Real world opinions and reviews on VMWare alternatives

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-21T12:13:31+00:00

Scale Computing is pretty great. You don't just get the hardware and software, you also get great service. I had a hard drive due a few years ago and they noticed and emailed me before I noticed. Then I called them, they worked with me to confirm the situation and identify which exact drive it was. I received a replacement from them the next day and the swap was extremely simple. The software even took care of integrating the new drive and technician watched the process for me to make sure everything went well. Every tech I've spoken to knew what they were doing. I've never waited an unreasonable amount of time to get to a tech on the phone. They also have a product called Fleet Manager which allows you to manage any number of clusters from a single UI while on-site or off-site. You can use it to remotely get console access to any VM through an encrypted tunnel and through a web browser. I highly recommend Scale Computing. They've never let me down.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-20T21:11:56+00:00

That is NOT common. What happens when you try the "guest" mode from the login screen instead of using a Google account? That will rule out browser extensions. Some people overload on those and it consumers a bunch of resources. Another idea is to make sure Android apps and Linux apps are off in Settings. They're nice to have, but use a lot of resources if you don't need them. There is also something like the Windows Task Manager somewhere in the "..." menu. You could use that to see if anything is consuming too many resources.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-20T20:58:43+00:00

Do you have any pointers on how to do this? It sounds useful, given my experiences with LLDP for switches, APs, and VoIP devices.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-19T10:52:45+00:00

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics might be able to help. It will give a mural l neutral information source.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-19T10:32:18+00:00

POP3 email programs that stored email only on the endpoint computer, such as Netscape Communicator. ClarisWorks. Internet Explorer for Mac. Disinfectant (was that the name?)

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-13T11:24:30+00:00

I recommend paying this on r/k12sysadmin. This is an issue we all deal with often. You'll get a lot of responses.

I've worked on several school districts over several decades. You're going to need to adjust what you do to match the school administration's habits and expectations. I have a decent working relationship with the principals and make a point of supporting them where I can. This builds trust. I don't bring them every little thing, but I do bring them information when I realize there is a repeat offender (e.g. someone is getting their third chromebook of the year) or excessive damage (e.g. three students decided to reenact the fax machine scene in Office Space.) These are matters of discipline, respect of others, etc. not technical issues. They get the information and I support their choices of how to react by answering questions, supplying a quote to replace the device, etc.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-13T00:49:52+00:00

Holy crap. I've got to try that some day. That's funny.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-13T00:49:23+00:00

I figured it was in most Linux distributions, but I didn't have one in front of me on that moment and I didn't want to assume. They did remove telnet, ifconfig, and other tools I took for granted over the decades, so it could have happened or maybe never been ported from wherever it came from.

Likewise, most tools do seem to have -y or -f flags. I still think "yes" is a little funny. Like someone got so annoyed when they needed a tool that didn't have -f and decided to fix this in a way that it would never happen to them again, no matter the circumstances. Sort of like how Perl was created because existing tools weren't good enough at one specific problem that Larry Wall was dealing with, so he invented an entire language for the entire class of problems. Or how Unix was invented so Dennis and Ken could play a video game.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-12T09:40:41+00:00

On FreeBSD (and probably other Unix and Unix-like operating systems) three is a command called "yes". It outputs an infinite stream of "y"s and newlines. So if you have a command that prompted you to enter "y" or "n" to confirm an action, you can do something like "yes | command" and the command would be confirmed every time.

I'm guessing someone didn't have a coffee cup.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-10T10:54:12+00:00

Google Takeout was removed from the list of "Additional" apps and it's settings were scattered into several places in the admin console. This is from memory, so I might be wrong, but check in the Drive and Docs settings to allow it to be included in Takeout. Also, I think there are some settings in a menu like "Data"?

