@scottalanmiller said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

@thecreaitvone91 said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

@matteo-nunziati said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

@JaredBusch so currently the file is pushed to a server placed at customers' sites?!
You can write some http API but still you need to set the server.
Can't you othetwise keep the sftp server at the source and let customer use any ftp client (even the browser) to download it? Basically this reverse the process snd customers pull the file.

Winscp offers scripting automation as well so you could send that to them to automate the download to whatever folder. I believe it offers some recording function as well if you don't want to manually script it.

SCP is part of Windows now by default. If your OS is up to date, or if you add it directly as a component, you don't need any third party tools. SSH/SFTP/SCP is there for CMD/PS to use and you can automate that way.

My point was the other side could generate what they needed to do in the GUI of WinSCP rather than having to script it if they didn't know how https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_generateurl#script

@matteo-nunziati said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

@JaredBusch so currently the file is pushed to a server placed at customers' sites?!
You can write some http API but still you need to set the server.
Can't you othetwise keep the sftp server at the source and let customer use any ftp client (even the browser) to download it? Basically this reverse the process snd customers pull the file.

Winscp offers scripting automation as well so you could send that to them to automate the download to whatever folder. I believe it offers some recording function as well if you don't want to manually script it.

@stacksofplates said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

So you just want the system to send a text string to a few people? Like through email?

There's really nothing stopping you from doing EDI over email if the cost of the VAN is the issue, and both ERPs easily do VANs.

Just quick googling for cheap solutions you could use https://www.emailparser.com/ for the incoming side, either sort by sender or subject (or both) and save to a folder location for the incoming EDI

for Outgoing I haven't found one yet, but I'm sure there's an easy way to take your outgoing EDI folder and have it email out when a new file is placed there.

Not the best but if both sides are setup for EDI may be the quickest.

If they already have an ERP selected to replace it, I think it would be wise to see what they do and support and try to do something the new ERP can take as well so you aren't switching it again soon.

@JaredBusch said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

@scottalanmiller said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

What about a RESTful API? Simple for everyone involved, typically.

A RESTful API is what I was thinking about, but I wasn't restricting the question to a RESTful API as I don't know enough about the entire process from a development point of view.

If you are looking at moving to Restful API, this tends to be the Standard: https://www.ibm.com/products/datapower-gateway it's not cheap.

Restful API for B2B hasn't been fully Standardized yet like EDI has

@JaredBusch said in Has anyone setup an API for an internal application:

The data in question is simply formatted text.

Are you sure that isn't already EDI just without the VAN?

An EDI VAN is the normal way of doing this, There are industry-standard forms for many different things so you aren't doing anything custom for each. You just have to get the application to talk to the VAN. There's a lot of different VAN Providers

https://www.b2bgateway.net/what-is-a-value-added-network-van-and-how-does-it-work/
https://www.b2bgateway.net/edi-info/#EDI-Communication-Methods

If you do any business with big companies like Kroger, Walmart etc. They require it.

https://edi.kroger.com/EDIPortal/VansAndProviders.html
https://cdn.corporate.walmart.com/5d/8d/897b4bb84a95bb05214bf897cee3/edi-getting-started-guide.pdf
https://www.swicktech.com/SWICKtech/Resources/Blog/Direct-EDI-vs-EDI-VANs.htm

@JaredBusch said in Cell signal boost in area with limited connectivity ...:

^^^^ this is exactly what you want.

Radio waves are not a new thing and equipment exists to handle it.

I definitely recommend a professional analysis and not buying random low cost stuff you can google.

Yes, you definitely want someone that can do a site survey.

we use this system everywhere https://cel-fi.com/quatra4000/ They have a nice management interface too.

They are not self install and they will do a site survey.

@Dashrender said in Web filtering for SMB:

@thecreaitvone91 said in Web filtering for SMB:

Back in My SMB days I used NxFilter. You point your clients DNS to it (I did it using DHCP) and you can still use it if you have a domain, I just setup Zone Transfers from the AD DNS to Nxfilter, I had them setup in a failover pair. Does AD authentication for Group Lists of allowed/block sites, reporting etc. You'd normally block client devices from using Port 53 so they couldn't do their own lookups on your firewall.

https://nxfilter.org/p3/

A zone transfer instead of just making the NXfilter the upstream DNS for AD's DNS?

You couldn't do Groups or custom filters or reporting if you did it that way as all requests would be coming from the DC itself.

Back in My SMB days I used NxFilter. You point your clients DNS to it (I did it using DHCP) and you can still use it if you have a domain, I just setup Zone Transfers from the AD DNS to Nxfilter, I had them setup in a failover pair. Does AD authentication for Group Lists of allowed/block sites, reporting etc. You'd normally block client devices from using Port 53 so they couldn't do their own lookups on your firewall.

https://nxfilter.org/p3/

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@coliver said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.

In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.

This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.

My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.

