@scottalanmiller It's a bit of a no-brainer though I've not watched the vid.

The Cult of the Lowest Common Denominator will win in most cases. There are some niche players out there not a part of the Cult, but one needs to sift through the chaff to find them.

@JasGot Intermedia doesn't' host as far as I know any Exchange Servers through Rackspace.

@scottalanmiller said in December 2022 Maintenance:

Yes, I've been saying this about certain core functionality for a long time. I try to avoid anything in plugins because there's so much fragility there. They are a constant source of problems on products like this.

I upgraded my platform this morning to v2.6.1 and I have no issue with the embed plugin working. It does give a warning on load.

@Fredtx said in SAMIT: Should You Still Be Using Disk Partitions:

In a Windows world, it seems it would be better to create a Storage Space, because it gives you the flexibility to extend the storage instead of having to add/mount another virtual drive if you were to run out of space.

Exactly. Same logic applies universally, always best to have that flexibility on your platform. It has no real overhead, but protects against the unknown.

@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Stop Using Secure Email:

@JaredBusch said in SAMIT: Stop Using Secure Email:

Also, accepting insecure email is different than allowing your organization to send insecure email.

Very true. Accepting things insecurely is better than sending them.

I accept email in any way that it is sent. But all sent email is required to be TLS or it will not send. I have a couple of people that the boss cannot email because of it, as well as one prior customer that is still running an ancient ass GroupWise 6 email server. They email asking for one off support for their routers sometimes.

@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

From that, you've drawn a huge number of untrue assumptions, such as I'm not really IT,

Where did I draw that conclusion? I asked you if you were and you've not said one way or the other. That's all. Repeating that you work for an ISV, whatever that means to you, in no way whatsoever answers the question. Just because an ISV is in no way an IT organization doesn't mean that they don't hire some IT staff internally. I feel like you are saying it to try to tell us you're not in IT, but it doesn't imply that.

Just like working at McDonald's includes both flipping burgers and being a CIO.

ISVs tend to have incredibly small IT needs, in general. But they certainly need IT. As someone that's owned an ISV for a very long time, we certainly have IT. But we don't offer IT, we offer software. But developers need IT support too. As do the office staff, etc.

@DustinB3403 said in Microsoft Finally Deprecated WINS:

@scottalanmiller Finally. . . I have a customer who insists that WINS is as good as it'll ever get. . .

Now maybe I can put their nose into it. .

How many clients even know what it is? Wow.

@scottalanmiller said in Leveraging Zoho Connect:

@Pete-S said in Leveraging Zoho Connect:

So I would disable feeds, groups, channels and ideas from Connect. Streamline it. Use it as a "static" information hub with manuals, links to all apps you use, phone directory (people) and whatever else you might need that is static. Have it setup as the starting page in the browser where applicable.

Trying this, but can't find where to disable.

Try settings on the right top edge.

Should look like this:
d0cf8d16-4fc0-45bb-b09b-eb0d4da5ad7d-image.png

I haven't tried which options can be disabled and which cannot.

But under Apps & Features there are some options:
5ae48811-169d-434a-8cca-7a64dfc9472c-image.png

@scottalanmiller said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Pete-S said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@scottalanmiller said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Pete-S said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Dashrender said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Pete-S said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@scottalanmiller said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

First the command itself, showing gmail settings here by default but obviously fill in with your own details:

Does it work? I thought gmail required OAuth nowadays and you couldn't use plain username & password for authentication anymore.

gmail still allows the creation of app passwords.

OK, then it works for now I guess.

I always cringe when I see MSPs that set up their clients MFPs and other devices using random gmail accounts.

IMHO it's unprofessional and much better to use a real transactional email service for these kinds of applications.

It depends. If it is going out to customers, then it's weird. If it is for purely internal stuff then transactional email doesn't make too much sense. But if it is internal, normally you can just use whatever internal tool you already have.

Typical scenario with gmail is that someone sets up a MFP to use a random gmail address for sending alerts and scanned documents.

When the user scans the document it's often sent to his own email address [email protected]. So primarily internal.

Well, problem is that gmail saves mail sent over SMTP in the sent folder. Which means that the "printer guy", who if often not even an employee, can read all the scanned document that was ever scanned and emailed by logging in to the gmail account he set up.

And of course sent email coming from outside your domains might be flagged as spam. So people scan documents and it doesn't work. I mean the list of problems is long.

Well when lots and lots of companies still demand to only use Gmail already, it's not so weird.

You'd be amazing how often we get people requiring that they stay on Yahoo and AOL addresses for their businesses. I kid you not.

