node815
@node815@lemmy.world
- Comment on Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO 2 weeks ago:
In one way, I’m happy this is happening, in another way, I’m not - I’ve given well over 2 decades of my life to the call center way of living. Let me give you a sneak peak into what really happens in the daily life of a call center worker.
-
You live by the time on your telephone, it’s your punch in and punch out system in most centers. Don’t clock in more than 8 or 15 or whatever insane metrics they set past your clock in time else you will be considered tardy. This includes all breaks and clocking out.
-
If you are a first contact person and taking phone orders, your ‘talk time’ is measured. Anything more than the standardized 5 or 6 minutes is considered excessive and they tell you to move the calls along faster.
If you are customer service, your talk time is loosened but you are also the first and last contact the customer should have for the issue. -
Your phone calls are monitored and/or recorded (For Real!). If you are like me and hate to your your voice, woe be it to you when they play back your last call or two so you can hear yourself talking to the customer. If not recorded, then it is up to the monitoring person to be nice. You are then told what you need to do to speed up your talk time, or increase sales etc…
Telemarketing
Oh dear God, this is a life sucker and has the highest turnover on jobs. You quickly learn more about human nature in an odd sense. The sheer pressure on booking that next sale is insanely high and if you don’t meet the sales minimums for the day or even hour, you are sent home without pay. I worked for a company which sold HR Manual trials, I was never more relieved and happy to be fired when I was for not making the per-requisite sales quotas for the half day.
TIPS
I don’t think I’ve encountered a single call center rep in my years of service where a CSR decided that today, they would be a jerk. All we ever want to do is get through the day and earn our wages and go home.
One thing I will say with confidence, is everyone you work with has something in common, you aren’t there necessarily because you enjoy it, you are there because it puts food on the table and beats living off of unemployment benefits. It’s a thankless job.
If you receive great service from a call center rep (CSR) and are happy, politely ask to speak with their supervisor and when you do, be sure to leave them a good review. It doesn’t always help to do this after a bad call, but sometimes rebounding to a new agent by calling the company back and asking for a supervisor will make a big difference if you take issue with them about the poor quality of service you received.
Remember, if you can’t resolve an issue with a CSR, It’s not always that they don’t want to resolve the issue for you, their hands are probably tied and in fear of losing their job or being reprimanded, they simply won’t budge.
Kindness goes a long way with us as well, if you are respectful and kind, we reflect the same back to you and often have tools at our disposal to grant you an extra discount and/or savings. We genuinely want to see you happy!
ON THE OTHER HAND
If putting AI in front of the call centers will help screen out the most common issues, then by all means do it. Also, if the stupid bean counters out there which insist of outsourcing to third world countries as it’s cheaper, can find it to be more cost effective to use AI, and keep the jobs local to their country of operation, then I’m in favor of it.
-
- Comment on Thinking of building a database of "stuff" that I have at home + some other family households. Multiple accounts with private and shared inventories. 2 weeks ago:
Homebox - before we relocate - whenever that is, I will be printing labels and putting them under and behind my stuff, scanning it into there and then will use that to keep track of our items after the move to know what is in which box etc.
NocoDB Self Hosted (I use this for a few things) - started out with my network ip’s I have on my servers and ports for my containers and most recently a sleep log.
Just a couple there.
- Comment on WeatherStar 4000+ Emulator 4 weeks ago:
From their readme. I asked about that last night and he replied an pointed me to it. :)
Kiosk mode
Kiosk mode can be activated by a checkbox on the page. Note that there is no way out of kiosk mode (except refresh or closing the browser), and the play/pause and other controls will not be available. This is deliberate as a browser’s kiosk mode it intended not to be exited or significantly modified.
It’s also possible to enter kiosk mode using a permalink. First generate a Permalink, then to the end of it add &kiosk=true. Opening this link will load all of the selected displays included in the Permalink, enter kiosk mode immediately upon loading and start playing the forecast.
