Best posts made by guyinpv

I have to finish building a chicken run. Then put in about 6 hours of freelance work. Clean the car. Figure out what to do for 5 year anniversary in a week.

It's my understanding that the main difference between relational and nosql is that relational is rigid and nosql is not.

If you design a relational DB, it's made up of tables, with certain data types, in a 2D structure of columns and rows, columns that are predefined for the table.

If you have a table with 50 columns, one row might have data in 25 columns and another row has data in 35 columns, but both rows have all 50 columns of data (even if blank, empty, null, etc)

In a nosql or "graph" type dataset, you don't necessarily worry about columns at all. One page might need 25 pieces of data and another page needs 35 pieces of data, no more, no less. More can be added later, or removed later. Not only that but each record may have completely different data.

I also think of nosql as somewhat 3D. You forgo the 2D relational style of rows/columns where multiple tables are linked by column IDs. Instead, ALL the data is stored in a 3D way in a single document, or graph. This is really the difference between something like CSV versus XML. Because XML can have sub-data and sub-sub-data all the way down.

In a relational database, if you have a "customer" table and want to allow that customer to have as many addresses assigned to them as they like, they you would be required to build a separate "addresses" table, then link records by user ID. If you wanted to delete addresses when a user is deleted, you'd need app logic or a foreign key relationship. But if you didn't delete the related data, you could have orphaned rows of data, lose those relationships, and the data starts to get ugly over time with bugs sneaking in.

In nosql, you just pull up the customer data and all their addresses are available in the record. They can have no addresses, or 30, doesn't matter.

If you have a ticketing system in nosql, then all data just gets stored in 3D like JSON or XML structures.

So the big question, what if you want to find all tickets by a certain user? Well that's what the nosql engine handles, you just search for the user and it finds all the records.

Should records be stored by ticket or by user? I would think it's by user, actually, and all the tickets and all the sub-information about those tickets get stored all the way down the line.

MongDB is essentially a JSON storage engine, that's exactly the type of data you store. It also means it's limited. If you have multiple nested levels, perhaps hundreds of bits of data, you can't just replace one small bit of data that changes, you have to write the entire document again.
MongoDB is perhaps the best choice for people who typically use relational but finding predefined columns a bit limiting.

Redis excels for rapidly changing data but limited DB sizes. It works best when the entire DB can fit in available memory space. The data structure is more aligned with key:value type data.

Cassandra for when you just need to store a bazillion records, like analytics, hit counts and logging. Data can have its own expiration date set.

ElasticSearch is also JSON but can save parent and child documents and has more advanced searching when relating records together.

CouchDB is good for accumulated data that doesn't change much and you want to run the same queries all the time. Master-master replication is possible for multi-site deployments.

And yes I got all this info from a nifty chart here which is pretty handy: https://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis?

Personally I haven't found a project that doesn't very easily fit in the relational DB mold. Most data, I think, is still relational, where some list of stuff belongs to or relates to some other list of stuff. As long as the idea of predefined data (columns) applies to the "list of stuff", relational is still good!
However, if the "list of stuff" is terribly random, such as "list of stuff in a person's closet" versus "list of stuff intalled in a PC" then it makes more sense to go nosql.
List of stuff in PC -> defined columns ["cpu", "RAM", "HDD", "Video Card"......]
List of stuff in a closet -> undefined columns [ {name: "shirt", color: "black"}, {name: "shoebox", contents: "pictures"}, {name: "vacuum"}, ........]

It's all so magical!

I was born and raised in the Arizona sun, same as my wife. We both live up a little north and are used to the desert brush, surrounding mountain ranges, and some forest lands.

It's great country, but small towns. The biggest city around would be Phoenix, but neither of us want to touch Phx with a 20 foot burning cactus arm.

My desire would be to live near the woods and stay in a mountain region, but near a big city. Her desire is to be closer to the ocean, and near a big city.

There are so many things to think about when considering moving somewhere you've never been, and have no family there. You have to think about politics and city/country life balance and raising kids and so many other views and stuff to see if it matches our desires.

The entire west coast is out for us, we have no attraction to the lower California big cities, and up north the water is just too cold. Washington and Oregon are not for us either.
Neither of us have ever been to the east states or touched the Atlantic waters. Florida has some perks but we aren't leaning that way with the humidity and hurricanes and stuff. I don't know.

