Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Hawkbit]

So, this isn't a quick tech question, but more of a WTF do I tell them beyond "you're screwed"?

My wife is an attorney; her firm is winding down the current practice and is being acquired by an out-of-state firm looking to build their business in WA. The IT guy quit a few weeks ago and they have to move offices in the next 3-4 days. I don't know what happened, but the server move and hosting service fell through. So they're looking for ideas on what to do with a server rack that needs to be maintained for access to old case files and they need a decision in the next day or two. The new firm refuses to have anything to do with the existing server, based on separation of client bases.

So I'm thinking:

A: Hire someone to upload the stack into AWS or Rackspace and have it hosted there, but they're balking at potential security problems on that.

B: Hire someone to physically move the server, set it back up with hosting and keep it maintained like in a server farm? I'm not even sure of what or who would do that.

If anyone has any ideas to get started, please let me know. This is clownshoes and if it wasn't my wife's job this is attached to I'd calmly step back away.

[Trippy]

What city is this and how many servers and how much storage are we talking about here?

[Hawkbit]

Seattle.
Appears to be one or two server blades.
I don't know how much storage. Maybe 1-5 TB?

They sent me a crappy pic but it's a side-angle so I have no idea really what is there.  It looks like a 7' rack but only half of it is actually used. Maybe 4 small boxes on the top which I'd guess are switches or routers of some sort based on size and the 10+ ethernet cables coming from the front of each. On the bottom are another 4 larger width boxes which appear to be the server blades and/or storage array.

I don't even know how old it is, which might have helped determine rough specs. I'm really coming at this from a top-level view.

[Trippy]

Are there any apps that run on these or are they really just file servers? Is this Windows and/or Unix/Linux? Are the servers currently connected to the Internet (public IPs) or only accessible on the intranet?

Edit: also how much upload bandwidth do these servers have access to?

[Chimpy]

Also, if they know, are the applications running on this equipment already virtualized with VMware or Hyper-V or are these individual physical servers? If it is already virtualized, moving it to one of the vendor's public clouds is relatively easy. A lot of companies and government organizations have their data in cloud providers these days (including HIPPA stuff) when it comes to data security those providers are actually pretty good. I would actually be more concerned about the security of a one-off rack of servers/storage in some office than at a cloud provider.

[Hawkbit]

I really don't know any of these answers, though I'm 95% positive they're Internet connected, as my wife can VPN into her work system. I can't imagine they're using any other cloud-based systems, only that primary server to do all that work. I also assume the server/s are used primarily for file servers to house their case histories.

What these questions really hammer home is that they need to just suck it up and hire someone ASAP to handle. I suspect they balked at the cost of the quotes they received and never bothered to follow up with contracting the service.

Much appreciated for the list of questions - it's not in my wheelhouse, and it's not in theirs. At the very least I can tell them to get some contracted help. What type of service should I refer them to? General IT, or are there folks that specialize in this sort of thing?

[Chimpy]

Most general IT shops should be able to handle something like this or know who to forward them to, especially in a market as big as Seattle.

Last minute is going to cost them probably twice what they got quoted.

[Hawkbit]

Thank you both for your time and expertise. I really appreciate the assist.

[Mandella]

So is there a simple program that will assist me in speed checking all the links of my home network, other than just timing the time it takes to move a test file back and forth?

I'm not looking to be overwhelmed with information, just speed check and maybe packet loss as I play with network configurations.

Must be able to handle transfers between Android and Windows devices.

[Merusk]

Do you have multiple routers/ switches set-up on your home network that it's an issue?  When I set mine up all I had to make certain of was that my wiring was good for Gigabit between the wall and the Patch panel. (Wired right, all copper touching) That involved a physical device to test the wires.

Once that was good, I had to make sure the switch was set-up properly and patch-in. Since the switch is gigabit that handles the speed there just fine. I'm only talking between local devices so I don't need to ping/ tracert/ etc. One 42-port switch and done.

