All programmers know is "the system you give everyone else in the company isn't good enough for me...I need one with 12 gigs of ram and the best video card on the market.... now"
Whenever I've worked in a corporate environment, I've always taken the slowest spec in current use.
If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you.
I know it makes you IT guys hate us and all, but you really can't have enough RAM on a development machine. Most decent IDEs will swallow a gig without thinking about it, then you need to actually run the software, and maybe you need a local database and/or web server and/or application server. God help you if the database is Oracle.
Like, I've heard the words "Active Directory", and I know it's a thing that exists. But what does it do exactly? I assume it's a system for controlling who gets to log into what box, and who gets to print to this printer or that, and what box gets which patch when?
More or less.
At its core it's a way of organizing users and computers (and other network resources) into a hierarchy. This is a random screenshot of the most frequently-used Active Directory tool that I found on GIS:
So you might have a folder called West containing subfolders:
-West
--California
---San Francisco
---Los Angeles
etc.
Maybe you organize computers by region but you organize people by department.
From there you can organize people into security groups. So you can say "everybody in the B2C Sales group gets access to the B2C Sales folder on the server" or "every computer in the San Francisco group gets patched at 3am Pacific time." Active Directory is also where the user's passwords are stored (as encrypted hashes) and a lot of other security options (like whether a user is allowed VPN access). Windows OSes (except for the Home versions) can be set to check Active Directory every time a user attempts to log in and access a file.
It's based on an interoperable standard called LDAP which allows it to work with non-Windows OSes.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
All programmers know is "the system you give everyone else in the company isn't good enough for me...I need one with 12 gigs of ram and the best video card on the market.... now"
Whenever I've worked in a corporate environment, I've always taken the slowest spec in current use.
If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you.
I know it makes you IT guys hate us and all, but you really can't have enough RAM on a development machine. Most decent IDEs will swallow a gig without thinking about it, then you need to actually run the software, and maybe you need a local database and/or web server and/or application server. God help you if the database is Oracle.
Eh, RAM isn't a big deal. It's more when somebody is requesting a completely different build entirely.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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TincheNo dog food for Victor tonight.Registered Userregular
I'm gonna try Googling around a bit instead of clogging up the thread with newbie questions.
If you're planning on developing on/for any OS other than Windows, you probably want to focus more on learning LDAP and DNS first.
In classic Microsoft style, Active Directory is a hodgepodge of different technologies, so learning the open-standard techs individually first and then putting them together is probably a better approach than learning the propriety MS implementation first and then working backwards to the industry standards.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Ugh feral your office looks like our "server" closet.
That was a random GIS. I don't really have an office, I have a desk in an 'open office environment' which is a nice way of saying 'we're too cheap to spring for cubicles or a decent space, so we're just going to put everybody on desks in an open floor.' I keep thinking about throwing my boss a copy of Peopleware and saying "You're doing it all wrong!" but I know that nothing will ever happen from it.
That's two good recommendations and one "doesn't suck too bad" for Trend Micro.
Late to this but urgh, don't get me started on this. Every single morning I get in, find a desk and then have to go and spend 20 minutes getting myself set up. And hsaring Mice / Keyboards (we keep a number just floating about for anyone thaty wants one) just seems really unhygienic to me.
And I have to use a laptop instead of the big bastard Mac Pro I wanted. It's retarded.
All programmers know is "the system you give everyone else in the company isn't good enough for me...I need one with 12 gigs of ram and the best video card on the market.... now"
Whenever I've worked in a corporate environment, I've always taken the slowest spec in current use.
If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for you.
I know it makes you IT guys hate us and all, but you really can't have enough RAM on a development machine. Most decent IDEs will swallow a gig without thinking about it, then you need to actually run the software, and maybe you need a local database and/or web server and/or application server. God help you if the database is Oracle.
Eh, RAM isn't a big deal. It's more when somebody is requesting a completely different build entirely.
