeze. Use this pattern.

wmic computersystem where name="%COMPUTERNAME%" call Rename Name="NEW-HOSTNAME"

Using the where name="%COMPUTERNAME%" pattern lets you skip putting in the local machine name. The only piece you need to fill in is what your NEW-HOSTNAME should be.

Confirmed as working on ScreenConnect, too.

Step one.... deposit in the trash bin.

Step two... buy a real phone.

Here is a basic, working Nginx conf to use with ScreenConnect.

server {
  listen 443 ssl default_server;
  server_name my.site.com;
  server_tokens off;
  ssl          on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/my.site.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/my.site.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot

    location / {
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
      proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8040;
      proxy_redirect off;
  }
}

This configuration assumes that ScreenConnect is running on the same server as Nginx. If it is not, change 127.0.0.1 to point to the IP address of the SC server, instead.

Hey guys, just wanted to point out that you can help the vendors who help you, if you have an account at SW (and who doesn't?) hop over and show some love for the vendors who do some heavy participation over here. CloudatCost and Pertino are both on this list, just go vote and show your support!

New switches in 24 and 48 port configurations just announced by Ubiquiti.

Over the years of reading questions on SpiceWorks, I've come to the conclusion that there are a few simple ways that nearly all of us could get better answers, better advice, more information by changing how we ask questions. Here are some tips that I've learned (this is not about break/fix questions but about guidance questions...)

• Always give the business background. No IT choice is made outside of a business context, so provide us with the drives on the decision. Need product type X? Do you need it to be fast? Reliable? Flexible? Cheap? What business factors are prompting the decision? Defining "why" you are looking for a solution not only gives people an opportunity to actually answer you properly but also forces you to think about the reasoning behind your thinking as well.

• Step back one level. By the time we are looking for advice all of us are one level too deep to know if we are asking the right question. By the time we are stuck, we've already gone further down the decision path than we were prepared to. So step back and ask a broader question than you think that you should. For example... if you are asking what SAN to buy, instead ask if you should get shared storage or not. If you are asking which email system to implement, instead back up and ask if you should be looking at hosted or in house email. Looking at VoIP and want to know which PoE switch is best? Instead ask if PoE makes sense. Implementing VLANs and want configuration guidance? Instead, ask if VLANs meet your need best.

• Use meaningful titles. Don't put extra works, pleases, thank you's, ASAPs, HELP HELP or other meaningless stuff as a title. Say "Researching Email Systems" or "Need DR Plan for Satellite Office Ideas".

We all get blinded before we realize it. By the time we run out of answers, we've already lost our way. It's okay to say what you think the answer might be, but be careful as you might guide the answer. Get broader guidance than you think you need, it will serve you better.

(Reprinted from an August 2012 article that I wrote but a very important one that we need for reference.)

This must happen several times a day: we get a post asking for the best of a product or approach as if there is a clear "best" for each category. Some examples are "Please tell me the best:"

• NAS
• SAN
• Operating System
• Hypervisor

The list goes on and on. And the question rarely has any more information than that. It's clear that the assumption, unstated of course, is that all of IT can be distilled to just a "List of the Current Best Products" and that that is just a super secret list and that if you ask someone will divulge the answers one by one.

This assumes that all products are simply measured on a one dimensional scale from poor to great and all you need is the product farthest towards great and that's the best answer. It disregards features, approaches, cost and other critical factors.

And the biggest issue is that different businesses and situations call for completely different products. The "best" SAN for company A might be really silly for company B. The NAS that I chose for home use for streaming by videos is hardly the same NAS that Fortune 500 is going to use for protecting all of their critical documents. Every situation is unique.

Asking questions like this is just a waste of time. Tons of opinion and conjecture will come to light with nothing useful for the person asking the question. But that they felt that they could ask such a question and get a meaningful answer means that they have a very high likelihood of taking insane, mocking or just uninformed answers as being correct.

Don't ask a question looking for what is "best". Give a scenario, give all of the relevant information. Think about all the factors that might be important and provide them up front. Then step back and provide the logic and reasoning that got you to where you are. And... most importantly: Provide the goal or business benefit that you are looking to achieve!

Then, and only then, does the community have any chance of providing useful feedback. If you provide less and get answers, those answers are not for your benefit.

I see little to none of this here in ML. But in other online forums I see this running rampant.

Published article about Types of IT Service Providers in the hopes of providing some terminology to make it easier to have meaningful dialogues.

Datamation reports on the release of Google Chrome 55 and how the latest release takes yet another step towards the ultimate removal of Flash support. Flash has been dying for some time and is getting closer and closer to no longer being widely supported.

I am often downright shocked by the common words that are missing from the dictionary. It often makes me question my ability to spell and then I realize that Google isn't even aware of common English.

So I figured we should have a thread to talk about the silly words that are missing.

Easy first ones: virtualization and virtualize

@IRJ said:

I wonder how many cloud providers have popped up in the last 12 months

The bigger question, how many have disappeared?

My latest article just went up on the StorageCraft Blog: Getting Started with IT Certifications.