@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:

@travisdh1 said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:

@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

So installation is not a feature, they're both pretty much the same.

It's a huge feature. That it is built into most OSes, and that we can install with just a command line from Windows (Chocolatey), and in all OSes get auto-updates that "just work"... it's a whopping feature.

That you even have to go somewhere to get MS Office is more work than installing LibreOffice. That's big IT time, over and over again to deal with.

You can install most versions of MS Office with Chocolatey now. Found it the other day and rejoiced that I no longer have to deal with ODT.

Make a thread with instructions!

You are slightly less excited than I was, lol.

@wrcombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just got back from a customer ; They called and said their tablets aren't working. Can't ping or see them online, tablets are showing offline at the device itself.
get to the site, and find out that the Wifi Adapter has been shut off. . .(disabled)
Not a problem right? just turn it back on (enable) right?

Nope - they use a version of Aloha that creates it's own users and permissions for those users.. and the user that was set to auto logon - is a local account and doesn't have permissions to do anything.

I ran net user <username> /active:no
This turns off the auto logon for this user, so that we can login with a different user.. I ran it both as Admin, and local.
Got an access denied (x2) - then was told by my boss that I'm using the wrong command.. because net user is only for over the network commands.... but he couldn't tell me the actual command that he's used. . . which I can't find anythign except net user
but hey what do I know.

Tried enabling the Wifi Adapter with cmd - No luck there access denied.

I laughed my ass off the whole hour drive back with their tablets.

Happy Friday Right?

netplwiz is the GUI tool. I prefer net user

Your boss and co-worker are on a journey of discovery where they find out you cant disable a currently logged in account. At least that's my first guess to what is going on.

I've been using OnlyOffice personally for a couple of years now. It was just better at getting the MS Office formatting correct when I made the switch. Which was a major factor for me while looking for a job.

/tangent Recruiters, do yourselves a favor and stop asking for resumes/CVs in Word format! /tangent

I've used LibreOffice since it was only OpenOffice. Remember when it started as StarOffice, the Sun aquesition, the split to LibreOffice, and now the Apache OpenOffice. More history lesson here. Sun purchased the company, Star Division, in 1999 because buying said company for 59.5 million was cheaper than licensing Microsoft Office for 42,000 employees.

We're about to leave for my birthday celebration. I'm not sure of the itinerary besides hitting The Great Lakes Science Center.

@scottalanmiller said in pi-Hole: Dashboard times out:

@gjacobse said in pi-Hole: Dashboard times out:

@JaredBusch said in pi-Hole: Dashboard times out:

Unless you have the Vultr Firewall in place restriciting access to your home IP or some software firewall running on the instance, you have setup a fucking public DNS server. What else would you expect to happen?

Great - that's an extra $10 a month unless I can run firewalld on the system and be fine.

$10? Should be $3.50 on Vultr

Naw, should be free. What's wrong with the software firewall?

@hobbit666 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Didn't want to start a few thread at the moment,
But i'm hosting a quick site at home on a VM, got a domain and forwarded to my external IP.

The VM is Linux Apache, MariaDB, PHP. But how would people beef up the security.
Stick Nginx in forint on the same server or a separate VM?

I always use a reverse proxy now (that's what putting Nginx between the server and the outside world does).

Either way, same server or separate VM should be ok. I prefer a separate VM, but that's because I already have one setup with gobs of things running through it.

@gjacobse Looks like someone picked up with Webmin where it had been dormant long enough for me to be concerned about it. Guess it's time to take another look.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1
With Using Macruim Reflect - can you also image / restore from network drive? We have a unsustainable model of using external USB drives... and I think there are four different drives with different builds.

Yep, that's why I stuck with Macrium Reflect. Have to manually add the network share, but the option is there. Forget doing 1 a time when I had 26 of the things to prep!

I tried this tonight because I was curious. Man, that is SO much easier to get everything installed and working together.

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Fighting the good GPO fight.

I love,... err hate GPOs.. I need to review a few to understand how things are being deployed / set. (eye roll).

Why do you hate GPOs? I love them!
They are window's version of ansible as far as I know.

Because they are great when they work as designed. and suck when they don't.

Isn't that the case with any management system?

To a point, but GPOs are a pain to manage, especially when just looking at them for the first time. Not nearly so quick to look at and understand like Ansible/Salt

@scottalanmiller said in Website Creation Recommendations:

@JasGot said in Website Creation Recommendations:

@scottalanmiller said in Website Creation Recommendations:

@JasGot said in Website Creation Recommendations:

Lots of places offer wordpress hosting for very low cost. Here's one example:
https://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress/shared-wp-hosting/

They offer hosting, but expect you to be a competent, experienced web master doing your own database management and they never (AFAIK) give you cache access so that you can properly manage your WP instance. I know of no service like that where you get a good site in the end because to do so requires a level of technical integration at the app layer that they can't provide.

