Based on the title, I legit thought this was an ask for help finding a lightweight splunk of graylog. With an RSS feed and a lightweight search function with prebuilt buttons for common searches. I mean who doesn’t want that?
I always thought it was weird one would congratulate someone for having a child, (congrats, your and your SO’s junk works!) so I’ll say welcome to the next grind! This one is usually a good experience.
I can’t speak necessarily well to the question of where to store files, I’m not sure what security you need to have or are required to have. That would dictate a large part of an acceptable answer. I can however help with keeping that commute down to HW issues only.
MeshCentral - Remote into a system, some basic monitoring (plugin abilities), keep you from having to drive 3-4 hours to fix a printer install or something stupid and not boot/network related.
Build a GOOD usb imaging stick to leave at each branch (lock it up with the branch manager?) so when you need to image (assuming no bad hardware) you can walk the end user through booting and clicking ‘GO’. Once it boots back into windows use Mesh to walk them through the rest of the login and setup process.
Have a desktop/laptop setup in the office ‘ready to go’ as a loaner. Have the user ship it to you to fix. It can be an old laptop, loaners are not for replacement, they are to ‘get you by’ until your main system is back up and running. How much does it cost for you to drive (not just gas money, but existing work stoppage) to another branch, fix a system, and drive back? Sounds like an entire day of work to do that based on what you said above. Shipping a laptop back and forth (even next day FedEx prices) can make sense.
I had gotten stuck on some code, and had someone ask me if I had asked ChatGPT to write a python script to do some BLE stuff in Win11. So we got on a call, and started asking ChatGPT.
It wrote the python code… for linux. Then decided to dump some WinRT stuff in there to …make it more windows like? Not sure what it was doing, it wasn’t for ble, or GATT. We went through a few times trying to explain that we didn’t want anything with linux and it needed to run in Win11.
It told us to install wsl, install python, and run its script through wsl. Ya, that won’t work for the environment this is running in. So I spent an hour, searched a bit for the one bit of python code I was getting stuck on, and finished the script. Works for what I need it to do. Doesn’t require wsl, and runs in python, along with being converted to an exe that runs on the systems I need it to run on.
Having said all that, it DID do a good job on a powershell script I needed it for a few days later. I think it got hung up in some logic loop thinking that you HAD to have linux somewhere to even do anything with python.