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The lonely tech post thread.

Sounds fun. I'm not a massive gamer (but like to have a decent setup for when I do), but it's probably worth asking in the gaming thread for suggestions that aren't shooty, but are also visually stunning to show of your card.

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I have absolutely no "need" for one, but I'm contemplating buying one of those tiny PCs with 4 ethernet ports of Aliexpress to use as an Opensense box to replace my router. Does anyone do anything similar?

There's nothing wrong with the TP Link wired router I have and it does fit in quite nicely with Omada ecosystem I've got, but I'd like another toy with more features to play with. I've got an old 3rd gen i5 I could stick another NIC in and do the same, but it's another full sized PC drawing power. I could also virtualize it, as I've got loads of resources spare on my Xeon box, but there's something that makes me a little nervous about having my main device for accessing the internet on what's basically my lab.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
I have absolutely no "need" for one, but I'm contemplating buying one of those tiny PCs with 4 ethernet ports of Aliexpress to use as an Opensense box to replace my router. Does anyone do anything similar?

There's nothing wrong with the TP Link wired router I have and it does fit in quite nicely with Omada ecosystem I've got, but I'd like another toy with more features to play with. I've got an old 3rd gen i5 I could stick another NIC in and do the same, but it's another full sized PC drawing power. I could also virtualize it, as I've got loads of resources spare on my Xeon box, but there's something that makes me a little nervous about having my main device for accessing the internet on what's basically my lab.
Click to expand...
where would you get the software?
 
UnderOpenSky said:
I mean I know heat sinks have got big, but are we really at the point we need anti gravity to spare the poor mother boards?
Click to expand...
The funny part is that it's not even that big. The bottom is meant to fit an M.2 SSD. I mean, it's hooge for an SSD cooler, but tiny in the greater world of heat sinks.
 
The boss and I assume his contractor who he fights with set up a signature system last year and they have shoved ownership on me a couple of months ago.

Doesn’t work properly and I’ve been very clear I am annoyed by this as I had nothing to do with its config and don’t really know about it. Which I think is annoying my boss but… you literally set the system up you know it better than I do? And apparently you set it up for a big firm years ago? There’s also no documentation aside from generic online stuff?

We apparently need to get it to apply signatures to all users from the server side not just outlook. I’ve been frustrated trying to get it working and I think I’ve just figured out why. The exchange connector looks like it was set to only apply to a specific group when scanning server based sigs.


So yeah I had to basically go back from the start to unpick what it was actually doing.
 
So at my last place the owner was keen we did as much automation as possible, but really we were to small, our different environments to fragmented and frankly I didn't get that many repetitive tasks to make anything I could do worthwhile with my limited skills.

Now I'm somewhere much bigger, I'm already seeing a lot of repetition, so with the help of ChatGPT & Bing I've knocked up a few that do most of the post imaging tasks. I'm quite pleased with working out how to have them throw up prompts for the user to enter data in, like renaming the PC and adding a description, rather then what I might of done before, which is just edit the variables at the start before running. I've learnt about getting to wait whilst it installs one bit of software before moving on the next.

Do I tell my manager or just quietly just get on and make my life easier? They did say they were open to ideas from outside, but not sure if it's to soon or above my pay grade.
 
Artaxerxes said:
The boss and I assume his contractor who he fights with set up a signature system last year and they have shoved ownership on me a couple of months ago.

Doesn’t work properly and I’ve been very clear I am annoyed by this as I had nothing to do with its config and don’t really know about it. Which I think is annoying my boss but… you literally set the system up you know it better than I do? And apparently you set it up for a big firm years ago? There’s also no documentation aside from generic online stuff?

We apparently need to get it to apply signatures to all users from the server side not just outlook. I’ve been frustrated trying to get it working and I think I’ve just figured out why. The exchange connector looks like it was set to only apply to a specific group when scanning server based sigs.

So yeah I had to basically go back from the start to unpick what it was actually doing.
Click to expand...

I remember being amazed when I discovered that Microsoft don't have some nice tools to do this for you and most of the third party ones really cost more then they should. Funnily enough one of my predecessors had written a script to do this for one client and trying to reverse engineer it when the environment changed.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
I remember being amazed when I discovered that Microsoft don't have some nice tools to do this for you and most of the third party ones really cost more then they should. Funnily enough one of my predecessors had written a script to do this for one client and trying to reverse engineer it when the environment changed.
Click to expand...

You probably could do something with the append/prepend options in transport rules but i suspect it'll look like crap
 
UnderOpenSky said:
So at my last place the owner was keen we did as much automation as possible, but really we were to small, our different environments to fragmented and frankly I didn't get that many repetitive tasks to make anything I could do worthwhile with my limited skills.

