Best posts made by guyinpv

@dafyre said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

But more poignantly let me ask you, how do you do the same thing if you have people clock in and clock out?

Depends on the business I suppose. We have obvious issues like business hours of operation, where our shipping personnel and customer service has to be expected to be working. Shippers have to do their thing also based on the schedules of the shipping truck drivers for deliveries and pickups.
The phones have to be answered during set business hours.
People who need priority shipping or rush services, we have to be there.
Finance people have to do their work within a workflow so that they do their thing before order processing can do there thing, so it's impossible for the finance guy to do freeform schedule when other people depend on his work to be done first.

The list goes on.

All of that stuff up there, sure, you can call it blue collar, administrative, etc. But it all wraps up nicely when you can just say "everybody be available from this time to this time". That way all the workflows and processing happens when it's supposed to and work is performed at consistent times and schedules.

I understand you make the point that white collar professionals don't really work in these types of positions. But then again, is there no such think as a white collar professional finance manager? If their work has to be done by 8:30am, then it has to be done, whether set hours or freeform. This is a time constraint no matter how you slice it.

I can understand when a person owns a business and leases office space or a storefront, they want butts in the seats. What good is having a nice office if freeform employees don't spend much time there and prefer to do most work from home or even a coffee shop?
I can see why a boss wants to be able to call at 2:30pm and know without doubt he's got an employee in a chair who will answer and do what he says immediately.

I can see why it would be somewhat annoying if the boss wants something done and has to round-robin calling people to find someone who isn't indisposed on a date or at the movies in the middle of the afternoon and thus has to wait 2 hours to get a task done.

I'm not arguing cause I think the freeform way is bad, cause it actually sounds lovely. I work best at night for example, I'm a night owl. I'm crummy in the morning and need a kick to get in to gear. I would love nothing more than being able to break up my day with a family lunch or a matinée or hit the gym to get a refresh. I'd love switching to a night schedule where I can work from after-dinner to 11:30pm or something and wake up at 9 or 10. It's just the way my body works.

Anyway I guess all I'm saying is, there are perks to both, perks for both the business owners, or the employees.

I would love to work from home, but if I'm working for a local business and a boss controls my time, then I want that time slot limited and to unplug from them the rest of the time. I don't want to go from feeling under control from 9-5 to being under control ALL the time which is how our salaried people felt. This is probably the boss's fault.

Freeform would only work for me if I get to be self-directed and don't have to feel like I'm on call. I've done on call, it's nearly panic-inducing. Making sure my phone is charged at all times and is near me with the ringer loud. Never forget to have it next to me in bed. Leave on the buzzer instead of turning it off in the theater. Always a small worry that it will ring at any moment. Warning people "if I get a call I have to run", etc. Having it on the counter next to me in the shower even.

That type of on-call situation is stressful. If I make one mistake and say I'm driving out the woods and don't have signal and don't realize it, then horror of horrors someone tried to contact me for an hour and now I have a black mark on my "performance report" for slow turn around time. It's just a horrid way to live as far as what I just described.

I guess at the end of the day it all boils down NOT to how passionate someone is about their work, but rather how controlled they feel within the company. I actually have a boss who often belittles people and is condescending, but of course, they are the boss, you just put up with it. With a boss like that, there is no better thing than being able to "unplug" and ignore them for the next 16 hours, irregardless of how much I love the work. And no worse thing than to have to hear their voice at 7:30pm when I'm having dinner with the family.

I guess I need a new job, hahaha, but I still love the work.

Yes. I would suggest you start dusting of the Resume. I won't put up with that from anybody, I don't care if it's the Janitor, the CEO, or the President of the United States. Be nice to me, and I'll be nice to you. In the end, though, we're all people, and we're going to have bad days. I can let stuff slide a time or two... but if it becomes a habbit, it's time for me to go.

Absolutely.

It's an interesting study in psychology though. Other people's attitudes don't affect me that much but it's very annoying just the same. Some have suspected this boss is bipolar for example, cause other days they act awesome. Some days all the employees are whispering "stay out of the way, they're on rampage" and that sort of thing. Some days they are fine.

