Been using Xero for a while. No issues. It works better than QB Online. I tried it.

@EddieJennings said in Where IT Consultants fit between Vendors and Clients: I don't recall saying consultant vs non-consultant, but the responses in the thread have addressed the question of who should interface with a vendor. I feel like I should provide some context for how some vendors operate to get a better idea for the level of vendor involvement and who the vendor wants to work with. Few things.... It depends on the vendor, and who the customer is. For instance, some vendors are 100% channel sales (Datto I think fell in here) and a customer outright can't buy them directly. Most larger vendors DO NOT WANT to talk/sell to smaller customers directly (It's too expensive, as they pay too good of benefits, and too high of compensation to their salespeople to scale down to small accounts that because they only sell their products can't form a meaningful relationship). There typically are 4 "buckets" for products. a. Retail sales for VERY low-value non-complicated sale items that a website can sell. These products don't require sizing assistance or are pretty simple. Think an ethernet patch cable. b. More complicated items on smaller deals that intend to be 100% channeled in sales (You don't want this stuff sold by Amazon as the customer will likely buy the wrong SKU, or screw upsizing). Note, the vendor may offer a direct model but will often have "cannon fodder" class salespeople in this space, and generally will even charge more for going direct. A VAR is your best bet here. Think someone buying 3 servers, or 20 laptops, or a single palo alto firewall for a SMB. all services are going to be VAR partner led when possible beyond post-sales support escalations. Also in these smaller accounts it's expected that the VAR/MSP is more than likely going to know the needs potentially better than the customer does. c. larger enterprise deals where the VAR is still involved but the vendor takes some leadership because the account is big enough to matter, or the vendor wants a strategic presence in this account. The paper may shift to being run by the vendor at the higher end of this, with a small revenue share back to the VAR who brought this deal to them for the life of this deal. Think ELA's, 100 site MLPS circuit deals etc. services might be delivered by either the partner or the vendor at this stage. d. Direct only deals. These are sometimes called "named accounts" and the vendor will 100% run paper directly. A partner of record might get 3% of the deal if they are lucky, or be subcontracted if they are a marque support partner with tons of certifications. Others can comment but sales teams tend to be organized around these different groups Example: Commercial-1 Smallest accounts and people who haven't bought anything in 5 years from you. These are called "Whitespace accounts" and you basically have people trying to get a meeting with hundreds of these in a territory or verticle and seeing if they can find some gold and get people with a low priced entry solution. ALL sales will be inside teams at this scale with VAR's or MSPs type shops doing any in person meetings. Commercial-2 Slightly larger accounts. Might have spent a few thousand, but there isn't a strategic or lucrative relationship. You might have a field team at this point but they will likely cover hundreds of accounts still. Midsized Accounts - Still larger. They will likely have some clue who their account team is, but still rely on a VAR for most day to day stuff. Large Enterprise - Big names you recognize. These accounts will have teams who might have only 5-10 customers. Alignment on this is going to be tied to geograhpy still more than likely. Globals - Account teams will be in some cases 1:1, or if there is a specific industry (Say automakers, or oil gas) you might have a team in a city (like Houston) whose job is to wrangle these guys. The Cxx levels of the vendor likely have strong relationships with these accounts and for a software vendor these accounts could be spending 9 figures at a time, or for hardware companies 10.

I had a similar issue in a workgroup with drives disconnecting. A bunch of Googling brought me to this. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/297684/mapped-drive-connection-to-network-share-may-be-lost That seemed to fix the issue for me.

@Romo said in Smb transfer through IPSec/L2TP VPN get's terminated.: @wrx7m Probably a lot less since during that time nothing else would be running. While currently the whole office was working regularly. Can you manually run the morning job to see what happens?

@Francesco-Provino said in Looking for an effective way to quickly access SMB shares from Fedora: Autofs. I have done some tinkering with Autofs... It's interesting, but it did work. I don't have it set up on anything at the moment though.

@dyasny Yeah no kidding

@emad-r said in Linux As File Server- Break Out From Other Thread: @scottalanmiller said in Linux As File Server- Break Out From Other Thread: @emad-r said in Linux As File Server- Break Out From Other Thread: The only down side to it, that the files will take size on their machine as well as the NC server, thats it. If you can afford this, then this is the way to go. That's purely optional. Not a given. NextCloud can be used with files purely on the server just like with SMB. Huh, how so ? you mean only via web client. If your installing the agent at somepoint it will need to sync the files to your account synced folder. That's one option, but not what I mean. You can map drives to it, too.

@bnrstnr said in Router / AP / Switch for business: ES-24-LITE That's right...

@wrx7m said in SMBv2/v3 Issues on Windows Server 2016: @phlipelder I thought that those files were necessary. I guess I will try to block them as long as it doesn't cause issues on the Mac side. I don't know if they are critical or not. From what I see online files like .DS_Store is just to show metadata to the mac client. This is likely the tag color etc for the Mac Finder, which for me (personally) doesn't matter. But I'm sure it would affect business pretty heavily.