Without blabbing on forever, we've essentially landed on Houston as a potential home. It is, of course, one of the largest cities in the US, right near the gulf, and lots of trees and grass (what my wife really wants).

I've done some initial research. On paper it seems to work out pretty good as far as affordability and cost of living and big city amenities and family life, etc etc. Plus as a tech guy there should be plenty of work there, or at least ability to run my freelance biz there no problem.

I would miss my mountains and forests terribly, but it could also be fun having the ocean near by and some different scenery and city life.

So then, does anybody here live in Houston? What's it like? What's the gulf really like? Is it a good city to raise a family? Benefits to running a home business there are far as freedoms and politics? Good stuff to do and adventures to find?

Any other near-coastal cities to think about?

@Dashrender said in Burned by Eschewing Best Practices:

@travisdh1 said in Burned by Eschewing Best Practices:

@guyinpv said in Burned by Eschewing Best Practices:

@tiagom said in Burned by Eschewing Best Practices:

@guyinpv Wow that's amazingly stupid.

And I couldn't get them to stop. They would just chuckle "ya ya ya I know I shouldn't put stuff there, but it's just easy and fast for me to work that way..."

It's easier and faster for me to just drop your paycheck into the shredder, I think I'll do that from now on.

and it saves on postage too

psshh, direct deposit yo. It's 2016.

Define "good"

@scottalanmiller said in Why Does Everyone Still Focus on Relational Databases?:

I just built out a NoSQL ElasticSearch three node cluster in the lab. Whoo!

The perfect DB setup for storing a hit counter for the number of times I've watched Tombstone!

@scottalanmiller said in Anybody in online retail and warehousing I need ERP advice:

Or that they can but what they find is terrible.

Regarding shopping carts, this.

Poor handling of variations/SKUs. Can manage payment options right, do refunds or whatever. Completely lack normal business data like what the store paid for an item. How can they even do a profit statement if they don't allow store cost?
Weird limits, like can't export more than 200 of something. Limited products, limited variations, limited orders per month, limited revenue limits.
Poor API abilities or lack of addons or apps.
Bad uptime. Bad support contracts.
Lack of multi-user security features.
Lack of payment options (the one we need)
Lack of good shipping controls.
Lack of good themes and theme-editing abilities.
Lack of mobile responsiveness.
Bad checkout experience.
Bad profit model (they give cart away cheap, then have to pay for all the basic features as addons)

List goes on.

I also switched to OneNote recently for much of the same reasons.

There are some quirks to feel out but so far it's coming along.

Keep in mind that each Evernote section/book/folder becomes an entire OneNote notebook. OneNote does not automatically show all notebooks so the feel of it won't be the same as Evernote. You don't see everything all at once, you only see the current notebook you have open.

For example in EN you see a tree-list on the left of all your sections. In ON each section is now a separate notebook, which is physically just a file on OneDrive. You can't see them all at once, you have to open one notebook at a time.

That said, I used the MS tool to convert EN and it worked fine, but now I'm actually having to combine notebooks together because I don't want like 150 different notebooks!

In EN one section contains a bunch of note cards. In ON you get an extra set of sections, the notebook has tabs for sections and then pages within each tab. I'm having to re-organize my notebooks to combine them where they could just be tabs within the same notebook, then pages within the tabs.

As for sharing, you can share the entire notebook right now but that's it. MS will have the feature to be able to share individual tabs as well as individual pages very soon. They've had a feature release just in recent weeks preparing for this sharing ability.

As an example I have one notebook for a certain type of client. All my tabs are actually just alphabet so "A, B, C, D, E, etc) then within each letter I'll put individuals' pages (with sub-pages!) for each client.

CLIENT
--> G
--> --> Bill Gates
--> --> --> Subpages (info1, todo, info2, invoices, etc)

As of now I could only share the whole "CLIENT" notebook, but very soon I'll be able to share just the info2 page directly with Bill, or the entire Bill Gates page with subpages.

So far OneNote is working fine on all devices (Windows, Android, iPad) but I'm having to do a lot or re-organizing of notes into the different way ON stores them. However, some notebooks completely fail to open in the web interface, I'm hoping this will be fixed after I reorganize my notebooks.

