@jmoore Windows event logs any help, or are they as cryptic as usual?

@jmoore I've never had great success running office installers (2013 / 2016) from a network share (which is what I assume you're trying to do based on the networking theory). I always copied the files over to the machine or did up a deployment package that cached the installer locally before executing.

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@notverypunny I do have that in both of my faculty and student images. Some faculty workstations are just too much of a pain to reimage. They have document solution software, the government financial aid stuff which took a lot of patches to get working reliably because their database runs on Access. It is for these systems I want it working reliably.

Yeah, I get it. One of my former gigs was in the construction industry. I avoided re-imaging / reformatting most machines there unless necessary, too many specialized applications for estimating and design.

For your Office 2019 issue, I expect you've already looked at conflicts due to existing crud on the machine? Like the O365 garbage that probably comes shipped, or is it auto-installed now with the build updates?

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

From an overhead / maintenance point of view I've moved to using MDT + VirtualBox for our W10 image. This way it rebuilds the image from scratch every time. Been doing it this way for about a year now and haven't run into any problems. Takes about an hour from pxe booting the VM against the deployment share until I'm capturing the new image against our FOG master server. From there it automatically gets sync'd to the FOG storage nodes at our remote sites. This way there's no old update or version cruft that follows from month to month and when we want to test a new windows version or software I can copy the whole task sequence and play with it before changing the baseline / benchmark.

This part isn't bad. Making the baseline is pretty easy and totally sensible. It's needing to roll that baseline out to every machine to do the install. If it is one app, once a year... trivial. If apps go at different times to different people, and there are many of them, it's a problem.

Yeah, we try to avoid app installs once the HW has been deployed so that possibility didn't come to mind.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to figure out why 25% of our office 2019 installs fail.

install in a master image once and then it either works for everyone or is borked for everyone

That's good if you are going to re-image for every software release. Which is feasible, but extremely heavy.

You mean heavy looking at the image size or looking at the IT overhead?

Image size, my W10 image with a bunch of apps is smaller than my W7 image with nothing installed, even after running all of the crap removal tools and dism image cleanup stuff that I could find.

From an overhead / maintenance point of view I've moved to using MDT + VirtualBox for our W10 image. This way it rebuilds the image from scratch every time. Been doing it this way for about a year now and haven't run into any problems. Takes about an hour from pxe booting the VM against the deployment share until I'm capturing the new image against our FOG master server. From there it automatically gets sync'd to the FOG storage nodes at our remote sites. This way there's no old update or version cruft that follows from month to month and when we want to test a new windows version or software I can copy the whole task sequence and play with it before changing the baseline / benchmark.

@jmoore said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to figure out why 25% of our office 2019 installs fail.

install in a master image once and then it either works for everyone or is borked for everyone

@scottalanmiller said in VP of Operations and Technology - Canada only:

@flaxking said in VP of Operations and Technology - Canada only:

@scottalanmiller said in VP of Operations and Technology - Canada only:

@flaxking said in VP of Operations and Technology - Canada only:

What makes the biggest difference to our bottom line is having to have two vehicles. In the city we just had one.

Why two? Here it's one outside the cities and zero inside, normally. What's the second one for?

We don't live in the towns where we work.

I get that, but that would only make me require one, not two.

One for self, one for SO?

@scottalanmiller said in VP of Operations and Technology - Canada only:

@flaxking said in VP of Operations and Technology - Canada only:

What makes the biggest difference to our bottom line is having to have two vehicles. In the city we just had one.

Why two? Here it's one outside the cities and zero inside, normally. What's the second one for?

No public transport. Shitty / sketchy taxi service. Winter

Also consider that it's going to be STUPID cold there in the winter.... more or less halfway between Winnipeg (aka Winterpeg) and Regina.....

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs The up-sale comes because many tires would get worn out more rapidly if not level.

I know you can refuse, and I often do too because I'm cheap, doesn't mean that you don't actually need two tires.

Rear wheels on a FWD you should be OK to change just 1, I'd avoid going mis-matched on the drive axles... unequal traction can do nasty things in rain and snow.

I think this is going to be a "yes but...." type of answer. I think it's going to depend on what you're using as your vpn endpoints and how the network is configured at either end of the tunnel.....

Some quick reading here : https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/release-independent/nce/topics/concept/policy-based-route-based-vpn-comparing.html leads me to believe that your firewalling is integral to the policy-based vpn's creation... basically that your firewall rule action would be "ipsec" instead of allow/deny/ etc

Yeah... "to photoshop" is a little too vague as to what you want to do. If you're looking for high fidelity image editing and mastering, you'd want something like tiff or raw as @Pete-S stated. If you're just looking to make memes or other time-killing image editing that doesn't require high quality or fine control then you'll be fine with png or jpg.

Getting lost down the rabbit hole of es.net and fasterdata.es.net.... maybe they were known quantities for some / many / all here but there seems to be a TON of information and resources with regards to optimizing your network.

@Pete-S I wouldn't be surprised if it varies by carrier but we had to allow udp 500 and 4500 on our egress rules.

@bnrstnr Jeebus! Most recipes call for 12 to 24 hours.... A week? I'm tempted to try it though.....

@Pete-S Should be on any wifi on the condition that there's nothing firewalling the service. We had to open some ports here at work to allow it out on some specific ports

@Pete-S
From what I understand it allows the carrier to route your assigned number either over the cell network or via the public internet, depending on what's available and activated on your phone. I can activate it on my Pixel and still get calls and sms via my regular number over the wifi when I'm at the sister-in-law's where cell service sucks.

So yes, strictly speaking it's voip but in a carrier-managed fail-over type of configuration.

Boot order settings? If the server was set to boot from USB before HDD could it have been trying to boot from the removable drive and timing out?

Maybe I'm overthinking things but your approval / licensing process is going to come into play on this.

I'll be perfectly honest that I've not had to admin / oversee the app management side of SCCM, but in a previous gig I was doing helpdesk and deskside in an SCCM environment. In that environment the user wasn't able to view / install a managed application until they were added to the appropriate security group in AD. So the request / approval part was done via helpdesk ticketing, not an SCCM catalog. If you're licensing the target applications for everyone or if controlling access isn't a concern then I could see SCCM working.

Just finished Good Omens yesterday. Worth watching, just not sure if / how they could do a second season. I'm tempted to read the book just to see what was changed.