Skip to main content
  • EN

Blogs and Podcasts

Bring your knowledge and expertise while creating blogs and podcasts

  • 1,154 Topics
  • 8,878 Comments
1154 Topics
SSimpson
SSimpsonComes here often
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
How are you Protecting your Data?

In today's ever changing data management environment, protecting data integrity and security has emerged as the number one priority for businesses of all sizes. Veeam's backup and replication solution offers a range of features to assist organizations in protecting their data. Among these features, immutability stands out as a crucial capability that plays a role in defending data against ransomware attacks, accidental deletions, and other potential threats.Understanding the Concept of ImmutabilityImmutability refers to the capacity to prevent data from being changed, deleted, or altered in any manner for a specific duration. Within the realm of data protection, immutability ensures that backup data remains unaltered and secure, even in the presence of cyber risks or human mistakes. By integrating immutability features, you can establish an additional layer of security to shield your essential data and maintain uninterrupted business operations.Various methods can be employed to enforc

602
coolsport00
4 months ago
marco_s
marco_sVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Veeam Encryption (What) is the key ?

INTRODUCTIONInformation, now mostly in the form of digital data, is a critical asset for all companies, from the smallest to the largest.The ISO/IEC 27001 standard reminds us what the requirements and best practices are for best managing the security of this information.The three core principles are:Confidentiality: not everyone can access a particular piece of private information, only people with the right permissions Integrity of information: the data that the organization uses to conduct its business or that it keeps safe for others must be stored reliably, ensuring that it is not deleted or damaged Availability of data: data must be available at all times, so that anyone with authorization can access the information whenever necessary VEEAM'S ROLETo protect this data, software solutions like Veeam Backup & Replication are crucial because they help to achieve the three mentioned cardinal principles of information security.Specifically, Veeam allows us to:create backups and repl

7415
Dynamic
4 months ago
Iams3le
Iams3leVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Active Directory Recovery: How to perform Instant Recovery

Since AD Recovery is not a routine operation performed daily, many of us lack experience with it. This is evident in the article below.​​​ Recently, my lab environments have been repeatedly restarting due to a faulty switch. After extensive research to resolve this issue before performing VM recovery, I discovered that the Hyper-V host was experiencing unplanned restarts. This can cause the virtual hard disks connected to a virtual IDE controller to become inconsistent if they are being used by virtual machines.According to Microsoft, when you virtualise your domain controller (DC) on a Hyper-V host server, a crash or power outage on the Hyper-V host can lead to several issues. The Active Directory database may become corrupted, or the virtual machine may fail to start, resulting in an error message like the one shown below.Troubleshoot via DSRMDSRM (Directory Services Repair Mode or Directory Services Restore Mode in versions prior to Windows Server 2012) is a special boot mode for Wi

52910
Iams3le
4 months ago
Cassandra Faris
Cassandra FarisProduct Strategy
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
An Intro to Backing Up Azure Cosmos DB

Data drives organizations. In today’s environment, it’s crucial to safeguard your data’s accessibility, integrity, and resiliency. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service provided by Microsoft. It offers high availability, low latency, and automatic scaling, making it an excellent choice for storing and managing large amounts of data. However, with any database, it’s important to have an effective backup strategy to safeguard against any unforeseen events. In this post, we’ll cover what Cosmos DB does, why it’s important to back it up, and suggest some best practices and guidelines for creating robust backups.There are several reasons that you might need a backup plan for Cosmos DB. In the event of data compromise, corruption, or deletion, a backup provides protection. A backup also provides disaster recovery in the event of a natural disaster or ransomware attack.  In some cases, for instance in the medical and financial industries, compliance or regula

990
Cassandra Faris
4 months ago
SSimpson
SSimpsonComes here often
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
They say cash is King, is tape the king of Backups.

