Was a long, rough day at work. The next project hits tomorrow, and even my boss was having trouble figuring out what is going on.

@Dashrender said in Is this a fake job?:

so fake interviews by who? head hunters?

I've been to a few over the years.

@nadnerB said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@nadnerB Haven't had that much bad luck with them as switches goes and they have lasted more than Dell and HP for us.

When other people have bought TP-Link kit, it's been pretty good.
At work (pre-merger) we had some things that APs, switch etc, they seemed to keep going.
Opposite story at home I've had, i think I'm up to, 3 DOA modem routers, and one that was dieing a slow death. IMO, I have bad luck with TP-Link, so I've stopped buying their stuff.

Other people don't seem to have the issue.

Any of their home gear (routers, modems, etc) is generally trash.

Switches and enterprise gear is much better.

I've heard good things about their Omada products as well, but haven't used any yet myself.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Pains me to say - I may be going 'consumer grade' for a router as I now find that my 16port switch is lost as well.

This is due to cost and turn around.

You can still find 16 port switches for reasonable cost, they're just harder to find. I recently got a 16 port PoE TPLink switch from Amazon that wasn't overpriced or impossible to actually get.

Why would you consider consumer grade routers? At the very least, you can get ER-X from MicroCenter. There are a few other quality options around that are better than consumer c*** now as well.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Sigh
Device burn-out saga continues,… the ERL went down this morning. It now sings when powered.

One more device to replace…..

How's the power quality in your area? I've had to buy the fancy online (power always comes from the battery) types of UPSs before because the incoming power was so dirty.

@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Finally Deprecated WINS:

There was a time in the 1990s when Microsoft was taking a bet that WINS would be better than DNS, at least on the LAN. This proved to not be true and Microsoft officially made DNS their main mechanism with the release of Windows 2000 (NT 5) in 2000. That's 22 years ago. But for 22 years WINS has still been included and developed for Windows Server.

For those that haven't paid attention to the fine print, with the release of Windows Server 2022 (which we are deploying regularly) WINS is still included, of course, but they have announced that development has ceased and you can be sure that sometime, probably not in the next version of Windows, that WINS will no longer be included with it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/removed-deprecated-features-windows-server-2022

If you rely on WINS for anything, it is time to figure out where and start phasing it out now before it becomes painful.

But WINS was always painful.

Just avoid additional pain.

@scottalanmiller said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Pete-S said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@scottalanmiller said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Pete-S said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Dashrender said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@Pete-S said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

@scottalanmiller said in Send an Email via SMTP from Command Line with cURL:

First the command itself, showing gmail settings here by default but obviously fill in with your own details:

Does it work? I thought gmail required OAuth nowadays and you couldn't use plain username & password for authentication anymore.

gmail still allows the creation of app passwords.

OK, then it works for now I guess.

I always cringe when I see MSPs that set up their clients MFPs and other devices using random gmail accounts.

IMHO it's unprofessional and much better to use a real transactional email service for these kinds of applications.

It depends. If it is going out to customers, then it's weird. If it is for purely internal stuff then transactional email doesn't make too much sense. But if it is internal, normally you can just use whatever internal tool you already have.

Typical scenario with gmail is that someone sets up a MFP to use a random gmail address for sending alerts and scanned documents.

When the user scans the document it's often sent to his own email address [email protected]. So primarily internal.

Well, problem is that gmail saves mail sent over SMTP in the sent folder. Which means that the "printer guy", who if often not even an employee, can read all the scanned document that was ever scanned and emailed by logging in to the gmail account he set up.

And of course sent email coming from outside your domains might be flagged as spam. So people scan documents and it doesn't work. I mean the list of problems is long.

Well when lots and lots of companies still demand to only use Gmail already, it's not so weird.

You'd be amazing how often we get people requiring that they stay on Yahoo and AOL addresses for their businesses. I kid you not.

@Pete-S said in Any Experience with BeeLink Mini PCs?:

@travisdh1 said in Any Experience with BeeLink Mini PCs?:

The NUCs are just a pain. Too many warranty claims (like 8-10% of new units out of the ~150 I deployed over 2 years). To make matters even harder, the OEM only warranties RAM/storage. So you have two different companies you have to deal with warranty repair/replace issues with.

That's a lot. Intel usually know what they're doing when designing PCs.

I've never had to RMA any of them but I've not deployed as many as you have.

Is it just one kind of failure or is it different?

All types. Some storage/ram, some motherboard/cpu. What makes it such a pain is that Intel doesn't actually sell a complete system, which means playing vendor roulette whenever something does go wrong.

