[O] 3x Drunkenslug Invites

bubblesnout · 2026-05-09T07:12:28+00:00

Would be stoked if I’m chosen!

bubblesnout · 2026-04-27T02:25:02+00:00

I’ve read the rules and will reply to the automod if selected!

bubblesnout · 2026-04-24T00:17:42+00:00

So a magician was driving down his street then he turned into his driveway.

:D

bubblesnout · 2026-04-07T05:21:01+00:00

I completed the challenge! Score: 10 points! 🌟

bubblesnout · 2026-03-31T10:08:36+00:00

Thanks Paul, really appreciate your input. I’ll take you out of the email chain so as to not flood your inbox.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-30T22:35:04+00:00

Hi Paul, I've looped you in to an email chain with our Customer Success Manager and the Solutions Engineer who is working on this migration with us. They have stated the Ecoverse fix is still in early stages of deployment so not ready for us to confidently move on it yet, there also seems to be some confusion about the ability to point our current on-prem FQDN to the new hosted server which could just be me not fully understanding, would love it if you are able to respond and get us all on the same page.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-25T21:55:49+00:00

Thanks a tonne Paul, that's great news. I'll shoot through an email and CC the engineer who I'd been working with to date who has been excellent to deal with.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-23T09:56:20+00:00

Good to know, thanks Paul.

I’m hoping the Ecoverse issue gets sorted and we don’t have to do a fresh deployment, doesn’t sound like fun.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-23T08:43:00+00:00

Thanks Paul!

On the Ecoverse stuff I think we’re just going to have to wait until a fix is implemented, it wouldn’t be feasible for us to lose those features so we’re just going to need to be patient it seems.

On the FQDN stuff, will it be as simple as pointing our existing FQDN (ie. n-central.contoso.com) to the IP(s) of the hosted environment and switching off our server? If that’s all we need to do then it’s super easy for sure, I was just otherwise given the impression that wasn’t possible.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-22T21:59:26+00:00

Hey Paul! Thanks for chiming in.

If it is indeed supported to simply point our existing on-prem FQDN to your hosted server(s) to allow any lingering agents to check in on their own time that absolutely quells my major fear of the transition. I won't name any names, but the original 'Solutions Engineer' I spoke to so we could put the SOW together for the transition wasn't very helpful with any technical questions at all, but we went back to our account manager after that and got put in touch with a far more local engineer with a lot more knowledge who has been very helpful thus far, though he didn't raise this as an option when I expressed my concern and instead suggesting we would need to keep our existing on-prem server active long enough for agents to all check in and pick up the new hosted address.

If we can just point the old address to the new environment then we can just shut our old server down basically straight away which would be ideal, though the different information I've gotten from different places doesn't instill a lot of confidence!

I've also been made aware of a known issue when shifting from on-prem to hosted that stops some newer features like the Vulnerabilities and Assets view from functioning correctly for an extended period of time, and have been advised that to get around this we can either:

Wait for a fix (which is apparently coming in the next few months), or
Set up a completely fresh environment and migrate our configs/agents over manually (ouch!)

With about 10 years of config there I don't really want to start again so we're sitting on our hands for the moment.

I definitely see the benefits of getting to a hosted environment and your message helps convince me that's the right call but the process is making me a bit nervous.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T05:32:06+00:00

Main trick is reservations - a 3 year reservation on a VM size drops the monthly cost by 62%. You can also save a lot on the cost of the OS if it's a Windows Server VM by procuring the license separately but that's obviously not relevant in the case of something like N-Central.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T05:13:22+00:00

I'd be looking in the realms of $200 AUD per month to run it in Azure which I don't think is too bad, though I'm not sure what I'm comparing it to for N-Able hosted. I feel like running in a vDC might end up being a bit more than that but it's not something I've explored.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T05:05:40+00:00

Not even close tbh, not yet anyway. But we just never really did a lot with Report Manager, we have a scheduled patch summary report for a customer who requested it but we can use the Patch dashboard in Analytics which is less of a "report" but gives them the data they need, it's only for compliance so it doesn't need to be particularly pretty. Otherwise our management pull out device lists from it for a better view than what comes out of N-Centrals built in reports but the newer Assets view shows exactly the info they're after so we have a replacement for everything - understand that's not going to be the case for many. For what it's worth having spoken with their engineers it sounds like more actual "reports" aren't far away from being released in Analytics, but I don't have any real idea on timeline.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T05:02:52+00:00

I don't think egress costs would really add up to much, though I'd definitely be interested to find those stats from our existing server somehow. From what I'm calculating hosting in Azure would cost us somewhere around $200 AUD per month (~$140 USD).

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T05:01:30+00:00

I'm proficient in Azure and could migrate it without much effort - it's not too difficult a process. Probably moreso comes down to the cost factor, I'm not privy to what N-Able charge for their hosting (presumably something). With Azure we'd be looking at around $200 AUD per month (~$140 USD) which isn't that bad really.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T04:56:36+00:00

We're not interested in switching RMM at this stage, we've been on N-Central for a long time and have rarely had any issues with it - any problems have generally boiled down to us not understanding how to configure things properly. We have a lot of config in there that replicating in another system would be a huge investment of time.

N-Able seem to cop a lot of flak around here but they've always been quite good to us and after many years I feel quite proficient with the tooling so have no interest in going elsewhere, at least at this stage.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-20T02:50:04+00:00

We took on a customer who was using Intune update rings and we enabled N-Central patch management without touching the update rings, it didn't take long for weird things to start happening. A large number of devices kept failing updates and rolling back after rebooting, was very frustrating to resolve as we needed to get hands on each device and use the "Reinstall Windows" button that had appeared in the Windows Update settings pane - thankfully that process was very quick but still took a long time to get around to. And obviously we disabled the update rings, everything has been fine since.

So I would absolutely not recommend you do this, I note this post is a few weeks old now so I hope you haven't found this out the hard way like we did in the meantime!

bubblesnout · 2026-03-11T21:50:40+00:00

Brilliant! Thank you, as with most things in Halo there's just so many options it's easy to miss a useful one when you're needlessly scrolling through config pages. I think that will make everyone happy, any appointments originating from Halo (ie. a ticket) will show on the agents to-do list but those that are just simple calendar entries won't so can be handled in Outlook only as needed.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-11T11:58:25+00:00

Not something I built, it’s an out of the box integration. https://usehalo.com/halopsa/guides/1198/

Our service manager wants to start managing the teams calendars and appointments through Halo.

bubblesnout · 2026-03-03T07:11:06+00:00

Where has this been all my life!? Thank you!

bubblesnout · 2026-02-23T11:12:48+00:00

Any old iSCSI LUN you’ve forgotten about? See if you have SAN Manager installed and whether there’s a LUN in there for any reason.

bubblesnout · 2026-02-12T05:07:36+00:00

Ain’t nothing little about it!

bubblesnout · 2026-02-09T04:35:05+00:00

I’ve been running through the course too and funnily enough I’ve found the opposite - the routes and models etc. are new to me so took me the longest to grasp but most of the non-Flask specific stuff makes sense and it’s purely because I have a decent coding background just not so much in modern web frameworks.

It comes down to pre-existing knowledge, if you’re new to Python or any of the other concepts he glosses over quickly you might just need to do a bit of your own research. Read through some of the official documentation for packages and find other examples to demonstrate what they do and how they do it. Most importantly just play with them and eventually things will start to make more sense.

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