They also have an old school "boss pattern" that is all too familiar and ugly. The pattern of "better to fear me than love me". A patter than says you must exert yourself as powerful over the lowly employees and "show them who's boss". Where pushback is never tolerated, black marks all around, performance reports, dissenters will be punished and publicly humiliated, jobs will be subtly threatened if they don't get their way, it will sometimes be reminded that we can be replaced easy enough.

All these old school bossy bully tactics get very old. I would much rather work in a true team environment where everybody encourages greatness and nobody has to feel threatened about anything and lash out at each other. Where the boss doesn't feel threatened and have to show how powerful they are so they can feel in control.

My boss demands we come talk about any "issues" but invariably anybody who brings up an issue gets on the black list until further notice and it's quite obvious this happens. They've fired people for "bringing up stuff" that they didn't like.

Wow, I'm ranting like a disgruntled employee! But I love the work!

Now come on, is THAT not a sign of passion too?!

This is the same old question. I want to discuss truly viable options for home businesses.

There is bottom of the barrel stuff like in home computer repair. And all the way up to MSP services or even custom application programming.

The situation is that I have a family and kids and not really interested in hugely risky business types. I live in a small-ish town of 40k people with another town 20 miles away with another 40k people. The type of business I do can't depend on living in huge cities to make it work.

I am skilled at the intermediate level in many different things such as web design, programming, IT, and graphics. Freelance work is often on my mind for example.

I mainly want to discuss options for a single-owner IT business. What can I do that has potential for good income and is sustainable by a single owner? I don't think I have the temperament for herding cats so I don't really want 5 or 20 employees to manage. An accountant and personal assistant/secretary is just about enough for me. That said, the business(es) needs to pull in anywhere from $60k to $150k.

I think computer repair is low hanging fruit. People buy $399 computers from Walmart, they don't want to pay $75/hr to move icons around and install printers. Most of my time is waiting on slow internet connections and slow computers to catch up. I feel like every in home job I do is a rip off. It's 20% work and 80% waiting for their Walmart special to catch up.

MSP is overreaching for me. It's more than I want to chew. It's the type of thing where, even if I could find some businesses to do this for, I would be limited to servicing everything myself, and thus could only have a few clients in the first place. One lost client could represent a huge chunk of income, which is risky.

Somewhere in the consulting space is where I see myself. Consulting has a specific niche though. If a business is large enough or complicated enough, they will have their own IT staff already. If the business is a cut-n-paste business, they already have an IT blueprint and use local providers.
The niche is small businesses without IT staff who don't lean on local providers, and yet have the funds and need for IT services.
In a small town, this niche may be hard to find? I'm not sure.
If a company "needs" IT services, you'd think they would have found it already. Either that, or computer stuff is easy enough to find and buy, setup, or rent online, that they rarely need IT in the first place.

I see mom-n-pop tech shops open and close regularly in this town. One week I'll see a car driving around some slogan pasted on the window "Call Bill's Super Deluxe Nerd Shop Today!" These companies are fly-by-night. I think home-based servicing is almost dead. Computers are fairly reliable, and when they die, you get a new one for $399. Plus people are going to iPads and phones for a lot of stuff. Most of my in-home stuff people only use them for email and printing things and shopping sometimes, etc.

I'm looking for actual viable businesses that will work for single-proprietors in smaller towns that are known for being successful for the most part.
This is likely going to involve a combination of local work, freelance work, and maybe even running smaller businesses on the side (think like gumball machine route, etc), anything easy that turns an ok profit without a ton of work.

I'm curious what some of you do for a living if you are in this situation. I know only a handful of you that are part of MSPs or what have you, but otherwise I'm curious what many of you do.

Is the in-home IT business dying too? Am I better off trying to work for a large company? Beside mom-n-pop "computer repair" companies, what else can a guy do?