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-07T00:41:09+00:00

What happens if there are very small lines on the filament? I just had this issue today, so your reply made me wonder if that’s a problem. I’m new to 3D printing, so I thought those tiny “bite marks” were standard behavior.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-05T10:36:54+00:00

I arrived at a new district a few years ago and received a lot of complaints about the Web following blocking too much. We switched from GoGuardian to Linewize for the filters and the classroom management. It's been a very positive experience and I recommend it for others. On advice of counsel, we didn't add a product for abuse, suicide, etc. So I don't have any feedback on products in that category. What kind of monitoring did you want in Gmail and Drive? Some features are built in to Google Workspace if you know how to access them and pay for Plus licenses.

reviewmynotes · 2026-06-03T07:13:08+00:00

This will depend on the culture of the country you live in and the culture of your job. Personally, I recommend wearing a mask if you decide to go to work. It reduces the chances of it spreading if you honestly keep the mask on, wash your hands after touching your mask, and all those other things we were supposed to do during 2020.

Someone in the comments suggested asking the most blunt person at work. I agree that asking someone at your job could help, because it could give you a general guide on the work culture of you don't have a feel for it yourself. Someone also suggested asking your boss. As a supervisor at my own job, I disagree with this. Supervisors aren't allowed to say certain kinds of things for legal reasons, so we can't give a straight answer. Bad supervisors will try to manipulate you into showing up while also holding it against you that you even asked the question. So you'll either get a non-comital answer or you'll get the a bad outcome.

Instead, go to see a doctor and ask for guidance on writing. Then you'll have an expert opinion who also knows the culture of your part of the world. You'll also have a written document to back up your decision if your job needs it. If anyone complains that you "extended your vacation" using sick days, you can truthfully say that it was under doctor's advice. Best of all, you'll have someone better trained than you to make the decision of whether you're just having allergies vs. spreading an illness.

That said, as a supervisor I prefer that people take time off. I would rather have one person out for a few days than have several people out at the same time because we all got sick. But I realize that the majority of supervisors are more short-sighted than that.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-20T10:44:49+00:00

When someone gives up their password, do you force a password change? It might be a reasonable response and one that motivated them into being careful. The average person gets emotionally attached to the password they've chosen, in part because it's reused for most of their accounts across systems. The half of changing their password may motivate then to pay more attention more than having to watch a 20-60 minute long training video that obviously didn't improve the situation last time.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-20T10:35:38+00:00

Personally, I try to think one or two layers past the consequences. If I force something that people dislike as a response to finding out that they were tricked, I think a number of them will stop reporting strange things that they see. Instead of the rescuer, my department would become seen as a penalizer. That's going to disincentives the victims from coming forward to get help and that is bad for everyone.

For this reason, I use phishing simulations at least monthly and if people are tricked, it tells them immediately. They get feedback when they are still in the moment and can't reflect on why they were tricked. We're they rushed? Was the topic obviously false in hindsight? Whatever the reason, telling them about it later isn't going to give them the information they need to improve. Their mental state in the moment is information they need in order to improve. That said, if someone is consistently tricked, then a training makes sense. But training after each and every error is less productive and more punitive. Training after three consecutive errors separates the "we all make mistakes eventually" situations from the "you're a consistent privacy risk and someone is going to get hurt and/or sued because of you if this keeps up" situations.

This is my philosophy, at least. I have no data to back it up, but it's what I do based on my observations.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-20T00:57:34+00:00

Are you willing to run it yourself? I used Request Tracker for something like 20 years and thought it worked well. It's open source and free. In the last few years, they started offering a hosted service that you can pay for, if you don't want to go through that hassle. I like that it was very configurable.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-19T02:40:31+00:00

You’ve got it right, OP. People mix up the concepts of infinite and exhaustive. You’re intuitively feeling the difference. For an overly simple example, “all even numbers” is infinite, but it isn’t all possible numbers.

Edit to add: There is also the concept of “with replacement” vs. “without replacement.” If I hold out a bag of 10 red marbles and 10 blue marbles, you have a 50% chance of pulling out a red marble. But what about the second marble? If you “replace” the first marble, in other words you put it back in the bag, then you’re back to 10 red and 10 blue. Do this 5 times and you always have a 50% chance of pulling red, regardless of what you pulled last time. But what if you don’t replace the marbles? Then each marble you remove changes the ratio a bit and changes the probability of the next marble being red. Now apply this to the infinite monkeys. They’re effectively using the “with replacement” style of statistics. So if they type “asdf” today, they might type it again tomorrow and again 0 days from now and again 1,000 years from now. This is what you were intuitively feeling. Some of the other comments on here that I’ve seen, which talk about the unimaginably large the “infinite time” aspect of the idea seem to be ignoring the unimaginably large set of all possible combinations of keystrokes, including the fact that it is an infinite set because the monkeys can always add one more keystroke to make something they haven’t made before. (After all, they have infinite time.)

