I feel like this is way too often a viable paraphrase of a SW conversation:

I've looked for a consultant that does exactly what you do and what you are helping me with right now but have been completely unable to find one in all of my searching so I have given up. Does anyone know where I can find one?

While talking to five companies that are all helping him for free and do exactly the thing that he is needing help with.

I don't know why we have never made a post like this, but one is needed. There has become a list of the standard things that people do wrong in IT. "Wrong" is always subjective, but there are approaches that sometimes should never exist or should almost never be done or were done for the wrong reasons that have become common, recurring and predictable antipatterns or the examples of "what not to do" in IT. In many cases, we can tell that when one of these has been done, others are likely hiding in the wings or when disaster as struck, often we can backtrack to these common SMB mistakes.

Let's go...

• Using RAID 5 because it is "standard." It was never standard, really, it was always a cost cutting measure but one that was acceptable in 1998 when the Microsoft guide was published but even then they made sure that people knew when to use it and when not to and it has been industry deprecated since 2009.
• Using a SAN for no reason. Often based on some assumption or myth that a SAN provides some functionality that it does not.
• Using high availability or fault tolerance when it is not warranted - doing no financial research and just assuming that they are the special case and that downtime is "impossible". Typically the more this is believed, the less the value of uptime as companies that really are costly to be down know how much that costs and how much to spend protecting against it.
• Buying HA products but not doing HA. Leading to disasters like the inverted pyramid of doom.
• Doing something risky and/or costly and then believing that "getting lucky" was the same as "making a good decision."
• Confusing SAN and NAS and using the terms interchangeably and never realizing that everyone is trying to explain that these are two very different things.
• Mistaking their SAN as a device for file sharing, hooking it to two or more guests without a clustered filesystem and being surprised when the SAN itself destroys all of their data (as intended.)
• Powering down a server before replacing a failed hard drive rather than using the hot swap features that they paid for.
• Confusing sales people with consultants and attempting to get free advice from sales people who are just trying to sell them things that they don't need (often a SAN.)
• Buying big name products based on nothing but the fact that lots of marketing exists around it. Or forgetting that they never hear about affordable products because affordable ones don't have the margins to market to them so strongly (if at all.)
• Avoiding virtualization because they think it is only for people bigger than them, smaller than them or they confuse it with other things like high availability or consolidation.

@wrx7m said in Webroot to be acquired by Carbonite:

@pmoncho said in Webroot to be acquired by Carbonite:

@WLS-ITGuy

Well, I just re-upped for one more year so I have a year to decide.

Normally, I am not a fan of buyouts. Very rarely does it actually work to the users benefit.

I re-upped last September, I believe. I have not been that impressed by webroot. I have had a few issues in the year and a half that I have used them. I can't imagine this will make them better.

AV vendors seem to be super cyclic. One gets good, others get worse, but it is like a lava lamp, they just changing position. Except for a few like Symantec that never get good.

@Jason said:

How should you address this?

Take it to the CIO's office.

It happens all of the time but in the heat of the moment people generally don't want to talk about how they felt a best practice didn't apply to them, skipped it and now have a disaster. It's common to ignore discussions around improvement using the excuse that things need to be fixed now. Of course they do, but we need to learn from mistakes as well or we will just keep repeating the pattern.

So I wanted to start collecting examples of where this happens to show examples of how things that sound good can go very wrong when established good practices are ignored.

Tagging a few people involved....

@seal @scale @craig-theriac from Scale (Jenny was there but lacks an account to tag.)

@kooler @StarWind_Software from Starwinds (Max was there but lacks an account to tag.)

@nic from Webroot

@ChrisL @SamieWalters from Colocation America

@art_of_shred from NTG

@rob @aboyd @shannon from AetherStore

@ryan-from-xbyte @xByteSean @BradfromxByte @Lyndsie_xByte from xByte (they had a conflict and could not attend in person.)

There are many good options for an OS to install on a SAM-SD. But some are more common than others. There are many factors, from performance to scale to experience to connection technologies that determine which OSes and which additional software will make sense in any specific scenario and this can change over time as well. But as a starting point here are the primary operating systems that should be considered in very roughly the order in which they should be considered.