I've got a company doing online sales and ships from their local warehouse. They also manufacturer stuff, and do product customizing where the customer actually sends stuff TO them as part of the order.

There is only one sales channel which is their ecommerce store (BigCommerce Enterprise).

Despite BC costing like $1600/m, they have very poor order processing. You can't accept multiple payments, can't do split payments or partial down payments. You can't edit orders after customers makes them or do partial refunds etc etc.
You also can't create custom order statuses or tags/categories or even have a quick notes field that is easy to access and view.

Regardless, due to their complex catalog and offerings, they need something beyond the simple tools in BigC.

I first looked at fulfillment software like ShipStation, ShippingEasy, and Ordoro.
This software is adequate to replace software such as UPS Worldship and Stamps.com, but are not generally acceptable as complete order management tools. ShippingEasy, for example, does not import all orders, only those from certain BigC statuses.
ShipStation imports almost all orders, but skips any that do not actually require "shipping" services, like say digital products. So it can't be considered order management, as some orders never get in to it.
As fulfillment software, they work great and are reasonably priced.

When I try to jump into full order management, I usually get pulled in to these massive all-in-one suites that do everything. ERP, CRM, order, shipping, receiving, vendors, POs, accounting, ecommerce, marketing.
Suites like NetSuite and Bizautomation come to mind. Another called Orderbot is a somewhat customized solution in this space. Problem is all of them are way out of budget and probably over the top in features for our needs. NetSuite being $4k to $5k to start. Orderbot being up to $40k for the first year getting started.

Other systems cross my path like ShipWire.
The problem with a lot of these other tools is they try to be too much. I don't want full accounting, we've already got that. I don't want built-in ecommerce, we're using BigC. I don't need a huge focus on running dozens of channels, we've got just one. I don't need a huge focus on multiple warehouses or global distribution.

What I DO need, is to manage our order lifecycle. What statuses and tags they are in, who is responsible to do what, what the order is waiting for, what POs the order is attached to waiting for parts. We need fulfillment and shipping, naturally.
That's about it.

So I've found decent fulfillment software but is not order management. I've found fulfillment + inventory and warehouse management (ERP) but also lacking order management.
I've found order management but it's far too expensive and drags along other services we don't need.
I've found software like Megaventory but they don't have integrations, you have to build off their API yourself.
I've found BrightPearl, which is very close to our needs, a little too much, but is just out of budget, being over $500/m to start. They are out of Europe though, and we're a US company.

At this point, my Google is failing. I have "snow eyes" and simply can't find something for our needs.
I started looking for an online retail/ecommerce consultant but this space seems filled with SEO-foo wannabes and I can't tell who is gold and who wants affiliate commissions.

If we could have some ERP features like generating POs, that's ok. I want something that:

1. Pulls in ALL orders from all channels.
2. Advanced order management; tags, filters, categories, statuses, notes, workflows, user assignments, tasks, customer communications tracking. And sync as much of this data as possible back to the channel when done.
3. Fulfillment. Advanced shipping rules, automations, batch label printing, reports, split boxes, split shipments, error checking (address validation etc) and syncing tracking codes and everything back to channel.
4. Affordable for small business. They can't afford one piece of software being an entire employees wage.
5. If full order and fulfillment comes along with basic ERP and CRM or some level of accounting, so be it. But we aren't replacing our current accounting.
6. Ecommerce and marketing not necessary, we already have a cart and other services.

I've reached my limit for doing research on this, either no such software exists, or adequate tools are impossible to find within budget.
The budget we have is not outside what something like ShipStation is, but ShipStation, feature wise, is only getting us about 85% of the way there. It's so close!
Software seems to jump from $40-$80/month strait to $600-$5000/m. Where is the middle market?

@DustinB3403
The "try now" is just setting up an online version for you to play with. The actual product is a download, in fact it runs in Docker on top of Windows or Linux.

Watching some of their videos, seems pretty slick.

LibreOffice doesn't let you collaborate on a document at the same time, attach to projects or all that other stuff.

