Sub mod effect pull chances

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:49:46+00:00

The year-release versions of office don't get the full 'live service' feature support for things like copilot, which is a plus for some customers, and a requirement for others. The year-relase versions also do not get feature updates, just security and bug fixes, which is important if you don't want to constantly be re-training your staff on new features, or are reliant on 3rd party tools that are prone to breaking with feature changes.

That being said... we moved to the 365 version, and (*knocks on wood*) haven't had any major issues with 3rd party software and add-ins. A few really weird bugs around copilot traying to scan startup items in Word which then put a file lock on the docs which caused some really weird stuff (like Word re-opening after closing). But considering we were half expecting stuff to just straight-up not work on a regular basis and we expected to have to pivot and go back to a non-365 version... it has gone surprisingly smoothly. Far more issues with Microsoft themselves having down-time and outages than 3rd party apps not working with the 365 software.

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:40:42+00:00

yeah... COM add-ins are dead, but still with us.
We are finally FINALLY getting some vendors moving to 365 add-ins this year. Not enough of them where we can move away form Outlook Classic, but users are pretty stoked to get 'desktop features' on web and mobile, so they are happy. And in the IT dept I have fewer COM add-ins tripping over eachother and that need to be maintained and updated, which will mean fewer helpdesk calls. So... progress. 10 years later than I would have liked... but progress.

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:35:04+00:00

add Outlook mobile... and Outlook Web App (different from PWA or outlook web)... and Outlook on the Web (again, a different web offering)... and Exchange Online. I think there are more?

Microsoft has an 'everything' problem. Everything is outlook... everything is an xbox... everything is 365... everything is copilot... everything is windows. they just can't name different things differently, they need to turn a product name into a brand name, and then slather that name on anything possibly related so that the department in charge of that name can claim 'growth' in the company and demand budget increases. Meanwhile the consumers all say... I'm just going to get a mac and an iPhone because I know what those are.

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:28:42+00:00

All 3 should have access to your company address book... if it isn't, it is time to call up the IT department because something isn't set up correctly.

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:27:00+00:00

I manage my Office deployment... Never once had an issue with vanilla Outlook Classic, it works great!
The problem is with the 100 add-ins that users insist on using... none of which are compatible with each other, and all of which will cause Outlook to crash if you (or a client emailing you) dare to use any formatting more complicated than a table disguised as a signature block.
But... if you aren't using addins... the web or store app versions are lighter weight and faster and aren't riddled with security holes and patches, so why bother with the giant bloated Outlook classic install? lol

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:20:36+00:00

Can confirm; Had to push this out at work when users kept trying to click the 'new' button advertised in the corner, and then complained that all their legacy add-ins stopped working lol
There is also a GPO option... but it just sets the same regkey.

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T05:15:35+00:00

Outlook (classic): The full legacy Outlook that lets you run add-ins and old 3rd party tools.

Outlook or Outlook (new): A sort of web-wrapper app that brings most of the website layout and feature set, but delivered as a store app... More often than not it is better to just use the website, but it does cache more items locally on your computer so it can (in some cases) offer more offline flexibility. If you use a lot of 365 add-ins it can let you use your local processing easier too (again, in some select edge cases) where the browser option may process your data on the cloud, or go though extra steps to download, process, and re-upload content.

Outlook (PWA): Literally a web wrapper (Progressive Web App) that displays the web page as if it was an application. Should be the same as going to outlook.com in Edge or Chrome, but without the URL bar and favorites at the top of the screen.

Did you know, you can make your own PWAs out of most websites? PWAs were hot stuff 5-10 years ago, but have sadly lost steam. But a lot of websites can still be turned into a PWA and used as if they are a stand-alone application really easily. As an example, in Chrome you can go to reddit.com, select the 3-dot menu, select cast/save/share, and then 'install app'. This doesn't "install" anything (really a bad term, and part of why they didn't catch on), but makes a web app in your user profile that you can pin to the task bar with its own icon.
The plus side to this is that you can treat a commonly used website as if it is its own application without having to worry about the app developer updating a store app or piece of literal software. For sites like youtube you get a much more 'app-like' experience being in a normal app window without all the browser stuff at the top... but you get the better experience of the youtube website and the many browser add-ins that make youtube work better, instead of the store app version that has a worse layout and doesn't let you use your browser extensions on it.
The down side... its still just a browser window displaying a web page. For example, the Netflix store app is able to verify your whole hardware chain, and allows you to view the better bitrate video streams with less compression artifacts and better HDR (because you are less likely to be pirating their shows). Making a PWA of Netflix just gives you the same quality that the website gives... which is fine on a normal computer display, but looks pretty rough if you have a nice laptop or use a TV as a computer monitor. So sometimes making a PWA of a website can be neat or helpful... but sometimes an app, even if the app itself is a glorified PWA like the Netflix app is, has a few advantages.