I didn’t see IIS mentioned, but I didn’t take a close look at the code. They give you a docker run command to set it up, so I converted it to a docker compose file so I can run it later. All of this is running on a Debian 12 system, so if IIS is needed, I’d wager that is if you are running a Windows setup.
I have mine embedded in Home Assistant now as an iframe using the Kiosk mode setting which works.
- Comment on WeatherStar 4000+ Emulator 4 weeks ago:
Looks nice! I set mine up and have it as an Iframe in Home Assistant. The app is a fork from github.com/vbguyny/ws4kp with his demo site here: battaglia.ddns.net/twc That version has the music we all came to know and love from back then.
- Comment on Looking for a reverse proxy to put any service behind a login for external access. 5 weeks ago:
Authentik is my IDP provider so I put it in front of all my publicly facing Apps which support OIDC login. For example, I can log into my Portainer instance from an external network, but to do so, I log into Authentik First which sends it to my service.
For the apps which support HTTP headers, like I said, Pomerium acts as the service which passes my credentials to the device. I admit - Authentik does this also without the need for Pomerium, (through their flow settings) but I found Pomerium to be much easier to set up for this than Authentik and haven’t looked back or felt the need to change it.
- Comment on Looking for a reverse proxy to put any service behind a login for external access. 5 weeks ago:
With that, I use Pomerium for apps which accept a HTTP Headers, for example, my Fresh Tomato firmware flashed router, it has a HTTP dialog. This allows me to login from the road if I need to manage something like rebooting it or updating firewall rules etc.
My access flow is this :
router.example.com —> Cloudflare Tunnel —> Pomerium IP —>Authentik —> Router’s Gui.
It works flawlessly. I don’t often use it, but when I do, it helps. I also had it enabled for AdguardHome but moved to Technitium DNS which I prefer and that doesn’t have the HTTP Headers so it’s not fully compatible with Pomerium that I’m aware of.
- Comment on Simple authentication for homelab? 1 month ago:
www.youtube.com/@cooptonian His Authentik videos are top notch and they (Authentik) have also had him make some for them. One of those videos, I can’t recall shows you how to do this, I think it may be the 2FA/MFA one. I use Authentik and can login with fingerprint login without using my UN/PW first. It’s pretty slick.
- Comment on Appreciation / shock at workplace IT systems 1 month ago:
I am a former IT Desktop drone…er…support worker… I used to swap towers for my local municipality back when Windows XP was being replaced with 7. I saw passwords on post-its attached to the monitor, mouse pad, and even under the keyboard or keyboard drawer (I had to get under desks to do the swap). Our policy was to remove those whenever we saw them and trash them in a different can across the building or a different one. They have a standard 90 day password cycle and most people couldn’t handle that. I would answer the phone often to 'unlock" their account after 3 attempts. My all time favorite when I would help an end user with software was when I would encounter someone’s “God Mode” icon for some of the registry hacks that used to float around. Everyone had Admin privileges (ironically), so it wasn’t really needed anyway.
Their primary server admins and IT folks in the main office were Top notch though. Never any downtime and the main security guy was very strong in making sure everything was adhered to. We, as desktop support didn’t have the master password to decrypt a laptop which was GPG protected and had to bring it to him if we had a user which locked themselves out. With great consternation, only a few machines would be allowed to XP and those were VLAN’d and isolated from the outside world.
The rest of the server admins handled everything with ease seemingly. The fun part was when they had a third party come in and do a security audit. No problems on the server side, but it wasn’t a success. They did the 'ol drop a flash drive randomly in different locations test. Knowing human nature, they knew someone would pick it up, plug it in and be baited with an excel file which looked like it had financials. Unbeknownst to the user, it sent a ping to their reporting server and the drive ID. Which was later reported back. They also did physical security penetration tests - walk in behind you type of thing. I remember seeing a group of guys non company ID badges try to follow me into the main IT office. I stopped them and asked who they were and what they wanted (this was a Govt building), and the look of confusion mixed with satisfaction from them that I stopped them was priceless. I let the head IT guy know who was at the door and left it up to them to unlock it for them.
