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You can also use the file server migration tool, if all your fileserver does is act as a file server, that will make life much easier, though not sure where you're at in the process. I've also never used it because all my clients have their file servers doing multiple things.
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Jun 18, 2021 21:25
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GreatGreen posted:I have a request to use DNS to forward all requests for file server A to the new file server B. Both servers are members of the same domain. Use DFS so that you won't have to do this again
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Jun 23, 2021 19:58
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Thanks Ants posted:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/dns-cname-alias-cannot-access-smb-file-server-share#resolution That article was exactly what I was looking for, thanks! Also, you and everybody else would be correct about going to DFS Namespace as well when we can deploy it. It solves so many problems.
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Jun 26, 2021 06:21
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 Let's say one wanted to do: code:Broken from CentOS 8.3 to CentOS 8.4... loving DBUS man...
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Jul 27, 2021 15:54
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I am the loving moron who is burdened with IT tasks at a small business with 4 employees. It is not my expertise or my main job, but I am responsible for it. We are moving our server out of a residential basement, into a small office. It's a desktop PC, with Windows Server 2012, that hosts FTP, email, and VPN filesharing (1.5 TB) servers. The office is bare, we'll set up our own equipment and cable runs. I have a rough idea of my plans, but I'm worried about my unknown unknowns. 1. Any advice on business ISP selection? I'm likely going to be choosing between Spectrum and AT&T. We're in Columbus, OH. We use 3 static IP addresses and uptime is important. Data usage is relatively low, on the order of 10's of GB per month. Are there other factors to research besides cost and meeting our minimum needs? 2. I've got two options for server rooms: a repurposed closet with a sprinkler head in the ceiling, or the electrical service room which contains the breaker panel. We'll install locks in the chosen room. The room might also house the network hardware. I'm thinking I should use the electrical room to avoid the sprinkler head? What other concerns am I overlooking here? Sorry if these questions are too general or if this is the wrong thread. Andenno fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jul 27, 2021 |
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Jul 27, 2021 18:14
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Avoid ATT Business like the plague. It's the single worse customer experience ever. It's an impenetrable force. One thing you're gonna want to make sure it's that the room is proper cooled.
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Jul 27, 2021 18:29
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Would it be possible to move those servers to the cloud or to a colo? What you're describing doesn't usually work out well. Otherwise, I agree with the advice. Avoid AT&T and watch out for cooling. Avoiding the fire sprinkler is a good idea. You're not big enough to have any sort of redundancies, but you might be small enough where having a reasonable size UPS and a portable AC is enough to get you by. But yeah, it would be way better to not have those servers on-site, both from an effort perspective, and certainly from an uptime perspective.
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Jul 27, 2021 18:55
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Something else to think about, all ISP's lose connectivity sometimes, nothing you can do about that. But you can build in redundancy. If uptime is vital, you'll need at least two separate internet connections, each coming from a separate ISP, and setup for automatic failover.
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Jul 27, 2021 19:03
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If the downtime from occasional ISP disconnects is a factor in the operation of your business, on premise hosting is already out of your budgetary scope. Seriously, if you guys are not able to absorb the occasional downtime of Comcast disconnecting, you need to ask why you are not renting a rack somewhere or using 0365
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Jul 27, 2021 20:12
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E: Just saw your reply Potato Salad. I'm dumb and used the wrong terminology: uptime is important for us, but we've already been using a residential ISP and do absorb the occasional downtime. We just want to avoid frequent or prolonged downtime. Still, I see your point, "why do this in-house?" Thanks so much for the advice, BonoMan, Internet Explorer, and GreatGreen! I appreciate the warnings on AT&T and server cooling, and I hadn't considered dual ISP's! I think you're right, Internet Explorer, that we'd be better off outsourcing this stuff. The current setup exists because the business owner wanted to save money; trading monthly service costs for the one-time cost of the in-house server. But that doesn't really factor in my labor, or the cost/risk of downtime. It might be a good time for me to make the case for switching to cloud or colocation. Even if we proceed with this plan, I think we'll need to switch in the next few years. I have some more questions, if you don't mind: 1. Would a colocation service be suited to our single, dinky, desktop server? I wasn't sure if we're too small. 2. With our email, fileshare, and FTP server hosting needs, could we reasonably expect business class, cloud hosted, replacement services for $50-$100 per month? 3. For a cloud solution, would I be better off looking to directly replace my Windows Server with a cloud hosted one, or am I better off shopping piecemeal for separate FTP, email, and file share server hosting? I understand if the answers are: figure it out yourself. Any starting point or tips are helpful. Thanks again! Andenno fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jul 27, 2021 |
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Jul 27, 2021 20:13
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Microsoft 365 should do everything you need. Change your FTP and file server workflows to use OneDrive.
