Below is a compilation of links we've found to be helpful for Sys Admins (capitalized because we're important, like a towel):
AntiVirus/AntiMalware Tools:
Networking Tools:
Miscellaneous Tools:
- APC Power Estimator - estimates your power needs based on devices, which you can specify
- Dependency Walker - scans modules and builds a hierarchical dependency tree
- Greenshot -- Screenshot + utilies
- HJSplit -- Split/Join files
- Jing - Screenshot + utilities
- Notepad++ -- Enhanced Notepad (e.g., color coding)
- WinDirStat -- File space analysis
- HTAccess Redirect Generator -- Generate Redirects
- Hostsman Manage Multiple Hosts files from one utility.
- PC Decrapifier inventories all the bloatware (HP/Dell Utilities, etc) on a PC based on user-driven feedback and recommendations and removes them sans-uninstallers. Great for cleaning useless shit off out-of-the-box PCs.
- Recuva undelete software that restores deleted files, as well as files on damaged or freshly formatted drives. Paid corporate licensing but free for personal use wink wink nudge nudge.
- NirSoft has utilities to do nearly anything you want to do from sniffing passwords out of FTP/HTTP/SMTP traffic on your network to editing Outlook NK2 Autocomplete files to retrieving your Windows/Office product key to a nice viewer for BSOD minidump files.
- Screen Connect Free Use this to create a free tech support portal for yourself for personal use.
- VM for learning Puppet
- MobaXterm Super handy terminal program. Has local Cygwin shell and can spin up a lot of servers. Get it.
- Check to see if it's Thursday. It may or may not be.
Printer Configuration tools:
Ransomware/Cryptoware information sheet
Stress Relief Tools:
...more to come
last updated 5.25.2017
Mostly just huntin' monsters.
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Posts
It keeps me sane after I have to deal with users.
Windows error codes are numbers, they can either be spat out in base10 or hex.
Enjoy your new, human friendly, error message.
The first half corresponds to the source of the message, the latter the actual error
Hooray!
1. Surround the device generating the error in a salt circle of standard dimensions.
2. Place an offering in the circle and incant the passage listed on page 23a of the install guide. (Contrary to popular belief, a live sacrifice hasn't been required since the 1998 antitrust lawsuit. Popular alternatives are an offering of a choice food item such as a cookie or a shot of whisky, a printed and then scanned and then faxed copy of a complaint from a user, or a piece of broken printer hardware.)
3. Break the salt circle with a wand of ash.
4. Burn the offering and breathe in the fumes -- the answers should come as a dream the next time you sleep.
Tough
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
He finally read the install guide!
XBL:Phenyhelm - 3DS:Phenyhelm
Remember that one time I banned myself when heartbleed came out because I kept trying to post here over and over and eventually racked up like 8 points and it banned me?
I'm ready for deer.
@Decomposey Well, you'd need the Sec+ 6 months after hiring(Net+ would be a bonus thing really). Pay seems variable? Not sure what your expectations are.
"iDRAC8 Enterprise, integrated Dell Remote Access Controller, Enterprise". $300 and fucking worth it. You can connect to the console on your iDRAC if the server is powered off, mount an ISO from your laptop at home, and boot the server from the virtual optical drive you mounted it to. It's fucking amazing.
It has its own dedicated port for the iDRAC, so you're not eating a QP NIC port for that.
The single QP is probably enough. You don't need a vMotion dedicated port with a single host, so you designate one port for your ESXi management interface, 3 for VM traffic, and the iDRAC is on dedicated hardware. That's plenty. The other 3 NICs will team through the vswitching so you essentially have a 3 gig nic.
Remember when you create VMs or P to V your current environment or whatever, to use the VMXNet 3 virtual NICs.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
EDIT: Plus you can get 10 gig copper now.
I'd like to take a moment to appreciate how cool it is that we can get a 1U server with almost 32 TB of SSD storage, 36 cores running 64 threads, a half terrabyte of ram, and quad 10 gig NICs.
I was pretty devastated when she told me that Thursday is tomorrow, not today.
When you have one server it's doable, but when you get to multple VHosts you really want to have some kind of common/shared storage. It's way more efficent, and makes moving VM's between hosts way easier.
I'd love to be able to do vMotion and seamless takeover but until I can get my boss to okay another 30k dumped into it that's a pipe dream.
It'd probably be 10-15 minutes *per VM* if you have to move the VHD's. when you get to 10+ VM's that adds up quickly. If the VHD lives on a shared storage medium, then it's seconds per VM.
again, with one host it's fine. But when you want to expand, you'll find that shared storage is a way better option.
They did a full conversion of test databases and it only took a spritely 12 hours to run through 40 gigabytes of report databases.
Now it was brought to their attention that there are several clients with half a terabyte of data.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
By the time you get there you may or may not want to look at multiple SANs and/or hyperconverged storage.
Local storage is fine for small shops.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
http://isitthursday.org
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I really needed that a couple hours ago.
Technically this is why vSAN is a thing, but currently the price tag makes it non-viable for small businesses.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
you're writing end-user desktop software that is supposedly the highest quality
so like you are assumedly caring about error handling and whatnot
you're writing the bit that writes the error logs
why the fuck does it not check the logfile size?
like in what scenario am I thankful for the 160gb text file, oh yeah this is good information, good thing it all got saved
most people don't even have a application that could open that file
why isn't it coded to write a circular log
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Because offshoring and inshoring talent saves them billions of dollars so you don't get true common sense, but rather, cheaper labor (though still at a premium because microsoft).
@Cog
I sold him on almost 100% more thread/core count.
Jesus fucking christ dude
Send them a two word email:
"Log levels."
oh I know
I know that very well
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Sophos, are you fucking reading this?
Because God fucking dammit Sophos
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Nice thing is, with EVC mode you don't have to worry too much about matching hardware anymore when you add hosts down the line.