Controversial posts made by scottalanmiller

@anthonyh said in PCI over Ethernet?:

Why change something that we have aboslutely no issues with? It wouldn't save us any money....

Doesn't it? Are the physical IVRs going to be free forever and carry zero risk? If not, it seems like it does save money, at least eventually. It also protects you from something you don't have protection from today AND solves the problem that you are trying to solve here, right?

@Dashrender said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@anthonyh said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@scottalanmiller said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@anthonyh said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@aaronstuder said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@anthonyh said:

PBX In A Flash.

Why?

Why not? Except for this very specialized scenario, PIAF has worked beautifully and has saved us a shit ton of $$$$.

Saved you money compared to the standard alternatives of FreePBX or Elastix which are also free and their IVRs are very simple to use?

I'm confused. My understanding is PBX In A Flash is a variant of FreePBX. In fact the web interface says "FreePBX" all over it???

To me that makes me ask - why not just use FreePBX then? what made PIAF better than FreePBX? I'm asking since I have no clue.

Probably the era when they built it. There was a time like eight years ago when Elastix 2 wasn't established yet and TrixBox was waning that PIAF was pretty viable.

@anthonyh said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@aaronstuder said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@anthonyh What VoIP solution are you using?

PBX In A Flash.

That definitely has its own IVR functionality.

@BRRABill said in Phone Calls Over WiFi:

@JaredBusch said

It can do that also, but that is not the core implementation of GV. GV has always been a forwarding service.

That's why I was wondering if you just turned off your cell service, would GV just use WiFi?

I don't see how they could block that, but I have read this does not work.

I have no idea what they do with existing accounts, but the GV web page is entirely blocked in the EU. I can't even look at it for information.

@JaredBusch said in Fibrant ISP/SIP Provider Salisbury NC:

@scottalanmiller said in Fibrant ISP/SIP Provider Salisbury NC:

@coliver said in Fibrant ISP/SIP Provider Salisbury NC:

Just for background - Fibrant is a municipal ISP that was setup by the City of Salisbury to fill in the gaps that other ISPs in the area refused to fill. They expanded from there and offer high speed services to the majority of the city.

but adding in SIP to services, that's where the problems tend to start. Being an ISP is good. Offering SIP is good. Putting the two together is generally bad. No
t always, of course, but pretty often.

Just because an ISP offers sip does not mean they are a shit IST

Yup, which I pointed out. I leans that way, but doesn't mean that it is the case.

@coliver said in Fibrant ISP/SIP Provider Salisbury NC:

Just for background - Fibrant is a municipal ISP that was setup by the City of Salisbury to fill in the gaps that other ISPs in the area refused to fill. They expanded from there and offer high speed services to the majority of the city.

but adding in SIP to services, that's where the problems tend to start. Being an ISP is good. Offering SIP is good. Putting the two together is generally bad. Not always, of course, but pretty often.

@JaredBusch said in ownCloud 9.0.2 with PHP 7:

@scottalanmiller said in ownCloud 9.0.2 with PHP 7:

Just tested and teh issue remains.

Did you file a bug report?

I asked and he said that it was working.

@wirestyle22 said in ownCloud 9.0.2 with PHP 7:

@travisdh1 said in ownCloud 9.0.2 with PHP 7:

@wirestyle22 said in ownCloud 9.0.2 with PHP 7:

Where are you guys getting your accurate information about the repository packages?

Personal experience with it in this case. Just try installing owncloud via the repository on CentOS with PHP7. It doesn't work.

I mean in general. I find that there is a lot of mixed information online and you can't rely on the company/group themselves admitting wrongdoing in a lot of cases.

I guess that I am not sure what you are asking, exactly. In this example, we are looking at the ownCloud repo failing because they added a bad package to it whose sole purpose appears to be to break PHP7 compatibility.

@FATeknollogee said:

If your application is Windows only, then you're kinda "stuck" with MS...

You can always choose to change the application. While painful, it is often the better solution.

Especially as nearly any application that requires a specific OS isn't just unnecessarily expensive or limiting, but having an OS dependency means it is mired in a 1990s and older software design paradigm. Modern business software made even since the mid-1990s only very rarely has OS dependencies. That's quite literally a DOS-era problem.

There are exceptions to this, but they are very rare. Nearly all "stuck on Windows" problems are caused by archaic software and companies that are happy to use software that doesn't come up to incredibly low standards.

Who logs in graphically to a server?

Problem solved.

@johnhooks said:

I might end up doing this, it sounds fairly simple. What about the root password when you create a new server? How do you add that if it's in the envelope?