Ya our developers normally run 2-3 sql servers for whatever reason, Eclipse, a VM or two running server stuff, and a ton of other garbage. THEN they'll take their laptops home and let their kids install random Facebook junk and complain about their computers being slow.
General_Win on
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited October 2010
Yeah, my biggest pet peeve is an account where users have laptops with full admin rights and when I get them back they've got limewire, about six gigs of music (although that's a bonus for me, my entire collection of music is from other people) a few video games, and about five facebook java or flash exploits because they never update.
Okay, so Windows Server 2008 w/ IIS 7.5 - how do I set up email?
Here's what I have now:
I have a small ASP.NET MVC 2 site for personal business. It's a generic "Hi, I'm a developer, here's some things I did, send me money" site. I'd like to add a professional looking contact form, which would gather a potential client's information and send me an email with those details. The construction of the form isn't an issue - I can code it up fine. My problem is figuring out how to set up email at all.
As a bonus, I'd love to have a legit myname@mydomain.com email account that I could use for business communication.
So, any help you can give me with this would be greatly appreciated. Just note that I'm pretty unfamiliar with server management at all in a general sense, so I may be completely lost when it comes to even simple tasks regarding this.
You should have email under IIS, unless it's changed. Check under the IIS Configuration MMC panel snap-in or whatever it's called. I believe there's a portion for POP/IMAP and SMTP.
bowen on
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
You should have email under IIS, unless it's changed. Check under the IIS Configuration MMC panel snap-in or whatever it's called. I believe there's a portion for POP/IMAP and SMTP.
At both the server level and for my deployed site, I only have an option for SMTP.
Also symantec endpoint is fine unless you try and have more than one central management server
Other than that I usually don't have much issues with it other than the fact that it does nothing to keep new malware from infecting people who download random crap on the internet. I usually have to add malwarebytes, or combofix to help out on the bad ones.
oh and I've dealt with Sophos, and trend micro, and I hate both of them. Microsoft security essentials is good but not really enterprise ready.
I wonder if anyone else's company has a real IT vs Developers mindset like we do
We (we being software developers) are constantly breaking things, and IT has to fight to keep up because we have to have admin for our work
I'd pity them, except their paycheck is bigger
Where I work its "eh, the developers broke something..we'll get it fixed eventually but since they broke it themselves it won't be high priority, and if they can't get work done because of it they have to explain to their bosses why they broke it, no skin off our back"
I mean basically we'll get it fixed, but only when we have spare time not allotted to projects, so it might take a few days, or a week.
God i love how laid back our IT manager is, he also wouldn't let them give us blackberries because it would mean too much extra after hours work for us <3<3
We use OCS, integrates nicely with Outlook, but man is it expensive.
bigwah on
LoL Tribunal:
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
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lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
We use OCS, integrates nicely with Outlook, but man is it expensive.
I saw the price and yeesh. What parts of it do you use? Our phone contract is going to be up in a few months so we've been looking at VoIP as one of the options.
lwt1973 on
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
edited October 2010
We just started using Spark, hosted locally. Works fine, though I find myself wishing it was as full-featured as Pidgin :P
Also symantec endpoint is fine unless you try and have more than one central management server
Other than that I usually don't have much issues with it other than the fact that it does nothing to keep new malware from infecting people who download random crap on the internet. I usually have to add malwarebytes, or combofix to help out on the bad ones.
oh and I've dealt with Sophos, and trend micro, and I hate both of them. Microsoft security essentials is good but not really enterprise ready.
That's why there's Forefront. Unless you're talking about it not being ready in terms of detection and whatnot, in which case yeah, there's not really any difference between MSE and Forefront. They're basically same product with different licensing terms, and one can be centrally managed.
A quick Googling suggests that MSE's detection rates are pretty solid. Better than Trend Micro, a little worse than the other big names (ESET, Kapersky, Symantec, etc).
Get a message from a manager that the VP called him with no phone/internet.