In a time of cloud computing tape storage might seem like a Prehistoric Dinosaur. But, for organizations that prioritize data security it’s a critical tool. One of the reasons is its ability to provide the only true airgap for data. With weekly Ransomware attack in news, it really got me thinking that if some of these organization had done a tape backup, they may have been back online much quicker, many of these attacks affect the backup files as well. And with Veeam you can easily backup a copy of your data to tape. There are several reasons why tape is best in class to protect your data let’s review few.1. IsolationAn airgap is a measure where a device or network is physically disconnected from other networks, particularly those connected to the internet. Tape excels at this because it is offline when not in use. Unlike disk that remains connected to the network, tape can physically be moved and stored in a secure, location.2. DurabilityModern tape media can reliably store data for u

866
dloseke
4 months ago
Matt Crape
Matt CrapeNot a newbie anymore
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Navigating Your Recovery During a Global IT Outage

It was hard to miss the global IT outage on July 19th—it likely affected many of us in some form, whether services were unavailable or you were responsible for getting those systems up and running. In the face of an emergency, we sometimes look for the quickest way to get our systems back up and running, and it can be all too easy to miss some of the options available.With that in mind, I wanted to provide some quick suggestions in addition to a list of recovery options available to Veeam customers.Recovery OptionsBefore I dive into recovery options, I want to provide some high-level advice and takeaways:If a full VM restore is required, Quick Rollback is a feature you should consider. This will leverage Changed Block Tracking, restoring only the required data blocks, meaning a faster recovery time overall. Keep in mind that Veeam Backup & Replication can perform an Instant Recovery to a hypervisor different from the source, particularly to vSphere, Hyper-V, or to Nutanix AHV. This

1533
dloseke
4 months ago
NicBackup
NicBackupVeeam Vanguard
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Veeam Agent Recovery Media Boot Integration

Due to recent events, I thought I would share a blog post I wrote a while back on how to add Veeam Recovery ISO to Window’s Boot Menu. This helped us tremendously during the CS outage to quickly gain access to our DC’s.   Veeam Agent Recovery Media Boot Integration During the last Veeam Vanguard/Veeam 100 summit in Prague, Czech Republic part of the summit was “Fun field facts” where attendees presented various topics they found useful for sharing. I presented on how to integrate Veeam Agent into Windows. This will be a short follow-up post on how to incorporate the Veeam Agent Recovery Media into Windows Boot Manager.I started my presentation in Prague with “When it rains, it pours…” and, after being in IT for many years now, that is what happens. Just like Murphey’s Law; so imagine this, you have a physical workload backed up with Veeam (great), and the OS crashes. You need to restore to bare metal as fast as possible. But now you need to create the recovery media first, boot up the

3159
dloseke
4 months ago
JMeixner
JMeixnerVeeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Data Backup Basics XIV: Backup Testing in Realistic Scenarios - Ensuring Comprehensive Recovery Strategies

In the former parts of this series, we have seen the importance of backups is well acknowledged. In the last part was shown that the mere presence of a backup does not guarantee the ability to recover your data - you have to test that the backups are restorable, not corrupted and – for virtual machines – be sure that the backups are bootable.The critical step after you assured all these things lies in testing your recovery abilities under realistic scenarios to ensure they function effectively during actual data recovery situations. This article explores the need of realistic testing scenarios for backups, including the simulation of various failure situations such as hardware failure, ransomware attacks, and the failure of a bigger environment structure – for example an entire data center (DC), to ensure comprehensive recovery strategies.You will see that recovering from a major incident requires more than just backups. You will likely need to provide replacement hardware or an entire

814
Scott
4 months ago
MicoolPaul
MicoolPaulOn the path to Greatness
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Veeam Backup Service Fails to Start – AKA How I broke my lab this time…

 It feels like everyone is always trying so hard to be perfect, I’m certainly not! But I’m happy to learn from and share my mistakes. I was messing about recently with Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator and made some changes to my lab, and all was fine when I shut down. A few days later I fired up the lab again, but my Veeam Backup & Replication server wouldn’t start its core “Veeam Backup Service” service. I over-engineered my response expecting it to be something far more complex than it actually was, and here’s my story. Hour 1: The Service Won’t StartI fired up my Veeam Backup & Replication server, ready to write my next blog post, uh-oh, the service won’t start! I jumped into the logs and couldn’t see anything of any note, really!This was my log, if you don’t load/can’t read images, the final three lines contained the following:[db] Minimal supported database server version is 10.0.1600.22[db] Connecting to SQL Server (CurrentUser=[NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM], ServerInstance=[W

