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I truly don't like 17" screens. They're too heavy, too delicate and they suck battery for what I'd call insufficient surface area benefit vs. a 14" or 15" screen. To my mind, either you need a portable device or you need some kind of a desktop-size screen and the 17" laptop is the worst of both...

Up sides to the MBP: Good overall specs and weight, lovely screen. Bad things about the MBP: No upgrade options, love or hate input devices and questionable support if you don't live within five minutes of an Apple store, expensive. Good things about a Surface Pro: Amazing specs and weight...

Storage Spaces can't implement RAID10 but I don't think I'd want it. Slow writes are really only a problem once in a very great while.

Here are the NICs and cables. And just for laughs, best case sequential read off the fastest disk array I have top out at 3100MB/s. Writes are a different and much more depressing story but that's RAID6 for you.

The second cable was purchased as insurance in case the first one is bad or gets damaged or something. I don't think channel bonding will help enough to bother setting it up. Also I'm pretty much positive that nothing I have will move 5GB/s unless I start building disk arrays out of M.2 drives.

And in a moment of weakness, I am now the proud owner of a pair of MHQH29B-XTR 40Gbps (yes, 40) Infiniband adapters and a pair of 10m QSFP cables. All for under $200. A little more reading regarding Windows and IB says that Server 2012+ fixes the performance issues that were present on Server...

Looks like cheap Infiniband has some pretty serious limitations, at least for Windows and Linux. I suspect that not much has changed since the article was written in 2011.

Neither of the sites where I could potentially source my connection will let me put up an aerial to mount my antenna. I could still do it from my apartment, if I felt that strongly about making it happen. My apartment is facing the wrong direction and I'm not sure I have any rights to mount...

As long as my databases snapshots are happening and getting dumped to where they can be backed up, I generally don't have to care too much about the machine configuration on most of my VMs. The most obnoxious thing for me is finding a vendor puts their stuff in an oddball like, say, Gupta...

I'm sure Enterprise SSD manufacturers would love the idea. The biggest single production host I have runs nine guests. If I *had* to, that machine does have the capacity to run enough drives that I could feasibly run each on a dedicated drive, but in some cases the machines are virtual...

That 24 SSD machine looks oddly familiar. Mine only has five SSDs in it though. :D

Given the explanation in the article, perhaps the best practice is to dedicate an SSD to each guest?

Having some fiber in place means being able to switch your layer 2 technology as soon as it's economically feasible instead of waiting for the day that someone solves the issue of implementing that speed over copper wire. Your backbone stuff can be different from your client hardware. That's normal.

The reason for the warning is the (very funny and intensely passive-aggressive) in game commentary from the AI in the game. It wants you dead. DEAD. Not alive any more. I'd expect even a seven year old to handle it just fine but I can see how some people would object to kids hearing that, but...

There was a parade in my town today. There were still a couple WWII vets in town spry enough that they felt like putting on their uniforms, but at least this year none of them were trying to march with the Korea and Vietnam guys, but nothing is weirder to me than seeing the guys in their 20s and...

A 970 would be a modest upgrade from a single 690, but the 690s were incredibly expensive cards and they're still quite credible for overall gaming performance. If your customer is looking to blow $500 on a new card, the right answer is probably to look at another 690; even an SLI pair of 960s...

It's just layer 2. Whatever it is, you put SMB, NFS or iSCSI on top of IP and I don't think it matters other than the data transfer rates. I had a tab open about 2000s-era supercomputing that mentioned Infiniband repeatedly, which is what inspired me to go look at parts pricing (14 year old NICs...

It's straight up AV with limited antimalware, a web filter and a VPN client. The web filter can be configured to your needs or shut off. I think actual multiple-system management needs Fortigate, but since I'm not putting it on client machines I don't care so much about that part. The bottom of...

I am going to say this in this thread also, since I just had it kind of save my ass: Forticlient is a big-boy grown-up Antivirus application that runs on Windows Server editions and does not cost money. One of my co-workers nearly hosed my production VM host with a Flash drive full of Autoplay...

Goddammitsomuch. I gave away the osciiloscope I kept in my car for YEARS just maybe 15 months ago. The sound you hear in Australia is me sobbing as I pull a 40kg UPS out of my rack.

In my case I only need point to point. If I were willing to cheat I think I could get away with a single 10m cable.

Ebay seems to have a lot of inexpensive Infiniband controllers. Looks like there are quite a few PCIe 10GbE adapters for under $40, but I can't tell what if any transceiver is being sold with them. We'd probably be talking about $30 per meter of cable but that's still substantially cheaper than...

Here's a handy site that will generate unattend.xml for your Windows 7/8/8.1 or Server 2008r2+ mass installs.

It's pretty straightforward. You can build a Windows machine the way you normally would, let updates happen, install apps to taste and then run sysprep from C:\windows\system32\sysprep\. After it runs, shut down, boot in to your drive imaging software (TrueImage or WinPE/ImageX or whatever) and...