Also, you don't need Office to get ON, it can be used as a standalone app.

I find the dark blue color for folders abhorrent. My eyes can hardly read it!

In PuTTY, you can go to the "Colours" section under "Window" and change it.
A common color for blue might be 74, 74, 255 and dark blue 140, 140, 255.

You have to save the session and give it a name in order to change these settings. And then after changing setting you have to save again.

On the topic of color, I like to narrow the contrast a little. Instead of pure black background I like a dark dark grey with a hint of blue, like 40,40,45 with the foreground text 230,230,230 instead of pure white.

Short story: hard drive died on a computer, replaced it and loaded up Win10.

They had a USB drive connected to File History. The drive is completely full and I see the FileHistory folder on it and all the files from their last backup (sadly, over a month old by the time stamps).

Regardless, I can't get Windows to recover from the previous backup. When I go to select the drive, that part works. When I use the "old" Control Panel to connect the drive, it actually SEES the old backup and tells me the correct timestamp of it. When I say to use it, everything seems to be fine.

But then I go to the Restore Personal Files section and it just tells me "there isn't any history of your files, folders, or libraries."

But of course there is history! It's on the drive, I see it, I see all the files with their file names edited with the time stamp, the drive connect wizard SHOWS me the old backup is there and I can connect to it.

I don't know how else to get it to connect to the old backup and allow me to restore all the files.

I really don't want to have to build some kind of crazy script to read every file and rename them and so forth. I just want File History to do what it's supposed to do! Connect to the old backup!

Ideas?

I'm sure this question comes and goes regularly.

I need to replace some workstations, just wondering if there is anything interesting in the market today. Innovations with form factor, power use, administrative features, etc. Anything cool happening I should be aware of? Features I should be sure to get?

Or do I just go grab some Dell towers off their home page as usual?

I wanted to backup 4 VMs using XenCenter. The VMs were suspended, then I selected them and went to the menu "VM" and then "Export".
I exported them as vhd/ovf and sent them over the network to a Synology DS216+.

The 4 VMs total are about 32GBs as backed up, but to break that down they are 1.8GB, 8.7GB, 6.2GB, and 17.6GB after backup.

I know for a fact the 1.8GB VM backed up in only a minute or two. And I'm pretty sure the 8 and 6 gig VMs backed up relatively quickly as well. I think it hung up on the larger 17gb one for reasons I can't explain.

I opened the backup folder shortly after starting the backup process and the 6 and 8 were already done. I then kept an eye on the folder for the rest of the day as the 17gb slowly grew in size for hours on end.

What could be the reason for this?

All the VMs use just one VD with a single partition. The only thing I can think of is that the 17GB backup happens to be a VM with the largest VD of about 2TB. It's not using all that space by any means, but that must be part of the issue somehow?

Ok so the time came to upgrade XS from 6.5 to 7.1. My setup is simple enough, I have the Dell SD card thingy where XS 6.5 is installed, and then I have one big RAID for storage of everything else.

I don't remember the initial install of XS being anything complicated. But anyway, I've now installed XS 7 three times trying to get it to work but it's not.

The first time I used the "upgrade" option, this ended with an error "the new partition table could not be written but was reverted successfully: Could not create partition 1 from 46139392 to 83888127
Error encountered; not saving changes."

After system reboot, I still had functional 6.5 but the storage repository was now "unplugged" and "not usable by this host." swell

So I said screw it and just did the clean install instead. This went through no problem. I created my password, setup static IP stuff, set time etc etc, then it kicked out my install DVD and wanted a reboot.
The system reboots, and loads up a nice old XS 6.5! Ok that's weird.

I did the install a 2nd time, also clean install, making sure to carefully check each screen. The only screen that has anything to do with storage is when it asks me where I want to store VMs, and I choose the big RAID.

Once again, I reboot, and up comes 6.5.

I have no idea where XS 7.1 is supposedly installing to, it doesn't ask me where to install to, it just does it on its own I guess. But there is my 6.5 still untouched.

Obvious question here, why isn't it installing to the SD or upgrading on the SD? It's not even asking where to install too. It must have installed somewhere right? And now my SR is offline.

I must be missing a step here.

WinSCP is fairly standard.

