what did you learn today? (part 2)
- Thread starter continuum
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It's not always obvious that this is in "The Server Room". And besides, Arnold was a robot with AI generated programming.
Renewing support/maintenance on our "end of sale" (but not "end of life") PA firewalls will cost more than buying brand new replacements. That doesn't count the person cost of screwing around with the actual replacement, but still, funny in a not-haha-funny kind of way.
Lol, yes. There's a very similarly named thread in the Lounge where that does belong. Mea culpa, but I'll leave it there as a learning tool.
Bleh. Okay, so that KB for Netapp didn't help. All the network interfaces show up, but the partner node that needs giveback doesn't even see the node that is on the cluster.
Problem node still sees itself in a cluster, as does the good node. Good node cluster show sees both nodes with health false, but system health subsystem show all Ok.
I really want to find the lickspittle that cut the power.
Problem node still sees itself in a cluster, as does the good node. Good node cluster show sees both nodes with health false, but system health subsystem show all Ok.
I really want to find the lickspittle that cut the power.
Oh I know, nothing I hate more than the bullshit on-prem hardware replacement treadmill...while I am aggressively moving compute and storage to public cloud, unfortunately we're still going to need firewalls for our physical locations for the time being. Almost certainly not going to be PA in the future though. Maybe it's worth it for large orgs to put up with their crap, but it's not for us.
Oh that was dumb. Turns out the problem node's bootarg.init.boot_recovery had a flag set. Unsetting it let everything come up normally.
Change control should tell you whodunnit.
Yeah, wish I could do something about that...
Well this isn't going to be cheap, we're excited about the build though
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So your plan is to have people in the lobby, snack room, and MPR(?) watching conference room meetings?
edit: Or I guess they get brightsign or cable box content 99% of the time, but have the option. Wild design that feels maybe overkill, but whatever.
I'm just hoping nothing interferes with all this HD bluetooth. It was awkward once when we had so many guests, it took down our wifi and a video couldn't be played.
Other way around. Be able to feed the conference rooms arbitrary inputs (Cable TV, HDMI input somewhere, digital signage (brightsign)
The normal operation is the Poly X52s will go out to the matrix and come right back to the tv (or the right hand TV in the case of the big room) and operate like normal Teams rooms, but for special events or if they want TV on the front desk can route nearly any video source to any output.
The kitchen/snack TV and the multi purpose room are technically in the same room right outside the conference rooms. The matrix lets us pick and choose what goes where. It's all monoprice blackbird gear, which all does bidirectional IR passthrough as well, so we're sticking the X1 boxes in the server room and putting the emitters on them.
I can't tell if you're joking or not, but this is all 18Gbps (4k60 @ 4:4:4) HDBaseT gear, not wireless.
Shockingly <megacarrier> lied about path diversity, and we lost light to our main peering routers at ~9AM thanks to a fiber cut. Which kinda sorta sucks because our backup peering routers are only on 1 or 10 gig ports instead of 100.
Many, many years ago I was helping a friend of a friend work through some stuff at their work. They had a mini-call center, and had (from what I remember) a pair of T1's from ISP/Telco A, and another pair from ISP/Telco B, and even had physical last mile diversity and entered the building on different sides. One day all of them drop off at the same time. Turns out nobody checked and ISP B was using ISP A for transit and an upstream DS3 was cut that fed them both.
Sorry if I laughed at that (not entirely), but if you stop and look about, you'll see that ridiculousness way too often in the industry. Hell, that one even bit IBM at one of their call centers once (both outside connections ended up going back to AT&T where an upstream cut happened). If I recall the news article correctly, it was a guy with a backhoe in the middle of nowhere that was digging to replace a water line at someone's house and didn't know the buried AT&T conduit was there (lots of blame and finger pointing, ended up the physical plant/civil engineering docs were wrong and had the conduit on the opposite side of the road).
You're still supposed to call in a locate even if you know the conduit is over there just to avoid that situation. Not like a locate is a guarantee tho, we nicked a gas line a few years back because the gas company blew the locate by like 6 feet.
