Posts made by Dashrender

@WLS-ITGuy Good question - I haven't looked - but you can enable logging so you can find out who is doing it...

@WrCombs said in What are you using to open HEIC files?:

GIMP seems to be the winner; anyone use GIMP a whole bunch?

I've used GIMP over the years - I don't find it overly straight forward -but if all you're doing is opening and looking at an image - it's fine.

@marcinozga said in What are you using to open HEIC files?:

If I ever get these, usually by email, I just open them on iPhone.

not a real business solution.

sounds like a bug

I looked at my receipt on Amazon - only a 30 day return window, which was nearly 30 days past... so I'm basically just screwed at this point.

I have sent an email to BeeLink directly, I'll give them a few days to respond.

I also posted on their forums - but my post is moderated and yet to actually publish. - I didn't even bitch about anything in the post - I was asking for help/ideas to fix it.

I recently purchased some SER 5 5560U mini PCs.

All three of them have had an issue or more since day one.

And yesterday - I came home to find one basically dead - the power light is on, the fan is on - but no other responses beyond that.

The original issues were,

• they wouldn't boot upon first plug in. I had to reset them (remember the reset button? - yeah they have one). They finally did come up.

• Update BIOS/UEFI was a huge pain finding their updates

• list itemwireless keyboard didn't work when plugged into the front USB ports - this turns out to be that on these machines, USB 3 has so much radiation coming off them, it interferes with wireless keyboard/mice - the recommended solution - buy and use a six in USB extender.

• USB ports are mounted upside down - come on - USB isn't new - no excuses here!

I troubleshot the now basically dead machine:
I long pressed the power button - nothing, I head the button for 30 seconds - nothing.

I pulled the power, pressed the power button 15 times (to drain the capacitors) plugged it back in - pressed the power button, lights came on - fan is spinning - no beeps, no video.

I removed power again - i held the reset switch for 15 seconds, plugged it back in - it instantly powered on - again, fan spins, no video.

I disassembled the device, unplugged the BIOS battery, left it unplugged for 10 mins, the pressed the power button 15 times, held the rest button down for 10 seconds, then reassembled it, plugged in power - it instantly gave the power light and fan spin - no video.

I removed power, I removed the RAM and the M.2 SSD, plugged it back in - instant power, fan spin - no video no beeps.

The only signs of life in this unit are power light and spinning fan, but nothing else I've tried has brought this unit back to life.

There are no additional troubleshooting tips I can think of.

I recommend staying away from these, if for no other reason than their website for drivers is bad.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I had someone recently tell me that their CIO wanted to use Vmware over KVM because, and you can't make this stuff up, they liked "working with the biggest vendor."

Literally, they didn't care if it made sense for the purpose, they didn't care if it was reliable or cost effective, they didn't care if it was secure. They literally only wanted to know which product was made by the largest company. No IT factor considered.

And then, as incompetent as that is, with only a single thing to research; with no need to check on features, cost, licensing, support, price, or other complicated factors; they got the ONLY thing that they were considering wrong.

KVM is made by IBM at about $63bn USD. VMware is made by Broadcom at about $21bn USD. IBM is roughly three times the size. And IBM is the KIND of company that should make hypervisors, Broadcom really isn't. But that aside, no matter how insane it would be to consider market cap or revenue of a vendor as the determination of product applicability to a company, they got that one, insanely simple task, ass backwards.

When you are THAT dumb, it is pervasive. If you are dumb enough to think company size matters in some significant way, you are also so clueless as not to be able to determine company size.

While they said - the larges company - what they really meant was - the one that advertises the most to people like me - in airports, on TV, etc... If I'm not seeing ads for them - then they aren't worth considering.. /sigh

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@EddieJennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Reading through income tax return.

We ended up having to pay a little for Fed, and got very little back from state. All around close to even, but still enough to annoy the wife.

what is her goal?

Refund.... she's used to getting a large refund.

Of course I think we came out real close to right.