Enter all the sites, storing credentials and keys as you see fit. Then configure whatever you like as the text editor of choice. Notepad++, Sublime, VSC, et al. You can make it so that double-clicking any file goes strait to your editor of choice. Or create multiple editors that handle different file types.

A nice thing about WinSCP is that it's scriptable and has a command line executable for using however needed. I use it, for example, to automatically connect to a server and download backups to my local machine as a scheduled task in Windows.

Another handy feature is that you can save any given login as a Windows shortcut icon so simply double-click the icon and it opens up that connection. I use this by saving a shortcut in each project folder for different sites I work on. So I open my working folder and can double-click strait into the files.

Let's see, what else? You can tell it to synchronize local and remote folders to compare differences and sync up. You can tell it to keep a remote folder up to date so that every save of a local file will automatically upload to remote. You can open multiple sessions to different connections at the same time and even copy files between different sessions on completely different connections (tabbed interface). It can store multiple open sessions as a single state so that you can with a click open a WinSCP session that automatically opens multiple connections at the same time, such as if you commonly work on multiple servers at once.
If you connect with SSH, you can even bring up and run terminal commands.

All that said, it's a bit more powerful than typical tools like FileZilla and CyberDuck, but still has a few quirks. It's pretty much a standard though.

@irj said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

@guyinpv said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

@brrabill said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

@guyinpv said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

At a place I work, they want me available on my days off for those "just in case" times. They compensate this availability by paying part of my cell phone bill.

Doesn't seem like a fair trade. Unless you bill is thousands of dollars.

Nothing out of the ordinary about a boss who wants to keep IT on a tight leash. I'm the only one who can fix or research or do anything of technical importance. Naturally they want quick access to me.

@jaredbusch said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

Or jsut say, sorry my phone battery died and I did not notice. Will not happen again.

And move on.

Nah, not these guys. Once I was unavailable for over 4 hours (starting at 3am mind you) when a forum got hacked and defaced. Didn't fix it until noon. On my day off, on a Sunday. But they decided to grill me and black mark me anyway for having "more than 4 hour turnaround time in an emergency". And of course, this 4 hour rule was literally invented AFTER this happened, just specifically so they could black mark me for not having met it.

Hey, if I can put a wingding in my house that rings if needed, and it's only 85 cents a month, I guess I can justify that.

Excuse my french, but are you are fucking kidding me? I am going to go out on a limb and guess they are only paying you like $20 an hour or something... Am I right?

I've ranted about this company before, some around here get tired of it. They are old school bosses, they lead by "better to fear me than love me" thing. Black marks, performance meetings, threaten my job when they don't like something, etc.

But, long story short, small town, few tech jobs, low wages.

I'll be leaving when my own business is built up more. I've talked on here about that too. In fact, my home business income is up to making about half my income of this place already. Still not ready to fully make the switch though.

Tell power settings to not shut off the device to save power.

15 years ago I might have wondered if there was IRQ conflicts or something. Other drives stealing same resources.

Otherwise, it's not uncommon for networking to go out. There could have been a surge or something that make the electronics a bit wonky.

I've got a LiquidWeb VPS with WHM/cPanel and a couple sites on there.

Some part of the Wordpress site hosted on there is creating these random files in the /var/tmp folder to the point where it will fill up over time and run out of space. All the files are about 5MB in size, and they are all named the same, with "php" followed by 6 random characters with no file extension.
Opening a file shows only binary gobbledigoook with no real clues what it's for.

The file is created as the user/group of the user of the cPanel account. And as far as I've seen, it creates about 4 or 5 of these files a day at various times.

No errors appear in normal PHP error logs to match, so it does not appear to coincide with any kind of error dump. The files are also not generated through normal means by the PHP or Apache or MySQL processes.

My best guess is that they are created by a poorly written plugin. It's creating the files and not cleaning them up.

I have attempted to match up the time stamps of the files creation date with the raw access logs of the server. I went line by line opening every URL endpoint from the access log and then check if a file was created but this did not work, I couldn't get one to generate by going down the access log.

So that leaves my final method. I need some way to backtrack. To detect when such a file is written and somehow record or log what process or code is writing it.
I need some kind of linux tool to monitor the file operations of the WP site and log whenever a file gets created to the /tmp folder and by what script.
Not sure if this is even possible.

