@stuartjordan said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:
Is there many people using Fusion PBX in production? is that much of a comparison compared to Freepbx? GUI looks slightly nicer than Freepbx.
That's the History of Asterisk. Pretty GUI's, with much less stable/scalable code on the back end 
@stacksofplates said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@john-nicholson said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@stacksofplates There are other costs to GIMP (I've used it, honestly prefer Paint.NET).
Training. There are a bazillion classes, youtube videos, books, and even college courses that include photoshop. GIMP has significantly less available in this realm and while it has some free content it's less than 1% of what is out there for PS.
Sunk Cost software - Photoshop for many is a sunk cost (They own it, have an Adobe subscription for Illustrator or other things you use, their company has paid for it). This also extends into arguments for why you should leave other commercial products when you already have an ELA etc for given software.
Sunk Cost Training - If my staff knows how to use PS or other software, and has 5000 hours of experience with it, it's going to take a while for them to switch to GIMP. Even at 200 hours of lost productivity or slow work to get back up to speed on GIMP, if my labor is at $150 an hour (what I got quoted for a conversion job recently) It's going to cost me 30K to switch to GIMP.
Im not arguing with any of that. What I'm saying is 99.9% of the times I've seen someone say they can't use Linux because they can't use Photoshop they didn't need it. They aren't graphics professionals and rely on stolen/hacked versions of PS to do their work.
If you really need it you really need it, no argument there. But some hipster who "needs" it so he can make a new age poster for his craft beer room doesn't really "need" it.
When I was a storage admin it was pretty much impossible to do your job with Linux. Way too many windows specific dependencies. Even when I carried a MAC I ran Fusion to keep a windows VM for stuff.
Now that I'm at VMware 99% of our stuff is web based internally and we have a SSO portal (Workspace one) that I can sign into once a day and get into anything (even my 401K and external stuff).
Still, I do feel the need for a Full version of outlook (The web version has some issues and workflows are weird for some stuff), OneDrive and other tools to work with my team.
My podcasting and video production stuff (Camtasia, Audio Hijack) lacks anything of reasonable quality on Linux. Also, I collaborate with team members and we use proprietary project file formats for the editing and exporting to MP4 would lose the layering stuff.
I have to use Lync/S4B plugins to get on conference calls with some companies (The web version of this suck horribly).
I used to do a TON of EUC stuff (VDI Architect) and the reality is that on any OS or end user computer project all it takes is a SINGLE application not working for a project to fail.
@scottalanmiller said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@john-nicholson said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@stacksofplates There are other costs to GIMP (I've used it, honestly prefer Paint.NET).
- Training. There are a bazillion classes, youtube videos, books, and even college courses that include photoshop. GIMP has significantly less available in this realm and while it has some free content it's less than 1% of what is out there for PS.
All that matters is that there is one good one, not that there is lots of random stuff. Maybe the stuff out there isn't good, I don't know. But like support or jobs, you only care that there is one for you, not lots that you don't use.
Given the nature of graphics (There are endless amounts of techniques, plugins, designs, workflows) I'm going to disagree with you. This isn't training someone how to change a car filter, this is an art, not a science so while quality does matter, the breath of training is huge.
@stacksofplates There are other costs to GIMP (I've used it, honestly prefer Paint.NET).
Training. There are a bazillion classes, youtube videos, books, and even college courses that include photoshop. GIMP has significantly less available in this realm and while it has some free content it's less than 1% of what is out there for PS.
Sunk Cost software - Photoshop for many is a sunk cost (They own it, have an Adobe subscription for Illustrator or other things you use, their company has paid for it). This also extends into arguments for why you should leave other commercial products when you already have an ELA etc for given software.
Sunk Cost Training - If my staff knows how to use PS or other software, and has 5000 hours of experience with it, it's going to take a while for them to switch to GIMP. Even at 200 hours of lost productivity or slow work to get back up to speed on GIMP, if my labor is at $150 an hour (what I got quoted for a conversion job recently) It's going to cost me 30K to switch to GIMP.
@scottalanmiller What are you using for recording. Selfie iPhone?
@coliver Sounds like you have bad apps?