For someone who is just starting out, and using it for personal use, it will likely be a perfect stepping stone.

Well, the problem is that it's a much larger step. It's not an impossible step, but it's one that leaves security, performance, management, etc. up to you rather than having it handled. Not a big deal, but often a surprising amount of work for someone who thinks that they are paying for something and finds out that they may actually get nothing for their money. Paying $5/mo for hosting that might be harder to use and far less performant than a $5 VM and getting no support or services for that money is a bit odd, I think. If you are in need of assistance, you will want to receive that assistance. If you aren't, then you'd want to run your own VM and get all the power and flexibility and ease of use that that provides.

The "cPanel" hosts I think are a scam. Harder to use, higher cost, and slower performance than just running your own server. They give the illusion of getting everything managed for you, but my experience is that they actually have so much complexity that they create more work from something that was actually quite easy if you don't use them.

I went down this path convinced that standard web hosting must make sense and learned my lesson. Not a big deal, but I'd say it's the opposite of a stepping stone.

My personal favorite "What are you thinking" "feature" of cPanel is the custom compiling Apache options. Seemed like every time I wanted to change what is normally a basic option within an OS, I had to recompile Apache within cPanel.

Chewy keeps shipping cat litter and treats in the same box, with well-known consequences for said treats. Getting them to replace things now.

@wscsuperfan said in Hosted DNS questions:

@JaredBusch said in Hosted DNS questions:

@wscsuperfan said in Hosted DNS questions:

Looking at using a hosted DNS service for my domains. Looking mostly at Cloudflare (but open to suggestions).

Cloudflare is the only thing I use for DNS on my domains, and on every customer domain I have control over.

@wscsuperfan said in Hosted DNS questions:

Seems that most of these major hosted DNS providers do not provide Automatic Zone Transfer to setup secondary nameservers at another provider.

What is the need for this? Do you have a need for this level of redundancy?

@wscsuperfan said in Hosted DNS questions:

Seems hit or miss on the providers that provide DNSSEC capability.

Cloudflare supports is.

The only reason I would look for a secondary provider is in the event Cloudflare has an outage. It would then be nice to have a secondary provider.

DNS is already designed to mitigate this. It's what the TTL setting is all about. If you are really concerned that Cloudflare could have an outage, then set a long TTL, and all the other DNS servers will keep that IP address available for a long time even without Cloudflare up.

I do notice that Cloudflare supports DNSSEC, and am leaning towards them. Do you use DNSSEC on your domains?

I use DNSSEC. Mostly because I also use Cloudflare for my domains and DNS, so it's on by default. It doesn't really do much, but when it takes zero effort on my part, why not?

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dustinb3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Writing some simple powershell scripts as the human factor has been to unreliable to do the job correctly.

Time to replace the human with automation.

"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script!"

uh what? or?

That's from an old Dilbert comic strip.

@scottalanmiller said in Chatting About How Service and Support Aren't Just a Checkbox:

Youtube Video

Good enough I sent this to my boss tonight.

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@jimmy9008 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Laughing my ass off at red tape. Get a project. Reach out to specific vendors and get get the pricing and options. List four good options, with a #1 recommendation suitable for us. Get together with the C levels, and get it shot down as 'C' levels want to verify what we actually need from the options (which I did already). C levels spend several weeks in meetings, internally, externally... and come back with the exact same #1 recommendation. Pfft.

So they are IT now?

By all accounts, yes.

@siringo said in Windows Servers Archived onto Linux, suggestions/help pls:

Is it possible to run Proxmox up on an online hoster like Vultr or similar so I can have a look at it. Any suggestions??

You'd need to use a bare metal server. Vultr offers these, but only at $120/month currently.

@danp said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Now that's some funny s*** right there

@AshKetchum said in Windows folder auto sharing:

@JaredBusch said in Windows folder auto sharing:

@AshKetchum said in Windows folder auto sharing:

I noticed my windows 10 machine (domain connected) automatically shares the drives (c$, d$, e$). how to prevent windows from automatically sharing d and e drives?

Those are administration shares. Unless a person has administration rights to the device they’re not accessible.

is there a way to prevent windows to share D and E even to the domain\administrators?

Sure, turn off the sharing. Better get permission from your domain admins tho.

If you are the domain admin, you can always create a GPO to remove the default shares.

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to collect logs from Friday afternoon. Log files for a single day (they rotate nightly) are 1.3GB, they are taking a stupid amount of time to load.

Copy to local machine then cat/grep/ open in notepad++ ?

Basically, yep. In this case VS Code.