@scottalanmiller said in Wiki Idea Shot Down:

Sounding incompetent is never smart, boss or not. You don't want someone documenting your lack of understanding for when you go to HIS boss to ask for a promotion since YOUR boss doesn't know he's doing.

I certainly get that and had no intention to imply that or put him on the spot. I just presented the wiki I had worked long and hard on to him then he asked if it was built on php which I answered yes to. You know the rest

@dashrender said in Wiki Idea Shot Down:

Maybe he doesn't need to because he's the boss, and was just giving any excuse to make you go away

You could be entirely right there Dash. Telling me php was insecure just tells me that whoever set it up did something wrong with whatever app it is working with.

@nerdydad said in Wiki Idea Shot Down:

Probably would have come back and asked him what he considers to be a secure technology to his vulnerability scans without sounding insubordinate. This way, you can sound like you're trying to be a team player and still help the company.

What does he consider secure anyways? HTML5?

Another thing is, if they are already in the network then they already have the upper hand.

Well I was trying to be a team player mostly and trying to do something that I really thought was a good idea to show people I can think about an issue they have complained about before and come up with a solution. I would like to be an admin someday so I try to learn as much as I can and think about my organization's issues.

@scottalanmiller said in Wiki Idea Shot Down:

This falls under "not a plausible excuse." He doesn't appear to really know what was a viable bluff and what would make him look foolish.

Alright I get that. Could be right, I really don't know. I just don't think PHP being insecure should be a reason. He also said he never liked it since the last web guy installed Wordpress to play around and they ended up with pharmaceutical ads constantly. That is just the web guy not knowing how to harden Wordpress and Apache though and php has nothing to do with that.

@eddiejennings said in Wiki Idea Shot Down:

Ha! Not necessarily that, but just use whatever system is on the current site owned by the person putting the brakes on the project.

Yes it would of course use the existing system as I don't want to invent the wheel again so to speak.

That would of course work if done right but it isn't because no one uses it including the IT department. It's last update was 3 years ago. So public folders were made for each department but each department can only see their own documentation. The public folders are not used either according to management.

My idea for the wiki was have it available as an organizational resource where anyone with proper credentials can log in and edit/add information for their department that others could see but have special permissions for things that needed to stay within that department. I believed it was doable and an idea worth considering.

Well the title says it all. I was trying to add some value to myself in light of management and help our documentation problem. Didn't go well since the idea was shot down in less than a minute. Our documentation for IP assignments, guides, pc inventory, printer inventory, and many other things are in separate files scattered around everywhere. None are in same directory. In addition other departments have the same situation where they have some shared folders but only shared with a few people and several of those staff are no longer with us. So big problem I thought. Well I spun up a vm on and installed mediawiki without any issues this time and had been working on some basic documentation for our department to showcase how it would work. Guess I'm not a salesman either lol.

Anyway, the main reasons were he wanted to keep everything on our website even though there still isnt anything there and I have been there 2 years now and he said PHP is too insecure. He said he does vulnerability scans and PHP always gives him a lot of warnings and he wants to get away from anything that has PHP.

So as you can imagine I have a question if anyone knows. I don't see how PHP can be insecure and that vulnerable with as much infrastructure that uses it. As context I believe MediaWiki is built on PHP and thats what I built the department wiki with. I have used it in many projects and a few websites and have never had an issue. Is there validity to his concerns if you are properly hardening things?

What kind of vulnerability scans would be doing on a Windows 7 network with Active Directory?

Thanks in advance!

Good video. Possibly another video idea, if you want to get into it, is a break down on how you make the decision on what operating system or software to use and how to run the numbers. I hear that a lot and I personally would not know how to do this reliably. Maybe others would not either .

Interesting perspective. It does make a lot of sense too. I can definitely see how that would be the case. I guess as an IT person, it would make sense to apply some of the same ideas to ones career?

@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:

Those that do tend not to stay an SMB for very long.

Yeah that makes sense. If you make the right decisions over a long period of time then you should be growing steadily. Fascinating subject.

@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:

They don't use "business value" or "profits" as their reason for selecting their business partners.

Yeah and that is weird because you would think that would be what they care about most for their businesses. If I was a business owner it would be those exact things 95% of the time and possibly more that dictated what decisions I made. I did computer science and physics in college so the "math" means a lot to me!

First, I know it would be less money over a period of time. I'm ok with that. I guess I 'Want" to believe that it would pay off in the end over the long term by making good relationships with clients and doing a good job by recommending exactly what they need for their business.

@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:

As a consultant, open source is not your friend. You make your big money supporting closed source software because it is almost always harder to manage, requires more support hours, and you have whole extra categories of things to manage. It's not very ethical to recommend closed source because of this, but it is why closed source is so popular even with the people who don't have to pay for it. Everyone wins from closed source in general - except for the final customer.

Yeah thats how I would feel by recommending something that did not fit a business's need, unethical. I don't want to win like that. Guess I'm not cut out to be a consultant lol.

@dashrender said in Free is never free:

That's the rub isn't it. Finding new work to fill the time that not supporting those free things leave you with.

Your right, guess i can haunt Mangolassi more and learn more good open source software to recommend to people that won't need me after i do that lol.

@scottalanmiller said in Free is never free:

his is one of the saddest points of IT work - doing the best thing for your customer rarely is beneficial to you or is even appreciated by the customer. Often they will drop you just because you did too good of a job

i don't know what to say to this but I know your right, I've already experienced it. It is just sad though. Well i will keep working on my career I guess.

That's a lot of interesting points on both sides. Question though, would it be better, as a consultant, to just use open source for clients and make money by supporting it slowly and over a longer period of time than many MSP'S do with proprietary software? I am thinking yes to this myself because from a clients point of view your solution worked better with far less support and they will then be happier and more likely to recommend you to others to get you more work. I believe this extra work would more than make up for lower support fees by using proprietary software that doesn't work as good. Am I completley off base or not?

Oh ok thanks, got it

@dashrender said in virtualize all the things... ?:

@JaredBusch and NTG are both running many FreePBX servers in Vultr - 100% virtualized setup using SIP.

Might I ask the situation that they need "many" FreePBX servers out of curiosity?

Might be able to make this but still too early to tell.

I see the main problem with this. For most people that are not Windows admins they will not be comfortable at the command line and is why they use clients they can easily find by searching. Lots of people are just afraid of the command line if computer use is just a hobby for them.

@dashrender said in Why Does Windows Need Special SFTP Functionality?:

I guess this answers my question. If they don't include RSAT in Win Pro, why would they include this? /sigh.

Yeah that's a great point. I'll install this and see how it compares to what people find by searching.

Certainly good points. Since I haven't used Windows SSH before how does it compare to WinSCP?

@scottalanmiller said in Why Does Windows Need Special SFTP Functionality?:

It's pretty useful, but if you are so used to not having it that you never think of it, you might not realize how often you'd like to have it. SFTP makes getting simple, normal files on and off of systems in an ad hoc manner SO much easier than with pretty much any other tool. Need to do remote file manipulation or direct system to system file transfers, nothing really beats it. Very secure, very little setup, very easier to use.

When I do anything like moving files from one system to another I am using some Linux operating system honestly. I support Windows and I have it at home for the wife(support it at home too for her lol) but most of the time I am in a vm running some version of Fedora or BSD learning things. The only time I use Windows 10 is to play Everquest.