Still, they built the mechanism/ability of including updates in the install media. It would take all of 1 engineer all of 1 hour to compile an updated ISO and stick it online.
Over the course of 10 years it probably would have reduced the load on their update servers by a fantastical amount.
Well it happened again.
Ordered an Eaton 5S700. Might as well give it a shot.
Titles don't matter that much except for companies that literally base your pay range on it. If they are going to do that, then fight for the best paying title!
And yes, I do work for a comp that does it. I started as "IT Helpdesk" and could not get my title changed even once I began supporting Linux web servers and doing all the purchasing and essentially being responsible for all-the-things.
The person before me who remained on staff for a while was called "IT Coordinator", whatever that means.
Eventually I had to write like a 6 page letter explaining what I do and what titles actually mean and finally got my title approved to be "IT Systems Administrator" (a most appropriate and generic title for my position and duties). And then negotiated my pay as a separate thing. Plus I like calling myself a "SysAdmin" and can celebrate national SysAdmin Day.
What's funny is that when my boss would send phone calls or emails to me to do things, he would use important-sounding titles to look impressive to the other person. Like "I'll pass you on to our CTO to handle that" even though I'm no such thing, lol
I was on Crashplan for many years, simple unlimited plan, cheap enough, just my one home computer.
Now they are getting rid of "home" plans, only business plans, which would be $10/m per computer.
I'm looking at options, I'm sure I'm not the only one! iDrive, Crashplan business, BackBlaze, Spideroak, etc etc
A few features would be nice:
Ability to adjust what is backed up, not one of these "we'll automatically grab only your user folder and exclude tons of stuff" deals.
Client-side encryption would be nice. Trust no one.
Individual file restores, ability to browse backup files and histories, etc.
Restore to alternate computer in case of new HDD or crash, etc.
Light on resources.
I'm considering two options at the moment. Continue with Crashplan business as they are giving 75% discount for first year. That at least puts off the decision for another year, and I don't have to wait weeks to upload backup to new service.
Backblaze, for home plan is $5/m unlimited. But business plan is also unlimited for $50/yr (which is $4.17/m) .
I'm already paying Crashplan $6.54/m, so switch to BB is actually cheaper anyway. I don't really want to do $10/m on CP.
Any other good options?
I think for now I'm going to go with Crashplan business, mainly because it's 75% off. I'll push this off for a year and save a few bucks.
My user folder and my data drive are just over 500GB so not a huge backup, but still, CP is currently dead and waiting even a week to backup to BB hurts a little.
I do have O365 so I've got 1TB there. I actually store some Windows user folder (docs/music/images/videos) directly into OneDrive. I just don't want to use it as a "backup" in the fuller sense of the word. It's not exactly protected from crypto and would be a huge pain to recover from.
@irj said in Looking for some neat Server Build Projects:
OneDrive is such a terrible product. It's really flaky for me. Every other cloud storage I've used is leaps and bounds better. It's almost unbelievable how bad it is.
I think it's fine but it does have quirks. Folder/file level issues, file names, symbols, etc.
We use Box at work and have had endless issues with it. Some issues as bad as literally seeing files on one computer that never sync to another, and yet the files are seen in the cloud, but they refused to sync down to a device. We are constantly having to delete files from the cloud just so we can try to reupload them to sync. Just lots of issues. Background app suddenly dies and does nothing, even though icon is still in system tray.
OneDrive at least is more keen on stayling alive and reporting sync issues. Box just sort of silently dies and we discover problems later.
For me, since we have Office365 (mainly just to get Office suite), it really sucks that Sharepoint is bad, OneDrive is bad, OneNote is bad, etc etc. I really wish O365 just worked great and I didn't have to also go buy alternate services, ignoring MS ones I'm already buying.
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some neat Server Build Projects:
@guyinpv said in Looking for some neat Server Build Projects:
Well I guess I'll just have to buy O365 to get Word and Excel. Then buy Google Apps to get Drive. Then buy some other suite just to get a decent intranet. Then another suite to get some notes. Then another suite just to get the wiki. ffs
Why do you need Word and Excel? I mean lots of people need them but why do you?
Because all the non-techy people are used to Office. I only recently finally got them to stop using old copies of Office 2007. At least now they can use 2016 on O365. They will not use anything else, and threw a hissy fit when MS started pushing Office as a subscription model. They were THIS close to forcing us to keep using 2007 just because we happened to have those licenses and the software still runs fine.
MS's licensing model is such a pain. All I want is updated software, and all the boss wants is to not spend thousands of dollars upgrading when the old stuff "still works". And nothing compares to Word/Excel right now. Don't even bother telling me to try doing spreadsheets in the cloud in a web browser on Google. No chance of ever getting anybody around here to do that.
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.
My main forms of contact are going to just be my phone, wife's phone, and Slack if I'm at my home computer.