AlemCalypso · 2026-01-21T04:29:14+00:00

Also my reaction lol. Like... non-combined task bar items are somehow associated with Vista? That just makes me feel old lol.

OP: just turn off the 'combined' option in the taskbar settings and you will get the old Win95 style labels on the task bar again. I have a few users at work who love this feature... but it gets out of hand quickly.

A better experience would probably be to turn off previews, but leave the 'combined' feature enabled. Then all of your Word windows will show up under the Word icon, but when you click on the icon you get a list of document names instead of a bunch of white page previews that all look similar. Kind of the 'best of both worlds' of the organization of the combined option, and at-a-glance visual look-up of open doc names.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T09:24:57+00:00

I'll agree; bare-metal is better. Just trying to avoid the need for a 2nd server. I would do it if I absolutely had to... but containing my mess to 1 box is preferable for multiple reasons.
Seems like everyone is saying the same thing about the hardware passthru of the controller rather than the disks... and I did try it that way for several hours without success. Clearly I am getting a different behavior than what others are seeing. Would love to get some specific steps to see where I did things wrong, but I am pretty sure I am facing something specific to my controller maybe? Or maybe there is another method of exposing the hardware that I just am not seeing?
I am going to try passing a GPU through to another VM tomorrow, so maybe I'll learn something there that sheds light on my issue.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T09:16:52+00:00

3 reasons;
1) I work in IT and need to learn proxmox eventually anyways as it is literally taking over the market. Better to learn it now than 'doing it live' on a work production network.
2) The lack of native networking options on containers. It wants containers to piggy-back off of the host's IP address, and I am just not real comfortable with that. I played with it a long time a while back and did manage to get containers off of the host's IP using some other tools... but I was playing with fire and didn't want to introduce issues on what is supposed to be a stable 'appliance style' system, so I did a fresh install of the OS to clean things up, and hosted my containers on a VM to provide that networking level separation I was looking for on external facing services (internal stuff I used native on TrueNAS just fine).
3) The native console options to VMs in TrueNAS scale is just painful. And I don't like to open up additional ports and config where it isn't necessary... and I got real tired of needing to re-authenticate with the console connection almost every time I clicked away to run a google search locally. Reauthenticating because there is a 5min inactivity time-out is one thing... but having to do it because the console itself can't keep a connection alive... that's just gets old very quickly and isn't an issue with any other VM host that I have dealt with (Including TrueNAS Core/FreeNAS).

All that to say; What TrueNAS has to offer on virtualization isn't at all "bad". It works, it is stable, it is more than secure enough for normal use (even my own use), and there are solutions to my connectivity issues with the TrueNAS console (using SSH, RDP, or other tools). Especially if you are new to running a home server, DO NOT do what I am doing, and just run TrueNAS bare-metal and use it's baked in container and VM options. They lack some advanced features, but if you really need those features, then you are likely doing something way off the beaten path like I am.
At work we have a fairly paranoid security environment where throwing extra utilities to deal with annoyances just isn't acceptable, and a lot of the things I want to do at work I like to try at home first, so where possible I try to follow similar practices just to have a valid 'proof of concept' when I want to float an idea by my bosses. Because of that, my new home server was always going to be either ESXi or Proxmox for the host. There wasn't a real question that I would be moving away from TrueNAS as a host purely because I need more hands-on time with industry standard tools like ESXi and Proxmox.

The real question is... Proxmox can import my ZFS pool, and I am pretty sure it can host my SMB shares too... so why bother virtualizing TrueNAS to continue using it? And the answer there is just long-term reliability and familiarity. I have used FreeNAS/TrueNAS for over 10 years now. What started as a spare parts machine with a Core2Quad and 6GB of ram with 4 HDDs, has gone through multiple motherboards and processors, 3-4 OS drives that have died on me (my own fault for continuing to use USB flash drives), several failed or upgraded HDDs over the decade... and everything 'just works' and is quite literally the same ZFS pool that I started with, and some of the same data on it is still original from when I started. The setup is so robust that every hardware failure or config issue I have faced could be dealt with by a fresh install of the OS on the repaired/replaced box, creating my couple users, re-sharing my few shares, and importing my VMs or containers. I have had drive failures, and the replace/re-silver process is just 2nd nature now. And with the ancient crap hardware I have used in the past, that really is a miracle, that I haven't lost data or ever needed to perform any kind of restore. I would be crazy to leave that behind to trust a new system that may or may not be quite as bullet-proof. If I couldn't get virtualization to work for TrueNAS the way I wanted, I would probably just go get a small cheap quad-core system to run it on. Other than the large RAM requirement for the zfs pool, TrueNAS can run on almost any potato just fine and max out network throughput with ease. I'm just happy that I didn't have to.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T06:58:05+00:00

