Best posts made by flaxking

@pchiodo said in MS Audit???:

Yeah, a SAM audit, not to be confused with a Scott Alan Miller audit, is complete and utter BS. The easiest way to figure this out is to specifically ask them if it is a required audit or voluntary. If it's voluntary, why would you ever do it? There is simply no upside. The only time I would be concerned is if BSA contacted me. Then I would go to a CDW or a PC Connection for a licensing expert. Plus, in every case of the BSA getting involved, your company attorney(s) should be called in.

At the end of the day, those companies who are really violating licensing know they are doing it, and should not be surprise when BSA comes knocking. This is things like installing a retail Office on 30 computers, or using one server license across a whole server stack.

If you are working with a good reputable reseller, and are doing your best to be compliant, you will likely never have a problem.

I wouldn't trust your reseller on being the licencing expert. I've talked to a CDW 'licencing expert' before and know first hand that they are only experts in comparison to your account manager

@JaredBusch said in Comparing PowerShell to Linux User Manipulation:

@scottalanmiller said in Comparing PowerShell to Linux User Manipulation:

And you conveniently left out that almost no Windows has this PowerShell stuff, it's non-standard! Only extremely current versions have this without having to go through hoops to install it extra. This isn't universally workable for PowerShell.

WTF? What version of Windows are you claiming here? Because PowerShell has been install by default since Windows 7 (PowerShell version 2.0).

And Powershell 2.0 is missing a lot of stuff that are taken for granted by Powershell users today. If WMF was made available through Windows updates, that would have made life easier.

Offshoring junior Devs that will end up always being junior Devs is a good way to make your senior developers have to work harder and give them incentive to find a new company.

As far as I know, robocopy is still the best file copying/syncing utility included in Windows, and you have to parse the output to get any anything useful back to work with in Powershell.

^ another example of Windows administration mismatch

I'm really excited to start using this at work on Monday. Admittedly, I've never used Onenote or Evernote, so I can't really compare, but it looks like this will be perfect my organizing my meetings, project roadmaps and todo's.

Also the web clipper is really neat, convert a webpage into a simplified markdown page.

Security+ is not too hard and is very straightforward. It's the kind of certification I would recommend to all techs to get them security-minded so they don't do stupid stuff because they can think logically about it from a security perspective.

I believe all the other ones are more specific if you want to actually get into infosec.

@David_CSG said in Opinions: Ansible vs. SaltStack:

For real road-warriors, I’ll leverage our RMM (Solarwinds), which is ok (I have to overcome shortcomings for the Mac with custom shell scripts, and shortcomings for Windows with custom powershell).

But I’d much rather leverage Ansible where possible.

Or you could use Salt to manage your in house and your road-warriors.
Though learning Ansible is probably a better career move (searching saltstack on stackoverflow jobs returns 7 results, ansible 106)

However, I believe that salt generally makes more sense for user computers than ansible

I've worked on a project with a company that uses Skype for Business. They always complain about it, but my biggest complaint is sometimes it takes a whole minute before it unmutes my mic.

Deploying a scheduled task can work really well for installing software, I would definitely recommend it over built-in GP msi deployment.

If you have a WSUS server, that works really well too. Not well enough to be the reason to maintain a WSUS server though.

Hmm, I just got the same when testing using telnet

550 5.7.1 Non-Compliant sender address. Code : -4

I ran Evolution in debug mode, the email sent, then I tried to run the same SMTP commands as in the debug log in telnet but got the error again

Evolution didn't actually include the email data in the log, so that's where the SMTP commands I ran could have differed

People probably use nginx for the ssl termination instead in order to use Let's Encrypt.

I've heard some bad reports about running screenconnect on Linux. Probably due to the fact it relies on Mono for .Net, rather than actually being initially developed for Linux.

@scottalanmiller said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

@flaxking said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

I've heard some bad reports about running screenconnect on Linux. Probably due to the fact it relies on Mono for .Net, rather than actually being initially developed for Linux.

No, the issue is more marketing than actual issues. We've run on both Windows and Linux and all things considered, it's been better on Linux. All the issues come from it being poorly written for legacy .NET and not updated to current .NET, but not really an issue. .NET itself is cross platform and no more Windows than Linux. But it's written for legacy, and needs Mono to deal with that, but Mono does so just fine.

But because of Nginx, SC is actually quite significantly better on Linux than on Windows. Lower cost, better performance (at the same price point.)