After that it's all about how fast your ethernet cards, memory buffer and write speed are on the devices in question. (My old 7000rpm hdd on the old PC will be much slower than the 10,000rpm HDD on the new one which is slower than SSD)

Am I wrong on that or am I missing something else in this equation?

[Mandella]

I'm talking wireless transfer speeds and reliability in particular. I was hoping that there was a simple speedtest like app that would, for instance, move a test file between machines and give me a reading of the actual average bandwidth. Right now I'm using a stopwatch and a 67 meg test file.

As for my home network, well it's a hodgepodge of old laptops and tablets and usb hubs that would be thrown off the Serenity for being too junky.

[Viin]

The stopwatch is probably the cheapest route. The other speed test apps I know of hit the internet rather than stay local. Make sure you use the same device for all of your tests or you will see variances in how each OS/device handles the files rather than just network throughput.

You could try something like this on your laptop: http://www.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.html

[Merusk]

Android has an app that our sysadmin found via Reddit r/sysadmin.  No iPhone version so I don't know the name. It did signal strength and signal mapping for wifi networks and I THINK it did speed testing too but I'm not sure.

[Chimpy]

Android has an app that our sysadmin found via Reddit r/sysadmin.  No iPhone version so I don't know the name. It did signal strength and signal mapping for wifi networks and I THINK it did speed testing too but I'm not sure.

Apple changed their iOS SDK/APIs a long time ago to stop apps like that from working (in iOS 5 or 6).

NetStumbler is a Windows application that does wifi mapping.

[Mandella]

The stopwatch is probably the cheapest route. The other speed test apps I know of hit the internet rather than stay local. Make sure you use the same device for all of your tests or you will see variances in how each OS/device handles the files rather than just network throughput.

You could try something like this on your laptop: http://www.totusoft.com/lanspeed1.html

Thanks. That looks to be just the thing, at least for the Windows side of the network. Speed to and fro the Android stuff isn't that big a deal anyhoo...

[Strazos]

Here's an annoying one - I was merrily playing Dragon's Dogma on the PC last night. Said good night to a buddy of mine, and shut it down.

This morning, the box appears to be dead - nothing happens when I attempt to fire it up, no lights functioning on the MB. It's not the outlet, or the cord. As far as I can tell, everything else connected to that UPS is working just fine.

I'm thinking it's either the PSU or the MB, but I don't know of any easy ways to be sure. I could, theoretically, salvage the PSU from the system I built back in 2008 - it should be plenty powerful enough to try to make the system boot. I'm loathe to do this however, as not only do I not know if the sockets have changed too much in that time (system built in 2014), but the cabling is done up really nice and I'm not sure I know how to remove it.

Any easy ideas on testing either the MB or PSU? I cannot imagine it'd be anything else. There are no other apparent problems with the hardware, and the system has been rock solid since I got it. 

[Trippy]

If you aren't afraid of blowing yourself up you can test the power supply disconnected from everything but a few case fans by using a paper clip to simulate having the power supply plugged into the motherboard.

You need to short the pin with the green wire on the motherboard connector to any of the pins with a black ground wire using the paper clip.

http://support.antec.com/support/solutions/articles/1000015319-is-my-power-supply-dead-the-paperclip-test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojwcj-Alm_c (shaky cam and you can't really see the pins well but he verbally goes over what the article talks about).

[Mandella]

Finally committing to running about 75 feet of network cable to stream movies and games to the living room.

The question: do I need Cat 6 over Cat 5? If it makes any difference, the box I am running to is going to be using one of those Ethernet to usb adapters anyway.

[Trippy]

I would get Cat 5e.

[Chimpy]

I would get Cat 5e.

This.

