For those who live in the Linux desktop world and don’t have a way of using Visio (I assume). What are your favorite applications for network diagrams, flow charts, etc?

I recall trying Dia a while back, and I’ve used Libre Office Draw before. I’m curious to see what else is there or commonly used.

Realizing trying to make "reasonable" forecasts of how much storage will be needed for our office server will not be an exercise in precision.

At first glance this sounds like a site-to-site VPN.

Something that strikes me as odd is that your ISP is offering colocation services (assuming you're talking about a server being put into "their datacenter.") Generally you'd want to avoid having one vendor provide all of the services you need -- or at least think through the ramifications of it.

Favorite time of day:

If PowerShell remoting is available you couple possibly use Invoke-Command with Add-LocalGroupMember.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Finally a question that people know the answer to.... oh wait, it's a bench question not an IT one.

What end-user types "OSI Layer 1" in their ticket?

@JaredBusch said in Free / Cheap Unattended Remote Access Utility for Windows PCs:

MeshCentral

+1 to MeshCentral

@DustinB3403 Not long. I have a bottle of user tears and some cotton swabs. The combination works nicely.

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter the full path of the root directory to search"
read ROOT_DIRECTORY

ALL_FILES=$(find $ROOT_DIRECTORY -type f)

for i in $ALL_FILES; do
    INDFILE=$(echo $i | rev | cut -d '/' -f 1 | cut -d '.' -f 2- | rev)
    echo $INDFILE >> /tmp/tempfilefordustin
done

UNIQUE_FILE_NAMES=$(cat /tmp/tempfilefordustin | sort -u)

for j in $UNIQUE_FILE_NAMES; do
    find $ROOT_DIRECTORY -type f -name "$j.*" | sort #not sure if sort is needed
done

rm /tmp/tempfilefordustin

Some man pages and a little Dr. Google + Stackoverflow for the rev idea (never used that before) was enough information to make that. Initial tests were positive.

Edit: Added a fix that I pushed up to Gitlab.

Poor guy is in for a world of hurt:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2011665-soundstation-ip-6000-not-registering-on-altigen-maxcs-version-8-5-0-208

It took us two months to get our Soundstation to properly function with our Altigen PBX, despite Altigen "certifying" that it will work. Our problem wasn't registration, but terrible voice quality. The final fix was to follow a document acquired by our dealer from Altigen that had us use ancient Polycom firmware on the phone.

@hobbit666 said in Re-organizing cable management for client. Need help.:

@jaredbusch said in Re-organizing cable management for client. Need help.:

@hobbit666 never do anything permanent like this

Its not permanent just snip the cable lol

Just snipping the cable seems easy until you make a mistake and slice the cable. When I have to do cable management, I'm 100% on the velcro strip train. Nylon cable ties have always ended up being a pain for me.

Finally! My test can make and receive calls using PJSIP trunks and Twilio!

If you were self-hosting a VM that's to be public facing (like MeshCentral, NextCloud, etc.), would you bother with also setting up a separate VM as reverse proxy server for that traffic?

I would say "yes." Even if you're just proxy-ing traffic for only one server, you would still want the single ingress point for external traffic.

I think of it like virtualization. Even for a single server you still install a hypervisor on the bare metal. There's no downside to the one server being a VM and if if you add servers in the future, you just spin up more VMs. In the case of a reverse proxy, if you find yourself hosting more stuff, you can simply add configs to your reverse proxy and manage TLS certs in one place as well.

The goal is patch management for our servers. Right now the process is me RDPing to the servers, install updates, restart as needed.

Before I show too much ignorance I'll see if there is a thread about good patch management strategies, or start one myself.

Side note: ML has now become my preferred reading source when in line at Chick Fil A.

I was a LastPass customer to turned to BitWarden.

If I've gained only one thing from the ML community, it's more confidence to simply ask the question, no matter how much of a n00b I am in a particular area. If there are black eyes to be had (especially if I have simply failed to Google properly), once they've healed some kind of learning will take place, which will help lower the amount of n00bishness within me.

There are many things you can do, but we'd need more detail about what data is to be backed up. Also, we'd want to know where these remote servers are compared to this to-be backup server.

Conceptually one of the easiest things you can do is have this server pull backups from your various Linux servers using something like rsync or just ssh / scp.

Since I'm on PTO as of yesterday, I've taken a little break from things (and am training the rest of my colleagues that PTO really means "Eddie's not available for work."

Plane leaves Atlanta for MangoCon in 6 hours.

The quality and effectiveness of meetings varies greatly. For my environment, calls where we're brainstorming a problem or hashing out some details of how $the_thing should be approached tend to be the most effective. These meetings tend to be rare and usually result from trying to work on a problem over chat where it's determined voice and visual aids are going to be more effective for communication.

In my experience, majority of meetings are unfocused, which leads to everyone's time being wasted, or are meetings for announcements only without any need (or intention) for real-time collaboration -- the meeting that could've been an E-mail.

I win. Just had a talk with one of my bosses that ended with a conversation about the benefits of virtualizing our production servers. A small step forward, but a necessary step.