Lots of choices there. You could have the password memorized by a trusted party who makes it. I've worked places where the envelope was digital and handled automatically. Or you can have an envelope for each machine, of course. Or do it by groups. There is no super simple answer. A single, shared root password for an SMB is generally best. Something that you can automate or semi-automate for builds and then store somewhere. Whoever types it in has to be assumed that they have memorized it even if it seems unlikely. So unless you have it fully automated and hidden from all humans, someone "knows" the password.

@JaredBusch said:

I completely skipped this entire thread after the examples. The examples are completely not what "It gets the job done" means. Those examples were all 100% deliberately sabotaged jobs.

"It gets the job done" does not mean sabotaging the job. It means that the product does the job it is needed to do. It does certainly leave room for a job to be done better.

@scottalanmiller if you want to start this over and be willing to have an intelligent conversation based on real examples, I will participate.

I picked these because they are exactly alike. How are they different?

We constantly see IT pros doing "whatever other people do" and providing zero guidance of their own - literally not doing their job at all. Many try to do a good job but get it all wrong like the wedding planner.

These are, I feel, incredibly close examples. If you have better examples, please share. But these were chosen because of how close they are. Based off of the example of ignoring the needs of the business goals and just using a proximate "success" metric that does not support the business goals directly and using it to excuse either IT or the business managers of not doing their jobs either on purpose, accidentally or just doing it poorly.

@LAH3385 said:

Ultimately, I am trying to prove that Hyper-V is better in our scenario and we do not need to spend a fortune for it.

The onus should be completely on VMware to show how it is even a viable option, which I don't believe that it is. It is about $5K more and even at that higher price it delivers a technically inferior solution. VMware carries no benefits here, only technical and financial downsides. I'd question how it would even make the consideration list let alone how better solutions justify against it. Hyper-V should only need to show that it is better than XenServer. VMware is the fourth option, the "only when nothing else is available" option.

I'll keep people informed if they turn out to be still in business. I assume that they are and that their apparently "unmanaged" web presence is a fluke and the dead Twitter feed is a coincidence. So far no responses on either Twitter feed, Facebook or here. They have been told directly about this thread, so expect a human from ShopTech to be posting in here if they are, indeed, still up and running.

Exactly, tiers and being a trial aren't the same. To take it to the next logical level, is the Chevy Camaro just a trial version of the Camaro SS?

Two issues with the common ideas around the issue.

1. The stolen fingerprints are digital, not physical. So you need some complicated 3D printer mechanism to turn the model of the fingerprint into something that can be leveraged in the physical world. (At least for the situation mentioned in the OP. If you are fearing physical theft of fingerprints, that's a different issue and different concerns.)

2. The thing that is stolen isn't actually a fingerprint at all. It is a digital signature created from a fingerprint. Think a SHA hash of it. So even if you have it, likely there is no way at all to recreate my actual fingerprint. In order to use it you have to attack the device from which it was stolen, or at least one using the same hash mechanism and salt, and attack it from the position of having already bypassed the fingerprint reader and talking directly to the security mechanism "as if you were the fingerprint reader."

It requires not only compromising your fingerprint but compromising the device as well. It's an important risk to think about and consider, but it is also important to keep it in context. The issue, in this specific case, is the security mechanism has been compromised, not your fingerprint.

In the context of passwords, the same type of shim could get a hashed password after it has been entered and theoretically replay that too with the same concerns. But you could not use that to recreate the original password and attack other devices without having the same encryption, same salt and same shim.

@IT-ADMIN said:

the matter is the core business in our company rely on phone calls, kind of call center, so the management believe that relying on staff to manage something crucial is risky, so they delegate this to our ISP, so that they can feel safe because the guaranty that they offer to ensure a better VOIP service is more than i can offer,

Problems:

• Relying on management that makes reckless decisions based on not understanding the problem domain. The risk here is the managers as they are creating risk by be willing to make decisions based on things they clearly have no knowledge of. That's the most dangerous possible thing.
• Delegating to the ISP alone should be a huge flag. This means management not only doesn't understand IT but doesn't understand basics of business or management.
• The ISP has no particular skills to do this. They aren't even running a minimally enterprise PBX, it would seem.
• Management sought to only delegate SOME of the VoIP to the ISP and not all of it, leaving you with more of a mess than if they had let you run it yourself.
• This argument is fundamentally nonsensical because YOU running a PBX and the ISP running one are hardly the only options. Neither is even the obvious option. It sounds like they ruled out everything that would make business sense so that they could justify a horrible decision by only considering another bad option. This sounds like someone in management is getting a kickback from the ISP.
• If your telephones were truly crucial, the ISP is the last reasonable option. So the reason given by management don't match the reality.

