@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Listening to the godfathers of surf music... The Ventures. You're probably not even aware that you've heard them many times before.

I tried to find this post after clicking on something else. Finally! Anyway. Thanks. I do know a lot of their songs, but didn't know it was they who played them.

@black3dynamite said in NextCloud - Updating/Upgrading File Permissions Errors:

setenforce 0

setenforce 0 worked. Thanks, @black3dynamite !

I am a one-man shop and I would not be able to utilize this because it would be inefficient. I could see where this would be great for larger help desks.

I personally love to use live chat (as an end user) to get certain areas of support for things like billing issues or ask some basic questions because I can also be on the phone or do other things while I chat.

Here is a link to what the rest of us missed from VeeamOn 2017 -

https://www.veeam.com/veeamon/product-announcements#announcements-section

@travisdh1 said in [Solved] NextCloud - LDAP/AD Integration: Is anyone using it?:

Good to hear. LDAP integration is on my personal list of things to test.

Yeah, I am going to test it and see how it behaves. I also need to see how to do it when deploying NextCloud on Vultr (if I can ever get a storage instance larger than 125GB; they keep selling out of them).

Hello everyone.

I am considering SSO for our SMB. We currently have about 75 employees with AD accounts. We have Adobe Acrobat Standard/Pro/CreativeCloud subscriptions, Office 365 Pro Plus (I hope to move our e-mail services here soon) and will be adding some other services sooner or later.

Obviously, compatibility/support is a concern but I would like to see what others are using.

I started using the hosted version. One, because it was cheaper and two, because I needed something sooner than later and didn't have time to deploy and get it going. I confirmed that I can move the data out and host myself in the future.

I like it overall but some of the importing has proven to be flaky when grabbing csv files. Sometimes the header doesn't really apply and I will have to make a small adjustment and then reimport. I am still in the process of adding assets but I like it overall. I also use SpiceWorks reports and verify against known good data as I import the csvs.

You have the option to skip that part and "set up later".

I have used screenconnect for about 2 years. If you need to remote in via an Android device, make sure you test out their app. It leaves a lot to be desired. The mouse control sucked for the majority of my time using it, then several months ago, the mouse functionality just disappeared and didn't work at all. They finally "corrected" it last month(?) and now it just sucks again.

I used to use LMI and would constantly remote in to do maintenance from my phone. I dropped them because of their rising prices and security concerns. Now, with screenconnect, I don't even bother because the app is that frustrating.

This was on both a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 on KitKat and Marshmallow and my Samsung Galaxy S8+ on Nougat.

That being said, if you are just using a laptop or desktop, it is really nice. I am using the hosted version and only had one access issue in April when WebRoot went rogue and it affected their servers.

@jmoore said in Decision on Remote Support Tool- ScreenConnect:

We use DameWare here and it works great. You should like it. Using PDQ for deployment also and we have been happy with it.

For internal clients, I use dameware remote. I have had it since version 8 or 9 (12 is current). It works 99.9% of the time but the interface is really dated. Think Windows XP. You can pass-through creds so you don't have to manually login just to connect (once connected you have to login, at least that is the way I have to do it). I can't figure out how to standardize the interface. Some systems I connect to, will have the multi-monitor toolbar floating on some other section of my screen and others will have it integrated. Some will have the session windowed and others with the whole window floating with a floating toolbar.

I also use PDQ deploy. I was using the free version for about a year, then I really needed to have some of the functionality of the enterprise version so I finally broke down. It saves an amazing amount of time and once you start building the multiple step deployments, you can really save some time and hassle. I still use a software deployment GPO for things that I want to automatically happen when the system boots and when it has an MSI. But if it is an exe or involves some sort of filecopy or other script, a schedule, several steps that can be automated, I have started using PDQ Deploy.

I would love to use Vultr for this but they have been sold out of storage instances for months. I check at least once a day most days. Every once in awhile, they will have a 125GB(?) instance pop up but that isn't enough.

