SMTP itself and thus Exchange doesn't have functionality for delayed send. So that ability was created purely in the Outlook client, which is why the application has to be running for it to work. I don't know what MS does to make it work for O365 accounts through the web interface front end (or Outlook in online mode), but it's not a general thing they implemented as their outlook.com email accounts don't have delayed send functionality either.
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
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.
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
I have some bad news for you...
?
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.
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
I have some bad news for you...
?
yer a programmer, harry
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
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
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
I have some bad news for you...
?
yer a programmer, harry
why is this bad news
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.
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
I have some bad news for you...
?
yer a programmer, harry
why is this bad news
Cuz now you gotta leave!
Or something!
I dunno, I don't make the rules. We leave that shit to fucking programmers.
5 years from now, you will get a call at 3 am. Someone at your old job has made a change, and now one of your automation scripts broke. Nobody's done the process manually for 5 years, and now nobody knows how to do it and they're panicing.
5 years from now, you will get a call at 3 am. Someone at your old job has made a change, and now one of your automation scripts broke. Nobody's done the process manually for 5 years, and now nobody knows how to do it and they're panicing.
And that's when you get to charge $500/hr consulting fees!
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
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
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
I have some bad news for you...
?
yer a programmer, harry
Not just that, they sound like.... microservices.
I'm scared to say this in the programming threads, but I actually like microservices.
Maybe cause I come from IT land so undocumented operational issues don't bother me anywhere near as much as undocumented piles of code.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
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
I've been writing Powershell scripts to run jobs in our business automation systems, building them to return JSON output, and then passing that JSON output over to other automation systems.
This feels like programming.
I have some bad news for you...
?
yer a programmer, harry
Not just that, they sound like.... microservices.
I'm scared to say this in the programming threads, but I actually like microservices.
Maybe cause I come from IT land so undocumented operational issues don't bother me anywhere near as much as undocumented piles of code.
Oh they're fine when done right, it's just you often have devs who think functions=individual services rather than thinking through what the service mix should be for the application function and where you want your integration breaks to be.
Coincidentally, I just looked up an old website I developed back in 2012 or so (and was still live several months ago) and just found that the company completely replaced it with a turnkey solution. (Kind of like Squarespace, but more specific for their industry, and more sophisticated with online job applications and such.)
I'm slightly sad but they literally did nothing to maintain the content or design of the old site, so I'm not that sad. I'm also not at all surprised.
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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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Oh they're fine when done right, it's just you often have [People A] who think [X = Y] rather than thinking through what [X and Y actually are] and [how they should properly work together].
FTFY
+1
Options
lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
Love waking up to find out an update messed up Exchange. Good times. Good times.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
Oh they're fine when done right, it's just you often have [People A] who think [X = Y] rather than thinking through what [X and Y actually are] and [how they should properly work together].
FTFY
Oh yeah, humans are at least 90% of most problems.
Server 2003 to 2008 R2 upgrade on the books for today. I think it's been 9 years since I've had to touch one of these. All because the security system software is running on 2003 and I am moving it to Hyper-V that doesn't allow USB passthrough.
Edit: Just realized the 2003 server is 32bit so :?
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
Love waking up to find out an update messed up Exchange. Good times. Good times.
That just sounds like every day managing on prem exchange.
*Looks over at his onprem exchange happily chugging along without any problems*
*Thinks back to how, two weeks ago, his housemate didn't have work email for a full day because of something screwy with O365*
Uh, huh. Sure.
I mean. Sure. Sometimes On prem services go down. Sometimes cloud services, which are just remotely located versions of the same thing, go down.
I was making a joke as much as anything, but I've had on prem exchange humming along for over 2 years until a routine upgrade, and then it wasn't. And then it was hell on earth for 8 hours on the phone with microsoft to fix it. I've seen cloud services go down for an hour every month. Neither is great, an argument can be made as to which is a better experience for the users.
For the sysadmin, the cloud service going down is better because there's literally nothing you can do about it. When it's on prem, you're responsible.
Love waking up to find out an update messed up Exchange. Good times. Good times.
That just sounds like every day managing on prem exchange.
*Looks over at his onprem exchange happily chugging along without any problems*
*Thinks back to how, two weeks ago, his housemate didn't have work email for a full day because of something screwy with O365*
Uh, huh. Sure.
