@ricedg
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I thought I recognised the acronym. It’s from the server world.
Well the Xeon won’t boot in the H97, I suspect it’s the ram. Now moved to the server with an ancient AMD graphics card in an 8x pci-e slot.
Running FreeNAS and 2 x Ubuntu server VMs is hardly registering on the CPU usage graph.
Happy New Year to All
I have been trying to add a cat picture, but the dialog box for Insert Picture – Source has no way to browse to anything and copy and paste into the message body doesn’t do anything either. This is using every browser I have! So imagine a black and white cat who is, as usual, fast asleep.
Yes, it’s the Kaspersky Password Manager that I use.
I’ve just found out that Bitwarden has a self hosting option using Docker. My DS218+ should be able to run it and the PiHoleVM, but also so should my UniFi VM @ Telehouse.
I currently use Kaspersky, but would love it if Synology (or someone) could come up with a password manager that sits in my private Synology cloud.
BTW the next point version of Synology DiskStation Manager is going to introduce while disk encryption. It’s been shared based until now, which has it’s benefits as well but is a bit clunky.
What I find really dopey about Windows encryption is it won’t let you save the password to an encrypted drive at creation time. Surely if anything should be kept safe it’s the key to your whole device?
The fingerprint reader is the only issue so far. Some customers with NUC and Asus PN50s upgraded a long time ago; no problems reported there either and one of them uses Google for Business so that’s OK too.
I did my first clean install yesterday on an AMD Asus PN50. The default drivers worked absolutely fine but to get all the bells and whistles it is worth installing the OEM versions. In the case of a NUC it is absolutely essential to install Intel’s Driver & Support Assistant and well worth it on any Intel based machine.
I think it’s time to start installing it by default on new machines, apart from customers with a mix of W10 machines that can’t be upgraded (which I find particularly stupid).
They must have upped the minimum SMB level again. I rarely (knowingly) use SMB any more, Synology have their own solution.
Current good deals on E-Buyer
Lenovo V15 G2 AMD Ryzen 3 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Windows 11 Home 15.6″ £350
Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15ITL6 Laptop, Intel Core i5-1135G7 2.4GHz, 8GB DDR4, 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD, 15.6″ Full HD, Intel Iris Xe, Windows 11 Home in S mode £380
I have the ThinkBook version of the i5 and it’s a fantastic piece of kit. The NVMe drives they use are very good too. S mode restricts you to the Windows Store for apps, but a quick trip to settings sorts that out.
Once you register, Lenovo will offer you an extended warranty at a very good price too.
Check to see if it’s using IP V4, I tend to turn off V6 entirely although I see it’s back on after the W11 upgrade.
I also use my PiHole as a DHCP server as well as DNS (I actually run it as a VM on my Synology). All my Virgin Hub does is routing and firewall duties as even my WiFi is separate. I find things are a lot more stable and much better supported. How many router firmware updates do you see? 2 or 3 at most.
Nice one D2.
Yes Ed you’re correct. The triangles are a lot softer so I tend to use the sticks to start the process and you can also get more leverage on them. The other really useful tool is the small point (by the suction cup) which is great for pressing reset buttons and getting sim trays open.
The cheaper consumer devices really are brute force jobs. Some of the better engineered laptops, like my Lenovo ThinkBook, can be very difficult to start but then come part easily. Then you get kit aimed at Corporates where no tools are required at all (or only a screwdriver) and the internals are sensibly laid out, like HP Probooks.
What I do find a waste of time are Corporate desktops with bits that fold out or hinge up or slide in. IMO they just make things fiddly. Don’t get me started on Dell where to add a second hard drive you find you need a plastic tray that isn’t included.
I think this is the one you have, Amazon video of adding a HDD here https://www.amazon.com/vdp/06be63801e4e47f0954cad236862830d
Just like a NUC, which can also sometimes be reluctant to come apart, but at least you can see how it should and know where to apply some help. I bought a toolkit very like this one for laptops and these sorts of jobs.