I'm assuming that it can be opened to the web in order to allow people to work remotely too, not sure.

Seems like it's trying to be a document store as well as Intranet and office apps. Has CRM and calendar and projects and a bunch more. Kinda like, I dunno, clinked, huddle, yammer, podio kinda thing but with the document editors also built in.

@scottalanmiller said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

@guyinpv said in Would You Hire Someone in IT Who Does Not Have a Home Lab:

That type of on-call situation is stressful. If I make one mistake and say I'm driving out the woods and don't have signal and don't realize it, then horror of horrors someone tried to contact me for an hour and now I have a black mark on my "performance report" for slow turn around time. It's just a horrid way to live as far as what I just described.

I used to have that happen all of the time, but normally because I was in the office where people would pull me into meetings away from my phone, email, IM, etc. Going home is what let me answer the calls.

It's certainly a paradigm shift.

Do you have examples of where it was necessary to point out an employee whose output was not up to par? Where does freedom of time end and "let's get some work done here fella" begin?

All the above is my opinion too.
@irj You aren't ripping at all. I need opinions from people who've been there.

My last bench job was over 10 years ago, even then it was about $13/hr after 6 years at the place!

My last job interview for bench/repair/onsite general tech at "the" local "big" shop was just a year or two ago but they maxed out around $17 or $18/hr even for an onsite tech who does business clients.

I've never seen a general tech position in my local cities anywhere over basic $10 to $14/hr. It's pathetic.
The highest paying IT job I ever found/applied for was for city government which was about a $45k job with full benefits, maxing out around $70k ish.
Even hospitals and town governments pay around $40k-$50k tops.

If the very best I can do in my city is government at $50k, there has to be something better I can do on my own. I just don't know what that niche is, what it looks like, what is my value/offering.

OK so if traveling technician is out, and MSP it out due to complexity and lack of experience, what other niches are there?
It seems obviously to cater to business rather than consumer, though there may be a small niche of consumers worth going after too.
Businesses must have a need for IT but not big enough to afford their own part time or full time staff. And not small enough where they just have one or two Walmart PCs and a inkjet.

Maybe I just need more examples of what people actual DO if they run their own IT business, and how much can be made doing it. I might as well not leave the 9-5 if going my own way increases work load by 40% and only make a few hundred more a month! Or I can keep applying for government jobs. eww.

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

Have you looked at something like Odoo?

Haven't come across it yet. Will take a look!

That's why I created thread, see if there are any players I missed.

Which part is confusing again?
Right from the main home page, click "Solutions" and the bottom one says "Desktop". On that page is a big "Download" button.
The license is a very common "free for home, pay for business". Or free if you are a SaaS customer.

They offer the infrastructure as cloud-hosted, paid. Or install on your own server, AGPLv3. Or just use desktop apps, free for home, pay for business.

The whole cloud/saas vs local deploy vs desktop app may confuse things but just a few minutes looking sorts it out.

Of course they want to promote their full enterprise SaaS cloud version the most.

In any case, I think I'll give these a try and see howe they work. I like Libre Office alright, but don't like the 15 year old looking interface. Wish they had some GUI designers give things a fresh look.

People put too much hate on A+.

Sure if you've already been a bench tech for a few years it kind of doesn't mean much at that point, you've seen enough problems to be a good tech.

But for me, I owned like 2 computers before I got my first job as a tech, and they wanted A+ for the job. All of my study was purely for A+, with no experience at all. I remember reading those fat bastard 5 inch computer repair books all night trying to memorize power supply voltages for each pin, and IRQs and 802.x details. I burned through many highlighters and notebooks!

As a person with no real computer repair skills, all of that study was a huge foundation for me. It's not the A+ test or cert that teaches anything, it's how much study and experience you get/need to pass it in the first place. I actually failed the hardware part of the test at first due to all the friggin nonsense trivia questions.

Regardless, a person can be a "computer repair tech" purely by experience but not really know anything about how anything works or why. But you do gain a bit of an advantage with the book learning aspect too. It's nice to read up on how things work under the hood, and not simply know how to fix it.

