Well, my first interview is Tuesday, even before my final pay check is due

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco That is a totally different life style to what I was imaging...

So where do they grow their plants if they don't have land to work? Where do they sleep if they don't own or rent? And don't they ever just get an urge to have a big fat juicy steak with a side of shrimp?

The answer to all those queries is "who cares, they're filthy hippies".

hey now, hippies have a use, like human shields.... or fertilizer for feed for beef farms..

Yes, they made my news feeds again today.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hardcoded-password-found-in-cisco-software/

Since Cisco keeps being so popular with the security breaches and vulnerabilities, I figured it's time they get their very own thread.

Well, looks like I will be able to make it, thanks to @DustinB3403!

Dilbert and one of the big topics around here:

Thought I'd drop one of my current projects here. It started as just wanting a way to see what the temperature in a room is without having to have someone go check. (It's another building in a locked room few people have a key for.)

We already have lots of project cases, and also already had a Raspberry Pi. The new $5 Pi would need a network connection of some sort, so figure $10 for the networked PC ($20 if you need a power supply and memory card as well). I splurged at $13 for a combination temperature and humidity sensor. I went ahead and added a door sensor as well, it was $2. I also got a Cobbler Plus GPIO Breakout for $8 and a Perma-Proto board for $6. Total cost for me was $29. If you need a Pi as well figure ~$50 for everything. Compare that to any of the commercial offerings!

I'll post the code I use for everything here, along with references where possible. After all, that's where the real cost of these little things end up being.

It might be good to add a battery backup to it as well, which is quite easy, but I have no real need for that (if the power is out, the temperature isn't going to be getting out of control.) Adafruit makes it really easy.

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Thing learned today: Domain controller must have SMB v1 enabled for a Server 2003 member to join the domain.

I learned that I only have to get inside your LAN in order to steal all the network data.

This is mostly to make things a matter of public record, in addition to a bit of a rant.

Got a call yesterday morning. They can't process credit cards. That office happens to use Intuit/Quickbooks for everything from inventory tracking, to payment processing and accounting. I've been down the road of getting away from Intuit often. Don't know if this will push them past the edge or not.

Ok, spent 2 hours manually doing updates because the automatic ones broke along the way somewhere. Updates complete. Good, we should be up and running. They try to login, and get asked for a code. Ok, check the email address... nothing.

Now I'm calling Intuit support (bad idea, but we're basically not in business at this point.) That's a 3 hour call where I'm told something is wrong with our email server.

Fine, hang up with one unhelpful peon. Go eat lunch (3:30pm at this point, my blood sugar is about to tank.)

Get back into the office around 4:30. Enough time to find something very interesting in the server logs...

2016-10-05 14:01:56 H=lvmailappout12.intuit.com [199.16.139.22]:30939 sender verify fail for <[email protected]>: response to "RCPT TO:<[email protected]>" from mailin.intuit.com [206.108.40.19] was: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected.
2016-10-06 11:17:10 H=mailout203.intuit.com [206.108.40.17]:49121 X=TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256 CV=no F=<[email protected]> rejected RCPT <[email protected]>: Sender verify failed

Now, I spent way to much time figuring out how to deal with spam, and have gotten it figured out for the most part. So, they are sending a confirmation code out using an address that their own email server does not acknowledge as being valid. Yet it's somehow my fault that the email is not being delivered.

Spent another 2 hours on the phone this morning going over the same stuff. We're working through alternatives, none of which are something the business would normally find acceptable.

This on top of them having me enable SSL2 in the browser. Uhm, these computers have to remain PCI compliant, and they just purposely made them non-compliant.

Malicious company, let it be known.

Getting noticed is easy!

Getting the right kind of notice is very hard!

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/900-000-routers-knocked-offline-in-germany-amid-rumors-of-cyber-attack/

On Facebook, Deutsche Telekom engineers recommended that users unplug their devices, wait for 30 seconds and restart their router. If the equipment fails to connect to the company's network, engineers told users to disconnect their device from the company's network permanently.

To compensate the downtime, Deutsche Telekom is offering free mobile Internet until the technical problem is resolved.

DSL routers all over Germany, and presumably worldwide if anyone else happens to be using the same DSL Modem that got hit by this.

@thwr, hope you're still running!

@scottalanmiller said in OpenAI ChatGPT 4.1 vs 4.5 Models:

Until you spend a lot of time in technical tasks, you might not be aware of just how significantly different the output from different models can be for coding and other technical tasks where we want discrete results and not wordy soliloquies. After weeks of deep diving into using several models for technical research GPT-4.1 is a clear winner by quite a stretch. Keywords has a great breakdown of the two latest ChatGPT models, 4.1 and 4.5 and how they stack up (and why) for different tasks.

https://www.keywordsai.co/blog/gpt-41-vs-gpt-45-a-comprehensive-comparison

This is a somewhat surprising because all the recent reviews I've read or heard claim o3 and o3-mini are the best models so far at least for programming purposes. Are 4.1 and 4.5 newer than o3?

