I started my path down VPS hosting on DO and later Vultr - mainly for hosting clients' WordPress webservers. I think their biggest advantages are predictable pricing and user-friendly admin interfaces. It's really nice to be able to say "Hosting is going to be $12/month" and know that will be true for the foreseeable future, versus trying to explain/predict AWS' pricing which is more like paying a utility bill. It's also really easy to get a development server up and running quickly without having to worry about all the details.

With all of that said, I haven't gone back to DO or Vultr since I learned how to work AWS EC2 instances. For one thing, it's a much easier sell to say "I'm hosting your site on the same physical infrastructure that powers Netflix" than trying to explain the advantages of VPS hosting to non-techie people. With reserved instance pricing, you can really cut down on the extra costs typically associated with using AWS as well...

The biggest thing for me is that, last I checked, DO and Vultr both charge you full price for any VPS associated with your account, whether or not it's running. You need to totally destroy a VPS to stopped being billed for it. AWS (and I would assume other "big players" in this space) only charges you for data storage of stopped instances, which is a relatively tiny part of the usual hosting cost.

This is a big advantage for me as I can keep staging/development copies of webservers ready to go without paying full price for their existence or having to wait for a whole new instance to spin up. This has been really nice with the regularity of platform updates on WordPress and the importance of applying them quickly...

Python and Ruby are two good places to start.

I have heard that Shoes works well for getting Ruby apps to work with a GUI, but I don't have any experience with it myself.

@travisdh1 said:

@IT-ADMIN said:

what do you think Dear Scott of python programming language, i heard interesting things about it, also it is portable,

also what is the best IDE (has to be drag and drop GUI builder) i can use to make GUI application with it ??

I've used python a little bit with a RaspberriPi doing sensor and light type things. I don't know that it'd be very good for doing GUI, but I'd look at Eclipse by the way of pydev.

I would be interested in hearing more about that in another thread at some point as I'm trying to hook a Pi up to some sensors in my off time... were they i2C sensors?

Did you get the whole admin console or just the remote control portion? We have v8 over here as well.

Back in the WC3 custom game days I remember hating DotA because I wanted to play things like Sheep Tag, Tower Defense etc and had to sift through all the DotA games to find them.

Then I got into HoN and eventually Dota 2 and I understood why it was so popular. After I graduated from college, I stopped having the free time to commit to 30-45 min matches and cut mobas out of my life for a while, but I got hooked again with Heroes of the Storm.

Now Heroes is pretty much the only moba I'll play because matches usually end within 15-25 minutes and you don't need to have amazing micro skills to be good. Best of all, there's no All chat, which seems to have really cut down on the saltiness and general negative atmosphere that mobas usually seem to cultivate.

Other than that I've been playing a lot of Rainbow 6: Siege lately... I've always been a fan of FPS games and it's fun to have some strategic decisions to make on top of "what gun should I pick".

I picked it up a few months ago and it's really pretty amazing.

Their goal with remote administration is to have screen sharing be a last resort to solve problems. You can view and edit control panel items like installed printers, mapped drives, etc and view the task manager without interrupting the user at all.

Over the past year they've been focusing on making their product better for people getting their feet wet with PowerShell. One example pointed out in the sales demo I went through is that you can build PowerShell scripts that only affect the local computer, then use Goverlan to define the scope and run it locally on each computer.

I was able to deploy it for a nonprofit space due to the glorious renewal pricing - $80/year for major upgrades, which tend to come out every few years based on their past releases. Their support plan is also $80/year.

The only caveat I have found is that all of the coolest features only work if you're connected on a private network - they don't let you manage drive mappings for someone over WAN. For remote user assistance, people here have two options: Use Goverlan's "request assistance" program, where the user initiates the assistance request and a popup appears on your admin console to accept/decline, or just use ZeroTier to extend your private network.

Recently I learned about OSSEC, which touts itself as "a scalable, multi-platform, open source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (HIDS)."

Has anyone heard of this or used it before? I know Snort is kind of the de facto open source IDS - it looks like OSSEC's main strengths over Snort are its focus on central management and low resource usage on endpoint systems, which are two things I like the sound of.

Thought it might be good to check in with you guys before devoting a weekend to getting it up and running

But you guys, somehow they have lower prices on equivalent hardware! That means it's all worth it.

/s

Dear leaders of the People's Democratic Republic of MangoLassi,

Directly hotlinking to images is generally considered poor internet manners in the circles I've run in, but that doesn't seem to be universal so I won't argue that.

More pragmatically, hotlinking allows someone else to effectively embed arbitrary content on your site should they so desire. This introduces the potential for performance and security issues you cannot directly control should the image host get vindictive...

Example: if someone notices dog.jpg on their site is getting way more traffic than makes sense, they can replace it with dog1.jpg on their site's links and then do whatever they want with the original image. This can range from introducing performance issues (dog.jpg is now a 10mb photo!) to, if they are truly nasty, embedding malware within the image to be served wherever it's linked.

The chances of this actually happening are pretty low, of course, but it's possible and I don't know if anything could be done on the website to check for changes in what's getting served from hotlinks.

