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CainFortea
Oct 15, 2004


I work at a small rental business, I am the entire IT department. We're not an IT company.

Until recently, our rental system was a bunch of dumb terminals hooked up to a unix mainframe. The guy I replaced had them all talking over ethernet somehow using some kind of serial to RJ45 adapter. I'm not a unix person, so I don't even pretend to understand how a 20 year old dumb terminal can talk with a unix system over an ethernet connection, but I never saw any of them on network scans or anything.

Every single device in the entire building came back to a single switch in his office. Which he had bolted to the wall, then put a table in front of it, and a shelf under the table.

He once told me that after a while he stopped following the color codes for terminating CAT5 and would just do all the solid colors in the middle since they were easier to see. Since some of these cables were laid when the system was installed and some weren't, I have no clue which wires are done right or not.

Or I should say, I *had* no clue because this last weekend our rental system ate itself. A year and a half ago our tape backup drive died, and instead of spending a few hundred to buy a new one the boss just shrugged and said "Eh, it only helped like once since we bought the system in `94".

I pointed out that this means that if anything at all happens to the system that I can't easily fix and would require me to build a new one we're hosed. Since the rental system had some kind of proprietary backup thing going on, I can't just copy the data off the tapes. And I don't have the install disks for the system, and the company that sold it to us has passed through like 2 other companies since then and support was ended over a decade ago.

I suggested at the time that we start upgrading to a new system that can actually be maintained. And if we do it BEFORE the old system dies, we can copy a bunch of info off of it. AND I can set everything up ahead of time, so when it comes time to switch over it would take like, maybe 2 days to run all the new cable and physically swap the machines. "I'll think about it"

I've spent the last week tearing out all the old network that doesn't help anyone anymore, putting new stuff in, crash ordering a bunch of parts to build machines for us to use a new system with. I had to gut the office to get to that old switch, and clean everything up, and caught friggin ring worm.

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SamDabbers
May 26, 2003



Why should I pay for backups? We almost never use them!

I just had a former small business client frantically contact me out of the blue 5 years after my last project with them ended to ask if I still had the source code from that project, and would I send whatever I have to them.

I was also helping them with their infrastructure in addition to the software development project, and they flat out refused to spend money on backups when I proposed it.

It turns out that I did have a copy of that source code, and I asked for a modest sum (less than my proposed backup solution) for the data recovery and the owner balked but ended up paying me.

I like to think they learned something from this but I'm not so sure.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


SamDabbers posted:

It turns out that I did have a copy of that source code, and I asked for a modest sum (less than my proposed backup solution) for the data recovery and the owner balked but ended up paying me.

I like to think they learned something from this but I'm not so sure.

He learned his lesson alright. Should've made those drat dirty commie employees sign perpetual free labor obligations :argh:

Dans Macabre
Apr 24, 2004


"My VPN isn't working."

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

"My VPN isn't working."

Beefstorm
Jul 20, 2010

"It's not the size of the tower. It's the motion of the airwaves."
Lipstick Apathy

NevergirlsOFFICIAL posted:

"My VPN isn't working."

Theme of the week...

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Thread title, honestly

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Funny, "my VPN isn't working" complaints hush right the gently caress up when we point out that our remote support tools don't need a vpn

Too bad for everyone who's been using this lie as an excuse to open a ticket with us, complain to their boss (our clients), and peace out for the rest of the day.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


The only VPN isn't working call I've gotten is from people that were let go and their boss didn't call to tell them. I'm kind of wondering if I should expect that equipment back and when.

Kazinsal
Dec 13, 2011



pixaal posted:

The only VPN isn't working call I've gotten is from people that were let go and their boss didn't call to tell them. I'm kind of wondering if I should expect that equipment back and when.

Good thing repo isn't your problem.


I hope.

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord
Our VPN ran out of licenses so we stood up a second, different brand of VPN for people to use if the first one gave an error.

lol

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


COOL CORN posted:

Our VPN ran out of licenses so we stood up a second, different brand of VPN for people to use if the first one gave an error.

lol

Management did this because they expect this to either blow over or only have half as many people in 6 months. Either way problem is solved.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Quick Veeam question....I backup a couple terabytes worth of VMware cluster to a Synology which works great. Also backs up to a cloud host for offsite, works fine as well.

I'm now required to make monthly or quarterly backups. Whatever the schedule ends up being. I can get 10/12TB USB hard drives and one will hold a full backup.

Do I just create another backup repository in Veeam (\\synology\usbshare) and run a monthly full backup to it? Or is there a way I can use my existing weekly full/daily incremental backup?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Bob Morales posted:

Quick Veeam question....I backup a couple terabytes worth of VMware cluster to a Synology which works great. Also backs up to a cloud host for offsite, works fine as well.