• Linux Family [Very Well Suited to Storage in General]
  • OpenSuse: enterprise, free Linux distro with a heavy focus on storage and clustering technologies.
  • Fedora, CentOS: enterprise, free Linux distros with heavy focus on core technology and stability.
  • Ubuntu: enterprise, free Linux distro with high change rate.
• Windows
• Solaris Family
  • Solaris
  • OpenIndiana and derivatives.
• BSD Family
  • FreeBSD
  • Dragonfly

One of the more convoluted concepts in IT is "what is UNIX" and, even more confusingly, "where does Linux fit into the UNIX world?"

UNIX began as a research operating system at AT&T in the late 1960s. For the first several years, UNIX was a "product" mostly purchased by universities. Over the next decade UNIX evolved from being a product, to becoming a family of products connected by a singular system interface standard and design philosophy.

This heritage leads to much complication and disagreement. Today there area number of UNIX family members that share some small amount of common heritage from the early days of the code base and others that have no shared code heritage. UNIX was originally its own product, then a family of products based on the code of that original product, then a certification and then a philosophy.

Linux is, far and away, the most well known and popular member of the UNIX family. Because of this, it is also one of the most heavily disputed as many people want to say that it is not a "true UNIX" because it is a clone and not derived from the original UNIX code. The creators of the original UNIX system, however, have directly stated that not only is Linux fully UNIX, it is the most pure example of it (e.g. it is the reference standard.)

Popular UNIX systems that have paid to be certified as UNIX include IBM's AIX, HP's HP-UX and Apple's Mac OSX. Popular UNIX systems that have not paid for this certification include the Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris and BSD families.

The fragmentation and open implementations of UNIX have led not only to UNIX being a family, but truly to it being a family of families. Some, like AIX, have no derivative works and stand as a singular product. But others, like Linux, are only families and have no stock implementation (Linux exists only as family members, there is no original Linux product from which others are derived.) So the total number of UNIX systems in existence is enormous and they are extremely varied.

Since the early 1990s, the computing world has slowly eliminated all major operating system families except for Windows NT (which even itself has a small amount of UNIX heritage and came from a company that was making UNIX systems years before moving into Windows NT with Microsoft Xenix) and UNIX. UNIX has long been the dominant server operating system with dominance almost continuous increasing since around 1980 and was the basis for the design and implementation of the Internet; and in the last decade has become the dominant player in consumer equipment as well with a huge presence even in the desktop and laptop space and almost completely ownership of appliances, set top boxes, mobile devices, tablets, embedded systems and the like. UNIX is found everywhere and even at fifty years old is continuing to increase in popularity still.

What UNIX is Not: It is common for people to associate UNIX with common abstractions that often exist on it. Things like the SSH protocol, the Bourne shell family, command lines and such are in no way native or intrinsic to UNIX. Common, of course, but they themselves are not part of UNIX. UNIX shares a common interface at the C language system call layer exclusively.

That's right, I just got word. It's not quite the Lord of the Flies yet but getting close. It's true, the coffee machine is down and they don't know what to do. Amazon is attempting to get a backup coffee system into place but the SLA is more than 18 hours and things are getting desperate.

All operations have been shifted to other sites while HQ attempts triage operations using a legacy drip brewer.

It's true. I love operating systems. Not just the concept but I love the variety and getting to work with many different ones. This is probably partially a product of my age having grown up in the world of every device having its own and the differences between them being highly pronounced. Very different than today. Much of my formative IT years were around the era when OS research was at a peak and product were vying for visibility and to prove value. The era when Microsoft still had three OSes on the market, not two. The era when Linux was an upstart and the UNIX world still had half a dozen key players not including all the newbie open sourcers. The era when Apple wasn't into UNIX but was trying to figure out where to head next (see what I did there?) The era when VMS was still prevalent, when OS/400 was a major player. You get the picture. The landscape was different and BeOS was thought to maybe be the industry shaker that would change the game for forever (spoiler: it didn't.)

Since that time, the cloud-era has arisen and the vanillification of the OS landscape has happened. The Linux world has been nearly reduced to Red Hat and Ubuntu, Windows is there and FreeBSD is hiding in the background shouting in a very far off voice "Hey, I'm here too, guys." That's it. The Suses, Archs, VMSs, NetBSDs, OpenBSDs, experimental, backwater, upstart and traditionally vendor centric (Solaris, anyone?) operating systems are just not available on cloud platforms (yet) meaning that most people have begun to limit what they learn and use to a very few and generally very similar two or three choices.

