Best posts made by guyinpv

Fire for moral reason. Lying, cheating, stealing, laziness etc.

If people do those things once, chances are good they will keep doing them. Simply because they were caught once doesn't mean they will never do it again, it means they will try harder to not get caught the same way.

Another one is inability to learn or change. As someone else mentioned, if they make the same mistake and are told about it multiple times and can't stop, that means something. If they show zero ability to get better at anything. I mean, if you work with Excel for 2 years and still don't know how to do some visual design or a use a basic formula for some magic, that's an issue.
For me personally, if I have to use a tool regularly, I've got the user manual downloaded, I'm looking for hints and tricks, and I'm looking to automate repetitive tasks, and I'm occasionally testing alternate tools. I'm watching Youtube videos, or taking online classes. People who are stuck in their ways cannot drive a business forward, they can only plant it securely in place and hold up status quo.

A bad decision, sure. If your tech opens a game server and a bunch of router ports and starts serving torrents for a hacked game off your company server, that's pretty dumb. This shows complete carelessness, not just a lack of some knowledge.

If they can't be bothered to back something up before making a huge change. I understand many things in tech are complicated, and some things potentially have dozens of possible solutions, but the very "basic" stuff like do a backup before a major change, is base level.

On a personal note, I would probably fire butt kissers. These people drive me nuts. They not only butt kiss, but they will throw others under the bus for their own gain, to get an edge with the boss. A little office gossip, a little "just look what she did!"
I'd fire the boss/manager for falling for butt kissing.

@ChrisL said in US Lawmaker States that Privacy Doesn't Matter Because No One Has to Use the Internet:

So I assume that this guy still uses a paper filing system, a full filing cabinet, communicates ONLY via letter or telephone, has never bought anything online, and still drives a covered wagon...

It occurs to me that none of those things are actually secure at all.

Why am I not surprised?

LAN ports on router are completely dead. Lightning or something on the previous Friday (when I wasn't here of course).
So I try to get a few people online using a Verizon passport thingy. One computer got on but another one I plugged in a USB wireless stick (brand new) and after it was just about to connect, BSOD. BSOD every time the USB is plugged in.

I give up on that and head to Best Buy. That's a 10 minute drive, I show up, and they are still closed for another hour.
Staples is closed.
The only one open is OfficeMax. I head there.

I pick out a router and bring the empty box to the counter, but nobody is doing checkout. I wait for their one employee to come over from the printing station, only to find the box I picked is not in stock. I go back and pick a different router, now someone is in front of me. I wait some more. And that one is out of stock too.

Well finally they go in the back to see what the crap they DO have in stock, and luckily they had a newer model and gave me a price match to the one I wanted.

I head back to the office and start installing and all that, then find the port on the switch also blew out. And now our finance person is trying to remote in and can't.

So I sort out a port to use (our switch is completely used up so somebody has to get unplugged).
Then I fix finance computer.
Then I start getting others online and letting the new network through the firewalls.
Then I gotta fix the BSOD computer.

Now finally, three hours after getting here, we're finally online, but looks like I'll be replacing our switch next.

And just how am I supposed to prevent lightning strikes through the network?

Freaking Mondays!

@travisdh1 said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv Did the Synology come with the drives already installed? If so I'd ask support. If they didn't come with the Synology I'd ask the vendor support.

What is the reallocated sector count in the SMART statistics?

It's actually performing the advanced SMART tests right now, at 40% complete. I'll know in a little bit the final details.

@scottalanmiller said in HP Possible pulling a Lenovo with Stealthy spyware?:

@guyinpv said in HP Possible pulling a Lenovo with Stealthy spyware?:

What? People chose to have an HP, they chose to have Windows Updates turned on and automatically load software. Windows updates also gets system tools and drivers, so HP came through it as a driver or something. Obviously Chrome can't get installed through Windows updates, but the HP thing apparently was "that kind" of tool where it can be included as if it were a really important driver or system tool. I don't know how that works.

All this means is that either HP socially engineered Microsoft and/or MS is in on it. MS is the one in the dangerous position here. They either have to throw HP under the bus, or admit that they intentionally deployed spyware through their updates!

This is the most interesting part for me.

Unless I got the story wrong, this came through Windows Updates. And I thought MS only updated MS software, or system drivers through updates. How would HP "spyware" get into Win Updates?

I don't know that faxing is the worst.

I'd say email is to faxing what radio is to ham.

Some day when the world burns and our enemies have destroyed the web, there will be nerds faxing each other over POTS.

What are the current best options for self-hosted file sync?

I have tried both Own and Next in a quick home lab setup and found both to be somewhat buggy and even annoying.

