First a touch of background to add some context: I work as a team lead & sysadmin (+ “hack” of all trades) in education on a fairly large Windows network. Low budget, high demand, and besides some legal stuff and, contrary to what all the teachers and admin staff believe, no overly urgent requirements (no intellectual property, no critical systems, no four-9’s uptime requirements, but we do have lots of personal and sensitive data). We have an old, mostly unchanging network but due to the nature of teaching, many departments change up their location and/or software (which is often cheap, poorly made and has incredibly specific requirements) on a termly or yearly basis. Lots of “last minute this is urgent do it now” stuff, and even more projects where we’re not consulted and have to hack together solutions at the 11th hour after the majority of work has been done without anyone communicating with us.

We’re small enough that we don’t have much available extra capacity people or resource-wise, but complex enough to have a couple dozen servers (mostly VMs) running on old hardware and nearly 100 switches across a dozen buildings on four campuses, on top of other random infrastructure that is becoming digitised, such as boilers, cctv, access control. Small team, too, so time is tight. No overtime and no out-of-hours work (9-5 only) which is nice, but causes problems as we have no maintenance windows to make changes!

q1: in order to make our lives easier I’m beginning to embrace more automation. We’ve got the big stuff out of the way but to proceed we’re looking into using lots of custom powershell scripts for a lot of this given the random requirements and poor quality of our software. We’ve run into a small issue but I’m not sure what the best practice and most practical solution is. We often need to run scripts over night. So far we’ve run them off a random server that also does other things during the day (hosts a few end user applications) but we know there’s a better way. What is it? Dedicated server? Does something exist that’ll manage this for us instead of using task scheduler on a 2016 box?

q2: We deal with a lot of sensitive data across a lot of systems involving many different types of person – students, staff, parents, visitors, governors, contractors, etc. We know that if an incident/breach occurs and we need to investigate, we’ll be on the phone to an expensive third party to come in and investigate for us as we just don’t know what to look for or where to find it. We need some kind of centralised logging, which we can deploy in time. For now, though, what are the essentials to enable and where can we find them? (eg: logging in AD)

“Is there an affordable way to image Windows desktops that is less insanely complex than Microsoft’s deployment thing?”

I’ve already had a few suggestions here on Telegram but perhaps other listeners face the same challenge.

AWS/GCP/Azure fall off the face of the planet overnight, and you are now faced with either choosing smaller providers (with probably a much smaller feature set) or moving back to on-prem

In that situation, what would you choose?

If the former, how would you deal with the limitations? Would you mix and match workloads across multiple providers or would you stick with one or two and work with the limitations?

If the latter, would your workflow and choice of infrastructure change based upon how you work with the cloud now? Would you steer more towards hyperconverged and/or private cloud in a box solutions, or would it be VMware/KVM/Hyper-V with config management, or just revert to how it was pre-cloud days?

I suppose in a sense it’s a question partly about reliance on the big clouds, but also how do you think on prem has improved (if at all) to keep up with the cloud providers

Thank you for your podcast.

In episode 075, you asked about tools to check whether a web page had
changed. You might like to try Silas Brown’s WebCheck program:

http://ssb22.user.srcf.net/setup/webcheck.html [Note: we were contacted by the author of this app to note that the URL had changed. This link is now the accurate one.]

Thank you

David

Hey chaps,

Just wanted to say thanks for a fantastic episode 75.

I gotta be honest, a lot of what you guys talk about goes over my head as I’ve never used Selenium, Terraform, Ansible, etc… but I still enjoy listening because I can often pick up some utter gems.

This time around I’ve managed to fall in luuurve (wrong podcast?) with SyncThing and Digital Ocean.

I’d heard much talk about SyncThing on t’interwebs, but it wasn’t until I heard about it on this episode and actually looked into it more that I realised how powerful it actually is. I’m currently using it to perform a one-way backup key folders on my phone and tablet to my laptop. But I also have a two-way sync (kinda like a Dropbox or NextCloud shared folder) in place so that I can transfer files to my phone seamlessly.

Having heard about Al’s experiences of spinning up a NextCloud instance on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet, I decided to do the same as a test… and ended up shifting over to it permanently. All I had to do was spin up the droplet, snap install nextcloud, enter some information, run a single command to apply a Let’s Encrypt certificate, and that was it. 5 minutes, tops. And moving all my stuff between instances was really straight forward too. So thanks for the confidence to make the move, Al!

At the moment, I have 3 VPSes (costing over £36/month) that I could quite easily replace with a number of DO droplets. A $5 droplet, with backup, plus VAT is just under £6, so I could theoretically spin up to 6 $5 droplets (or fewer if I spin a $10 one up, which I might do for some of the smaller services I’m running), but I don’t think I’ll need that many, which will save me money in the long run – win!

Again, thanks for a great episode, and congratulations on the audio quality… you should give your producer a pay rise #JustSaying

Cheers,

Dave

As gathered from the Iron Sysadmin Slack:

XenoPhage (Jason) [12:59 AM]
Hey @JonTheNiceGuy … Was listening to AdminAdmin 75 .. (Yeah, I’m behind a bit) .. Tell Al to take a look at webinject.pl .. Works great with monitoring systems like nagios/icinga2/etc. for monitoring versions of software.. I’ve used it for years to let me know when updates come out for things i can’t just add a yum repo for. :slightly_smiling_face: