Microblog

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*.

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!

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.

I tried out Sophos UTM as an experiment for work today. I learned something about the product: as much as I wanted to like it (and there were a number of good features to like), it’s moniker for “Home Users” was very poorly placed. Sophos UTM’s default configuration is like a Republican congress with a Democratic president – the land of ‘no’. After spending nearly two hours with it, I could not get it to let any real nonstandard traffic out the door. HTTP worked fine, but remote desktop on a nonstandard port? Nope. Getting the new replies in misc.legal.moderated using Agent? Nope. Syncing my phone with my NAS? All aboard the Nope train to Nopeville! It didn’t matter what rule I put into that thing, that traffic was NOT happening. I never thought there would be a software-based firewall that would make me pine for a SonicWall, but a ‘deny any any’ rule in a default config for outbound traffic? Not fun.

pfSense? From CD to working default config in 20 minutes. I can be okay with this. I’m also looking forward to seeing what happens with my transparent proxy; hopefully it will speed up load times on my poky DSL line.

While clearly dated, this is hysterically accurate…

http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/

Saw an ad for VMTurbo, which promised monitoring for Virtual Machines in an environment. I missed the fine print that indicated that it required vCenter, so it doesn’t work on ESXi.

“Free VM Monitoring” is prominently displayed on the front page. “Doesn’t work with ESXi” is on a forum post that requires a Google search.

If I’m spending money on the virtual environment I’m building, I’m spending it on Veeam.