It's 2023. If your company doesn't offer chat or phone support in this era you are that store that doesn't take credit cards. You're not going to make it.

Lansweeper only offers support via email, and those emails are not returned. I suffered a license issue that took two days to get resolved, all the while down, and Lansweeper could not have cared any less. I decided not to renew our license. Two weeks later they sent me a renewal with a 40% increase.

I had a chuckle as I deleted that email.

Hello everyone.

I haven't had any need for OCR software in probably 15 years, but I have a client who has 7 document boxes worth of forms filled out by hand that they need digitized. They're scanning them into PDFs this week, but want to recover FirstName, LastName, Phone, Email and then a hand written feed back box and load those all into a database.

ChatGPT recommended ABBYY, but it looks like it might be overkill for a one time need like this.

I told them that a couple teenagers doing data entry might be more accurate and cheaper. IDK if that's really true though. I'm not at all an expert on OCR software.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Oh boy, here we go

"Move to the cloud" they said

Ever since I’ve came to the company as a sole Sys admin (where there was none before) I’ve tried to keep it simple as possible… everyone has MS Office Home&Business, I’ll move everyone to Outlook from the damn Windows Live Mail… and sure thing, I’ll also install Outlook on their phones whoever wants to have Email access on their phones.

And it’s been a mess… people on Windows complaining that they dislike the new Search inside Outlook, sometimes when they try to start it up it doesn’t even open but hangs as a dead process so I had to put a shortcut on their desktop that does ‘taskkill /IM outlook.exe’… it happens on both old Windows 10 setups and brand new Windows 11 setups of all kinds… Also they’re pushing their new look a bit by bit and I’m thinking of migrating to something else before it even happens

On Android sometimes it has hard time syncing with IMAP and the search is also broken… it doesn’t work at all if only one IMAP account is logged in, so I had to login a dummy IMAP email account as a second one because only then you get the search option of which directories to search for and only then it works… idk how else to explain this but I found many people complaining about the same thing and using a solution like this for years…

So, what are your top alternatives for Email clients? It doesn’t have to be free (but a one time payment would be preferable), but it has to be a stable and simple experience for the workers on both Windows and Android. Body

Hi all. I'm not ready to die on this hill, but I am willing to suffer some serious injuries.

Here's the question: Should an IPAM product hand out static IPs when called upon by API for next available address?

Say I setup a machine on vRA using API calls to an enterprisey-IPAM solution using their documented API to poll, and perhaps subsequently pull, the next available IP address.

The API assigns an IP, but the IP assigned is the next IP available in a static range, not an IP address in an established and advertised DHCP range. Thus, any of a number of reserved static IPs will be dynamically assigned via API. The API is not using the IPAM product's built-in DHCP server to dynamically assign addresses. The IPAM product's DHCP and DNS are authoritative.

Bug, or feature?

As an engineer, my take is that the API calls should always pull from DHCP. Static IPs must be considered to be reserved, even if marked unused in IPAM, and should never be assigned whereas DHCP keeps records of IPs assigned and can be trusted to hand out an IP not being used. The idea is, when a new machine is brought online and gets an IP, that machine can either retain the DHCP-assigned addresses or I can assign it a static IP if necessary. Never, ever should my IPAM product think it is OK to hand out a ~~private~~ static IP address.

I can see how some people flip this and want their DHCP pools to be untouched by IPAM, but that's just backwards in my eyes.

I thought this was the right place to ask, let me know if somewhere else was better.

I have a classroom in a public school with around 30 PCs (windows) I need to install software on (python and codium). They are all the same PCs. In the past there was a management system but due to some licensing issues that does not work anymore.

How its been done before: Go to each and every PC and setup everything manually, or do it once and mirror the HDD 30 times .... both ways very time consuming.

I thought there might be a better way to do this, do you have any idea?

I've been trying to swap out a dead computer that operates a scale but the scale software is a pain in the ass. What have you guys been up to?

I started a new job at a school district as a systems manager and one of our bigger problems is our new Windows 11 AIOs are getting stuck on a "please wait" screen at boot which, after enabling verbose, saw it's actually "Applying Computer Settings"

Slight background I came in since they were renewing the entire district, I've been with them about 6 month now and have primarily been their JAMF admin in all honesty. We use WSUS, on prem AD, and an older MDM called ZenWorks or MicroFocus. (Idk but all the docs are for XP and Win7 when I look at it..)