I mean. Sure. Sometimes On prem services go down. Sometimes cloud services, which are just remotely located versions of the same thing, go down.
I was making a joke as much as anything, but I've had on prem exchange humming along for over 2 years until a routine upgrade, and then it wasn't. And then it was hell on earth for 8 hours on the phone with microsoft to fix it. I've seen cloud services go down for an hour every month. Neither is great, an argument can be made as to which is a better experience for the users.
For the sysadmin, the cloud service going down is better because there's literally nothing you can do about it. When it's on prem, you're responsible.
I was half-joking as well. To be fair, after looking at my housemate's phone and seeing her email settings, I strongly suspect that what "broke" O365 for her was a problem with either AD password sync (the very thing I've been struggling with recently) or one of the other ways you can have SSO between O365 and on-prem AD. So that's less "O365 was broken" and more "somebody at her company didn't set things up right."
And given how much difficulty I've been having with AD password sync, I kind of sympathize with that. It's much more difficult than I expected to get SSO between on-prem AD and O365. Which sucks.
I'm not mad at you, wunderbar, not at all. I'm just very salty in general about how on-prem Exchange has this reputation for being difficult to manage and... it really isn't. If you make like Sam Tarly - 'read the book docs and follow the instructions' - it's no more difficult than any other large enterprise platform. But I meet people constantly, including new coworkers, who find out we have on-prem Exchange and think that it's a major burden. Like when some other system is running slow and somebody makes a joke "maybe if Exchange didn't eat all our RAM." Motherfucker, Exchange isn't even in the top 5 RAM consumers in our environment! Our SQL cluster is at the top, and we have individual databases that chew more RAM and storage than our entire on-prem Exchange. Meanwhile I have a boss who keeps attributing things to O365 that just don't make any goddamn sense. "O365 makes backups easier to manage."
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.
Running your own mail server, period, doesn't matter if it's Exchange, Qmail, postfix, doesn't matter, provides an easy bullseye for folks to throw darts at.
If they misspell an email address and get a bounce, it's because you fucking imbeciles and your goddamn piece of shit mail server aren't set up right, you skimped out on purchasing it, and I'm tired of dealing with this shit. What's that, read the bounce message? I can't read this, this is garbage because our email is garbage.
It has very little, if anything, to do with the actual performance or stability of what you're running.
Running your own mail server, period, doesn't matter if it's Exchange, Qmail, postfix, doesn't matter, provides an easy bullseye for folks to throw darts at.
If they misspell an email address and get a bounce, it's because you fucking imbeciles and your goddamn piece of shit mail server aren't set up right, you skimped out on purchasing it, and I'm tired of dealing with this shit. What's that, read the bounce message? I can't read this, this is garbage because our email is garbage.
It has very little, if anything, to do with the actual performance or stability of what you're running.
Yep, tons of the cloud appeal is non-differentiated work (or, we need email, but it doesn't give us a competitive advantage) can often be drop kicked to cloud services and you now have a pile of infrastructure shit that is no longer YOUR problem. That means you can focus your employees on problems you actually care about instead of "the exchange hardware needs a refresh".
Love waking up to find out an update messed up Exchange. Good times. Good times.
That just sounds like every day managing on prem exchange.
*Looks over at his onprem exchange happily chugging along without any problems*
*Thinks back to how, two weeks ago, his housemate didn't have work email for a full day because of something screwy with O365*
Uh, huh. Sure.
I mean. Sure. Sometimes On prem services go down. Sometimes cloud services, which are just remotely located versions of the same thing, go down.
I was making a joke as much as anything, but I've had on prem exchange humming along for over 2 years until a routine upgrade, and then it wasn't. And then it was hell on earth for 8 hours on the phone with microsoft to fix it. I've seen cloud services go down for an hour every month. Neither is great, an argument can be made as to which is a better experience for the users.
For the sysadmin, the cloud service going down is better because there's literally nothing you can do about it. When it's on prem, you're responsible.
I was half-joking as well. To be fair, after looking at my housemate's phone and seeing her email settings, I strongly suspect that what "broke" O365 for her was a problem with either AD password sync (the very thing I've been struggling with recently) or one of the other ways you can have SSO between O365 and on-prem AD. So that's less "O365 was broken" and more "somebody at her company didn't set things up right."
And given how much difficulty I've been having with AD password sync, I kind of sympathize with that. It's much more difficult than I expected to get SSO between on-prem AD and O365. Which sucks.
