CentOS comes with a firewall that blocks most traffic by default (everything except SSH and ICMP.) You need to allow HTTP through the firewall. Two ways of doing this:
Run system-config-firewall, go Customize, but a "*" beside "WWW (HTTP)" in the list, then Close, then OK, then Yes
Run these commands from the shell:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
service iptables save
But why not leave a voicemail? If I were in his shoes, I'd leave a voicemail. And/or e-mail. And if for some reason I couldn't leave a voicemail/e-mail, I'd probably call the company's general phone # and talk to a secretary or some other live person (sales lines are usually a good route to find a live person) and make sure they relay my message to the person I'm supposed to be interviewing with.
To me it's a bit unprofessional to not leave a message. I could forgive having to delay an appointment, but I don't see how there was no way to leave a message (even if it was 5 minutes before 3PM.) Unless your voicemail system was down?
@Dashrender said:
oh, I consider myself lucky then. Other than waiting for a call back, the 3 calls I've ever made have all been extremely pleasant and easy - well as pleasant as any situation can be when you're opening a MS support ticket
I'd say so. 10+ years ago, Microsoft support calls were a good experience (and cheaper). In the last 5 years or so, they've become terrible. The last one I made was nothing but a waste of time and they refunded my money; every time I gave the guy details about the issue, he would say he'd have to go talk to his manager and call me back the next day.
Hello Everyone,
I heard about ML yesterday from some guys on the “other community”. It looks quite promising and looking forward to seeing it grow.
I'm from Ontario, Canada (Toronto/Niagara area) and spend my days as the IT “Superman” for a mid-sized manufacturing company in the argicultural industry.
One of the ways we encourage people to submit tickets, besides reminding them about it when they phone/e-mail/walk-over-and-interrupt us, is we more or less drop everything to deal with issues submitted via tickets. We accept/assign the issue as soon as someone reads it (which is usually within 5 minutes during business hours, rarely more than 15 mins.) If we're working on a project, or something that wasn't submitted via ticket, we'll stop that to address the ticket. If it's a relatively simple issue we will deal with it right away. If it it's more involved, we'll reply and indicate what we'll be doing to address it and when.
On the other hard, if someone e-mails us we generally take our sweet time replying (e.g. after lunch, end of the day, next morning.) Phone calls are usually responded to with "we'll call you back", unless it's some sort of a legitamit "system down/I can't do my work because this thing is broken" call. We also make hints like "Ok, I just have to finish fixing this ticket from Joe then I'll come look at it"
If you're not worried about losing any data on the drive and just want to wipe the GPT table so you can start over from scratch, run these two commands:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=512 count=2
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=512 count=2 seek=$(($(blockdev --getsz /dev/disk2) - 2))
The first one wipes the GPT table from the beginning of the disk. The second one wipes the backup copy from the end of the disk. GPT keeps two copies, in case one gets corrupted, so you have to wipe both.
How does an external drive start being used as shared storage? I'm assuming it's not mirrored? If not mirrored, you're just asking for trouble (and creating extra work for yourself when it fails)
Sounds like that needs to get replaced as soon as possible. Something with mirroring. Even a consumer-grade NAS is probably better than whatever you currently have. If you're really pinched for capital, use a PC with two large hard drives and install FreeNAS (that would be better than the consumer-grade NAS)
@Bill-Kindle said:
How well does it work with other software. Lets say I had another app I wanted to push, like Office or some other app?
It works quite well. We use it with a few pieces of software that PDQ doesn't pre-package (GoodSync, ScreenConnect, Sonicwall VPN Client, Scan to PDF, PDF Split & Merge) and it handles them all. The nice thing with PDQ is you can do scripting as part of the deploying, which is particularly useful for software that requires you to uninstall before installing the upgrade. We also use that feature for copying configuration files and changing registry settings after installation.
In PDQ we have a "New Workstation Setup" package that deploys all the packages in one shot. It has made deploying new workstations (and reinstalling existing ones) so much easier; join it to the domain, add it to the security groups, deploy software in PDQ, run Windows Updates, and it's done.
@thanksaj said:
I love that Chrome has the sync feature with my bookmarks especially.
Firefox has that too .. and has it for quite a few years. Plus the data is encrypted in your browser before transmission, so they can't access it; something I have my doubts that Chrome does (they likely transmit it over HTTPS but I'm betting Google sees all your browser data)
I know Firefox has updated significantly over the years but they still feel behind, in my opinion.
What are they behind on?
This isn't me talking as a fanboy. Just sharing an experience.
If you support your statements with examples/facts, they will be less fanboyish.
The hospitals around here all have regular PCs on carts with Saran Wrap taped over the keyboards.
Maybe look for some used laptops? Something on ebay, kijiji, etc? You should be able to find something decent for $200.
Another terrible article from Phoronix. He doesn't explain his point; what exactly does he think VirtualBox needs to be adding? He needs to take a course in critical thinking.
