Building your own servers can work, if you have very competent admins, a good selection of spare parts, and don't fucking cheap out when it matters. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.

I don't know about your spare parts, but the other two seem to be mostly absent.

We have a tremendous spare parts cache.

burn-in stations for disks, RAM, battery charging stations...

I was actually impressed by the data center operation.

I thought... well, if you're going to self-support and are cost-conscious, maybe this is the way to do it.

9 months in, I realize that 90% of server have single PSUs, we have many cooling and chassis problems with Supermicro, RAID batteries fail weekly and toxic combinations like SAS and SATA on expander backplanes cause performance problems.

@ewwhite move on

@Iain you've never had a challenge?

I have to give it a shot.

Give it a shot, but be prepared to move on.

I'm always prepared.

@ewwhite lots but the way you constantly whine about your employer makes me thing you're not happy so moving on would be the correct thing to do

I whine about every employer :)

I gotta give it a shot to try to change things.

I've walked into some bad shops... but I'd never want to work somewhere where everything was all-solved, all-smooth.

I think the difference here is that I didn't immediately have the mandate to make those changes.

Plus, there are business changes occurring that are appealing.

@Iain healthcare in the US is a big deal... big business.

and we're poised to capture more of that marketshare.

The more healthcare market share you capture, the more tight the HIPPA regulations and the more of a nightmare your life becomes

@MDMarra We can do it... with the right staff. It's a company on the cusp of good things. We must have good salespeople to continue to get business, even with the deficiencies I describe.

Not to be discouraging or anything

Meanwhile, I'm on my balcony grilling sausage and bacon wrapped asparagus while drinking a three philosophers.

Life doesn't get much better from this vantage point

@MDMarra I had a burst of systems creativity... so I've been hacking away at some projects all day.

Nice. I haven't looked at work since friday

It's a nice change

it's needed.

I don't even know where I'm going tomorrow. Maybe Wilmington, DE. maybe Harrisburg

No use preparing, so lets drink!

yeah, if you don't know

Hey kids

Wife is sickly and a pain.

I probably won't actually have to go anywhere until Wednesday so that's nice

whats up with your wife? Everything ok?

@ScottPack hi dad

Roar

@MDMarra SHE'S overworked.

so, my work issues pale in comparison.

Gotta work hard to live in a palace!

@MDMarra man, it's not worth it.

I wouldn't know. I have a shitty 600 sqft 1br 5th floor apartment

@MDMarra we never moved. the new house is a short-sale... nothing's happened

I'm hood rich

@ewwhite happened with my parents retirement condo. They made a full cash offer. The bank sat on it and let it go into foreclosure because the market rebounded and they felt they could make more on a foreclosure sale.

They ended up buying the place next door

But my parents had a bunch of money tied up in an offer that the bank didn't respond to in the 60 day window

yeah, so my $ is tied-up... and we've been in a holding-pattern since February.

Might as well pull out and open a waffle shop. "Get fed at Ed's!"

just got iPad autocorrected pretty hard

Honestly, I don't even really want to move.. and the Chicago market has tightened up. There's no inventory, so that neighborhood has ~25 homes available for sale in the $400k-$1m range.

Is it actually in the city?

yes

but again... the only thing that would make me happier is better weather, moar bike riding.

We're starting to look in the Philly suburbs

The city is too pricey

Places close to a train 15 minutes outside are 1/2 the price and the schools are way better

I mean, 1/2 price is still like 400k in a good school district. But still

better than 750k in a school district that's bankrupt

Anyone here ever dealt with Mid-Band Ethernet?

@MDMarra transport is key.

It's not on Wikipedia so I'm not sure if it exists, of it it's just some marketing ploy

@MarkHenderson just metro with fiber

@MDMarra With? Or without?

They're telling us they can offer 80Mbps over the copper lines, which seems unreal

@MarkHenderson Yeah, I have it in my Los Angeles Produce sites.

Ah, but not over a single copper pair, over 6-8 of them

It's called Ethernet over Copper here

let me show pix!