The other solution is to not design an IPOD.

Exactly. Buy a correctly sized Scale box - no IPOD... sure, huge upfront cost, but who knows over the long term compared to Azure. etc etc etc.. We don't have any of the other needed information to know if going to Azure was the right move or not... but it's done, so we move on.

Literally everything is cheap compared to Azure. LOL. Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload.

Their serverless offering is on par with the rest. It's a million requests per month and 400,000 seconds of compute for free. After that it's only $0.20 per million executions and $0.000016 per second. That's not really expensive at all.

Here you used serverless pricing to say that you could use it to get the cost of Azure below having infrastructure of our own. How do we make it cheaper, if it's an additional cost rather than a replacement one? Wasn't the point of this to say that going all cloud would allow us to remove the cost of our own server? If not, what were you saying?

Nope. Never said that. I was replying to you saying "Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload."

I said their serverless offering is on par with the rest. And it's cheaper than running serverless yourself if you use the free tier. You're grasping at straws here.

I was pointing out that even when you leverage serverless type stuff, because I know what it is and had already considered it, it wasn't enough to overcome all of the costs.

Responding that the serverless portion is on par with other providers is fine, but doesn't address the point that when taken together, it's not really cost competitive.

Again the only costs that were mentioned was directly related to serverless. You interjected your own ideas here and made a mountain out of nothing.

Then I apologize. Their serverless offerings are good value similar to the industry and I read into what was being said inappropriately.

No it's fine, I'm not trying to be combative. I maybe could have worded things better.

We should do a serverless seminar. It would be great to have a solid talk on real world example use cases of where regular companies would have their best chances at trying it out.

I'd definitely love to see an SMB (on the smaller side) example of that - how you deal with file shares, windows server apps, etc.

Serverless isn't for dealing with those types of loads, they are more akin to data processing, scheduled reports or what you might call batch processing. Moving Data from one place to another, sending emails. anything that's event triggered.

@IRJ said in MS SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2019?:

@scottalanmiller said in MS SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2019?:

Trying to find this info while on a call. Will SQL Server 2016 happily live on Server 2019? Have an app that won't let us update the database, but I'd prefer to keep at least the OS up to date.

That really makes things expensive. It would be nice to run it on Linux. I would find out if it can support SQL 2017.

Good point, why waste a windows license?

Actually you can: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-setup?view=sql-server-ver15

@stacksofplates said in encrypted email options?:

@Obsolesce said in encrypted email options?:

@stacksofplates said in encrypted email options?:

@Dashrender said in encrypted email options?:

HIPAA doesn't require encryption at rest, even though I have it on my side with O365.

I'd rethink that.

https://thehcbiz.com/is-encryption-required-by-hipaa-yes/

So… it’s not required. But HHS goes on:

“The covered entity must decide whether a given addressable implementation specification is a reasonable and appropriate security measure to apply within its particular security framework. For example, a covered entity must implement an addressable implementation specification if it is reasonable and appropriate to do so, and must implement an equivalent alternative if the addressable implementation specification is unreasonable and inappropriate, and there is a reasonable and appropriate alternative.”

The key phrase here is “reasonable and appropriate.” As in, encryption IS required if it’s reasonable and appropriate to encrypt. This is really important and we’ll come back to it later. HHS continues:

“This decision will depend on a variety of factors, such as, among others, the entity’s risk analysis, risk mitigation strategy, what security measures are already in place, and the cost of implementation. The decisions that a covered entity makes regarding addressable specifications must be documented in writing. The written documentation should include the factors considered as well as the results of the risk assessment on which the decision was based.”

Basically what they’re saying is that you don’t “have to” encrypt, but if you choose not to you’d better be prepared to demonstrate, in writing, why you believe that. Then, in the event of an audit, The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will review your documentation and determine whether or not they agree with you.

IMO, it IS reasonable and appropriate to keep unauthorized people from accessing the data you are sending, which means OME.

Yeah I'm not arguing that. They already have encryption at rest with O365 anyway, I'm saying more everything else. Saying HIPAA doesn't require encryption at rest is I guess technically true, but hopefully you document why it isn't in whatever use case.

It's kinda in the same vein, that you can build a house that meets code, but is still a piece of shit, just because it's the minimum that you have to do by law, doesn't mean that's all you should do, nor does it mean you can't meet the code and still get sued for something you did that met code but done in a negligent way to cause damage later on.

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

Keep in mind that serverless itself doesn't imply cloud or hosted or third party. You can run serverless on your own server. It requires containers to run in, just like any other workload. If you feel that serverless is a critical part of your design, but don't want a dependency on third parties, you can always run your own.

I presume that this allows you to control latency issues common with serverless by enforcing what stays hot, although I've not tested that theory.

I assume you're talking about OpenFaaS. You can control cold starts but the complexity of setting that up along with maintaining it is light years above deploying to a provider.

