Posts made by scottalanmiller

Haha, police just took the neighbour away. Apparently quite the domestic going on.

@Dashrender said in FIPS encryption (non domain laptops):

@IRJ said in FIPS encryption (non domain laptops):

FIPs 140-2 has nothing to do with smart cards. It's about forcing validated cryptographic modules. Generally that is older versions of cryptographic modules and require an older kernel.

For example windows 1809 is the latest certified version. You can see the latest certified modules here. You need to have these versions set in order to turn on FIPs mode.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/fips-140-validation

holy crap - isn't MS dumping mainstream updates for 1809 soon, if not already done? They had an 18 month lifecycle on versions for a while at least.

FIPS isn't something you do when you want security. FIPS is US gov't, the antithesis of security. FIPS is for politics, security is for business.

That's awesome

@Pete-S said in Zoho Assist problem:

Anyone here that uses Zoho Assist?
@scottalanmiller @dbeato perhaps?

No, we love Zoho but we use MeshCentral for that particular function.

@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

Why don't Facebook and Apple like each other?

Big corporate rivalries, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Boeing and Airbus, McDonald's and Burger King, tend to have one thing in common - competition for the same business. That's why Facebook and Apple's feud is so intriguing.
They're both big technology companies, and that's where the similarities end. Almost all of Facebook's revenue is from advertising - but it provides only a small fraction of Apple's, which comes mostly from devices and its App Store. The two companies don't really compete with each other - they just don't like each other. For years, Apple's Tim Cook has said Facebook treats its users as a product - to make money from advertising - and plays fast and loose with their privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, says Apple's products are expensive and it has ulterior motives for criticising Facebook.

Maybe because, by and large, they BOTH make bad products and it's nothing personal just.... the average person doesn't like either of these companies so that the two don't like each other should be... expected.

@black3dynamite said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/11/vivaldi-browser-integrated-email-client

Neat, but pretty late to this game. Who uses IMAP to access email any longer? The idea of pulling email down to a client is pretty antiquated.

@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:

Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

A strange metal monolith has been discovered in the Utah desert by a helicopter crew, leaving local authorities baffled.
Wildlife officials spotted the "unusual" object while counting sheep during a flyover in a remote south-eastern area of the US state. They said the structure had been planted in the ground between red rock. There was no indication who installed the monolith, which was about 10 to 12ft (3.6m) tall. In an interview with local news channel KSLTV, the helicopter pilot, Bret Hutchings, said: "That's been about the strangest thing that I've come across out there in all my years of flying."

Saw this, very cool stuff.

@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:

Coronavirus and gender: More chores for women set back gains in equality

The coronavirus pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new global data from UN Women suggests.
Women are doing significantly more domestic chores and family care, because of the impact of the pandemic. "Everything we worked for, that has taken 25 years, could be lost in a year," says UN Women Deputy Executive Director Anita Bhatia. Employment and education opportunities could be lost, and women may suffer from poorer mental and physical health. The care burden poses a "real risk of reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes", Ms Bhatia says. Even before the pandemic, it was estimated women were doing about three quarters of the 16 billion hours of unpaid work that are done each day around the world.

Seems like it just exposes existing inequality. If the equality existed, it wouldn't be making more chores for women, but for "people". But it's not, it's making chores just for women (according to the article.) So it's not setting anything back, it's just making it more obvious that inequality exists already (assuming that the article is correct.) Given that they use the data to make a false premise, though, the entire article has to be suspect.

Vacation marathon is going on here.

@Dashrender said in Adding 8GB of RAM to the Acer Aspire 7 A715-41G-R7X4:

@hobbit666 said in Adding 8GB of RAM to the Acer Aspire 7 A715-41G-R7X4:

Personally i always like to match RAM -
Size
Make
Speed etc.

For the average person - hell, the average IT person too, does it even matter? It's not like you're likely running a gaming rig you're trying to squeeze every last ounce of power from.

I know Scott is doing video editing - perhaps on this device.. so it might matter to him, a 1% performance increase could be several saved mins on a video...

More than anything, matched sticks means the least potential for problems. THe price on matching was within about $1 of anything else and anything faster would be wasted.

@Pete-S said in Adding 8GB of RAM to the Acer Aspire 7 A715-41G-R7X4:

@scottalanmiller said in Adding 8GB of RAM to the Acer Aspire 7 A715-41G-R7X4:

If you have this Acer Aspire 7 laptop like me, it comes with 8GB of RAM and while it can be expanded to 32GB (some sources say 64GB), the logical expansion is to move from a single 8GB stick to 2x 8GB sticks giving you 16GB. This is the cheapest, and most effective level of upgrade. What you will want is the matching part to what is already there so that you have a matched pair.

The included RAM stick is HMA81GS6JJR8N-VK from Hynix. Just order another one! Should be around $35.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JP4C1PD/ref=crt_ewc_title_huc_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2TC87EJKQMY9O

Good!

You don't need a matching pair though, you can use anything. The system will operate at the speed of the lowest though, so it's a good idea to pick the same speed as what you have. So any PC4-21300 SO-DIMM 8GB would do the job equally good.

Essentially like RAID in that regard.

@Fredtx said in Help Understanding LAN test Speed Results:

I ran a LAN Test speed using from a client to a server, which are both in the same LAN as it's a small dental office network. The results are showing 67.88Mbps (Writing/Upload) and 405.51Mbps (Reading/download). I don't know what their physical infrastructure is as I work remote, but I'm sure it's 1Gbps Ethernet. If that's the case, does this test result indicate there's an issue, with the huge difference between upload and download, all in the local LAN?