If not, or it would be way too consuming of resources to monitor all file operations, I'm open to other ideas. But right now, some stupid code somewhere is writing endless 5MB files to /tmp and filling it up over and over.

Since this is a production site, I really can't experiment by messing with WP like turning off plugins and changing theme and stuff like that.

Any ideas?

@stacksofplates said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Sorry, kind of trolling. But if they are having this many problems with just editing files they shouldn't be able to edit the version of the file that everyone sees. You're almost to the point where you have to do some kind of approval process to have changes made. That sounds ridiculous.

Heck I'd rather do a lot of things.

These Excel files are mainly used for tracking physical inventories, parts on order, incoming/outgoing/received/awaiting/etc.

Much better to use dedicated software for this kind of tracking, but we can't always get what we want. They are used to spreadsheet files, been using them for a decade, so a custom database just isn't in the cards.

Files based on vendor, which also contain lists of our own orders which are awaiting product for the incoming parts, etc. It's been evolved over the years and it's just the way it is. How they manage the files, how they are named, what folders they go in, and how data is entered, all very precise and people trained to use it.

And up until a few years ago these files would have been on a folder share on some random computer in the office. At least with the LAN share if someone opens a file, it won't let another person open it too.

@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@coliver said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

@guyinpv said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:

I'm not the one who demands we "share" O365 accounts, that was their brilliant plan to avoid $30 more a month. I'm quite tired of it really.

You may want to look at your licensing for O365 and report this to Microsoft. Generally licenses can't be shared and are per user.

And definitely not with O365. It's not a grey area at all, it's straight up theft.

I have much bigger concerns in my life then worrying over whether MS is losing out $30 a month.

And I know, I've spent most of my time on mangolassi ranting about my job, lol. But the time is coming to leave, as my side business is growing and I'm ready to do my own thing. Hopefully this year, I'm out. Hopefully within the next couple months.

You all know I've been wanting to leave my messed up job for some time now, been there 8+ years. It's been a roller coaster with management here.

Anyway, I finally had "the talk" about an exit strategy, and that's when the dung hit the wind generator if you follow.

The boss spent the whole night rummaging through my IT folder in our cloud drive, basically making a huge list and a stack of papers about what she "doesn't know" about my job and all the vendors we use, etc.

So she then comes up with a template of all the stuff she wants to know about every vendor made mention of in my files. Who are they, what do they do, is it a service or a plugin, how much is it, is it paid manually or automatically, on what card, do they need an SSL, when is it due, how much, users/passwords, support contact, etc etc etc.

Keep in mind, most all this is in my vendor information files already, she just didn't bother to read any of it. Instead she creates a new template in Word or Excel or something with lots of little fields to put all this info in.
She's asking for things like the physical mailing address of these vendors! lol, like I'm going to spend time finding out the physical address of some place where I bought some sound files once. Fax number, minimum order quantities, just weird stuff.

Lots of lecturing about how she doesn't know what some vendor or another does, and IT people have "secret knowledge" that is complicated so laypersons can't understand it. She says all my notes "might make sense to an IT person, but it's not how my brain as a layperson understands it".

She wants me to write up a "function book" where I write thousands of little "how-to" articles for each "function" I perform as an IT person, but written for the layperson so they can do my job "if they had to". All the information about each vendor, plus all the functions I perform at those vendors, what it's used for, how to make changes, when to make changes, how to troubleshoot it, etc etc etc. Who has SSLs, how are they renewed, when, how...

To top it all off, she won't read stuff that's too long. If I send emails that are too long or detailed, she refuses to even read them and then chides me. But if I write stuff that's too short, she complains it's not written for the layperson.

If I write "right-click the start menu and choose manage" she complains it's too short and written for IT people. What is right-click? Where is the start menu? Is this Windows 10 or 7? Do I right-click the manage link too? ugh
So I write longer, for the layperson, and she complains I write too much and doesn't read it.

Anyway, I'm kind of ranting here, but that's not the point.

The point is, I have a folder in the cloud where I have documents for dang near every vendor that plays even a small role in operations. This document has payment information, user info, support contact info, descriptions, even troubleshooting advice. My password database has access to everything. My computer has loads of other stuff handy for the next IT person, like my scripts, private keys, tons of source files for everything I've ever created.