If you are wanting to go nuts and run good Coax at the same time, get some siamese cable. http://www.summitsource.com/steren-772wh-structured-composite-cable-home-quad-shielded-siamese-cat5e-data-video-pair-coaxial-cable-white-combo-multimedia-wall-coaxial-network-cable-part-300772-p-8829.html

[Mandella]

Thanks. I've given up on the wifi route for game streaming. House is just too sprawling. Now I wish I had gone ahead and just run net cable to every room when we were building (I did run coax, as it happens).

[Yegolev]

I'm in the same boat.  Sucks.

[Viin]

My Radeon drivers keep crashing, even when I'm just sitting on my desktop clicking on the Spotify app. I assume it's a Windows 10 related issue as I didn't have this problem before upgrading.

Anyone run into this and figure out how to fix it?

At least it will recover on it's own, but nothing like a blank screen for 5 seconds while in the middle of a Rocket League match!

[Hoax]

This may be too esoteric...

I need a monitor upgrade and the special requirement is clear text while scrolling. So think long tall documents with tons of text and needing to be able to skim them while scrolling through. Some LCD's for whatever reason seem to blur the shit out of things as you use the mouse wheel to scroll. I'm not sure what monitor spec to be looking for here.

Refresh rate? Response time? Both? Something else?

[Trippy]

What browsers and OSes do you see this blurry text while scrolling in? Do you see it in non-browsers as well (e.g. MS Word)?

[Hoax]

I replaced the old ViewSonic monitor with a temporary Asus decent-but-whatever monitor and suddenly the user had a problem I'd never heard of that needed fixing. Its been demonstrated to me, the text in both pdf readers and firefox is blurry when you scroll. Like there isn't even an attempt to bring things into focus until the scroll movement ends.

I believe it has to be a hardware issue because nothing changed at the software layer besides the monitor drivers.

[Trippy]

What about Chrome? Firefox has known issues with scrolling and blurring text (Chrome does too for that matter but its not as bad). In Firefox there are a bunch of things you can turn off to see if that fixes the problem (Google on "firefox scrolling blurry text"). If fiddling with the Firefox settings fixes the problem then the problem is likely an issue with using the GPU to do text rendering.

[Goreschach]

Try going to options>advanced and turning off smooth scrolling. It'll scroll faster anyways.

[Mandella]

Okay well *that's* an improvement -- turns out wired does indeed beat wireless, at least in this house.

So with the very simple network I've got here to start, do I really need a switch? I'm just running gaming machine to router, then router to micro-PC multimedia system (it's hooked to my TV). I also have an old laptop with an external drive attached plugged into the router to stream media.

[Chimpy]

Okay well *that's* an improvement -- turns out wired does indeed beat wireless, at least in this house.

So with the very simple network I've got here to start, do I really need a switch? I'm just running gaming machine to router, then router to micro-PC multimedia system (it's hooked to my TV). I also have an old laptop with an external drive attached plugged into the router to stream media.

The builtin switch on your router is fine unless you need more ports.

[Trippy]

Okay well *that's* an improvement -- turns out wired does indeed beat wireless, at least in this house.

So with the very simple network I've got here to start, do I really need a switch? I'm just running gaming machine to router, then router to micro-PC multimedia system (it's hooked to my TV). I also have an old laptop with an external drive attached plugged into the router to stream media.

The builtin switch on your router is fine unless you need more ports.

If it's Gigabit Ethernet. If it's not, get a Gigabit switch.

[Hawkbit]

I might upgrade my 500gb ps4 into a 2tb system - any hdd recommendations in the sub-$100 range?

[Trippy]

There's only one 2 TB internal hard drive that will fit, the Spinpoint M9T ST2000LM003 2TB HDD (made by Seagate, branded by Samsung). Fortunately for you you can find it for ~$100.

[Hawkbit]

Thanks!

[Yegolev]

Since gigabit switches have come up...
I love my WRT54GL and even that WRT54GS a little bit.  However 100Mb is kinda crap.  Are there recommended gigabit hardwares which I might be able to customize via dd-wrt or similar?