@scottalanmiller said in Find Source of Windows Mapped Drives: @jaredbusch said in Find Source of Windows Mapped Drives: Doing @powershell, you probably need to handle escaping quotes or something is all. Likely https://docs.connectwise.com/ConnectWise_Control_Documentation/Get_started/Host_page/Run_a_command_from_the_Host_page#Use_Powershell

@dbeato said in Can Roaming Profiles be a good idea?: Before Windows 10 to get a symlinknyou couldn’t do it without elevated permissions now is much improved. I use directory junction (/J) instead of directory symbolic link (/D), which requires admin privileges. All I wanted is to create a link from c:\users\user1\Desktop to c:\users\user1\Nextcloud\Desktop. Edit: Now obviously there are more to it than just creating links to have it properly setup.

See the following for ideas as to how you can accomplish what you're seeking to do: https://macmule.com/2011/09/08/how-to-map-drives-printers-based-on-ad-group-membership-on-osx/

@scottalanmiller said in All SMB IT Are Generalists SAMIT Video: @jaredbusch said in All SMB IT Are Generalists SAMIT Video: @scottalanmiller said in All SMB IT Are Generalists SAMIT Video: @jaredbusch said in All SMB IT Are Generalists SAMIT Video: it is about time you got your editor to fix the preload image.. It's kinda random. No, it is not. It never has been. It is only random when you have an editor that cannot read. Which is obviously an issue in and of itself. There is a big old button there to put one of your choice on there. That's not the editor that picks that, that's the poster. And that is manually chosen every time, but only from the three choices, need to have someone make a title pic otherwise. Maybe just need to do that. You are correct that I simply assumed the editor would post it to your channel for you. Seems silly to have to send it back and forth.

@luismc said in Port - How to go about setting up a client to be virtualized?: @dashrender said in Port - How to go about setting up a client to be virtualized?: As for Sharepoint - You don't get that much storage in Sharepoint in O365, so you'll likely be paying for more storage there. Sharepoint also has a number of files per site limit, just something else to watch out for. For future reference to anyone wondering, I spoke to three different O365 reps today and they said the limit has been bumped to 1 million items so we'll be good for a while! That's a bit more!

@Dashrender said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226: @scottalanmiller said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226: @dafyre said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226: @scottalanmiller said in SMBv1 is removed in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16226: Not quite the same as NFS 3 and NFS 4, but we intentionally use NFS 3 much of the time today even though NFS 4 is old. This may be good for a fork...but why hang on to NFSv3 instead of stepping up to NFSv4?? Because the work differently and having the overhead of NFSv4 often does not make sense. Can you give more detail? They are very different protocols with a lot of different features. NFSv3 is much lighter than NFSv4.

@dafyre said in Kooler on DFS-R Issues: With Starwind's coming Linux release (or has it already been released?)... Would this not be done in a Linux VM? That would eliminate concerns about licensing and such. StarWind Linux VSA is released There's no problem to install anything like us into parent partition, question was is it OK to use it as a file server with a free version of Windows

@dafyre said in Mac OS X Writing to NTFS: @Mike-Davis said in Mac OS X Writing to NTFS: @scottalanmiller said in Mac OS X Writing to NTFS: So how is a Mac involved here? It seems like you are trying to do a Windows to Windows copy, no Mac in the process? Correct. It seems that a Mac unzipped the files to the windows server. There was a bug at the time that set the file type bit to something that makes windows think it's encrypted. (thus windows shows it as green and the encrypted check box is checked) All I'm trying to do now is copy the files from a server that is having issues to a new server. Where are you running the copy operation from? The new server or the server with issues? I'd suggest trying to run the copy FROM the server with issues. He can't, logging in causes the system to crash.

But real XS does have the SMB based ISO mount, it's just not made available for the production storage.

