Posts made by brianlittlejohn

I'm a Dark Chocolate M&M's fan!

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller said:

That's much like the guidebooks here.... "In litigious countries like the US, you'd never be allowed to go explore a live lava flow, but here in Nicaragua, you can walk right up to the volcano edge."

They seem to favor natural selection and Darwin Awards, lol.

Yup. We drove right between eight volcanoes this week, it was awesome!

This is the image that popped into my head when I read this...

Have you tried 123456, or 000000 as the passwords?

I don't know what it is with CloneZilla, when I use it I have to copy the drive twice. The first time will never boot, but the second time everything works fine.

I'm glad we are talking about longer/more in depth sessions. This year was my first year to attend spice world and I was a little disappointed in the breakout sessions. I was hoping there would be more in depth topics. Also a couple of the sessions I went to the speaker spoke nothing about the topic they were supposed to.

Now that Winter is coming, I love skiing. Unfortunately the closest place you can always count on for snow is a 10 hour drive.

@MattSpeller said:

@brianlittlejohn after work has been my time but with winter coming I don't think I can continue outside with it dark so early

I usually go when it is dark (early AM) way less traffic. I live in west Texas where there is nothing scenic to look at, and not very cycler friendly so its best to go out before there is a lot of traffic.

I enjoy cycling if I ever decide to get off the couch after work... or wake up early.

@JaredBusch said:

@brianlittlejohn said:

My parents tried to cancel their home phone service and their bill would have gone up like that as well, so now its set to 2 rings and goes to voicemail. Nobody they want to talk to calls them on it.

Unplug it so it can never ring then?

I told them to do that and they won't do it, but they were fine cancelling it all together... it wasn't worth the argument, so I let them do what they wanted to do.

@RojoLoco said:

@Dashrender said:

@RojoLoco said:

Who has a home phone anymore? (besides my parents)

I do, since I still have cable and internet, it saves me money bundling and keeping the phone service. Canceling my $12/month phone would cost me $35 in bundle savings.

That is super fuct.

My parents tried to cancel their home phone service and their bill would have gone up like that as well, so now its set to 2 rings and goes to voicemail. Nobody they want to talk to calls them on it.

It bugs me that changing ISPs is the only option you have if an issue like that comes up.
Specifically my issue was with a link on Level3's network that I wasn't a customer of, so no way to report an issue.

They all are doing a conversion to analog as far as I know.

Its no longer an issue now, at least with that site. I have a higher up contact now with our main site if an issue arises anywhere else. I was just curious if there were any other options out there i had not considered.

@dafyre said:

@brianlittlejohn said:

Slow Paying Customers! When I consulted, I had a client who owed me a trivial amount ($400ish), They payed it over 4 months and 3 checks. After that I know longer did work for them anymore...

I agree this could be a problem. Especially if you are the MSP. However, before a project of any scale is started, I would ensure that payment details are agreed up on so there are no surprises.

If i were to do consulting again, I would do things alot differently that I did the first time. I've learned alot since I was 19.

@dafyre said:

I would contact the ISPs for each site and report the problem and escalate up their food chains until you get a network engineer working with you or the problem is resolved.

That is normally they way I go, just dealing with local cable companies sucks, I could never get escalated up because they never saw an issue on their side. In the end I moved the remote office to the same ISP so traffic never left their network. (couldn't set it up initially that way because service wasn't available at the time in the area)

I’m curious what other people do when they run across situations like this.

Let’s say you have two offices connected by vpn on two different service providers. Lets call Site A the main office, Site B the remote office. Site A and B each have different ISPs. Packets are being dropped between the two sites but, traffic just reaching out to the internet works fine for both sites. Performing a traceroute between the two sites shows you being routed through a 3rd providers network, and one of the links in that providers network is dropping the packets from intermittent issues. The link is up enough that the router doesn’t detect it as down to use another route to send the traffic through. But it is disruptive enough that people in Site B can’t access the services in Site A.

Where/who would you contact to begin troubleshooting/reporting this issue to?

Slow Paying Customers! When I consulted, I had a client who owed me a trivial amount ($400ish), They payed it over 4 months and 3 checks. After that I know longer did work for them anymore...

@scottalanmiller said:

@brianlittlejohn said:

I've always wanted to visit New York State. MangoCon may let me do it on the Company's dime!

Upstate NY, when it isn't winter, is actually pretty awesome. Especially in the fall and to a lesser extent, the spring. Great food, low costs, easy travel, tons of great history, neat cities, etc.

All of the stuff I like.

I've always wanted to visit New York State. MangoCon may let me do it on the Company's dime!

I had a client that used an old DOS base modeling program in the oil/gas industry and needed to be able to print from it. Being DOS based it could only print to an LPT port. Of course the laptop no longer had a parallel port to plug a printer into, much less a printer that hooks up parallel. My workaround was to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, share the usb printer back to the computer and map it to the lpt1 port.