259258
T
4 months ago
Nico Losschaert
Nico LosschaertVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Secondary airgapped backup using tapes

More and more customers are aware of the fact that backups are more and more important than before 😍.The number of impacts by ransomware and hacking makes customers more and more aware of the fact that backups are often their last resort.They understand that they need an airgapped or immutable backup copy.In every conversation with a customer about backups, I talk about the necessity of implementing the 3-2-1-1-0 rule.If you want to know more about that : 3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule | Veeam Community Resource HubIn that context the customers ask me what are the possible options to have a secondary airgapped or immutable backup.They also ask what are the pro’s and con’s of those solutions.As everyone knows, there is no fits-all-solution.The best solution for the customer depends on several factors : The size of the full backups on disk The size of (daily) incrementals on disk The bandwidth of the internet-connection The preference or aversion of a certain solution (cloud vs tape) The

1504
Scott
4 months ago
HunterLAFR
HunterLAFRVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
[Spanish] Object First – OOTBI – Pasos finales para estar «ready»!

Hola,Tras haber realizado un par de entradas, quiero continuar compartiendo con vosotros la configuración final de OOTBI, creación del Repo en nuestro VBR, y una tarea de prueba inmutable.Os dejo aquí las entradas anteriores: Ahora, vamos con el contenido: Ya hemos visto tanto el «unboxing» y también los pasos iniciales para tenerlo todo listo.Ahora vamos a lo «divertido», configuración del Bucket S3, configuración y adición en VBR y primeras impresiones, como siempre, a pantallazos!Accedemos a la GUI de nuestro OOTBI desde la IP del cluster creada en pasos anteriores, y ponemos credenciales, usuario objectfirst, contraseña, la que hayas definido en el proceso de instalación.Precioso Dashboard inicial, con información sencilla y crucial.Vamos a Crear nuestra Key S3, para poder luego crear el BucketAquí la tenemos, guarda bien esta información, Key ID y PasswordYa está creada y listada la keyAhora vemos en el menu lateral de navegación que nos hemos ido al menu S3 BucketsCreamos nuestro

1291
jcolonfzenpr
5 months ago
Madi.Cristil
Madi.CristilCommunity Manager
published in Blogs and Podcasts
Veeam 100 Show - Simplifying Kubernetes: Building Applications Backup Blueprints with Kanister

 Did you miss Episode 8 of the Veeam 100 Show? No worries! You can now catch up on our YouTube playlist. @JonahMay  and I had special guests @Ian_RSA and @Geoff Burke to discuss their Hackathon 2023 project on  Kanister framework for application-level data management in Kubernetes. Watch it now!  Best, Madi 

601
Chris.Childerhose
5 months ago
Link State
Link StateVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
[guide] How to install & Configure Veeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM)& RHEL

A greeting to allI have deployed a POC of OLVM 4 host Hypervisor version 4.5.4-1.0.31.el8, to replace Vmware infrastructure.I am successfully testing the Veeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Red Hat Virtualization 4.1. I enclose a fairly comprehensive guide with the ste by steps of configurationWith ISO version 12.1.2.172 the Ovirt KVM plug-in is already installed.for those who do not have latest version of VBR installed download and install the pluginDownload plug inhttps://www.veeam.com/it/products/downloads.html?ad=top-sub-menuVeeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Red Hat VirtualizationPerform the following Operations   Architecture OverviewArchitecture Overview - Veeam Backup for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Red Hat Virtualization • Virtualization managerVirtualization manager is a Linux-based physical or virtual machine that manages oVirt resources such as VMs, hosts, clusters, storage domains and networks. • Backup serverA backu

13086
Link State
5 months ago
Link State
Link StateVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
[guide] How to install & configure "Veeam App for Splunk" + Splunk Enterprise 9.2.1