Experience is great, book learning is great, but a mix of both is better still.

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv

That was basically my exact argument.

I'm sure @scottalanmiller will chime in to present his side.

But I don't see why there is an "argument" at all? What is the argument? Are there tech people who refuse to be labeled as sales people? Is somebody trying to be a tech while never selling anything?
Technical people have to present tools and options to clients who then buy stuff. Sometimes there could be commission, maybe not, why does it matter? Who cares if IT people are also sales or sales people are also IT?

Quite frankly, I don't understand why there is an argument about these definitions in the first place. The whole world is in sales. If you do "work", that means other people pay you for stuff, therefore you are in sales, you have to sell your services first and foremost.

All the richest people on earth do sales. Commission-based sales jobs are probably in 3rd of 4th place for highest paying careers of any type.

Are people offended at being labeled salesman? I just don't get why this is an argument. Or is this just going round in circles for funzies?

Has anybody compared ClearOS with Zentyal side-by-side?

Both can be a replacement for a Windows Server environment, so I'm wondering if anybody has done a head-to-head on them.

Let's pretend they would be used for all the common server roles. DNS, AD, SAMBA, Web server, etc.

Because Monster/Indeed/etc are all fronts for legal purposes.

Everybody knows you get hired due to who you know Bob in the mail room, his sister's old boyfriend's cousin's drinking buddy used a computer once, the cousin highly recommends him. HIRED!

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@BRRABill said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@scottalanmiller

Can a consultant also be a sales person?

No. Sales essentially overrides all other things. Sales pays you to anti-consult, you can't serve two masters in that case. You have to unethically fail to represent one party or the other if you mix the two together. Logically, you only mix the two when you intend to scam the customer, not to scam the vendor because under normal payment schemes you get nothing that way, vendors know better.

I have some problems here.

"Sales overrides all the things" <--- huge assumption about human greed. Non-sequitur. It's entirely possible that a consultant cares more about the work they do and providing the right solutions, than about whatever paltry affiliate fee they might get from promoting a solution they must KNOW is not the best.

"sales pays to anti-consult" <--- Really? By offering an affiliate/commission system, the product automatically becomes the worst choice in all scenarios? It's very possible that the product BOTH fills the need perfectly, AND offers commission. Another non-sequitur.

"You have to fail to represent one party or the other..." <--- False dichotomy. You're assuming that if a product has a commission program, therefore it can never be a good solution for a client. Because either the client is somehow screwed, or the vendor is (if you don't promote/use them in a particular case).
OR the product actually IS a good fit, AND has commission. OR the product is not a good fit, so the consultant does their job well and recommends something else. This doesn't mean the other vendor is screwed, they simply weren't an option on the table, commission or not.

"you only mix the two when you intend to scam the customer" <--- Seems like another non-sequitur. How is it you can sell Synology to hundreds of clients with good success, but if you change and now receive a small commission, it becomes scamming? The very same customers would have been scammed rather than helped, by the inclusion of a commission?

This discussion does assume a lot about human nature, and it's NOT a matter of logic. It's entirely possible that a commissioned option is available for a particular customer, but the consultant ignores that option if it's not the best choice.
It's entirely possible that a consultant is honest enough to not push services the client doesn't need.
It's entirely possible that the small commission potentially made by a product is insignificant next to the entire job. If a consulting + labor job is going to be $2k or $3k or $5k, then a $100 finders fee from some service provider means nothing compared to doing the best job I can for $5k. $100 won't swing decisions one way or the other, and if the provider that I like so much I've signed up to be an affiliate, happens to work in this scenario, and I make $100, this is definitely not "scamming" the customer. I would have recommended the same product regardless.

My opinion is that in most cases, especially independents like me, the small affiliates I get from my favorite products are a simple value add, or bonus, for me. I would be recommending the product anyway.
I don't recommend the product because of the affiliate, I signed up for the affiliate because I like the product so much.