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Jul 27, 2021 20:40
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$100 a month is easily achievable. Business Standard is where I'd start, with a view to upgrading to Business Premium if you want to manage Windows 10 Pro computers and phones etc. later on: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business#coreui-heading-hiatrep Migrate your email to this, use OneDrive/SharePoint for file sharing wherever possible.
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Jul 27, 2021 21:22
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You know the boss is gonna want to cheap out with the $5/user/month basic tier. The web/mobile versions of the Office apps may even be sufficient depending on what they do with them. The important bits for replacing the on prem server are the Exchange and OneDrive/SharePoint cloud services.
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Jul 27, 2021 21:55
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If you have $100 of budget, you can -get a way better email experience with O365 mail on Android and iOS thanks to the simplified setup experience -increase your storage space by a largee natural number factor -this is important: worry way the gently caress less about Exchange and FTP vulnerabilities if the business owner ever expressed concern about file corruption, crypto, backups, etc, going to the cloud is a good sell for improving your security posture
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Jul 27, 2021 22:06
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Thanks for providing some voices of sanity! I'll see how things go with the owner.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:40
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Everybody had some good answers. I'll chime in with 3 more things. 1)If you had to, you could just stand up a Windows Server in your provider of choice and do all the same things you're doing today, but on a Windows VM that someone else manages the power/internet/cooling on. 2)Don't let the owner be lovely and say they can't afford it. There are externalities that they are not accounting for, and paying a bit more to do this properly is worth every penny in the long run. I promise you they will lose more money in downtime over 5 years than they would pay, even if they were paying 50% more than they are today. 3) There are colos that will let you bring a small server or desktop, or even lease you their own. I can't remember names off the top of my head, but they probably aren't hard to find. I would only do this as a last resort.
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Jul 28, 2021 00:16
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Everyone else really covered it, but here's what I did when I was in a not-entirely dissimilar situation in Columbus, OH about ten years ago: 1. Moved all our stuff to Google Suite or whatever it is they're calling it now. The "not having to deal with administering Exchange" aspect cannot be overstated. In retrospect I'd use O365 but at the time we were already on Google Suite for a lot of stuff so it made sense. 2. Moved our VPN filesharing off the local server to Google Drive. Yes Drive was kind of bad (probably still is) but it's miles ahead of dealing with hosting your own server and requiring uptime on that in some random building in Columbus. Again, I'd use OneDrive if I were doing this today. 3. Swapped the business cable connection for fiber - that alone brought an SLA and uptime miles ahead of anything we had before. 4. Those few things that actually "needed" to be always-on and globally reachable were just moved into AWS. The inevitable "what do we do when AWS goes down?" is replied to with "during a societal collapse the widgets we make won't matter anyways". The real important thing though is don't ever use AT&T for anything, and definitely don't use Earthlink unless you're on the way out and want to leave a big ol' "gently caress you" mess for someone else clean up. Sheep fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 08:29
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Thanks, Internet Explorer!Internet Explorer posted:1)If you had to, you could just stand up a Windows Server in your provider of choice and do all the same things you're doing today, but on a Windows VM that someone else manages the power/internet/cooling on. Internet Explorer posted:2)Don't let the owner be lovely and say they can't afford it. There are externalities that they are not accounting for, and paying a bit more to do this properly is worth every penny in the long run. I promise you they will lose more money in downtime over 5 years than they would pay, even if they were paying 50% more than they are today. Internet Explorer posted:3) There are colos that will let you bring a small server or desktop, or even lease you their own. I can't remember names off the top of my head, but they probably aren't hard to find. I would only do this as a last resort. Thanks for sharing your similar story, Sheep! My takeaway from your, and others posts, is to try O365 and SharePoint/OneDrive to replace all of our services. The office is in Dublin, Columbus suburbs, not Columbus city proper. Fiber may not be available at the new location  . At least it's not a downgrade, since the server is currently on a residential cable connection.So we'll probably go with Spectrum (formerly Time Warner) over AT&T, based on the unanimous condemnation of AT&T here. I worry that there's not really a "good" choice available.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:50
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You're welcome! And good luck, friend, you are doing the lord's work.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:58
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Speaking of AT&T and their royal fuckups. I've got a client moving offices, they put an order in for a new circuit turnup back in April, had it scheduled for mid-july. The office move was supposed to happen tomorrow. AT&T did the install, but no connectivity. After a lot of faffing about on AT&T's end, my client emailed the CEO and, in his words, "ripped him a new one", he got multiple calls from CS reps promising to fix it. After more faffing about, they found yesterday that someone entered the address in wrong and so everything is configured all hosed up. They've promised to have it fixed Monday; my clients lease is up on his old building on Saturday.
