Serious Techy Business Thread

I have the slightly more butch version of those TP-Links and they have been pretty much flawless. As above, they are fire and forget consumer devices so lack some mid/advanced features but they are fantastically easy to set up and maintain.

Cheers for the input. I found out what was "wrong" with the ones in my link anyway; the ethernet ports aren't gigabit. Mixed reviews on whether that is only the ethernet backhaul thing or whether that includes the ethernet link to the modem, which would be a real problem., but as the gigabit version (M4) was only £10 more I've taken the plunge on those.

They also lack 2.4/5Ghz separation though which is usually something I do by reflex. Apparently you can only achieve that by adapting the guest network which I might have to do. Or dare I hope that the problems associated with dual band wireless have been sorted out these days?

Fun fact: I have a friend who paid someone a big chunk of money to wire ethernet outlets throughout his house due to "slow wi-fi" before I got there and took all of two minutes to diagnose his dual band network as the problem

I tend to just stick in a MAC address filter block for anything that shouldn't be on either 2.4 or 5GHz. Used to have different SSIDs for each, but this way feels like slightly less of a faff.

Netgear have broken the Orbi app on Android for my mesh. Think an Android update fucked it but they're not recognising the issue. Work around is to switch on Access Anywhere, which doesn't seem terribly secure.

So far I've spent my day with an IT illiterate person trying to talk them through installing, sharing and mapping a printer. It's going about as well as you'd expect.

The classic "I've been struggling with this for over a week and your step by step user guide doesn't work" but then it becomes immediately clear that he hasn't read a single fucking word of the guide. I mean is this even a not-a-computer-person thing? Like I'm no plumber but if I was fitting a tap, and I had the tap and its installation instructions right next to me, do you know what I'm going to do instead of fucking around with a tap up my ass for 7 days? Fucking RTFM.

Yes. I have used their products for years and they're usually very good at the price point. We currently have InsightVM and AppSec and I've previously used Nexpose and InsightIDR.

What are you looking at?

As for their privacy, they have pretty much industry standard security and privacy policies. You're as safe with them as any other SaaS provider, tbh.

www.rapid7.com/trust/ 

We use insight to enroll macs cuz we use MDE. My guess would be that it reports back the basics but, assuming your traffic isnt going through a proxy, it wont report web usage and whatnot, if thats what youre worried about.

We have corp builds which, when WFH, everything goes through the VPN and back out of our web proxy. The dev machines, mainly macs, just have a VPN to access resources but web traffic and whatnot just goes straight through whatever youre connected to.

Is it their device? If it is, you're pretty much tied to whatever they decide. Ultimately, it doesn't belong to you.

If it's not and it's a BYOD, you probably still have to follow policy, but you could probably ask for a work device instead and not install things on your own and not use it for work.

Fwiw, this is a work Mac I'm typing on now, with MDM and Insight Agent on it. No one is looking at my web logs.

There'd probably be stuff flagged (to me, lol!) if I went to Pornhub or something on it, but people don't still do things like that on a work device, do they? Surely not...

I got some eye-wateringly expensive TP-Link mesh devices to sort out problems with my wifi at work (thick walls). These things are atrocious. Obligatory online account, can't configure anything if there's no internet already connected, horrible convoluted phone app and useless browser interface, no options to speak of.

And to boot, they didn't solve my thick wall problem. One of the computers disconnects from the closest AP in a specific location and connects to one very far away for some reason resulting in loss of transfer for 5+ secs and much degraded perf afterwards.

Fucking pieces of shit. My wifi is better than it was before, but I'll be unloading them as soon as I stop needing them (hopefully in some 6 months time).

I mean, they arent going to beam through a thick wall, they arent magic. They would need a node either side of a door or window in it if you cant hardwire any of them.

And you can stop them roaming. There is a toggle per device that says 'mesh' or something which disables node roaming. I had to turn that off on one of my Sonos speakers that kept jumping nodes and crapping itself.

Assuming that those ones support wired backhaul, of course. Even then my mesh requires the nodes to be directly connected if you want it to work (ie, not via a switch etc) and I believe that this is common with the consumer units.

Any Linux / Raspberry Pi geeks in here?

I'm using a proprietary app on my Raspberry Pi 4.

The app has a bug where after a certain amount of time it slows to a crawl. It doesn't fully crash, it just starts performing sub-optimally. The fix is to kill the process and reopen it.

There is a flag in the apps console output I could use to determine that the problem has occurred: "Time taken to process image --249" (249 being the maximum it reports).

Is it possible to set up a .sh file to monitor strace for this process and then kill the process and re-open it? I've done plenty of Googling but I am out of my depth.

I would prefer not to write the strace to a text file and then read from that file. The console output from the application updates 60~ times per second and this would quickly ruin the SD card.

My instinct is to loop through the 10 most recent entries in the strace and look for a string match, but I can't figure our the syntax for that nor if it's even possible.

Oops, this passed me by completely, sorry for only now seeking out the thread. It’s an office, but in an old house. Thick brick walls everywhere.

I can’t lay cables without messing a lot of the place up and closing’s not an option right now. Believe me, I’d much rather have cables than this radio wave gomorrah.

Edit: Oh, this is old and you already asked on stack. I'll stop thinking about this now.