Well, my first interview is Tuesday, even before my final pay check is due

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco That is a totally different life style to what I was imaging...

So where do they grow their plants if they don't have land to work? Where do they sleep if they don't own or rent? And don't they ever just get an urge to have a big fat juicy steak with a side of shrimp?

The answer to all those queries is "who cares, they're filthy hippies".

hey now, hippies have a use, like human shields.... or fertilizer for feed for beef farms..

Yes, they made my news feeds again today.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hardcoded-password-found-in-cisco-software/

Since Cisco keeps being so popular with the security breaches and vulnerabilities, I figured it's time they get their very own thread.

Well, looks like I will be able to make it, thanks to @DustinB3403!

Dilbert and one of the big topics around here:

Thought I'd drop one of my current projects here. It started as just wanting a way to see what the temperature in a room is without having to have someone go check. (It's another building in a locked room few people have a key for.)

We already have lots of project cases, and also already had a Raspberry Pi. The new $5 Pi would need a network connection of some sort, so figure $10 for the networked PC ($20 if you need a power supply and memory card as well). I splurged at $13 for a combination temperature and humidity sensor. I went ahead and added a door sensor as well, it was $2. I also got a Cobbler Plus GPIO Breakout for $8 and a Perma-Proto board for $6. Total cost for me was $29. If you need a Pi as well figure ~$50 for everything. Compare that to any of the commercial offerings!

I'll post the code I use for everything here, along with references where possible. After all, that's where the real cost of these little things end up being.

It might be good to add a battery backup to it as well, which is quite easy, but I have no real need for that (if the power is out, the temperature isn't going to be getting out of control.) Adafruit makes it really easy.

@eddiejennings said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Thing learned today: Domain controller must have SMB v1 enabled for a Server 2003 member to join the domain.

I learned that I only have to get inside your LAN in order to steal all the network data.

This is mostly to make things a matter of public record, in addition to a bit of a rant.

Got a call yesterday morning. They can't process credit cards. That office happens to use Intuit/Quickbooks for everything from inventory tracking, to payment processing and accounting. I've been down the road of getting away from Intuit often. Don't know if this will push them past the edge or not.

Ok, spent 2 hours manually doing updates because the automatic ones broke along the way somewhere. Updates complete. Good, we should be up and running. They try to login, and get asked for a code. Ok, check the email address... nothing.

Now I'm calling Intuit support (bad idea, but we're basically not in business at this point.) That's a 3 hour call where I'm told something is wrong with our email server.

Fine, hang up with one unhelpful peon. Go eat lunch (3:30pm at this point, my blood sugar is about to tank.)

Get back into the office around 4:30. Enough time to find something very interesting in the server logs...

2016-10-05 14:01:56 H=lvmailappout12.intuit.com [199.16.139.22]:30939 sender verify fail for <[email protected]>: response to "RCPT TO:<[email protected]>" from mailin.intuit.com [206.108.40.19] was: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected.
2016-10-06 11:17:10 H=mailout203.intuit.com [206.108.40.17]:49121 X=TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256 CV=no F=<[email protected]> rejected RCPT <[email protected]>: Sender verify failed

Now, I spent way to much time figuring out how to deal with spam, and have gotten it figured out for the most part. So, they are sending a confirmation code out using an address that their own email server does not acknowledge as being valid. Yet it's somehow my fault that the email is not being delivered.

Spent another 2 hours on the phone this morning going over the same stuff. We're working through alternatives, none of which are something the business would normally find acceptable.

This on top of them having me enable SSL2 in the browser. Uhm, these computers have to remain PCI compliant, and they just purposely made them non-compliant.

Malicious company, let it be known.

Getting noticed is easy!

Getting the right kind of notice is very hard!

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/900-000-routers-knocked-offline-in-germany-amid-rumors-of-cyber-attack/

On Facebook, Deutsche Telekom engineers recommended that users unplug their devices, wait for 30 seconds and restart their router. If the equipment fails to connect to the company's network, engineers told users to disconnect their device from the company's network permanently.

To compensate the downtime, Deutsche Telekom is offering free mobile Internet until the technical problem is resolved.

DSL routers all over Germany, and presumably worldwide if anyone else happens to be using the same DSL Modem that got hit by this.

@thwr, hope you're still running!

@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!