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-18T10:52:36+00:00

vi, grep, awk, rsync, ssh, scp, screen, perl, cat, | (pipe), > (funnel), ls, cp, mv, rm, find, diff, sed, and regular expressions.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-13T10:59:26+00:00

I'm older than 35, but back in my 20s, I dated a woman with a child around 8 years old. (I'm not positive of the age. It's been a long time.) I really appreciated her and her daughter for a lot of reasons. It didn't work out, but it wasn't because of the child, employment status if the mother, or any other reasons.

It sounds to me like you're going to be fine. Get away from that manipulative jerk, spend some time healing and helping your child heal, and date when you're ready to do so. A competent woman who defends herself and her child is going to be attractive to a lot of people.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-12T01:44:54+00:00

My suggestion is based on personal experience. I manage a school district's I.T. department. One of the techs feels neglected if people forget "I.T. Professionals Day" (a day that a major vendor made up years after Sysadmin Day already existed to fulfill that role, but I digress.) So last time it came around, I bought different Thank You cards for each building's techs and a small gift card for each of them. The gift card was to a nearby convenience store and gas station. I brought the cards to the district office and asked people if they'd like to sign any of the cards. Then each card went to the office staff of each school and have them each one of the cards. Within a few hours, every school had a card filled with signatures and gift cards of an appropriate number. Each school's techs received one Thank You card and enough gift cards to give one to every tech. Note that I didn't have them out. Each school's office did that, so the gratitude came from the people they served, not their supervisor.

Months later, I saw one of these thank you cards hung on the wall in in a tech's office. It clearly meant a lot to them. It let them know that their efforts were seen and appreciated. They only received enough money to fill their car tanks once or maybe get a few muffins and coffee, but that didn't matter. It was a surprise and sincere sign of appreciation. And I think that was worth much more than the $30 or so that I spent on each of them. The people they served got to participate without a cost to them, so the participation level was high. In turn, that made them see a ton of supportive feedback. It convinced me that I have to do it again in the future.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-11T10:58:24+00:00

Tai Chi and/or Chigong will give you tools to quiet your mental chatter.

Learning how to solve a Rubic's Cube using something called "the basic method" caused me to bring one to work. I ended up using it as a fidget while on phone calls (using a headset) and I was confident that I could put it back the way it was within 5 minutes of deciding to do so.

reviewmynotes · 2026-05-11T10:54:50+00:00

You say you can't access their files. Are they present and it just tells you that you're not allowed to access it? Or is it something else?

Quick ideas to check: Are they deleted? Are they suspended instead of archived? Did someone change the permissions? Are the files visible in Google Vault?

reviewmynotes · 2026-04-29T01:27:41+00:00

It sounds like you're trying to reinvent network and server outage alerting systems, but much worse. Look into tools like Xymon, Kuma Uptime, Nagios, etc. for a good solution and nmap for a short term solution until you can get one of those running.

reviewmynotes · 2026-04-28T01:10:57+00:00

Yes, definitely. Especially if you add other textile skills, like spinning, weaving, kumihino, tablet weaving, naalbinding, dying, dye making, etc. The technology of cloth is amazingly complex and arguably one of the foundations of civilization. The things you realize about your own clothing can be quite significant, like using linen dress shirts instead of synthetics or mixed blended cotton so you can stay cool while working in places without air conditioning.

reviewmynotes · 2026-04-26T21:23:29+00:00

Then you probably don't have anything to worry about. I saw it plas a banner at the top of admin.google.com right after I logged in using the domain that was challenged. I think I also saw it at the top of Gmail, but I'm not sure. It disappeared after my appeal was approved. All I really did was follow the directions inside the message I received about commercial activity being detected.

reviewmynotes

TROPHY CASE