We should do an episode during the conference!

@dashrender Off the top of my head, it's a sheet of expenses, mileage, taxes, and income.

@restoronixsean I don't think you have enough drinks....

Got into the Ghost Recon Wildlands PVP closed Beta, so gonna be playing that tonight...

@kelly give https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzaM6qs7bgA a listen, I'm in love with that cover.

@bigbear said in What Exactly Is a VPN, Is HTTPS a VPN SAMIT Video:

I love the videos,

I hate that everything is VPN

LOL. It's all VPNs. All the way down.

@manxam said in What Do You Want in a Helpdesk and Ticketing System?:

Proper scheduling! That's one of the major missing pieces for all the less expensive PSAs/ticketing systems. This is about the only thing that ConnectWise does really well:

While in a ticket you can assign a status and then schedule the ticket for either
a) perform this task on this day/time (i.e: you've made arrangements with a user to do X at time Y and it should take Z time to complete)

b) follow-up with the user at this date/time for whatever purpose you deem necessary (i.e. pre-ticket closure email ensuring the issue is resolved to the client's satisfaction)

Exchange / Outlook integration a huge plus...

Also, time tracking via manual entry or start/stop.

Definitely some great ideas in here and also some ideas that are already in place! I like the scheduling concept and will try to put that through product management. As for time tracking this is already in place. It works currently but it is very bare bones where we we're planning on revamping it an approaching it from a (very slightly) different direction.

@travisdh1 said in KVM Poor Man Replication HA:

@matteo-nunziati said in KVM Poor Man Replication HA:

gluster has been choosen upstream and by read hat for their hyperconverged stuff, so it should be ok, even if use it without ovirt seems a bit complex. But it is just a feeling, I never used it, just had a look to the how-tos

Yeah, if you don't break it down it can look like a bear, but it's really not that difficult. I haven't spun up a cluster using it in years, otherwise I'd do a how-to here.

I think that I have one.

@dbeato said in Xen Orchestra: special discount...:

@scottalanmiller yeah still that's only 3 servers or 2 servers with SMB.

Three servers isn't too shabby.

That will affect it a bit. Seven versions newer.

@quixoticjeremy said in What Are You Drinking:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Drinking:

Redds Wicked Apple

Funny, same thing.

Ha

@ccwtech said in Unable to get time to sync on Server 2012 R2 DC:

I'm reading that if it is off only by a few minutes it slowly changes the clock to run faster until it 'catches up'.

Check again in the AM and report back.

Goodnight all.

That's correct.

@wrx7m said in UPS Replacement:

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 really like the Eaton 5PX line myself. Never upgraded the one we had with the network card tho.

@scottalanmiller
Haha

Instagram and Twitter
@dbeato

@JaredBusch : I just wanted to say THANKS for posting all of that FreePBX how-to info. With it I was able to procure a DID, setup an IVR, configure routes, etc. I even managed to configure an inbound route set to go to a DISA (pin protected) for the cell phones!

Your notes were very detailed and a ton of help.

Again, thanks for posting that!

@jmoore said in Certifications for IT SAMIT Video:

No, jahlelin I think, an everquest name, but i don't think i ever posted, I just read constantly. Love the storage, training, and helpdesk categories

Oh okay, that would explain why I had no idea.

@jmoore said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:

Good video. Possibly another video idea, if you want to get into it, is a break down on how you make the decision on what operating system or software to use and how to run the numbers. I hear that a lot and I personally would not know how to do this reliably. Maybe others would not either .

Good idea.

@scottalanmiller
You are entirely correct. The people like that it seems will not even consider anything else and would rather pay big license fees than learn other systems.

@kelly said in What Type of Hypervisor is Hyper-V? SAMIT Video:

The way you pronounce "hypervisor" sounds Irish. #justsayin

That's interesting. Now I wonder how I say it.

@alyragab said in Issabel PBX " Elastix Alternative ":

I think that the purpose of the Issabel is to continue creating the Add On Modules that was supported by Elastix , also it is based on CentOS 7 which will be more reliable than what Elastix 2.5 was.
anyway i think we need to wait till we find Issabel is stable distro and we can depend on it as we did with Elastix.

I assume that they are working form the nearly released Elastix 4 work. That was on CentOS 7 at the end.

So finding a FOSS pbx is the much better alternative, not getting a "flowroute for PBX"?

I've been playing with FusionPBX all day. I do wish Monster UI from a kazoo was built for a single server deployment...

In the web development world, I'm still searching for an adequate workflow for working on other peoples' websites.

In other words, I need to turn any website, hosted on any host, with any number of server configurations, into a dev/staging environment somewhere else for dev/testing. Then convert that back into the live site, and include backups along the way.
But beyond that I need to often download the dev/staging site to my local machine so that local development IDEs can work on the source code better. But the files have to continue to be updated on the staging site. Typically over FTP still.
But not only that, other people might also need to work on staging, so we don't want to overwrite each other. So what is this? Some kind of constant Git-like code merging has to happen at all times.

This kind of workflow is easy enough when you just work on your own site and you picked the host and you run the right tools and software and plugins or whatever. But it absolutely sucks when every job is a different host and different setup and different sized sites. One site might have a gig in pictures. It's not necessary to pull those down anywhere, but sometimes it kinda is.
And other times the client continues updating the live site even if it takes days or weeks to develop the new stuff, and you don't want to copy back the dev work and overwrite the new stuff on the live site!

There are so many little gotchas it's unbelievable, and very hard to make all this work, especially in an automated way. Sometimes it takes me hours to set up a proper dev environment and get all the files copied over. Then you deal with https issues, licensing of plugins that don't want to work on other domains, environment configurations that might have to change for localhost or staging servers but can't be copied back to live. The list goes on and on.

Some kind of ultimate site development workflow tool would be on my wishlist. And it can't involve demanding I move to different hosts, use different CMSes, etc. It has to work around whatever limits might be there.

@dashrender said in Is the CompTIA A+ Certification Right for IT? SAMIT Video:

@scottalanmiller said in Is the CompTIA A+ Certification Right for IT? SAMIT Video:

@dashrender said in Is the CompTIA A+ Certification Right for IT? SAMIT Video:

@scottalanmiller said in Is the CompTIA A+ Certification Right for IT? SAMIT Video:

@dashrender said in Is the CompTIA A+ Certification Right for IT? SAMIT Video:

Not on purpose or anything, but I skipped right over the A+ and studied for and passed the NT 4.0 MCSE as my first certifications.

It's not really skipping it any more than you likely skipped your automotive certification. It's not in the path between "interest" and the MCSE. And the Network+ didn't exist back then, so the MCP was the starter cert in that arena.

Well the job I had at the time was hmmm... install/fix end user PCs, run cabling, move (but not program) phones. We did eventually take over image deployment with a Partition Magic for Win 3.1 and 9x machines.

So, is that bench or IT?

That's bench.

This was my assumption.

I definitely didn't to be in that department for long. At the company, the pay topped out at like $28K for a bench tech.

Move to the LAN department (as it was called - the department that was responsible for the network switches/firewalls/servers) ranged from $40K - $130K. remember this is in NE, 15 years ago, and cost of living is still low compared to a lot of places, but apparently it's moderate compared to where Scott likes to live.

A lot of people do go to bench before going into IT. Too many, I think, that it starts to become an assumption.

@gjacobse said in Final Count Down:

That's where I am right now.