@stacksofplates said in Anybody use Confluence for their project management/todos?:
If you're using Zoho for email, they have a decent basic task system as well.
I do use it personally and for my home business but not in the context I'm talking about.
I'm giving Asana free version a try. If that doesn't cut it I'll just have to spring for yearly Todoist.
@dafyre Looks like your basic list-of-checkboxes.
Can the tasks have subtasks? Can they have a description and extra text/comments added to them, or attachments?
I admin my needs seem to be complex. Or not?
I use the word "todo" but I don't mean one sentence with a checkbox next to it. I'm not making a shopping list. So I do want the extra project management stuff to go along with it like subtasks, organization by folders or projects or clients or whatever term they use.
I do like subtasks to help split up longer tasks. And a good description field for comments and notes. If it can track start and end dates, that's fine. Priority levels, cool, tags, ok, comment stream, nice, attachments handy.
Producteev worked well and it was probably very similar to Asana and those direct competitors. Guess I can try free version of Asana, see what kind of limits I run into.
@jaredbusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
There is a difference between charging $80/hr for 20 minute calls, versus $65/hr working 4 to 7 hours strait.
Actually no.
And she is on site 4-6 a day 2 times a week plus other work form home time.
On average we bill one client 15-20 per week for her work.
For a help desk person? I think I'm missing the bigger picture here. You're talking about MSP and business management of technology right?
For me, at least until I run in bigger circles, my clients tend to be mom-n-pop sites who cringe at a new feature costing more than $100.
That's part of the problem, I need to get a foothold into networks with bigger ticket clients. People who have custom sites that need unique and specialized features.
Any time I run into work and it's just some person with a goofy Wordpress site, they don't have $80/hr for 15 hours weekly. That's for sure!
But to the point. Are you saying you wouldn't bat an eye at hiring a developer to work on a website for $80/hr? And do you realize that general developers can be found on Craigslist for $10/hr? You can definitely penny-pinch in this game if you wanted!
@dafyre said in Anybody use Confluence for their project management/todos?:
@guyinpv said in Anybody use Confluence for their project management/todos?:
Interesting. I've had a BookStack install for some months now, I have a couple posts on here about that.
It did not strike me as something to use for project management and todos. Unless all my todos are just written out in a plain text list which I'm not keen on. I could just open a Word file for that.
I'm actually using my NextCloud install... It's got a couple of nice option. If you want something only at your desk, it's got a Decks plugin -- think Kanban...
If all you want is a Todo list, it has the "Todo" plugin. You can set due dates and stuff and via DAVdroid or OpenTasks, get it on your mobile device.
I have NextCloud, been thinking about the todo plugin. But everything I read on it basically people use it for calendaring. Set all their todos with dates and then CalDAV it into some calendar app.
My needs are less about calendars and dates and more about just having my projects and tasks in some database somewhere.
@jaredbusch said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
$65/hr
Just no.
The billed rate for our part time (primarily helpdesk) person at the lowest rate for any client is $80-$85. Forget their exact rate.
Help for what?
There is a difference between charging $80/hr for 20 minute calls, versus $65/hr working 4 to 7 hours strait.
There are certainly web devs that charge up to $100/hr. And programmers are typically $80 to $200/hr depending on the languages and project.
An agency I work for does charge $100/hr but they get their work by being seen as an agency. So as a simple freelancer, I either need to be a household name in web dev, top of my game, or appear bigger than I am, or something else.
Keep in mind that in the web dev space, I compete with 3rd world countries who charge $10/hr and claim to do all the same stuff.
Heck I'm not saying I'm not worth more. I only started freelancing 2 years ago and started at $40/hr, so I do plan on getting higher, but hourly rates do top out eventually. I have to scale in other ways too. And small towns just don't charge as much as "big city" agencies and corporations.
Interesting. I've had a BookStack install for some months now, I have a couple posts on here about that.
It did not strike me as something to use for project management and todos. Unless all my todos are just written out in a plain text list which I'm not keen on. I could just open a Word file for that.
@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:
Also, it appears since my last post, I had another baby, lol.
You should look into that and verify for sure, LMAO.
Confirmed. I wake up every day with it scratching my face off and biting me.
I'm still on the lookout for a todo manager after Producteev went belly up.
It would be nice if there were any products with a half-decent free plan for a single person, but there just isn't. Most will hit you with some pretty major limits, like no comments on todos, no attachments, no scheduling, no sub-tasks, no labeling. Things that are kind of definitional to what is a task manager.
I then turned to self-hosted products and was really digging in to Confluence. It has some pretty remarkable features for organizing content, or basically, using as a wiki. But I figure I can make it work as a todo/project manager too. And for a one-time payment of $10 for self-hosting, that's not bad.
