user3280964's questions

I made myself a loop back plug as per

• When I plug it into a 1Gbps port on 100/1G switch the port does not light up.
• 100 Mbps port on 100 Mbps switch lights up no problem.

The obvious problem could be that I crimped the cable wrong, but now I'm on the 3rd one and I get exactly same frustrating results. I triple checked my pinout and I just can't get it to work. I'm not new to crimping cables either, so I'm 99% sure I succeeded in crimping it well. I also tried several switches, and it's always the same: 100Mbps lights up, 1Gbps doesn't.

The other weird thing is that 1Gbps switch that's 100Mbps capable doesn't detect this at least as 100Mbps (I could live with it not showing up as 1Gig). But it stays completely dark. But maybe that's to be expected because that's also what happens when I plug in my other 2 pair 100Mbps RJ45 loopback ... so maybe 100Mbps works ONLY on 100Mbps switch? I could live with that if that's how that works, but what about 1Gbps loopback with 4 pairs? Why is that not lighting up?)

Can anyone shed some light on this? I just don't get why it's behaving the way it is. Am I doing this right?

I have been comparing our server room logs for power usage, compressor usage, and outside temperature and I'm not sure if something is wrong with my understanding how these systems work, or if something is wrong with our records.

• Hot day: +30C outside, ~50% compressor use, ~25 KW electricity use
• Cold day: -30C outside, ~50% compressor use, ~25 KW electricity use
• Inside it's constant 23C
• Equipment that this is cooling generates about 28 KW worth of heat as measured by UPS readout.
• This is an 20 year old Liebert 20T HVAC unit hooked up outside condenser.
• ~25 KW includes the condenser electricity use
• Compressor readings go in increments of 0,25,50,75 and 100%
• This Liebert has 2 compressors in it and from what I gather (maybe wrong?) each compressor has three speed modes. Off, Medium, High. So if two compressors are on medium that's 25+25=50% or if one is high and other medium that's 75%. If both are on high that's 100% readout.

I would think that on a cold day the compressor use should be way lower than on a hot day. I also assume that lower compressor utilization means large reduction in electricity use.

We have one reading per day (manually entered), and because the compressor use oscillates between 25 - 50 - 75 as it's internal thermostat tries to maintain 23C steady, it's possible that we were unlucky and we got reading during the very short time it was in the "up" part of the curve on the cold day. But I took averages of those numbers to eliminate that possibility. The 50% and 25 KW are averages over multiple days. I rounded them (+/-10%) for the purpose of of highlighting that they are essentially the same. The effect I'm looking for is 30% to 80% difference due to temperature. On the really cold day wouldn't the cooling be essentially free?

Are my readings wrong or am I completely wrong in my assumption that there should be massive power savings during cold weather with this kind of system?

When I try to send email from our email server to hotmail or outlook.com I get

550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [216.x.x.x] weren't sent.
Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is
on our block list (AS3150). You can also refer your provider to
http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.

I read through all the troubleshooting tips, and searched stack exchange and Google, it all kind of makes sense, but here is what I can't figure out.

Why are they saying that we're coming from AS3150? AS3150 is NTT America https://bgp.he.net/AS3150

We've never been with NTT America. Our IP is on our own IPv4 block registered with ARIN. We operate on our own AS number and we peer with 4 backbone peers in Canada where we are located. None of our peers are NTT America or their subsidiaries. And even if it was, we're still our own standalone AS with our own reputation.

It is frustrating that we're getting blocked because of NTT America's poor reputation. We're not even related. How do we get delisted? This is obviously some screw up.

Or putting on my paranoid hat, is this because our Canadian traffic gets funneled through NTT America's outsourced solutions for mass NSA sniffing and this is just a side effect that someone forgot to covered up? Obviously this would be bad, but at this point I'm so frustrated that I don't even care. If someone will get us delisted, I will happily let them sniff it ... they're doing it with permission or not anyway :-)

First, while it would be amazing to get a solution, at this point I'm willing to accept new ideas to try.

Here is the background:

What I'm trying to accomplish is to upgrade an old vCenter Appliance 5.0.0 to at least 5.5. I've tried all kinds of things, but every time the upgrade fails with red X beside "upgrading vcenter appliance"

This is what I've tried

• Tried upgrading from 5.0 -> 5.1 (fails same way)
• Tried upgrading from 5.0 -> 5.5 (fails same way)

My latest goal is to update from from 5.0.0.3324 build 472350 -> 5.0.0.latest. It looks like the version I'm running is DB2 and I wonder if the transition from DB2->postgres->new version is just too much. That's why I thought I'd give it this easier task. This task never fails. Instead it runs for a week crunching away at /storage/db/export/*.lob files. I looked into some of them randomly and all 5 that I looked at contain the word "en". I'm wondering if it went into some kind of a loop. There was 7 million+ of them there in total. I didn't have the patience for it to finish, because right now I'm doing the upgrade in the lab, and even if it did finish, it would not be viable solution for the live environment. I can't be without vcenter for a week. I tried pruning the database size by turning off logging and reducing retention. That didn't seem to make a difference. Is there a way to prune this so that the update doesn't take more than 1 day?

Now thinking outside of the box:

• Let's say I give up on automatic update and upgrade, what's the best way to get my configuration manually imported from the old environment? I saw an option where I could import config. But how do I export?
• Let's say that I even give up on export/import and I just rebuild from scratch. Are there any guides that walk me through the process of doing that?
• Are there other things I should try with the upgrade before giving up on it or am I at a dead end?

Thank you

Is there a way to audit access to USB drives with built-in windows logging? We already do GP based auditing on our server's NTFS file system, but how do we extend that to workstations? There are no guaranteed of what kind of file system will be plugged into the workstations through USB. It may be NTFS or FAT32.

The reason we need to do this is to have a record of potentially unauthorized copying of company files.

Note: we also restricted USB access to majority of machines. That works, but it turns out that the people who ask for (and are given) exception are also those with access to very sensitive info.

Environment: - Windows 2008 R2 Server AD - Windows 7 Pro workstations