TJF's questions

For a new build-out I have to install Windows Server 2016 on several bare metal HP Gen9 hosts.

I won't have SSCM or any other tools available and am pretty much limited to iLO and Powershell.

From my research it appears it is possible to automate the deployment via Powershell but I have not found a comprehensive guide to walk me through this.

Does anyone have guidance on a) creating a fully patched Windows Server 2016 image suitable for automated/unattended deployment and b) the process on automating the deployment of that image to various hosts via powershell?

I have some of my Hyper-V VM's on a network segment that pushes a lot of UDP multicast traffic (several 100MBit/s).

Now, all Hyper-V Windows hosts actually see and count the traffic on the Ethernet ports without joining the multicast group. I can even capture the traffic with Wireshark without having joined the multicast group. This means, Hyper-V must pass the traffic to the NIC driver when the traffic should be ignored by the NIC itself.

On my ESXi VM's this is not the case - the MCAST traffing is only seen when the host joins the multicast group and some goes for bare metal hosts.

Any idea why/what Hyper-V is doing here and if this behavior can be changed?

I have a .NET 3.5 application that makes a standard http WebRequest:

var webRequest = WebRequest.Create(new Uri("http://myserver.com/target.xml));
var webResponse = webRequest.GetResponse();

This application is often deployed within networks that utilize proxies but I never really had issues with this until it was recently deployed at a client that utilizes the "Blue Coat" Proxy/Firewall.

Their proxy is configured as a transparent proxy.

The issue is that 90% of the time, my WebRequests fail with 401 Unauthorized, yet sometimes they work fine (the behavior is the same on 10+ client machines).

Also, on all of them, it works completely fine if Internet Explorer is opened first and they manually browse to one of my URL's (I checked their IE config and no proxy config is entered). Consequently, all WebRequests from my application work seamlessly.

Their network team has no suggestions but does admit to have seen "funky" behavior in the past.

Anyone have any idea what's going on here and what could be done?

I'm looking for a FTP/SFTP client that can store all the session information in a central SQL server, so all employees always have an up-to date list of FTP sites they can connect to. I've been using FileZilla in the past but it's lacking the multi-user capabilities.

I have a Domain Admin User that logs on via RDP to a w2k8 r2 server, UAC is turned off locally at that server.

Whenever I try to access certain folders, I'm getting the following prompt: "You don't currently have permission to access this folder". When I try to launch certain programs, I have to right-click "Run as Administrator" to gain admin elevation and e.g. write rights to the program files folder.

When the very same user logs on to another ws2k8 r2 server, I don't have these issues. Both servers a freshly installed.

I was wondering what alternatives to DFS-R are out there on windows machines for real-time bidirectional file & folder replication? DFS-R requires active directory and a domain controller which I don't want utilize in this particular environment.

Thanks!

Tom

I'm trying to test UDP multicast throughput via iperf but it seems like it's not sending more than 10Mbit/s from my dev machine:

C:\> iperf -c 224.0.166.111 -u -T 1 -t 100 -i 1 -b 1000000000
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 224.0.166.111, UDP port 5001
Sending 1470 byte datagrams
Setting multicast TTL to 1
UDP buffer size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[156] local 192.168.1.99 port 49693 connected with 224.0.166.111 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[156]  0.0- 1.0 sec  1.22 MBytes  10.2 Mbits/sec
[156]  1.0- 2.0 sec  1.14 MBytes  9.57 Mbits/sec
[156]  2.0- 3.0 sec  1.14 MBytes  9.55 Mbits/sec
[156]  3.0- 4.0 sec  1.14 MBytes  9.56 Mbits/sec
[156]  4.0- 5.0 sec  1.14 MBytes  9.56 Mbits/sec
[156]  5.0- 6.0 sec  1.15 MBytes  9.62 Mbits/sec
[156]  6.0- 7.0 sec  1.14 MBytes  9.53 Mbits/sec

When I run it on another server, I'm getting ~80Mbit/s which is quite a bit better but still not anywhere near the 1Gbps limits that I should be getting?

C:\> iperf -c 224.0.166.111 -u -T 1 -t 100 -i 1 -b 1000000000
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 224.0.166.111, UDP port 5001
Sending 1470 byte datagrams
Setting multicast TTL to 1
UDP buffer size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[180] local 10.0.101.102 port 51559 connected with 224.0.166.111 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[180]  0.0- 1.0 sec  8.60 MBytes  72.1 Mbits/sec
[180]  1.0- 2.0 sec  8.73 MBytes  73.2 Mbits/sec
[180]  2.0- 3.0 sec  8.76 MBytes  73.5 Mbits/sec
[180]  3.0- 4.0 sec  9.58 MBytes  80.3 Mbits/sec
[180]  4.0- 5.0 sec  9.95 MBytes  83.4 Mbits/sec
[180]  5.0- 6.0 sec  10.5 MBytes  87.9 Mbits/sec
[180]  6.0- 7.0 sec  10.9 MBytes  91.1 Mbits/sec
[180]  7.0- 8.0 sec  11.2 MBytes  94.0 Mbits/sec

Anybody has any idea why this is not achieving close to link limits (1Gbps)?

