Joey – Page 13 – My Thoughts, My Finds, My Journey

My first rant…

Whoever designed Sonicwall devices, and thought they were a good idea, needs to spend a year in Gitmo. After that, they need to go back to first grade for a year…but with an old-school Catholic nun with a ruler in her hand and a trigger finger. Once they graduate from first grade again, they must go back to high school for the math chapters in logic, they must join debate team (and win a championship somewhere), and they must go through Professor Maurer‘s critical thinking class. Then, they need to spend some time with the folks over at pfSense, taking copious notes on how to make a useful UI, and take every word they say as if it was spoken by God Himself. Then, and only then, will they be granted the privilege of being allowed to pay for their sins by rebuilding the Sonicwall UI, from the ground up.
The final test will be to give them a week to show their first grade class (now third graders) how to configure a Sonicwall. If they finish their tutorial, and not one of the students can figure it out, the process repeats again.

I have spent far too much time this weekend reconfiguring Sonicwall devices and it’s starting to get to me.

</rant>

January 18, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

#ThrowbackFriday

Why thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed on the internet:

I NEED CHANNELWOOD HELP!!!!!

I STILL NEED CHANNELWOOD HELP!!!

And yes, that thirteen-year-old was me. This, dear readers (all four of you) was me, on Usenet, back in 1999. At the time, my dad and I shared an e-mail address, and Outlook Express for Windows 95 was also setup for Usenet access (thank you, Suffolkweb!), which helped me get through the game Myst. All caps, lots of exclamation points, and plenty of obnoxiousness in the posts. I was terrible at internet communication back then. Luckily, just a few things have changed…

Side note: if you’re going back in the Google Groups to the point where your browser crashes, check out the excellent NoScript plug-in for Chrome or Firefox. Google Groups will give static HTML links with zero window dressing, 20 at a time. You can jump ahead by tweaking the numbers in the address bar, as long as they’re exactly 20 apart. It’s ugly, but the ‘next’ buttons load *instantly*.

January 15, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Wisdom from Steve

Not that you’re supposed to have “cheat days” on a fast, as it generally defeats the point…but I swung by Facebook briefly, and loved what my friend Steve Goad had to say…he’s one of the few folks who has insightful, original posts…like this one:

Have you prayed for your enemies today?
Have you prayed for political candidates you disagree with?
Have you prayed for the illegal immigrant?
Have you prayed for the thief, the murderer, the rapist?
Have you prayed for the terrorist?
Jesus said “Love your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you.”
Instead of cursing them… pray for God to bless them, and show them love… even as God has shown us love.
If all Christians did this… I believe amazing things would happen in our world.

And y’know what? He’s absolutely right.

January 13, 2016 by Philosophy and Faith 2

Dear Canon

Dear Canon,

I generally love your printers. Your copiers are a different story. In addition to being problematic work emailing via SSL on non-standard ports, it’s 2016…and changing the IP address requires a full restart of the copier, a problem solved by Windows in 1999. Firmware updates, please!

January 12, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Funny

Via Reddit:

A priest and a rabbi buy a car. The priest walks out and sees the rabbi sprinkling water over the hood. “What are you doing?” Asked the priest. “I’m blessing the car,” said the rabbi. “Oh, as long as we’re doing THAT…” The priest walked into the garage. He later came back out with a hacksaw and cut 2 inches off of the tailpipe.

January 9, 2016 by Uncategorized 0

Altaro’s ‘Gotcha’

A client at work has had an issue with the Windows Server Backup application destabilizing his server. I’d like to actually poke around and resolve the issue, but with the time factor involved, I decided to try out the excellent Altaro backup program. It’s pretty, it’s intuitive, and given that he only has two virtual machines, the free version perfectly fit his needs…or so I thought.

Protip for everyone: “Offsite Backups” are one of the features that are not included in the free version. Initially I thought that statement simply referred to WAN-based file transfers, but it apparently also applies to hard disk rotations, so it you use multiple hard disks for backup, you’ll be stuck getting the paid version. That being said, at $395 for the standard version, it’s one of the least expensive server backup programs available.

January 7, 2016 by Computers and Tech Microblog 0

Judgment

I write this blog entry from the checkout line at a local supermarket. My grocery list consists of: a bag of granola cereal, a box of Star Wars cereal, and three of those $0.50 Jell-O cups. My cashier will likely judge me as she rings me up, and deservedly so.

Perhaps I only sense this vibe because I was a bit judgmental when I was a cashier, and this is simply karmic projection.

January 5, 2016 by Microblog 1

Reader Interaction Poll / Ask Me Stuff / Topic Suggestions

It’s been amusing that I’ve talked to a number of people who have indicated that they’ve read things on my blog. My stat counter isn’t incredibly useful with respect to visitor numbers, since all the bots and site scrapers are included, yet precisely four different people have commented on things here since I’ve started the blog. Moreover, what was intended to be a blog with a bit more diversity of topics has turned into an admittedly soapbox-like pulpit where I spend more time complaining about technical things than not. My ‘Food and Cooking’ category still doesn’t have an entry in it, though I have a planned entry for it.

Having said all that, I’m open to topic requests and suggestions, questions to answer, and matters to research. I can’t promise I’ll honor every request (points to ToS), but I figure that most of my loyal readers would be interested in a change of pace from the technical rants and rallying cries for adherence to the Bill of Rights, so I’d at least be interested in knowing what sort of content you’d like to read.

January 4, 2016 by Microblog Uncategorized 0

…Spreadsheets are no better.

