Comments for Gyrate Dot Org

Comment on Kaseya Monitoring Sucks by Declan

Declan — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:51:01 +0000

Hi Guys,

I’m trying the Kaseya Product at the moment, we are a solution provider to small companies and I’m looking for a product to meet their needs. I have looked at other products such as level platforms, heroix etc. From a budgetary and business models the kaseya appears to resemble closet what Im looking for.

Technically though I have to ensure it will do what it’s supposed to. I dont want my techs flooded with useless information which eventually they will ignore .. and then miss something crucial.

I do agree with SNMP being issues and also the Remote control is pretty poor.. it’s much too slow. But to be fair most of these products don’t seem to be built for MSP’s.. to date kaseya seems the closest I’ve found.

As i’m just demoing the product at the moment I’m trying to get some overall research to see how others find it in production but I’m having some difficulty getting info.

Any pointers/comments would be great.

Comment on Set Passwords as Non-Expiring on the Windows Command Line by Thom Blake

Thom Blake — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:28:11 +0000

It’s funny how MS likes to claim things aren’t there sometimes. Like in Windows XP home, you can access the “users and groups” mmc but Windows says “sorry, you can’t use this in XP home”.

Comment on Kaseya Monitoring Sucks by andrew

andrew — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:15:23 +0000

You are right that in the latest version of Kaseya ActiveX is not required anymore and the user can download and run an executable. My mistake. However remote assistance is still garbage because the remote user needs local administrator rights to run. Instead of fixing this, the Kaseya programmers put this in the web interface:

“Attention standard users! Administrator privileges are required to request remote assistance.
On Vista, right mouse click on Internet Explorer and start it by choosing the menu selection Run As Administrator.
On all other systems, be sure you are logged in as a user with administrator privileges.”

I read this as “We are too lazy to fix our broken code. Kaseya remote assistance will not work in all cases, so keep your fingers crossed.” How hard is it to fix this? Not very:

The RealVNC server program (winvnc4.exe) that is included in the Kaseya remote assistance agent listens on port 5900. This can run as a limited user. RealVNC picks up its settings from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/RealVNC/WinVNC4, but it also accepts a wealth of command-line options (try winvnc4.exe -h). So it is as simple as changing your script/code that starts winvnc.exe, but it is easier to write a warning that says “administrator privileges are required”.

Comment on Kaseya Monitoring Sucks by Mike

Mike — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:02:15 +0000

anon: dont tell me “they are great” on monitoring until you address at least one of the issues i’ve listed above. otherwise, you make yourself sound like a very uninformed person (which i am assuming is why you posted anonymously in the first place).

if anyone has actual solutions for me, i’m all ears. im not here to bash kaseya for the hell of it. i have work to do, and i would honestly love to know how other msps have been dealing with these issues.

Comment on Kaseya Monitoring Sucks by anon

anon — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:20:22 +0000

Shows that there are myths. Remote Control utilizes 5 different methods and activex is not necessary. A url link can be clicked to direct download a dll that initiates the connection.

On monitoring, they are great. They listen and have opened up monitoring to unlimited events and alarms. If you are a shoddy msp you will flood the system with millions of events in minutes but as I understand it they are going to add some protections for those situations. They do listen.

Comment on Thoughts on GUI Automation by Mike

Mike — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:39:01 +0000

i deleted it.

Comment on Thoughts on GUI Automation by Thom Blake

Thom Blake — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:22:16 +0000

Was that an ad?

Comment on Windows 2008 Telnet (not SSH) Server by Thom Blake

Thom Blake — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:16:26 +0000

Why should it matter what windows does? If you’re setting up a server, use unix. If your company insists on using windows and can’t be convinced otherwise by their own experts, find a company that isn’t trying to kill itself.

Comment on Kaseya Monitoring Sucks by andrew

andrew — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:16:56 +0000

Their remote assistance is a joke too. It works fine if you’re trying to remote to a machine that has the agent already installed, but if it doesn’t you will be explaining to the user how to install an ActiveX control. Good luck with that. Also installing the activeX control will not work unless the user is a local administrator… I ran into someone who wasn’t and they needed my help. I wasn’t able to help them thanks to Kaysea.

Why not just do what everyone else does and have the user download an executable? Because the programmers are half-wits who have never tried to remotely assist a user using their own code. Who the hell uses activeX anymore? Use GoToAssist or PCHelpware instead, they know what they’re doing when it comes to remote assistance. If you’re going to implement a feature in your product do it right or don’t do it at all.

Comment on Windows 2008 Telnet (not SSH) Server by andrew

andrew — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:24:37 +0000

Cisco does the same thing with telnet… SSH is new for them. do you expect MS to jump in and use SSH? at best they will add their own (incompatible) changes to SSH and call it something else.

“Those who don’t understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.” – Henry Spencer

It’s a shame we will all have to support this garbage… I think MS should just roll out Xenix again and be done with it. Unix is for servers, Windows is for…playing solitair. they could even do what Novell did with Netware — have a Linux base (Xenix in MS’s case) and have the Netware (Windows Server) services run on top of that.