@jaredbusch Thanks for the steps. Do you know if you are able to dynamically expand the block storage?

Thanks. I knew it was Type 1 but I haven't used it that much. I didn't know how it behaved when installed as the "role" and then converted to a VM. That is pretty interesting.

@scottalanmiller - I see. However, that is still a deal-breaker for me.

I had 4x TrippLite 3U 3000VA units with their SNMP Webcards for network monitoring and control. The webcards were horrible. I always had issues with them locking up, losing certain settings upon reboot/power-cycle (which required them to be physically removed from the chassis) and had to replace several of them. TrippLite support was just as bad as their products. I loved getting woken up by my PRTG alerts at 3 in the morning when it couldn't communicate with those stupid cards.

At the 5-year mark, I finally ditched them in favor of some Eaton 5PX3000RT2U units with the NMS network card. I had already been using 2 of those for over a year without issue for my edge switch rack and am using and am mostly pleased. So I now have 6. I also have some 3rd gen PDUs and EATS 120s. The only thing I don't like about the ATS is that they don't have the ability to control the individual outlets, hence the additional need for a PDU.

I just received a request from our e-commerce manager requesting a 3rd-party VPN/proxy to make his IP change to different geographic locations. He says he wants to "test localization for Google and Amazon".

Is there be a better way to do this?

I ended up going with an upgraded script by truly using powershell.

I found the answer here -
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/936108/how-to-script-ftp-upload-and-download

Essentially this is the script:

$File = "D:\Dev\somefilename.zip"
$ftp = "ftp://username:[email protected]/pub/incoming/somefilename.zip"

"ftp url: $ftp"

$webclient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$uri = New-Object System.Uri($ftp)

"Uploading $File..."

$webclient.UploadFile($uri, $File)

I have been using a Synology NAS (first, an 1812+, currently an 1813+) as a Veeam backup repository for about 5 years and was about to pull the trigger on the Synology DS3617xs until I saw last weeks' Veeam Community Forums Digest. If you aren't familiar with it, Anton Gostev (Vice President, Product Management at Veeam Software) sends a brief weekly message about things that mostly relate to Veeam, VMware and Hyper-V but also other things that he finds interesting. Anyway, he mentioned a QNAP data corruption issue and how low end NAS devices are not recommended. Excerpt here:

"Here's one more nail into the coffin of low end NAS usage > QNAP critical data corruption. Indeed, we had quite a few customers impacted by this issue – we just could not "separate" this particular one from a bunch of other issues causing corrupted backups with this sort of devices. As I keep repeating at my breakout sessions, usage of low end NAS is by far the number one reason of corrupt backups and failed recoveries that we're seeing in support. This is why for cheap backup targets, we've always been recommending using a physical Windows or Linux server with a bunch of disks instead."

He was referencing this - https://www.crn.com.au/news/qnap-keeps-quiet-on-critical-flaw-that-corrupts-data-468923

I started questioning this statement and found many posts by Veeam reps on SW that don't seem to have any qualms with them and in the SMB, Synology (also QNAP and ReadyNAS) are very popular for this use case. I have never experienced an issue with mine except I did have a drive fail when a larger than normal backup occurred and maxed the storage capacity. I replaced the drive and it rebuilt just fine. I am using OBR10 (not RAID5 like the QNAP article mentioned).

I also have external (separate from Veeam) tasks that run copies to an AWS S3 bucket to get the backups offsite almost immediately after the jobs finish. The only one I don't do that with is the "huge" file server, that is currently 2.4TB for a full backup. I also manually copy all backups to USB hard drives every weekday and take them offsite every weeknight. I do this because it would take quite awhile to download all the backups from S3 in the event of a disaster.

Should I reconsider my plan and start looking for an actual server to fill with local storage as my next backup repository?

@grey What is going on over at SW? I just got a beta request for testing version 8 of inventory/desktop.

Also, I will add that I just started using the hosted version of Snipe-IT, so integration there could be helpful.