The only issue I have is Outlook crashes one a day, Skype 4 Buisness is unusable (but that's true on Windows) and Onedrive is a giant turd.
@coliver said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@john-nicholson I find it funny but Linux on the workstation has been much more stable then any of our OSX laptops.
When your best app option is TuxRacer, this doesn't surprise me. I used Linux on the desktop in college because it limited hugely what I could do and that provided more stability than anything.
My OS X laptop hasn't been rebooted in 2 months so I'm not sure what your doing wrong with your mac's but stop doing it!
@Scott - OpenBSD are the guys who like singing funny songs about CARP. For this reason, I like them for firewalls, and if you want Linux on the desktop hate systemD and don't like Debian it's an option?
@scottalanmiller It's OK I got this!
Gentoo - The distro for people who like to beef up 15 year old Honda Civics with fancy lights because blue makes them go faster.
Ubuntu - The distro for people who like artisanal hand crafted coffee and cool backgrounds with each release.
Redhat/CentOS - For Grown ups who just want shit to work.
SuSE - Same as Redhat but for German's and Austrians for some reason.
FreeBSD - For the paranoid
NetBSD - For your weird tin foil hat neighbor who wants to run something on his toaster.
Windows 2000-2008R2 - For someone who likes to click next a lot
Windows 2012R2-2016 - For the people who like writing the longest possible CLI commands (Seriously Powershell!)
MacOSX 1985 - 2009 - HIppies. Damn Dirty Hippies.
Mac OS X 2010 - current - Network and Unix administrators who hated putty, and wanted something as stable as their server to run as their desktop OS.
Linux on Desktop - For masochists who somehow lack my burning hatred for SystemD.
"Large well supported, Linux is cheaper to support well, takes fewer people less time, and Linux has a denser admin to server ratio"
I think in a lot of SMB's they are just well below the threshold for automation on density having any real benefit (they don't need 200 servers!). The efficiencies of scale arguments also carry a lot of weight in other elements of deployment (People with less staff should take more serious getting same day parts support, buying from Tier 1 vendors for added support and validation vs. being their own integrator of solutions etc). Maybe you might add "If you are below the density point for Linux admins and other things making sense then maybe you should be shifting more things to MSP's, SaaS and get rid of the IT position.
The other thing is in large enterprises they often have dozens (or hundreds) of business units and Silo's and IT organizations that effectively push them down to SMB the density of systems. The Federal government and military is a huge example of this.
I do agree it's a huge gap Microsoft has in that they don't bundle support with software licensing (vs. Every other Enterprise vendor). SQL is cheaper than Oracle, but one of them will pick up my calls on Memorial Day while the other will open a ticket take my credit card number and call me back the next day.
Beard, Smug statements, Hawian shirt. UNIX ADMIN DETECTED.
BES is dead, Good is how you make smartphones dumb, and Mobile Iron lacks good training resources and is more complicated than it needs to be.
@stacksofplates I went thru Airwatch SE training a few years back and was blown away at what it could do, and how easy it was compared to everything else I'd used. (Full discloser) Technically my current employer owns Airwatch (The company) but that's a different BU so these days I don't keep up with it too much. AirWatch is licensed either per user or device. There is a hosted option (My recommendation) or an on premises solution (For people like the DoD). Talk to the Airwatch/EUC SE's about that stuff as they know hospital requirements really well and live and breathe all the weird what is supported by what platform. When evaluating any MDM solution ask for references in your industry that you can talk to, and talk to the vendor directly not just resellers. It's too complicated for 3rd parties to keep up with 100%.
@aaronstuder said in KVM Poor Man Replication HA:
Ceph would be a better option
I think Redhat knows why they aren't using it. Its core feature set was high-speed transactional object and not block (the Block have was explicitly not production ready when they acquired it). While it is architecturally better for the block, It's dynamic failure handling is non-existent (Gluster is a bit better here because of the layering it tends to sit on and use of Local RAID which was what RedHat was packaging for HCI). Ceph is the #1 reason I've seen for OpenStack deployments to crash and burn in a disastrous way. With Careful testing, validation, lifecycle control, and prescriptive deployments it's powerful. It's just... Kinda a glass cannon, and you'll see it openly cursed at OpenStack conferences and presentations (with people talking about using CINDER + something commercial like SolidFire etc).