As with anything, people not leveraging public cloud offerings (specifically serverless in this case and not just the big 3) is because of FUD. There are very few real cases where it can't be leveraged. As you said in another thread, don't avoid the best because it fails to be perfect.

Doesn't have the same cost benefits running on your own hardware either.

Nothing.

I have enough sales calls from the outside. Internally, almost no one other than IT has a need to contact me, they go to the helpdesk for any support. Helpdesk techs or sysadmins can contact me if they need assistance.

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@bnrstnr said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Obsolesce said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@coliver said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.

In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.

This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.

My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.

The other solution is to not design an IPOD.

Exactly. Buy a correctly sized Scale box - no IPOD... sure, huge upfront cost, but who knows over the long term compared to Azure. etc etc etc.. We don't have any of the other needed information to know if going to Azure was the right move or not... but it's done, so we move on.

Literally everything is cheap compared to Azure. LOL. Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload.

Their serverless offering is on par with the rest. It's a million requests per month and 400,000 seconds of compute for free. After that it's only $0.20 per million executions and $0.000016 per second. That's not really expensive at all.

Exactly. I'm using in a lot of places in production with ~10k users and twice as many devices that is using the serveless functions in many areas... basically for free. And, that's just the start (one example) of it... Having a VM with enough power to process that as frequently as it's getting done now along with all the other benefits around it, there's truly no comparison. Scaling it down to how a typical SMB would use it, well that's a no-brainer, as it'd be totally free and 100% beneficial. I don't think one's ignorance of a technology justifies it's disqualification of use in the real world.

This should probably be it's own topic, but here we are... I'm totally ignorant to Azure and serverless concepts in general. What types of real world services/processes are SMBs using (or could/should be using) serverless Azure for?

There's a few different scenarios. Anything reactionary essentially. Send a message/email based on an event, do some kind of work based on messages in a message queue, transform or modify data, etc. You can even use it to build and define APIs. I have an API running in Vercel (not Azure but another serverless offering) and I don't have to run the service in a VM full time.

Invoicing and Accounts Payable is a big use of it

OME is what we use, we have rules setup to encrypt if you put [encrypt] in the subject line.

@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@IRJ said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

But admins head closer to $500K.

Where?

You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.

Scott was the CIO or a step or so below or to the side of that making that much or more on wallstreet. So sure, it's possible, but again, just super rare.

These are true facts, but this mixes things together in a misleadingly suggestive way. I was a CIO or similar on Wall Street. But that only explains why I have such broad insight into what different roles get there. I was also a true admin and engineer there.

CIOs make way, way more than this up there. You word this in such a way to make it sound like you believe that it was me not being an admin, but rather a CIO, and to explain my salary that way. But that's wrong. And we aren't talking about me, but jobs in general. All of your implications here are completely wrong.

My CIO offer was in the millions, not the hundreds of thousands. And I hired admins, lots of them, at this prices. Real admins. And I worked as an admin and I'm using the admin salary, not some other salary, when I talk about admins. And I still, to this day, am used as a salary advisor for hedge funds who call me and I help to set their hiring prices. So I think you tend to mislead in how you present this. I'm part of the hiring manager teams, still today, who determine these salaries. So when I say $450K is what we intend to hire at as a mid-point for a position category, I mean it.

How could you turn down that job? lol

Lawsuits from other banks. It wasn't just good money, which is obviously a factor, duh, but it was an amazing team, private flights, my own offices and staff in NYC, Zurich, and France, a junior CIO to support me off hours in Singapore, HK and Tokyo that would report to me, a budget of billions... it was amazing on the tech side and the human side. It was also a "move into the office and work non-stop" position with crazy stress, but brilliant, amazing people. Best interview I've ever been to, best offer I ever got.

Why would other banks sue?

Trying to figure out what's up with my home aruba AP mesh. Only getting like 60mbps over them now... Can usually get full gig speeds since each ap has two gigabit uplinks to them. Physical links on all devices started showing 650Mbps or less. Was working fine earlier smh..

@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:

In these days in a SMB, what's the difference between an System Admin and a IT Director? Because its hard for me to believe that a System Admin or whatever random title you were giving would making a $200K and up.

There's a big difference. an IT director Manages people, specifically, a Director manages managers and/or supervisors. The CIO is at the top of the chain(an executive), they do very little day to day managing of people, usually go to the board and shareholder meetings set policies etc. an Admin is working on the systems/network.

If an SMB is using those titles interchangeably they are using the titles wrong.

In an SMB, one typically wears many hats.

I personally dropped IT Director (what my boss calls me) to IT admin. While I advise what to buy, I haven't been the one making the decisions, though I suppose my opinion does weigh heavily...

Who makes the decision on what to buy really doesn't have anything to do with titles. normally it's not a director making those kinds of decisions, an IT director is more involved with the business side of things and making sure their teams have plans to meet those needs and come up with solutions to business problems.