Taking over IT for a small business
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Also for you guys that do this kind of stuff on a small scale like this, do you create policies for the client? It seems like you could cover alot of these in policies that can be used in a cookie cutter fashion to work with other customers.
Handing a manager or ceo a best practice policy and asking for valid reasons for exceptions is a good way to get a good security posture.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Pete-S said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
Change the defaults in windows to "sleep" instead of "shutdown".
Send Wake On LAN packet if you need to start it.Remove hibernate unless it's a laptop. Frees up some disk space too.
Also, basically set all machines to go to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. It could be an hour or whatever. Saves on power and if someone forget to turn it "off" (sleep) it will automatically sleep.
2/3's of my fleet is laptops, so yeah.. wake-on-lan is not an option, I'm not sure sleep is even wake-able on a laptop on WiFi?
It's called WoWLAN. Windows supports it but I haven't tried it.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
In this customer's - from a power POV, I could easily designate a single machine as an always on machine for this purpose
I always set one or more machines to power on at 10:00pm (bios)
One if they prefer not to leave them on, then I use WoL to power the others up when I need to (updates).All if they don't have a preference and it's a small office.
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@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
In this customer's - from a power POV, I could easily designate a single machine as an always on machine for this purpose
I always set one or more machines to power on at 10:00pm (bios)
One if they prefer not to leave them on, then I use WoL to power the others up when I need to (updates).All if they don't have a preference and it's a small office.
That is a crazy amount of work I don’t wanna do that
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@JaredBusch How so?
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@Dashrender I left this out earlier for fear he would say I was conflating....
Here's our push for power-on for dell PCs, we push it with GPO, or ScreenConnect, or drop it in the startup folder with a script that uses an admin$ share. Most bios mfrs have a utility for editing bios remotely.
It sets it up the way we want, and if someone changes it, it auto re-applies at the next boot.
\\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoon=everyday --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonhr=22 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonmn=0 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log -
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@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender I left this out earlier for fear he would say I was conflating....
Here's our push for power-on for dell PCs, we push it with GPO, or ScreenConnect, or drop it in the startup folder with a script that uses an admin$ share. Most bios mfrs have a utility for editing bios remotely.
It sets it up the way we want, and if someone changes it, it auto re-applies at the next boot.
\\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoon=everyday --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonhr=22 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.log \\server\netlogon\cctk\x86_64\cctk --autoonmn=0 --valsetuppwd= -l=c:\pc.logActually - he would adore you for this.
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@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JaredBusch How so?
Go back and count the steps that you just listed.
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@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JaredBusch How so?
Go back and count the steps that you just listed.
It's two clicks from SC, and since we only work in domain environments, we import the GPO as part of our on-boarding. Since we script everything, and our next customer is not our first customer, the workload to accomplish the auto power on task as described here is undetectable.
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@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JasGot said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@JaredBusch How so?
Go back and count the steps that you just listed.
See what I said - he's lazy
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
See what I said - he's lazy
But I can't hold that against him, I may be lazier than anyone!
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@JaredBusch said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
How are you dealing with machines that people turn off at night?
By having a company policy put in place that they are to be left powered on. Logged off, or locked, yes. But not powered off.
This is my policy. Reboot when you leave. Login when you come back in. Let's just say that only about half of the people do this. For the other half, I have a PDQ deploy schedule for every night at 8 PM, that works with PDQ inventory to reboot client systems that have an uptime of greater than 5 days.
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End of day reboots are the best. Machine is up for work, but nothing is logged in and the machines don't stay booted up indefinitely.
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@scottalanmiller said in Taking over IT for a small business:
End of day reboots are the best. Machine is up for work, but nothing is logged in and the machines don't stay booted up indefinitely.
Exactly. Freshen everything up, scans, updates, no open files on the server shares.
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@scottalanmiller said in Taking over IT for a small business:
End of day reboots are the best. Machine is up for work, but nothing is logged in and the machines don't stay booted up indefinitely.
Yeah, I'm going to look into this as well, if not a daily reboot, definitely a weekly one - for all but my boss, ug.. I just can't ever get her to close her apps when she leaves - it's a constant battle - she (as the boss) just simply refuses to close down at the end of the day - claiming she can jump right in the following day.
I know windows was working on something for that - some way of knowing all things that were open at say 4 PM yesterday, and bring all that stuff back up with a click of a button... I need to look into that for her.. might - might - be a saving grace.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
I know windows was working on something for that - some way of knowing all things that were open at say 4 PM yesterday, and bring all that stuff back up with a click of a button... I need to look into that for her.. might - might - be a saving grace.
Settings -> Accounts -> Sign-in options -> Privacy
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@black3dynamite said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
I know windows was working on something for that - some way of knowing all things that were open at say 4 PM yesterday, and bring all that stuff back up with a click of a button... I need to look into that for her.. might - might - be a saving grace.
Settings -> Accounts -> Sign-in options -> Privacy
yeah, that's not what I am talking about.
Timeline is what I was talking about.
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@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@black3dynamite said in Taking over IT for a small business:
@Dashrender said in Taking over IT for a small business:
I know windows was working on something for that - some way of knowing all things that were open at say 4 PM yesterday, and bring all that stuff back up with a click of a button... I need to look into that for her.. might - might - be a saving grace.
Settings -> Accounts -> Sign-in options -> Privacy
yeah, that's not what I am talking about.
Timeline is what I was talking about.
Oh my bad.
