If you use Outlook...
First off, Focused Inbox is awful. I don't need essentially two junk mail boxes. Plus, things that are in focused sometimes aren't even verified yet. Just give one inbox and I'll deal with it. Surprised more people don't know you can disable this, so I'm spreading the word.
Go to Outlook > Settings (gear) > Layout > Focused Inbox > Don't sort messages.
This is a rant.
So there's this company, I'll just call them Company X. They provision and deploy networks and devices for lots and lots of clients. ~95% of clients follow the same model for their shared storage. That is a single SAN which has LUNs for user shares, VMs, everything.
When I brought this to someone's attention, I was told that was standard so I started asking higher level people and was told "they're fine, we built in redundancy". I then said "well yeah the SAN has dual controllers, and there are redundant switches... but what if the SAN fails? The whole box fails." I was asked "how often have you EVER saw a SAN fail? I mean a good SAN." .... Three actually. One was a Tintri, one was a Compellent, the other was an Equallogic.
In the end I was told "NO customer of ours can afford two SANs, they can often barely afford one. What you're suggesting is buying two SANs, or not having any SAN at all?" Exactly. Put in as much redundancy as you want, but there's still a single point of failure. The SAN.
I mean you don't need redundancy all over the place, as not every customer would require that much redundancy. But all shared storage and no redundancy? Pretty careless.
Put in as much redundancy as you want, but there's still a single point of failure. The SAN.
Having worked in the public sector, government, private single company, and now going on my third MSP; mainly consulting, building out infrastructure, and migrating services to cloud based environments (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS depending on the need). I've gotten the opportunity to see the market shift over the years, the last 2 being very interesting.
We have been doing a massive amount of migrations to the cloud for security, uptime, and cost (subjective to the use case of course). It's been done for healthcare, eCommerce, legal systems, public school districts, etc.
Many infrastructure skills are being deprecated in this process. High level Exchange engineering is something I'm actually a little sad to see go; I legitimately enjoy building out highly available Exchange environments, SharePoint, etc.
As the market shifts in the next 5-8 years, it's becoming very apparent that there are going to be a handful of different positions that one would need to bet on as the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure become mystified if you migrate your clients to the cloud:
Development - Coders will still be in very high demand.Cyber Security - Still going to be in very high demand.Networking - I can't see this going away on-premises. If anything, things will get more complex with NIDS/NIPS, UTM capabilities, etc. Possibly offloading to hosted services all together for filtering/inspection/etc.
DevOps - Bridging the gap between dev and infrastructure (whether migrating or not, wherever that infrastructure might be).
Solutions architect - It's not really on the infrastructure side of things necessarily, even working with IaaS. It's more about working with products and business workflows really.
Cloud engineer/automation - Working for a major provider, whether it is in cloud computing (Azure, AWS, GCC, etc), VPS (Vultr, Linode, Digital Ocean, etc), or cloud services (Dropbox, etc).
It's not like looking into a crystal ball, it's like looking into a black hole if you're a senior infrastructure engineer like me who doesn't like coding (not the same as scripting).
What are you putting your time and efforts into for the coming years?
Haha apparently Namecheap let their own site's certificate expire today. Found it when signing in.
This is a good idea. One area that I've saw groups struggle is knowing when to give feedback. Usually you let someone present their idea, then provide feedback when they're done. But when it comes to someone needing help (let's say 2 people are providing feedback to someone), often either of those 2 people cut off the speaker, then talk between each other, and the speaker is left half-baked on the topic.
When I bring that up in groups that do that, we go back and re-try. After only one feedback session the improvement is impressive because you're giving real feedback, in comparison to what was unfolding previously. I usually also give positive feedback where it's due (on the second try). Something like "see, you changed $technique and it was effective because $reason. Nice job."
@jaredbusch said in IT Project Consultant:
@bbigford said in IT Project Consultant:
@kelly said in IT Project Consultant:
I realize that y'all aren't the market for this discussion, but IT staff would be stakeholders in a discussion about this, so I figured I would posit the question here. Do you think that there would be a market or interest in having a third party come in and handle project planning and coordination for IT that is not associated with an MSP or a vendor? The idea would be to have someone come in for larger scale transitions and changes so that it wouldn't affect IT's current staffing/workload ratios, they would handle as much of the coordination and communication for working a project through the stages, and then hand it off to internal IT at whatever point is deemed appropriate by the company.
Lots of MSPs do this exact thing. There's quite a few projects where I will only coordinate with certain clients, and others I'm all hands on. Just depends on the client's needs at the time.
Most of the time, I do the planning and the implementing. Most clients are 500 users and below, with no IT staff. It's not "as needed" though as they have weekly/semi-monthly maintenance and visits.
But MSPs are generally sales organizations.
The confusion with some MSPs is where they call themselves MSPs but really they are just a VAR. Sales driven is something we've tried to strongly avoid. We didn't even have a procurement department for 8 years because we said we'd never sell hardware... now we sell hardware. Other than that, it's just outsourced IT like one should expect.