@scottalanmiller said in HPE Acquires Junipeer:

Just got this press release..

On July 2, 2025, Juniper Networks was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). As this integration moves forward, we will continue to steward your data with HPE's help. The personal data we hold about you is being transferred to HPE and will be processed by them in accordance with their privacy statement.

If you currently receive marketing emails from us, you will continue to do so, and your preferences will follow your data to HPE. You can manage your preferences using the Juniper preference center.

Yours sincerely,
Juniper Networks, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

I wish I thought that means that firmware updates will no longer be held behind a paywall.

@gjacobse said in Recommendation for home WiFi router:

@JaredBusch
the UniFi Express 7 looks pretty decent in capacity and features - and likely a contendor replacement for the UniFi Lite Router I have since my NTG days. Has that really been ten years ago now?

I will say I sort of feel that they seriously missed the mark in the design. Seems that USB-C has to be shoved into everything - but seriously - why!!??

They could have easily put the PSU into the unit and only had the AC power cable. True, the unit shouldn't need to be moved once in place. But,.. really? Get real - Just because USB--C can do so much, doesn't mean that you need to use it everywhere - especially when all you are suppling is 5v. Incorporate the whole thing and it'll be a better format.

That said,.. I'm still likely to move to something like it or this in the future.

I had a location with a UniFi Lite router that died around a year ago. Upgrading to the UniFi Express doubled their throughput with QOS enabled. Went from 300MB download to 600MB. Upload is limited because of the cable connection.

These aren't necessarily Mesh Central replacements (one actually uses Mesh Central on the back end) as they're actually RMMs.

The first one that comes to mind, but is the one I haven't used myself yet, is RustDesk. It's completely self hosted, and includes clients for Windows, Linux and MAC. There is a completely free OSS version, and then the licensed versions are very reasonably prices imo. I'm not sure what the differentiators are between the OSS and different paid for versions.

The second one is TacticalRMM. This is the one that uses MeshCentral as the back end remote access, but you never see MeshCentral unless you go looking for it. So depending on what the issues are pushing you away from MeshCentral are, it may be a hard no-go for you. Only provides Windows clients for free, MAC and Linux clients are the only things you pay for.

Both would be way more functionality than what I remember ScreenConnect or Mesh Central making available themselves.

Please do let us know what you end up choosing.

@scottalanmiller said in Proxmox backup to remote PBS over Zerotier:

If you haven't played with it for tiny scale stuff, TailScale makes this SO easy to do.

I do have a TailScale account, but didn't think of it because I already had some other stuff at the location already on Zerotier.

@Mario-Jakovina said in Recommendation for home WiFi router:

Hello everybody!
(I'm sad to see Mangolassi dead, but here is a topic from me)

1. Can you give me some recommendation for new home Wifi router?
Here is description of my "system":

• internet link is 300/30 Mbps
• 15 devices should be connected to it (6 phones, 4 laptops, 3 TVs, one WiFi access point + occasionally ,some guest or our HTPC
• of these 15 devices, 3 should be connected via LAN (2 TVs, one HTPC), others via WiFi

Reason for buying is that my internet provider changed the router type (after upgrade of speed from 200/20 to 300/30, but this new device seems to struggle with the load).

2. Is there some Mikrotik device that you would recommend for this? (we have good local Mikrotik dealer here)

3. If I put telecom's router in "bridge mode" and put better router behind it, is it reasonable to expect that the telecom's router's should not be a noticeable bottleneck (or not as much)?

Thank you

I'm not sure which MicroTik routers would be a good fit.

We use a lot of the Netgate/PFSense routers at work, and I've been impressed with the price/performance of them. If they're available in your area, you should look at a Netgate 2100 for your needs.

Once you have the ISP router in "bridge mode", it should cease to have any performance impact at all. Even the cheapest devices can forward traffic at line speed these days.

While I was attempting to look up how to backup a Proxmox host to a remote Proxmox Backup Server over Zerotier, all the instructions I found were very complex. While those instructions are true if you want to route an entire network, it is very easy to get a single Proxmox host and single PBS server connected over Zerotier.

1. Join both host and PBS to the same Zerotier network
2. Add 2 routes in Zerotier, each pointing to the remote subnet the Zerotier IP of the remote host as the Via address in Zerotier.
3. Add the PBS server to the Proxmox host like normal.

As an example, this is my Managed Routes section of Zerotier with a working backup job.