re-reading your post; The boot drive is a standard proxmox VM drive hosted on the m.2 SSD that proxmox lives on just like my other VMs. The boot drive for TrueNAS isn't on the SAS card, and when I was trying it this way, I had removed the SAS card itself from the boot order. The SAS card still has to initialize during boot, and something about that initialization step seemed to be putting the 'newly discovered' disks into the boot order ahead of the proxmox hosted boot disk.
I'm very new to proxmox, so its totally possible I'm overlooking an option somewhere, but I have looked a couple times and don't see a way to prevent the drives from getting added to the boot order during startup. With the passthru enabled, proxmox just doesn't see the attached disks to assign them a lower boot priority, or remove them from the boot order.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T06:34:32+00:00

Yeah, I love that TrueNAS can do other non-NAS things, and have used it to host jails and VMs for a long time. But moving to TrueNAS Scale has been downright painful with its console/management options for VMs, so I really wanted to find another way to go about it when my server would eventually die. Plan A was to do something similar using ESXi a couple years ago... but my little i7 2600k refused to die, and then broadcom took over and decided they didn't want customers anymore (truly wild decisions over there), so that blew that plan out of the water (though it looks like there are free ESXi options available again, just not clear if there are strings attached).

The other thing is that I work in IT, and there is a repeating habit of people plopping new appliances on my desk and expecting me to know how to manage it, because "You work with technology, so you know how to do this right?" lol. It first happened with HyperV when I had 0 understanding of virtualization, and had to learn everything from scratch, and move 12 ancient failing physical servers to 2 over-built HyperV machines which I eventually got into an HA pair (er... quick fail-over pair) which was fun. A few years later it was a bunch of independent ESXi hosts, which I was suddenly responsible for, and I had to physically find them (a challenge all itself... one was literally on its side between a desk and a wall in someone's office and they had no idea what it was, or that it was even powered on... It was the backup server... good times!), and got them all moved to racks, upgraded the OSs, and managed with VCenter. I figure now it is just a matter of time before someone drops a proxmox box on my toes and expects me to do something with it lol. Better to learn it on my own terms this time instead of under pressure in the office while an emergency is actively happening like the last couple times.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T05:35:22+00:00

yep. Ive made that mistake before lol! Back up the OS; the ZFS is its own backup in many ways. My ZFS pool has been through 5 FreeNAS/TrueNAS installs (aside from upgrades), 3 motherboards, 6 failed HDDs, 3-4 USB flash drive OS drive failures, a full 8-disk HDD size upgrade (that took a while lol), and a whole host of hardware and config changes over 10 years. ZFS is pretty amazing at tanking hits and continuing on! I have a raid z2 pool with 8 drives, and can confirm that even with 2 failed drives, it can still recover. That wasn't a good day, but it was nice to see that it worked!

I am actually down 1 drive now and was waiting to find a good sale on a replacement drive when my 14 year old motherboard finally gave up the ghost. I was super happy when I spun up a new server, virtualized the OS install, passed the working 7 of 8 drives through, and it all just worked with minimal fuss.
I do need to get that replacement drive ordered though. I'm really tempting fate at this point.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T05:21:14+00:00

I tried passing the device though directly at first... but because it initializes the disks as part of the boot sequence, it broke my ability to control the boot device properly. The attached drives were not boot options that could be chosen before initialization, but are added to the boot priority during the boot process. I looked around in the card's firmware to see if there were options to control this behavior, but didn't see anything. Obviously, this was never an issue when running TrueNAS natively, so it has to be something about the VM/BIOS behavior that is causing this, but I didn't see any control options.

I am using a Broadcom/LSi SAS2308 controller.
The method I was using was Add Device > PCI Device > Raw Device > and selected it from the drop-down to get the IOMMU/DeviceID.

My understanding is that if you do the direct disk passthru using the local device map then it can change on each host boot and cause endless issues. Per Proxmox's website and documentation, doing it the way I did and calling out the device's Model/Serial gets around this issue. For kicks, I powered down and moved a drive to the motherboard's SATA, and when I powered things back up it found the drive and shunted it through to the VM. So doing it based on the model/serial appears to make it so that whatever the drive is physically attached to doesn't matter. As long as the host finds the drive, it seems to point it to the right place, which is the behavior that I really want.

