Tech Corner

[seangee]

I'm finally having fun with the Intune trial / migration for my wife's small practice.
For context

• I got 10 days notice from Jumpcloud that their free service was coming to an end.
• The paid service is twice the price of Microsoft's and not nearly as functional out of the box if all your managed PCs are Windows
• The last time I (officially) managed a Windows environment, Server 2000 and Windows XP were the latest and greatest , and for most people the internet was something you accessed using a modem and analogue phone line.
• My Jumpcloud config was pretty basic using OOB functionaily. the stuff I couldn't do I put instructions into a README for users to do themselves - but almost always ended up doing myself via a remote session .

It took a couple of days to get up to speed and another couple to replicate what I had on Jumpcloud + I no longer need the README. This was a part time evening activity as I do have a proper job
Since then I have been blown away with how much I have been able to achieve to replicate an enterprise like environment with the assistance of my 2 AI buddies generating scripts for me. I need 2 because I regularly crash into the daily usage limit for the free accounts .

Now for testing I have 2 VMs on my PC running Windows 11 Pro. One of these I never touch so I can see that changes are being correctly applied. The other one I use as my development and support machine. I have now got to the stage where I do a daily re-install of Windows on this machine. When its done all my tools are installed (dev and support), all my files and source code are back, my VPN is connected to the office nework, and the machine has the full user config for apps, connectivity, printers, etc. One of the tests is that the config on the 2 machines is identical, with my user having all the extra dev and support stuff and any other user have all the normal stuff that staff can use (with appropriate access). Having a clean start means I can manually install and uninstall stuff to my hearts content and I can't damage anything because I can always get it back to its desired state. I also have a laptop connected to ensure it works on real hardware.

Extra benefits

• I no longer need their stuff on my PC or to remember to connect to the VPN
• I won't need to take my laptop when I go to the office - I can just use any availabe machine
• I don't need a licence for my support VM - before I hit the 30 day acctivation limit I can just create a new one
• SWMBO has 3 machines in 3 locations and is totally compuer illiterate - I no longer have to do everything multiple times

Probably old hat to any proper IT pros, but these days I'm just an end user who helps out.

For the non-tech folk who stumbled in here - why is this so important?

• When I get a call on Friday to say there is a new starter on Monday all I have to do is go onto a website and enter their details and access level. They just need to sign in and the machine (any machine) will configure itself.
• When I get a call on Friday to say someone is leaving at the end of the day all I have to do is go onto the same website and remove the tick in the active box. They immediately have no access to anything, and I have nothing to clean up

 

[MaloK]

Which management software you are using for your VMs, Hyper-V ?

 

[jaylach]

Which management software you are using for your VMs, Hyper-V ?

I'm not who you are asking but I run Oracle's VirtualBox for my 5 VMs.

 

[seangee]

I am using Hyper-V, can't remember why but I switched from VirtualBox some time ago.

 

[MattW]

The Steam summer sale has finally arrived. Managed to get Crash Bandicoot N sane trilogy for £3.50 Got a few other games as well.

 

[seangee]

I am using Hyper-V, can't remember why but I switched from VirtualBox some time ago.

Its come a long way from when I created my very first VMs using Xen on Debian with no GUI whatsoever.
Its so long since I created a Windows VM on Hyper-V I was surprised to discover it has sound

 

[jaylach]

Sometimes I'm an idiot! Was just playing with my drive configuration and quickly remembered why I got the PCIe to M.2 adapter cards. My 2 WD blacks and WD green 1 TB M.2 drives are rated for PCIe gen 4 which works fine as to backward compatibility in my first M.2 slot which is gen 3 but the second M.2 slot is only PCIe gen 2. A gen 4 M.2 drive is only compatible back to gen 3 and will not be seen on a gen 2 slot.

I MAY try one of the 1 TB drives back in an adapter and plug in on my open gen 3 PCIe 16X slot but I'm currently playing and have a 500 GB Samsung gen three M.2 drive in the second gen 2 slot. I am in the process of doing a clone of my M.2 1 TB WD black system drive to the Samsung to see how it goes.

After I play with the above I'll probably try with an adapter in the open PCIe X16 slot to see how it goes.

 

[jaylach]

To add on to the above post the clone, using EaseUS ToDo, worked fine and proven to properly boot to Windows 10.

Next step will probably be to boot to the smaller Samsung and try an upgrade to Windows 11. If that works it will be good enough if the next adapter test fails as, even though the Samsung is half the size it still has 184 GB free space so there is plenty of space to try the upgrade.

 

[MaloK]

Always a good thing to have a dual boot system with 2 separate drives, you can use one OS to fix the other one, loll,

I too followed and suceeded the MCSE, MCP and MCSA on Windows 2000 Advanced Server and that was a lot of fun. Win2k was complete beast of a OS and probably my favorite of all the old Windows.

VirtualBox is the simple and functional VM engine, literally any OS that runs on PC hardware is working without extreme configuration. Hyper-V is for me a Windows only VM engine and if you need to install Linux based VM's, stay away from it or you're going to suffer for real. Then there's VMware, IMO the best material support, the best video acceleration and OS compatibility and by far the most robust.