I'm not mad at you, wunderbar, not at all. I'm just very salty in general about how on-prem Exchange has this reputation for being difficult to manage and... it really isn't. If you make like Sam Tarly - 'read the book docs and follow the instructions' - it's no more difficult than any other large enterprise platform. But I meet people constantly, including new coworkers, who find out we have on-prem Exchange and think that it's a major burden. Like when some other system is running slow and somebody makes a joke "maybe if Exchange didn't eat all our RAM." Motherfucker, Exchange isn't even in the top 5 RAM consumers in our environment! Our SQL cluster is at the top, and we have individual databases that chew more RAM and storage than our entire on-prem Exchange. Meanwhile I have a boss who keeps attributing things to O365 that just don't make any goddamn sense. "O365 makes backups easier to manage."
Hey, no worries. When I'm employed I usually run an on-prem exchange server. I first touched 2007, and have worked with every version up to 2016. (2007 still gives me nightmares, that entire line of office server products was god awful).
Personally, I don't think Exchange is hard to run until it goes sideways. Then it's a nightmare, but that's rare. But I'm also getting sick of running it. When you talk about "low hanging fruit" of stuff you can move to a cloud service to free more time to do other things, email is the #1 thing I'd always say to move. Personally, I just want everyone on Office 365, at least for email, Office, and OneDrive for Business for personal files. Taking those three things away from a SMB's Sysadmin's plate so they can actually work on new/better stuff is huge.
It's been awhile since I set it up, but I've had very few issues with Azure AD Connect and password sync since we moved to O365. Getting that service account created and rights delegated was a bit tricky if I recall, but we've been using their Seamless SSO for over a year and it works well.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
edited August 2020
Part of my new job is setting up new computers. One of our clients is going to drop ship me 20 new PCs to setup. I'm trying to find a good imaging solution. My ideal solution would be a device with like, 4+ usb leads that I can just plug into the laptops that need to be imaged. The device could capture an image of 1 or more computers and store it. Alternatively I could just provide it with say an Acronis tib or iso file. The USB lead would act as bootable host device that writes over the HDD of the machine it's plugged into with the supplied image.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
Part of my new job is setting up new computers. One of our clients is going to drop ship me 20 new PCs to setup. I'm trying to find a good imaging solution. My ideal solution would be a device with like, 4+ usb leads that I can just plug into the laptops that need to be imaged. The device could capture an image of 1 or more computers and store it. Alternatively I could just provide it with say an Acronis tib or iso file. The USB lead would act as bootable host device that writes over the HDD of the machine it's plugged into with the supplied image.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
It's definitely possible but the methods I use for that are a bit clunky.
Basically if you have a Windows image that you customized with something like MDT or NLite, and it's compatible with WDS or SCCM, then you can take a USB drive that was created as a factory Windows install using the Microsoft Windows 10 Media Download tool and then just replace the install.wim and unattend.xml files on it. (And copy onto it any drivers you need for preinstallation.)
If you're starting with a bootable ISO instead, you can use Rufus to create a bootable USB from that ISO.
As long as your unattend.xml is correctly crafted, the end-user won't have to make any decisions during the installation. There will at least one prompt along the lines of "Press Enter to continue installation" so there needs to be a minimally-awake human present at the keyboard.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are third party tools that can streamline the USB creation process.
Edit: to be clear, this wouldn't be a single device, this would just be a stack of USB flash drives. I misread your post at first where I thought that the PCs to be drop shipped were going to arrive at a remote location. Still, this should work for you.
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.
Running your own mail server, period, doesn't matter if it's Exchange, Qmail, postfix, doesn't matter, provides an easy bullseye for folks to throw darts at.
If they misspell an email address and get a bounce, it's because you fucking imbeciles and your goddamn piece of shit mail server aren't set up right, you skimped out on purchasing it, and I'm tired of dealing with this shit. What's that, read the bounce message? I can't read this, this is garbage because our email is garbage.
It has very little, if anything, to do with the actual performance or stability of what you're running.
This is too true.
FIX YOUR FUCKING SPF RECORD PLEASE.
Yes, all of this. Fuck. Goddamn.
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.