So I go to check out the wiring closet on their floor. This is my baby. This whole little fiber ring is my baby. Some asshole outside contractor needed access to that closet and unplugged some switches from my stack. Then went to lunch. And left my server closet door wide open.
Get a message from a manager that the VP called him with no phone/internet.
So I go to check out the wiring closet on their floor. This is my baby. This whole little fiber ring is my baby. Some asshole outside contractor needed access to that closet and unplugged some switches from my stack. Then went to lunch. And left my server closet door wide open.
I have yet to find that mother fucker.
I had that at a remote location. Contractor had to work on replacing a circuit board for a pump inside the building. I had a camera system there for security and lo and behold a few hours later we couldn't connect to the camera system or the location. The contractor swears he didn't do anything so I drive out there, look and see that the cat5 cord was ripped out of the socket. A repair of the socket and the camera system is up and running again.
The contractor still insists that he didn't do anything.
lwt1973 on
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
I have a working FTP user account. The FTP user is apparently a member of the USERS group. Should I simply give that group write permissions on the folders I want to upload to? Is there a better, more secure way to do it?
I've tried adding the FTP user to the list of users manually in the folder's security screen (right click->properties->security tab), in order to give it permissions that are separate from the rest of the USERS group, but I keep getting blocked by a login screen. I haven't been able to get past it with my credentials, so it may be that the company hosting my VPS doesn't want me fiddling with that shit. Or, I may just not be entering my credentials properly. That's also a distinct possibility. It asks for domain/username, and I'm not sure what my domain would be in this context.
As an IT worker at my university, Forefront is amazing. It auto updates and updates with windows, so our stupid ass Bradford Client acts up less because Forefront updates well. So hurray Forefront.
Also, it's not dumb as hell and requires removal tools, like McAfee and Symantec.
But Bradford is dumb. If anyone is using it...stop it. It's terrible.
To clarify my previous post re:Forefront and it's detection. I have nothing to say on the issue having not used it and not followed the comparatives terribly closely. I was just trying to distinguish between the two types of readiness he might have meant, since it was unclear.
I have a working FTP user account. The FTP user is apparently a member of the USERS group. Should I simply give that group write permissions on the folders I want to upload to? Is there a better, more secure way to do it?
I never give the Users group permission to access anything if I can help it.
(I can't always help it. Ah, the joys of supporting small businesses.)
Every user should be part of a more clearly-named security group. So if you're working for Dunder-Mifflin, you could have a DMEveryone group containing Michael, Pam, Jim, Dwight, etc.
Then there would also be a DMService group, and that contains "non-personal" service accounts. For instance, FTPUser, XeroxCopier, ScanningStation, etc.
I've tried adding the FTP user to the list of users manually in the folder's security screen (right click->properties->security tab), in order to give it permissions that are separate from the rest of the USERS group, but I keep getting blocked by a login screen. I haven't been able to get past it with my credentials, so it may be that the company hosting my VPS doesn't want me fiddling with that shit. Or, I may just not be entering my credentials properly. That's also a distinct possibility. It asks for domain/username, and I'm not sure what my domain would be in this context.
Okay, here's where you're going wrong.
The FTP service is running under a user account. It is probably either LocalSystem or NetworkService. It is almost certainly not going to be your FTPUser (and shouldn't be!). You can check that by going to Administrative Tools - Services and looking up Web Management Service. Whatever user Web Management Service is running under, that's the user that needs NTFS permissions to the FTP folder. (You may need to enable Anonymous access too, I don't remember for sure.)
Now, in addition, IIS 7.5 adds an extra layer of authentication to that FTP site. There are a couple ways to do it: the easy way and the right way. I'm going to skip the easy way because it's wrong. (It's also the way Microsoft recommends for simple one-user FTP sites, but fuck them.)
We have been migrating all of out physical server to virtual ones running inside Hyper-V. There are two beastly machines running with a SAS shared between them, that way if one of them dies we can just grab the image and spin it up on the other server.
And when I say we, I mean a developer who has taken over most IT stuff (which I thanked him for, I don't have the time).