Hello everyone & @regnor @Rick Vanover @safiya @Madi.Cristil   I share with the community the guide to the installation of Splunk Enterprise 9.2.1 on the Windwos platform and the related installation and configuration of the powerful new Veeam Splunk App. Veeam App for Splunk key pointsStrategic Convergence: combines veeam's backup solutions with the powerful Splunk data analysis tool, offering an integrated approach to data analysis.Real-time Visibility: Allows users to monitor the status of jobs, provides real-time visibility into backup and restore operations.Performance Optimization: Through in-depth analysis, help identify performance bottlenecks and areas for optimization in backup operations.Enhanced Security:  Includes advanced features of real-time alerts of critical events and audit capabilities to ensure compliance with current industry rules.Empowered Business Continuity: It enables organizations to proactively identify possible risks, optimize pi resetting processes an

8578
Chris.Childerhose
5 months ago
tarik.yenisey
tarik.yeniseyInfluencer
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Veeam User Roles

 Veeam User RolesVeeam Backup & Replication uses a role-based authorization system to manage user access and authorizations. Each role contains a set of permissions that define specific actions that users can perform in the Veeam Backup & Replication console. This gives you more control over your data backup and recovery and prevents unauthorized access.  User Roles in Veeam:Veeam Restore Operator: This role allows users to recover data from backups. Users can browse backups, select recovery points, and restore files or objects to their original location or an alternative location. However, they do not have the authority to create backups, manage backup jobs, or manage user roles.Veeam Backup Operator: This role allows users to create and manage backups. Users can create new backup jobs, change backup settings, run and stop backups, and view backup history. They can also back up and recover virtual machines if Veeam Backup Enterprise Edition is used. However, they do not have t

18596
P
5 months ago
kirststoner12
kirststoner12Product Strategy
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Monitoring Nutanix AHV Backup Policies with Veeam ONE

Veeam ONE helps organizations meet the challenges that come with digital transformation, navigating hypervisors, and meeting the data protection requirements of today’s businesses. It provides insights into backup status, resource usage, SLA Compliance, threat mitigation and observability. By leveraging Veeam ONE’s monitoring and analytics organizations gain complete visibility into their virtual and backup environment.The Veeam Data Platform continues to develop support for a variety of workload types, providing an easy way to protect data whether it resides in virtual, physical or cloud deployments, including enterprise applications and SaaS offerings. However, backup is only one factor when it comes to protecting an organization’s data. Organizations need also to consider how they can leverage security features, orchestrated recovery, and advanced monitoring to stay resilient and protected in today’s digital landscape. As workloads continue to move across platforms, it’s important t

3305
kirststoner12
5 months ago
SteveHeart
SteveHeartVeeam MVP
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Veeam Backup & Replication - Syslog Events - Let's dive deeper

IntroductionAs security operations centers (SOC) manage a daily flood of alerts and logs, the ability to effectively analyze and interpret this log data becomes an essential part of the cybersecurity workflow. Processing and investigating security incidents are the be-all and end-all of any SOC analyst. Before starting an investigation, we must have a common terminology to define attacks and security-related activities and a search that leads us to those activities.In my previous blog post, I demonstrated how log data from VBR can be sent to Elastic via Syslog for evaluation and visualization. Let us take a step back and start with the basics.The BasicsSecurity Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems centralize the collection and analysis of log data across diverse sources, offering features like data aggregation, uniform formatting, pattern detection through correlation, secure log storage, in-depth analysis, and detailed reporting to ensure comprehensive security event manage

5733
coolsport00
5 months ago
MicoolPaul
MicoolPaulOn the path to Greatness
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS & Netplan - Creation & Troubleshooting of Bonded Interfaces

Hi,Whilst I appreciate Netplan isn’t Ubuntu 22.04 specific, I thought I’d note the version in the title for any eventual changes.As the title suggests, I was building a bonded interface for a server recently and was having troubles with Netplan not utilising the configuration properly.For background information, I was trying to create a simple active-backup bonded interface, so that should one NIC fail, another interface should carry on serving traffic. When I’m working with network switches of shall we say, questionable quality, I sometimes prefer utilising a simpler active-backup network resiliency mechanism vs configuring active-active methods that can cause compatibility issues between server OS and switch, especially when you’re playing with 10/25GbE. Ways of Monitoring Interface Failures As a primer, there are two ways of monitoring an interface failure, these are: MII Monitoring:Set with ‘mii-monitor-interval’ within Netplan, MII (Media Independent Interface) is the monitoring o