In this case, everybody at the office magically forgot Slack existed. And my phone died just seconds before I plugged in to charger so I didn't even realize it was off most of the day.
In any case, with only two phones and computer chat, it's still possible they might not be able to reach me for a length of time. If wife is out, my phone is off or in another room or something. I want to add one more form of contact and I figure a house phone is a good option.
With VOIP options today, I think this could be a pretty cheap enterprise.
So what is the cheapest path to getting a house phone just so there is something else that can go "ring" if they need me?
I'm guessing your answer will be something along the lines of voip.ms and a cheap $30 voip phone or something?
If the voip phone thing turns out to be pretty cool, I may eventually expand it to become a house line for my home business itself, so I want to keep the option open for things like toll free number, most extensions around the house, voicemail, fax, stuff like that.
Ya, I just never get around to it.
For two reasons really.
Some of the projects are purely made for myself, so I just use MySQL and Navicat and do my thing. Or the data is so rarely accessed, people just come to me to find out something.
The project is temporary or purely an archive.
For those project which will be accessed by others, the data either sits in Excel because it's not that much data anyway, or I build out a little web interface using a CMS though it might lack some CUD, at least others can read/browse the data.
The problem with these things is that, when data is needed, it's needed NOW BLAST YOU! But once we're done, it's barely needed and thus not worth the time to build a crud app around it.
And my final excuse, down here around 10%, I just don't care any more. If somebody needs a report, I gather and extract the data and make a pretty report as needed. Too much other stuff happening. For example, creating a DVD video from source footage when the boss took a trip. Yes, I do that, lol
$15-$20 hour is high class living for a single dude with no debts and a one or two bed apartment!
It's when the wife and kids come, and for some reason they want to eat food and get a van, that $20/hr ain't gunna cut it!
I've nearly doubled my income from pre-dating to family life, but it's still not enough!
@rojoloco said in Where do you order most of your product from?:
But I will say that at least CDW keeps trying to have our account rep be a hot chick... Current rep is "Britney", and she sounds hot. I don't buy anything from her, but I will occasionally take one of her calls, just to hear her try to use her hot girl tricks on me (I don't fall for them).
She be like "hi there, would you like to buy our latest motherbrains!"
@dbeato I should be able to install and use any tool I want, it's a VPS.
But monitoring the folder, I don't think will work. At best it would only be able to tell me that the PHP process wrote a file, but not which script did it. I would need some kind of application monitor that monitors all the PHP scripts as well as monitor when they write files to that tmp folder.
I thought maybe just a simply stack trace log that could be "turned on" in Apache and/or PHP for temporary time like a few days, then turn it back off.
Logging all PHP functions for multiple days would likely produce a mountain of data, so I'd have to figure out how to save that and search it.
Wouldn't the Zend engine or some other PHP diagnostic monitoring tool be able to do this? I think it's something that can be done using Apache/PHP tools rather than underlying OS tools, I don't know.
@jaredbusch said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
@guyinpv said in Week 2 of switching to NextCloud:
- nobody will ever understand user based permissions I swear! The boss wants some "private" folders for management only, so I created those under her account. But one day she wanted somebody to use the office scanner to archive some PDFs into the folder. Well the scanner used is on a particular computer which doesn't have access to her private folder, of course.
So what did she decided to do you ask? She moved the entire private folder into the public company share folder so that one person could put some scanned PDFs into it from another computer. That was like over 500MB private folder that just got synced to everybody for no reason except to let someone copy some files into it. So much for private!Again, this is not a NC issue. it is a user issue. You have many options to have worked around this issue.
I would have created a new NC user account, and shared only that folder with the new account and then added that second NC account to the NC client on that computer and dropped a shortcut to the folder on the desktop or wherever it was needed.
Yes, that is what WE would have done. But users don't ask permission, they just do random things that make sense to them at the time. Like move a 500MB folder from a private folder into the mass public one just so they can let one person copy some things there.
All these people need a "public" folder where everybody deals with files.
Then the boss wants a private area for some corporate stuff, payroll, taxes, etc.
But they always find ways to complicate things.
You can build the most advanced toy ever, but if you let in a gang of monkeys, they will poke and prod and pinch and push and pull and yank and tear every possible weak point.
Sometimes these things only make sense to nerds, others just refuse to get it.
@dafyre Looks like your basic list-of-checkboxes.
Can the tasks have subtasks? Can they have a description and extra text/comments added to them, or attachments?
I admin my needs seem to be complex. Or not?
I use the word "todo" but I don't mean one sentence with a checkbox next to it. I'm not making a shopping list. So I do want the extra project management stuff to go along with it like subtasks, organization by folders or projects or clients or whatever term they use.
