It works pretty well with Docker. Here's a repo to get started: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/docker-onlyoffice-nextcloud

It's using SQLite, but you could easily just create a container for postgres or whatever and use that.

@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:

Forked so that you guys can have your discussion our of nowhere about a perceived resentment to closed source solutions based, I presume, on the fact that some of us don't like one or two pieces of software that happens to be closed rather than on anything stated. The original topic was about IT professionals vs. people who hire IT professionals and don't do any IT themselves, but somehow this thread on software got added to it. So it's forked so now you can talk about this perceived resentment.

The original post was about IT buying vs doing. Purchasing software to ease IT burden is 100% related to that. Not sure why you keep saying this.

@scottalanmiller said in Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

Vetastic - $195 a month for a hosted service. When OpenVPMS is open source and free.

This is a weird comparison because...

1. One is a service, not software.
2. This thread isn't about software.

So it's neither applicable to the topic, nor a comparison on its own.

You can purchase a local appliance of the vet service to run at your business location. Physical appliances are products not services. And I still do not believe that there is a difference between offering a service and using an open source product.

I can either run Rocketchat locally as a product or use their service. You're making distinctions here to justify your actions on selling things with one hand for high prices and then the other saying free are better.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

I don't believe that you actually think this way. If you did all of the products you are selling would be open source or you would just be using the existing open source things.

1. I sell no products.
2. I'm confused by this talk of products at all as none of it is related to the topic. It's not the office discussion that has sidetracked things, it's the entire talk of any products at all. The post was about IT, not software or hardware.

You own Vestastic and SodiumSuite?

I do. Neither is software nor for sale.

Man you are splitting hairs now. You just spent how many posts comparing office365 which is a service to LibreOffice which is software.

Office 365 is a licensing model for buying software that you download, install, and run yourself. You get software. It's a common misconception that Office 365 is a service, but it's primarily a licensing option for software. Within the O365 licensing pool there are services, but Office isn't one of them. That's still delivered as software that you install and run. Unless you mean just the hosted version, which is a slightly different product, in which case LO offers that too, but I discussed neither of those. Only the software.

False. You don't need to download anything. It's 100% a service that also let's you have local copies of the products.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

I don't believe that you actually think this way. If you did all of the products you are selling would be open source or you would just be using the existing open source things.

1. I sell no products.
2. I'm confused by this talk of products at all as none of it is related to the topic. It's not the office discussion that has sidetracked things, it's the entire talk of any products at all. The post was about IT, not software or hardware.

You own Vestastic and SodiumSuite?

I do. Neither is software nor for sale.

Man you are splitting hairs now. You just spent how many posts comparing office365 which is a service to LibreOffice which is software.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

I don't believe that you actually think this way. If you did all of the products you are selling would be open source or you would just be using the existing open source things.

1. I sell no products.
2. I'm confused by this talk of products at all as none of it is related to the topic. It's not the office discussion that has sidetracked things, it's the entire talk of any products at all. The post was about IT, not software or hardware.

You own Vestastic and SodiumSuite?

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

So you have to go to your NTG or whatever IT labor you use and open your pockets at $150-300 an hour when you have an issue.

The same as with non-FOSS software. People go to pay for support with non-FOSS solutions way, way more than FOSS ones. This is one of those myths that people selling software repeat, but has absolutely zero foundation in the real world. While it's 100% off topic and unrelated to the discussion at hand, it's a myth that should never be repeated.

The obvious examples would be things like Windows or MS Office vs. Ubuntu or LibreOffice. The amount of support hours that you have to pay to an IT firm (or hours spent by your department) are vastly higher, on average, with Windows or Office than nearly any alternative. It's some insanity that has permeated IT through sales and marketing that has convinced people that by some logic if you pay for software, therefore it costs less to maintain. There's no logical connection between the two, in fact, logic says the opposite - companies making software that you have to pay for have to have more overhead to acquisition to accommodate the process (licensing Windows is so complex, even full time Windows people constantly need to seek consultants just on the purchasing process alone) and then you have vendors who know their customers are willing to pay and so create ecosystems around milking them for more and more funds. And that's exactly what we see. Windows, in the enterprise, is measured at numbers like "quadruple" the support cost of an Ubuntu install doing the same workload. And Office must be in the thousands of times more effort per install.

