Best posts made by bbigford

I was asking about this feature a while back, now I see you can finally delete private chats. Awesome! Helps to shorten the list.

@Dashrender said in It's a turrible day. Just turrible!:

@BBigford said in It's a turrible day. Just turrible!:

Either OpenFire or RocketChat would have worked out great. Way better than SfB in fact.

do you only need a chat client?

OK I see what you're saying here. yeah a customer of mine a long time ago was illegally using Office. I told them that they had to buy 10+ copies of Office or my company would no longer support them. I'm sure they read between the lines that an audit would be coming too. They quickly, though complainingly, pulled out the checkbook.

Good on you. I quit a job because we were distributing bootleg copies of Office, out of the repair shop!!! I had one come back and I said "hey $owner, I removed a pirated copy from so-and-so's machine. They need to purchase a copy, so if you'd include that on the quote please."

$owner: What?! Put that back on!

Me: It was throwing errors that it was pirated. We can't support pirated software.

$owner: I put that on there, just run the activation that is out on the NAS.

Me: YOU HAVE AN ILLEGAL ACTIVATOR ON THE NETWORK??? That puts at more of a risk during an audit!!!

I ended up quitting.

@scottalanmiller said in T-Mobile Service in Canada:

That's what I was afraid of. I knew that they had a subsidiary here in Romania. They have brick and mortar stores even in Kosovo. Canada just gets the worst of everything.

I hear good things about their health care...

Well it doesn't look pretty inside, but at least our rack won't just have a random mini and external hard drive loosely sitting on another device. It was decided that we would have a Mac Mini as a central device for Time Machine backups. It's running the perfectly designed (sarcasm) software: OSX Server.

I was thinking today about hyperconvergence and VDI after watching a Scale Computing "field day" on YouTube (a couple years old).

Is anyone using this? I figured just scaling with more boxes in the cluster would handle the workload and virtualizing your connection broker/etc should be fine. But the product manager said there was no call for VDI and that Scale wasn't pushing support or features for it. I didn't really understand why you couldn't get some zero clients, PCoIP cards, and go at it... I know @scottalanmiller uses Scale. Any input, sir?

Youtube Video

Definitely agree with @thwr ...

AMD's APU is far superior to Intel's iGPU. You can game a fair amount on their integrated graphics unit. You get about 4 cores of CPU, and 8 cores of GPU. An A10 is about as high as you can go. You'll save yourself from having to buy a graphics card since you aren't doing AAA. The flexibility will come in the future if she decides she does want to play AAA, she won't need a whole new PC, she can just buy a graphics card that can keep up. Something like an AMD R9 390 would suffice. Sapphire makes a real good one for $300.

I prefer AMD graphics for budget gaming, and Intel CPUs. But Intel is spendy and you're talking about ultra low budget at $600. AMD can get that done and she could grow into the card if need be. If not, then there is no loss.

@Son-of-Jor-El said in Over Investing Early Can Be Big Time Failure:

Interesting convo. I can't get into too much detail but in the solar industry it is ESSENTIAL to have the investors lined up. If you don't, you die.

Having a plan to scale, and having money ready to do so is one thing. Overspending and hoping you scale is another... that one is the dangerous gamble.

I can drive a monster truck to work because I might need the extra horse power, chassis clearance (maybe there is a flood... we live below a dam and if it breaks we'll be flooded), or because I can get home much faster by just driving over the top of everyone. But it's just unnecessary.

I would fire someone for...

...recommending Lenovo.

@BBigford said in DBAN a MacBook:

@RojoLoco said in DBAN a MacBook:

Just use one of these to access the secure boot options on a Mac... apply liberally, repeat as necessary.

Though that lacks the word "boot". lol

Although I guess here's the boot option...

"My trackpad is angled super weird". Took apart a customer's laptop to find this hidden gem.

Posting this for a colleague who's honestly too busy to post himself so he's watching the thread when he can. His environment is a very low budget network that he inherited in a rural town. To put it into perspective, the town is about 325 people. The school is obviously tiny. There is an elementary and a high school/middle school combo.