She realized that's insane - right? hell - you want to owe every year so YOU get the interest free loan instead of the gov't.... Of course - you PLAN for that and save money to pay when it's time...

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@EddieJennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Reading through income tax return.

We ended up having to pay a little for Fed, and got very little back from state. All around close to even, but still enough to annoy the wife.

what is her goal?

Sounds like all the bases have been covered.

It's unrealistic to work with files of that size (even 10 GB files are unrealistic to work on from cloud).

As Pete said - show the owners the time it takes to move the data, then show them the cost of a potential VDI solution with hosted storage - your solution of a NAS will quickly be back on the table with backups to cloud.

Perhaps my situation is odd - but why is this a real issue in a company? People not working and just surfing random stuff - and IT has to fix their pop-up issue for that?

Much to my surprise - this hasn't been an issue for us, I've never even had a "hay, just asking cause, ya know - I get these popups.. how do I stop that?" which IS odd now that I think about it....

@Obsolesce said in MS Edge and pop-ups:

I use the same popup blocker in every web browser, even Edge, and it blocks everything. I've not come across any weird issues like that otherwise.

Have you tried this one?
https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ublock-origin/odfafepnkmbhccpbejgmiehpchacaeak

Agreed - I personally use ublock origin everywhere - but I don't deploy it corporate wide.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Talking to a company that needs to go to VOIP because their land line copper lines have been down for over a week and no hopes of getting them back up.

That's the push - they likely should have done it ages ago for cost savings reasons...

@Skyetel said in Skyetel billing error:

@Dashrender We refunded the mistake back to the credit cards if there was an auto-recharge. The refund should clear before the initial transaction does, meaning your credit card should only be charged what you should have actually paid.

We aren't auto charge. It's not that big of a deal in our situation.

@Oksana said in Centralized print management with Azure Universal Print:

Working with a mix of new and old printing hardware in hybrid-cloud IT infrastructures can be complex and cumbersome. Microsoft Azure Universal Print allows organizations to bring existing print infrastructure into the cloud without a lot of heavy lifting.

Learn more in the new article by virtualization expert Brandon Lee for StarWind.

I love this idea - but when printing adds like $0.05/print, that makes this a VERY expensive option.

@Skyetel said in Skyetel billing error:

Sorry about the headache this caused.

We rewrote our entire billing system and it worked perfectly... except for a single typo. Believe it or not, it was caused by a rouge "%" in a SQL query.

Full RFO to come

Interesting.

Luckily it was late at night for us (super low usage of phone system) and the overage amount I keep my account at enabled the fees to not put me into a negative balance.

Biggest drawback for me is prepaying about 2 weeks early for the next month...

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

everyone (who is affected) ready for daylights saving time in 2 weeks? cause I'm not.

hell no - stop the madness

Just making you aware there might be a billing error

@scottalanmiller said in I Cant Even...:

@Dashrender said in I Cant Even...:

@scottalanmiller said in I Cant Even...:

Today a large corporate "IT department" that uses DattoRMM (OMG, shoot me now) ask me if we needed these "apps"...

sc.exe and wmic.exe because DattoRMM was flagging them.

Um, that's WINDOWS. What kind of IT department that manages thousands of Windows computers opens a ticket to their upstream MSP to ask what sc and wmic are? Like, ever heard of Google? Or Windows? Seriously?

Damn... /sigh

And here I am being told to 'use the MSP more'

It wasn't your MSP that said that, lol.

Actually - it was both.

@scottalanmiller said in I Cant Even...:

Today a large corporate "IT department" that uses DattoRMM (OMG, shoot me now) ask me if we needed these "apps"...

sc.exe and wmic.exe because DattoRMM was flagging them.

Um, that's WINDOWS. What kind of IT department that manages thousands of Windows computers opens a ticket to their upstream MSP to ask what sc and wmic are? Like, ever heard of Google? Or Windows? Seriously?

Damn... /sigh

And here I am being told to 'use the MSP more'