This entire things basically seems to come down to whether human natural greed always wins over simple human honesty and sincerity.

Where things fall apart are the grey zones.
The simple product would work, but my affiliate product which is a little more advanced and more than they need, will easily fit too, but hey I get paid!
The super quick job that might cost them $200, but where I could get a $100 bonus, that's a pretty hard-to-reject offer. It's 50% of the entire job!
However, the $5000 job, a $50 or $100 finder's fee is not very cloudy. Maybe one or two little poofy clouds, but mostly a clear sky.

Lastly, commissions are not the only thing can cloud someone's view. If the client is cheap and wants as fast as possible, you might be tempted to recommend products you are most familiar with and can work quickly with.
Or maybe the client themselves "know" about a product you already happen to have an affiliate for, they demand THAT product, and you get a bonus, you feel even better about it.
Or maybe you're being clouded by cloudiness! You can go with the non-commissioned simple product, but the client (and you) feel like maybe you should go with something more powerful in case of future growth or needs. But the more powerful option is an affiliate, so now you actively don't want affiliate to cloud your judgement, so you feel almost an anti-affiliate pull to not recommend it just so you don't feel guilty! lol

Anyway, interesting conversation. I'm not fully convinced that I should never do affiliations for products for which I already love and recommend, and have affiliate programs available. My loyalty is to the client and doing a good job, I view affiliate commissions as little more than happy bonuses should there be a sale.

@scottalanmiller said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:

@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:

I really am surprised there are not good options here.

Well on one side you are recognizing an opportunity. That's good. But from the system admin side, I don't see a problem to solve. Already everyone in an environment of any scale has a system that works incredibly well, the command line. There isn't a problem to solve. So while you might have a solution, it's a solution in search of a problem.

not that the idea is bad, but attempt to implement it, even on paper. How man of these ad hoc things do you want to include? Any one you leave out might be your "inode" to someone else. What does this GUI based system really look like? how do you make an interface for "everything"? And then make it easy to use.

Buddy, those are the questions us GUI people are made to answer

It could reduce the learning curve on performing hundreds of common tasks.
Training level 1 support would be easier. Less need for high level super techs at level 3.
Based on a permissions system, certain parts of the GUI could be exposed to low level tech support or even staff.
Customized dashboards could be setup for any given area of control for any given tech.

Just like Webmin, any given service or part of the system would have a module to help manage it. If the system doesn't run BIND, no part of the GUI would have to be designated for it. It's only as complex as the complexity of the server farm and roles.

Just dreaming

Well from what I've seen when job hunting, is that any company with a little technical ability is going to have their own "Career" section right on their own website.

If I were in the job market and actually wanted to work for any large company be it a university or fortune whatever or just any company I happen to like, I'll go see if jobs are open on their own websites.

Even if I use a company like Monster first, just to notice a position, I'll then skip Monster and go strait to the corporate website to the career page. There usually is one.

Also, I would assume for larger companies, hiring from within the walls is the first/best bet. Promote someone up, and another and another, and then after promoting people all you have left are bottom level positions to fill.

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

But no one is defining it that way. Maybe in your mind that is what VAR means, but not to anyone else. VAR means you do sales and add services.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable conclusion. The problem is now that VAR is established, many many negative words were introduced to describe them.
Their ONLY job is "selling as much as possible."
They are "beholden" to the vendors.
The vendors are their "masters."
Their opinions are wholly "biased", if not totally "corrupted."
They cannot ethically/morally/objectively do any "consulting" when possible reselling is on the table.

I'm fine being called a generalist "services" provider, a VAR who provides services, break/fix, comes up with solutions and has some recommended affiliate/partner products in my toolbox should they be needed.
What I reject is being told I am essentially as good as a pushy vacuum salesmen, whose only job is selling for the man and so I can't be trusted for the best advice. Or that I've become a car lot and my whole job is selling the most expensive car.