AWS and Azure both have education pricing, but Microsoft typically gives big education discounts. Nonetheless they both appear to be very similarly priced. It doesn't have to just be AWS and Azure in the conversation, as Digital Ocean, Vultr, or someone entirely different might fit the bill. He's looking into aggregating his services to the cloud since he is a one-man operation (he's the director, and cannot hire more people... no funds for that). He gets some e-rate pricing one stuff so the cost might also be a little less. Anyway, this is focused more at functionality and I have my bias. But I want to hear from the community.

Obviously Azure is a Microsoft product, so having issues would allow a "one throat to choke" should there be any issues, he could just call Microsoft. He's looking to basically offload everything from on-premises.

I was also thinking about some of the downtime I've saw with Azure. Many businesses have reported (online through a few tech communities) various outages with no explanation. The only thing they get told while there is an outage is "We are experiencing some unplanned maintenance. We're sorry for the inconvenience." Sometimes their network is down for an entire day.

This isn't a topic on a complete overhaul necessarily. It's just what you've experienced with AWS vs. Azure (if you're in education, that's a plus). He already has Google Apps in place. More focusing on any shortcomings on either side you've experienced so I'm giving him more input than just my own.

Thoughts?

I moved away from an area that was Time Warner and only TW for big names. The rest were terrible small companies. The ones that are over priced, over subscribed, and under valued.

I moved to an are where there is CableOne 100Mb for $55 a month and no contract. I own the equipment outright (Motorola surfboard modem and Asus router/WAP).

CenturyLink has been by twice now, pitching their 1 year contract for $44/month ($34 if you buy a new DSL modem). This includes a "dedicated" fiber run to your house. The "last 2%" is copper inside, I'm guessing RJ11, but the person didn't know.

They go on about how CableOne shares your connection out and says you're really getting under 30Mb because of that.

Honestly never used CenturyLink, but I think every ISP is pretty terrible on the residential side. I work for an ISP and that's why we don't do residential. It's the side where everyone loses.

Thoughts on CenturyLink? The whole "dedicated 40Mb fiber", and how much grander their connection is than everyone else?

Was talking about file services/NextCloud earlier and ran across this online through unrelated search results. Pretty interesting at a low cost (~$79).

http://www.zdnet.com/article/nextcloud-box-a-cloud-for-your-office-or-living-room/

So no sane person in the world would use Skype for Business (at least not willingly). OpenFire with Spark left a lot to be desired. Rocket Chat was so close to Slack... Then they were right on top of them with screen sharing. Slack made a bold move and acquired Screen Hero. Though, it is a separate application, for now. Slack's pricing plummeted, from about $35/u/m, to free. Not about a month ago they did release enterprise (if your wallet is that big... Their free to paid isn't too painful through the tiers though).

We have tons of licenses, alongside ScreenHero, at no cost, and it is great.

The question is, what are you using over everything else, and why?

Got it figured out. It was just something dumb with Kaseya. Stripped everything out and redistributed, with a 'Pause' as well, and everything processed in about 30 seconds. What a huge waste of time, but at least it works now.

We have a client, and they are a shared email hosting provider. They are getting on black lists from spammers using their service. I'm going down the road looking for a solution that allows them to auto-ban abusers (could be 24 hours at a time, up to indefinitely based on pattern behavior), to mitigate them getting picked up by blacklists like SORBS. Worth noting, they seem to have a problem with people actually signing up for their services (after having talked with someone over there) and then abusing the system. So the abusers are authenticated.

Any suggestions for ones you've tried?

@JaredBusch said in SQL single instance or multiple:

The SMB almost never needs multiple SQL Server instances. Saying it is for security means that there are jsut bad software developers in the loop that did not write their applicaiotn to use appropriate permissions.

One thing I've been told is people who don't understand multiple instances, want them. Those who do know about them, don't want the hassle.

Flaw in the login screen with the latest release. Simply typing in 'root' allows the user to login without entering a password. https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-flaw-allows-macos-high-sierra-logins-without-passwords/

Had read about some EOL this evening. Just did an upgrade on the Unifi controller and got this lovely little reminder to upgrade the hardware as well. I love being the second pair of eyes on stuff!