The one thing that IS bad, is the server requirements. It says it wants a quad core processor and like 6GB of RAM! I don't have any VPS that large, I just wanted to throw it on one my cPanel VPS servers at InMotion. But not if it wants to chew up 6GB of RAM and 4 CPUs!
I found a dozen other various self-hosted projects around Github but these things haven't been touched in years and years. I definitely want something that feels modern and efficient.
The only other project I'm considering is OpenProject.
I'm just very surprised how there can be 900 todo and project management tools out there and none of them fit the needs of a single person with low budget. Even Confluence, it's $10 for up to 10 people, but if you pick more than 10, it suddenly jumps to $1500. Really? Another another popular one Wrike, which I think is really good, forces you to buy 5 people as a minimum, thus starts at like $25/m. That's just no good.
Todoist is pretty nice, and a yearly billing of $30 isn't that bad, but I was hoping for other options to be on the table.
I haven't updated this in a while, this is a fat thread!
I've stuck with freelancing so far, got some good regular clients, working much less in my day job, hopefully will be leaving some time this year for good.
Also, it appears since my last post, I had another baby, lol. This complicates things even more. But also, I noticed after having a 3rd kid, the family needs me as much as the day job does. So many times I have to come home, illnesses, hospital visits, whatever. Working from home would be a huge plus at this point in my life. I need to be more available and set my own schedule more.
The challenging part now is organizing my little business, it's still just me doing everything, and this is already hurting as it pertains to savings and record keeping and taxes and all the junk I have to do that is unpaid time. I know, there are personal assistants that can do this stuff, but I have no extra cash for paying anybody anything yet, not even a tax man. We got hit with over $3000 in taxes due. On one hand this is good cause it shows I had a lot more freelance income this year, but I never tried to calculate for any pretax payments or whatever. There is SO much stuff to keep track of and balance and prepare for.
What I have to do is reverse engineer our income needs and then figure out how to make that. At this point, if I'm charging, say, $65/hr for freelance work, I would have to be billing 6 or 7 hours each weekday to get the income where it needs to be. But I find this goal not very tenable. Freelancing is really hit and miss as far as when there is work to do, and I can only attempt balancing so many active clients.
With 10 clients there can still be two weeks with nothing to do. But if 2 clients have heavy projects and tight deadlines, I'm suddenly swamped. It's very stressful sometimes, there is really no way to just have a nice constant flow of work for a clean 6 hours of billable daily time. Everything is random.
Also, this income will top out eventually. I mean, even if I can bill $65/hr and get 8 hour days, this limits the top end of my income, so I have to scale somehow. I can charge more, which might make finding clients harder. Or I can try to find some flat rate work at much higher amounts. A single $10k job that takes me a month is nice, but can I get one of those a month consistently? Doubtful.
A huge job for $20-$30k without a tight deadline is something I can trickle out over 6 months or the whole year, but where would I find that work if I'm not at the top of my field? These types of clients aren't typically looking for small town freelancers. That isn't really my market.
So basically my challenges are:
So goes the journey!
@scottalanmiller said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
@guyinpv said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
I assume it's also due to inexperienced users doing weird things like messing with the root folder structure.
My configuration has become exactly as yours.
Yes, why are they doing this? Why are things needing to be moved all of the time? That won't work well in any situation, cloud or legacy.
Because they want to use "the cloud" no different than managing files on their local hard drive.
I can explain the nuances till I'm blue in the face but I'll just get commanded to go find "better" tools that have no problems at all.
It's the spoiled attitude of 2018. There is ALWAYS some other choice, some other software, some other company to go use if the one you have isn't working right. Grass is always greener. If this thingy acts weird, there must be another that does all the same things AND doesn't have that problem AND includes even more features AND costs less.
This attitude stinks!
I try to tell people how to use the cloud better. For example don't open a file, make changes, click save, then immediate rename the file then immediately cut it and paste it into a different folder....before the system has had a chance to sync any of those changes in the first place.
Cloud sync always seems to bugger up when you do multiple operations on a file successively.
I know some of this stuff is not NC's fault per se, I mean who knows, maybe the coding actually could be better? But I had hoped to go more than 1 week before people complaining that the system is arbitrary just "doing things" that aren't caused by people. Complaints the desktop sync tool is throwing errors. Complaints of duplicate files created. Complaints that "someone else changed this file but I'm not seeing the changes on my computer."
Maybe all sync tools suffer from this, I don't know. I've only tested about 15 of these things and they all have their issues.
What seems to happen here people mess things up but won't confess, always blaming the technology, "the stupid store just automatically removed everything I added!". The "stupid cloud put my files in the wrong place."