+1
Options
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Part of my new job is setting up new computers. One of our clients is going to drop ship me 20 new PCs to setup. I'm trying to find a good imaging solution. My ideal solution would be a device with like, 4+ usb leads that I can just plug into the laptops that need to be imaged. The device could capture an image of 1 or more computers and store it. Alternatively I could just provide it with say an Acronis tib or iso file. The USB lead would act as bootable host device that writes over the HDD of the machine it's plugged into with the supplied image.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
It's definitely possible but the methods I use for that are a bit clunky.
Basically if you have a Windows image that you customized with something like MDT or NLite, and it's compatible with WDS or SCCM, then you can take a USB drive that was created as a factory Windows install using the Microsoft Windows 10 Media Download tool and then just replace the install.wim and unattend.xml files on it. (And copy onto it any drivers you need for preinstallation.)
If you're starting with a bootable ISO instead, you can use Rufus to create a bootable USB from that ISO.
As long as your unattend.xml is correctly crafted, the end-user won't have to make any decisions during the installation. There will at least one prompt along the lines of "Press Enter to continue installation" so there needs to be a minimally-awake human present at the keyboard.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are third party tools that can streamline the USB creation process.
I've been doing research on this all day and can't find anything that does exactly what I wanted. The closest I've found was Acronis SnapDeploy that works via PXE boot but it requires you setup a central server for image deployment which I was hoping I could avoid. USB3 or Thunderbolt would just be faster too. I'll probably end up going with something like SnapDeploy, though.
Part of my new job is setting up new computers. One of our clients is going to drop ship me 20 new PCs to setup. I'm trying to find a good imaging solution. My ideal solution would be a device with like, 4+ usb leads that I can just plug into the laptops that need to be imaged. The device could capture an image of 1 or more computers and store it. Alternatively I could just provide it with say an Acronis tib or iso file. The USB lead would act as bootable host device that writes over the HDD of the machine it's plugged into with the supplied image.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
It's definitely possible but the methods I use for that are a bit clunky.
Basically if you have a Windows image that you customized with something like MDT or NLite, and it's compatible with WDS or SCCM, then you can take a USB drive that was created as a factory Windows install using the Microsoft Windows 10 Media Download tool and then just replace the install.wim and unattend.xml files on it. (And copy onto it any drivers you need for preinstallation.)
If you're starting with a bootable ISO instead, you can use Rufus to create a bootable USB from that ISO.
As long as your unattend.xml is correctly crafted, the end-user won't have to make any decisions during the installation. There will at least one prompt along the lines of "Press Enter to continue installation" so there needs to be a minimally-awake human present at the keyboard.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are third party tools that can streamline the USB creation process.
I've been doing research on this all day and can't find anything that does exactly what I wanted. The closest I've found was Acronis SnapDeploy that works via PXE boot but it requires you setup a central server for image deployment which I was hoping I could avoid. USB3 or Thunderbolt would just be faster too. I'll probably end up going with something like SnapDeploy, though.
If you end up going the server route, WDS is "free" (with a Windows Server license) and basically works that way. PXE boot from a central server. It's not even hard to set up, but it's not going to win any points for being easy for the technician to manage images.
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.
Part of my new job is setting up new computers. One of our clients is going to drop ship me 20 new PCs to setup. I'm trying to find a good imaging solution. My ideal solution would be a device with like, 4+ usb leads that I can just plug into the laptops that need to be imaged. The device could capture an image of 1 or more computers and store it. Alternatively I could just provide it with say an Acronis tib or iso file. The USB lead would act as bootable host device that writes over the HDD of the machine it's plugged into with the supplied image.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
We use SmartDeploy here. You build your base PC image as a virtual machine on your workstation/server including any software or utilities you want to install (that will function correctly after a SysPrep). SmartDeploy packages that up into a SysPrepped image file. SmartDeploy supplies driver packs for you that are specific to Manufacturer and Model of PC/Laptop. You then create bootable USB sticks that contain the image and the driver packs you want. For example we have an general Windows+Office image, a no-Office image, and a LTSB Windows image for automation type equipment all on the same stick with drivers for the several recent models of Dell and HP desktops and laptops we are currently buying.
Pop that stick in a PC, it boots to the SmartDeploy utility, you pick your image from the list, click next and it images the machine, installs the driver pack that it sees matches the hardware, wait about 15 minutes and it's done and reboots into Windows.
