I just got an ASUS VivoBook Flip 14 two weeks ago for my parents. The Celeron N4020 in it is not very fast, but it is light years ahead of the things @Dashrender is talking about. Thankfully those terri-bad CPUs are a thing of the past now. Performance isn't great, but it's not bad, and the touchscreen is nice.

I've had an HP Chromebook with the 360 degree hinge, and it's been a workhorse that goes for two full days of heavy usage on a single charge. For everyday tasks, that HP @Pete-S listed would be just fine.

@dafyre said in Gaming - What's everyone playing / hosting / looking to play:

I picked up the Final Fantasy 7 Remaake & it's first DLC. It was "on sale", but I went ahead and bit the bullet anyway.

It's definitely a retelling of the game, keeping some of the more important high points. I'm not that far into it yet. But it is definitely worth the money if you're a fan like I am.

I haven't picked it up yet because I just don't have time to play it. I'll be keeping my eye out for when all 3 episodes are released so I can get the whole story-line instead of just 1/3 at a time as well.

@stacksofplates said in Virtual appliances?:

@travisdh1 said in Virtual appliances?:

@stacksofplates What the what?

1. Install Fedora
2. sudo dnf install -y kubernetes
3. `systemctl enable --now podman1

That's all it takes.

Yeah I see you haven't actually done that.

1. Podman is not Kubernetes. Also when you install Kubernetes you don't get a podman1 service (or any type of podman service).
2. When you install Kubernetes that way you don't get a Kubernetes service. You seemingly have to start the kube-proxy, kube-scheduler, kube-controller-manager, kube-api-server, and the kubelet separately.
3. It installs docker, which is deprecated in k8s now. They have switched to using containerd which is pretty much the standard runtime now.

So I'll stick with my original recommendation.

Yep, this is why I need to mess with this stuff in my home lab. I can't even talk about it intelligently yet!

Just took a look at documentation for theopenem.com. Open source, but servers only run on Windows Server I'm not paying that kind of licensing for my lab!

@Pete-S said in Light weight Distro for VMs:

@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:

@Obsolesce said in Light weight Distro for VMs:

@travisdh1 said in Light weight Distro for VMs:

Ubuntu server minimal might work as well, but not as easy to use imo.

What do you find difficult about a minimal Ubuntu install versus Fedora minimal?

Nothing in the installer. It's managing things after install. Having the enabled-sites and available-sites for Apache configs is one example.

I'm not sure I understand what you are thinking about with that one. Debian/ubuntu have tools to enable and disable sites and modules and have had for many years. Do you mean it's harder to use commands than editing configuration files manually?

Also it's actually not obvious at all but the different directories for the apache config files are just include files to make it easier to manage. If you don't like it you can just use one httpd.conf for everything.

I know this, but it's still more complex than Fedora/CentOS where you just have different .conf files. Why add the additional steps? It's not like it would prevent someone from messing up a config file!

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 ah, that looks better. What features does it offer? Their website is pretty scant on details that would make me interested. Including how the communications happens (can we host remotely) and what it does that non-Windows tools don't already do with more maturity (and lower cost.)

I honestly don't know. Someone had mentioned it here on Mangolassi a while back, and I figured I'd take a look at it the other day. I took a look, and dropped it like a hot potato,

@gjacobse said in how to push 3rd party software updates to domain clients?:

I’d go choco. Ninite requires rebuilding the installer (last time I used it) ever time you add/update/remove an application .

Choco is much easier, @JaredBusch uses it if I recall.

It's included in our RMM now (Atera). Really nice when you have someone calling asking for software and can say, "It's now installed, look at your start menu" without missing a beat on the phone.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Imagine a flaky filesystem in this day and age.

@DustinB3403 said in The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream:

@jclambert Yeah we discussed this yesterday here. It's to little to late though for many though as IBM has burnt those bridges.

Yeah, if this was the plan all along, it should have been announced at the same time. What it looks like now is a management panic reaction to public outcry after they've already lost a large percentage of the user base.

Just tried to upgrade an Oracle Cloud Ubuntu LTS to current. Failed to boot

It's nice that there is a free-forever tier, but if current stuff doesn't run, then I don't know how useful it will be.

Among the things I'm thankful for this morning, automatic updates!

Found a great place for dinner about 35 minutes away. The Twisted Olive

@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:

@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:

While it has a place, it's extremely rare that it makes sense.

Yes.
Like when you need a managed Point-to-Point with a one hour SLA to keep your $20m/year business operational from two geographically disparate locations, and both are within the carrier's physical footprint. It allows the CEOs to sleep well at night.

A signed SLA makes me nervous, that 60 minute SLA is probably only "We'll respond within x amount of time" and not actually fix anything until we feel like it. SLAs are generally meant to protect the seller, not the consumer.