Lol social media isn't the problem for poor behavior... there's a deeper issue with the parenting skills obviously.
Any gamers in here?
Here's the situation... I know Xbox Gold you can share downloaded games and content with a friend. My friend has downloaded Exo Zombies maps, but a physical copy of Advanced Warfare. The question is, can I download just the game, share it with him, and he can share the maps in the same session? Essentially playing together while combining my game and his maps since it would all be downloaded.
Nice video.
I've found in conversations that if I provided too much technical detail, thinking they wanted to know, it ultimately destroys the conversation and gets everyone off track. Approaching conversations with business value first, technical second, was an interesting growth area for me.
@MattSpeller said in Hours I work/PTO:
@BBigford said in Hours I work/PTO:
Lol thanks for the laugh. It made me feel worse, but at least I got a good laugh out of it.
You'd be welcome up here in America's hat my friend. 37.5h/week, mediocre healthcare that you don't have to pay for directly....
I was disputing a measly $100 to the insurance company. The response "Well I see we've paid for quite a few bills over the last 4 months totally around $800, so you have that to be thankful for right?"
My reponse: "I paid you $840 in the last 3 months so you should be footing the bill when I get horribly sick. I pay a co-pay on top as well!"
Her response: "Oh, actually I do see you have gold coverage..."
The dispute? They only cover you if you get diagnosed. If you have abdominal pain and the doc say "I don't know... I can't diagnose you if I don't know. I can refer you though..." Which means you have to pay full, out of pocket for that visit with this major insurance company if you don't get diagnosed. I said that was BS, the insurance company agreed, but wouldn't help.
It was indeed the firewall. Simple enough I guess... thanks for the quick reply, Scott. Man, I'm glad you brought me over to Mango. Super fast responses.
@scottalanmiller said:
@BBigford said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Got caught attempting to steal from the drawer four times and showed zero remorse
I must be completely missing something here... For how much they've been smeared in the news over the last year, can you elaborate on that one? Or was that the one on Josh Duggar?
They did the network shim hijack. The one associated with Superfish. That was one epic. That alone is unforgiveable and that they had a single customer since that time is, to me, inexcusable on the part of any IT department or business with knowledge of it. That was so deliberate, evil and remorseless that they should have been completely shunned. They were not and they took advantage of it. This was done through elaborate means that gave normal shops no means of bypassing - clean installs could not get around it.
They pulled an SSL cert manoeuvre, I believe, but I don't remember the details.
They did a BIOS level bloatware (which is malware when you don't want it, so malware) installation that could not be bypassed via reinstallation. You do a clean install and software that you never authorized was pushed onto your machine without permission or authorization. They got caught just doing it with bloatware, but what they intended to use it for before getting caught we will never know. that the system was compromised at the hardware level (below root level) is what it was, however.
Then they did the shared, 12345678 password backdoor issue this week.
That's four. I think I missed one or two. They've had so many issues it is pretty much impossible to track.
That's on top of running the scam that we got stuck with at Spiceworld 2014. They ran a promotion to win a laptop. My wife won and they wouldn't even respond to us until we threatened legal action. We went through them directly, they blew us off. We went through SW, both they and SW blew us off. We went public, they got their promotional people to pretend it didn't matter. We starting talking lawyer and grand theft and... a week later our superfish enabled, networking broken, no wifi crippled Yoga 2 arrived.
(For reference, at the event they lied to my wife and told her that they had no Yoga 2s there and she would get it by mail. She was the first winner. All of the MALE winners after her were handed a Yoga 2 on the spot, the very one Dominica had already won and they refused to give her. Technically, they gave hers away. Our guess is that they were guessing that she was female and unlikely to make a fuss and that they could blow her off and since they have no community presence had no idea who she was and that she would get a lot of attention when they didn't honour their commitment. But that is just speculation as to why they did it.)
That laptop giveaway is messed up. Sorry you had to go through that. There was one more thing I wanted to add about shortcomings. With the first of the Lenovo Twist models, there was a caching SSD. Take that out, and you are completely locked out of the BIOS. You could substitute it for a bootable M.2 SATA SSD, but you lose the BIOS. BIOS malware is unforgivable, but I didn't realize a clean install couldn't get rid of the Superfish exploit. 
Man I hate them. I've noticed over the years that managers will only remember things from about the last 2-4 weeks. So if you do a great job in the last month, you're golden. Have a great year except for the last couple weeks and you're toast. This was a good year.
But a CEO once told the entire company an All-Hands, and said it best for me: "I've had a lot of questions about why we don't do annual reviews anymore. Can anyone guess why?"
Someone raises their hand in the back, and you can faintly hear a simple question... "because they're stupid?"
CEO: "EXACTLY!!! Because they are stupid. They cost the company a lot of time in down time from people not working on their daily tasks, and the metrics have shown us they don't provide much benefit, if any. So, we will not be doing these ever again while I'm in charge, because performance reviews are stupid."