I think the issue I was thinking of was this one https://control.product.connectwise.com/communities/6/topics/1691-tls-13-seems-to-breaks-screenconnect-when-using-ssl-on-mono

So I think at this point reverse proxy ssl termination should probably be considered the best way to run it on Linux, which is pretty standard for a lot of web apps.

@scottalanmiller said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

@JaredBusch said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

Stop pushing your conspiracy theories without proof.

1. This shows a misunderstanding of what a conspiracy is.
2. The proof is in their software. There's gobs of proof. They 1) make crap that depends on legacy components and 2) go out of their way to push the Windows version when the Linux works really well and is easier to get working properly.

So neither a conspiracy, and loads of proof. Stop acting like it's crazy to point out the obvious.

Technical debt + starting using a Microsoft stack is a great way to vendor lock in without any kickbacks.
It's possible that it is simply the preference of their support team.

@scottalanmiller said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

@flaxking said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

@scottalanmiller said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

@flaxking said in Has anyone got a guide to installing ScreenConnect on Fedora 30 with Let's Encrypt?:

I've heard some bad reports about running screenconnect on Linux. Probably due to the fact it relies on Mono for .Net, rather than actually being initially developed for Linux.

No, the issue is more marketing than actual issues. We've run on both Windows and Linux and all things considered, it's been better on Linux. All the issues come from it being poorly written for legacy .NET and not updated to current .NET, but not really an issue. .NET itself is cross platform and no more Windows than Linux. But it's written for legacy, and needs Mono to deal with that, but Mono does so just fine.

But because of Nginx, SC is actually quite significantly better on Linux than on Windows. Lower cost, better performance (at the same price point.)

I think the issue I was thinking of was this one https://control.product.connectwise.com/communities/6/topics/1691-tls-13-seems-to-breaks-screenconnect-when-using-ssl-on-mono

So I think at this point reverse proxy ssl termination should probably be considered the best way to run it on Linux, which is pretty standard for a lot of web apps.

FTFY

Having SSL offloaded to a reverse proxy would be the expected way to run anything like this in production. If you aren't doing this on Windows, you aren't treating the Windows install as seriously as the Linux one. The expected deployment method for this on Windows would still be to have Nginx (or similar) in front of it, generally on Linux. So the parts that you are finding most challenging are identical regardless of how you install SC itself, the reverse proxy is equally standard, and equally likely to be on Linux.

That they have an issue with SSL on Mono is really neither here nor there. That's the wrong place for SSL termination to be. And I know people running SC on Windows that can't get SSL working too. It's not just a Mono issue, maybe a different issue, but SC support wasn't able to help. So they need Linux there, even for Windows installs. The SSL issue with Mono is like running something like NodeJS. You don't put SSL encryption in the app itself, you put it in front. Like you said, it's a standard pattern.

Good fix.

Did someone ever test out Zammad or was there something to disqualify it? I remember it looked interesting.

@scottalanmiller said in MSP Helpdesk Options:

Some open source project could do an amazing job with that really easily.

I've thought of creating an open source library for ticketing features, since at work we want to replace the email client we created and built in to the software with a ticketing system, but it's unlikely I get time to work on that during business hours.

@IRJ said in MSP Helpdesk Options:

It's truly mind blowing how many ticketing systems are out there in the wild.

Tons of FOSS ones, but of there's a feature you want, it things the list a lot. Just wanting the concept of clients being under an organization and accepting tickets via email drops a ton of FOSS ticketing systems.

@marcinozga said in Any Way to Automate Adding a New Computer to an AD Group?:

@flaxking said in Any Way to Automate Adding a New Computer to an AD Group?:

@marcinozga said in Any Way to Automate Adding a New Computer to an AD Group?:

Ansible can do that. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/win_domain_group_membership_module.html#win-domain-group-membership-module
You can add new PCs to domain, and change their group membership, you just need to know computer names in advance.

Which is just a layer on top of Powershell. The Active Directory Powershell module is still required.

It's not required, or that module is included already in Windows 10 by default. Because I haven't had to install it on any machine I managed with Ansible.

"win_domain_group_membership requires the ActiveDirectory PS module to be installed"
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/modules/windows/win_domain_group_membership.ps1

They have it in the documentation as well "This must be run on a host that has the ActiveDirectory powershell module installed."
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/win_domain_group_module.html