I've worked closely with the network engineer and have taken out any ACL or possible blocking.

It happens on Wi-Fi and ethernet. At seemingly random times, I can never consistently get it to reproduce but one room at one of our schools is having it happen about once a day.

And yes, we're investigating DNS but it all seems in order when we check.

One thing it could be is the server admin was also shouldering my job when I got there so he just simply kept the old Win10 GPOs and never did any updating or checking. I'm not in control of this but he's really helpful and is going to take a look when he can.

I've been grasping at straws and I'm not looking for answers but a bit of venting and curious if anyone else has come across the same thing because I don't have many more straws to grab at.

I just stumbled across this on Newegg and it looks like a nice board for desktops in rugged environments

I'm confused about protecting backups from ransomware. Online, people say that backups are the most critical aspect to recovering from a ransomware attack.

But how do you protect the backups themselves from becoming encrypted too? Is it simply a matter of having totally unique and secure credentials for the backup medium?

Like, if I had a Synology NAS as a backup for my production environment's shared storage, VM backups, etc, hooked up to the network via gigabit, what stops ransomware malware from encrypting that Synology too?

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

cross-posted from: https://bolha.forum/post/199189

I need indications of email servers that accept relay transmission.

The MX will point to the Microsoft Exchange server, but emails that do not exist on the MS server will be relayed to this secondary server.

I just registered another domain name that doesnt support whois privacy and I would like to hide my actual details.

How have you done this? Post office box?

From The Hacker News

Personal rant: AI is definitely NOT ready for production.

The University of Michigan says in a statement today that they suffered a data breach after hackers broke into its network in August and accessed systems with information belonging to students, applicants, alumni, donors, employees, patients, and research study participants.

I'm so absolutely sick of it.

I'm new to Windows deployments, and I need some help. I've gotten as far as setting up a new system from a Windows 11 image downloaded from MS, configuring it/installing software, and then running sysprep. I made a WinPE boot thumbdrive, but I'm stuck at capturing the Windows image part. Part of my problem is that I'm trying to make this in a VM. Is that more trouble than it's worth?

Is there an easier way to do this? I've seen people saying I can use Linux tools like Clonezilla, which sounds good to me, since I'm very comfortable with Linux-- but I read that might cause problems. One thing mentioned was licensing.

I would be deploying these images 100% onto Lenovo machines that we purchase from CDW, so I'm not sure how licensing would work. Is the license tied to the MAC? Will they auto-register once I boot them with the new image?

Thanks for anyone that takes the time to help me understand this :)

Oct 17 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O) is preparing to bring Amazon.com (AMZN.O) as a customer for its 365 cloud productivity tools in a deal worth over $1 billion, news site Insider reported on Tuesday, citing an internal document and a person familiar with the matter.

The e-commerce giant has committed the amount for over five years and to secure more than one million Microsoft 365 license seats, according to the report.

Microsoft, whose shares gained nearly 1% in extended trading following the report, declined to comment. Amazon did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.

Amazon is expected to start setting up the new systems in early November, the report said, adding that the company currently uses a local, on premise version of Microsoft's Office products.

Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila

cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/323269

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

Hey guys,

We are struggling with our Azure joined machines used by multiple people during the day. Each time they log on to a new machine we get a helpdesk call for us to set up OneDrive / Sharepoint libraries synchronization in the client.

We know Intune can do this but Intune settings can take up to 8 hrs to propagate by which the user has already called us. This takes too long.

I've made a support call with Microsoft which has been open for a month now with what I think is a fairly straight forward question but they keep telling me they' re discussing this with their team.

Is there a scenario that sets these settings instantly that minimizes helpdesk calls? Or is this made for 1 user per device scenario's? Apart from reinstating on-prem DC's and whatnot ;)

Hope you guys can point me somewhere because Microsoft doesn't seem to..

I keep a machine around just for gaming, and I run windows on that. Periodically it needs to be refreshed from a clean install. And it's laborious work.

What are people's recommendations, for installing Windows Enterprise headless, triggering some sort of system configuration to install steam, drivers, games, networking config?

Ideally I'd like to use some declarative configuration language, but I'm open to options. My least favorite approach is to simply image and known good drive, and then have to apply updates to the known good drive. Periodically, creates more maintenance overhead.

From ItsFOSS