@scottalanmiller said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:

@guyinpv said in Making Business to Candidate Hiring Connections:

Also, I would assume for larger companies, hiring from within the walls is the first/best bet. Promote someone up, and another and another, and then after promoting people all you have left are bottom level positions to fill.

That's what the worst companies do, but obviously good ones cannot because the best people won't come work for you that way. Wegmans in NY does this, promoting all IT from the ranks of cashiers, and it shows. Even the most basic tasks need to be outsources and everything is shoddy, slow and costly.

Are we talking about IT companies?

There is a huge benefit to promoting internal talent. I.e. they already know the work ethic and temperament and how they work with others. That they've shown some leadership ability and drive, or actually enjoy the work and the product. You don't get a lot of that in a couple job interviews. It's a safe bet to promote internal talent if you see the potential in someone to move up.
And what employee wouldn't like a fresh set of responsibilities and a nice pay bump?

It's also a benefit to start people at low positions because you tend to get the beginners and new talent. People you can mold a little bit and grow into what the company needs.
This as opposed to hiring some veteran person stuck in their ways and has a hard shell for change.
I'm making an assumption that it's a bit easier to hire for lower positions than higher. Higher positions have more security clearance, more responsibilities, more control. That must be difficult to make the decision to hire.

But obviously, what you described can happen too. I'm just surprised you think that is the norm rather than the exception.

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

Why must one be a VAR before they can have some favorite tools in the toolbox? Or pull out some "common" options when a particular need comes up?

Having a solution that you are paid to favour (or accept money for favouring) or exchanges money in any way... makes you a VAR.

The favoured solution bit is totally wrong and something you added. Favouring a solution doesn't have anything to do with it. A consultant can favour a solution and not be a VAR. A VAR can have all solutions available and have no favourites. The two are unrelated.

They may be unrelated but it's the motive behind it that you twist against my words.

"You must be a VAR when the solutions you favour pay you to favour them"

Except that I already favored them for years, then I decided to sign up, nobody made me. I get it, you are using the absolute definition behind the terms, but I don't like the way you handle the motivations and underlying relationship with the vendor with the language you use.

Being "paid to favor them" is NOT the motivation. It might be true in reality as something that happens, but it does NOT have to mean that this is the technician's primary motivations or the reason why they favor the thing in the first place. It does mean in the least that the commission changes the way they work for the client one iota. It does not HAVE to mean that, not logically, not at all.

I have a Ubuntu server up on VULTR which I use as a web server and it runs Vesta Control Panel, which I do really like and want to keep using.

The problem is Vesta has lost its mind with its backup system.

What is happening is that Vesta "thinks" there is one backup in progress, but it thinks this endlessly and it never stops. If I try to manually create a backup it will error saying that one is in progress.

The "in progress" backup never finishes, and fills up the entire drive space of the server with /backup/tmp.* folders until the server runs out of space and everything stops working.

I can delete all those tmp.* folders and gain 50% drive space back, but it will fill up again within a number of hours.

I've restarted the Vesta service and it doesn't work. I've gone as far as restarting the whole server and that doesn't stop it either.

My question is basically how can I FIND this script that refuses to stop and is filling up the drive with tmp folders? Why is it kicking right back up when the server is restarted?

I'm not the best when it comes to dealing with running processes and what is doing what. Am I able to figure out what specific service/process is responsible for creating specific files and folders? Can I monitor what process is accessing that /backup folder?
Obviously the script is connected with Vesta but I still don't know how to use that info. Like where is the script running from or what it might be called. Maybe it's even part of the larger Vesta service and I can't even stop it individually?

Any ideas how to find this script and fix it? Or at least stop it. I've reported to Vesta on two different web channels but no response. I haven't found anybody else having this runaway backup script issue.

And just in case anybody asks, it is not the case that the script simply needs all this room. I used to have multiple backups stored and it never used this much space. Now, all backups are deleted for all accounts, it should definitely not need this much temp storage to do a backup of some small websites.

I just need some way to make the connection of THIS script keeps writing to THIS folder. Is there a way to find this out? Not sure what my options are.