Everything has been running relatively smoothly. I just got my trial of ArcServe Backup running (which is awesome) and felt good about my disaster recovery options. The phone rings this morning at 7:00 AM. It was the developer.
"I was installing some updates on the two host machines and rebooted them. When they came back up the two virtual servers were simply gone."
They were gone. The folders were empty. This is the worst possible thing that could happen. Ever. He had grabbed a snapshot of one of the servers about 14 days ago, restored that, and started to restore files from my last backup, which was just under 24 hours old. The other server he rebuilt from scratch but it wasn't working yet.
This is what I walked into this morning. Suddenly I really don't trust the SAS, but I have no idea why a reboot would destroy multiple virtual servers.
We have been migrating all of out physical server to virtual ones running inside Hyper-V. There are two beastly machines running with a SAS shared between them, that way if one of them dies we can just grab the image and spin it up on the other server.
And when I say we, I mean a developer who has taken over most IT stuff (which I thanked him for, I don't have the time).
Everything has been running relatively smoothly. I just got my trial of ArcServe Backup running (which is awesome) and felt good about my disaster recovery options. The phone rings this morning at 7:00 AM. It was the developer.
"I was installing some updates on the two host machines and rebooted them. When they came back up the two virtual servers were simply gone."
They were gone. The folders were empty. This is the worst possible thing that could happen. Ever. He had grabbed a snapshot of one of the servers about 14 days ago, restored that, and started to restore files from my last backup, which was just under 24 hours old. The other server he rebuilt from scratch but it wasn't working yet.
This is what I walked into this morning. Suddenly I really don't trust the SAS, but I have no idea why a reboot would destroy multiple virtual servers.
TBH, sounds like someone hiding their mistakes.
bigwah on
LoL Tribunal:
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
Anyone with experience using Blackberry Enterprise Server 6's web piece know if there's a better way to monitor when a server has problems communicating with attached devices? One of mine gakked in the wee hours this morning and we had no idea until help desk started taking calls twelve hours later. Currently the only way I know of monitoring all users on a particular server is to use the advanced search, select a server, and sort by last contact time.
We have been migrating all of out physical server to virtual ones running inside Hyper-V. There are two beastly machines running with a SAS shared between them, that way if one of them dies we can just grab the image and spin it up on the other server.
And when I say we, I mean a developer who has taken over most IT stuff (which I thanked him for, I don't have the time).
Everything has been running relatively smoothly. I just got my trial of ArcServe Backup running (which is awesome) and felt good about my disaster recovery options. The phone rings this morning at 7:00 AM. It was the developer.
"I was installing some updates on the two host machines and rebooted them. When they came back up the two virtual servers were simply gone."
They were gone. The folders were empty. This is the worst possible thing that could happen. Ever. He had grabbed a snapshot of one of the servers about 14 days ago, restored that, and started to restore files from my last backup, which was just under 24 hours old. The other server he rebuilt from scratch but it wasn't working yet.
This is what I walked into this morning. Suddenly I really don't trust the SAS, but I have no idea why a reboot would destroy multiple virtual servers.
TBH, sounds like someone hiding their mistakes.
I thought of that, but I have no proof because I did not set up the Hyper-V servers or the SAS (frankly, because I don't know how), I am just batting clean up when things go bad.
Posts
More or less.
At its core it's a way of organizing users and computers (and other network resources) into a hierarchy. This is a random screenshot of the most frequently-used Active Directory tool that I found on GIS:
So you might have a folder called West containing subfolders:
-West
--California
---San Francisco
---Los Angeles
etc.
Maybe you organize computers by region but you organize people by department.
- Sales and Marketing
--Marketing
---Advertising
--Sales
---B2B Sales
---B2C Sales
etc.
From there you can organize people into security groups. So you can say "everybody in the B2C Sales group gets access to the B2C Sales folder on the server" or "every computer in the San Francisco group gets patched at 3am Pacific time." Active Directory is also where the user's passwords are stored (as encrypted hashes) and a lot of other security options (like whether a user is allowed VPN access). Windows OSes (except for the Home versions) can be set to check Active Directory every time a user attempts to log in and access a file.