From the Badlock page: What can attackers gain? The security vulnerabilities can be mostly categorised as man-in-the-middle or denial of service attacks. Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks: There are several MITM attacks that can be performed against a variety of protocols used by Samba. These would permit execution of arbitrary Samba network calls using the context of the intercepted user. Impact examples of intercepting administrator network traffic: Samba AD server - view or modify secrets within an AD database, including user password hashes, or shutdown critical services. standard Samba server - modify user permissions on files or directories. Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks: Samba services are vulnerable to a denial of service from an attacker with remote network connectivity to the Samba service. Who is affected? Affected versions of Samba are: 3.6.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x, 4.2.0-4.2.9, 4.3.0-4.3.6, 4.4.0 Earlier versions have not been assessed. How can I fix my systems? Please apply the patches provided by the Samba Team and SerNet for EnterpriseSAMBA / SAMBA+ immediately. Patched versions are (both the interim and final security release have the patches): 4.2.10 / 4.2.11, 4.3.7 / 4.3.8, 4.4.1 / 4.4.2. With the release of Samba 4.4.0 on March 22nd the 4.1 release branch has been marked DISCONTINUED (see Samba Release Planning). Please be aware that Samba 4.1 and below are therefore out of support, even for security fixes. There will be no official security releases for Samba 4.1 and below published by the Samba Team or SerNet (for EnterpriseSAMBA). We strongly advise users to upgrade to a supported release. Some vendors may choose to ship 4.4.1, 4.3.7, and 4.2.10 versions and add regression patches on top of them, due to wide scale and complexity of this release. Some may also just backport the patches to older releases. Please contact your Samba supplier for details. What further improvements after patching are suggested? Mitigations for man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks: Network protections that could be used MITM attacks include DHCP snooping, ARP Inspection and 802.1x. It is recommended that administrators set these additional options, if compatible with their network environment: server signing = mandatory ntlm auth = no Without server signing = mandatory, Man in the Middle attacks are still possible against our file server and classic/NT4-like/Samba3 Domain controller. (It is now enforced on Samba's AD DC.) Note that this has heavy impact on the file server performance, so you need to decide between performance and security. These man in the Middle attacks for smb file servers are well known for decades. Without 'ntlm auth = no', there may still be clients not using NTLMv2, and these observed passwords may be brute-forced easily using cloud-computing resources or rainbow tables. Mitigations for denial-of-service (DoS) attack: Apply firewall rules on the server to permit connectivity only from trusted addresses. Will encryption protect against these attacks? The SMB protocol, by default, only encrypts credentials and commands while files are transferred in plaintext. It is recommended that in security / privacy sensitive scenarios encryption is used to protect all communications. Samba added encryption in version 3.2 in 2008, but only for Samba clients. Microsoft added SMB encryption support to SMB 3.0 in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. However, both of these types of encryption only protect communications, such a file transfers, after SMB negotiation and commands have been completed. It is this phase that contains the fixed vulnerabilities. Samba/SMB encryption is good practice but is not sufficient for protection against these vulnerabilities. Network-level encryption, such as IPSec, is required for full protection as a workaround. How bad is Badlock? The severity of Badlock according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS): CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H/E:P/RL:O/RC:C Base: 7.1 (High); Temporal: 6.4 (Medium) Is this vulnerability exploited currently? It may be possible since we already have several PoC (none of them will be released in the near future). What does "Badlock" stand for? "Badlock" was meant to be a rather generic name and does not point to any specifics. Yet Another Bug With A Logo? What branded bugs are able to achieve is best said with one word: Awareness. Furthermore names for bugs can serve as unique identifiers, other than different CVE/MS bug IDs. It is a thin line between drawing attention to a severe vulnerability that should be taken seriously and overhyping it. This process didn't start with the branding - it started a while ago with everyone working on fixes. The main goal of this announcement was to give a heads up. Vendors and distributors of Samba are being informed before a security fix is released in any case. This is part of any Samba security release process. Who found the Badlock Bug? Badlock was discovered by Stefan Metzmacher. He's a member of the international Samba Core Team and works at SerNet on Samba. He reported the bug to Microsoft and has been working closely with them to fix the problem.

@Dashrender Okay let's retake a clean example: one VM in a SR, with one 4GB VDI: # lvscan inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/MGT' [4.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e' [4.02 GiB] inherit After first snapshot: # lvscan inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/MGT' [4.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-38e2156f-da74-4edb-ac83-56fda54cfe55' [1.75 GiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e' [4.02 GiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-f18856a5-039b-4d84-bf6c-a259d0f49a9e' [8.00 MiB] inherit After second snapshot: # lvscan inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/MGT' [4.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-38e2156f-da74-4edb-ac83-56fda54cfe55' [1.75 GiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-f18856a5-039b-4d84-bf6c-a259d0f49a9e' [8.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e' [4.02 GiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-68408f33-5a69-4b3b-afdd-a2cfabcad9ba' [8.00 MiB] inherit As you can see, we got a second 8 MiB logical volume, nothing more (base parent and active VDI doesn't change). Let's remove the latest snapshot: # lvscan inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/MGT' [4.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-38e2156f-da74-4edb-ac83-56fda54cfe55' [1.75 GiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-f18856a5-039b-4d84-bf6c-a259d0f49a9e' [8.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e' [4.02 GiB] inherit It removes the previously created volume, as expected. Now, let's remove the initial snapshot. Durin few seconds, we'll have this: lvscan inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/MGT' [4.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-38e2156f-da74-4edb-ac83-56fda54cfe55' [1.75 GiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e' [8.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/leaf_770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e_38e2156f-da74-4edb-ac83-56fda54cfe55' [4.00 MiB] inherit But it will be automatically "garbage collected" when the system will see than the chain doesn't have any snapshot in it (after few seconds in this case): # lvscan inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/MGT' [4.00 MiB] inherit inactive '/dev/VG_XenStorage-e27c48de-509f-3fec-d627-7f348062ab1a/VHD-770ceeac-e97e-4e05-b9c5-892b97b9d16e' [4.02 GiB] inherit We are back to the initial situation.