Now I'm somewhere much bigger, I'm already seeing a lot of repetition, so with the help of ChatGPT & Bing I've knocked up a few that do most of the post imaging tasks. I'm quite pleased with working out how to have them throw up prompts for the user to enter data in, like renaming the PC and adding a description, rather then what I might of done before, which is just edit the variables at the start before running. I've learnt about getting to wait whilst it installs one bit of software before moving on the next.

Do I tell my manager or just quietly just get on and make my life easier? They did say they were open to ideas from outside, but not sure if it's to soon or above my pay grade.
Click to expand...

NHS and other massive organisations is why automation tools exist. 20 years ago, to add a feature to 100 switches, you had to do each one separately. Python/Ansible means you can do it with one small script.
 
souljacker said:
NHS and other massive organisations is why automation tools exist. 20 years ago, to add a feature to 100 switches, you had to do each one separately. Python/Ansible means you can do it with one small script.
Click to expand...

I mean they have Configuration Manager (formally sccm), but it doesn't seem to do some of the post imaging stuff that's currently done maunally. I've not played with it so I don't if it can't do it or it's just nobody has configured it.
 
souljacker said:
NHS and other massive organisations is why automation tools exist. 20 years ago, to add a feature to 100 switches, you had to do each one separately. Python/Ansible means you can do it with one small script.
Click to expand...
My stuck-in-the-past manager was a bit taken aback when I said that changing the root password on 100 servers would take "about 5 minutes". I really should have lied and taken the rest of the day.
 
Explaining to someone that their emails do not go out because the mail server (rightly) rejects invalid FROM addresses.
"The FROM field must be a valid email address. fred@fred is not a valid email address. fred@fred.university.ac.uk is."
"Can we have a meeting about this?"
"We can. However I'm going to caution you that there are only so many ways I can explain that the FROM field must be a valid email address before I get frustrated and leave."

Apparently I'm not being helpful.
 
2704w8.jpg
 
reminds me of an incident years ago (would love to say it happened only once and person was having a brain-fart, but it didnt ..... )

There was a video intercom doorbell at the rear entrance to our building (this was years ago and the video door bell was unheard of!) and when staff wanted to come in, they would buzz, and a little screen on a phone device by my desk would ring. If I recognised the person, I would just press buzzer to allow them in and tell them 'pull the door' .... One time this person buzzed, I released door and said 'pull' .... they pushed ... I could see them push and see the door not open. I heard them say 'its not open' .... i replied 'yes, it is, just pull' .... they said 'I am' ... I replied 'no, you are pushing. you should pull' .... this took an embarrassing long time to sink in . Push & Pull are not the same thing. The only thing I can think of is that people sometimes hear one thing and the brain translates it into whats expected , ie Pull = Its open , do what you normally do

Yeah, I can explain it, but I cant understand it for you ........
 
Chz said:
My stuck-in-the-past manager was a bit taken aback when I said that changing the root password on 100 servers would take "about 5 minutes". I really should have lied and taken the rest of the day.
Click to expand...


On the other hand I am fighting the uphill battle of “who actually has access to our share point from outside the company” because it’s been allowed to sprawl to 360 sites and we’ve been giving direct permissions to folders to people for nearly 15 years rather than sharing links. There’s no audit tool (that’s cheap from ms anyway, license ahoy) for the with MS and half the SP powershell is obsolete.


I had to turn tenant registration on for guests this year and I’m still getting told to be careful not to turn on expiration for guest users yet
 
Trying to get my head around when powershell scripts will run and when they won't. Was surprised initially that a fresh VM I made at home was more restricted then my admin account I've got at work. Thought I was doing quite well making some batch files that pointed to the script to just run them, but failed as cmd doesn't support UNC paths. I guess I can have it mount a drive and then unmount it afterwards but it was Friday afternoon and I'd kind of lost the will.
 
Uggg. Wet Saturday so thought I start wading through the piles of stuff I've accumulated over the last few years. How did I end up with so much stuff.

Does anyone have any need for 16GB of DDR3. It's got fancy heathsinks and everything. :D

Pulled from a PC that wasn't booting, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the RAM.
 
Installing this cool little thing. Converts a 5.25 bay to take a 3.5 and 2 x 2.5 drives to put some drives I'm not using into the workstation I use as my homelab.

PXL_20231209_154738605.jpg

PXL_20231209_155055981.jpg



Except annoyingly I didn't check before I started this project and I need a sata power splitter to use all three drives.
 
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