Another good one is hitting old & abandoned in place trunk lines. Nobody bothers to send out a locate for those (even though they're supposed to) and the sinking feeling you get when you look in the ditch and see a 1500 pair trunk line cut is just the same even if it is AIP'd.
Another good one is hitting old & abandoned in place trunk lines. Nobody bothers to send out a locate for those (even though they're supposed to) and the sinking feeling you get when you look in the ditch and see a 1500 pair trunk line cut is just the same even if it is AIP'd.
Oh. Never heard of that. I feel a lot better about everything being wired.
Seeing as how your three Poly x52 systems support two TVs each, wouldn't that require 6 ports on your 8x8 matrix where you have 4 allocated? or did I miss something?
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Yeah, AT&T are forcing us off our 100 year old analogue lines. We only have them for elevators and we are replacing them with mobile lines that are a fraction of the cost.
Old school POTS is a lost artform that can bloody well remain lost. Packet switched all the way lol.
E: Outside of cool places like the Connections Museum over in Seattle anyway.
E: Outside of cool places like the Connections Museum over in Seattle anyway.
We use x52's everywhere regardless of if there is going to be 1 TV or 2. For the small (1 TV) rooms the 2nd output doesn't go anywhere, and for the larger room we decided that we didn't see the need to be able to feed both TVs with unique external content, as it would likely just cause issues (What happens when you have two different cable TV channels on for example and people don't know what to do about what audio they want to hear)
The conference rooms default config is to just directly patch the X52's output back into the room (basically making it an invisible long HDMI cable), but it allows for switching that TV in the room to something else (digital signage, wall input, cable boxes)
The HDMI-CEC controllers we use power the displays on automatically when video comes alive, so if we flip a room to one of the cable boxes that TV will turn on (and force it to HDMI 1 in case any enterprising idiot found a way to change it)
I should do a mini write up about it when it's done. This is our first office we're building completely the way we want. We're considering some wall touchscreens for input selection at some point but we can't find anything that isn't either a million bux and closed like crestron, or looks like a cheap rasperry pi.
For now we had our appdev guy build a little website for the office manager/support staff that can go and swap the matrix to a bunch of presets. The physical switcher itself also has 4 preset buttons on it that we're going to configure "1" as "put humpty dumpty back together"
The matrix also supports injecting arbitrary CEC commands so we can turn TVs on/off remotely. It's going to be nice when it's all done.
The conference rooms default config is to just directly patch the X52's output back into the room (basically making it an invisible long HDMI cable), but it allows for switching that TV in the room to something else (digital signage, wall input, cable boxes)
The HDMI-CEC controllers we use power the displays on automatically when video comes alive, so if we flip a room to one of the cable boxes that TV will turn on (and force it to HDMI 1 in case any enterprising idiot found a way to change it)
I should do a mini write up about it when it's done. This is our first office we're building completely the way we want. We're considering some wall touchscreens for input selection at some point but we can't find anything that isn't either a million bux and closed like crestron, or looks like a cheap rasperry pi.
For now we had our appdev guy build a little website for the office manager/support staff that can go and swap the matrix to a bunch of presets. The physical switcher itself also has 4 preset buttons on it that we're going to configure "1" as "put humpty dumpty back together"
The matrix also supports injecting arbitrary CEC commands so we can turn TVs on/off remotely. It's going to be nice when it's all done.
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I was already wondering how you prevent people fucking with the matrix switches and teach them which remotes to use to reset it back, but a web based portal + "just fix it" buttons work.
