I would assume that any legitimate usage of this function would be heavily marketed as a time-saving measure, something like:

"Many of our customers prefer to start off with a fresh install of Windows. We understand that hunting down drivers just to get hardware working after a reinstall is frustrating and time consuming. Now, we're using cutting-edge technology to ensure your computer has a direct line to automatically download the latest drivers even after a complete reinstall of Windows! System administrators: If you'd rather have a completely blank slate upon reinstallation, this option can be disabled in the BIOS."

You don't just spend time and money getting a feature like this set up without some sort of return on your investment, and in an ideal world this would actually be a pretty decent selling point. I would love to be able to do a fresh install without worrying about driver downloads & updates immediately afterwards. It's not a huge thing but it would be nice.

In contrast, Lenovo's implementation got shut down by Microsoft, and was only discovered by someone doing some deep diving into their own system. Otherwise it would have quietly been a thing until they had to patch it out. It was also difficult to disable, implying Lenovo didn't plan on allowing it to be disabled.

Hmmm... SAM can't post to Spiceworks?

Quick, everyone head over there and recommend SANs, FreeNAS and VMWare!

Hey look it's a bare link on a forum. It looks like it leads to a system that tests people's susceptibility to phishing attacks.

Can someone forward this thread to Alanis Morrisette as an example of irony?

Just got a cold call from someone offering hosted PBX services (among other things).

By the end of the call the latency on their end was making it almost impossible for me to understand what they were saying.

I decided to pass on their offer...

I want to believe that someone was handing out cheese as a promotion for their new line of mice.

From Ars Technica:
"In a move eerily similar to the Superfish debacle that visited Lenovo in February, Dell is shipping computers that come preinstalled with a digital certificate that makes it easy for attackers to cryptographically impersonate Google, Bank of America, and any other HTTPS-protected website.

The self-signed transport layer security credential, which was issued by an entity calling itself eDellRoot, was preinstalled as a root certificate on at least two Dell laptops, one an Inspiron 5000 series notebook and the other an XPS 15 model. Both are signed with the same private cryptographic key. That means anyone with moderate technical skills can extract the key and use it to sign fraudulent TLS certificates for any HTTPS-protected website on the Internet. Depending on the browser used, any Dell computer that ships with the root certificate described above will then accept the encrypted Web sessions with no warnings whatsoever. At least some Dell Inspiron desktops and Precision M4800 models are also reported to be affected."

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/dell-does-superfish-ships-pcs-with-self-signed-root-certificates/

Very disappointing news as I have been a fan of Dell's hardware for a while and stopped buying Lenovo in part due to the Superfish debacle... All the more reason to make sure a fresh OS install is a part of setting up new computers!

@DustinB3403 said:

So this is a two fold question regarding GPO's.

First, does it hurt to have multiple distinct GPO's for specific purposes? (say 40 for arguments sake, I don't know how many we have specifically.)
I'm assuming that multiple small GPO's means more work for the servers and client pc's that receive these GPO's but want confirmation.

Second, is there an automated way to compile the existing GPO's into 1 concise GPO?

From what I know, keeping each GPO to a single distinct purpose is considered best practice so you can more easily troubleshoot group policy conflicts/failures.

Hi everyone!

So is this like the cool kids table in the Spiceworks cafeteria?

I have been lurking for the past couple days and am excited to actually start saying stuff. It reminds me of the small forum communities I used to spend too much time on, except everyone here is (mostly) sharing useful info

@johnhooks said:

Do they think people email each other like that.

Good Morrow Sir,

I hope you are well, but lets dispense with the pleasantries. I will need a transfer of funds from the financial institution, post haste. Please inform me of the financial details.

Best Regards,

I've heard a theory that scammers intentionally mangle the grammar in their emails so they pre-screen the people that are going to catch on quickly and only get responses from people that are most likely to fall for the whole scam... No idea how true that is as I'm not a scam copywriter, but it does explain why no scammers seem to have any grasp of grammar and/or how people actually talk.

Got back into the office after a wonderfully relaxing vacation about 3 hours ago.

Just finished locking down the account of an executive that got spear phished this morning after their account started sending out shady wire transfer requests.

At least the attacker waited for me to get back, and no one actually transferred anything! I will call that a win overall.

I've seen what happens in SMB when you need consistent, pricey license renewals to keep things updated - oftentimes, things will just stop getting updated after a while.

I also think people choose the "premium name-brand option" when they don't know much about the options available, but know they will need to depend on whatever they use.

Some people are also just much more susceptible to advertising, which VMWare has more of a budget for.

Lastly there's good ol' cognitive dissonance... Same reason why people think it's reasonable to recommend Meraki gear over Ubiquiti for SMB. If you've been using a hammer that has a $500/year price tag for 5+ years, your brain isn't going to like the idea that you could have been using a regular hammer the entire time and will start justifying why regular hammers can't be trusted to put nails into walls. See: Monster cables.

I love the idea of someone buying an Alienware to play Candy Crush... and hate that it has probably actually happened before.