Alternatively, you can set it up so it pulls those images and driver packs from a network share either from a USB boot or PXE boot. We don't utilize it because our bandwidth at our multitude of remote locations means it's just faster to use the USB sticks.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
+1
Options
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Part of my new job is setting up new computers. One of our clients is going to drop ship me 20 new PCs to setup. I'm trying to find a good imaging solution. My ideal solution would be a device with like, 4+ usb leads that I can just plug into the laptops that need to be imaged. The device could capture an image of 1 or more computers and store it. Alternatively I could just provide it with say an Acronis tib or iso file. The USB lead would act as bootable host device that writes over the HDD of the machine it's plugged into with the supplied image.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
We use SmartDeploy here. You build your base PC image as a virtual machine on your workstation/server including any software or utilities you want to install (that will function correctly after a SysPrep). SmartDeploy packages that up into a SysPrepped image file. SmartDeploy supplies driver packs for you that are specific to Manufacturer and Model of PC/Laptop. You then create bootable USB sticks that contain the image and the driver packs you want. For example we have an general Windows+Office image, a no-Office image, and a LTSB Windows image for automation type equipment all on the same stick with drivers for the several recent models of Dell and HP desktops and laptops we are currently buying.
Pop that stick in a PC, it boots to the SmartDeploy utility, you pick your image from the list, click next and it images the machine, installs the driver pack that it sees matches the hardware, wait about 15 minutes and it's done and reboots into Windows.
Alternatively, you can set it up so it pulls those images and driver packs from a network share either from a USB boot or PXE boot. We don't utilize it because our bandwidth at our multitude of remote locations means it's just faster to use the USB sticks.
That looks promising. I've been looking into similar software for a mass Macbook deployment I got stuck with next week. Thanks!
Posts
Depends if you're in Cached Modus or Online Modus. In Online Modus it is kept on the server. But yeah, makes no sense.
This feels like programming.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I have some bad news for you...
?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
yer a programmer, harry
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
Not just that, they sound like.... microservices.
why is this bad news
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Cuz now you gotta leave!
Or something!
I dunno, I don't make the rules. We leave that shit to fucking programmers.
And that's when you get to charge $500/hr consulting fees!
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
I'm scared to say this in the programming threads, but I actually like microservices.
Maybe cause I come from IT land so undocumented operational issues don't bother me anywhere near as much as undocumented piles of code.
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
Oh they're fine when done right, it's just you often have devs who think functions=individual services rather than thinking through what the service mix should be for the application function and where you want your integration breaks to be.
I'm slightly sad but they literally did nothing to maintain the content or design of the old site, so I'm not that sad. I'm also not at all surprised.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
FTFY
Oh yeah, humans are at least 90% of most problems.
That just sounds like every day managing on prem exchange.
*Looks over at his onprem exchange happily chugging along without any problems*
*Thinks back to how, two weeks ago, his housemate didn't have work email for a full day because of something screwy with O365*
Uh, huh. Sure.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
For an MSP the best case scenario is having your client's exchange server in your datacenter. We have 3x redundant 1gb connections and a 100mb backup.
hopefully you have multiple exchange servers across multiple datacenters and you run your tenants in DAGs
right?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Edit: Just realized the 2003 server is 32bit so :?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I mean. Sure. Sometimes On prem services go down. Sometimes cloud services, which are just remotely located versions of the same thing, go down.
I was making a joke as much as anything, but I've had on prem exchange humming along for over 2 years until a routine upgrade, and then it wasn't. And then it was hell on earth for 8 hours on the phone with microsoft to fix it. I've seen cloud services go down for an hour every month. Neither is great, an argument can be made as to which is a better experience for the users.
For the sysadmin, the cloud service going down is better because there's literally nothing you can do about it. When it's on prem, you're responsible.
I was half-joking as well. To be fair, after looking at my housemate's phone and seeing her email settings, I strongly suspect that what "broke" O365 for her was a problem with either AD password sync (the very thing I've been struggling with recently) or one of the other ways you can have SSO between O365 and on-prem AD. So that's less "O365 was broken" and more "somebody at her company didn't set things up right."
And given how much difficulty I've been having with AD password sync, I kind of sympathize with that. It's much more difficult than I expected to get SSO between on-prem AD and O365. Which sucks.