I'm hoping the NodeBB devs use the Imgur API to automatically upload images linked to and serve that instead. That would eliminate the bandwidth concerns as well as the potential revenge issues.

I'd appreciate some sort of option to turn topic icons off in the meantime, but I also understand it would probably be a lot of work to add that in if NodeBB doesn't already provide it!

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?

Does MS volume licensing allow you to image computers not actually owned by the organization?

To me it sounds like the School's IT wants to have their cake and eat it too... They don't want to buy hardware for students with their budget, but they want to lock down the students' hardware as if they had.

...And that hardware is running Windows for some reason? I'm wondering why the school didn't just tell parents to buy Chromebooks if they wanted to go this route. Less costly for parents while maintaining the control the IT dept wants.

As someone who dabbled in messing with school computers back in the day, I understand wanting to lock down anything touching the school network. This just seems like a poor implementation of that goal that is likely to cause more friction between the administration and parents down the road.

With all that said, the author of the story should have waited for some response from the school before publishing. This feels like someone trying to flash their journalist badge to get what they want, which significantly weakens the article's impact.

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 am a Slack advocate for sure, and would probably join a "team" if it were put together. It's most of what I love about IRC, with an interface built this millennium

Archival and searchability might still be a concern as the free version only allows you to browse/search the latest 10k messages from what I understand.

Mandrill and MS Hosted Exchange are coexisting pretty peacefully over here with DKIM set up.

One time Mandrill decided to cut off our access while they investigated whether or not we were secretly using their service for spam - Hosted Exchange emails continued to flow despite that.

On that note, in my experience you're more likely to trip Mandrill's internal spam filter than get blacklisted elsewhere, but that's only happened to me once in a few years of using it so far.

Every time I've seen VAs mentioned outside of this thread in particular, it's been in Be An Entrepreneur Today-style books like The 4 Hour Work Week etc where the advice is essentially: "Hire a VA who lives in some country where you barely have to pay them anything. They'll keep you on top of things without costing you a lot of money!"

In other words, there's a demand for VAs but I have a feeling a sizeable portion of people specifically looking for them will only be interested in those with dirt-cheap rates.

This isn't insurmountable - for example, many VAs are tasked with social media ghostwriting so their clients look more "connected" than they actually are. If you can do that clearly better than others and people know it, you'll be more attractive to clients who are looking for that skill in particular. Despite that, you will still be compared to people who are willing to do the same job for less money.

Personally, I wouldn't try to go down the VA path myself despite being interested in working from home. It sounds like you have some technical skills that would likely end up being wasted more often than not if you brand yourself as a VA.

@Nic said:

@Jason meraki says it's not a bug - here's there response:

As discussed in our Z1 datasheet (https://meraki.cisco.com/lib/pdf/meraki_datasheet_z1.pdf) the rated throughput for the MX (firewall) is 50Mbps.
Therefore the speeds you are achieving are correct and are within the specifications as outlined in the datasheet.
If you were previously achieving higher speeds and have now seen a drop in performance this may be caused by changes within the new firmware update. However your device is still achieving speeds as specified within the datasheet.

Sounds like someone forgot to flip a "don't go above rated throughput, if they want more they'll pay more" switch in the firmware until today.

In other words, what am I doing right now? On a break wishing I was at home so I could fiddle with my new toy some more. Alas.

Spent the weekend jumping through various hoops to get my new Raspberry Pi Zero working. First my desktop's internal SD card reader wouldn't turn on, then I had to go out and get a powered USB hub so I could plug in everything I needed for the initial OS setup... Overall you definitely have to spend significantly more than $5 to get "the $5 computer" to actually do stuff, but almost all of it is stuff you can reuse on your next Pi so whatever.

I also found out the hard way that our main TV is the only thing with an HDMI port where I live. It felt funny installing Raspbian using the main house TV, but once I got the OS + WiFi configured I got it running headless without too much trouble.

I'm still at the point where my mind is blown every time I look at it. I skipped the regular Pis so the next smallest computer I've owned is a laptop. Now I have a computer that's smaller than a business card. I posted a picture of it on Facebook and my Dad asked me if the Pi was "like... the chip?" that you put in a full computer.

Next steps - getting some wires so I can connect some GPIO components!

I'm cautiously optimistic, heavy on the caution.

They've done a good job with the rest of the plugins so I'll check it out when it's released, but I've really been enjoying offloading email hosting to cloud providers!

I switched over to Dashlane after LastPass' LMI acquisition and have been evaluating them since. I really like their interface and how easy it is to use, though having their program start with Windows took getting used to.

They provide easy ways to import data from other password managers - exporting my LastPass passwords was easy, and there's an option to import KeePass data as well which I have yet to try. They also have apps for iOS and Android so you can access your passwords on mobile if you'd like. Their browser plugins also seem to be a little more seamless than LastPass' IMO.

I ended up buying Dashlane Premium with no regrets so far. At this point I'm grateful for LMI's acquisition as it gave me the chance to evaluate other options