5f34099e-464c-4cd3-a7e3-f7845ca46d05-picardfacepalm.jpg

@scottalanmiller said in Any Experience with BeeLink Mini PCs?:

@gjacobse said in Any Experience with BeeLink Mini PCs?:

@scottalanmiller said in Any Experience with BeeLink Mini PCs?:

@gjacobse said in Any Experience with BeeLink Mini PCs?:

Would any micro form factor pc work? While I would never suggested Lenovo,.. their micro is about that size with 65w power supply... I'd go Dell or ANYONE else over Lenovo!

In theory, but Lenovo is typically 300% or more cost for the same thing. Lenovo we can get in country easily (they are about the only ones), but the cost is absurd. For these, in the US, prices are like $250!

I would never recommend Lenovo - to expensive for the hardware. But - it's what the office uses, I'd go HP before I went Lenovo...Unless it was free...

We've gotten two Lenovo's for free from Lenovo. Both were like $1800+ models. Both died really early. I'm literally diagnosing the dead hardware on one of them right now 😞

Dang- that’s not good. The free I refer to is the: it’s had its life and it’s heading to the trash/ recycling bin. Drive pulled and ‘scrapped’. So it’s already several years old….

The models we are using now are running about $2100 and up.

@Carnival-Boy said in People Fear Change More Than They Actually Hate the Change - SAMIT:

Yeah, time is a big problem with dealing with change. I work in the Microsoft SaaS ERP space and Microsoft release a new version every month and they're constantly changing things and sometimes it feels like a full time job just to keep up with it all. I can lose 15 minutes just trying to find something after they've moved the menus around.

Sometimes I just think "slow down, I can't keep up".

That's a weird thing that I find from Microsoft. They make "staying on the same product" sometimes harder than "switching to a totally different one that feels more familiar to end users."

Office 2007 was the famous example. LibreOffice felt more like O2003 than O2007 did. People wanting to stay with what they knew, changed.

@scottalanmiller

I wonder if your assumptions are correct. They are probably just using gethostbyname() / getaddrinfo() to find the IP and then it's the OS (Windows) that is responsible for the behavior you're seeing.

As I'm sure you know those function are part of socket programming functions of the OS. Based on BSD originally but Microsoft must have added code to deal with netbios, wins and whatever they've been doing since the days of Wfw.

Linux by comparison only deals with name resolution by DNS and manual hosts files. I can't think of anything else right now at least.

@scottalanmiller Weird I haven't see that, that is a new one for me.

@Matthew-Grieve said in How to Backup Patterson Dental EagleSoft Software:

https://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.help.sqlanywhere.12.0.1/dbadmin/da-backup-dbs-5615940.html

SQL Anywhere Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
SQL Anywhere is compatible with the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). You can use VSS to create point-in-time snapshots of entire disk volumes or volume sets and to make copies of files that are open for exclusive use by applications such as the SQL Anywhere database server. VSS is supported on 32-bit Windows XP operating systems and on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2003 and later operating systems, including Windows Vista.

By default, all SQL Anywhere databases can use the VSS service for backups if the SQL Anywhere VSS writer (dbvss12.exe) is running. You can use VSS without the SQL Anywhere VSS writer to back up databases. However, you might need to use the full SQL Anywhere recovery procedures to restore those databases. To prevent a database server from participating in the VSS service, include -vss- when starting the database server. Alternatively, you can use the Service utility (dbsvc) for Windows to specify when the VSS service is started.

How VSS works with SQL Anywhere:

Your backup application sends a command to VSS to take a snapshot.

VSS issues an identify command to the SQL Anywhere VSS writer (dbvss12.exe).

VSS issues a prepare to snapshot command to suspend all transactions and write all modified pages to disk on all databases on all database servers. If transactions are not suspended on a database within 10 seconds, the snapshot might contain uncommitted transactions and full recovery may be necessary.

VSS issues a freeze command to checkpoint and then suspend all activity on all databases on all database servers. Each SQL Anywhere database server waits a maximum of 60 seconds for all databases to suspend all activity. Typically, this process takes a few seconds.

VSS issues a thaw command to the SQL Anywhere VSS writer to resume all transactions on all databases on all database servers.

In rare circumstances, SQL Anywhere might be unable to suspend transactions or complete a checkpoint within the maximum time allowed by VSS. If this occurs, you must use the transaction log file and the full recovery process to recover the backed up database.

We use StorageCraft ShadowProtect with ImageManager to take hourly incrementals of our clients server volumes. Never had any issues.

That's true when you have SQL Anywhere running as a service. But when embedded, there is nowhere for the VSS to link against. Are you sure that this process will work with EagleSoft and their implementation of SQL Anywhere? I know that a full blown SQL Anywhere can do it. But that's not the issue here.

Thank you for the heads up @scottalanmiller