@bnrstnr fork.

@ambarishrh said in screenconnect migrating from Windows to CentOS7:

Should i reconsider moving to Linux server, when the product owner recommends to stay with Windows?

Should also note, the vendor chose to use .NET for their server and much of their software is utter garbage; their reliability in decision making around these things is already highly suspect.

@ambarishrh said in Preventive measures against ransomware:

@iroal said in Preventive measures against ransomware:

I've installed ransomfree https://ransomfree.cybereason.com/

Good tool, and free, to avoid ransomware.

Check if that detects when you run ransim https://www.knowbe4.com/ransomware-simulator

Ransomfree create a few folders in the system with many dummy files inside (.doc .jpg .xlsx..)

In case one of these files change, Ramonfree block the computer and ask you if you allow these changes.

Ransim just check his installation folder so Rasomfree cannot detect it.

@scottalanmiller said in SIEMonster:

@ambarishrh said in SIEMonster:

I don't have a spare bare metal or space on VMware to test this. When I tried on aws with a medium instance; this needs 5 instances to complete the setup, i got the warning that the resources doesn't meet the requirements. Didn't get a chance to explore further

Five seems excessive 🙂

https://vimeo.com/202195055

@dbeato said in Ransomware Detection Service- Anyone tried this?:

@dashrender said in Ransomware Detection Service- Anyone tried this?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ransomware Detection Service- Anyone tried this?:

@tim_g said in Ransomware Detection Service- Anyone tried this?:

Haven't looked at that.

The best way to prevent ransomware is to keep your systems up to date.

Next is to have decent AV and use good file permissions practices.

Above that is LANless design. Ransonware primarily preys on LAN-based Windows network design for its ability to spread.

Actually, typical ransomware doesn't spread. It simply encrypts everything it can write too. Most of them are not worms.

Just wannacry 🙂

lol, of course, making it one of, if not, the worst ones.

@ambarishrh said in Weird blinking mouse pointer issue on my work laptop:

@dbeato said in Weird blinking mouse pointer issue on my work laptop:

@ambarishrh said in Weird blinking mouse pointer issue on my work laptop:

Explorer flickering and mouse icon flickering were unrelated as i suspected!

Final Solution that worked for me:

Mouse flickering issue fix: Uninstall Spiceworks (Suspecting it was trying to run something and may be crashing due to lack of admin rights)

For Windows explorer flickering issue, i just disabled the "preview pane" and it fixed that problem as well!

Spiceworks is not supported in Windows 10...

oh! It worked when i ran (was checking the inventory part for something i needed internally), but i guess that explains why!

Oh it will work but not supported means that you are on your own, I have been dealing with this for the last year or so on the SW community where the application has weird things happening on Windows 10 and Server 2016. As soon as the person goes back to a supported Windows 7, 8.1 or Server 2012 R2 it works fine.

@kyle said in Helpdesk SLAs:

@travisdh1 said in Helpdesk SLAs:

@kyle said in Helpdesk SLAs:

@scottalanmiller said in Helpdesk SLAs:

@ambarishrh said in Helpdesk SLAs:

@scottalanmiller said in Helpdesk SLAs:

@ambarishrh said in Helpdesk SLAs:

we are a very small team now, 250+ users 3 techs. Screen connect plays a bigger role here! 🙂

Idea is to set an SLA and review this on regular basis, find out the gap and either increase headcount or if no budget for additional headcount, then increase the SLA.

With the current tech headcount, the SLA that we are thinking are:

0_1507276456209_e6fcd8e9-e100-4a64-a977-1febb6c25811-image.png
*Resolution includes temporary fix or work-around solution.

New hardware requests usually take 4-6 weeks to deliver from HP (we can keep stock of 5 but the user requests are quite a lot this year and next year as well, but no finance approval to keep more than 5 as of now), so agreed with HR on this timeline.

An SLA means that there is a punishment to you if you do not meet the requirements. What happens to the IT team if they cannot resolve these issues in the SLA time? How do you determine what is within the scope of what IT can have fixed and not?

The purpose for this is also to evaluate the existing issues, see if our small team can cater the requirements and based on the results we either get more people or increase the sla. As of now this will be visible only to IT team and based on our analysis we will release to users on a later stage with SLA that we can achieve

SLAs are not a good tool for that. Just use good reporting for that. SLAs are adversarial, not something you ever want to use internally.

Yet they are integrated in several helpdesk options.