What I need is extreme robustness of the core feature of file syncing, with robust clients on all platforms. Wingdings and feature bloat need not apply.

It's main purpose is to replace needing paid options of other competitors like Box and OneDrive, etc. Most of the syncing is in-office with only a few mobiles or tablets that might want access outside. One computer at another location would connect as well.

So I'm considering Echo for a couple different purposes.

One would be at home, I'd want two, one for living room area and another in my home office. Since Echo has a kind of intercom/walkie-talkie feature, it would be good for voice activated chat or messages or however that works. We have a new born so if the wife is stuck on the couch she could use voice to send me a quick message easily, that sort of thing.

The other purpose would be at my job, at the office. We have 5 employees upstairs and I'm curious about creating some custom skills we can all use, like connect it to a special server for specific commands. For example "Alexa, what are the sales for today" and have it lookup from our store. I can do other kinds of reports and statistics and other fun stuff, if possible.

So the biggest question on my mind is of course security. Obviously all voice commands get sent to Amazon and who knows what kinds of profiles they are building on people.
Can these profiles be erased? If I trash the thing in a year can I make Amazon forget everything it knows about me? That's a big deal I think.

Do you have any fears about it "listening" all the time or sending more data back to Amazon even when not activated by "alexa" or whatever?

These things could either be the biggest AI awesomeness of the century, or the biggest security nightmare on the planet. I don't know. A microphone that's always listening and could potentially be hijacked and used by mother brain or any kind of authorities, governments, hackers, spies, all that tin foil stuff.

Do you feel safe using these things? Whose do you trust the most? Cortana, Alexa, Siri?

The internet never forgets, and that's a scary thing. It's like, in 30 years if you want to run for senate or something, a special committee comes in like "well I mean, it was odd that you looked up the best nude beaches in Spain that one time in 2017".
I hate the idea of spying or storing profile data and histories and such.

Any other thoughts?

Turns out neither of the two drives have a reported bad sector in SMART. The only thing I can see is that disk 2 has SMART value "current_pending_sector" of 1. Apparently this means there was a write or read issue and it will be marked the next time it attempts to be accessed.

As far as I've researched, having 1 pending sector issue is nothing to worry about.

I just wonder why it didn't handle it automatically and further, wonder if it's striping that somehow prevented it from auto-fixed the sector. I may just have to use these drives separately and skip the striping.

@rojoloco said in Is the Echo trustworthy?:

@jaredbusch interesting. I wish there had been a link to the article saying they sent lots of data, I'd like to see their methodology and numbers.

To me, the difference in being trustworthy is based on which devices have built in microphones. I'd wager that those mics can't be disabled, and that's where I draw the line personally. I'm good with typing my searches and keeping private conversation private.

In a document somewhere or another, the open connection to Amazon isn't activated until the keyword is spoken.
So it's always listening but not always sending/recording. It only listens for "alexa" and that opens the phone call to Amazon where the command is sent and analyzed.

The biggest tin foil fear is obviously whether Amazon (or any other middleman) is able to latch on those microphones or send phone calls to Amazon whether you ask it to or not.

What if Amazon decides that other keywords become important and secretly records when those are talked about?

I assume they are not doing that now, but this is one of those cases where it's like, it's so easy to do, it's just there, it's possible. And Murphy's law, if it can happen, then it eventually will. Neither humans nor corporations nor governments can be fully trusted. Especially not with something as tempting as always-on microphones that can record anything going on in any home in the world that has one connected.

And who are the gatekeepers and the watchman? I assume there are plenty of nerds interesting in monitoring outgoing traffic from these things and looking for foul play, but if connections are encrypted and all that? I don't know, who is monitoring the monitor? And who can take down Amazon if there is foul play?

I really want the thing, I'm ready to buy three of them, but the security concerns are overwhelming.

It wouldn't hurt to just turn off RAID, bypass everything, stick in just one drive and try to install to it. Use your newest drive.

If you must RAID, do something simpler and just mirror two newest drives.

It would seem on the surface that XS simply can't configure the way it needs, which means perhaps hardware incompatibility?

If it were me, I feel I have to rule out the RAID and RAID hardware and drives entirely. If a drive works by itself, then try a simple RAID mirror. If that works, try the 10 again with 4 drives. I could be one of the physical drives just isn't matching all the rest in some sense.

Like you said, grasping at straws.

I'm sure there is some open source Alexa-like project out there somewhere. Voice controlled AI we can run on our own in-home servers and train ourselves, all data kept safe under our pillows. And if there is not such a thing, there should be.