I came across Duet yesterday and was pretty impressed by the demo.

I've been trying to think of a way to have a client portal where they can keep track of invoices, task lists, and all that good stuff. Then Duet comes along and is like "here's all of that for a reasonable one-time fee". The developer also has a free, stripped-down version for just managing invoices and such but I went ahead and bought the full project management version. I figure the one-time cost will be offset by potentially not having to pay for a Harvest subscription anymore.

I haven't had a chance to try installing it myself, but it looks like you just need a basic Linux webserver stack. I'll be trying it on a VPS within the next week or so, and will try to remember to document the process. I do eventually want to tweak it to use Stripe Checkout instead of stripe.js, but that should be fun to try and figure out and the developer provides full access to the source code upon purchase.

I thought you all might be as interested in a self-hosted project management solution as I am!

To me, Edge is the Duplo to Chrome and Firefox's Lego. Once you know what you're doing and want things in a particular way, you'll probably prefer the latter, but the former is great for people that would rather keep things simple without as many options for customization. At the very least they have similar compatibility, unlike IE which is definitely MegaBloks in this metaphor.

@MattSpeller said:

Just finished cobbling together a quickie wordpress site for a lark with a friend.

Now onto a nuke/pave with a macbook pro for the first time ever. I should be throughly entertained this afternoon.

Watch out, I cobbled together a quickie wordpress site for a small nonprofit about a year and a half ago and now I'm building about one every other month for people that need them! It can get addicting.

@dafyre said:

It would be nice to see a free vs paid feature list as well... The Anchor App appears to be a completely separate application. They both look super cool though.

Ask and you shall receive!

@Reid-Cooper said:

@johnhooks said:

@Reid-Cooper said:

@johnhooks said:

Trying out the free avast business cloud antivirus.

How many users is it free for?

Says unlimited. https://www.avast.com/en-us/avast-for-business

It looks really nice so far. Centrally managed and free.

What is the business model there? They must need to monetize this somehow, right? This looks a bit too good to be true.

I've been running this for a few months now in a limited deployment and had a phone meeting with an Avast sales rep yesterday.

He mentioned offhandedly that whether or not we pay them, Avast is happy to have us as a customer - we're either paying them for extra features, or helping to grow their network of protected computers and adding to the "herd immunity" in a sense.

So I think the free offering could work out very well for them if it works the way they think it will - a combo of "foot in the door" sales strategy, along with being able to rapidly grow out a number of endpoints that they can learn from and adapt their business AV for.

They also have a 50% discount for qualified nonprofits that sign up for a year or more (I think that was the deal)... The difference between free and $1/endpoint is a lot more justifiable than going to some $50/endpoint solution like MBAM.

I enjoyed reading through The Phoenix Project - for one thing, the first chapters made me feel better about the workload I had on my plate But the whole book itself was a great (fictional) case study on shifting from traditional Development & Operations departments to a DevOps environment. It's basically a story of a dysfunctional enterprise IT environment getting better, told from the perspective of someone uniwttingly tossed into the role of IT director. It helped me see the problems DevOps practices solve along with the challenges that can arise when shifting over to them.

Got a call within 5 minutes of being at my desk this morning, it's something I need to troubleshoot at another site.

Get to the site, start troubleshooting, find a solution and oh the power goes out on the whole block.

Thankfully the "surprise UPS test" succeeded and we were able to gracefully shut servers down without issue.

Power comes back up, people immediately start powering their computers on and trying to log in despite the fact that it's come back up and gone out again a few times already. Get confirmation that the power company techs have resolved the issue, power the server back up, tell people their computers will work now, solve the original reason I had to jet over, and GTFO.

Got back to the office just in time for lunch! That's one way to make a Friday go by quickly...

I am still in my first year of being more than a level 1 help desk tech. Google and Spiceworks get me through the break/fix issues pretty well, but I have started reading IT books on specific topics to get a more thorough understanding of the underlying technology and hopefully set my systems up for success throughout upgrades, maintenance etc. I'm also trying to learn about the basics of lots of things before settling on a specialization...

I'm hoping for some recommendations on books that help to round out a relatively green IT administrator's knowledge of how and why things work. Some examples of what I mean:

Servers for Hackers by Chris Fidao - When I'm not working as an IT admin, I develop WordPress sites for small businesses and nonprofits. This book was a huge help in acquiring the knowledge I needed to properly build and maintain Linux VMs running WordPress on nginx.

Networking for System Administrators by Michael W. Lucas - I'm reading through this right now because the details of networking have been an arcane mystery to me and I'm hoping to eventually be comfortable implementing pfSense. Since there's no concrete timetable on that, I figured I may as well learn the basics of networking itself instead of relying on tutorials or things like the pfSense Cookbook. Lucas does a good job explaining the basics of many very complex things, along with the tools to figure out which of those things is malfunctioning when there's a network problem.

So, are there any good books you remember reading that helped jumpstart your understanding on a particular IT topic? I'd love to find a good primer on virtualization in particular, but really anything that is well-written is awesome. Bonus if they're on Safari Books Online!