I now work in a help desk position for a software company and miss those days of desktop support. But, I know for a fact that I.T. Guys an Gals don’t get enough recognition. They are the understated backbone of a company’s well-being especially when holidays and weekends are prime time for systems to fail and they are practically on call no matter what.
- Comment on This Week in Self-Hosted (15 March 2024) 1 month ago:
I am testing it and it seems to run every 5 minutes to sync. Handles standard IMAP and POP inboxes. No auth for main page, so they caution appropriately to avoid public facing web exposure. They are planning on adding more support for Gmail and the like:
github.com/bandundu/email-archiver/issues/6
It installs by default in debug mode which may or may not be a red flag depending on your security model.
The email search is fast, but could use work, I will say it is VERY early in development. But for downloading email for later storage, it should do. It stores your e-mails in a SQLite database in the same directory as the installer, so if you want to manipulate the compose file a bit, it should be able to point to your desired storage directory. With that said, I also was able to add a TZ= directive so my logs at least are a bit cleaner with timestamps to match my timezone, something they have not added.
If you wish to access this remotely before they add a public facing login, protect it with a SSO solution or other front facing login setup so it would not be accessible. Or securely access it via Wireguard, TailScale, or Headscale.
- Submitted 1 month ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 15 comments
- Comment on Proxmox vs. TrueNAS Scale 2 months ago:
I use Proxmox and don’t use Truenas. My setup is basically to install Cockpit on the host server via apt-get and then the 45 Drives cockpit-sharing plugin. This provides the NFS and Samba sharing I need and use. I host Home Assistant in a VM and Docker containers in a few LXC containers which host about 10 containers each. Then, in combination with tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ you can set up pretty much anything you need from there.
This is on in computer terms ancient, a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with 16gb Ram and software such as Authentik and Vaultwarden from different dedicated LXC containers. Never have any issues with overload of the system resources or running out of memory. It’s pretty much rock solid.
- Comment on What does your current setup look like? 2 months ago:
Tailscale is but since you already tried them, maybe headscale that’s supposed to be the self hosted version of Tailscale that someone wrote, so you have better odds at less latency! headscale.net
Zerotier? Not sure -https://www.zerotier.com/ can speak more to this.
- Comment on What does your current setup look like? 2 months ago:
If behind CGNAT and forwarding is not an option, Headscale, Tailscale or ZeroTier may be an option. I use Tailscale and it have ZERO forwarding on and can access anything on my network when connected through it. Think of these as Wireguard on Steroids. :)
- Comment on virtualizing PFSense. What else works besides ESXi for virtual networking? 2 months ago:
As Another Proxmox user - I’ve been doing well with it. I use these scripts for the LXC’s which has been fantastic:
I also can log into it from the web as it’s secured by Authentik, SSO OIDC login when Away from home and need to manage it. Rare! But the option is there! :)
- Comment on Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages 4 months ago:
Installed and no way to login, see this in your GH issues:
github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden/issues/415
This is a fresh install as about 10 minutes ago so using the :latest tag which I believe is the v 2.4.8 build. Signing up is possible and I was able to create my user account so that’s a good start at least. :)
- Comment on Planning on setting up Proxmox and moving most services there. Some questions 4 months ago:
Since you didn’t include a link to the source for your recommendation:
I’ve been on Proxmox for 6 or so months with very few issues and have found it to work well in my instance, I do appreciate seeing another alternative and learning about it too! I very specifically like Proxmox as it gives me an actual IP on my router’s subnet for my machines such as Home Assistant. So instead of the 192.168.122.1 it rolls a nice 192.168.1.X/24 IP which fits my range which makes it easier for me to direct my outside traffic to it. Does this also do this? Based on your screenshots, maybe not, IDK.
- Comment on Any simple alternatives to smoke ping? 5 months ago:
Probably the only true way of knowing is by setting up an EXTERNAL host somewhere on a VPS or maybe a reputable VPS provider. Then, on that provider, set up Uptime Kuma, or if you don’t want to go through that trouble and don’t mind a potential 10 minute gap in knowing, uptimerobot.com which checks every 5 minutes and sends an alert.