I'm now required to make monthly or quarterly backups. Whatever the schedule ends up being. I can get 10/12TB USB hard drives and one will hold a full backup.

Do I just create another backup repository in Veeam (\\synology\usbshare) and run a monthly full backup to it? Or is there a way I can use my existing weekly full/daily incremental backup?

You could do that, you can also do Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) backups. Honestly, I hated the way Veeam handled this. It was probably one of my biggest critiques of the product.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_copy_gfs.html?ver=100

If you do a search for "Veeam GFS" you'll see a bunch more info and threads about it.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


I actually love the way that it handles GFS; to each their own.

Create a new repo and make a new copy job to it.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Potato Salad posted:

I actually love the way that it handles GFS; to each their own.

Create a new repo and make a new copy job to it.

It's good there's options to store full backups of yearlies, monthlies, weeklies, etc., but there should be an option for it to be a backup chain. Let's say I wanted to keep 10 years of once a year backups, 1 year of once a month backup, and 1 month of once a week backups. That's 26 fulls of the data set, in addition to the "live" backup that's going. Deduping is pretty much the only way you're going to tackle needing to keep 26x of your production storage, and it adds a ton of complexity. Why can't I have a live chain, a yearly chain, monthly chain, and a weekly chain? Why can't I have a "live" chain and a "GFS" chain? You could kind of do it by just using the normal backup function for your GFS chain, but last time I used the product (about a year ago?) they didn't have the scheduling options for it.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


Pretty sure it does GFS and differencing it's a checkbox someplace . I haven't looked at my config in years though and currently don't have access.

I'm almost positive it does that becuase I remember speccing the backup space for it and ended up being able to backup up more than I thought due to compression working so well. I think this is on the 2015 or 2016 version of Veeam.

Use your regular backup as the source for the GFS backup.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


I'm running REFS atop kickass S2D dedupe; in my use case I kinda don't actually care about what the chains *think* they are in archive, my bad.


Tbqh for the use case of putting data onto removable hard drives like they're worm tapes, you should probably just manually copy the most recent full and ignore any chains. Bonus points if you're already synthesizing fulls. File copy jobs with filters can help you here.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


You can setup a backup job for rotating disks, Synology was even mentioned which works great with that. Rename all external drives the same thing in Synology so they map to the same spot. You want to tell the Synology to wipe the drive when it's plugged in or manually do so.

Veeam will backup to the drive on schedule. If you happen to not have a drive plugged in it will email regularly until you correct it.

You will need access to the Synology UI for naming each USB drive, different names will mean you need a different repo for each one. It's the name in Synology not the name in Windows that need to be the same.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





pixaal posted:

Pretty sure it does GFS and differencing it's a checkbox someplace . I haven't looked at my config in years though and currently don't have access.

I'm almost positive it does that becuase I remember speccing the backup space for it and ended up being able to backup up more than I thought due to compression working so well. I think this is on the 2015 or 2016 version of Veeam.

Use your regular backup as the source for the GFS backup.

I spent quite a while trying to make it work that way, working with support, working with the account manager to get engineering support to see if it was possible, so if it was just a checkbox that we all missed I am going to be pretty frustrated. I don't work there anymore, so not really my problem and I don't have a Veeam instance to test on. For the basic GFS bit I set up, we of course used the backup as the source for GFS. Same with replication. We also had SAN-integrated backups running with Nimble, which was pretty slick.

Potato Salad posted:

I'm running REFS atop kickass S2D dedupe; in my use case I kinda don't actually care about what the chains *think* they are in archive, my bad.


Tbqh for the use case of putting data onto removable hard drives like they're worm tapes, you should probably just manually copy the most recent full and ignore any chains. Bonus points if you're already synthesizing fulls. File copy jobs with filters can help you here.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't trying to say it wouldn't work for this use case. For tapes or backup drives, for sure fulls are the way to go if they'll fit. I was just starting a different conversation about GFS. At the last place, they didn't want to spend any money on backups. Would be in the budget and then pulled at the last minute. They spent money in other places, but for some reason there was just a hangup on this. I was in the process of just sending it offsite to a Veeam provider, which is another reason why only being able to do fulls with GFS was a problem.

pixaal
Jan 8, 2004

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


I was using the Hyper V version, maybe the VMware version has slightly different options?

Digital_Jesus
Feb 10, 2011

pixaal posted:

I was using the Hyper V version, maybe the VMware version has slightly different options?