Yeah so for a few years our typical Teams room setup are the Poly X50/52's which do "Direct guest join" for Zoom and webex but it honestly kind of sucks, you only get 1 monitor (on dual display systems) and a lot of other limitations. So each office has one of the "Plus" rooms with a conference PC the room can switch to. The 4x4 matrix is hidden with the gear and users never touch it, we map F8 on the keyboard to a powershell script that tells the matrix over RS232 what inputs to go to. One huge benefit of the poly X series bars is they have a USB input and when that goes active the bar goes into "Device mode", which makes it show up to the computer as a speaker/microphone/camera. This means no duplication of that portion of it and zoom/webex/youtube/anything on that PC can use the bar for A/V. We manage this with a Startech industrial USB hub that we also turn on and off via a powershell script, when you push F8 the USB hub port turns on and the matrix switches.
We equally have a "Go back to MTR" button on the desktop of the machine (and a scheduled task that runs at 2am if it doesn't detect zoom) to make sure it goes back to the default config.
In the new build the 8x8 is rack mounted in the server room and equally nobody should ever see or touch it, instead only interacting with it via the limited view we've provided instead of access directly to the device.
Life got so much better when we started convincing customers to let us redo conference rooms with proper setups, though we mostly use the Logitech Rally systems.
We've standardized on Logitech Rally systems. One room we installed an accessory set of 3 microphones that hang from the drop ceiling. Helps with those 30 people meetings. We don't really use the Rally bar's features much as it locks you into an ecosystem. Instead, we just plug it into whoever's laptop and they connect to the meeting as if they were at home.
Our users don't like bringing their laptops to meetings. sobs
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We started requiring a laptop to host meetings this year - it simplified the room hardware and let us drop some licenses. Overall has been a much nicer experience on the support side, as well as (I am told) the user side.
So a coworker programmed up with some utility he wants to share with everyone and push a shortcut onto everyone's desktop. Fine, whatever. Weird thing is when I copied the file off his thumbdrive and pasted it to a share, the file had some sort of corrupt ACL/permissions. I couldn't delete it, couldn't take ownership, couldn't even examine the current permissions even with a domain admin account. Fucking windows. Powershell couldn't do anything. The file didn't have any open handles or file locks. googled everywhere to no avail. well until someone mentioned using shift-delete in explorer. Somehow that bullshit actually worked. I don't even. Disclaimer: I was also running chkdsk /scan, so maybe that helped.
That's the plan. I just realized that windows lied to me and despite the file disappearing in explorer with the shift-delete, it's still there and reappears after a few seconds or an F5 refresh. The obvious way to delete a stuck file like this is with a linux boot cd, but I consider this a last resort on our main file server and probably not worth any risk or downtime.
Use psexec to launch a cmd windows as SYSTEM and delete it that way.
Too many people have no idea how to turn off notifications on their laptops, and after some very embarrassing incidents we've pivoted AWAY from laptop-based meetings. We use the full Logitech Rally (with "swytch" and "tap") + MTR setup in our rooms. The option to connect a laptop via USB is installed in all of the rooms, but it's meant as a last-ditch option in case an MTR blows up during a meeting (which has happened) or for troubleshooting. The full-fat MTR solution comes with some decent remote-support capabilities which has been a lifesaver due to our huge geographic footprint, but we're learning that the option to remotely power-cycle equipment is a must, so we're adding managed PDUs to some of the remote and/or more critical locations to be able to cycle the displays, Logitech equipment, and MTR PC.
Also, it is critical for your sanity to have "real" commercial-grade displays in conference rooms that default back to sane settings after a reboot in case some idiot decides to tamper with them, and if you have the infrastructure and knowledge in place, I'd connect them to the LAN as well to allow for their settings to be changed remotely to fix issues, reset settings, change settings, etc. All of the good commercial displays have these capabilities, most of them can be scripted, but they are all wildly different so needs invesigation.
Check out the Raritan PXO - it's designed specifically for AV/conferencing rooms:
https://www.raritan.com/ap/assets/uploads/Resources/Data-Sheets/PXO/RAP-DS-PXO-1272-R3.pdf
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still getting access is denied. I'm trying to disable UAC to see if that helps, but it requires rebooting the file server.
Can the original programmer log into that PC with their own credentials and try deleting the file? Or open CMD with their credentials?