Once you do this, unless you have a Static IP, you will want to register with a DDNS provider so you can then tell the uptime service to ping your DDNS host which should echo back . If your internet is down, it won’t echo back and then it will trigger their alert. Of course, this won’t work if your IP changes, so staying on top of that is key unless you use a router which auto updates it which a lot do now days.
Or, if you use Cloudflare Tunnels, it can be configured to alert you when the tunnel is down or unhealthy (A.K.A. No internet or the server is rebooted).
- Comment on Replacing Cloudflare Tunnels with Tailscale? 5 months ago:
Understood! I have subnet routing enabled as well. First thing I did when I realized my phone couldn’t access my local server once connected to Tailscale. :)
- Comment on Replacing Cloudflare Tunnels with Tailscale? 5 months ago:
Simply put - I won’t risk making my work’s IT mad by logging into my machinename.tailscale-defined.ts.net. I don’t know if it’s blocked there, but you never know with IT polices and such. I’ve already been able to get through to my foo.example.com address without issue so I’m letting a sleeping dog alone so to speak.
Also, I think it’s easier to tell someone to go to videos.example.com than machinename.tailscale-defined.ts.net. :)
- Comment on Replacing Cloudflare Tunnels with Tailscale? 5 months ago:
Gotcha, so normal means of exposing services via reverse proxy. :)
- Comment on Replacing Cloudflare Tunnels with Tailscale? 5 months ago:
Nice! So, using the --accept-routes part, does that allow you to use a CNAME record to your funnel’s address (machine.tailscale-id.ts.net) ? I tried to do this and it failed to resolve for reasons of too many redirects.
- Comment on Replacing Cloudflare Tunnels with Tailscale? 5 months ago:
Thanks! That’s one part of the equation. I think. I have a lot to read up on, I just got set up about an hour ago with Tailscale so a lot to ingest.
Ideally, I want to replace my Wireguard connection which I am currently using (WG-Easy) to stay connected to my home network when I’m away from home so far that’s been hit/miss on 2 out of 3 phones I have running Android 13. I’m working on getting that to work with my new setup on Tailscale.
- Submitted 5 months ago to selfhosted@lemmy.world | 29 comments
- Comment on Unable to send test message from Sonarr to Gotify 5 months ago:
Don’t use Curl Just use the IP or domai it asks for then your token.
Mine works without issue. - Comment on NVR software recommendations that supports SSO/LDAP 5 months ago:
I just installed Pomerium and got it to integrate with AdguardHome and my router which both use basic HTTP, I also use Authentik. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but in short, this is what the config.yaml file needs to work to get it up and running:
The basic auth header for this is just UN: example PW: Password `– authenticate_service_url: verify.mydomain.com idp_provider: oidc idp_provider_url: Authentik.mydomain.com/application/o/pomerium/ idp_client_id: AUTHENTIK’S CLIENT ID idp_client_secret: AUTHENTIK’S CLIENT SECRET idp_provider_scopes: null routes:
-
from: agh.mydomain.com to: 192.168.1.200 ##Adguardhome address policy:
- allow: or: - email: is: myemail@mydomain.com set_request_headers:
blitter.se/…/basic-authentication-header-generato…
Authorization: “Basic ZXhhbXBsZTpwYXNzd29yZA==” #AdguardHome allow_websockets: true
-
from: router.mydomain.com to: 192.168.1.254 policy:
- allow: or: - email: is: myemail@mydomain.com set_request_headers:
blitter.se/…/basic-authentication-header-generato…
Authorization: “Basic ZXhhbXBsZTpwYXNzd29yZA==” #Router allow_websockets: true
cookie_name: pomerium cookie_secret: RANDOM 32 CHARACTER COOKIE= cookie_domain: mydomain.com pomerium_debug: true ` So, now when I go to my Adguardhome’s URL ( agh.mydomain.com), it auto directs to my Authentik instance, then upon matching my signed in email in the browser session, it transparently logs me into Adguardhome without issue. The same applies to my router’s login.