But instead it sounds like she wants me to rewrite everything I've ever written, only in the format she likes, in the way she likes, along with a "layperson" user manual for every vendor and service along with how-to procedures for every bit of work that could be performed with those services.

Frankly, this is just ridiculous to me. I'll be here for the next 6 months just writing stuff over and over that I've already written, while getting chided because IT stuff is too hard for laypersons.

This just isn't right. They don't even want to replace me, they think I can just write enough user manuals and procedure/how-to docs and vendor information docs so that everybody else here (no technical people at all) can just do my job by following procedure checklists. Managing emails and forwards, troubleshooting internet problems, adjusting router settings and testing it, managing backups and cloud drives and archives.

I've told them, just hire somebody so I can train them for a few weeks, but they don't want to, they don't think they can find anybody as cheap as me! Instead they are looking for IT service companies to remotely manage everything + be on call for those emergencies when they happen. But everything else in house should be able to be handled by my expert layperson procedure guides.

On top of all this writing I'm supposed to do, they want me training at lease 2, maybe 3 people here on taking over support and management of various services and websites I run. Like handing over management of our dedicated server to a person whose never seen an SSH shell before. But it's ok you see, because I'll write up a layperson guide.

What is the right protocol here? I feel like I've already written everything of any value that an IT replacement could use. They are trying to force me to stay until all documentation is written just the way they like. Because if I left, if would put their company in a seriously vulnerable state because they "don't know anything about my job and what needs done" or how to troubleshoot and fix stuff if there is a problem.

Since I've already written stuff, it feels very stupid to RE-write everything just to change its format and looks. Like moving a pile of rocks from here to there, then rolling a ball up a hill and letting it roll back, just to roll it up again. This is busy work!
How much responsibility do I have to rewrite documentation just to change its format to please everybody? And keep in mind they never had any kind of official document store or official documentation guidelines. I just write docs as they make sense to me. Server information and the sites hosted by that server are in a spreadsheet. The financial summary of all the vendors we pay for, is in an Airtable DB as well as vendor Word files. General concepts like our overall backup strategy is contained in its own Word file along with any problems, and future changes I want to make. I separate a dedicated document for a disaster plan with overview of troubleshooting advice and who to call bout various things. I have document with instructions on how to do every scheduled task I have in my calendar. I have how-to procedures for each of those scheduled tasks.
I have user manuals saved, research docs, network diagram.
I have a MySQL database on my local computer where I've recorded all our hardware information, assets, computer specs, purchase and warranty info, model numbers, etc.

I have some docs in a self-hosted documentation tool called BookStack. I like it, but it seems she doesn't want to use a service, she wants everything in Word and Excel files in the cloud folder. So Airtable is no good, BootStack, MySQL, nope.

I have accounting information all laid out nice in an Airtable database which I link to from a doc in our cloud folder. She was confused by seeing a link and didn't even click it.

I really don't want to be stuck here for 6 months training laypeople to do IT work, writing endless user manuals for service providers, and changing formats of everything I've written for the last 8 years to make it conform to style choices.

What should really be expected of the IT person when they leave? I've heard everything from "hand over the passwords and walk" to "as a cornerstone employee it's your duty to not leave the company vulnerable at all." In some corporate high-level jobs, an exit strategy for important positions can take a year or two.

And believe me, there is no benefits while leaving. My vacation and sick pay is already cut off, my cell phone stipend is cut off, there is no severance. Heck we didn't even get a holiday bonus this year. So I'm being practically demanded to stay to do all this, while every benefit is already cut off simply because I've had "the talk" about wanting to leave. We don't even have an official last day.

This whole thing is driving me nuts right now. I consider them friends and I'm happy to have worked here 8 years so I don't want our relationship to blow up at the last second and lose any kind of reference I might have here. I'm sure they are in a bit of a panic, but what they are asking is months of work and to somehow distill 25 years of IT and web dev experience into one little "functions" black book that any layperson can follow to do my job. And there is no explaining to them otherwise.

On top of that, since they don't believe they can find a replacement who does everything I do for a reasonable price, they instead tell me I have to find my own replacement and to "use my circles" to track down a technical person.

I know a lot of responses here might be "just leave", but these things are easier said than done. I don't want their business to suffer, nor our relationship, nor my reference with them.