@rjt said in Who do you call for IT assistance:

@scottalanmiller As someone who has had to deal with vendor supplied hardware and software for a medical practice, I have come to firmly believe vendors are the enemy, a $very $very $expensive enemy.

Yup. In some cases, a true enemy. In others, just on the other side of the chess board. It's not always malicious, normally it is not. But their interest are very, very different than ours and their financial responsibilities oppose ours. So they are stuck either being ethical to their employers, or ethical to the people they are paid to convince to do things not in their interest.

If they are true to their employer, they can be ethical across the board. If they try to be good for the customer, they have to be unethical to their employer. A nonsensical situation.

@JaredBusch said in Proxmox pricing:

@stacksofplates said in Proxmox pricing:

but users on your LAN need a link or some way of knowing it exists

Users of the things running on it do not.

If they're interacting with the hypervisor. Not like windows users. But anyone using the hypervisor would. Should have been a little clearer.

@VoIP_n00b said in Contact for FB Support:

I can help. Send me a PM.

Sent. Thanks.

Took another look this morning, and it's fixed. No idea what was going on with my account last week.

@IRJ hrm it didn't when I looked will check again

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel support:

Never heard back from T-Mobile, but calls now connect.

Ain't that always the way.

Full PDF of plan comparison
https://vitalpbx.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ENG_VitalPBX-Plans-Web.pdf

Oh look WP link. Lazy....

@IRJ said in The Receptionist conumdrum:

It's not always true that first level support is useless. Tenable has great support. The guy you chat with is the guy that will work your case. They do everything from chatting, spinning up VMs to test and try to get the same results, analyze diagnostic files, etc.

Elastic is the same way. They have a dedicated developer pair that supports you and since we were DoD we could even get cleared people as support so they could on site visit.

@DustinB3403 said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

Microsoft started pulling Security patches off of their servers after your contract expires but the platform is still supported.

Microsoft no longer provides patches for XP Server 2003 unless you pay them a lot of extra money. It's basically a license with security updates for a fixed interval that can be extended for a ton of money...

@travisdh1 just use the UK for now
https://www.support.hp.com/gb-en/drivers

It works

@scottalanmiller said in What Is Expected of Microsoft Server Support?:

Did they fix something broken with the OS that IT could not have fixed?

There are some quirky poorly documented things that are sometimes need to be done with ESEUTIL, and repairing from corruption, or failed log replays on Exchange and SQL. In theory it's not always Microsofts fault (caused by storage layer issues).

The other issue is driver issues for IO devices. In theory this should be transative (supported by teh OEM who agree's to support your OS). That said OEM's often don't support the free OS's because they don't have joint engineering commitements to fix issues on them.

RedHat has hard commitments from Avago/Broadcom to fix a driver HBA issue if they find it. Having a Server that has a supported OS means they have Avago's commitment to spend hundreds of thousands of engineering time to fix an issue. Redhat will possibly work to mitigate it from their side if possible. Missing the OS vendor in this conversation/effort can make things move slower or stall. Avago and other component manufactoreres will refuse support calls from a customer who bought the device through an OEM so without the OEM listing your OS as supported you are kinda screwed.

(A long time ago) I saw a case where a I/O device had outright buggy silicon, and a driver and OS side workaround was needed to resolve it. This is all the more fun as how the I/O device engineering teams work is they generally refuse to work with a customer directly and require the OS vendor escalate the issue to them.

The argument I'm trying to make is 1) protect olivier from the customers that would abuse the support and 2) make it so that the good customers (big and small) don't get raked over the coals.

Which likely means a per-core cost (or per host* (really doesn't make sense)) and some sort of tiered support plans, like @bnrstnr 4 tickets a year or some such system.

Which is highly effective, cost wise for everyone. Olivier won't get rapped by shitty customers, and customers can up their support level to "Please wipe my ass Tier" if they so choose.

@marcinozga said in Ubiquiti - piss poor customer service:

@dashrender said in Ubiquiti - piss poor customer service:

@marcinozga said in Ubiquiti - piss poor customer service:

@scottalanmiller said in Ubiquiti - piss poor customer service:

You are missing that it's not Ubiquiti causing the problem here. We don't know why different places are listing these products, what we do know is that according to Ubiquiti, they are early release and not eligible for resale.

Do you really think B&H would be selling product that's not officially available?

you didn't buy it from B&H, you got it from NewEgg, So I really wonder, is B&H (no clue who they even are - never heard of them before) just has a page up for pre-sales. Don't really know.

Everything on Ubiquiti's site points that the product is still in beta.
https://i.imgur.com/2FuAW4i.png

I had a quick look at some products here, and only Aircube seems listed on products page. No XG units, no application server, no PRO camera, no application server. If Aircube is still beta, it should be clearly marked as such on main product page, not in forums that are inaccessible without applying for early access.

I agree that it is not as obvious as might be useful. But it is important to understand that this is a universal standard to have products that are not released yet on product pages as if they are released. You can never tell, with any product or any vendor, the status of release in this way. Example Asus - their entire website is advertising products that have not released yet. You can't tell even when year products will release.

I don't like it either, it's a confusing way to let people know about products, but this is how everything works. Unless it explicitly tells you that it has released, you have to find out somewhere else. UBNT at least does have the info, vendors like Asus don't have it at all and leave you guessing until the product line is done and shut down. Sometimes you can never figure out if it ever released at all.

@storageninja said in The argument for official support vs third party support:

@dashrender said in The argument for official support vs third party support:

Same problem for the vendors. If you are dealing with unpatched spares, so are they. Having worked for some of the big ones, I know that their supply chains struggle to get parts, too. Heck, IBM couldn't deliver a server internally in more than six months, imagine how hard it is to get support parts!

Shit like this just blows my mind.

Parts Bins, internal supplies for labs, and customer supply chains are all completely different (well IBM may have been a gong show). Dell and HPE staff can't just go grab something off the line, with Mfg you have to account for the costs and someone gets to pay (and often at a premium to prevent abuse) for those internal servers.

Parts Bins and stocking those are different, and supply chain for a OEM might actually be different in the us than EMEA.

At IBM< we were an external customer, even though we were inside IBM. We showed up just like any external enterprise customer. So their inability to support was universal.

@Dashrender @JaredBusch

Of course that's true - but you have important data on a machine? no backups? or just don't want to deal with restoring the data?

We do have backups done on a regular interval via the help of SaltStack.

again not every situation is similar situation to the usual places you guys work, I work with MSF France as an I.T Supervisor in a hospital, where the users need to be mobile and work in locations at camps offline. and Central Authentication system can do more harm than good, and we have a lot of policies and rules to maneuver around.

trust me Jared you wont be able to survive here. it is way out of your comfort zone with everything ready for you in place and having a big budget for everything. Here I.T budget has to be shared with the Yemeni crisis and you can imagine where will the money will always go to. So we have to live and operate with what we have and do the best with it.

Oh and before suggesting something clever, that you assume I have not thought about already, We cant use cloud services in MSFF.

@gjacobse said in Korora 25 Daily Use:

@scottalanmiller said in Korora 25 Daily Use:

@gjacobse said in Korora 25 Daily Use:

@scottalanmiller said in Korora 25 Daily Use:

Use top and hit "m"

That I like.

Shows Firefox using about 15%MEM

How often are you restarting FF? On Korora I found that it could not be left on for more than one day.

The system as a whole has only been running 1:4:3:00 - I restarted FF this morning after @dafyre made mention of it.

I mentioned the other day that you needed to restart it regularly 😉