Apparently I'm running an Exchange 2007 to Exchange Online staged migration for 1 user...
We upgraded almost a year ago, before I even started working here, but a temp employee just came back and needs access to her email and oh yeah it's on-prem still. Time to learn stuff I shouldn't need to know!
This is how people get a case of the Mondays.
@scottalanmiller said:
@WingCreative said:
2nd dump from Ashley Madison hack is 2x, includes CEO e-mail
Of course the CEO has an account. Who doesn't have an account with their own service to see how it is working?
I think what they mean by "Includes CEO Email" is that the second dump contains the contents of the CEO's inbox.
I feel like I'm overthinking this but I just want to make sure.
I've been asked to find a nice wireless headset for an analog NEC telephone. It has a square RJ in the back labeled "headset". I've never been the one buying headsets for stuff like this before so I want to make sure I do it right without overspending.
I found this Plantronics headset which seems like it would probably work... it's pretty expensive though and I hear Plantronics is kind of a more premium brand for stuff like this.
Are there cheaper wireless headsets out there that are designed to hook right into an analog headset jack, or am I chasing a unicorn here?
PS as I wrote this out, the person who asked me to price this decided to do their own research and sent me a link to some dirt cheap bluetooth headsets. Apparently they forgot that I told them bluetooth wouldn't work with our landlines last week.
In one of those "learn a bunch of new stuff and develop new routines" cycles... This guy is back to being my mascot for now:
I think we're in the last generation of "We NEED MS Office because of its features" and are moving into the age of "We CAN'T use Office because it sucks to work with online and/or it costs way too much" unless Microsoft catches up in a big way soon. Google's successful Chromebook push in the education sector means that there's going to be a significant portion of adults in the next 10-15 years who grew up with effortless online collaboration being standard. Heck, my alma mater switched over to Google Apps for Education about 3 years ago... I joined the IT help desk shortly afterwards, and everyone that mentioned the switch to me was incredibly happy about it.
In comparison, I've tried to get people to use Office Online but all of the apps are just different enough to provide a sort of Uncanny Valley of features and UI that seems to make people anxious to use it. I have to provide training for anyone who needs to use the online version, showing them where things are because it's all almost - but not quite - in the same place as the desktop application. And then there are the small Microsoftisms throughout that bog people down, like the fact that you have to click "edit document" to actually do anything to the document besides look at it. That tiny User Experience glitch in particular has been a pain point for every single person I've trained... and I feel a bit evil telling people to use Office Online instead of Google Docs, which they already know how to use.
I am hoping the bulk of Office 2016's new features focus on improving online collaboration. Based on Windows 10 it appears MS is taking big steps on integrating internet services into the desktop experience, and based on this article that's what they plan to do with Office 2016 as well... but given their current implementation, I'm going to have to see it myself before recommending it to anyone.
If management allows it, I would suggest helping him adjust his status settings so it doesn't broadcast whether or not he's been away from the computer for 5 minutes. Bumping it up to inactive at 30 minutes, away for an hour would probably help ease him into it... but you could also make the limits super high so he has to manually set his status to something besides a generic "online".
At the end of the day, some accommodation might be made but his workplace is shifting to a new form of communication. He will need to deal with it as a workplace annoyance, or find another job. As others mentioned, you could muck around with settings to try and make it impossible to close but there isn't too much point if you're putting a policy in place soon. After that it becomes a policy violation and management's problem if he continues to close out of it.
I also finally killed the spider that has been lurking in my office for the past few days.
Today has been a good day.
Sad - I tried LastPass a while back and ended up preferring KeePass, but I was recommending less tech-savvy people check out LastPass as recently as a month ago. I'm done doing that unless LMI actually responds to the outcry over this purchase in a meaningful way, and I wouldn't bet on that happening.
For one reason or another, something monumentally stupid happened to one of my clients' Vultr instances yesterday that took it down for far too long. When we went into the clients' Vultr console to check on its status, the VPS was stopped with a message that it was down due to some emergency thing and technicians were working on it to bring it back up ASAP. Okay, cool, but I saw that at 4pm and it stayed down until almost 10pm when I submitted a support ticket through the client's account asking for an update on the outage.
Right after submitting the report, the VPS hosting their webserver went from "stopped" to "running". It started responding to pings but wasn't serving the website yet, so I tried viewing the console and got in at first but then got a connection error that kicked me out and kept coming back when I tried to reconnect. Attempting to restart the server through the console was met with an error message stating the server timed out so it couldn't be restarted. I was about to try an SSH session when the website loaded in my browser and seemed to be working fine again. I was able to log in, make a full backup, and download it. Shortly afterwards the support ticket was updated with a message noting that the instance should be back up and running now. The entire time, all of my own VPS instances on my account were running just fine.
I'm glad the server came back up, of course, but I can't shake the suspicion that human error was ultimately responsible for the length of this particular server's outage. Though possibly a coincidence, it is pretty fishy that the server came back up immediately after submitting a ticket after being down for so long. It makes me wonder if the actual outage wasn't that long but someone forgot to flip a switch somewhere to start the server back up... And of course, their SLA is vaguely mentioned in the TOS but not actually laid out anywhere I have found so far... except that you waive your right to it if you don't mention it to them within three days.
Throughout the outage, spinning up a backup from their automated server backup system didn't work, despite me doing exactly the same thing earlier that day on a test server. The original VPS was in LA, and the backup instance was in Seattle, but neither of them were loading the website. Also, the LA node was listed as green with no issues here the entire time.