It's simply absurd to connect FOSS with "more cost to support". Sure, nothing about FOSS guarantees that it also requires less IT effort, but the nature of FOSS actually does encourage that and the ecosystems of paid software encourage more costly support. And the market, quite obviously, plays this out constantly.

Ok the office discussion has sidetracked this.

Back to this post. I don't believe that you actually think this way. If you did all of the products you are selling would be open source or you would just be using the existing open source things.

Vetastic - $195 a month for a hosted service. When OpenVPMS is open source and free.

SodiumSuite - No idea pricing. Why even bother when other open source tools exist such as TacticalRMM. Sure it's new but it existing has now devaluated SodiumSuite by quite a lot. If you want Linux support you could just contribute that to the project instead of building your own separate competitor.

The point is, you either believe FOSS is always the better option or you believe that there are times where paid software is better.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

And to get collaboration it's not just Install the software like it is with Office. You need to now manage a server running NextCloud and issues that come up with that as well.

Is that different than running your own Sharepoint? Running NC is a lot simpler than running SP.

No that's the same. My point there was with office there's an option to not have to do that. You don't have that option with LibreOffice. Sure you have the option to run locally if that's a real requirement but most of the time it's not.

What's the option? Can you do MS Office collaboration without Sharepoint?

Or do you just mean hosted? NC offers that.

I'm saying office will do collaboration without a local SharePoint install through O365 (because most places it's not a requirement to have everything local). LibreOffice requires you to run something else entirely to be able to do collaboration no matter whether that's a real requirement from the customer or not.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

And to get collaboration it's not just Install the software like it is with Office. You need to now manage a server running NextCloud and issues that come up with that as well.

Is that different than running your own Sharepoint? Running NC is a lot simpler than running SP.

No that's the same. My point there was with office there's an option to not have to do that. You don't have that option with LibreOffice. Sure you have the option to run locally if that's a real requirement but most of the time it's not.

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@stacksofplates said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

Can you imagine adding/changing sha256 sums Everytime someone gets a new application or needs to run a script. And doing it by hand every single time. That would be your job day in and day out.

And needing to do it for every new patch to every application. Eek.

Yup anytime there's an update to anything you would have to fix it.

Can you imagine adding/changing sha256 sums Everytime someone gets a new application or needs to run a script. And doing it by hand every single time. That would be your job day in and day out.

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@stacksofplates said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

I would make one million percent sure this is a real government requirement, more just something some admin thinks is one.

I'm pretty confident that it is made up. Made up to the point of not being really plausible, hence made up by someone that didn't know enough to know what was even plausible as a requirement.

Yeah I mean you can do it but you will pay for it for the rest of the time you work there. Especially if config management is "not approved".

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@marcinozga said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@gjacobse said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@gjacobse said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

One thing I found about portable apps is occasionally a smarter user will install these. Yeah, it gets around our permissions in Ad because they do not modify the registry. so I do not like them for that reason. I can't have users installing whatever they want.

Something else you can do to make chocolatey easier to install in multiple places is use an xml file with the apps you want for yourself or for departments. I made one for myself but I really don't use it, however I have one for a few different departments here because they some specific things and its hard to remember the install names on each. So I just carry them around on a flash drive.

I'm curious on how you set this up,.. I know I have just been using a simple batch file once the core is installed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <packages>
      <package id="googlechrome" />
	  <package id="firefoxesr" />
	  <package id="flashplayerplugin" />
	  <package id="adobereader" />
	  <package id="jre8" />
	  <package id="7zip.install" />
	  <package id="vlc" />
	  <package id="powershell" />
	  <package id="silverlight" />
	  <package id="quicktime" />
	  <package id="irfanview" />
	  <package id="treesizefree" />
	  <package id="windirstat" />
	  <package id="crystaldiskinfo" />
	  </packages>
</xml>

this file is called staff.config
Then i just use:

choco install d:\packages.config –y

I'll have to give that a try on my next build. neat way to address the install.

