Philip Elder

TL;DR We do not, as a policy, do in-place upgrade for anything. Why? I'm that old? ;-) NT4 --> Windows 2000. Horror show. Windows 2000 to Windows 2003. Horror show. Today, there's lots of success with in-place migration for most workloads when the OS is in a virtual machine. I am of the mind that drivers and firmware are always going to be the Murphy's Law club that hits and hits hard. **** Domain Controllers are really easy for us since they're Server Core and ADDS, DNS, and DHCP only we install a fresh OS, DCPromo, and finally transfer FSMO Roles and Time to the intended PDCe. Exchange Server gets a fresh OS and a fresh install with the mailboxes migrated. SQL Server is the same we migrate the databases. SharePoint Server same same. File Services is now set up using DFS-R and DFS-N so it's a relatively painless process to migrate to fresh. Though Sage refuses DFS-N so a bit of Group Policy change is required there. For Hyper-V Hosts and Cluster Nodes the operating system always resides on its own partition. So, we wipe and reload fresh. For clusters that means a Cluster Rolling Upgrade. Or, depending on workload saturation levels we could drop two nodes out and use Shared Nothing Live Migration to move them.

My very favourite is the appreciation from a user when something that has been bugging them for a while gets fixed _while there in person_ as that's the only real way to make IT all warm and fuzzy! ;-)

Just learned about the concept of a “telescope ranch” in Texas. People pay to have their $10,000+ telescope rigs set up in the middle of TX to avoid light pollution. Every night the roof rolls back off the warehouses. Then you can remote in to your telescope and use it from anywhere in the world.

WINDOWS SERVER UPGRADE EXPERIENCE SURVEY The Windows Server Team is looking for some input on the Windows Server Upgrade Experience! :0) forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/response…

@cyb3rops This sounds like a prophetic vision for ... HPC (HighPerformance Computing) ... That's used where? Yeah, Universities, and such in GRID like applications. Welcome to the niche my friends! ;-)

I have been saying this for a while. It was only a matter of time until someone started running the much cheaper Chinese models on US-based infrastructure. Until now, you could still argue: "Who wants to send sensitive data to a Chinese provider?" Healthcare, defense, government, finance - for many of them this was basically a no-go. But if the same model runs on US-hosted hardware, with a US-based inference provider, many of those objections get weaker. And then it gets interesting. What happens when investors realize that maybe 50-70% of enterprise AI use cases don't need OpenAI or Anthropic at all? Maybe they run fine on: - cheaper hosted models - open-weight models - local models - or some future box of GPUs nobody had on their bingo card The big frontier models may still be needed for the hard stuff. But if only 10-20% of workloads really need them, the ROI story looks very different. That is where the card house starts to shake a bit.

Now, imagine an org with a $175,000 US per month spend. What's an extra $5K? $10K even? Would anyone even notice? If a tree falls in the forest ...

Now, take that and shift to: 1: Compromise Tenant God Mode 2: Set up Azure Services 3: Bind and Obfuscate Customer gets a bill $4,500 US over their usual $150 US per month M365 fee. Uh huh ... ask me how I know? The "beauty" of it? Virtually impossible to cancel.

@Mericamemed The jack is probably the #1 killer of guys ... literally.

looks pretty solid, no need to panic

NOTE: I won't delete this but it turns out that the needed information fields in the first three may be in the wrong place. I haven't had time to debug it yet. But, the needed info is _not_ in the result. :-(

STORAGE SPACES: CHECK DRIVES FOR RELIABILITY ISSUES Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Select-Object DeviceId, @{Name='FriendlyName'; Expression={(Get-PhysicalDisk -DeviceId $_.DeviceId).FriendlyName}}, @{Name='Model'; Expression={(Get-PhysicalDisk -DeviceId $_.DeviceId).Model}}, @{Name='SerialNumber'; Expression={(Get-PhysicalDisk -DeviceId $_.DeviceId).SerialNumber}}, MediaType, Wear, Temperature, TemperatureMax, PowerOnHours, ReadErrorsCorrected, ReadErrorsUncorrected, WriteErrorsCorrected, WriteErrorsUncorrected | Format-Table -AutoSize This script comes courtesy of Grok! x.com/i/grok/share/0…

@MihaPecnik Yeah, I happily posted the above without testing it on a an actual cluster since I was waiting for the storage server to come online. :P My apologies, lesson learned.

@airmainengineer It sure visualizes the pause between "balls to the wall" and those engines spooling up!

Go-around without nose landing gear touching the ground . What do you think went wrong here?

@alphafox I feel at least just a bit younger. I had to look it up! :0)

If you need one of these ethernet adapters, your computer probably can't use a web browser:

@AmericanWinning @JClarkeatDell There's always a moment where one has to pay the piper. Those of us that work with the stuff can see through the façade pretty quick. There's always questions that AI won't, or can't, answer. ;-)

@JClarkeatDell I find it ironic that all of the crusty college graduates boo AI at commencement when it literally allowed them to cheat through at least 3 years of school.

The companies that win the next decade will be AI-native. They won’t just use AI. They'll be built on it. linkedin.com/pulse/ai-nativ…

@techspence Outlook (Classic) or the data and keys pilfering service modern "Outlook"? IMNSHO of course!

After upgrading -> why is outlook broke

AZURE LOCAL "ACCIDENTAL" VM DELETE REMEDIATION First line: #known-issues-from-previous-releases" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/az… Points to: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/az… HT from: linkedin.com/pulse/azure-lo… .@DarrylvdPeijl My take: Thou Shalt NOT Lose the Data! There's something seriously wrong with quality testing. :-(

@linuxishawt @techspence Yeah, we didn't go the Always On route because the troubleshooting dials, knobs, and logs were virtually non-existent. That was just too painful. So, RD Gateway with MFA/2FA all the way.

@MPECSInc @techspence I have a few hundred users using Azure Always On VPN pushed via Intune with pki auth across several clients and when it works it works well, when they have issues we have to troubleshoot individual machines. DA always just kinda worked.

What Nathan said. I don’t claim to have the best answer but moving away from traditional firewalls is part of it

@infosec_fox Just one. All your data are belong to us.

How many data centers does this planet need?

@maietta What's the backup setup? I heard replication, laptop, and NAS in there but nothing about an actual backup?

Client doesn't need all this horsepower but the arrangement is that I am putting in a dedicated server rack for my business which they will fit directly from. They will be covering the electricity and internet cost, I will be hosting their stuff at no cost to them other than that. They have an on-site generator that's going to be hooked up at some point in the future and then I will have a UPS battery system in place so we will have the ability to operate through power outages.

@techspence It's too bad Microsoft got rid of Direct Access. That was the cat's meow for secure, and seamless, user access.

@techspence Palo Alto How many VPN boxes have been compromised in the last 6-12 months? RD Gateway with 2FA/MFA is the only way into a network.