With our new lab capacity, I am so excited that this is changing for us (read: me.) I've had one day to be getting things loaded up and already we have DragonflyBSD up and running (yes, the one with the Hammer filesystem!!), Suse and other OSes that you aren't finding on your cloud platforms or for sale at Best Buy. Check out that shot, even Windows Server 2016 TP4 is ready to be installed. Linux Mint 17.3 is already running too. Heck yeah, this is where it starts getting fun for me.

Conferences come in all shapes and sizes, each type has a different value to it. MangoCon focuses primarily on being heavily vendor neutral with a strong focus on career and technical development. Unlike most conferences that cater to a single vendor ecosystem, focusing on a tight technology set or providing vendor-focused training sessions; MangoCon strives to educate broadly across the IT industry, develop best practices, investigate the future not of products but of the industry and build peer to peer professional relationships.

MangoCon takes an informal leaning towards the SMB, SME and service provider spaces which is relatively unique, but does so with a technical depth generally associated with enterprise internal training. MangoCon prides itself on mixing technical practicality with pushing the envelope, looking to the future of our industry and preparing decision makers for the needs that they have today in order to be ready for their infrastructures of tomorrow.

Peer interactions are not just at the cursory of MangoCon, but at its very core. A conference that has a strong online presence year round with the MangoLassi.it community and provides for strong IT pro to IT pro interactions during the conference. We learn when we can discuss, review and create the network effect to increase our understanding of concepts, explore new ideas and learn from each other.

It is common at conferences to have a large number of technical sessions or "tracks" happening at once. This is ideal for conferences focusing on small, discrete tasks on individual products. At MangoCon, the opposite approach is taken - a single session track with few, far more intense educational sessions. This greatly reduces overlaps, allows for a better core track, minimizes movement and overhead and lets everyone focus on a large, shared value educational experience in a way that few other conferences attempt.

MangoCon is truly an IT conference, not a product conference. It's ideal for IT decision makers, IT professionals building careers, companies that want to move from subsistence infrastructure to competitive advantage and anyone looking to learn deeply about the IT profession and how to take their organizations and businesses to the next level.

http://mangocon.it/

I use doctors as the example of why we don't use university education in IT all of the time.... because doctors are the opposite of IT in every way. Literally, the polar opposite.

With doctors, our goal is not success, but the avoidance of failure. We care primarily that the doctor not kill the patient, this is MORE important than curing a rare disease. We don't care about the overall chance of survival, only that the doctor not be blamed for the death. If a doctor has an 80% chance of saving someone's life, but a 50% chance of killing them trying to do it... the doctor is trained to let you die because it's a huge risk to have the doctor be blamed for your death. Doctors are all about "avoiding a lawsuit" and "not being at fault" rather than "achieving the best results." So we have systems that focus on heavy memorization of repetitive things, pre-defined procedures to be followed, pricing based on procedure rather than effort, promotion based off of politics rather than results and loads of certifications to deflect legal risks. In fact, doctors are essentially in a union that makes there be little to no value in being the best. The real value is just... showing up.

IT is entirely the opposite. With rare exception, our goal is success and the risk of failure is acceptable. Because IT is in business, not out to do surgery. Smart businesses have always known that you want people who fail from time to time because it means that they are taking real risks. Businesses do not succeed without taking risks and chances. IT has to look at cumulative success, not "risk avoidance at all costs." IT looking at the same scenarios as doctors do very different things. If you take a 50% chance of driving a company into bankruptcy in order to get an 80% chance of wild financial success you take the risk. The entire VC market is based around this. If you acted like a doctor in the IT world, you'd be literally useless (and likewise, IT people would be bad doctors.) So things designed to pressure memorization and reduce law suit risks are literally worthless in IT. We only care that you can do the job better than someone else, not that you can "not get blamed". That's why certs carry little weight, university training is essentially worthless, the government doesn't oversee IT, there are no unions and our success is based on our results.

And that's why IT people find comparisons to doctors to be insulting. It implies that we are striving for excellence but just catering to politics to avoid getting blamed. That is failed IT right from the beginning. Business doesn't work that way, and IT is a business aspect, not a medical one.

