All of my limited gaming time over the past couple weeks has gone to Vermintide.

Left 4 Dead and its sequel are two of my top played games of all time, and I'm been a fan of the Warhammer setting in general. They've done a great job adding their own spin on the "hectic horde battle genre" (if that's a thing) with the item/forge system and new special enemies like the ratling gunner. There's also a stealth mechanic that manages to be rewarding if you pull it off in the right situations without being totally necessary.

How about this from RapidSSL?

Had a series of brownouts in NW Oregon due to a huge windy rain storm last night - They started happening right as I was talking about how storms make me think about the potential for power loss now and how I want to get a generator someday...

Right now all my production Linux hosts are on VMs so I have snapshots of the backend infrastructure along with application-level backups of data as needed. Mostly these are EC2 instances running WordPress where I have a base AMI ready to go with offsite BackupBuddy backups. It's served me well in the few times I've had to use it - I can go from a launching an instance to all data recovered in about 15 minutes or less.

With that said, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Veeam's Linux backup works once it's released!

@MattSpeller said:

@WingCreative said:

Had a series of brownouts in NW Oregon due to a huge windy rain storm last night - They started happening right as I was talking about how storms make me think about the potential for power loss now and how I want to get a generator someday...

Got you covered with this one, I deployed my beard in a giant curtain to slow it down.

Jokes aside, same storm and she was pretty fierce.

Thanks - I thought I could rely on Portlanders' faces to break the storm, but it turns out they've mostly moved onto ironic mustaches at this point

It's tough loving the ambiance of heavy rain battering against the roof and windows, while also knowing that there's a good chance it will make a lot more work for me if it manages to cause a power outage...

While we wait for MangoCon: I found this video helpful for understanding what it does and how to deal with it without disabling it altogether.

Just set up DC, DNS, and DHCP roles on my first-ever 2012 R2 server install

After spending the past few weeks delving into the depths of Linux system files and configuration, it's weird to be doing Important Setup Stuff in a GUI... not that I'm complaining!

Apologies for the late response, I've been busy holidaying it up

I wasn't sure how familiar people were with the content marketing term around here, so I gave some real-life IT examples that people would recognize. I wasn't trying to suggest that OP should try to emulate them outright, sorry for the confusion!

I figured it would be worth sharing the most popular trend in SEO that I'm aware of as a way to help focus OP's research and see if they thought it could work for them... With that said, please don't invest effort and/or money on building a whole new branch of marketing just because a guy on the internet said it might help

Scott's definitely right that SEO by itself isn't going to be a magical panacea for drawing a bunch of customers in, and there is always a good chance that hiring a dedicated SEO "expert" could end up being a bust. Passive traffic is helpful but it's not the constant flow of paying customers that some make it out to be.

I think the reason why SEO is usually considered an essential part of online marketing by most marketers I follow is because putting current SEO best practices in place doesn't just generate passive traffic. Since most current recommendations focus on making your site experience easy to use and helpful for visitors, having SEO in place means the people drawn in from your ads elsewhere will be more likely to stick around and explore. It also means you have some reliable way of tracking where site traffic is coming from, so you can track which ads you're putting out are actually bringing in traffic.

With content marketing specifically, it means your ads on social media can have a more interesting hook than a small discount or just a link to your site - Even if no one ever googles "fleece vs down jacket insulation", you could have an ad that points to the imaginary article mentioned in my last post that gets shown to people who list camping, hiking, hunting etc as an interest on FB. Then, even if they weren't actively searching for that info, their interest might be piqued by the article and either way you've gotten the idea that you're an authority on that sort of thing out to them. I'm pretty sure this is how Dollar Shave Club gets quite a few new customers - I never googled "subscription razor blades" but I get reminded of their existence every few days!

I would say that no one here can know enough details about the business in question to give a truly definitive answer for you because some of the details needed to form that answer (current sales volume, average customer lifetime spend, etc) would be foolish to post publically.

Ultimately, if you are committed to expanding the digital sales side of your business, you should consult with someone who specializes in digital marketing and discuss the details of your business, including what you do to market yourself right now. They they can help you build a digital marketing plan with clear goals, documented methods for achieving them, and metrics that you can use to measure the ROI on each method. Otherwise, it's all too easy to spend money trying out a smattering of different methods without ever really knowing which, if any, actually helped.

@johnhooks said:

Has anyone tried Pydio before? It looks interesting.

I have a Pydio server running off a Vultr storage-optimized VPS as a personal fileserver.

It's been running without compaint for about 6 months now... Works well, looks nice, and I appreciate how I can use their free iOS app to access whatever I have stored on my site. OwnCloud's app, on the other hand, is $.99 which isn't huge but creates a paywall if you want to deploy it on a scale beyond yourself or a few people.

Pydio was my recommendation over OwnCloud for a while, but now I think I prefer OwnCloud ever-so-slightly after giving it another chance. I would say whichever one you prefer in terms of features/interface will get the job done.

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

@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.

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.

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.

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

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.