Why not utilize proper configuration management tool for that? Ansible for example works very well with Chocolatey. The above approach might sound cool, but to me it's more of a stone age way.

Not approved here. However i can use powershell all I want.

That's suicide. Are you using group policy? That's config management. These people sound like they have no idea what's going on. I would make one million percent sure this is a real government requirement, more just something some admin thinks is one. There's no way a college needs this level of hardening.

On Windows I can't help you at all. I mean there's tools like CyberArk but I don't know cost or manageability. On Linux fapolicyd can do whitelisting.

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@stacksofplates said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

A big question would be... why do you want to restrict binaries from users?

Thats the sysadmin decision. He considers it a security measure and I can understand it somewhat.

Does he? Because he's not restricting them in any way, and totally okay with all the portable apps delivered in the web browser, right? So he's totally okay with them. Just confused, I'd guess.

Well, I can't presume to know his mind but hes just trying to limit the damage that can be done i suppose. I am guessing that is what he is thinking.

Is this from a government requirement? The only way to do this is checksum all of your executables. Unless you are required to do this, you're insane.

Yes we are a 2 year college and this is what I am told.

Wait you're told it's a government requirement? If so ask for the reference. Because if you aren't 100% required to do this, you are in for pain for no reason.

I worked for a DoD contractor and we fought tooth and nail to get an exception for that.

As has been mentioned I'm sure above (I didn't read everything). The users can create scripts which would count as portable apps and run them. This really is not a road you want to go down unless you are forced to.

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@jmoore said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

A big question would be... why do you want to restrict binaries from users?

Thats the sysadmin decision. He considers it a security measure and I can understand it somewhat.

Does he? Because he's not restricting them in any way, and totally okay with all the portable apps delivered in the web browser, right? So he's totally okay with them. Just confused, I'd guess.

Well, I can't presume to know his mind but hes just trying to limit the damage that can be done i suppose. I am guessing that is what he is thinking.

Is this from a government requirement? The only way to do this is checksum all of your executables. Unless you are required to do this, you're insane.

@scottalanmiller said in Applications; Portable vs. Installed:

It's far more complex than that. Both approaches exist and are useful in different situations. There is a reason why installed apps have far more traction, on every OS. Installed apps are able to register with the system deeply, be easily managed by the installation tools, and interact with library versions. A portable app has to have all libraries compiled into itself.

This goes further. So if libraries are used from the system, it is easy to audit and know when you have a library out of date. Find a bug in OpenSSL, you know that when you patch OpenSSL that everything that depends on it is likewise patches. But if you have a portable app that statically compiles in OpenSSL you can't tell what version of the library you have, and patching requires you to download a new version of the portable app, which likely will lag dramatically behind the library patches, if it ever gets them at all.

Portable apps are handy, for sure. But they have less control, require more work from the vendor to stay maintained, are much harder to audit for, and are much larger than their installed counterparts.

This might be changing. Go tools are essentially portable apps that don't necessarily require dependencies (some can obviously). The maintenance work is the same no matter what. Size for them is dependent, anywhere from a few MB to things like Terraform that are over 80 MB. I'm sure there are bigger also.

I think things that weren't designed to be portable are harder to maintain than software that is. But I see the landscape changing to more single binary executables in the future.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

But explain the live collaboration?

Live collaboration we can self host with things like NextCloud (and we do.) With MS Office we, and our customers that have it, don't get that unless they pay MS for it monthly and put their data on MS. Which, if you want to pay for it and use it, it's a great service. When you don't, it's a gap. With NextCloud (and other options), LO lets you self host (for security, control, performance, or places where there isn't Internet). It's very flexible.

Is it as good as MSO's colaboration? No, absolutely not. It's a weak point on performance. But a major plus on flexibility.

Yeah you can self host with SharePoint. Sure it's more, but don't act like you can't self host and have collaboration with Office.

And to get collaboration it's not just Install the software like it is with Office. You need to now manage a server running NextCloud and issues that come up with that as well.

@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:

You're not going to concede on the support so whatever.

Why would I when it's something we demonstrate every day. You claim it costs us more to support, how do you come to that conclusion based on my explanation that when we look at it, it is totally the opposite?

Because I've had the opposite experience. As I already mentioned.