Here is another daily occurrence in our business:

Customer 1 who does not understand automation:
"Hey friend, check out my new automated house! When I see my wife pull in, I press this button on this little keyfob and the garage door goes up, then I press this other button and the hall light by the back door turns on for 10 minutes."

Customer 2 who does understand automation:
"Hey friend, check out my new automated house! There is a motion sensor at the end of our 700 foot driveway. When this motion sensor sees motion, it causes our driveway camera to take a picture of the car pulling in. Our Raspberry Pi does License Plate Recognition on that picture, and if it is my wife, it runs this set of commands: Turn on Driveway lighting, Open Garage Door, turn on Hall light, Play the chorus verse of “My Girl” by The Temptations on the SONOS system throughout the house, and sends my wife a sms saying "Welcome home! I've missed you!" All the while, I never even woke up from napping in my Lay-Z-Boy!"

@gjacobse said in Does a script imply Automation?:

Here is process one from when I started.
...
Now do this on several PCs back to back.
After the sixth or so time through I was over it.
...

Things like this are the driving force behind thousands of our scripts.

We have one that does about 4 man-hours of work all by itself. It's on a USB, and 100% of the info it needs in order to personalize a new PC is read from an onboarding database that includes the Service Tag assigned to the new employee (we only use Dell) in the info for each user.

That's about as close as a human triggered script can get to being called automation. (And it is triggered by plugging in the USB and powering on the PC)

In my opinion

Great discussion, it really shows how we have all come to interpret the same things differently!

@dafyre said in Need to split this string in PHP:

@jaredbusch Is the Jitsi version always the same length? If so you could do it with some substr() magic.

Probably not, version 12.10.5550 is one char longer. (Assuming they will get to bigger versions someday.)

Anyone around with over-the-top knowledge of Exchange Server 2013, IIS, Certs, and Exchange Management Shell?

I need some help and am willing to pay for a successful outcome.

This is what I am fighting with:

VERBOSE: Connecting to EXCHANGE.mydomain.Local.
New-PSSession : [exchange.mydomain.local] Connecting to remote server
exchange.mydomain.local failed with the following error message : The client
cannot connect to the destination specified in the request. Verify that the
service on the destination is running and is accepting requests. Consult the
logs and documentation for the WS-Management service running on the
destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM. If the destination is the WinRM
service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and configure
the WinRM service: "winrm quickconfig". For more information, see the
about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.

At line:1 char:1
+ New-PSSession -ConnectionURI "$connectionUri" -ConfigurationName Micr ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo          : OpenError: (System.Manageme....
    RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [New-PSSession], 
    PSRemotingTransportException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CannotConnect,PSSessionOpenFailed

Failed to connect to an Exchange server in the current site.
Enter the server FQDN where you want to connect.:

This all started after deleting an old outdated cert called: Microsoft Exchange
I believe it is the cert that allows encrypted communication between the Default Web site and the Exchange Back End.

@scottalanmiller said in Understanding STUN???:

They noted that they only added the warning recently so it might have always had the issue without reporting it previously.

Okay. Sounds like I can just ignore it. I would like to be able to turn off the warning, though!

@scottalanmiller said in Understanding STUN???:

Yeah, very ignorable. But... why not just open the port and make it go away?

That was a good idea. It worked. Now I won't stress because something is less than perfect.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-is-now-a-public-company/

ETA: Direct Stock link if interested

Backblaze (BLZE)

@dbeato said in Exchange 2013 / IIS / Certificate / EMS Gurus?:

@dbeato Check this article

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/client-connectivity/owa-ecp-ems-cannot-connect-after-self-signed-certificate-removed

Thank you. I found that article a few days ago and followed it without success.

@siringo said in Problem with USB boot disk??:

The stick has a 1GB FAT32 partition and a 100GB NTFS storage partition.

Be careful when using sticks larger than 32 GB when you want them as a boot device, or to be recognized in your BIOS / UEFI firmware.

I am often unable to boot from a >32GB usb or even read from it on older devices because the bios can't handle it.

This is especially the case when you are using UEFI mode, which needs to be formatted with FAT32.

Also, Fat32 booted OSes may not be able to read the NTFS permissions on the NTFS partition under some BIOS. Make sure your NTFS partition is set for everyone in security with no other SID (users) listed.

