Running Quickbooks is like....

...brushing your teeth with steel wool and battery acid.

...eating a peanut butter and broken glass sandwich.

...voting Republican.

...plucking your nose hairs through your tear ducts.

...enjoying a bud light.

Trendnet sells some very reasonably priced cameras, and gives away a Windows-based Server to manage multiple cameras for free. You can also use Zoneminder on a Linux-based system to manage them, I believe it works with all of the Trendnet models that are out there. Hikvision also makes very similarly spec'd devices at a much cheaper price and I believe you can use Zoneminder to manage those cameras as well.

I recently came across this comprehensive resource for BASH on Reddit's /r/bash.

The BASH Hacker's Wiki ---> http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/

@Dominica That is the nice thing about using an AWS-EC2 instances. You can have pre-built/configured VPN servers in different locales (US East-Virginia, EU-Ireland, Asia Pacific-Singapore, South America-Sao Paolo) and bring up/take down an instance as you travel to different parts of the world. The last time we had people travel to Asia I spun up an EC2 instance in Singapore and they were able to connect to email and other services with little to no latency.

Traveling to Europe? Take down the Singapore instance and bring up an instance in Ireland.

Their free-tier is good for a year of use if I remember correctly, and should be more than enough oomph for personal use.

You could use AWS-EC2 free-tier linux instance to build an OpenVPN server and encapsulate the traffic in SSL. This is kinda shady, and depending on your locale could be considered less than legal, but it works.

I'd like a nice smoked gouda melted with some freshly roasted diced New Mexican green chiles between two slices on fresh baked lightly toasted marbled rye. With a side of tomato basil soup with a healthy dollop of sour cream.

Oh... And an overview of using SNMP to monitor and manage your network. This could possibly be built into a session on setting up a proper network monitoring service.

Some things I would like to see if able to attend:

1. Linux deep dive on troubleshooting via CLI.

• Configuring your terminal for maximizing productivity (customizing text for readability, setting up a terminal multiplexer like screen or tmux, useful aliases, etc...)
• Parsing text in BASH to find what you want(grep, awk, sed)
• Using logs to diagnose problems (tail -f, head, etc...)
• Helpful tools (top/htop, iftop, iptables, ip, etc...)

2. High level overview of system automation for SMB.

• Key areas that can be automated to specifically benefit small to medium sized businesses.
• Use of tools like Ansible/Chef/Puppet
• Examples of common tasks that can be scripted (BASH, Powershell, or otherwise...)

3. Deploying/managing container based services in a production environment.

• Deploying a new container-based service (Example: Discourse forums http://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/11/07/discourse-in-a-docker-container)
• Managing a container-based service.
• Migrating a service to containers
• General Best Practices for working with Containers.

4. BASH scripting best practices / standards.

• What basic format should my scripts follow?
• Do's and don'ts
• Where should my scripts live?
• When and how to add a script to cron.

@MattSpeller Preferably we want the 4770TE if at all possible. I have a total of 8 units that need to have the same build to provide tested reliability when working in this specific environment with our proprietary software and hardware. Fortunately, I'm able to rob one from another project and replace it with a 4770S for the time being. My only major concern with the other 4770 i7 procs is higher wattage and heat generation. I've got my fingers crossed the the 4770S doesn't cause us any major problems.

I've got a workaround involving a 4770S in place right now, but I'm still interested in 4770TE's if anyone knows of a vendor/supplier with new or working used units available.

Thanks!

I urgently need one more of these procs for a current project. I can't seem to locate on new/used anywhere that I can get in a relatively short period of time. If you have one of these or know where I might be able to get my hands on one please shoot me a message or reply here.

Spin up a VPN server in the cloud for whatever locality you are traveling to, test connectivity, and connect once you get there.

@scottalanmiller Have you done a Docker-based ELK stack yet?

@Ambarishrh take a look at Ansible as well, it may be easier to use if the prior experience with Chef isn't there. I'm just now starting to educate myself on Docker (and containerization in general). Although there is a learning curve, it looks like the time spent on education would be returned tenfold when reliably put into practice.

Have you thought about building the application(s) using Docker containers to standardize the dev/production environments and make everything platform independant?

@coliver Congratulations!

Prepping for the weekly status meeting and thinking about putting aside some time to ** finally** finish "Time Management for System Administrators".

@thecreativeone91 said:

@RamblingBiped said:

I'm working on punching an OpenVPN connection through "The Great Firewall" in hopes the boss will soon be able to check his email on his laptop while vacationing overseas...

Um, you can get in serious trouble for that. You need permission from the Chinese government for VPNs. They are very business friendly and would likely approve it, but you need the paper work in place first.

Well then... I guess I'm not working on getting a VPN up and running then. Good grief...

I'm working on punching an OpenVPN connection through "The Great Firewall" in hopes the boss will soon be able to check his email on his laptop while vacationing overseas...

I'm celebrating the (what seems to be) successful migration of a couple rails sites/apps to an AWS-EC2 instance. I'm completely ignorant of ruby/rails, so even though it was an irritating task at time; I acquired some useful future knowledge.