@matteo-nunziati RedHat's building a GUI for this stuff was my understanding. The other thing to be aware of is running bare metal requires you deal with things like Driver/Firmware lifecycle for Drives, Controller Backplanes and work with the OEM on issues like SAS buffering incompatibility, liberal interpretations of the T10 SPEC, or good old SATA tunneling protocol locking an entire PHY because of a SMART poll and crashing the controller. There be dragons in running storage devices in pass thru mode (especially modern flash devices in dense configs). If you go down this route I'd want to have RedHat or SuSE backing me from a support stance.
I deployed it for an HCI cluster (well tried). The issue was it locked read only on files on re-sync operations and certain things (which blew them up). I'm sure it's some ways, but Gluster wasn't designed for VM storage (Neither was Ceph, but it was designed to perform better at writes than gluster). The original core use cases were scaled out file services to get around limitations of scaling of XFS/EXT4 etc and do a little DRAM caching for read/metadata on nodes. It was a poor man's Isilon more than a low latency transactional filer, or general purpose block platform.
The other thing is to be careful with Gluster and quorum. It's REALLY easy to setup. It's also REALLY easy to setup something like what this guy had that was working till it didn't.
@dashrender said in 2FA - when required by your vendors, do you stipend your staff?:
@penguinwrangler said in 2FA - when required by your vendors, do you stipend your staff?:
Why not buy them some cheap Android Tablets. I mean you can pickup some really cheap ones, less than 50 bucks. As long as they are on the wifi then they use those. You have total control over the 2FA devices that way.
Now they are carrying around two devices with them, phone and this tablet.
It's worse than that. The device battery 6 months in last 10 minutes, the screen takes 2 minutes to use because it's some ancient touch screen, the Android release is 4 versions behind. The MDM API's are so crippled you can't get Airwatch or any real MDM solution to work. When you have labor resources that cost $100-500 an hour WTF would you try to save a few $ per person that will cripple their workflow? I've seen so many people try this and fail.
For what it's worth hospitals devices tend to be shared on call devices. My wife's on-call phone is locked down so tight that if she takes 2 steps out side air watch bricks the device till it comes back in the hospital. They use special Android devices that are properly patchable, have the full KNOX API's for air watch to hook, and have extra battery kits and hot docks everywhere.
@dashrender said in 2FA - when required by your vendors, do you stipend your staff?:
Of course calls, like SMS, are totally hackable with SS7 redirects. But again, I'm not controlling these systems.
PCI was on track to get rid of SMS for 2FA, I assume HITECH is also. Why not use an app (VIP is my favorite).
@bigbear I've used the platform for PBX use cases (partially because it was more robust than Asterisk back in the day when I was a VOIP guy). I know a DEV who's done some of the work on the windows builds (Old boss) is why I ask. I know a lot of call center people who've abandoned Asterisk for it.
Surprised you guys never look at FreeSwitch? I know it's aimed more at the carrier voice market but it makes a decent PBX (There are GUI packages). It was designed for multi-tenancy and call centers which are another really nice to have the more advanced feature set.
@texkonc said in Shots for Scott:
Where is that? That place looks awesome!
Bangkok, The Thonglor district Marriott. Back in my old neighborhood where I worked/lived 10 years ago.
I'm in Hua Hin right now as part of the John "Booze/Dive/Party" July Tour. Country #5! Started on the 2nd, and got another 11 days left.
@tim_g said in Microsoft Isn't Crazy:
I actually bought Vista Ultimate, but mostly because it came with a free upgrade/coupon for Windows 7 Ultimate
I got Win7 Ultimate for hosting a launch party at my house.
@scottalanmiller said in Open Source Hypervisors: do we really have them? do we really need them?:
HA-Lizard
HA lizard scares me. DRDB in the hands of people who don't understand it, and deploy it with a SINGLE IP ping for quorum (Stateless, and solo) is a recipe for split brain disaster.
Scale HC3 isn't OpenSource. It and Nutanix are closed source management and storage layers for KVM.