@MarkHenderson with

@MDMarra Hrm, there's no fibre in this area. Known disadvantage of this building in the park

Maybe they liberally sprinkled advertising and upon application they'll tell me I'm SOL

What's the max distance for 100Mb over 6A?

its gotta be fairly long

@MarkHenderson here you go...

@MDMarra this is Valley...

the Adtran router (blue) is the Ethernet over Copper setup.

note how the pairs are arranged.

This was in place for awhile until i could get fiber into the facility a few months ago.

@ewwhite Labelled SHDSL... is that what it is?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… :)

It's magic over copper pairs.

Prices seem pretty good, they're offering 10/10/200Gb for $299/month or 20/20/400Gb for $626

It's like 2-megabits per pair.

so kinda cool.

@MarkHenderson I'll be honest... my clients are all on T1, Wireless (microwave) or fiber these days. Or maybe some with a mix with a link balancer device.

But that's not a bad price.

@ewwhite We looked at fixed wireless, it was $3,000/month for 20/20

!!

for us, that's $1200-$1500/mo

And it would only be travelling about 500 meters too, as I can literally see the receiving antenna on the roof of the DC over the road

@ewwhite Now $1200/month I could probably get through'

can't you just use lasers or microwave if you have line of sight?

pew-pew

@Chopper3 I live in an area of the world that basically has 3rd world connectivity options

We're lucky if we can get a 10/0.5Mbps ADSL2 sync

@MarkHenderson the US? ;)

@Chopper3 Don't hate.

@Chopper3 Australia

@MarkHenderson I know, I was kidding

@Chopper3 Ah

We currently have two fairly unreliable ADSL2+ connections into the office and it's giving me the shits, it takes 10 minutes to push a 15Mb binary out to our servers

And we failover/failback about twice a week at the moment

balls

@MarkHenderson manually or no?

(wants the opportunity to sell you an Elfiq unit)

@ewwhite We have route inspection on the ASA that automatically switches default route if 8.8.8.8 is unreachable for whatever period

So, automatic

@MarkHenderson oh, interesting... which ASA? Can you share the setup?

@ewwhite 5505

standard license?

@MarkHenderson must learn this!

@ewwhite Security Plus

Apologies for the ASDM, I happened to ahve it open at the moment

I'm no snob. I appreciate some good ASDM, too.

Hang on, let me find the tutorial I followed

kk

I couldn't find an 8.x Cisco document on it, so I ended up using this one

petenetlive.com/KB/Article/0000544.htm

I didn't use the VPN side of his config, but the backup link part worked

Excellent. IP SLA.

Learn something new every day... Today I learned that Remote Desktop Services role cannot co-exist with AD DS role on Windows Server 2012.

Would you consider an address bus an integrated circuit made up of transistors that map to logic gates?

@MichaelHampton It only has 3 candidates doesn't it?

Oh wait, you mean our election

@MarkHenderson 7 candidates, not counting the world's most awesome troll.

ee also has an election which is what I thought you were referring to

Oh no, that was for @JohnMerlino

At the moment I'm shopping for a server... and I have no idea what I'm doing.

@MichaelHampton you sayin my questions are out of context here?

@JohnMerlino Quite so. :)

Yes, I make a point of always downvoting your questions, no matter what they say...wait, who are you?

Well, that was a quick exit...

@MichaelHampton Shopping for a server?

@ewwhite Yes, and I don't really know what I need. It basically needs to serve QuickBooks by remote desktop to 4-5 users.

Any other services? Budget? Prefer rack or tower?

That's all it will really be doing. So that, and anything else that supports that (like remote desktop web services?). It's going in a SOHO environment, so tower would be preferable.

So quiet matters....

Yes, quiet would be nice.

Budget?

I like HP, as you know... but I have a couple of near-silent models in the portfolio.

That's kind of open ended. They want to know "how much" it will cost before they decide on anything. And it's a nonprofit, so let's assume minimal. :)

k. Bare-metal? W2008?

Or do you wanna virtualize?

I figured I would virtualize...since remote desktop needs a domain controller and they don't even HAVE a domain I"d throw one in a VM.

@MichaelHampton K. Easy, then.

A wonderful example of the kind of user we love here

@MarkHenderson I don't see that I've downvoted any of those. WTF?