Yes, but many of us specifically choose to install the Office Pro Plus version because it allows us to do the following: - Control what computers have the software installed. We don't want users installing it themselves. - License using MAK keys so users don't have to log in if theybdont need to use the online integration pieces. We also have some machines that go 30+ days without internet access... The Office365 installer version goes into "limited feature mode" after 30 days of no internet - Control and centralize updates via WSUS so our 250+ computers are chewing our bandwidth to all download the same same thing About half of our users utilize the SharePoint and OneDrive online integration so this "change" is going to be painful for us...

Yes. When I took over here we had ESXi licensing, so I have continued that. Our VMware licensing and support is almost as much as our MS licensing! Our DC licenses allow for unlimited VMs on our hosts.

Haha, that's great for you, but last time I checked the 'enterprise management' tools for Linux are no where near what MS provides. Managing OS updates, software installs/updates, group policy, etc etc are fairly straightforward with my MS domain. I'd at through that $5k real quick in my time managing all of that on Linux desktops. Not to mention the end user training budget for teachers would balloon...

MS already basically gives their products away to schools. Im the IT Director for a non-profit based school and we pay under $10k annually for ALL of our MS licensing. This includes Office365, desktop licensing, Datacenter server licenses, etc etc. Honestly, as a school, if MS licensing is the hurdle in your budget, I think you may be doing it wrong.

When I signed my organization up with StartCom (StartSSL) 18 months ago, I did a few hours of research in attempt to do my due diligence. Unfortunately I found absolutely no information tying StartCom to WoSign or any Chinese groups. Had I known who was actually behind StartCom, I would have found another solution. I'm sure that I'm not the only admin in this position.

I would contend that even 'do nothing' is a dangerous option at times. That would mean all user input is ignored. No braking, no accelerating. This is the inherent problem with non-mechanical systems in applications such as a vehicle. There is NO good option for a 'default failsafe state' without the ability to interpret the context of the situation. Imagine your pulling out onto a busy road, your car malfunctions and goes into the 'do nothing' state. You can't accelerate, you can't brake... there you are coasting across a busy road praying that you don't get demolished.

Would you really wanna be in the middle lane of a 5-lane, 65 mph, highway and have your car 'controlled brake' to a stop? What about when your pulling out of a parking lot, turning left across a busy 2 lane road? Crossing railroad tracks? On an icy road? There are quite a few situations where I wouldn't want my car to begin a controlled braking action. I would tend to agree that there is no 'perfect' failsafe action that does not take into consideration the context of the situation.

Well as device or multiple devices need to make that distinction and act appropriately. Those devices (routers and firewalls) can become saturated with traffic and even the super expensive ones have limitations on how much traffic they can handle (deny OR allow). So when millions of botnet controlled nodes are sending massive amounts of traffic, it can overload the protective devices, not to mention saturating your Internet links. Some of these DDOS attacks are so huge that they have brought down the systems of the ISPs providing the internet links to the DDOS target.

Yeah, honestly, when I do use torrents, I run Transmission in a tiny Ubuntu server VM that I fire up on my home server. Nothing fancy, just an old desktop machine with enough RAM to run Server 2008R2 and HyperV plus a bunch of 3-6TB WD Red drives. The linux VM chows through the 2 vProcs I assigned it, but it doesn't affect the server as a whole and the download folder sits in an NFS mount pointing at a share on the windows server. The VM is also setup to use a VPN for dl traffic. All in all it took me about 3 hours to get it all set up and I would highly recommend it.

The short answer is 'no'. From what I understand, the Pi uses its USB bus for the on board nic and it is limited to 100Mb. If you're just downloading 1 or 2 things and not seeding, it might do just fine, but between the slow USB bus and the significant CPU required to handle 1000s or 10s of thousands of simultaneous connections, the Pi is not exactly the best solution. When I used to use torrents more often, I found that even my cheap routers couldn't handle the sheer number of connections generated by heavy torrent usage. I had one, crappy, linksys that would crash every few minutes if I let loose too many torrents at once.

Apologies for the spelling mistakes... I'm not illiterate, as much as it may seem, haha. Sometimes typing on my phone is a challenge.

That was my main concern. I am very familiar with VMware but since I'm the 'everything tech' admin, i don't have the time or resources to not has full on support for the primary infrastructure of the organization. The Essentials Plus license is pretty reasonable with the discounts we got and because I leveraged an existing Essentials license and just upgraded it. But thanks for the recommendation, I'll keep that in mind as I watch for warning signs from Dell\VMware.

I guess my experience with these things is that most of them make a concerted effort to hide the fact that it will install additional software as well as hiding the 'opt-out' option. Whether it's hidden in the 'customize' install path, the classic ass backwards phrasing so you have to read it 4 times to determine whether yes means no or no means no, the tiny checkbox next to or at the bottom of the EULA, the opt-out checkbox that doesn't actually do anything but instill false sense of security in the user, etc etc. I understand what you are saying and if the developer/site make it very clear, then I wouldn't consider it malicious, but I'm personally still not going to use the software and I'm definitely going to advise my peers, clients, and friends/family to stay away from it as well. Just consider that while the 'Ask toolbar' is relatively benign, sometimes it's impossible to find reliable information on the addon software and I don't know whether that developer can be trusted. Maybe an installer addon dev make an agreement with the distributor or software dev and the initial bundle is benign, but do I trust that software dev to review every change to the addon bundle? What if the 2nd or Nth iteration has something significantly more malicious or devious? It's too dangerous, in my opinion, to blindly trust that sort of thing. Like I said, I'd much prefer to outright pay the developer than to have it be bundled. If the software isn't worth paying for, then it's not worth the risk you take by letting an unknown entity be installed on your machine. Ps. I think Oracle actually includes the Ask toolbar in their damn JRE installer now

This small nonprofit has 200+ employees spread over 15 physical sites with a radius of about 60 miles. I apologize if I mistakenly categorized it as 'smallish', but i was under the impression that midsized orgs were like 500+ employees. We are running 3 HP DL 360 G9s for compute, an MSA 2040 with 12TB of useable disk space, and 2 10Gb HP 5700 switches dedicated for iSCSI traffic. We run around 50 VMs and I designed the cluster so that all of the VMs can run comfortably on 2 of the DL 360s so that I can minimize downtime for software\hardware maintenance. The switches are a bit overkill as we don't need the 40 10Gb ports or the 2 40Gb ports, but I spent 3 months working with vendors and directly with HP reps trying to find a smaller, cheaper 10Gb switch, but the 5700s is the cheapest solution with at least 8 10Gb ports. I explored Cisco and other vendors but that would require using SFP+ modules instead of DACs because HP doesn't officially support any DAC but their own. And the cost of the SFP+ modules alone made using a different vendor for the switches significantly more costly.

I honestly can't tell if that comment was a poor attempt to troll or a real suggestion... Regardless, my response is that some of us have to live in the REAL world and implement REAL solutions for business critical infrastructure.