Posts made by Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said in Raspberry Pi 5 Announced Today:

For those who don't want to read all of the details...

Basically everything from CPU to RAM to GPU is 2x - 3x higher performance than the RP4 from 2018.

Support hats will be available directly from RP for both PoE+ power (no need for external power on these!!) and, drumroll, for M.2 NVMe drives. Meaning you can really use this as a real computer like never before. Lack of native M.2 support was the killer of the RP4 generation.

An RP4 with NVMe would have made it a reasonable desktop system. Without it, it was hard to do anything requiring drive performance of any sort. With more than double the performance across the "board" and NVMe support, this is a very, very powerful workstation.

Active cooling is now semi-standard to accommodate all of this, too.

Now if only I could get one - I have a need for two of these right now..

@JaredBusch said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:

@PhlipElder said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:

We've gone through plenty of audits where QuickBooks has a company file on one PC while there are two or more other PCs accessing that company file. No issues there.

Historically, QuickBooks has only used file sharing for this. The remote users are opening the QuickBooks data file over the network. This matches the restrictions last I knew.

AVImark is connecting to a database server running on the host computer to my understanding. This is not file services, print services, IIS, or ICS.

historically this was true - but at some point QB expanded this to using ports other than file sharing to get the job done

Once QB did that - QB no longer qualified under the fileshare exception.

Here's a pretty easy way to test for this.

If you install a firewall between the instance hosting the AviMark software and the client and block all but 139 and 445, as well as 80 and 443 - and AviMark stops working - then you're 99% sure that it's not a legal use of Windows non-server edition.
of course this isn't 100% because software could attempt to use these ports as a bypass to the licensing..

What I assume is the same issue I ran into years ago - where a computer going to sleep, a user would wake it up, and when they stopped using it - it would go back to sleep in a super short amount of time (I believe it was 2 mins).

After years I found out this was the System unattended sleep timeout setting, which is a hidden setting by default. This setting can be unhidden so you can change it in the GUI via
powercfg -attributes SUB_SLEEP 7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0 +ATTRIB_HIDE

Or you can change the registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0

The Attributes DWORD controls how long before the system goes back to sleep.
0 - disables it

OK - onto today's issue.

User's computer went to sleep sometime yesterday - woke it up - between the amount of time the user stared at the screen, them typing in their password and pressing enter to start the login process - the timeout timer expired - putting the computer back into sleep mode.

The user would then wake the computer to find a - can't log in error message (Don't recall exact message).

Rebooting the computer instantly solved this issue - which they claimed they did - hmm.. now that I'm writing this - I need to look at the logs and see if they actually did reboot - I'm guessing not.

Of course when the user reported this issue - they reported - I try to log in - the spinny thing spins - then the computer just powers off. Of course once I arrived and watched the process happen - I noticed the slow flashing power light - indicating sleep mode, which instantly lead me to the situation I mention at the start of this post.

I rebooted the computer and was able to log in instantly. I logged out, had the user log in and it worked fine!

I went in search of the registry key (during which I updated my ancient post here) to change the system to not use System unattended sleep timeout.

Let's see how long until this user has their next issue.

Necro-post

found the issue for this problem.

There is a registry setting that puts the computer back to sleep if not used after woken from sleep after a VERY short amount of time.
i.e. the computer is sleeping - the mouse is bumped - wakes - but is otherwise not used - this timer goes back to sleep fast.
The problem is sometimes a computer gets stuck with this time and keeps it active even if the computer is used.

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0

REG_DWORD Attributes 2

This will disable this feature.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just got a parrot today. It's a rescue, very old and needed a new home very quickly. So now we have a parrot.

pictures!!

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I spent the last week cutting down/apart a tree that broke in half due to wind last week.

Hope it didn’t hit anything or anything important if it did. We’ve had quite a bit of systems come through here also..

Storm came through about 2:30-3:00am and was very active in lightning…

luckily not. the top half of the tree broke, but not completely - fell over slightly into the street. The break was about 20 feet up - made cutting it down a bit challenging - luckily my latter was talk enough.

haul away, etc was so expensive - it was worth it to buy a slightly used chipper shredder and just deal with it myself. I now have a small pile of logs to give away as firewood.

I spent the last week cutting down/apart a tree that broke in half due to wind last week.

@JaredBusch said in Zerotier installs but no conectivity on Fedora 38:

@syko24 said in Zerotier installs but no conectivity on Fedora 38:

@JaredBusch - I know their site says Windows, but maybe something related with the firewall rules getting messed up.

https://discuss.zerotier.com/t/attention-zerotier-on-windows-users-please-update-your-client-s-to-1-10-6-or-later/12706

I temporarily shutdown firewalld on both systems as well as disabled selinux.

While I doubt it's the issue - ZT has it's own firewall rules, any possible issue there?

We regularly email xlsx files to people outside our company.

On Monday one of my users received a note back from their counterpart telling them that they couldn't open the attachment.

After digging into it - MS is now applying Digital Rights Management (DRM) to attachments where it can.

Even worse - the external users so far in testing can't open the file unless they have an account in our M365 tenant.

It seems that MS has been rolling this change out for years - I've found posts about this in reddit from 5 years ago, and more recent posts about all the DRM changes they have been making lately.

The current listed solution is to disable encrypting the attachments tenant wide with this powershell command
Connect-ExchangeOnline Set-IRMConfiguration -DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly $true

I'm in the process of testing it.

@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

well the bootcamped mac has finally been replaced with a dell inspiron 1650. not a bad machine. build quality isn't bad, not up to the mac standard, but neither is the price.

so far so good. only gripe i have is that when doing not a lot and listening to streaming music i get that buffering/staggering sound occassionally. i got the i5 with 16gb. maybe i should have got the i7. too late now.

could be a wireless issue, not a processor one - or the HDD, etc..

@WrCombs said in Reboot resets Desktop Win 10 -:

Got a client running Windows 10, and every time they restart the computer, it resets everything on the desktop - Background is wiped, apps and programs are removed, files are removed, the only things that stay are the recycling bin, and Edge. I have no idea what is causing this, and I have no idea where to start. Anyone seen this before?

When you say programs are removed - do you mean the shortcuts on the desktop or actual full applications that were installed - like Chrome or Adobe Reader - are removed upon reboot?

@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?