Thanks,

Tom

we're a small but expanding service provider and currently still have a rather old Nortel PBX system which either lacks some of the features I'd like to see or is impossible to configure without calling "the phone guy" every time. Thus, I was looking into replacing this system with a newer IP based PBX. The features that I'd require are the following:

• Extensions
• Hunt Groups
• Certain actions based on office hours (e.g. forward to cell phone after 5pm)
• Auto attendant
• Call Recording
• Voicemail to Email
• Currently 8 extensions
• On hold music
• Call queues

Now, I've been trying to do some research but am quite frankly still rather confused as to what would be optimal for us.
We currently have 4 analog lines with our Verizon FIOS subscription. For us service quality is very important as we work in the financial industry and I don't have any patience for outages in our phone service, dropped calls, echo, etc. like what I read a lot about in SIP based services, so I'm not sure if SIP trunking for us is the way to go. I do however want to increase the number of simultaneous incoming/outgoing calls we can take but again, not quite sure what the best option for us is (e.g. I see Verizon offers a PBX trunk line service). When it comes to the actual PBX system, again, not really sure what would be a good choice. I've looked at e.g. 3CX, SNOM One, Cisco's UC500, Allworx, etc. but really not sure what to go for.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Tom

I have multiple W2k8 R2 servers and one of them uses an outside source to constantly sync time. I'd like to sync all my other servers to that server. This is a simple workgroup and no domain controller is present.

Anyone knows how to achieve this?

Thanks,

Tom

I've recently asked a question about my options for load balancing multiple servers (TCP non http traffic, very long running connections with very consistent bandwidth rates): Load Balancing long running TCP connections

In this post I was directed to LVS and just gave that a try. Setup was easy and it pretty much worked right off the bat, with my only issue being that I can only use LVS-NAT (realservers are windows and I do not want to change their config). The problem with that is that it rewrites the source IP, so if a client logs in, I only see the NAT'ed IP and not his original source IP. This poses an issue for us in terms of regulatory requirements as I need to log the real source IP for every client that logs in.

How do others deal with that issue?

Thanks,

Tom

I'm trying to research the best way to load balance long running TCP connections for the following scenario:

We have multiple servers behind a redundant set of firewalls and clients establish long running (usually 10-15 hours) TCP connections to our backend servers.
Right now, "load balancing" is handled via a client side round-robin approach to go through a list of IP addresses which are all homed at our firewalls and NAT'd accordingly to the backend servers.

I'd like to get away from this approach and have only one public IP and have a separate load balancer that can check the health/load of the servers and distribute the incoming client connection requests accordingly.

One problem here is that every client, establishes 3 socket connections on 3 different ports and I'd prefer if those connections were "sticky", so all those 3 connection requests are sent to the same backend server.

I've been looking at e.g. HAProxy but I'm not really sure if it's really suited for my scenario. We have a relatively low connection count (~300 clients * 3 socket connections for each). Usually we see ~15KB/s continuous data transfer volume for each socket.

Any input on this is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Tom

I'm ordering an Enhance Tec E8 external harddrive enclosure with with a Mini SAS 8088 connector. I plan to use 8 drives in a RAID 5. The RAID Controller I'm looking at says it has 2 x4/x8 hybrid ports, however all the ext mini SAS to mini SAS cables I can find say x4. Does that mean the x4 can only address 4 harddrives and I'd need to get two x4 cables to take use of all 8 harddrives or am I misunderstanding something here?

Thanks!

Tom

I'm having trouble configuring a VLAN across two switches (switch A is Cisco 3750G and switch be is a HP Procurve 2824) with Win2k8 R2 servers set up with teamed NIC ports and Gb1 landing on switch A and Gb2 landing on switch B.

VLAN 101 is configured on switch A like this:

!         
interface Vlan101
 ip address 10.0.101.100 255.255.255.0
 no ip redirects
 no ip unreachables
 no ip proxy-arp
 load-interval 30

and on switch B like this:

vlan 101 
   name "VLAN101" 
   ip address 10.0.101.99 255.255.255.0 
   tagged 1,3,5,7,21 
   exit 

Is this the correct way to set up the same VLAN on 2 switches?

I then configured a trunking port that connects both switches:

!         
interface GigabitEthernet1/0/21
 description "sw1-sw2"
 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
 switchport trunk allowed vlan 2,100-103
 switchport mode trunk
 switchport nonegotiate
 spanning-tree bpdufilter enable
 spanning-tree bpduguard enable

on switch B I think the trunking is simply configured by putting the trunk port into the VLAN config like I did above.

Now, one server's Gb1 NIC port is connect to switch A and Gb2 NIC port is connected to switch B. I'm using the BACS3 manager to configure SLB teaming of those 2 ports.

A router is connected to switch A (IP: 10.0.101.252) which I set as the gateway address on the servers.

From switch A I can ping 10.0.101.99 (the switch B VLAN 101 address). From switch B I can ping 10.0.101.100 and 10.0.101.252 just fine.

From the server I can ping all addresses just fine as long as Gb1 is up. However, when I shut down Gb1, Gb2 does not take over. Even when I set the gateway address to 10.0.101.99, I'm not able to ping it.

Am I'm kind of clueless as to what I might be doing wrong here, so any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!