Best posts made by Mike Davis

The backstory: I have a VMware horizion/View environment in place for remote access and for our training room. The company has downsized and I don't think it's practical to support anymore.

The users all have physical machines they can RDP to for remote access. (I'm planning on setting up RD web access and RD Gateway)

They had a training room with 12 Wyse P20 Zero clients. If I downgrade the firmware to v 3.x they support RDP. Without the user editing the settings on the P20, how can I have them log in and then RDP back to their desktop? I guess I'm looking for a connection manager that will let me specify the default machine for each user. Can someone point me in the right direction?

@dafyre said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

I am at the point in my career where I want to be, I think. I'm actively doing the work in the trenches. The only step up for me is management, which is the type of role I actively want to avoid. It may still happen, but I don't see that any time in the immediate future.

It's pretty sad that people with tech skills only see their next step as moving to management. There is nothing wrong with doing what you do really well. I have seen companies where someone is great at their job so the company promotes them to management - which requires different skills - and the person fails. (The Peter principle)

We need to stop calling these things free and call them tax payer funded.

@Mike-Davis Selective startup for the win. Not sure what was stopping it, but when I installed it before, it never got to the part of the install where it asked about running updates. This time when I ran the repair, it did that, and then when I launched it for the first time, it completed the initial config.

@Dashrender said in Negotiating for a Job You Are Leaving:

Is it sad if the person wants that experience? I'd see it as an opportunity personally.

I'm sure he was talking about @dafyre

yes.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to get in to management or anything else. You should always be asking "Where do I want to be 3 years from now and what do I need to do today to get there?"

@scottalanmiller said in Top Ten Happiest Places on Earth in 2019:

Cars SHOULD be priced off of the road.

You've lived in some pretty sparsely populated parts of the country. What would public transport cost in Piffard, NY? I think cars would like a cheap and reasonable alternative to busses running down all the country back roads every hour.

As far as best practice goes, Microsoft has gone back and forth on the issue between split DNS and internal domain name. The last time I looked, they recommended a subdomain for your internal network. So instead of domain.com inside and out, or domain.local inside and domain.com outside, they use ad.domain.com inside and domain.com outside.

I've dealt with them all and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the day, I think you just need to understand them and pick the one that works best for that client.

The student loan process is really screwed up. Only the government would give out loans like that. A private company would have a loan officer that would look at everything you have going for you and have you sign a document that gives them continuous access to your grades with the right to call your loan whenever they wanted.

Of course a private company wouldn't even do that with out the bankruptcy protection that the government enjoys. Think about it, it's the only loan that can't be wiped out by bankruptcy court.

The problem with these easy to get govt loans, is that it provides no incentive for colleges to come up with a value proposition. A private company would ask what you want to study, take a quick look and determine there are no jobs in that field that could possibly pay the loan back and deny your loan.

I have a client that has a database of news paper article archives that wants to know how much it would cost to put them on a website. The archive won't be added to at this time as they have been using a new system for years now. It would just have to allow users to search for old articles on the site. They are open to any suggestion for hosting. Let me know if you are interested.

Has anyone ever attended the Ubiquiti classes?
http://www.microcom.us/browse-by-brand--ubiquiti-networks.html
@Breffni-Potter mentioned training classes in a post and I found that link.

The only thing I would add is that if you are submitting your resume to someone that has a HR filter, you might want to word stuff like Point of Sale (POS) so that if they search for either search term, your resume gets a hit. A tech person knows all the server versions between Server 2016 and 2008R2, but a non tech that is told "we have Server 2012R2, so show me resumes that have experience with that" might miss your resume because it doesn't come up in the search...

Might want to create two channels. One for IT stuff and one for music. There are probably lots of people that would subscribe to one or the other, but not both.

Does anyone have any good experiences running QuickBooks on any cloud platform? I have an accountant moving to a new office and I'm questioning the need for a server for what I understand is a one man shop. I'm thinking of going Office 365 and putting his QuickBooks databases in a folder that gets backed up with OneDrive.

The problem is if he wants to access Quickbooks from outside the office, OneDrive won't work for that. So then I was thinking about some sort of hosted option. Does anyone have any experience with hosted QuickBooks? (good or bad) From what I have read, QuickBooks online is out because it doesn't work like the full version he is used to.

Think of it this way, a potential employer doesn't care about how you were paid (W2/1099/volunteer), they care about your experience and what you can do for them.

If you mean to "sync" and have it create accounts in AD, I don't think that's going to work. It doesn't even "sync" like that going in the other direction. It doesn't create a mailbox or anything in o365 until you assign a license.

Depending on the number of users you're talking about, (and group memberships, etc) I suppose you could script out the account creation on the AD side, and then start a sync. I'm not sure how well that would work though because the password would be newer on the prem side and it seems like it would over write the o365 side.

With powershell you can rename a UPN suffix. Pretty easy with powershell:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/canitpro/2015/07/07/step-by-step-changing-the-upn-suffix-for-an-entire-domain-via-powershell/

When it comes right down to it, I think those of us that know what we know have to talk to young people facing that decision and show them an alternative to what the college institution is going to show them. We have to tell the student to look at the decision like an investment and justify the decision that way.

Encourage them to read books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and think about investments instead of just listening to the mantra that if you go to college you'll earn more money.

Unfortunately both sites have users that need to use facebook to do their job. Aside from that, the scammers can just buy ads on any site.

The good side is now I have some fresh content to put in a presentation I'm doing on Tuesday about how not to get scammed.

4 drives in less than 3 years. When I was brought in backups were a big concern to them because the last guy did nightly backups to an external hard drive, but they discovered a quickbooks error and needed to go back a month. He was overwriting the backup every night, so they had nothing useful to work from.

I tried to talk them in to online backups, and eventually went for a USB tape drive because I needed something that work work through ESXi.

I'll have to see if the software will let me swap out USB drives with out re-configuring the backup job each time.

@aaron I told them what a pain tape drives were before I put it in and told them how much babysitting they need. They have to pay me every time I work on it, so they know.... They are otherwise a great client, so I'm not going to dump them for that.

Fortunately the hardware is not similar as the old hardware is a disaster. I like the fall back option.