I've always understood that there are five FSMO roles, but sometimes I see something that says there are seven. How many are there, really?
For a company with modest virtualization needs - VirtualBox is currently doing fine at hosting a few light servers - what would some of the benefits be of moving to a more robust platform?
I'm hoping to shortcut my research a bit - to get a short list of the features enterprise-level virtualization has that VBox and its ilk don't.
You've probably seen the messages at the stackoverflow blog and on codinghorror:
blog.stackoverflow.com experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.
We're working to restore it from backups ASAP!
Some of the stuff Jeff's doing is on Twitter. What would you be doing in a similar situation?
We have documents on our network going back many years. Migrating these old files to newer formats hasn't been a big problem, we've always been able do them on an as-needed basis. But we had to open a Word 5.0 document a while back and that required a bit of work to get 2003 to handle it (and only gave us the text, minimal formatting) and it got me to thinking.
I see it as being two related problems:
Opening very old documents just to get the information out. For us, it's mostly a matter of getting the text out, I've never been asked to convert an old 123 file.
Converting old, but not ancient documents to a newer format for easy access. Most of what I consider "old documents" are WP6.1, and Word, Excel, PPT files from Office 95 or 97. These all open in 2003, but we do run into formatting issues. One think I'll be doing soon is testing how well the old docs open in 2007.
I'm considering two main approaches:
Set up some VMs with Windows XP and appropriate versions of software to be able to open old documents. At this point, it would probably only take one VM that could have Office 2003 and WordPerfect Office 6.1.
Are there any good batch tools that will convert older .doc .xls .ppt files to 2007 format? If there are, I'd certainly consider running all the old files through one.
Surprisingly, after the long discussion on that well-known meta question, it doesn't seem like anyone's asked about the question that was used as an example: what are the tradeoffs of running your own Exchange servers vs. outsourcing?
For my company, we've seen outsourcing and insourcing come and go a couple times and have stuck to doing it all ourselves. We've used hosted solutions in limited roles (e.g. we've used email filtering for several years now, from when it was Bigfish), but that's it.
In no particular order, the reasons that come to mind for keeping Exchange (and most other functions) in-house are:
Accountability: my bosses know who's responsible for their data, their information system applications. If there's a problem, they have someone in the building (me) to call to find out what the problem is and when it'll be fixed. Worst case, they have someone they can fire if there's a big screw-up.
Security: I'm thinking mostly of data security: all our data is in our building (except for off-site tapes), it's backed up, it's available to the people who need it, access to anyone outside the company is limited.
History: it's not necessarily a great reason, but the in-house IT department has always done a good job, has never had any huge disasters, and the staff turnover has been low, so there's a lot of trust that's been built up that we can do whatever needs to be done - and do it well. Another historical influence is that we have lots of people (including me) who go back way before the Internet took off, before there were many options for outsourcing.
Flexibility: if our internal needs require an unusual configuration, we don't need to negotiate with a supplier to get it setup.
I've been contacted by two partners in a small professional firm. They are concerned about their other partner and want to take some steps to be absolutely sure that the company's data and systems are safe from "any eventuality."
They have one server (Windows 2003) that's used as a file and print server (all important files are on the server), Exchange 2003 Server, and it runs a few applications that make up their financial system. I don't know much more than that about their setup because I haven't had a chance to go in yet. The two guys I'm dealing with don't want to let the other partner know they have someone looking at their systems, so I need to minimize the footprints I leave while doing anything.
One thing I realize I need to get up to speed on is physical to virtual tools. I'll want to convert the server to a VM that I could then bring up somewhere else. If the legal stuff gets ugly, they might lose access to the building, or if it gets really bad, the other guy might take off with the server.
So far, the things I'm planning on are:
Go in and make notes on the server hardware and software configuration, with the goal of being able to re-create the server from scratch if necessary.
As part of the above, make sure they have all the original installation disks or files and make copies of them
Do a bunch of backups:
- make a copy of all their shared files
- figure out how to back up the data from their financial applications
- backup the mailboxes, convert them to PSTs
- backup and ghost the entire machine.
The reason for the first three backups is that I want them to have access to files and their application data outside of an image of the server in case they need to find something quickly. I can't set up recurring jobs for this, but I might end up going in every week or so to do a new full backup and maybe once a month doing another backup of files/databases/mailboxes.
Until I look at their accounts, I'm not sure exactly what I'll do, but I'll either create another Admin account, or make the partners' accounts Admins or something like that - the idea being to have some account(s) the other partner doesn't know about be an admin.
Verify that their PCs are all set up to store files on the server.
Look for anything the other partner might have had installed that could compromise the systems. Based on what I've been told, this isn't very likely, which is good because I'm not sure where I'd start looking for malware...
My question is: am I missing anything important? What other things would anyone suggest doing?