This is the method I use in your scenario, OP. You can use Folder2iso to get the files in that you need. If the OS has official VMware tools, you can also mount the VMware Tools ISO straight from workstation into the VM and this will give you the clipboard service so you can copy and paste files between the host and VM, if this scenario is permitted within your isolation needs.

Otherwise, go the ISO route. You just can’t bring stuff out of the VM back to the host is all.

The two aren’t even in the same league. I’m a big open source advocate don’t get me wrong, but VirtualBox is horrible to use and its not what OP asked.

Its very much still needed and heavily utilised in the enterprise world. Volume size is usually the lowest priority when it comes to arrays, redundancy and IOPS (the amount of concurrent transactions to the storage) is typically the priority. The exception here would be backup and archive storage, where IOPS is less important and volume size is more important.

As far as replacing sectors goes, I’ve never heard of this and I might just be ignorant on the subject but as far as I know you can’t “replace” a bad sector. Only mark it as bad and not use it, and whatever was there before is gone. This has existed since HDD days. This is also why we use RAID - parity across disks to protect data.

Generally production storage will be in RAID-10, and backup/archive storage in RAID-6 or in some cases RAID-60 but I’m personally not a fan.

You also would consider how many disks are in the volume because there is a sweet spot. Too many disks = higher likelihood of total array failure due to simultaneous disk failures and more data loss in the event it does, but too few disks and you won’t have good redundancy, capacity or performance either (depending on RAID level).

The biggest change I see in RAID these days is moving away from hardware RAID cards and into software-based solutions like Microsoft Storage Spaces, md, ZFS and similar. These all have their own way of doing things and some can even synchronise the data with other hosts.

Hope this helps!

Where my download accelerator plus gang at

There are restaurants that sell green ant ice cream as well, I’m told it’s quite nice.

Sorry I meant TIL about it being considered stable, haha. I’ve known about Fedora because I used it when it was meant to replace the free Red Hat Linux.

As for Steam, I don’t recall how I installed it, sorry! I just recall significant grief getting it going (again, perhaps a skill issue) but had no big roadblocks using OpenSUSE.

TIL about Fedora, last I knew it was a rolling bleeding edge OS. Clearly lots of movement in the Red Hat camp.

As for gaming, drivers were not the problem for me. Getting games to run with ease was. On OpenSUSE, I just install Steam, enable Proton and basically go at that point. Red Hat was non-trivial to do this. Could be a skill issue, but I had a better time getting going with OpenSUSE TW.

Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn’t bother me.

Servers are a different story but for Desktop, OpenSUSE.

Because:

• It’s stable even on their rolling OS (Tumbleweed)
• Gaming works exceptionally well
• CUDA works with little effort
• RPM-based (personal preference)
• zypper is an excellent package manager and my experience has been better than that of yum/dnf
• Extensive native packages and 3rd party repos
• No covert advertising in the OS
• Minimal (no?) Telemetry
• Easy to bind to active directory
• it feels polished and well built
• I do not have to mess with it to make it work

Part of my transition from Windows to Linux was that basic tasks like installing software or even the OS itself shouldn’t be a high effort endeavour. I should be able to point to a package file or run a package manager and be able to go about my day without running “make” and working my way through dependency hell.

I say this as a Linux user of all different flavours for well over 15 years who has a deep love for what it brings to the table. If we want it to be common place with non-IT folks, it needs to work and it needs to be simple to use.

Nothing manual required, you can federate with any other instance as long as you’re not on their ban list.

You basically use your instance’s search to search for a community on the remote instance, then your instance requests the top (5?) posts from the community on the remote instance. Once a user subscribes, all new posts going forward will be sent to your server via the federation.

At least I think that’s how it works, haha.

Same here! My background is in systems architecture, so I love this stuff.

Though I run mine on my own “private cloud”. Even though it sounds like an amateur operation I’ve got the proper safety nets in place (backups, redundant power, firewalls, etc). A lot of instances are public cloud which is cool and I have nothing against that, I just wanted to do something a little different.

I have no idea how to get people to join but I hope to have some friends in here some day :D

OP is such a community MVP fr

Also I require cat pics too plzzzzzz

Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I’m using KDE Plasma which it let’s you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.

If you’re familiar with Redhat you’ll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.

I’ve worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.

Not a distro but maybe Plasma Bigscreen is in the ballpark of what you’re after?

Depends on your use case, but you can use some Group Policy Objects on Linux (at least with sssd). See: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/windows_integration_guide/sssd-gpo

You can also grant sudo to AD group members in the sudoers file, which is how I’ve done it in a corporate setting.

I believe there are 3rd party ADMX templates you can add to your domain controllers to get more granular as well as additions to the AD schema, but I haven’t gone that deep with it since between sssd and the sudoers file I can achieve what I need to.

Authelia is popular, as is Keycloak. I believe Red Hat develops Keycloak or at least has a hand in it.

I’m on this journey as well, figuring out what I’m going to use. Currently most of my services just use LDAP back to AD but I’m looking to do something more modern like SAML, oAuth or OpenID Connect so that I can simplify the number of MFA tokens I have.

Just as an anecdote you may find useful - Personally I used to run an Active Directory for Windows and FreeIPA for my Linux machines and have managed to simplify this to just AD. Linux machines can be joined, you can still use sudo and all the other good stuff while only having one source of truth for identity.

Thanks for letting me know (and to the others that did as well). I might be able to jump sooner than anticipated, I’ll check my client tonight for the feature. I’m using it on the Apple TV, I think its the Swiftfin flavour of the client.

As a side note, it sure is a refreshing change to not be downvoted into oblivion for simply having out of date information and respectfully informed in the comments.

Whilst some might not find it a huge deal, not being able to shuffle all episodes of a specific TV show is a deal breaker for me. I do have Jellyfin deployed and configured, ready to go for when the feature arrives. Plex feels a lot more polished as well, but I can get over that.

Cool, cool, cool

Zabbix can do everything you’re asking and can be connected to Grafana if you want custom visualisations. Most importantly, it contextualises what you need to know on the dashboard, as in it only tells you about things that require your attention.

You’re of course able to dive into the data and look at raw values or graphs if you wish, and can build custom dashboards too.

I’ve used it in both home lab and production scenarios monitoring small to mid size private clouds, including windows and linux hosts, docker, backups, SAN arrays, switches, VMware vSphere, firewalls, the lot. It’s extremely powerful and not terribly manual to set up.

If metrics is all you want and aren’t too fussed on the proactive monitoring focus, Netdata is a great option for getting up and running quickly.