The suction cup can be very useful for the sort of problem you have as it’s just pulling off a tight lid rather than prizing a laptop shell apart. Something you may already have or can get locally. You could also try gently pulling on the screws, or, if they can be removed, a small driver in the hole applying upwards pressure.
Well I finally decided to upgrade the laptop to Windows 11 (it’s what I use most) and apart from having to uninstall / reinstall the fingerprint sensor it was painless.
The 22H2 version was installed (the main PC hasn’t upgraded as yet) and the UI changes are very nice. I can drag and drop files onto toolbar apps again, hooray! The look is a lot less flat than W10 and I don’t lose track of the mouse as much, hooray again.
With 22H2 I think we have reached that tipping point where W10 has moved to the background and W11 is where it’s at. For me the jury is still out on whether this is a “must do” upgrade but it’s certainly a might as well and there’s plenty of time left.
These two are the usual causes, becoming less and less common, but either the boot partition gets screwed or one of the system files does. Both easily sorted from the command line of a bootable USB. In the case of an encrypted drive you’ll have to put the key in before access is allowed. No key? All you can do is format it.
I do still have to deal with forgotten Windows passwords, but again very rarely. In the case of a hardware issue I would tend to remove the drive and put it in a caddy on my PC with all the tools on, but USB sticks with all the tools do still exist.
I’d also add a bootable USB stick with your backup software on it. All the big boys have an option to make one, usually called a Recovery Drive too!
I used to have bootable drives for Antivirus too, but those days are long gone when I had virus riddled PCs to clean up.
A recovery drive is something different and you’re not forced to make one. What’s saved as part of the process is a text file with the 64 character key in it.
Interesting that a Swiss type deal has been pumped into the grapevine.
It was a way that I thought things would go with the vote being so tight and the narrative was to bring the country back together again. Instead we had deliberately divisive actions and the whole country held to ransom by a hand full of extreme Brexiteers. I think their day is over.
Steve Barclay couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the economic damage done, just saying there were pros and cons. We can see the cons and apart from the inevitable vaccine roll out we could have done anyway, he didn’t actually mention the pros.
Thank God Rees-Mogg was removed before he could trash our laws and give massive power to a handful of ministers, riding rough shod over devolution in the process. This what they wanted, the ability to run their extreme policies without inference (Corbyn wanted the same). Where are the other countries that would be following our courageous lead?
Your spell checker’s not working.
Bit Locker is certainly nothing to be concerned about at all, as Ed says it’s invisible in use. I haven’t needed a special recovery drive yet, just the encryption key on the rare occasion something has gone awry (both linked to UEFI updates on older machines which reset the TPM).
Since Gen 6 (?) most Intel and equivalent AMD CPUs have the TPM inbuilt so there’s nothing to buy. For my business customers I encrypt by default on machines and server shares and encourage them to use Bit Locker on their USB drives.
You cannot complete the drive encryption until you have printed out or saved the key to another drive. For some reason beyond me you cannot save the key to an encrypted drive, which my network drives are. So I save them to a USB stick then copy them to the server. I keep the keys for all my customers (no they cannot be trusted to) so I add the machine name to the key’s filename to make them easier to find (don’t overwrite the filename as it’s what MS will use to prompt you).
May be I was a little harsh on 11 but I really cannot find any compelling reason to upgrade and I am an early adopter of everything. I still install Windows 10 on new machines as it may only have a few years left, but the free upgrade isn’t going away.
For backup I have used EaseUS ToDo for a long time now and install the Free version on new machines. I also use it to clone drives via system backup / restore as I’ve found it 100% reliable which I can’t say of direct cloning software. I have used the Free Acronis for WD on machines with WD drives, but ToDo is a lot easier to use.
A total meh. I can’t see any advantage over 10, indeed some is a step backwards.
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