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Jul 28, 2021 18:11
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Andenno posted:My takeaway from your, and others posts, is to try O365 and SharePoint/OneDrive to replace all of our services. quote:The office is in Dublin, Columbus suburbs, not Columbus city proper. Fiber may not be available at the new location Our office was in Easton just inside 270. The Dublin burbs don't look that far out in comparison. You may get lucky. Even if it does require construction, as long as you give them like 90 days' lead they may just run it out for free; they did in our case. Spectrum is a reasonable choice. Sheep fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 19:46
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Yep. Every time I hear about a server OS running on what is basically a glorified desktop machine, I shudder a bit. What happens if the power supply goes *pfft* like they so often do, and it takes the hard drives with it? Are your backups hosted elsewhere and up-to-date? Can you afford the downtime of a part replacement, server re-imaging (which you'll need to make sure you have the media and license info for), and backup restoration? Basically I agree with everybody else that you're going to want to offload everything you can onto a more stable solution. The monthly expenses for primary and secondary ISP connections and O365 should really be all you need, and you'll never have to worry about the headaches of power, hardware maintenance, software updates, backups, or physical data security.
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Jul 28, 2021 23:38
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SamDabbers posted:Change your FTP and file server workflows to use OneDrive. I think we have a *unique* FTP setup which can not simply be replaced by a OneDrive setup. Our FTP server receives csv files from field devices that only support FTP. No SFTP. Minimal configuration options. OneDrive doesn't support plain FTP connections (understandably). Filezilla can connect because it has a protocol for OneDrive. The clients' field devices do not. I know this is a bad setup. I have been pushing for a solution on the field device side, so the data is collected on a private network and then sent securely, but it's in the clients' control so it won't be fixed in a timely fashion. In the meanwhile, if I wanted to offload our FTP hosting, I think I'd need to set up a third party FTP server, then set up OneDrive to pull from it with a "flow." Can anyone experienced with "flows" and "Power Automate," tell me if that's the right way to go about this? Is there a simpler way to replace our FTP server with OneDrive? Sheep posted:Even if it does require construction, as long as you give them like 90 days' lead they may just run it out for free; they did in our case. Wise words. We have crashplan and on-site backups, some hardware redundancy, and plans for server failure, but you're still right that it'll be a nightmare. We'll still be offline for 1 or more days if the whole server dies. The business won't fail, but it'll be a horrible experience for me. I don't have the spare capacity to cover every potentiality and regularly audit everything. The sooner I can defuse this ticking bomb, the better. I'm thinking I'll try to offload as much as I can, even if I'm stuck with the FTP server for now.
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Jul 29, 2021 00:27
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Yikes, I'm going to assume you don't have much control over the software that runs on these "field devices." For the FTP case I would probably get an inexpensive VPS (e.g. DigitalOcean or similar) to host the FTP service and script pushing the uploaded files into OneDrive as a periodic task. It wouldn't be any less reliable than what you currently have. You could also look for a cloud storage host that provides an FTP interface. There has to be one out there. I'd still go with Microsoft 365 for email hosting and non-FTP file sharing though.
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Jul 29, 2021 00:40
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SamDabbers posted:You could also look for a cloud storage host that provides an FTP interface. There has to be one out there.
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Jul 29, 2021 00:52
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SamDabbers posted:Yikes, I'm going to assume you don't have much control over the software that runs on these "field devices." This solution is exactly what was going through my head as I was reading the post. Point DNS for the FTP server at your new VPS and just have the VPS do a cron job or whatever to push things to OneDrive via whatever mechanism is easiest. Albinator posted:I haven't used it, but AWS has an FTP service you can deploy. Wasn't aware this was a thing but yeah, this looks like it may be useful in this scenario: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-ftp-and-ftps-in-addition-to-existing-sftp/ Andenno posted:Wise words. We have crashplan and on-site backups, some hardware redundancy, and plans for server failure, but you're still right that it'll be a nightmare. We'll still be offline for 1 or more days if the whole server dies. The business won't fail, but it'll be a horrible experience for me. I don't have the spare capacity to cover every potentiality and regularly audit everything. The sooner I can defuse this ticking bomb, the better. Just a reminder that backups you haven't tested aren't backups at all. Have you tried testing a restore from Crashplan to see how long it would take you to recover in a full loss scenario? You might find out it's actually far too long to be useful, which is what happened to us and why we ditched it for Backblaze B2. Sheep fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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Jul 29, 2021 15:10
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Seconding (thirding?) the FTP server syncing to OneDrive suggestion, you could build something fairly easily with: https://rclone.org/onedrive/ Just have it sync hourly or whatever and use SharePoint as your master source of data, I wouldn't even bother backing up the VM hosting the (S)FTP server other than making sure you have copies of the configs and scripts.