Kill-A-Watt says that machine is using 584W continuous and draws 730W at peak.

I usually run adwcleaner FIRST because it's a five-minute scan on even shitty hardware. While it's running, I install/update the other crap I want. I actually have a script that pulls down the latest version of the MVPS hosts file, puts ABP in its common location in Firefox and runs the...

It's even better when you have a sysprep image that includes apps and a full set of slipstreamed drivers and updates. It's super easy to set up, too.

New Zealanders clearly have a better sense of humor about their national symbols than other, lesser countries. I am only surprised that the article didn't show off any designs featuring hobbits. Also I love that Firefox's spell checker knows that hobbits is a word but it still underlines USB...

Rufus definitely works a lot faster than the Windows 7 ISO to USB tool for making bootable Windows flash drives. I haven't tried using it for Linux yet, but since it doesn't depend on .NET 2.0, which isn't part of a default Windows 8/10 install, it's still a pretty handy tool.

Yeah, I can see the appeal. Have you set them up yet?

Do those machines not get addresses at all (i.e. APIPA 169.254.whatever addresses) or are they being given something incompatible with your network? They work elsewhere, but just for giggles you might also want to do a full reset of IE settings just in case somebody has configured a proxy server...

Good to know I'm not the only one with customers who occasionally make compelling arguments for justifiable homicide.

I had a seagull commit suicide against the front of my car this morning. It flew straight in to my front end. On the plus side, I got to spend 45 minutes of my work day today hosing off my car.

I ordered a Kill-a-watt and a 1200W Seasonic PSU. I'm to see about borrowing an IR thermometer as well. This machine is in a 13U rack inside a walk-in closet (I slide over the top of the rack when I need to mess with it). It's oriented so that the front of the PC is toward the back of the...

I don't generally open up power supplies. They normally have five or seven year warranties and I don't mind swapping them given the unit cost, though the urgency of getting a new one installed means that whatever comes back will get used elsewhere rather than back in my torture chamber. I do buy...

I can't even find a pirate with an ISO of it, but I did find Dell, HP and IBM OEM versions of 2003r2.

The UPS in question is a Tripplite SmartOnline 3000 and it is definitely an online UPS. I bought it new in early 2011 and I've replaced batteries in it twice since I got it. I do run the monitor application but I really only pay attention to alerts. As far as other appliances, the only one I...

I think I can discount static, particularly at this time of year. Summer heat is a real problem because of my HVAC situation, but my equipment rack has been in that room for years now prior to having these problems and it's not that warm yet.

The machine is off pending a replacement PSU and so is the UPS. It's a Tripp-Lite that I've had for five or six years and I don't think it's that smart. The electrical load in my apartment in general and in that room in particular is definitely lower now than it was a couple years ago, though.

It's sitting on a 3000VA UPS as it is. I replaced the batteries for it in March of 2014 and I do test it periodically.

When I do the math on my big file server, it should have a continuous draw of just under 600W. I've gone through three Gold-rated 850W PSUs (PCP&C, Corsair HX, Seasonic - all rated for 50C operation) in the last eight months, the latest just this morning. The PSUs all fail in the same way: some...

FWIW, I have SBS 4.5, SBS2000, SBS2003r2, SBS 2008, SBS 2011 and Essentials 2012. I even have product keys for most of them, but guess which one I'm missing?

Actually, Microsoft just recently started making Windows 7 ISOs publicly available. It's not ENTIRELY out of the question.

Pirated keys, yes (e.g. the infamous TPCRY key that was used on the first pirated copies of 7). But a lot of machines that are just in "Windows failed genuine validation" state do still get updates. As far as I can tell, machines in that state can continue to operate normally. They just get an...

When I get a new drive, I run an extended diagnostic test before I put it in service. I'm mostly concerned about shipping damage or the possibility of preexisting bad sectors. The tests take maybe half a day and have saved me from putting DOA drives in arrays a few times.

Remember that 802.11 loses about half its bandwidth to protocol overhead. 300Mbit for a point to point link is probably just enough to ensure actual 100Mbit operation. With regard to running a router appliance as a VM, it actually works great if you have the resources to throw at it. It's one...

On one of my home machines, I have an Untangle VM with a couple dedicated NICs for traffic control. It's essentially line speed for my cable modem and it wasn't hard at all to set up.

Apparently, Windows 10 will be made available through Windows Update for Windows 7 rather than the Windows Store. Testers are supposed to stream updates all the way into the release version.

I had a number of servers hang on a .NET update last night as well. They were all Server 2003 machines and they all required a hard reset. This crap never happens to my Centos machines. :evil::evil::evil::evil::evil:

As an interesting alternative to Adblock Plus, uBlock really does seem to be substantially more efficient for RAM utilization, sometimes by as much as 30%. Its installation procedure also includes the ability to select all of the additional lists I mentioned without any extra navigation. I'm...