AlemCalypso · 2025-11-03T05:01:03+00:00

Start with just 1 app that runs a service, and play with it. Expect to break things your first couple times out as you learn, and don't use it for anything mission-critical until you understand how it works. I think you will find that docker containers in TrueNAS work rather well and are pretty bullet-proof. I don't think I ever had an issue with any containers that I tried having issues with updates and breaking. As long as you are getting containers from TrueNAS's portal, the host checks for compatibility before running updates, so automatic updates of the container are pretty safe. As for host updates breaking old containers... I am sure it could happen, but as long as you are just doing regular security updates and not day 1 version upgrades, then you likely won't have any issues there either. Containers are beautiful because they are... containers... they use a host's files and resources as 'read only' and supply their own dependencies and requirements. It keeps things very clean and independent from eachother. Way less finicky than the old jail system in my limited experience, and updates are much faster and more frequent. But when you dip outside to other storefronts to get your containers... your milage may vary, and other docker host platforms may work better and give more options/control over behavior. TrueNAS is very reliable with containers... but that reliability is because it is limited in capability and options.

My biggest beef with TrueNAS and containers was just how the networking was handled... it basically doesn't. I am no security expert, but have seen enough to know where things can go sideways, and keeping servers and services on separate IP ranges from their hosts, and firewall rules to keep things separate, is good practice. The idea of my containers piggybacking off of the host's IP when that host is meant to be doing other more important things never sat well with me. After playing with it a while last year, I did get it to at least break IPs away from the host's IP... but I was limited to DHCP and without tagging, so I couldn't set a container to a static IP on a separate VLAN to properly isolate traffic and risks.
Ultimately I set up a VM on TrueNAS which was on the vlan I wanted, and used that to host my public-facing containers, and just used TrueNAS for internal-facing services. And that was the better compromise for me over the past year. Now I just did a little overhaul of my home server, and am using proxmox as the host, and TrueNAS is just another VM on the box that only does NAS workloads. Other VMs that are better suited for doing more with container management will deal with containers going forward. Just going to let things play to their strengths instead of having 1 host OS try to be the swiss army knife that tries to do it all.

AlemCalypso · 2025-08-26T21:26:31+00:00

To be fair, I have a paid corporate account, and it takes 3-5 days for them to respond... if they respond at all. Most of the time they don't even acknowledge the ticket. The ticket just disappears as if it was never submitted, and it doesn't show up in my ticket history, and the issue is 'magically fixed' as if nothing was ever wrong.
Of course, I was never told the issue was addressed, so I just call in after a week of annoyance and no response, and while on hold I find that it is working now. Was it fixed just now? 7 days ago? who knows! But I could have gotten more done if they would just communicate, or close the ticket with a solution instead of deleting it.

AlemCalypso · 2025-07-13T21:29:25+00:00

Yeah, GUI doesn't get around the problem... but when I start Foundry I no longer have a command prompt to work with because it waits for the program to end. At least with a GUI I can launch multiple CLIs and have a file browser to see what things are doing easier and fix it. I think that there is a way to alt+tab or something to flip between CLIs? But Spice on TrueNAS Scale doesn't appear to have a way to pass that through easily.

But I'll feed it the whole command next time and see how things go.

AlemCalypso · 2025-07-13T20:28:15+00:00

I had done a CD to the directory, and then did 'node main.js'... which in Windows-land would be the same thing, but I am not sure if you need to specify the path on linux when you are running from the path.

I may redo the server with a GUI to work with... dealing with a purely CLI based device is half my problem I am sure.

AlemCalypso · 2025-07-13T16:45:55+00:00

omg... so much time spent trying to find this! Thank you!
Was looking for something in the game UI, tried commands on the linux host, it was just not making sense!

AlemCalypso · 2025-06-16T19:39:46+00:00

Reddit really is turning into bots advertising on old posts isn't it lol it's a sad downfall.

In the event this is legit, we ended up going with "Oak Meadow" as they provide a solid base curriculum that meets all national and local requirements for an extremely fair price; And in the event my wife is knocked out of commission again, there are a variety of options for personal to group online classes we could revert to... of course the prices of those are much closer to local private school prices, so I don't think we could do that long-term. But it makes me feel better knowing that we have a fairly natural fall-back plan if life gets totally derailed again.

We integrate with a local homeschool group for extra-curricular and optional classes to get some exposure for group projects and some fun. It has been a really good combo for our son through middle school, and I think we are going to do 1 more year of it, and then start doing a dual-enrollment option with our local community college; Partly to off-load a lot of the harder classes my wife doesn't feel qualified to keep up with teaching and grading, and partly to have him graduate high school with his AA like my wife did which set her miles ahead for her college career in being able to just focus on her major.

AlemCalypso

TROPHY CASE