I do like subtasks to help split up longer tasks. And a good description field for comments and notes. If it can track start and end dates, that's fine. Priority levels, cool, tags, ok, comment stream, nice, attachments handy.
Producteev worked well and it was probably very similar to Asana and those direct competitors. Guess I can try free version of Asana, see what kind of limits I run into.
After going through Google Drive, OneDrive, Box.com, and now NextCloud, none have worked out. They've all been buggy, inconsistent, create too many sync issues, "lose files", desktop app closes unexpectedly, orphan files between web and desktop, renaming issues, file cut/paste issues, etc.
I've been tasked to once again change clouds and find something else that is hopefully more robust.
We need 40+ GB primarily as a single shared folder for the entire office to use. Although if the boss has their own personal folders for corporate stuff, that would be good, but everybody else just needs access to the one master shared folder.
We have 12 or so desktops and a half dozen laptops and some phones and home computers to connect to.
I was thinking of trying Dropbox this time. Buy two standard users, one the boss/management can share, and one for everybody else in the office to share. Then the 1st account creates the master share and shares that to the other user.
I've always had good luck with Dropbox on my personal one.
Any other ideas, hopefully low budget options? There is no way I'm paying $140/m for Dropbox Business for 11 employees to have their own accounts. It's not necessary here, all way want is shared access to one master folder and very robust desktop sync.
Our NextCloud server is $10/m so if we can keep budget low that would be good. Who knows, I'll probably have to switch again in 3 months when they start complaining of whatever new bugs they come across.
@scottalanmiller said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:
@guyinpv said in Synology one bad sector crashes whole volume RAID0:
I don't know how to put a price on data.
As the IT guy, it is for you to give a cost to recovery, it's up to the business to tell you how much the data is worth. They set the budget, so they had already determined the value.
I appreciate the advice of enterprise IT thinking but that's just not how I've seen it in small business. The only thing small biz owners ever do is haggle about price. Waaaa no way I'm "renting" MS Office. Waaaa no way I'm "renting" Adobe CS. Waaaa no way I want to pay a monthly fee for EVERY employee!! Waaaa what do you mean we need central management of XY service? Waaa I don't want to pay for hosting!
I provide pros and cons, options, and prices, and lay out the risks. They make the decisions. 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.
When the company you work for is just a joke, you know it's time to leave.
Wouldn't I love to just demand we buy a 365 account for everybody, at the level that gives us Sharepoint, then simply force ourselves to use the system as-is and stop whining if some feature isn't exactly the way they want. Ya wouldn't that be nice.
You guys are spot on.
The other thing to consider is when there are alternative technologies available. There are dozens and dozens of methods and services to do a sync'd folder share. So they reject the cost of Dropbox because they know I can host free NC software on a server that costs us $10/m. Heck I could probably do one of those torrent-based peer-to-peer file sync tools for completely free.
The second expectation is that no matter what we choose to go with, it will just magically work perfectly and never have issues. Because I'm IT, therefore whatever solution we choose should never have problems under my care. Doesn't matter if I buy a bicycle or an Echo or a Mustang, they should all get from A to B in a 3 second 0-60 and never have blowouts and always have room for the entire family.
Take, for example, Office. They used Office ever since buying Office 97 from the computer store all those years ago. Then they managed to spend out for 2000 and then 2007. But never all the computers, oh no, just the "Main" computers. So we had a mess of '97, 2000, and 2007 Office installed all over when I first got here.
When 2007 was really getting long in the tooth I pushed for an upgrade so everybody could have the same version. By then, MS had gone to 365. So even through all the gnashing of teeth about having to "rent" software, I finally got approved to setup O365 accounts. Oh, but ya only buy accounts for these people, and those people can share them. Garrrr! Yes I told them it's against TOS. But the point is, we couldn't get any other "Office". They rejected OpenOffice and Libre and online Google Docs, etc. They only wanted what they were used to, and now we could only get it with 365. So we had to buy it.
Similarly we are forced to buy our ecommerce products and services, shipping management tools, label hardware, hosting, etc etc.
I needed a half-decent NAS and my research ended up with the Synology. They don't tend to complain much about hardware purchases, but man do they hate having to do monthly service fees of any kind at all. Monthly fees are their kryptonite! I always try to find software and services with a lifetime license any time I come across a deal.
But when it comes to just getting a shared cloud folder, there is no clear winner in this category, nor are we used to any particular system. So it becomes purely a game of getting the cheapest thing possible, because there are so many options. And because the technology is handling such a simple/basic concept (i.e. shared folder), there aren't many reasons to think one method is any better than another. It's just, who has the best price.
But hey, the boss has a kid whose boyfriend once set up an XBOX, and they heard the Apple iCloud is nice, so of course they demand that is something we should use, based on authority. In a Windows-based company. Why is it always the boss's kid's girlfriend/boyfriend that gets to settle IT debates? Weird.