By always shifting blame to the technology, it shifts the blame on me. Then I get those evil-eye stares from the boss "we need these tools to work solid...."
So yes, we have ecommerce software that turns products on an off or deletes products as it wishes. Changes prices without notice, adds/removes stock, all automatically on its own! Imagine that!
Cloud software that simply moves files around as it wills, renames things, makes extra copies and tosses them around. All on its own! Nobody's fault! Imagine that!
We have financial tools that simply remove paid bills, move records into different categories, tag things at random. We have shipping management tools that retags orders, moves around statuses, arbitrarily removes notes and changes assignees.
Amazing all the tech we use has a mind of its own, nobody ever makes mistakes, and it's my fault for choosing such ill behaved software.
All these people need a "public" folder where everybody deals with files.
Then the boss wants a private area for some corporate stuff, payroll, taxes, etc.
But they always find ways to complicate things.
You can build the most advanced toy ever, but if you let in a gang of monkeys, they will poke and prod and pinch and push and pull and yank and tear every possible weak point.
Sometimes these things only make sense to nerds, others just refuse to get it.
@jaredbusch said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
@guyinpv said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
- nobody will ever understand user based permissions I swear! The boss wants some "private" folders for management only, so I created those under her account. But one day she wanted somebody to use the office scanner to archive some PDFs into the folder. Well the scanner used is on a particular computer which doesn't have access to her private folder, of course.
So what did she decided to do you ask? She moved the entire private folder into the public company share folder so that one person could put some scanned PDFs into it from another computer. That was like over 500MB private folder that just got synced to everybody for no reason except to let someone copy some files into it. So much for private!Again, this is not a NC issue. it is a user issue. You have many options to have worked around this issue.
I would have created a new NC user account, and shared only that folder with the new account and then added that second NC account to the NC client on that computer and dropped a shortcut to the folder on the desktop or wherever it was needed.
Yes, that is what WE would have done. But users don't ask permission, they just do random things that make sense to them at the time. Like move a 500MB folder from a private folder into the mass public one just so they can let one person copy some things there.
@jaredbusch said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
@guyinpv said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
- Cut and paste causes issues. This is intermittent. The users report that someone simply cuts a file and then pastes it into a different folder. But after this, everybody else sees the file in both locations still. Like cutting the file didn't actually delete it from the original location or something. Thus we ended up with duplicate files across multiple folders.
Note that moving files between folders, and renaming files, is a very common daily task for organizing things.This is again something we have never seen. User rename things all the time and they never get duplicated.
I would suspect multiple users had something open. There is no shared status as this is a local sync service.
I don't know, because human nature. Everybody blames everybody else, oh no it wasn't MEEEEE that didn't cut a file properly or fat-finger-dragged my double-click and moved one folder into another. It's that darn cloud program, it just does things on its own! Oh yes boss, I KNOW I moved that file, I was sitting right there watching myself! It's gotta be that cloud thing, blame the IT guy!
@jaredbusch said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
@guyinpv said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
- NC seems to forget or starts unchecking synced folders in the desktop interface. I know in the settings there is this thing about "ask for confirmation before synchronizing folders larger than...". I've had to turn that off for everybody or it drops various folders from our system.
But beside that, other top level folders become unchecked. I can't seem to tell the program to just sync ALL things period. So every time someone has a problem, I have to go in and make sure it's set to sync all folders and that the settings to skip large folders hasn't turned itself back on.I have never experienced this ever. I have had ownCloud and then Nextcloud desktop clients installed since ownCloud version 7.
I do always set the settings like this.
Of course I have missed a setting a time or three, and I have still never had older be unchecked without a user unchecking them.
I have the various versions of the desktop client installed on more than 200 machines across various clients.
I assume it's also due to inexperienced users doing weird things like messing with the root folder structure.
My configuration has become exactly as yours.
@jaredbusch said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
@guyinpv said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
- Apparently (not totally verified or tested) we had file name length issues. Reach path character limit in Windows or something? There was a file that one person created just fine, it and synced to the other computers, everybody saw it, but if you tried to open it, Excel said it couldn't find the file, maybe it was deleted or renamed, etc.
When I renamed the file and dropped about 8 chars from the total path length, people could open the file again.This is your problem, not Nextcloud. Plan ahead, there are many ways to get around this. But instead of getting around it, I would clean up all the subfolders that make something get this long.
You likely left NC in the default user folder. So tha tmeans the base path isC:\User\Username\Nextcloud\. You could have useC:\nc\if you wanted.This is simply about not planning things out carefully or not knowing your existing folder structure well enough to plan things out.