I'm not mad at you, wunderbar, not at all. I'm just very salty in general about how on-prem Exchange has this reputation for being difficult to manage and... it really isn't. If you make like Sam Tarly - 'read the book docs and follow the instructions' - it's no more difficult than any other large enterprise platform. But I meet people constantly, including new coworkers, who find out we have on-prem Exchange and think that it's a major burden. Like when some other system is running slow and somebody makes a joke "maybe if Exchange didn't eat all our RAM." Motherfucker, Exchange isn't even in the top 5 RAM consumers in our environment! Our SQL cluster is at the top, and we have individual databases that chew more RAM and storage than our entire on-prem Exchange. Meanwhile I have a boss who keeps attributing things to O365 that just don't make any goddamn sense. "O365 makes backups easier to manage."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If they misspell an email address and get a bounce, it's because you fucking imbeciles and your goddamn piece of shit mail server aren't set up right, you skimped out on purchasing it, and I'm tired of dealing with this shit. What's that, read the bounce message? I can't read this, this is garbage because our email is garbage.
It has very little, if anything, to do with the actual performance or stability of what you're running.
This is too true.
FIX YOUR FUCKING SPF RECORD PLEASE.
Hey, no worries. When I'm employed I usually run an on-prem exchange server. I first touched 2007, and have worked with every version up to 2016. (2007 still gives me nightmares, that entire line of office server products was god awful).
Personally, I don't think Exchange is hard to run until it goes sideways. Then it's a nightmare, but that's rare. But I'm also getting sick of running it. When you talk about "low hanging fruit" of stuff you can move to a cloud service to free more time to do other things, email is the #1 thing I'd always say to move. Personally, I just want everyone on Office 365, at least for email, Office, and OneDrive for Business for personal files. Taking those three things away from a SMB's Sysadmin's plate so they can actually work on new/better stuff is huge.
Does such a thing even exist? So far my searches have come up with very little. My goal is to reimage these computers in batches without having to disassemble them and screw around with adapters to get NVME drives to work.
It's definitely possible but the methods I use for that are a bit clunky.
Basically if you have a Windows image that you customized with something like MDT or NLite, and it's compatible with WDS or SCCM, then you can take a USB drive that was created as a factory Windows install using the Microsoft Windows 10 Media Download tool and then just replace the install.wim and unattend.xml files on it. (And copy onto it any drivers you need for preinstallation.)
If you're starting with a bootable ISO instead, you can use Rufus to create a bootable USB from that ISO.
As long as your unattend.xml is correctly crafted, the end-user won't have to make any decisions during the installation. There will at least one prompt along the lines of "Press Enter to continue installation" so there needs to be a minimally-awake human present at the keyboard.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are third party tools that can streamline the USB creation process.
Edit: to be clear, this wouldn't be a single device, this would just be a stack of USB flash drives. I misread your post at first where I thought that the PCs to be drop shipped were going to arrive at a remote location. Still, this should work for you.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes, all of this. Fuck. Goddamn.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I've been doing research on this all day and can't find anything that does exactly what I wanted. The closest I've found was Acronis SnapDeploy that works via PXE boot but it requires you setup a central server for image deployment which I was hoping I could avoid. USB3 or Thunderbolt would just be faster too. I'll probably end up going with something like SnapDeploy, though.
If you end up going the server route, WDS is "free" (with a Windows Server license) and basically works that way. PXE boot from a central server. It's not even hard to set up, but it's not going to win any points for being easy for the technician to manage images.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
We use SmartDeploy here. You build your base PC image as a virtual machine on your workstation/server including any software or utilities you want to install (that will function correctly after a SysPrep). SmartDeploy packages that up into a SysPrepped image file. SmartDeploy supplies driver packs for you that are specific to Manufacturer and Model of PC/Laptop. You then create bootable USB sticks that contain the image and the driver packs you want. For example we have an general Windows+Office image, a no-Office image, and a LTSB Windows image for automation type equipment all on the same stick with drivers for the several recent models of Dell and HP desktops and laptops we are currently buying.
Pop that stick in a PC, it boots to the SmartDeploy utility, you pick your image from the list, click next and it images the machine, installs the driver pack that it sees matches the hardware, wait about 15 minutes and it's done and reboots into Windows.
Alternatively, you can set it up so it pulls those images and driver packs from a network share either from a USB boot or PXE boot. We don't utilize it because our bandwidth at our multitude of remote locations means it's just faster to use the USB sticks.
That looks promising. I've been looking into similar software for a mass Macbook deployment I got stuck with next week. Thanks!