I'm just glad I'm on good enough terms with the client, and the website is small enough at this point, that it wasn't the gargantuan issue it could have been. Still, you better believe I now have the motivation to learn EC2 hosting and revamp my site backup system. Vultr just went from "awesome" to "not for production, or maybe anything" within the space of a few ridiculous hours.
I've been searching for the words to describe this site in the back of my head since I first saw this thread, but I haven't found anything that truly does this horror justice.
This is like choosing to build one's storefront out of cardboard boxes to cut down on the cost of doing it right. I am just amazed that there is someone in this world that made the decision to buy an ad here... but then again, if this site exists, what isn't possible?
The memory of this website's unfortunate existence will be a morbid comfort the next time I see an article prophesying that web designers & developers are going to go out of business due to the existence of Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.
With all of that said, if this person is actually a troll then they are of course nominated for whatever trolling equivalent there is for the Oscars... the Jimmies?
I think IPFire has an ARM version, but IDS doesn't seem to work.
I've looked into Pi + pfSense before and the general consensus is it won't work and there are no plans to make it work. Here's one of the pfSense forum admins quoting Ian Malcom in the thread about running pfSense on a Pi...
This $299 router from the pfSense store seems to have slightly stronger hardware and comes with pfSense preinstalled.
This is a huge improvement. Elastic IPs have been one of the most valuable (and unique) aspects of AWS EC2 for me, totally removing the DNS hullabaloo from switching servers. Now I can do that without paying for an EC2 instance 
@MattSpeller said:
@WingCreative With the intertubes connected it's not really a big deal (drivers). Unless you work on some hairy old stuff I doubt you'll have any issues.
True, I suppose my specific scenario where I was testing this was pretty rare - On my desktop I use a USB WiFi adapter from before I knew I would get into Linux that only has Windows Drivers, so I need to install the software that lets me use those Windows drivers and have them on the USB stick before I can access the internet. It's dumb.
I could also see this setup coming in handy if you were working on an infected machine where you don't necessarily want it to be connected to the internet, but then again if you're booting into a live USB session to check it out that shouldn't affect you too much so maybe not.
I had to buy a car for the very first time in order to secure my current IT job... a 2004 Mazda 3. It just hit 200k miles a month or so ago, so we'll see what happens now!
I'm looking for a Subaru Forester myself for stuff like camping/road trips, but who knows when that will happen.
I'm cautiously optimistic, heavy on the caution.
They've done a good job with the rest of the plugins so I'll check it out when it's released, but I've really been enjoying offloading email hosting to cloud providers!
@Dashrender said:
@WingCreative said:
I would assume that any legitimate usage of this function would be heavily marketed as a time-saving measure, something like:
"Many of our customers prefer to start off with a fresh install of Windows. We understand that hunting down drivers just to get hardware working after a reinstall is frustrating and time consuming. Now, we're using cutting-edge technology to ensure your computer has a direct line to automatically download the latest drivers even after a complete reinstall of Windows! System administrators: If you'd rather have a completely blank slate upon reinstallation, this option can be disabled in the BIOS."
You don't just spend time and money getting a feature like this set up without some sort of return on your investment, and in an ideal world this would actually be a pretty decent selling point. I would love to be able to do a fresh install without worrying about driver downloads & updates immediately afterwards. It's not a huge thing but it would be nice.
In contrast, Lenovo's implementation got shut down by Microsoft, and was only discovered by someone doing some deep diving into their own system. Otherwise it would have quietly been a thing until they had to patch it out. It was also difficult to disable, implying Lenovo didn't plan on allowing it to be disabled.
This tech isn't for businesses, it's purely for consumers. Businesses have people like you and I do make images that contain all the drivers needed, etc.
The vendors don't need to sell this to consumers, as the consumers won't understand what it means, and I'm sure they won't understand the value. Instead the vendor will use it because it CAN (but might not) help them reduce costs of support.
In the perfect world where companies use technological developments like this correctly, why not have it be for business too?
SMB and nonprofits rarely have imaging processes in place from what I have seen, and are more okay with buying the cheapest workable hardware instead of sticking to a standard hardware deployment.
If you could trust a system like this, you could use the same image across a variety of hardware without setting up and maintaining a driver repository. This would also allow places with mixed hardware to more easily integrate a standard imaging process without spending time finding the right drivers and keeping them up to date.
Instead, it was used like some sort of hidden DRM to ensure Lenovo software persisted when one assumed only Microsoft software would remain. This DRM-like system did not use SSL, allowing anyone sharing your connection the opportunity to intercept and modify the connection and traffic created every boot cycle. Boo to that.
@scottalanmiller said:
2003 Mazda 3 is a nice car.
Mazda was never really on my radar for awesome, long-lasting car manufacturers but they sure are now!
I'm just hoping the previous owner ran it up and down the interstate for most of its miles as the car salesman said... It seems to be in pretty good condition despite the 200k miles, so there's a slight possibility that they were actually telling the truth.
It's a weird time to be alive.
Netflix may be cheaper than cable, and "unlimited minutes" is standard for cell phones instead of being an unbelievable sales pitch nowadays, but a 15 minute ambulance ride can cost $1770 versus $0 thirty years ago.
For me it's not about whether or not we're "entitled" to receive healthcare or whatever. When a large part of my income goes directly to our defense budget in order to build tanks we don't need and ensure other nations don't ruin our lives, I'm left wondering why we can't collectively scrounge up enough to make sure an ambulance ride or getting a bachelor's degree can't do the same thing to someone living paycheck to paycheck.
I'm hoping that 10 years from now, there will either be major changes to the healthcare and educational systems in America or I will be an expat. It doesn't seem right for me to raise my children in one of the few developed countries where either one of these necessities can financially decimate them.