That may be true, woulda been nice if NC had warnings or helpful hints about file path lengths. Instead I had to research it like crazy and troubleshoot myself only to find years old github issues about path lengths that appear to have never been solved. It's not like they tell you "here's is how to prepare to run NC, so that you can tell Jared you DID do your research first..." No, you just have to run into mystery problems first and then figure it out later.
We also ran Box from the default user folder and didn't come across this for 2 years. Switch to NC and suddenly everybody wants to create 37 folders deep nesting!
I switched from Box to NextCloud. So far here is what we've run into.
Apparently (not totally verified or tested) we had file name length issues. Reach path character limit in Windows or something? There was a file that one person created just fine, it and synced to the other computers, everybody saw it, but if you tried to open it, Excel said it couldn't find the file, maybe it was deleted or renamed, etc.
When I renamed the file and dropped about 8 chars from the total path length, people could open the file again.
NC seems to forget or starts unchecking synced folders in the desktop interface. I know in the settings there is this thing about "ask for confirmation before synchronizing folders larger than...". I've had to turn that off for everybody or it drops various folders from our system.
But beside that, other top level folders become unchecked. I can't seem to tell the program to just sync ALL things period. So every time someone has a problem, I have to go in and make sure it's set to sync all folders and that the settings to skip large folders hasn't turned itself back on.
Cut and paste causes issues. This is intermittent. The users report that someone simply cuts a file and then pastes it into a different folder. But after this, everybody else sees the file in both locations still. Like cutting the file didn't actually delete it from the original location or something. Thus we ended up with duplicate files across multiple folders.
Note that moving files between folders, and renaming files, is a very common daily task for organizing things.
A user said the NC desktop client was throwing error messages up, she restarted the computer and it was working again.
nobody will ever understand user based permissions I swear! The boss wants some "private" folders for management only, so I created those under her account. But one day she wanted somebody to use the office scanner to archive some PDFs into the folder. Well the scanner used is on a particular computer which doesn't have access to her private folder, of course.
So what did she decided to do you ask? She moved the entire private folder into the public company share folder so that one person could put some scanned PDFs into it from another computer. That was like over 500MB private folder that just got synced to everybody for no reason except to let someone copy some files into it. So much for private!
I am giving up on cloud sync technology. It is still in an infant phase, it confuses everyone, nobody understands the concept of users and sharing, and there is never an end to bizarre sync issues, errors, client bugs and crashes, duplicate files, and other nonsense.
I'm highly considering going back to a local in-office shared network folder.
But even then, stupid computers lose their minds and can't find network drives some days, at random.
Maybe sneakernet still works? I hear USB thumbdrives are all the rage.
@mlnews said in Need to track what PHP script is generating a file on nix:
You can add this manually into the code yourself: http://php.net/manual/en/function.debug-print-backtrace.php
Nice, but where would I call it? So many different plugins and such, would be very hard to implement. But it only gives a backtrace, that doesn't exactly tell me when a function is writing to the file system.
@darek-hamann said in Need to track what PHP script is generating a file on nix:
I do understand the initial intention to get rid of those files by completely eliminating their source. Try this https://wordpress.org/plugins/string-locator/ to search for "/var/tmp/" hardcoded anywhere throughout the Wordpress installation. If not successful at the moment, you might simply automate their deletion with some cron job until you get to know what produces them.
This was the first thing I tried. I searched through the entire themes folder and plugins folder for any reference to 'tmp' and other variations. But no luck.
The problem with WP is that everything is cobbled together from variables and system calls and WP functions. So most likely there is no place where the folder path is selected explicitly where I can search for it in this way.
I'm left with these options then:
VULTR daily backup, only keeps 2. It can only be restored by recreating the entire node, no partial recovery.
A server script to send incremental backups of just the files off to B2 or wherever. These couldn't do full restores of the node, or NC itself.
A server script to do the "official" backup procedure of NC and send off to B2 or wherever. This might be the most flexible and normal solution, but I don't like having to keep so many copies of the entire file store if I can help it. It could be used to restore NC itself in the event the software is hacked or an update screws it up thoroughly (although this would not happen, as I take snapshots before those kinds of updates, I would restore the snapshot instead).
Use my local workstation to pull daily or 2x daily incremental file backups onto our local NAS. This could only be used to find accidentally-deleted files that are not in the NC trash bin but it couldn't restore the server, or NC software directly.
At the end of the day, it's all about the files. If I have to rebuild a VPS and install NC from scratch, so be it, as long as I have the most recent copy of files possible to upload back to it. The second concern is fastest turnaround for people to keep working and use the files. In fact, having the files backed up via a workstation to the NAS is probably the fastest way people can get back to work, because I can just shared the NAS folder internally as I fix everything.