@Dashrender said:

For example, Let's assume I use my ISP for internet, hosting my public website, phone service, cable TV, and DNS hosting (public DNS). Why is this so horrible?

• Cost. In the real world, this always costs more. Often a lot more.
• Risk. If your ISP fails or goes out of business or decided that you are too costly to keep as a customer or you decide that they are too expensive to pay.... you not only lose your Internet access, but you lose customer facing services there too! This is enormous risk. Potentially company crippling risk.
• Locational Risk. So big it gets its own risk bullet point. When you are beholden to your ISP for services you can't move to another location potentially. You are tied to the ISP physically. You are creating a massive type of risk that the Internet should have freed you from. It is basically a misunderstanding of the core ideas of a public Internet. If you avoid bundling ephemeral services with a physical line you have this concept of mobility. Mobility for moving to better service. Mobility for moving to a better location. Mobility to move to another provider should one fail.
• Quality. While an ISP "could" provide these services well, the real world results are that they do not. These are not their business or money making services and the best email, web, DNS, VoiP and other companies will always be those available to everyone, not those restricted to just local, physical customers. This is just a general matter of how markets work. Just like the best coffee will never be the free coffee in the local auto garage for customers in the waiting room, the best VoIP will never be the tack on from the ISP. Same concept. It's not what they do, it's not what they care about.
• Extortion. When your ISP not only owns your access to the world but also your presentation to it they know, and you know, that they can often raise rates, threaten, and screw you however they see fit because the choice to be extortable was completely yours.
• Billing. To you, a single bill "sounds nice." To me it sounds like an inability to dispute. What if your phone company, that is also your ISP, decides to bill you for $10,000 of calls you don't think that you made (this really happens, I can tell you an ISP that tried this with us!!) If you have mixed services, and you refuse to pay the bill, they can AND WILL turn off your email, websites, physical Internet access, etc. A single bill for critical services is a scary, scary thing.

@Dashrender said:

It's tantamount to saying that if you are a cable provider you shouldn't get HBO or Showtime or the internet or phone services from them - i.e. you should only get basic cable from them.

It's funny that you mention that. Because that's exactly a place where people screw themselves all of the time. Look at those bundles, they almost always cost you more and take away your options. While it is a different issue when dealing with consumers, the problems remain. Now getting HBO or Showtime is not bundling, that's different. But getting television and Internet from the same place is bundling (one is increasing the same service, the other is combining different services.)

There is an argument that non-critical or "luxury" services can be bundled. Television, for example, is a service that anyone can simple drop and not pay for anytime. It is not critical. It would save you money to not have it. So as a consumer, bundling your television service with Internet isn't an issue because the cable company has no real leverage to extort you in any way - because you can just drop the service.

Business services are different. Presumably if you get web hosting, DNS, email, telephony, etc. you NEED them and would lose money if they were to stop working. Having your ISP able to extort you, therefore, is a really big deal. And since they not only control the services but the access to services from other vendors you are potentially in a very tough position.

Beyond the common sense aspects, in the real world, no quality service, no even viable service, of this nature exists. Find any ISP that actually offers a good email, web, VoIP or other product.... you really can't. They only sell low end, cheap services to people who are violating the best practice of not getting bundled services and therefore know that they have no real financial benefit to doing a good job since quality of service is not what is creating their customer base.

On top of all of that, there is just the general principle of "best of breed." You should buy the best product for your needs, not the one that is "local" or "bundled." The bundling value is just that you don't have to "bother" finding a provider. It's basically IT skipping its duties. Same as only hiring your consulting company locally. The chances that the local company is any good, let alone as good as the best, approaches zero. So using local as a hiring criteria means you are effectively guaranteeing that you won't consider what is best and just use an artificial criteria to avoid the process of selection.

@Dashrender said:

Scott - other than your own articles who is saying that you never ever get any services from your own ISP?

That was a standard best practice since always. Never be beholded to a single vendor that owns you. It's a general best practice above IT. It's actually enough that it falls into a common sense arena, rather than a best practice.

If we were talking about email, DNS, web hosting, or anything other than VoIP, it would be obviously completely absurd to let someone who owns the access to your business ALSO control the services that are delivered over that. "Bundling" services is a well known anti-best practice because you lose leverage and safety.