Yes, because help desk software is a generic thing that can be used with the public, internally, or a combination of both. Just because a feature is already integrated doesn't mean it's a good option to use. I think of something like an SLA for leased lines like T1/T3.

I know. I just wish they were more granular in features as there are some hard coded features the are unnecessary and just clutter the classification of tickets. We currently use ManageEngine Service Desk and SLA's are built in and part of the reporting metrics despite the fact we don't use them.

I generally prefer light, simple helpdesks. Unless you are a huge organization, most of that extra stuff is just wasted and in the way.

@ambarishrh @scottalanmiller can do it for you 🙂

We're using Machforms. Wish I had seen this to compare against.

So they are not just managing the datacenter, but the IT as well?

@ambarishrh said in Looking for indoor & outdoor camera:

Vendor asked for building layout amd size so that he can get the right model

I wouldn't mind AMD things, but I think that was supposed to be an and.

Why is a vendor specifying the equipment that's being purchased? Please don't make us put this in the "Burned by eschewing best practices" thread!

Yes

@jaredbusch said in DNS manager for all domains:

@scottalanmiller said in DNS manager for all domains:

@dashrender said in DNS manager for all domains:

Cloudflare will read the current DNS server and build all the records in itself.

That only works for some records.

Most though.

Most of ones like www, ftp and mx records. But anything that you make that is unusual or unique in any way, I've never had found. I just did it the other day for a company and it found like two of twenty, and it was the two you'd be almost certain would be there.

The reason for looking at GFI is (we are decentralizing from the parent company, moving out of exchange to O365 and they have GFI email archiver. From that entire GFI archiver, we need to extract just our domain emails and then keep that, plus look at a longer retention emails on O365 moving forward as well.

If you have a mac you can use apple device configurator wmby which devoces can be pre cofigured and push apps. Catch is you need to use usb cable and configure phones one by one

OS Image deployment - I use Clonezilla. Setup a VM with all needed drivers/applications for all devices in fleet, create and answer file, sysprep and go.

remote support - I include the access version of ScreenConnect in all of my images (see instructions on anonymizing the setup pre sysprep.

asset management - I use Excel, but SnipeIT I hear is good.

But of course, the three links you pointed to already say all of this.

@ambarishrh said in Centralized Imaging/OS Deployment:

Some of the features I liked on that is the base image is made from a virtual instance so that this can be deployed to any machine and a single image to maintain, the driver packs for almost every model etc. I am planning to evaluate this in detail next week when I am back in the office.

JB does this almost exclusively with Clonezilla. I've done it as well, so using a VM doesn't matter to the product.

My second choice would be MDT but again if SmartDeploy is taking the pain for spending a lot of time on the initial setup, which we don't have at the moment (lot of internal projects in the pipeline with tight deadlines)

You're trading money for time here. MDT makes you do all the leg work, you have to find and add the drivers yourself. SmartDeploy takes your money and does that work for you.

I started using the hosted version. One, because it was cheaper and two, because I needed something sooner than later and didn't have time to deploy and get it going. I confirmed that I can move the data out and host myself in the future.

I like it overall but some of the importing has proven to be flaky when grabbing csv files. Sometimes the header doesn't really apply and I will have to make a small adjustment and then reimport. I am still in the process of adding assets but I like it overall. I also use SpiceWorks reports and verify against known good data as I import the csvs.

I actually do work on the system pretty regularly because we have a legacy app that is on Windows and this is how we access it for maintenance work and that's all through me. I don't access customer machines often, but I access our own pretty commonly. And my experience has mostly been "wow, I'm surprised how fast this is" considering it is a remote desktop to a very distant and very slow network.

@scottalanmiller said in Recommended Slack community & apps:

@JaredBusch said in Recommended Slack community & apps:

@scottalanmiller said in Recommended Slack community & apps:

@Romo said in Recommended Slack community & apps:

Not on Slack but there are several great one using https://gitter.im, most communities are for developers but I think you might like more than one using this tag:

Devops - https://gitter.im/explore/tags/curated:devops,devops

Ansible - https://gitter.im/ansible/ansible?source=explore Docker - https://gitter.im/docker/docker?source=explore

Seems a bit like an IRC channel.

IRC is all but dead, has been going that way for a long time. Just a lot of old timers hanging on to it.

This seems a lot like old timers hanging onto it, though 🙂

It is a huge community, but my personal experience show that less people are coming in than leaving because of tools like slack.