It's based on an interoperable standard called LDAP which allows it to work with non-Windows OSes.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Eh, RAM isn't a big deal. It's more when somebody is requesting a completely different build entirely.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Thanks for the intro. Sounds interesting.
I'm gonna try Googling around a bit instead of clogging up the thread with newbie questions.
Confined to a tiny spit of sand, unable to escape,
But tonight, it's heavy stuff.
If you're planning on developing on/for any OS other than Windows, you probably want to focus more on learning LDAP and DNS first.
In classic Microsoft style, Active Directory is a hodgepodge of different technologies, so learning the open-standard techs individually first and then putting them together is probably a better approach than learning the propriety MS implementation first and then working backwards to the industry standards.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Late to this but urgh, don't get me started on this. Every single morning I get in, find a desk and then have to go and spend 20 minutes getting myself set up. And hsaring Mice / Keyboards (we keep a number just floating about for anyone thaty wants one) just seems really unhygienic to me.
And I have to use a laptop instead of the big bastard Mac Pro I wanted. It's retarded.
Ya our developers normally run 2-3 sql servers for whatever reason, Eclipse, a VM or two running server stuff, and a ton of other garbage. THEN they'll take their laptops home and let their kids install random Facebook junk and complain about their computers being slow.
Here's what I have now:
I have a small ASP.NET MVC 2 site for personal business. It's a generic "Hi, I'm a developer, here's some things I did, send me money" site. I'd like to add a professional looking contact form, which would gather a potential client's information and send me an email with those details. The construction of the form isn't an issue - I can code it up fine. My problem is figuring out how to set up email at all.
As a bonus, I'd love to have a legit myname@mydomain.com email account that I could use for business communication.
So, any help you can give me with this would be greatly appreciated. Just note that I'm pretty unfamiliar with server management at all in a general sense, so I may be completely lost when it comes to even simple tasks regarding this.
Thanks!
At both the server level and for my deployed site, I only have an option for SMTP.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Google's first hit for free mail server: http://www.hmailserver.com/
Also symantec endpoint is fine unless you try and have more than one central management server
Other than that I usually don't have much issues with it other than the fact that it does nothing to keep new malware from infecting people who download random crap on the internet. I usually have to add malwarebytes, or combofix to help out on the bad ones.
oh and I've dealt with Sophos, and trend micro, and I hate both of them. Microsoft security essentials is good but not really enterprise ready.
Yeah, that's pretty much my complaint, too.
Migration and synchronization too often require some voodoo shit to make work. And there's really no reason for that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We (we being software developers) are constantly breaking things, and IT has to fight to keep up because we have to have admin for our work
I'd pity them, except their paycheck is bigger
Where I work its "eh, the developers broke something..we'll get it fixed eventually but since they broke it themselves it won't be high priority, and if they can't get work done because of it they have to explain to their bosses why they broke it, no skin off our back"
I mean basically we'll get it fixed, but only when we have spare time not allotted to projects, so it might take a few days, or a week.
God i love how laid back our IT manager is, he also wouldn't let them give us blackberries because it would mean too much extra after hours work for us
What do you use and why? We have about 50 people in office who would use it and several remote users who would through VPN.
We also just use msn, but ya virus come in through there.
Server:
http://prosody.im/
Plus, almost every IM client on the web can use it.
Here's some common ones:
http://www.pidgin.im/
http://www.jabbear.com/en/
Plus, you can actually develop your own if you want some integration.
http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/libraries/
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
I saw the price and yeesh. What parts of it do you use? Our phone contract is going to be up in a few months so we've been looking at VoIP as one of the options.
That's why there's Forefront. Unless you're talking about it not being ready in terms of detection and whatnot, in which case yeah, there's not really any difference between MSE and Forefront. They're basically same product with different licensing terms, and one can be centrally managed.
http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_od_aug2010.pdf
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We currently use Akeni. We used to use Jabber.