For those who are not Aware... VMware Workstation Pro is now Free of charges since November 2024 including personal, commercial and educational use. If you need something that has decades of proven technology the best integration tools and widest support, it is the industry standard for reliability. Try VMware, you are going to love it.

Of course if you talk about serious virtualisation you should consider Red hat, Citrix, vSphere. But those are not the kind that supports home PC .

I remember lagging Windows 2000 on Xen and the first installations of Elastic Sky X where awful. It also seem that the new ESXi is availlable for free again, but you need to register everything. If you want to play with an industrial strenght bare metal hypervisor and have cores to spare. Give it a try. You can have hundreds of Windows and Linux side-by-side with great softyware isolation (as long as your computer has the resources to do it, loll.).

If I take the Threadripper, I'm probably going to make it a vSphere Hypervisor 8 for 3 OS's and see how this can be accelerated.

 

[seangee]

These days I'm just a user who dabbles a bit and Hyper-V is just fine for the few machines I use. Most of the (linux) stuff that actually does work is in docker images that I pull of github and usually don't touch. And these have all been moved onto the NAS. Lets be honest, my phone is way more powerful than my first xen server - which was running 9 VMs

Completely different story at work where everything is going cloud native - but who can afford that just for playing about. Some of the Open Source tools for orchestration and management are incredible with the biggest players being Spotify and Netflix, which makes sense if you think about how they make their money. Spotify reckon they patched 95% of their prod servers with zero downtime in the first 8 hours when the Log4J patch was made available. The company I worked for at the time was still chasing its tail a month later.

 

[MaloK]

I still have a customer that runs Exchange 2003 in production. I renewed the server certificate a couple weeks ago... Loll. I installed MailEnable as front end over the exchange installation many years ago. And it's still hurling mails all over the world with no interruptions. My last mods makes it perfectly industry standard compliant.

The only limitation is the dreaded 2 gig mailbox maximum.

 

[MaloK]

So...

My threadripper would rip my pocket at a point that you would start to consider mental consultation.

It's blowing 18K$ for a 96 cores with 40 pci lanes... And it's not really officially supporting because ESXi doesn't support special cores.

So... I thought that there could be something more reasonable... Still able to run 3 VM at good steam.

And what do I find... A brand refurbished Dell PowerEdge R730 Server / 2X E5-2680 V3 2.5GHz = 24 Cores / 48 Hyperthreading Cores, 128GB RAM / 2X 1TB Enterprise grade SSD 16 bays hot swap H730 PERC raid 2.5 slots. And it's on HCL list for ESXi,.

720$

It's in the mail. it has 90 days warranty and we'll make sure it's good...

 

[MaloK]

Wow ! Since broadcom acquired, the support site is a mess and just finding the download files was a quest... In addition of the login on your account merry go round... But yeah its free.

Unlimited # of guess and never expires. With 8 way SMP The hypervisor can schedule demand on all free cores remaining of the machine to accelerate any queries from any VMs, so that will roughly leave a pool of 40 Cpus that can be Scheduled at any time.

Also to make sure I wont miss, I advertently let my index buy a second compatible machine that has much lower disk support, but a lot more CPU guts and a truck load of ram.

So if I do it correctly I should end with a beast and his little Frankenstein brother.

Once the machines confirmed good Adding the disk support and finalizing should still cost pretty less than a quarter of the AMD. For the moment.

 

[seangee]

My own experience with Broadcom acquiring other products is awful. AT least you got what you wanted. When they bought Symantec I ended up being locked out of my own account with no apparent way to regain access - even via their support. Its why I switched to ESET. IIRC I had to re-install Windows because I could not uninstall their agents. The agents stopped working because they could not authenticate except for one tiny little aspect - t hey would not allow installation of anyother AV software

 

[MaloK]

They locked all accounts, until you reached to their chatbot then re enabled and all my past stuff has disappeared. All the annotations and flagged documentations, vanished. And all support tickets are gone too.

I've been using VMware supports for decades, the staff would recognize me by my name and yesterday they simply said "Who are you ?"... "Ah... here's your new password... Good luck !". They installed a new portal and deleted the rest. all links it the software's for support are no longer finding the documents.

It's a BIG UGLY MESS

I remember I had to manually go trough files, registry and services to completely remove endpoint a couple times in the past... Today I use ReVo Uninstaller to rid boxes of any Norton Products.

They simply never cleaned their software removal correctly with their own installers. And more than once I removed Norton AV to reboot to a Blue screen because system files where left messed.

The only Norton stuff I still use and find awesome is Power Eraser and Bootable Recovery Tools. With this you can take back control on highly infected machines (That I haven't seen for a long time)

I'm not very fond of software "resident" antivirus and never used them, I really prefer to have it on the Edges devices, at the DNS level and on demand for stations. And with a couple neat restrictive techniques and some geofencing, I haven't heard about viruses in years. Even the malware that makes it trough is just ridiculous and of no danger.

A couple weeks ago I made a thorough dark web search to find if any of my important info had been leaked or whatever I could find. And besides the stupid passwords I put on stupid sites with no consequences, I was still surprised that my phone number was found and I discovered That it was leaked by adobe systems . Great !... Also not even a pictures of me was found, that I'm pretty proud.

So I'm confident at this level, I should be safe.