wat

why

Friends of the internet assemble @Dashrender @dafyre @MattSpeller @coliver @travisdh1

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Absolute worst day. I'm going to have to go to the gym to get all of my aggression out.

I had a rough day too...

Just kidding, I drank on the beach all day.

Now see, that's not going to do anything but piss @wirestyle22 off more and make him work out that much harder... On the brighter side... he can feel free to knock back a few after he gets done exercising -- I mean relieving his agression.

Nah. I'm happy he had a good day. Can't have good days without bad days.

@MattSpeller said:

http://www.ozzu.com/mswindows-forum/word-files-saved-network-randomly-opening-read-only-t75734.html

"I checked. Before we tried opening a file, nothing was listed as being open. Once we tried to open a file. The file opened in word as read only. When I checked the open files then, it showed the file being accessed. But not by her, it was showing being accessed by one of the service accounts we have set up for our fax server. I checked and she is logged in as herself, this is very strange. "

"Double check her machine to make sure the fax service is not set as her default printer."

Are you shitting me right now Matt? Hold on. Sigh.

T-minus 2 hours 6 minutes until my vacation officially begins. PAX here I come!

Nah. Her default printer is an HP 1350.

@RamblingBiped said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Counting down the minutes until quitting time and going over packing lists in my head in preparation for Ragnar in Richmond this weekend.

Have fun. You and @MattSpeller are way more active than I am. Then again I'm slowly de-evolving into a chicken mcnugget.

@MattSpeller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

Nah. Her default printer is an HP 1350.

I tried

Appreciate the effort. For the record she told me it said "read only" but it actually says "open by another user". She was making an assumption which I specifically asked her about and she gave me false information. The thing is there is no other open version of the file from the servers point of view. I think this might be a case of excel being closed improperly so to test this I had her start excel, open the file within excel, close the file in excel (while keeping excel running) and then open a new file. Rinse and repeat. We have not had this issue occur since then. We have probably opened at least 150 documents up until this point. So my question is where do i go from here?

@MattSpeller tagging you so you know I edited this.

Mine is more feeling purposeless in my job. I have a lot of good ideas on how to optimize but my company wants to live in the dark ages that are more costly and do less for us. The furstration's really getting to me. I go home every night and study my cert books to get my CCIE one day.

@johnhooks said:

@Dashrender said:

What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.

I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.

Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.

There are several ways to secure email,

1. you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
2. you could use a service that offers secure email

While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.

Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.

Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.

Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.

Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?

There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.

The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.

Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.

I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.

@Dashrender said:

What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.

I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.

Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.

There are several ways to secure email,

1. you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
2. you could use a service that offers secure email

While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.

Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.

Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.

Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.

Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?

There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.

The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.

Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.

I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.

PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file at all, just drop it in with FileZilla.

I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.

We could never get doctors offices to do this. Period. I can't get them to do anything at all actually.

@NattNatt said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 don't get me wrong, it'll be nice to have our own area and storage etc...but the smell and space....hah :')

I'm lucky that 95% of my co-workers are women so I don't deal with a lot of smelly people or bad smells in general. The perfume does toy with my allergies though

@Joel said:

Maybe a silly Q, but what are the pro's / con's about rack mounted desktops?
TBH, I didnt even know about these until a new opportunity came to me wanting to setup a new office and wanted costs for new PCS....After providing costs, they said they were discussing the options of rack mounted them....How would this work? If they are all rack mounted they'd have cables running from the rack to each work station and it would look messy no?? Unless the rack is in the middle of the desks??? Can someone explain how users would connect eg monitors, keyboards etc and what the pro's/cons are???

They have to mean thin/zero clients, right? Please update this thread with what ends up happening. If people actually think this way it'll make me more optimistic about my own job.

@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:

@wirestyle22 said in Non-IT News Thread:

@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:

@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:

@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:

I'd much rather move overseas to Europe at this point. Would need a place with lots of Dairy and lots of IT though.

Dairy is pretty common in Europe. They drink milk just like Americans do. And they don't import it from Asia or anything weird.

Which is funny... because people I know in the industry, connections again, are telling me we export most of our milk as powdered to the Asian markets. I haven't been able to verify that though.

Well sure, because Asia is short of food production. Europe, however, makes a LOT of food. It's an agricultural boom area.