5821
coolsport00
5 months ago
MicoolPaul
MicoolPaulOn the path to Greatness
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Jakarta Government Ransomware Attack - Learnable Lessons

ICYMI, the Story:On the 20th June, one of the two national datacenters in use by the Indonesian government was attacked, and ransomware deployed.Normally that is a headline in itself, but the story gets worse when you dive into it. This datacenter, housing more than 200 government agencies, had very little in the way of backups. According to an official from Indonesia’s cyber security agency, approximately 98% of the government data stored in the datacenter had not been backed up. (Source: TomsHardware). The government regardless took the stance that they would not pay for the decryption key and would instead manually proceed to working on decrypting & recovering the data, which I don’t doubt would be challenging if at all possible, and the risk to the integrity of the encrypted data is a reality here. In this scenario, the story supposedly has a happy ending, as the ransomware group behind this attack have allegedly apologised and offered a decryption key. Until the Indonesian gov

1184
jos.maliepaard
5 months ago
HunterLAFR
HunterLAFRVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
[Spanish] Object First – OOTBI – Primer arranque y configuración.

Hola! Hace un tiempo recibí mi OOTBI para comenzar a jugar con el,aquí tienes el enlace a mi post inicial:Os dejo aquí la entrada, que me parece mejor tener toda la info a la mano. Object First – OOTBI – Primer arranque y configuración.Tal y como vimos en la entrada anteriorAbrimos la caja y vimos nuestra unidad OOTBI.Ahora, es tiempo de encenderla, conectarnos por remoto a su consola, y realizar la configuración inicial del sistema, acceder a su GUI, y crear nuestro primer Bucket.Vamos…Nos conectamos a la IPMI de OOTBI, para encontrar la IP, yo escanee mi red con Advanced Easy Scanner…El usuario es ADMIN, la contraseña, la que viene escrita en la pestaña del frontal.Pantalla inicial del IPMI, desde aqui, vamos a controlar por remoto y encender nuestro OOTBIBoton rojo PowerPower Ondale!Ahora que está arrancando, nos vamos a la consola remota por HTML5Remote Console, Remote Console, Launch Console.Boom! aquí vemos como bootea nuestro OOTBI Os suena esta ventana? a mi mucho… donde la hab

690
HunterLAFR
5 months ago
Iams3le
Iams3leVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Steps to integrate OOTBI with Veeam Backup and Replication and Perform Backup and Restore

It is worth noting that Object First Out-of-the-Box Immutability (OOTBI) provides true data immutability and is very simple to deploy, as we will see shortly and addresses the issue of slow recovery times that can make ransomware attacks damaging to operations and reputation.I will recommend deploying an OOTBI appliance due to the pervasive nature of cyber-attacks on data protection infrastructure (backup). With OOTBI, you will achieve efficient data recovery, a user-friendly and cost-effective solution that can effectively stop ransomware attacks. As you all know, this storage solution was purposely built for Veeam.Before using this guide, read the following articles below  Please follow the steps below to integrate Object First OOTBI with VBR. You may want to take a look at the original blog post for more information.Create an S3 KeyIn the previous guide, we have discussed the various ways to access Object first OOTBI web interface. Upon login, we will have to create an s3 key. To

2178
Iams3le
5 months ago
coolsport00
coolsport00Veeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Malware Detection - Welcomed Inline Entropy Fixes/Updates!!!

