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

Why does it have to be Skyetel? If it's just a reminder, like "don't forget your dentist appointment tomorrow" the number used doesn't matter.

We have this requirement too, hence why we built the matching solution. It's so that the main phone number can double as the texting number in most cases.

@JasGot said in Slack? What is it?:

@scottalanmiller said in Slack? What is it?:

So who needs Slack today?

They have NOTHING now. And since the SIP provider has an interface already built for it, why not use it?

Well, that feels like a gap. How do they have nothing as every business class messaging platform includes something? Do they not have business email?

You could also remote to the NAS via another machine on the network. We often do that. Depends on what the customer has. Or expose a web interface to a jump box.

It's an easy fix. Sometimes the directions for the upgrade don't account for the source location of the APT REPO for ProxMox. Check your /etc/apt files and see where your repo is configured. If you are going from Buster to Bullseye for example, make sure that you have this line somewhere and the error should go away...

deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bullseye pve-no-subscription

@Pete-S said in Proxmox hates security:

I'm not saying Proxmox is insecure, I'm just saying it wasn't designed with security as it's primary focus.
KVM by default for instance is managed by libvirt and by default doesn't open any tcp ports at all. That gives the administrator the option to decide what level of security versus convenience they want.

Ignoring "by default" in that, ProxMox can be the same. You can close everything up and only manage however you like. You don't have to use the web interface on it, it can be totally shut down. Obviously defeating lots of the purpose, but plausible.

I spend far more time on ProxMox via command line via MeshCentral than via the web interface and the web interface, while we don't lock it down from the LAN in most cases (we run a LOT of ProxMox these days) we primarily access it from the PM host itself from a jump box running on top of it for the cases when the web interface is needed. So while we don't go to the degree of locking it off from the LAN, we could and we wouldn't notice the difference most of the time.

That's not a default, so obviously totally different. But it's a really simple setting.

@NashBrydges said in Fedora 33 SSH Access Denied But Webmin Works Fine:

@NashBrydges Yep, changed it to yes and now I can access via SSH!!! Thank you for the help!

This is expected behaviour. The former IT just didn't change it. They might have installed WebMin because they didn't know how to do this. WebMin is a pretty weird thing for an IT shop that knows Linux to install. So my guess is that they were so lost that they attempted a workaround.

@annalynnetech said in Helpdesk - PC replacement routines:

However it is not unusual for our supporters spending at least an hour helping the users with configuring mail etc..

That's not uncommon. The helpdesk is generally a bit of a customer service function and helping users settle in takes time and is a big part of IT's value to an organization. Being efficient matters, of course, but if I was a CIO and you told me this number I wouldn't take it as a negative, necessarily. Seems totally reasonable.

@annalynnetech said in Helpdesk - PC replacement routines:

I am just wondering/hoping there were a better/faster way to get the users settled in. Note that this is not related to data but all the local UI and application settings, shortcuts etc.

Really depends on what they are doing. Would some automation tools or similar help with making what your team does happen faster or more reliably? You might be able to speed it up some. But hand holding end users is totally normal.

@PhlipElder said in WordPress Site Lost Its Mind - Ten Minutes of Maintenance Over and Over Again:

@scottalanmiller If the timing is regular then look for a chron job running at that time. Or, is it "cron"? Meh ... *NIX skillset is pretty green.

We found it. Basically what it was was....

A PHP cycle job for a plugin to auto-update. But the plugin had some problem and couldn't update and would fail. So it never stopped attempting to update and it went into this death spiral that every ~12 hours or so, it would do this thing, kill the site for 9 minutes, and give up and return to normal.

So cron-like job, but seems to have been PHP-Cron or similar.

Okay, discovered that the computer does not have an account on the domain controller, at all. Yet the computer thinks that it is a member of the domain. Pretty fishy.

@BraswellJay said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

question of whether a SAN is necessary.

LOL, necessary? The question should be "under what scenario would it be acceptable?"

There's not been a mainstream acceptable use of SAN in like 18 years. It has extreme niche edge cases, it's not that the tech isn't real. But there's no normal business case where it should even be proposed, let alone seriously considered or used.

@BraswellJay said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

My gut instinct is that my situation is one that really doesn't require a SAN, yet I still find myself unsure that I understand the various questions that I should be considering when making this decision

There is only one question:

Can you do this task WITHOUT a SAN? SAN is never desired only required at certain times.

@BraswellJay said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

With that in mind, I had planned for two hosts so we could survive a failure of one of them. My primary confusion though is how would I accomplish replicated local storage.

How would you do it with SAN?

Do it the same with local storage. The real problem is that you don't do it with the SAN, someone pulls a shell game and gets you to look the other way and ignore the risks. With local storage, you are paying attention and actually trying to mitigate the risk (even though the risk is much less.)

Remember.. ANYTHING with SAN is more reliable without the SAN. If the SAN "feels" reliable, it's because you've missed where the risk was shifted. No exceptions. SAN adds complications and points of failure without any reliability benefits (it's simple physicals, it's impossible for a SAN to be beneficial or useful in a reliability discussion - it only makes it riskier, no exceptions possible.)

@BraswellJay said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

Our MSP has quoted an EMC SAN device to the tune of $25k so that VMs could be migrated between hosts with storage being on the SAN

And hopefully your fired them on the spot. Never let them in the door again.

@BraswellJay said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

so that VMs could be migrated between hosts with storage being on the SAN.

Okay but who cares? That's not where your risk is. The risk is 99% in the SAN. Where do you migrate when the SAN fails?

@Pete-S said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

@scottalanmiller said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

@PhlipElder said in Local Storage vs SAN ...:

StarWind and VMware adopted the vSAN designation for their Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution sets IIRC. Both did.

Both do vSAN. So it makes sense as they run SAN appliances on VMs.

VMware vSAN runs directly on the hypervisor as far as I know. I haven't installed it myself even if I specced it for customers.

They CLAIM that to be true, but they, like MS, often speak in licensing terms rather than how things are physically implemented.

What's funny is that if that is true, it would obviously make it not a vSAN at all. Which is totally plausible as it is a latecomer to the market and like everything with "virtual" or "cloud" slapped on it, they are just playing on the marketing name that people have heard. vSAN is the product name, not its description.

VMware vSAN uses a proprietary SAN protocol to distant nodes (and I assume the local one for transparency) making it... a traditional physical SAN. Just a converged one, rather than a remote one.

None of that is bad. It's all just funny that they claim to explicitly not be the product description whose name they used.

@Pete-S said in XO-Lite beta:

And also away from self-hosting and towards services that someone else will be responsible for.

This I don't feel is true. And when it is, that's still IT managing it, just under a different organizational structure. So all of the needs, whatever they are, remain the same just... elsewhere.

Today a large corporate "IT department" that uses DattoRMM (OMG, shoot me now) ask me if we needed these "apps"...

sc.exe and wmic.exe because DattoRMM was flagging them.

Um, that's WINDOWS. What kind of IT department that manages thousands of Windows computers opens a ticket to their upstream MSP to ask what sc and wmic are? Like, ever heard of Google? Or Windows? Seriously?

Today a customer can't bring from this one workstation.

Funny, everything else can print fine.

Oh wait, Windows 7 on Intel Core 14 years old, 32bit.

Um yeah, we don't have 32bit drivers on the network. WTF people?

Getting a VM to start automatically is a common task and would be far easier to do from the command line shell than to take the time to log into the web GUI, hunt around, etc. So much faster. You just need the command...

qm set VMID_Here --onboot 1