@DustinB3403 said:

@WingCreative I thought the same thing but am now uncertain. It makes sense, for the simplicity of the argument. You create a discrete GPO for a specific purpose. If it doesn't work, then you go back and look into it.

My concern is if existing GPO's might conflict and cause all sorts of issues.

Not having any issues at the moment. But just thinking.

Fair enough, I'm interested to know which way is more efficient for endpoints processing the policy as well!

To be honest, I'm mostly just parroting what I've seen people with higher spice levels than me say on SW - though our current environment has dozens of distinct GPOs and we haven't had any issues with it an occasional gpupdate /force couldn't fix.

@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.

Should have knocked on wood, got a call as soon as I posted that. OOPS

@dafyre said:

You guys must be having slow days at work, lol.

So far yes! Ninite takes the busywork out of patching Adobe stuff (critical updates to the usual suspects released today) and all my big projects are waiting on others so I'm catching up on IT news. It's nice to have a chance to breathe after spending almost all of last week bringing a server's data back to life.

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

Official documentation for whatever you're trying to configure is a good place to start, then cross reference that with what smart-sounding people who have used it before say works best.

Step 1 - ask where/how to find bank account info
Step 2 - ask where to put lucky number on bank website to get the money

I spent a lot of this last weekend playing Civilization: Beyond Earth with the new Rising Tide expansion.

Just like the expansions for Civ 4 and Civ 5, they added a ton of new content that really changes how the game is played. I've been enjoying the revamped diplomacy system and the new artifact system they put in - it's feeling a lot more like a modern update to Alpha Centauri now, versus the reskinned Civ 5 it felt like when I first played it.

I got in touch with one of their sales people through the site and they said pricing starts at $500/month.

That's way more than any of my current clients would be willing to spend on this sort of solution, but I can see why something like this would have a price tag like that...

...and in figuring all of that out, it appears Drive is back in action, at least for me. Anyone else having better luck now?

@dafyre said:

Site backups on Google Drive? How much storage do you have there? Ha ha ha.

I mostly have Google Apps for Work for my side business because I'm willing to pay $5/mo for Gmail's interface... That comes with 30gb of Drive storage, and so far I've filled up about 5gb with about 2 months worth of WordPress backups. Average daily DB backup is >1mb, weekly full "bare metal restore" with all media, plugins, themes etc are ~375mb each.

@coliver said:

@WingCreative said:

West Coast US checking in, was able to download a PDF once then got a "Failed - server problem" error. Now it's saying none of my files exist.

Literally just last night I was thinking "man I should switch over to Google Drive from Dropbox, I already have the storage"... naaaah

This is only the second time I've seen a complete outage like this.

That's fair, it's all too easy to hate on a service while it's down. I'm mostly frustrated because I use my Drive as offsite storage for site backups. I suppose this is my wake-up call to send them to multiple cloud storage providers!

West Coast US checking in, was able to download a PDF once then got a "Failed - server problem" error. Now it's saying none of my files exist.

Literally just last night I was thinking "man I should switch over to Google Drive from Dropbox, I already have the storage"... naaaah

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.

Recognizing one's own biases is a great way to figure out the weaknesses in whatever plan/project/debate you are involved in and address them early on.

This chart reminds me of learning about cognitive decision-making back in the day, which was probably the single most helpful class I took in college in terms of improving my personal & professional life.

If that class were condensed into two sentences, they would be, "Your brain takes shortcuts with the crazy amount of information it processes, and they are usually helpful. Sometimes they're not, and some types of marketing focus on hacking those shortcuts so keep an eye out."

This has been an incredibly rough year for data security. I'm wondering if it's enough for the presidential candidates to address it as part of their election campaigns... and laughing at what that would probably end up looking like.

Sad - I tried LastPass a while back and ended up preferring KeePass, but I was recommending less tech-savvy people check out LastPass as recently as a month ago. I'm done doing that unless LMI actually responds to the outcry over this purchase in a meaningful way, and I wouldn't bet on that happening.

This does look very interesting - I am always disheartened when I can't find the pricing details on a product's website, but it looks nice enough that I might check in with their sales team to find out.

@GregoryHall's method is what I used to do this exact thing a while back.

Only thing I wasn't able to figure out was how to automatically add the group to people's lists - I ended up writing up some tutorials on how to add groups and which one to add for one of our departments that needed to use S4B.

Got this up and running last night. Here are my notes:

On AWS EC2 micro instance for PCI compliance, reliability, and practice with AWS. Would probably work just as well on Digital Ocean or Vultr.

Used Debian 8 64 bit HVM AMI to get things started, with SSH access from a specific IP and open ports 80 + 443.

Total list of software installed via apt-get:
nginx
php5-fpm
mariadb-client
mariadb-server
php5-mysql
curl
php5-curl
sendmail

I used Nginx's WordPress config as starting point. Had to modify the PHP socket to match the listen directive in /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf, but otherwise worked great.

Once I stopped getting 502 errors and loaded up the install files, things looked pretty good until I got to the license verification step. It said to put in the email address I bought the license with, but gave an error saying it wasn't recognized. I ended up forwarding my purchase receipt to the developer along with my error - this was around 11pm Tuesday evening. I went to bed, and by the time I had woken up I had two emails from the developer: one suggesting a possible fix on my end, and one indicating he had dug deeper on the problem - he found something on his end of things that might have been causing the error and would be working on fixing it today. I was pretty impressed with the quick response!

My hypothesis is that my .co email address was throwing some errors for the verification system but I have no real way of knowing for sure. Yet another reason why I'm moving away from a .co domain, as I've run into a couple of weird snags like this before... Either way, I tried it again last night and it succeeded. It's all hooked up to Stripe and, outside of setting up HTTPS for payments, seems ready to go!

A couple of hiccups along the way:

• I didn't realize you needed to install php5-curl as well as php5-mysql at first, leading me to spend some time vehemently disagreeing with the install requirements page saying I didn't have cURL installed on the server.
• 502 Bad Gateway errors for the nginx WordPress config's PHP socket... I had to hunt down the location of the PHP5-FPM socket to fix this.
• Part of the installation includes setting 777 permissions on a few folders - I am going to experiment with setting those back down to something less worrisome and see if it breaks the installation tonight.