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Jul 29, 2021 16:23
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I dunno, backing up is easy enough in Azure and if it makes recovering from some sort of issue easier, I'd do it. Even if it was just the OS drive that held the configs or something. If there's a way to move the data to OneDrive and not keep it on the server, that'd be the way to go, that way you're not paying for that disk and you also don't have to worry about it costing much to just back up the entire thing. Sounds like Andenno has better stuff to be doing, so being able to just restore back to a few days ago when something is wrong is probably worth it.
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Jul 29, 2021 17:36
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Great news! I have the go-ahead to transfer our email and non-FTP file share to Microsoft 365! I also got approval to work on replacing the FTP server! In the near future, the in-house server will only be used for some custom in-house tasks that do not require constant uptime/connectivity. If I can figure out how, I may eventually offload those too. I was pleasantly surprised, it was easy to convince the owner that paying to offload these services will be be a good investment. I'm excited to reduce my "in-house server administrator" duties! SamDabbers posted:Yikes, I'm going to assume you don't have much control over the software that runs on these "field devices." Albinator posted:You might find out it's actually far too long to be useful, which is what happened to us and why we ditched it for Backblaze B2. Thanks, SamDabbers, Albinator, Sheep, Thanks Ants (Thants), and Internet Explorer. The tips, links, and suggested starting points are a big help! It's much more intimidating when I don't even know what type of solutions to consider. I'll look into AWS versus a VPS for the FTP server. Rclone looks like a handy option for SharePoint sync. Being able to easily backup and restore an Azure VM could be pretty sweet. I like the suggestion to not retain data on the FTP host. I'm really pleased about this development. Pretty soon I can be less of a loving moron with respect to admin, if nothing else. Thanks everybody!
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Jul 30, 2021 01:02
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Cheers Andenno! Glad we could point you in a reasonable direction, and that it wasn't a difficult sell to your boss.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:22
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drat I love a happy ending. I used rclone to copy our few TB up to Google Drive and it was utterly painless, so I'd expect that's a good tool to use for SharePoint and OneDrive as well.
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Jul 30, 2021 02:34
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Hell yeah. Like I said, doing the lord's work. If you have any questions along the way definitely let us know!
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Jul 30, 2021 04:42
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Just getting your file access off the residential connection and into high-performance cloud storage like Onedrive should be enough of a driver for this. If you'd like the case to be very strong, PM me the business's name and I'll make it for them. My consulting fees will be incorporated in the bitcoin request for the decryption key.
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Jul 30, 2021 14:06
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TheyHadUsInTheFirstHalf.jpg
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Jul 30, 2021 14:20
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Y'all think Dell has a bit of a Y2K problem? I'm tempted to find out whether they'll honor the warranty on my switches... (Yes, a replacement has been procured.)
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Aug 5, 2021 10:49
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HP has something like that on their site for procurves, which have a ‘lifetime’ warranty.
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Aug 6, 2021 02:38
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MSP chat: Trying to help out an old boss who left to start his own company by moonlighting as cloud engineer on a VDI deploy. He's trying to take over the account of a clearly overprovisioned MSP and they're kind of being a poo poo to him as they can see the writing on the wall. I'm trying to instill in him tell this potential client "you need to tell them to direct the msp to give you XXX access to proceed". Anyone here tried to take over another MSPs job gracefully or otherwise?
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Aug 6, 2021 20:37
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Usually you're fairly cooperative with other MSPs out of professional courtesy. Customers come and go, the industry isn't that big, and you might be in a situation where you're taking a customer handoff from another MSP that you've interacted with in the past, and you don't want to be lovely to them because then they'll be lovely to you. But I mean, people are people. It's not always a smooth process. If they already know he's taking over, then it might be good to have a heart-to-heart with the other MSP. If it's still under the radar, then it would be good for him to go through the client, like you said. Either way, it would be good for the client to re-read the contact that they signed with the other MSP to make sure they know the details. If they are comfortable with your friend, having the client give that contract to your friend so he knows might also be good.
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Aug 6, 2021 20:53
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MSPs they are lovely about off boarding are so short sighted it pisses me off.
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Aug 6, 2021 21:33
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We had a client acquire a company, they had an MSP, that MSP was friendly enough to do a decent handoff. The problem was that half of their passwords were wrong, poo poo was wildly undocumented, it was great.
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Aug 7, 2021 04:13
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