This was the same person who would tell you at every weekly meeting if you were exceeding or falling short, without you asking for feedback. Pretty brash about it too, "You know I gotta say, you're doing just a terrible job. How are you going to fix that?" or "You're really exceeding, keep doing exactly what you're doing."
This one has me stumped. A user had a profile issue that started from day 1, there were a bunch of changes made to her profile like dept change, name change, etc all within like 45 minutes. Shouldn't matter but then she would have sync issues and so forth. So I decided to copy her emails to username1 from username, copy her documents over, etc. I purged username from both file servers which are replicated and healthy. I've done replication tests and things work fine. Her target server is set to the correct (geographically closest) server. She has permissions and other GPOs are applying fine. I've checked the Scope Links & security filtering. Everything is correct there. Doing a gpresult /z I see other settings from the User Policy being applied, but not folder redirection.
In another note, any brand new users being created, redirect their folders/auto-create a folder on the file share just fine. It's just this one account that I can't get to create a new folder. I do not want to manually do any of this, I want the system to do it so I know everything is working the way it should.
I've already re-created the user profile after purging anything and everything relating to that username.
@Minion-Queen said in Slack Adds Video Calling:
Yup!
If the company selling the collab software doesn't even use it, then there is a big red flag.
You need to remember there are corrections, and panic sales. Panic sales are going to drop a price to a low amount, which is then followed by a correction. Don't focus on day trading unless you are investing tens of thousands. Otherwise you'll not see any noticeable returns.
Bitcoin is going to be viable for probably another couple years. Other block chains will directly compete with the Bitcoin block chain (block chains are hot for many reasons with being decentralized/ledgers, very fast to transfer money between organizations... Talking millions of transactions in seconds or minutes).
But Bitcoin is going to eventually fall to other tech because of its limitations with performance and scalability. You'll see Ethereum rise, but not to the same amount. I think we'll see few top what Bitcoin ever has or will. There will likely be something out of left field that might get to those levels, or possibly break it, but I don't believe it is anything currently out or even being thought about right now. Think of block chain as 1.0, how could Quantum computing ever change that? The next step is 2.0, probably 5-10 years away for whatever beats Bitcoin's top dollar.
Even though Ethereum was hacked (now ETC... Ethereum Classic), hacks happen in this game. ETH (Ethereum) will continue to climb. It's likely it'll get to about $6k and fall significantly over time. Realistically, it could probably get to $8k for top dollar.
Also keep in mind criminal activity being used to trade Dash and Monero. Criminals need money on the Deep Web to trade for their kiddy porn. Dash jumped up, but Monero won't rise for probably another year, maybe less.
Bottom line, it's all gambling. I watch the market, and traded a little bit. I made a small amount of money and stopped. I am not much for gambling and even less about obsessing on prices and when to buy/sell. I got too far into it and didn't like how much attention I was giving the whole process.
If you were going to exchange disks for completely different drives (model/speed/etc), they should have recommended moving the data off, destroying the volume, and completely rebuilding it.
Some people I know reserve them for things like "Sent from mobile, please excuse my typos!"
After some embarrassing typos from people, I see the reasoning.
@scottalanmiller said:
@BBigford said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BBigford said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BBigford said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BBigford said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@BBigford said:
@scottalanmiller said:
But that doesn't explain how the copiers POINT to the Exchange 2007 instance. How do they send the email to it in the first place? IP address?
Uses the hostname instead of IP... Some of the settings I've saw in the config:
Server FQDN: exchange-server.domain.com (older server with relay configured)
Server Port: 25
From Address: [email protected] (has a resource mailbox in Exchange, with a password to authenticate)I can't think of any other settings off the top of my head...
Right... so what are the questions about how to do this with a Linux relay? You already have a dedicated relay. It's just swapping out the name of the OS and the cost and stability involved. Nothing "changes." You are already doing everything as if you had a Linux relay.
There's no more confusion. You answered it way up the thread already.
I just didn't know how the Linux relay tied to hosted Exchange, but you already said you can define that in the relay by entering credentials for the hosted instance.
They tie through the magic of email
No, you wouldn't really use the credentials, that's pretty silly. You just... relay. Email is WAY simpler than I think you are picturing. None of that is necessary.
ok, so you point the Linux relay at the IP issued to the O365 instance, with a transport rule setup on the O365 instance to accept the traffic from the relay?
No... still way too complex. You do nothing. I literally listed all of the steps.
Email doesn't need any of those things. It doesn't get pointed anywhere.
How would the Linux relay know how to pass on the traffic from the copier to the hosted Exchange instance then...?
How does email ever get to where it is going? It just sends the email. It looks up the server's MX record. It's how every email everywhere gets delivered.
Oh ok, so the relay relies on MX records found in DNS?
Of course, that's how all email is sent that is not internal to the server itself, which wouldn't actually be email. So to simplify... yes, that is how all email is sent.
Sorry that took so long. Thanks for explaining.
...and after people tearing me down all day about SQL and Apple Mail, I'm pretty brain dead.