We're relaxing and trying to recover after a day spent a Cedar Point. Back in the hotel and looked at my step counter, 18093. A normal day is ~5600.

@Pete-S said in Blind swap / automatic rebuild on linux:

@travisdh1 said in Blind swap / automatic rebuild on linux:

@Pete-S said in Blind swap / automatic rebuild on linux:

I often see that the argument for using hardware raid is to be able to initiate an automatic rebuild by just swapping a faulty drive for a new one.
A lot of people assume that software raid can't do that. But that's incorrect.

Software raid on linux (as in md managed by mdadm) can do the exact the same thing.

It's under policy and partition policy in mdadm.conf. You'll find on the man mdadm.conf page.
The spare-same-slot option would be the one that works the same way as hardware controllers usually do.

I haven't used it myself since I prefer to initiate the rebuild myself. But I wonder if you guys have used it?

I don't think blind swap is about automatic rebuild, that's a given no matter what software/hardware RAID is running. It's more about seeing the light is red instead of green on drive 6, so you know that is the one to replace.

The only example of not having that available, that I can think of, is https://www.45drives.com/

I don't know man.
A typical SMB would have no monitoring and any server would be stuck in a closet somewhere. Nobody would notice any red lights until several months later or until something breaks and then they'd have no clue what to do about it, wouldn't know who to call and wouldn't have any idea if the server even has warranty (it never has). A spare drive wouldn't be available unless it was an old discarded drive left on the shelf from the last time something was replaced.

While probably true, that doesn't really have anything to do with blind swap.

Those SuperMicro chasis look nice, I'll have to check those out!

@Dashrender said in Is Real Estate Actually a Good Investment on Average?:

In looking at it from Scott's point of view - it looks like renting property is almost never worth the investment. So then who are the idiots who are buying these home and renting them to others?

How are these investment groups making any money buying all of these houses and then renting them all - taking all of these putting them under an umbrella and then selling ownership shares in that umbrella... how are they making money?

I know in this area, most of the single-family rental properties were bought as tax write-offs. They're known to always loose money, so we've got slum lords that buy these things and rent them out till they get condemned by the city/county.

@siringo said in VPN hardware suggestions.:

Thanks Scott. These sites don't always have staff, so it'd be good to be able glance at something to make sure everything is still up.

I'll take a look at the Unifi stuff.

If you go unifi, stick to EdgeRouters.

You'll be able to look at them all using UNMS, which also centralizes management. So things like firmware updates are just a button click.

I know Sonicwalls make you pay extra license fees to enable their web management, but you don't have to setup your own controller to do it. You'd have to decide if your time is worth the extra cost of having something ready to go.

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

playing with pfsense software router in Oracle VirtualBox.

Why? What's the goal? It's pretty rare that I would want a software router outside of a lab setting.

It was something I was working on a while ago that just spun back up to start over again.

I've not used a software firewall in decades. In a lab, sure, but not in production. You really always want hardware, but sometimes in the cloud you can't. But typically your cloud provider will provide the firewall in those cases. So it basically never comes up.

well then it's a good thing it was in VM's and not in a production setting .

No, I was explaining why I don't bother playing with the different ones out there - because it's not knowledge I can then apply to production. So while potentially interesting, it's not very valuable IMHO. There was a time when products like pfSense would get put on dedicated hardware because nothing on the market was any good. But today, it's very much a flipped market. Today you get better prices and better products by avoiding that stuff rather than by using it.

Just suggesting that if you are looking to play with something to further your career, pretty much anything else would be better because essentially (not completely) it's a product category without a use case today, making the time spent learning it and researching it lost to you.

Unless you are at a point in your career where there's just nowhere to go so you are no longer learning for the point of career growth Nothing wrong with playing around with tech if you find it fun. Just making sure you understand that knowing every software firewall on the market inside and out won't give you any soft of advantage of someone that just took a nap instead.

I get it, but i'm pretty sure you were the one who told me / gave me a "project" to help me on my learning journey.

I'd completely switch gears and go with VyOS instead if you want something useful for a career. It's what landed me my current position at least.

iPads and iPhones are headaches to keep working reliably on wifi. For whatever reason, Apple devices just do not roam well no matter what settings you change on the device.

The good news is there is a relatively simple fix, turn down the signal strength on any access point that has overlapping signal. It doesn't have to be much, but it means that Apple devices won't try to hold on at all costs to an iffy AP signal.

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@nadnerB said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Slurping coffee #2
Still uncertain if it's Monday today or something else.

It's shaping up to be a Monday, unfortunately. Drink coffee until you can see in triplicate and then go forth and conquer.

Monday for sure. Had an install on my calendar that showed as cancelled to me, but turns out it's still on. Now I'm prepping the stuff and actually going on-site to deliver it.