-
- Comment on Best free/cheap web host for DIY email 6 months ago:
I fully understand. :)
For hosting providers, you can always scout out deals on lowendbox.com or webhostingtalk.com, especially this time of year where black Friday deals are coming. Then, install something like HestiaCP (hesticp.com) and it will take care of the rest of the stuff like email and site hosting. Plus - with a VPS, you get a shiny new static IP you can use. :)
If you don’t want a site, that’s easy enough, just make an empty index.html page so if a curious email recipient wants to visit your site based on your email’s domain, they just get a blank page and move on.
Either that - go with a well known hosting provider which does basic cPanel hosting with low disk space.
I’ve never dared going the route of setting up an e-mail server at home mostly because of having a dynamic IP which rotates often enough to cause problems.
- Comment on Best free/cheap web host for DIY email 6 months ago:
I use Purelymail for my primary domain’s smtp and imap server. As long as you don’t use it for nefarious purposes like automated emails, then you should be fine. My primary use is to hook it into my services such as Vaultwarden, my uptime monitors (Uptime Kuma and StatPing) and Watchtower, so maybe less than 100 per month on it. They don’t seem to mind. They have great support via Discord and it’s been close to 1.5 years I think that I’ve been with them, no downtime.
- Comment on Is anyone here selfhosting the psono password manager? 6 months ago:
Testing so far - I got it to do the SSO with a little work. There’s a TON of file editing which needs to be done, so as long as you follow their docs, it should work okay. I was able to export my Bitwarden plain JSON file (I use Vaultwarden), and it was flawless. The server dumped all of the logins into a folder so you have to expand that to get to the main logins which if you had them in folders already, are there as “Sub Folders” if you will. You can move the folders one-by-one but not en-masse which may be a show stopper for some. Especially if you have many to move like I do.
PROS:
-
Enterprise version is free which supports SAML/OPEN ID and others whereas their personal doesn’t. SSO login was SEAMLESS as in you clicked the login button, and immediately logged into the server. No separate username/password to enter.
-
It has a pretty nice GUI out of the box
CONS
TOTP is NOT included in the logins, this means that in order to get to the TOTP code, you have to search for it using the browser plugin, then copy it from your web portal and then copy it over to the tab you were on. On my Firefox session, it FROZE IT UP For longer than the TOTP code expiration so I had to copy a new one and was able to pass the login through.
vs.
**Vaultwarden/Bitwarden **
Maybe I’m spoiled, but I’ve completely grown accustomed to the pasting of the TOTP code during my login session after I fill in the credentials. This by far is hard to break the cycle. Some may argue that it’s not secure to store your TOTP in the same password manager and they are probably right, but for me, it’s enough. :)
Vaultwarden is working on SSO it seems so this may be something to consider if you are working into the SSO world like I have been. github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/pull/1955
-
- Comment on Is anyone here selfhosting the psono password manager? 6 months ago:
This is going to sound weird, but I think I tried it a few days ago on my server. I never installed it at the time because of all of their setup steps to enable OICD login. I’ve been on the hunt for a OICD/SSO compatible one since Vaultwarden isn’t yet capable of such a thing. I just installed Authentik and it sparked the search. LOL - I’ve used Vaultwarden for a few years now and have yet to find anything quite as capable as it for managing my well over 500 logins I’ve accumulated over the years.
Your post got me to install it and I believe it will work, I’m testing it and can report later if you want. :)
- Comment on My Home Server software stack 6 months ago:
If you are using Docker at all, with wireguard, I use WG-Easy - dead simple to use and works quite well. Immich is up and coming and making waves in the self hosted community as well in terms of being a viable replacement for Google Photos so that may be an option, or you can always drop in Nextcloud or Owncloud and sync your photos that way with the bonus applications which come with either suite.