@thwr said in Linux: File Colors:

@thwr said in Linux: File Colors:

@guyinpv said in Linux: File Colors:

@thwr said in Linux: File Colors:

@guyinpv said in Linux: File Colors:

PuTTY, CentOS.
I also use Consolas, 14pt text.

Fonts are a client-side thing, the data is plain ASCII/UTF8/whatever

Didn't say it wasn't.
I mentioned PuTTY in Windows. I particularly like Consolas, I also use it for programming.

Didn't mean to offend you, just wanted to clarify. Not everyone here is a Linux guru

OMG, that sounds very SAM-ish...

Here you go.

OH, you said SAM-ish, whoops.

My dad has a big TV but he is about as technical as a house cat. At least the cat can walk across a keyboard and make things happen! (ps my cat once selected all my desktop icons and sent them to recycle bin)

He had a bluray player with apps on it for Netflix and such but it was always buggy, lost login info, disconnected often, lost wifi settings, etc.

I personally have a Roku and that's cool and all but has a ton of apps and not all are free and some require accounts, monthly payments, or pay-as-you-go etc etc.

What I'm looking for is a type of Roku where I am in control of it and I just put a big giant icon on there for netflix and one for youtube and one for physically stored music, videos, and pictures. If the stored files can come from built-in storage would be good, or like a USB drive.

And then I want every other option stripped out and gone. No confusing menus, no extra icons, ads, apps he doesn't own and so on.

What can make this happen?

Your whole team needs to be aware of the changes and important things can't simply be yelling around the office any more.

You need more than one-on-one chat. Your whole company should already be using some kind of chat, if used for nothing more than "heading to lunch" or "I'll be gone tomorrow" type messages. We only used our Skype for stuff like collecting lunch orders for example, but at least it's there.
Slack has the ability to just "be there" with everybody even if not used much. It can be handy for passing files, screenshots, links, groups and DMs.

If Slack is too heavy and email is too whatever and phone texting is too cumbersome, and Skype is too "meh". Then you need something that fits in the middle, like Telegram or What's App.
Telegram is chat but you have desktop, web, and phone clients that can be used. It's not as "big" as Skype or Slack but not as cumbersome as just texting. Plus you don't have the message longevity limits like Slack does. Messages are also encrypted.

Trello is really a project-based tool, which can still come in handy for historical purposed. Put meeting notes there, roadmaps, idea boards, upcoming sales information, whatever. Your remote guy can easily take part in projects via Trello and communications via Telegram, Slack, or Skype, and then of course email.

Your remote guy should have access to the other employees as far as chat, so I wouldn't stick with one-on-one messaging. You never know.

Take a look at Telegram's features and compare to Skype and Slack and even Freshdesk. But chat/messaging tools are not the same category as Trello, that's project management and is compared to tools like Producteev and Asana or even Basecamp.

Lastly, you don't have "control" over the remote person's hours and time per se, so you have to change focus to tasks or goals and benchmarks and projects.
Don't think "how do I know how many hours he works"; think "is he getting work done that satisfies employment."
In other words, is he getting satisfactory work done in reasonable time, versus trying to time track which is only a measurement of time, not work. You might even consider going salaried since time-tracking makes less sense with a remote worker. Unless their job is heavily based on particular hours "doing stuff".

Good luck!

Been watching this one, latest binge.

Youtube Video

At first I didn't care for the acting, but it's grown on me. Also annoying that every character has to invent a different kind of accent. Jared Harris is awesome but I don't know about this weird British slash Chinese accent he's trying to pull.

Overall good story though, can be hard to follow if you don't remember the detailed bits.

So where do these other services fit into the discussion?
Hard to keep track of what is RMM, versus ticketing, versus asset tracking, versus remote control and monitoring, reporting, etc etc.

Any general comments across these others?

http://www.landesk.com/

https://www.continuum.net/products/rmm-software/remote-monitoring-and-management

http://www.n-able.com/products/n-central

https://www.manageengine.com/

http://www.gfi.com/

I've put nodequery on it to monitor resource use, it'll alert me if anything goes above 80%. I'll be curious to see how it behaves as I add the users onto it.

Right now this guy just wants his files recovered.

I can't just copy them from the USB, it's hundreds of gigs and every single file has an appended timestamp on it.

I need the FileHistory system to recovery them.

@MattSpeller

The guy believes he did the Win10 free upgrade. And when I installed Win10 it didn't require a code or activation or any of that, it knew who I was and went through fine.

I can't say about the Win8 question though. The backed up files are over a month old so I guess it's totally possible he did the backup set on Win8 and then upgraded Win10 after that. Maybe this is why it never started backing up new files?

I haven't read anything about Win8/10 not being compatible though.