So, I’m certain you’ve read my prior post regarding how shopping for self-hosted chat/collaboration software is a pain, right? Well, browser-based office suites aren’t much of a picnic, either…

OnlyOffice was my frontrunner, even if it did require 6GB of RAM on my server. Yes it’s shiny, yes it’s got a Linux base to it, yes it does users and groups and has a web server and a database server powering it…but Lotus 1-2-3 required 192K of RAM (yes, Excel had a predecessor that single-handedly transformed desktop computing, you young whippersnapper), so a thirty thousand fold increase in RAM requirements would understandably seem a smidge excessive…but even with eight CPU cores and 8GB of RAM allocated to it, the software *lagged*. Not just ‘a smidge sluggish’, I mean ‘one-minute-per-page-load’ sluggish. I want to try it on my laptop at some point, but I’d rather rant on my blog at the moment. Suffice it to say, OnlyOffice didn’t last long.

FengOffice was my next attempt. It had a slim installation, ran just fine in 1GB of RAM, simple interface, good administration…and a patent inability to use relative URLs. Thus, it kept trying to direct me to 192.168.0.146, even when I accessed it externally through an opened port and used a dynamic DNS address. I went so far as to reinstall it using the DDNS URL when prompted…but even then it did a reverse DNS and forced itself to be tied to the external IP address, rather than the URL, which made no sense…something that further astounded me when I did a port 80 redirect. So, Feng is great for internal use, but external use clearly requires a static IP. We’re working on that.

eGroupWare seemed to have a spreadsheet module involved…but it didn’t…and I think the people who made the software went out of their way to make it as ugly as conceivably possible. Now, to be fair, their installation process was all of three cut-and-pastes on a plain Debian install, so props to them for having the simplest installation here (Really OnlyOffice? creating an OVA or including a VMDK file in the zip archive was *that* hard?). While Lotus 1-2-3 may have been the spreadsheet that brought a computer to every desk, eGroupWare brought flashbacks of Lotus Notes…and if you’re blissfully unaware of what it’s like to use Lotus Notes, thank your IT department for showing you love and care and concern and respect.

ZK Spreadsheet Server is what I’d love to go with…if I could. It’s a one trick pony that is *beautiful*…I mean, it is the most visually appealing spreadsheet software I’ve ever used. Every useful thing that Johnny Ives has ever said was distilled into what would make this software be desirable to use, and then implemented perfectly, with no middle management getting in the way. Moreover, the Windows installation couldn’t be simpler – a single executable Installshield wizard that installs a service that has a small config panel. Couldn’t be simpler. Unfortunately, Mr. Ives clearly had no say over the website. The site indicates that the download is simply an evaluation, but nowhere does the website list a price, or have a ‘buy now’ button, or anything to that effect. I have no idea how much this thing actually costs, or how it’s licensed. Also, there didn’t seem to be any way to assign users and groups, so a login ends up being a direct path to making a spreadsheet…not the best for security.

I probably should have spent the last six hours editing and uploading the podcasts and just using our access to Excel Online via our free Office365 subscription.

But where’s the fun in that?

January 3, 2016 by Computers and Tech Uncategorized 0

The devolution of web design, and frustration with chat software…

First and foremost, happy new year to everyone. Here’s to hoping that 2016 isn’t as bad as 2015…I mean, let’s be real – for 2015, Dave Barry didn’t even have to try.

That being said, it’s time for a rant.

I’m looking to get some form of chat/collaboration software up and running for a church where I do some tech work. There’s a relatively new trend in web design that’s quite annoying: the single scrollable site. Now, a part of the problem is that no one actually puts any content on sites like this, it’s just some shiny graphics and a vague sentence or two. Now, when I land on one of these hipster pages, it tends to inform me that it’s not the product I’m looking for.

As most of you know, I’m a bit old school, so data lives on my servers, period…except for e-mail in this one particular case, because when Microsoft offers free hosted Exchange for nonprofits, there’s no conceivable way to argue that. Here’s the list of products I’ve looked into so far…

Skype for Business: quirky, its integration features aren’t what they should be, desktop installs aren’t as streamlined as they could be, having issues with the mobile app.
Trillian for Business: won’t give me a price on their website for the self-hosted version.
Convo: won’t give me a price on their website for the self-hosted version.
HipChat: wants $1,800/year for 25 users, for software that lives on my server…but $600 for the version that they host? How is it triple the price to *not* deal with the infrastructure?
Unison: won’t give me a price on their website for the self-hosted version.
Campfire: ‘meh’ product, no self-hosted option.
Glip: No self-hosted option.
Brosix: Not the prettiest UI and no self-hosted option, but at $1.70/user/month, if we’re stuck going for a cloud-based option, they’re in the running.
OpenFire: Requires third party mobile app; XMPP-only protocol would require a lot of work to secure properly, browser-based UI hasn’t been updated since 2008.
MatterMost: Promising, but relatively lengthy install process and mobile apps are still pending.
Rocket.Chat: This was the one that I was really, REALLY hoping would do the job – it’s free (love the price!), self-hosted (love the control!), runs on Linux (love the freedom!), and took about half an hour to spin up – incidentally, it was the first time I’d ever used a Docker container. However, I ran into two problems: first, the mobile apps wouldn’t work properly. Second, user accounts are backwards: anyone can go to the login page and create an account, and the admin user can’t create users or groups. I need the opposite – to be able to create users, and only users I create can log in. So, that got put on ice until they get all that stuff worked out.

I also configured Yammer, until I realized it was just a private Facebook with no real-time chat capabilities. Same for eXo.

And this, friends, is how I spend my New Year’s Day…because this is the cost of being old school.

January 1, 2016 by Computers and Tech 0