Theyre identical now. Just licensed based.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares



I know we've probably already kind of beaten this Veeam thing to death, but you *can*accomplish single-chain archiving with jobs that... don't use the built-in archive feature :biglips:

A forever forward synth job that runs once a month and retains (years*12) copies is what I use for a specific stream of financials backups for specific financial regulatory compliance

Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 12, 2020

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

I setup a backup copy job but it runs like molasses

Going to reconfigure this nas to use iscsi instead of smb and try again

What's weird is backups are faster to the synology when using a usb hd as the target instead of the 8-drive raid 10

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Potato Salad posted:

I know we've probably already kind of beaten this Veeam thing to death, but you *can*accomplish single-chain archiving with jobs that... don't use the built-in archive feature :biglips:

A forever forward synth job that runs once a month and retains (years*12) copies is what I use for a specific stream of financials backups for specific financial regulatory compliance

For sure, and I think I mentioned that I looked into that and couldn't find the schedule options I needed. Very willing to admit I missed it or there's been changes since.

MrMoo
Sep 14, 2000

CainFortea posted:

Until recently, our rental system was a bunch of dumb terminals hooked up to a unix mainframe. The guy I replaced had them all talking over ethernet somehow using some kind of serial to RJ45 adapter. I'm not a unix person, so I don't even pretend to understand how a 20 year old dumb terminal can talk with a unix system over an ethernet connection, but I never saw any of them on network scans or anything.

Every single device in the entire building came back to a single switch in his office. Which he had bolted to the wall, then put a table in front of it, and a shelf under the table.

He once told me that after a while he stopped following the color codes for terminating CAT5 and would just do all the solid colors in the middle since they were easier to see. Since some of these cables were laid when the system was installed and some weren't, I have no clue which wires are done right or not.

It's common to use serial to RJ11 or RJ45: a lot of networking equipment for example for console access. :lol: at randomly changing the pinout across the site.



Otherwise is it a converter rather than adapter? There are oodles of boxes for machine control and junk that loves that. Also popular in finance industry for broker feeds that run over serial protocol ever since they were created back in the 60s.

MrMoo fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Apr 12, 2020

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe
Our network uses two Dell PowerConnect 2824 switches. We've added some runs to the office so I'd like to add a third switch to it.

They're like... $100 used. Is it as simple as just adding a third switch and connecting via the link ports?

We have no real IT person.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Yes, assuming they were set back to factory default "used."

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

BonoMan posted:

Our network uses two Dell PowerConnect 2824 switches. We've added some runs to the office so I'd like to add a third switch to it.

They're like... $100 used. Is it as simple as just adding a third switch and connecting via the link ports?

We have no real IT person.

You could also get a 2848 and just replace one of those switches with that one, and have 24 empty ports on the new switch.

Ham Equity
Apr 16, 2013

i hosted a great goon meet and all i got was this lousy avatar
Grimey Drawer

BonoMan posted:

Our network uses two Dell PowerConnect 2824 switches. We've added some runs to the office so I'd like to add a third switch to it.

They're like... $100 used. Is it as simple as just adding a third switch and connecting via the link ports?

We have no real IT person.
I don't know if those are old enough to require crossover cables or not, but you should find out if you don't know.

Not fun to plug in the new switch and the whole network goes down.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Anything 'new' enough to be gigabit will do auto MDI-X.

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe
On a related note I have another multipart question. Different issues. Same network.

edit: These are pretty simple questions that I got stupidly wordy on. Sorry!

First question.

I was up at the office last night poking around the machine room.

There's one port in an office that doesnt' work. It's old, but wired and I'm pretty convinced it's connected into the patch panel. I pulled it out of the wall at the office jack and it's a gray wire with telestrata data or something like that on it.
In the patch panel there's one gray wire (the others are alllll blue or yellow) coming in with that same name on it. But the port still doesn't work. The lights on the switch are lit so I figured that it was just a coincidence and there's another old port in the building with the same old wiring.

Except... at the switch, it's got a port 31 masking tape tag on it. While that port is not labeled in the office ... the other two ports in that office are. Port 30 and 29. So 31 seems totally like it would be *that* port.

What's the cheapest way to test the cable at the patch panel and jack to try to match them up and see if it's the same wire?

The other question.

We just upgraded to a new cloud based phone system with the Poly (formerly Polycom) VVX 450 phone. It has a gigabit pass through port on it.

At the office, a machine that is tested to get a 250/250 upload (which is our fibre's limit) will only get about 9 mbit up *and* down when using the pass through on the phone.

This is on at least three different machines. I took that same phone home and tried the pass through at home and it worked just fine and didn't limit the speed at all. So I'm sure it's something in our firewall.

Again no IT guy and the guy that setup our servers is long gone. But from what I can tell we have several servers and the aforementioned powerconnect switches all connecting in to a ubiquiti edgeswitch and there's a pfsense firewall setup.