Both are pretty terrible.
So I go to check out the wiring closet on their floor. This is my baby. This whole little fiber ring is my baby. Some asshole outside contractor needed access to that closet and unplugged some switches from my stack. Then went to lunch. And left my server closet door wide open.
I have yet to find that mother fucker.
I had that at a remote location. Contractor had to work on replacing a circuit board for a pump inside the building. I had a camera system there for security and lo and behold a few hours later we couldn't connect to the camera system or the location. The contractor swears he didn't do anything so I drive out there, look and see that the cat5 cord was ripped out of the socket. A repair of the socket and the camera system is up and running again.
The contractor still insists that he didn't do anything.
I have a working FTP user account. The FTP user is apparently a member of the USERS group. Should I simply give that group write permissions on the folders I want to upload to? Is there a better, more secure way to do it?
I've tried adding the FTP user to the list of users manually in the folder's security screen (right click->properties->security tab), in order to give it permissions that are separate from the rest of the USERS group, but I keep getting blocked by a login screen. I haven't been able to get past it with my credentials, so it may be that the company hosting my VPS doesn't want me fiddling with that shit. Or, I may just not be entering my credentials properly. That's also a distinct possibility. It asks for domain/username, and I'm not sure what my domain would be in this context.
Also, it's not dumb as hell and requires removal tools, like McAfee and Symantec.
But Bradford is dumb. If anyone is using it...stop it. It's terrible.
I never give the Users group permission to access anything if I can help it.
(I can't always help it. Ah, the joys of supporting small businesses.)
Every user should be part of a more clearly-named security group. So if you're working for Dunder-Mifflin, you could have a DMEveryone group containing Michael, Pam, Jim, Dwight, etc.
Then there would also be a DMService group, and that contains "non-personal" service accounts. For instance, FTPUser, XeroxCopier, ScanningStation, etc.
Okay, here's where you're going wrong.
The FTP service is running under a user account. It is probably either LocalSystem or NetworkService. It is almost certainly not going to be your FTPUser (and shouldn't be!). You can check that by going to Administrative Tools - Services and looking up Web Management Service. Whatever user Web Management Service is running under, that's the user that needs NTFS permissions to the FTP folder. (You may need to enable Anonymous access too, I don't remember for sure.)
Now, in addition, IIS 7.5 adds an extra layer of authentication to that FTP site. There are a couple ways to do it: the easy way and the right way. I'm going to skip the easy way because it's wrong. (It's also the way Microsoft recommends for simple one-user FTP sites, but fuck them.)
For the right way, try this:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/305/configuring-ftp-75-user-isolation/
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
What should I do for anti-virus? Would MSE be a decent choice, even for a server? I'm looking for something free/cheap that will do a good job.
And when I say we, I mean a developer who has taken over most IT stuff (which I thanked him for, I don't have the time).
Everything has been running relatively smoothly. I just got my trial of ArcServe Backup running (which is awesome) and felt good about my disaster recovery options. The phone rings this morning at 7:00 AM. It was the developer.
"I was installing some updates on the two host machines and rebooted them. When they came back up the two virtual servers were simply gone."
They were gone. The folders were empty. This is the worst possible thing that could happen. Ever. He had grabbed a snapshot of one of the servers about 14 days ago, restored that, and started to restore files from my last backup, which was just under 24 hours old. The other server he rebuilt from scratch but it wasn't working yet.
This is what I walked into this morning. Suddenly I really don't trust the SAS, but I have no idea why a reboot would destroy multiple virtual servers.
TBH, sounds like someone hiding their mistakes.
"Was cursing, in broken english at his team, and at our team. made fun of dead family members and mentioned he had sex with a dog."
"Hope he dies tbh but a ban would do."
I thought of that, but I have no proof because I did not set up the Hyper-V servers or the SAS (frankly, because I don't know how), I am just batting clean up when things go bad.