Guess I'll have to keep an eye open then. Moving is hard as we have lots of family in the area.

I can't leave NJ for the same reason. My fiance is very close with her family.

Yep, I'm like your fiance. I spent most of my childhood moving from place-to-place. Didn't have a permanent home until middle school. Thankfully that was in my parent's hometown with lots of family close by.

Between the demands of my job, studying for my CCIE, managing the servers for two doctors offices (friends of mine) and planning for a wedding I don't understand how our families can have any expectations of seeing us in the near future. You'd think they'd at least be coming to us, but no.

EDIT: The real crazy thing too is it's only her family. My brother lives in LA, my dad who lived locally passed away and my mom lives in England. What would we do if we had to appease two families? How do you guys deal with this stuff? I established boundaries for myself but my fiance just does whatever they want. It's rough.

@iroal said:

Hi.

Again this year I'm going to try replace our SonicWall NSA 2400, 6-7 years old.

After look many options I'd like Pfsense but i'm not sure if it's the best option.

Now we use Sonicwall for Vpn (10 people), Firewall and Content Filter for about 50 people and 5 networks connections.

I don't think I have a big budget if they approve buy a new one Firewall.

What are best options instead SonicWall ?

Thanks.

Pfsense is good but as SAM has pointed out there is currently no reason to use it as Ubiquiti makes a better product for less. Try not to get hung up on any particular brand or model. There are only instances of best solutions--meaning they change constantly. After a few months you would have to research it again because the pricing and products will change.

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I was turned down for a raise. I was just informed. So I'm leaving the moment I get another job.

+1 for +1 bro hugs, not because I like that it happened

Honestly, I was mad at first but it just proves their lack of knowledge and appreciation for my position. I know they're going to get hit with ransomware again when I leave and I'm telling you they won't recover. I've addressed this so many times I can't even feel bad about it anymore.

On to bigger and better things

@scottalanmiller said:

@wirestyle22 said:

It depends on the job but most recently it's been an associates degree in computer science, which doesn't make sense to me. I'm not a programmer and you aren't hiring a programmer.

CS isn't for programmers. It is for algorithmic researchers. Programmers get IT degrees.

It makes no sense and tells you instantly that you talking to a company without the slightest idea or concern about IT. It's a garbage job requirement, often fake, and a great way to improve your job searches by eliminating those places from consideration. You aren't desperate or starving, focus on real and/or good jobs instead.

I intend to take advantage of all of the good advice I've been given here. Hopefully I will learn quickly. On a side note my fiance just got a job with the state paying...a lot so that's great. Motivated me to get out there even more.

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@wirestyle22 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

So my friend has over 31,000 pictures on her computer. I told her she needs to back all of that stuff up even if its just an external hard drive. She needs redundancy. She didn't do it. Now her hard drive broke and she's having a freak out. I helped her but when I said we need to go purchase an external hard drive she still refused.

File this under reasons why I should charge an arm and a leg for my services. Maybe If it costed more for me to fix it she would actually listen to my advice. Sigh.

Yep, friends shouldn't help friends - it causes bad situations.

I just make it too easy for them. People only put effort into things if it removes the need for more effort down the road it seems like. It took awhile for this to be fixed and I didn't have a lot of time to begin with. No one seems to consider that. I think I'm going to tell her to go to geek squad so she can get a taste of what other people are dealing with.

The next time something bad happens, yeah that's about your only way to force the issue.

Oh, something's broke? Well the first thing you need to do is get our your checkbook and write two checks. The first one is to Best Buy (or thatever consumer electronics store you have nearby) to buy an external drive, and second is a check to me for $150. If she refuses either, Well, I'm sure the guys at GeekSquad will be more than happy to help you. as I just don't have the time to assist you for free.

I hate being this way but its the only way shes going to learn

non profit so we are tax exempt

@coliver said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

That sucks, did you at least get some venison? (assuming it wasn't completely ruined)

Would that I could have. I mentioned to some of my friends and relatives who butcher their own meat but they didn't seem to thing, from the description, that it would be worth going to get it. Although there were no outward visible signs of injury.

They don't tenderize their meat? :X

I've been playing with my ERX. It's pretty amazing for $60. Looking into purchasing their UAP-AC-LITE as per @JaredBusch

Looking at Wedding venues this weekend!