@Minion-Queen said:

@DustinB3403 said:

IT Themed Cocktail #1: Aptly named "The network is down"

3 OZ Bacardi 151
1 Can Redbull
1.5 OZ Fireball Cinnamon Whisky

You are missing the can of monster

Yes... Scott Alan Miller's energy drink of choice recipe:

• Take Extra Large can of Monster
• Empty Can
• Fill with whiskey

http://www.pcbsd.org/download/

PC-BSD is a rare, and by far the leading, BSD-based desktop distribution and is built from FreeBSD. PC-BSD directly tracks FreeBSD and was originally only a packaging of FreeBSD with configured desktop options ported from the Linux world – which often was not a good option for performance reasons. PC-BSD's scope has increased and the project has their own packaging, management tools, server distribution called TrueOS and most recently its own BSD-licensed desktop environment: Lumina. Quite an impressive project and impressive product. One of the best open source distribution projects out there.

[Yes, PC-BSD is made by iXsystems, the same company that makes FreeNAS.]

In this thread I am going to show the setup process for PC-BSD 10.2 on the latest build of the Scale HC3 cluster. As there are so many screenshots, I am going to do a separate thread on screenshots of the running system itself. In this one I will show the build parameters, build process and successful install.

Youtube Video

The CompTIA Network+ is easily the best certification to use as your first step into the world of IT. It is entry level, but covers knowledge that is broadly applicable throughout the IT space and is even good for people looking at related fields including bench, software engineering and even general computer power user. Useful and applicable knowledge that would be great for just about anyone to have. But for IT, this is the place to start. Applicable for someone just starting in IT or even for middle or high school students looking for a challenge to get their feet wet and show some serious interest and dedication in the field.

LOL, yeah, the scale that people think is big is nuts. I'm used to databases with pure SSDs, and 2TB of RAM and trillions of daily writes alone and that's virtual! And that was years ago. Nearly every post in SW is like "What year is it?" People are actually asking these questions today as if it was 2005 when the question was legit.

Red Hat is, and has long been, the leading contributor to the Linux world making the most popular business Linux distribution, the most popular free (unsupported) enterprise Linux distro and one of the most popular desktop and cutting edge Linux distro. They are also key contributors to many Linux projects from the kernel to KVM virtualization to Gluster and more.

Red Hat makes three key operating system products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or RHEL), CentOS and Fedora. Working in the Red Hat world, we need to understand the relationship between these three products.

At the top of the chain is Fedora. Fedora Linux releases a new version roughly twice a year. Fedora is a free distribution and very cutting edge. It has a strong bias towards a large base of software included with it, a lot of focus on desktop usage and leans towards new, cutting edge features over stability. It is meant to be used primarily by enterprises looking to see features before they hit the main stream, desktop users both at home and at the office, hobbyists and anyone needing a reliable Linux server but with very recent updates. Fedora has been making large strides towards being a key contender for server deployments, in addition to its traditional role in lab and desktop deployments.

Fedora, every several years, is "frozen" to a specific version, often with tweaks made between features in a few different releases, and put into a long term, enterprise support model, the packages supplied with it reduced to those that are stable, supportable and sensible for business use and supplied as the extremely mature and robust Red Hat Enterprise Linux, known as RHEL for short. RHEL is heavily supported and designed completely around the intent that stability and security trump all things. All support is extremely long term and RH has some of the best support in the business. This is an extreme enterprise server OS. It is also rather costly.

CentOS, formerly an independent distribution but later acquired by and managed by Red Hat themselves, is a rebuild of RHEL from the original sources, the same as RHEL itself, but without RHEL branding and without the support and support hooks of RHEL. In this way CentOS and RHEL are the same product, from the same company, CentOS simply is the completely free version and comes without any RH official support. CentOS normally releases a day or two after RHEL simply because it takes time to prepare and it is secondary in priority.

For educational uses, CentOS is used because it is simply the free version of RHEL. All experience and documentation is shared between them. Many businesses that do not wish to pay for enterprise OS support choose CentOS for this reason as well.

Review: Fedora is the main, base system. RHEL is the commercial, long term support "frozen" release based on Fedora. CentOS is RHEL's official free close. All three systems are made by Red Hat.

Simply put: hiring the best means living with the requirements of the best. Filters don't apply to companies hiring the best.

Stumbled on this old one and figured that I would provide an update....

Here is how the top ~10 have changed over the past two years....

And instead of 60K views on that one thread, it's now at 5.2M views!!

There is one and one possible thing to do here... you reinstall the computer. Don't even think of anything less. That machine is now taken over and owned by someone else. Don't let it exist another minute without being reinstalled.