So I have been using BitWarden since this conversation started. I have to say I like it. I think I am ready to remove all the saved passwords from Edge and Chrome. Would this be the next step?
It's a wee bit scary. But BitWarden does claim to have the same number of passwords as my Edge and Chrome, and the BitWarden password tool is working!

I have two locations with PA Systems. Identical setups. One of them just stopped passing audio.

Here's the setup at both locations.
Cloud Hosted VitalPBX (Same PBX services both locations.)
Comcast ISP with static IP Address
Sonicwall TZ 400
Fanvil PA2S SIP Gateway
PA System

Both locations have been working fine for more than a month (Since install date).
Suddenly one location stops passing audio.

No known changes to our equipment or software.

I've double checked all settings (comparing the non working site to the working site.) I've exported the setting from the working site and imported them into the non working site. And I've rebooted the cable mode and firewall.

No Joy.

Any ides?

I contacted the support staff at the host. I have to say, it never ceases to amaze me how good they are with this stuff.

They changed the NAT setting for the extension. I had no idea the setting was available because I have never setup a SIP device in VitalPBX before, only PJSIP. The NAT setting in question is not there for PJSIP.

This is the new setting on the Extension page for this extension:

I still don't know why it worked fine for a month and then suddenly stopped. I'll look in to that.

We have a customer who is being told they have to ensure all their data is encrypted when at rest. They are being told by their franchisor.

The software product they use for running their business is the only app on the server and the software vendor will not allow access to the server OS.

I know the hard ball way to deal with this, but I am looking to know and consider all of our options.

Moving away from the current software vendor is a nearly insurmountable task.

The software is running on Red Hat. Not sure which version.

@Dashrender said in Hard disk encryption without OS access?:

So you have access to the hypervisor allowing you to turn off the VM, but you can't replace the hypervisor yourself?

I'm not sure what you are asking..... I have no access inside what will be the running VM. I may be able to mount the offline VM and inject software or new users, but that may upset the 3rd party vendor.

@Dashrender said in Hard disk encryption without OS access?:

So you have access to the hypervisor allowing you to turn off the VM, but you can't replace the hypervisor yourself?

Oh. I see what you are asking. It is a physical machine right now. It is not a hypervisor. What we are talking about is making it a VM under our hypervisor to give us a Full Disk Encryption and the ability to maintain our own backup.

I just had a network engineer at a company "With thousands of employees located throughout North America, Europe and Asia" tell me that our cisco 4331 would not work at all under a 1GbE connection from our ISP because we had the default aggregate license.

Let me clarify, he didn't say it would only work at 100x100, he said it would not work at all!

We understand it will only work at 100x100 while connected to a 1000x1000 connection unless we buy the Performance or Boost license. I can't believe he said it simply would not work.

Sheesh!

@krzykat said in VitalPBX reporting:

What is their current system that provides those reports? I've been toying with making a whole external CDR system for asterisk based systems and have contemplated what data is required. Rather like the simple graph of Call Quality with happy faces.

Intermedia Elevate

@Dashrender said in VitalPBX reporting:

@JasGot take a look at https://vitalpbx.com/sonata-stats/

I looked through Sonata Stats, it looks more like an "accounting" stats interface. This use is looking for more of a high level overview.

For example, staff says OMg we were so busy yesterday. Owner says Hmmm, there were only 10 phone calls.

Example: staff says, so and so called 4 time and we could never hear them. The second pic above would confirm that by showing and entry for each call and would have a yellow straight face or a red unhappy face.

I don't need the emojis, but the other data is valuable for daily or weekly reference.

Get a reseller account at https://directnic.com/ and then register the domain with your customer as the registrant and make yourself any one or more of the contacts. You'll get the reminder, you'll get the bill, you'll pay the bill, you'll then invoice your customer.

We have a few thousand domains registered at directnic and have been doing it this way at directnic for about 20 years.

Contact me if you have questions. I'm happy to tell you more if you decide to go that route. We have no affiliation with Directnic other than being a very satisfied customer for decades.

We frequently move new customer's domains from wherever they are to Directnic. When the relationship is over, we keep renewing it and billing them until they request a transfer.

We find it is a huge selling point to explain that when we control registration and DNS, everything works very smoothly and we can promise no down time when they make host changes. (Because we know how to plan ahead for a smooth DNS change!)

@Pete-S said in Slack? What is it?:

What @flaxking is trying to say is that you DON'T want Slack. Normally calendar reminders over SMS is something that is fully automatic once it's in operation.

How can you say that when you don't know what the requirements are?