@scottalanmiller said in Unattended remote access utility/ computer:

@travisdh1 said in Unattended remote access utility/ computer:

@AdamF said in Unattended remote access utility/ computer:

@scottalanmiller

Great video. Thanks for that. Your assumption is correct. There are no PCs or servers on this network, just other networking equipment. I like the idea of the Pi and Mesh Central. I finally was able to find one and have it on order. Time to setup a mesh central vm.

I also found this as an option as well https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082VVCFNG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

Not too badly priced either. But I am going with the Pi.

I'm leery about anything running a Celeron J or N series CPU, a Pi is probably going to perform better.

Actually they are probably faster than the Pi. But I like the Pi more.

Not in my experience, but I've also never run Windows on a Pi.

@AdamF said in Unattended remote access utility/ computer:

@scottalanmiller

Great video. Thanks for that. Your assumption is correct. There are no PCs or servers on this network, just other networking equipment. I like the idea of the Pi and Mesh Central. I finally was able to find one and have it on order. Time to setup a mesh central vm.

I also found this as an option as well https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082VVCFNG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

Not too badly priced either. But I am going with the Pi.

I'm leery about anything running a Celeron J or N series CPU, a Pi is probably going to perform better.

@scottalanmiller

I've heard of them, but never actually had hands on one. That said, I'd jump at the opportunity to use anything other than a NUC.

The NUCs are just a pain. Too many warranty claims (like 8-10% of new units out of the ~150 I deployed over 2 years). To make matters even harder, the OEM only warranties RAM/storage. So you have two different companies you have to deal with warranty repair/replace issues with.

@pattonb said in ups battery life:

What sort of timeframe, before changing, does everybody get on UPS batteries. my experience is about 4 years.

I've seen a lot of oddballs, but generally 3-5 years.

Which reminds me, I probably need to replace some of my personal ones.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Slow day around here. What's everyone up to?

An impromptu 2hr meeting with the boss this afternoon. Myself and the other engineer I work with both had things we needed to discuss with him in addition to what he had called us about.

Also saw the latest drive stats from Backblaze came out today. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-drive-stats-mid-2022-review

County fair starts tomorrow, but we're not going till Monday.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

My YouTube channel is SO busy today, it's awesome.

Which one? You have so many!

@scottalanmiller said in Eero Inquiry:

@stacksofplates said in Eero Inquiry:

@Dashrender said in Eero Inquiry:

@dbeato said in Eero Inquiry:

@WrCombs You cannot hide your SSIDs on Eero. You also have a limit of your Main SSID and Guest Network. It is geared for Home and really small environments.

https://support.eero.com/hc/en-us/articles/214588166-Why-can-t-I-hide-my-network-SSID-with-eero-

Why Eero over Ubiquiti? Business versus consumer. Does the pro version have APs with wired connections?

Prob because management is much easier. I ditched my APs and edgerouter for a single Amplifi which I can update and control from my phone. My mom has a Deco setup and it works very similarly and is great as well.

Easier if you do it yourself. But if you have a support company, I think the Unifi is easier. The Eeros always made for a lot of extra work when we had to deal with them.

At a former job, we had an Amplifi system that caused ~8 hours of un-needed billable time. If it would have been a UniFi system, we could have fixed it without the site visits.

@Dashrender said in Eero Inquiry:

@dbeato said in Eero Inquiry:

@WrCombs You cannot hide your SSIDs on Eero. You also have a limit of your Main SSID and Guest Network. It is geared for Home and really small environments.

https://support.eero.com/hc/en-us/articles/214588166-Why-can-t-I-hide-my-network-SSID-with-eero-

Why Eero over Ubiquiti? Business versus consumer. Does the pro version have APs with wired connections?

My sister and brother-in-law put Eero in they're 7000+ sq ft house. They like it because it was easy to setup and they don't have to mess with it. I prefer Ubiquiti enterprise gear myself (the consumer stuff is, well, consumer crud)

Have you looked at MicroSIP?

@gjacobse said in NoMachine Server running, not found:

This is a bit frustrating - It seems that NoMachine is 'hit and miss' being being able to receive a connection. Searching for a device that is online find none, and the device shows running. Restarting the service may fix it, but many times doesn't seem too, and restarting the computer leaves the same issue - not found.

Some threads suggest re-installing it - which I will do, but seems like a poor fix on a service that should run on boot.

It's it just my aggravation is causing this or am I looking for something else?

That's why I never ended up using NoMachine. Too many issues like that.

Re-hanging the bathroom door. I have to put new hangers on it because the previous owners kept putting larger and larger screws in the wood. The door was only hanging on by a single hinge this past week, and the holes the screws used to be in are no longer usable.

Owning a 100+ year old home is lots of work.