VirtualBox seems to do everything you would need on a desktop virtual environment. I can't think of a single thing that's missing. USB device pass-through works great. It does accelerated graphics, shared folders from the host, configurable guest networking, snapshots. If you need additional features (e.g. performance monitoring, backups, HA) you probably should be using a server platform.
I always take his stuff with a grain of salt, especially his performance measurements. There's been many times he does a performance comparison but doesn't update one of the systems with the latest version (e.g. his Xen vs KVM article a few years ago; read the comments for details .. there was another article where he did the same thing with Ubuntu vs Fedora or something)
It's always best practice to disable root login over SSH, especially from the Internet; use su or sudo for root access. Another good practice is to disable password-based authentication; only use keys with a passphrase. The setup you're doing here is useful for allowing scripted/automated connections between machines (e.g. for backups, scheduled tasks, etc) but they should be accounts with limited access, not root. You should be creating layers that make it difficult for someone to gain access to your systems; root keys with no passphrase means you're solely relying on that one strong password (which is one keylogger away from being defeated.)
But are they using SQRL or just their own thing with a similar concept? Seems like it's their own thing with their own app?
The whole concept with SQRL is that there is no username/password. All the site knows about you is your public key, which is what's being authenticated. The site can then link that public key to an account, profile, username for posting on forums, etc.
@Dashrender said:
oh, I consider myself lucky then. Other than waiting for a call back, the 3 calls I've ever made have all been extremely pleasant and easy - well as pleasant as any situation can be when you're opening a MS support ticket
I'd say so. 10+ years ago, Microsoft support calls were a good experience (and cheaper). In the last 5 years or so, they've become terrible. The last one I made was nothing but a waste of time and they refunded my money; every time I gave the guy details about the issue, he would say he'd have to go talk to his manager and call me back the next day.
Think of it like LastPass; all your login credentials are stored in LastPass, and LastPass is what fills in the username/password box for you. However it won't fill out your username/password until you've authenticated yourself it LastPass. You can configure your LastPass session to require re-authentication every time, or every 5 minutes, or every hour, or every day, or whatever you want. So depending on how "secure" you feel your system is, you can choose set the timeout appropriately.
EDIT: I'm referring to the SQRL client stuff; not sure about this LogMeIn thing. Seems kind of sketchy to me; very sparse on details. But the SQRL stuff from Steve Gibson I would trust (which is NOT what this LogMeIn thing is)
The other day I received a generic off-the-shelf "holiday" card from a telecom sales rep with nothing in it other than his business card. No signature or anything, and it's not even like it was a custom printed card for their company. It was so impersonal (and such a change from his buddy-buddy attitude in person, which now really makes him look like a phony) that I feel like crossing him off our list for an upcoming bid.
@thanksaj said:
I love that Chrome has the sync feature with my bookmarks especially.
Firefox has that too .. and has it for quite a few years. Plus the data is encrypted in your browser before transmission, so they can't access it; something I have my doubts that Chrome does (they likely transmit it over HTTPS but I'm betting Google sees all your browser data)
I know Firefox has updated significantly over the years but they still feel behind, in my opinion.
What are they behind on?
This isn't me talking as a fanboy. Just sharing an experience.
If you support your statements with examples/facts, they will be less fanboyish.
How does an external drive start being used as shared storage? I'm assuming it's not mirrored? If not mirrored, you're just asking for trouble (and creating extra work for yourself when it fails)
Sounds like that needs to get replaced as soon as possible. Something with mirroring. Even a consumer-grade NAS is probably better than whatever you currently have. If you're really pinched for capital, use a PC with two large hard drives and install FreeNAS (that would be better than the consumer-grade NAS)
There's quite a few good ones on this list.
ERPnext is a new one for me despite having spent a bunch of time researchin open source ERP/Accounting systems over the last few years. It looks like it could be good.
A couple years ago I spent some of time testing Odoo (called OpenERP at the time) for a distribution company, but ultimately passed it up due to poor documentation, lots of unanswered and concerning issues in their knowledgebase/forums, and extremely poor upgrade paths between versions (no documentation, just pay them consulting fees and provide remote access so they can do it for you.) I just had a hard time recommending it to someone if I couldn't feel confident they would get proper support.
I've recently spent some time vetting xTuple for my day job (manufacturing environment) and they seem quite good. They are a US-based (Virginia) company, which is where all their sales, support, and development is based. They also have a partner network for localized implementations and support. Their documentation is pretty in-depth. Their software was started as an MRP system (with lots of in-depth manufacturing functionality) at the core and they built other ERP functionality around it (as opposed to other ERPs where accounting or CRM or something is their primary focus and other things like inventory/manufacturing is not deeply functional.) They definitely seem like a good choice of a manufacturer or distributor.
TimeTrex is another one I've spent a bit of time reviewing, and although I can't recall to many details about it now, they were still on my list of potential solutions before the project got put on hold.
I'm going to be looking for a basic CRM system for our company soon, so SugarCRM will probably be my first stop.