I have access to all of that with logins so I can poke around and change what I need to. Interestingly a lot of my recent knowledge (like when our new fiber got installed and they said "ok now it's time for your IT guy to use all of this information to setup your servers/firewall!") has just come from poking around and breaking poo poo then fixing it so I'm ok with accidentally doing that. Just need a little guidance on what parts of the firewall or switch I should be looking in to see what's limiting that traffic.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Just, you know, make sure you have backups and pictures and start documenting things before you start poking around with 0 knowledge. Do you have an MSP that you work with that you can call if things go south? Because you should.

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe

Internet Explorer posted:

Just, you know, make sure you have backups and pictures and start documenting things before you start poking around with 0 knowledge. Do you have an MSP that you work with that you can call if things go south? Because you should.

We have no MSP otherwise that's who'd be dealing with this. I could go on a long tangent on that but I won't. For now it's to me to figure out.

I don't have zero knowledge so I have never broken anything a reset or undo wouldn't fix. But I'm at just enough deficit to not be able to immediately say "oh it's because..." and go fix it. Generally if I get pointed in the right direction I can figure it out.

Ham Equity
Apr 16, 2013

i hosted a great goon meet and all i got was this lousy avatar
Grimey Drawer

BonoMan posted:

We have no MSP otherwise that's who'd be dealing with this. I could go on a long tangent on that but I won't. For now it's to me to figure out.

I don't have zero knowledge so I have never broken anything a reset or undo wouldn't fix. But I'm at just enough deficit to not be able to immediately say "oh it's because..." and go fix it. Generally if I get pointed in the right direction I can figure it out.
As someone who got into IT doing things this way: you can really unfixably gently caress things up on a firewall if you don't know what you're doing. Do not touch. If you need faster speeds on the passthrough, get an MSP.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


At a guess, the phones are just dumped on a voice VLAN rather than using LLDP/CDP so the passthrough port is also on a voice VLAN, and is being rate limited / is running over a connection that is just slow.

Phuzun
Jul 4, 2007

For tracing cables you want a Cable Toner and Tester. A basic one can be had for under $30. Just plug the toner on one end, use the wand to detect the signal on the other end.

As mentioned above, very likely the phones have their own vlan. You'd likely see this in the firewall and switches, maybe also some kind of bandwidth management to ensure call data is prioritized. Not something you'd want to mess with if you don't understand it and can't duplicate in a non-production network.

Phuzun fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Apr 29, 2020

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe

Thanatosian posted:

As someone who got into IT doing things this way: you can really unfixably gently caress things up on a firewall if you don't know what you're doing. Do not touch. If you need faster speeds on the passthrough, get an MSP.

Awesome thanks but this is not an option. I can't just change the way my company works. I've tried to get an MSP but can't. Unfortunately it's not just as easy as a toggle switch.

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe

Phuzun posted:

For tracing cables you want a Cable Toner and Tester. A basic one can be had for under $30. Just plug the toner on one end, use the wand to detect the signal on the other end.

As mentioned above, very likely the phones have their own vlan. You'd likely see this in the firewall and switches, maybe also some kind of bandwidth management to ensure call data is prioritized. Not something you'd want to mess with if you don't understand it and can't duplicate in a non-production network.

Thanks picked one up on amazon.

There's nothing in the switches or pfsense that has been setup to manage call data and if it was in the phone itself I would expect similar behavior when I tested it at home, but alas it's fine at home. Def not gonna poke around enough to break anything so not sure what to do at this point.

edit: To clarify a point that might be confusing. Nothing on the network has been configured for these phones. The servers/pfsense/switches were set up a few years ago and we just got the phones in the mail a few weeks ago and hooked them up. So if there's something in the switch/pfsense that's causing this... it wasn't intentional since they were setup before the phones were a twinkle in our eye.

edit 2: Might not even be the switch or firewall after all. I took it from home back up to work and now it works fine. Like using it in my home environment jogged it's memory or something. Frickin' weird.

BonoMan fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Apr 30, 2020

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Revalis Enai
Apr 21, 2003
<img src="https://fi.somethingawful.com/customtitles/title-revalis_enai.gif"><br>Wait, what's my phone number again?
Fun Shoe
We started doing curb side pick up and my boss spent around $500 for a company in China to make a website for ordering. It has been 3 weeks and the site still have issues. Boss wanted to hand the site to me to fix it up and get it running ASAP. Problem is I'm not familiar with ASP.net and I don't know how the database the site uses is setup, not only that they didn't send me all the files so I can't even test it on a local server.

Basically I need to setup a website where customers can create an account, order items and submit order to our email. Boss wants it in 5 days or less.

I don't even know if it's even possible much less how I should approach it. Should I hire someone to do it? Or can I download/buy a template and just modify it?

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