That the test is labeled writing / reading.... then yes, you're expected to be testing a lot more than the network and a big difference would be expected.

Just about to head to Thanksgiving dinner with the family.

If you have this Acer Aspire 7 laptop like me, it comes with 8GB of RAM and while it can be expanded to 32GB (some sources say 64GB), the logical expansion is to move from a single 8GB stick to 2x 8GB sticks giving you 16GB. This is the cheapest, and most effective level of upgrade. What you will want is the matching part to what is already there so that you have a matched pair.

The included RAM stick is HMA81GS6JJR8N-VK from Hynix. Just order another one! Should be around $35.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JP4C1PD/ref=crt_ewc_title_huc_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2TC87EJKQMY9O

@Pete-S said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

@Dragon3303 said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

but I wanted to see if others were trading speed for reliability and if it was worth it for them.

I wouldn't want to pay anything for enterprise SLA but I'd pay for fiber. But I think 100/100 is the sweet spot and 30/30 is too low.

Problem with fiber is when they dig into it. Then enterprise SLA wont help a bit. Otherwise it's simple and reliable.

Exactly. In fact, SLA typically protects the ISP, not the customer. It sets a maximum damange number lower than you'd be able to get otherwise. I've seen businesses basically destroyed because the SLA functions as a crippling contractual agreement.

@Dragon3303 said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

@JaredBusch said in Switch to fiber or stay with coax?:

It will not make any real difference since you said you are not having any issues now at 12mbps up.

But 30 mbps down is a huge change from 200 mbps down.

A simple example: 5GB Windows 10 ISO file would take
30mbps = 24 minutes
200mbps = 4 minutes.

That's my biggest concern. We used to be mostly all download as we would only have a few employees at a time out and traveling and everyone else was in the office. Now there's a some who work remote either 1/2 time or full time, but still a majority in the office.

Then moving from "working" to "more expensive and might not work anymore" feels like a bad move.

In Houston for the holidays, trying to get work in when possible.

@Texkonc said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just setup 1 of 3, 24TB monsters to replicate us to Scale from HyperV.

Doing HyperV migrations over here, too.

@dbeato said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@scottalanmiller A lot of RMM don't show that it is up to date on that screen. However it does show on the installed Updates so just check that. I know I have seen many RMMs do that however the devices are actually updated.

These devices are absolutely not updated. The problem is the opposite... it says up to date, but isn't. Not one. We manually checked around one hundred this weekend. Got about fifteen hundred to go. Those being patched since the RMM was configured to patch and report... zero. But every single one says it is up to date, until you check.

I've been going through boxes and unpacking / repacking stuff for storage.

@JaredBusch you look super excited.

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Just back from a walk.

At 1 am?

That's when I tend to go for walks. After everyone has gone to bed and no one needs me for anything. Only real "me" time that I can get.

I plan to play some Shenmue tonight!

Family just left to go to Houston for Thanksgiving. I can't join them until next week because I have on site work to do. So I am enjoying a totally alone weekend for the first time since long before COVID! This is nice!

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

And it seems like you're getting the equivalent of the enterprise edition for all apps. Which is a big deal.

Oh it's a great package. If you use anywhere near that many products per user it's so awesome that absolutely everyone gets absolutely everything. So flexible.

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

Incredible value with the drawback that you have to get it for every employee - regardless if they need it or not. It simplifies licensing though.

For us, the cost of the extra licensing is so high, we could hire a full time person to oversee the Zoho Licensing management alone from the cost savings of not paying $30/user. LOL Obviously that would be a super junior (and super chill) job to have. We don't, as it takes a couple minutes for us to do that as it changes extremely little. But the cost evaluation is based on that - and if we were to overpay Zoho or create a job for a new employee at break even, we'd take the new employee because at least we are creating a job.

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

Looking at Zoho One we're actually thinking about going all-in for real. Zoho One is a subscription that gives you access to almost everything Zoho has - Mail, Workdrive, CRM, Desk, Projects, etc, etc. It's $30 per month for every employee.

We've looked at it, but the price just doesn't work for us. Even if we bought every tool that every person would ever use, we don't have a single user who comes up to the $30/mo price. Most are in the $3 range, so the gap is huge.

Our core users are mail, workdrive, and connect. Beyond that, everything is unique to a role.

@Obsolesce said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Curious to know what someone did to stop or prevent updates 3 years ago on a Windows version I'm sure is currently no longer supported lol.

they installed NinjaRMM. It turns out, that it stops updates and reports that everything is up to date regardless.

But the issue that Windows claims to be up to date totally regardless of the update status is different, that happens even with a vanilla install. Just a vanilla install will update itself, so it isn't generally too far off being accurate.

Youtube Video

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

@dbeato said in Ticket versus Projects:

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

@scottalanmiller said in Ticket versus Projects:

@Pete-S said in Ticket versus Projects:

Is there a similar tool that we can use to keep track of our projects?

Zoho has a few. Zoho Projects, but it's not cheap.

Zoho Connect has a Task system that is Kanban based and works for projects for cheap. That's what we use.

Thanks, I've looked a little at Zoho Projects but I'm going to check out Zoho Connect as well.

Regarding projects I've also had a look at Asana. We have MS Project for making big complex stuff for one project at a time but really need something to plan and schedule many smaller projects.

We have Zoho Projects here, it works mostly like Kanban. Tracks the time separately from the Zoho Desk and CRM. So you have to do a sync between them for certain things. It has Reporting and Gant Charts (I don't use those). It has Invoicing and Expenses as well.

Looks like we're going to go down the same exact path - Zoho Desk, Projects and CRM.

Same here, we are nearly "all in" on Zoho.