Hello Community! SynopsisI couldn’t wait to get this out to you all. If you’ve been following along my Veeam Malware Detection journey, specifically with Inline Entropy scans, you know I’ve shared it has some shortcomings; although, it’s still a great tool to implement in your environment in my opinion.The post today coincides with my most recent Malware Forensics post on how to work through events you may receive from Veeam. Click below to read it if you like:Since my Forensics post a few weeks ago, Veeam has provided a few updates to its Malware Detection engine. UpdatesThe first update came with the latest Veeam Backup release, v12.1.2. Much of the Malware updates in this release came mostly from Community feedback on the Forums and pertained mostly to the File System Analysis (FSA) engine. I don’t use that engine in my environment, so not sure how well the update has worked with regard to FSA detection, false positives, and exclusions.The 2nd update is specifically for the Inline E

3485
coolsport00
5 months ago
Iams3le
Iams3leVeeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Steps to move Veeam Configuration Database to PostgreSQL Server

In this article, we will learn how to Migrate Veeam Configuration Database to PostgreSQL Server. I am sure you already know what PostgreSQL is. So let me not bore you with this information as some of our peers have already discussed this topic.   By default, PostgreSQL is used with all new installs of Veeam Backup & Replication 12. Existing Veeam Backup & Replication deployments that were upgraded from 11a or older will continue to use Microsoft SQL Server until they are manually migrated to PostgreSQL Why switch to PostgreSQL?Migrating Veeam Backup and Replication from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to PostgreSQL is driven by various reasons. Below are some common reasons to consider such a migrationCost saving: If you prioritize cost savings, choosing PostgreSQL for your database needs is an excellent option. It is an open-source database engine that is completely free to use, even for commercial purposes, under the PostgreSQL license.Mitigate Vendor Lockin: Migrating to Po

39599
G
5 months ago
coolsport00
coolsport00Veeam Legend
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Transfer Hardened Repository & Associated Jobs to new Veeam Server

Hello Community! I am in the middle of modifying my Backup/DR environment →  adding infrastructure, upgrading VBR servers, etc, etc...basically a refresh cycle as it were. One of my VBR Servers is used for DR purposes using Veeam Replication. I created a new server for it on the newest server OS (2022) and did a Configuration Backup migration. This was the first time I performed a DB migration and was pleasantly surprised by the ease of this task. Well done Veeam! As for my other VBR server, I’m not wanting to do a DB migration. I’m going to recreate most everything from scratch for various reasons. But, out of just under 30 jobs I have on this server, I do want to retain 7 of them. Sadly, as some of you know based off a Hub post from a yr or so ago by @shawnl :..exporting Jobs isn’t really possible. I really would like a Backup/Copy Job export function in the Console personally. Anybody else concur this would be a useful feature add?But, I digress. My main purpose here is to provide t

72312
coolsport00
5 months ago
D
DebanjanNew Here
posted in Blogs and Podcasts
Common Q&A- Where SAP on Oracle Plug-in cannot be used for SAP running with Oracle Database

This blog intend to assist SAs/SEs whose customers wants SAP integration(with Oracle databases) in OS platform like Windows, AIX etc. Q1. Customer’s SAP Environment is running on AIX or Windows with Oracle database as backend. Which solution should be proposed?A1. As there is no SAP on Oracle Plug-in for windows or AIX, we must utilize the Oracle RMAN Plug-in such cases.Ask the customer if he wants to utilize the advanced features of RMAN and can work independently without Brtools integration.If there are strict integration needed with Brtools, refer the Q&A in the following sections. Q2.Customer need strict integration with Brtools in such environments. How can this be integrated?A2. Brtools can be integrated with Oracle RMAN in the following waya. Ask the SAP Admin for the location of init<SID>.sap. From Oracle 12 onwards, it can usually found in /oracle/<SID>/sapprof/ b. Take the backup of the init<SID>.sap file c. Edit the file and configure the following para

1433
J
5 months ago

Badge winners

  • Veeam University Pro
    Dossinghas earned the badge Veeam University Pro
  • Veeam University Pro
    Arun Dashas earned the badge Veeam University Pro
  • Veeam University Pro
    AdemA.has earned the badge Veeam University Pro
  • Active VUG Member
    AndrePuliahas earned the badge Active VUG Member
  • Veeam University Pro
    EskBackupGuyhas earned the badge Veeam University Pro
Show all badges
Terms & Conditions