@jmoore said in Testing Zulip:

@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:

@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:

@gjacobse said in Testing Zulip:

@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:

@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:

At that price, we were able to afford to hire a full time engineer just to build and support a solution to replace it and were able to provide a vastly superior solution to the customers, at lower cost

You hired an engineer for $600 a month?

I'm guessing because "hundreds" doesn't tell me anything. So I'm going with 200 people.

While it’s been two or so years since I was an active NTG staffer, one client would have had 200 employees in just one state, and they where in all 50.

Rocket was a good process as it allowed for whole company separation and still include notifications like down time. But also allowed for the personalization of direct contact that wasn’t a flood to NTG

Wait a minute. So NTG is offering Rocket.Chat as a service to customers for internal communication along with using it as a means of notifications for SLOs?

And at no cost to the customer?

Yeah I'm not understanding this line of reasoning either. I get they want to be cheap to get business, but at some point it's not going to work as well as clients need as they often need hand-holding.

I'm sure it's not at no cost - but it's at like 5 cents/user/m or even less - it's most likely just baked into their monthly per user/device support fee.

I'm with the others pushing back on Scott though - are you saying any MSP worth it's salt is going to these lengths that NTG is to give awesome benefits at nearly no cost? Doesn't seem like making money is a goal here at all. Heck, even staying operating seems challenging at times. But really that would depend on your profits on the existing fees, perhaps you're already making 100% met margins, so this expense of labor would be worthwhile.

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:

@Skyetel said in Skyetel Postcards - What's Needed:

We've seen people transmit information via SMS that they really shouldn't (credit card numbers, SSNs, etc), and so they went a little heavy on the security.

You do not fix stupid by making a solid technical solution useless.

Yeah, this didn't stop people from sharing the info, it only made us unable to track or control who got access. It specifically made it less secure and forced us to expose the exact data they thought they were protecting because now we HAVE to share a password instead of controlling accounts.

Frankly - if the SMS number itself is going to be shared, I would assume everyone who has access needs access to any and all messages received so everyone is on the same page. So sure, it's less secure because sharing single username/password, but the data itself it's any more or less secure, because all the same people would likely still have access to it.

That said - I see both sides of this. non IT/security people just don't seem to give two shits about security and are just as likely to post their SSN on the side of their car as they are to protect it.

I need some assistance understanding in general, and we'll use a ER-X for specifics in the following scenario.

ISP will provide /29 of usable IPs (125.25.25.6/29)
Static assignment 125.25.25.1 - 172.16.16.200.11
Static assignment 125.25.25.2 - 172.16.16.200.12
Static assignment 125.25.25.3 - 172.16.16.200.13
Static assignment 125.25.25.4 - 172.16.16.200.14
Static assignment 125.25.25.5 - 172.16.16.200.15
Static assignment 125.25.25.6 - 172.16.16.200.x (all others)
ISP connection to your router will be over non public routable connection 10.100.100.2/30
ISP Default Gate 10.100.100.1
Internal network will be NATed 172.16.200.x/24

Assuming Port 0 is the WAN port, I assume we'll assign 10.100.100.2/30 to port 0, and the DG as 10.100.100.1.

Assuming Port 1 is LAN port, assign 172.16.200.1/24.

I don't know what to do with the the 125.25.25.6/29 address so my LAN is NAT'ed, and then sent via the 10. network.

Thanks for any insight.

can you show us the script?

I think you just want to replace \server\share1\folder1\folder2\folder3\file to .\file, assuming everything is in that one folder.

Did I miss something.

Company A worker wants to send a file to a government mailbox - right?

We assume the email admins have access to the mailboxes.
But really, so should anyone else in the department to whom these emails are being sent so work can be done by anyone in the department, not just one guy who might be on vacation for a month. So the originally mentioned idea that just one person has access to this data just seems weird thinking.

@JasGot said in Sending Secure E-Mail?:

Our customer doesn't want the city's bank account and routing info transported through e-mail. He was willing to do it if we could come up with a way that would guarantee it could not be read in transit.

I do believe there is another option, now that you have changed the rules to the bolded above. TLS, TLS gives you this. And this is something you can confirm beforehand.

anything not local will likely see complaints about access speeds to the very large files.

@scottalanmiller said in RingCentral and Vonage:

@360col said in RingCentral and Vonage:

Who else would you recommend we look into at our level?

Well the worst I've ever dealt with is Weave. Avoid them like the plague. RC is rock solid, just expensive as hell and not very business-focused. SpectrumVOIP seems like a joke, small town and no support but high prices.

Since we do business phones ourselves, we tend to see vendors with problems (like they can't make phone calls actually work), vendors that are expensive (like RC), or vendors that don't provide a business experience. Basically customers moving to business phones for a reason.

So we never really see the competitors that are good. Bundy Associates is the only competitor we ever recommend because we like their business model.

Don't forget Scott's own company - NTG, they also sell this service, if you didn't pick that up from his comments.

@jmoore said in How to hide a network printer:

I don't use dhcp.

I didn't used to either, but I do now. I use DHCP reservations for devices like these. Makes updating them later if a network change ever happens a snap.

@dbeato said in O365 - shared mailbox full access to another calendar.:

So is it the Shared Mailbox the one that owns the 5 calendars or the user that accesses the Shared Mailbox?

I'll update the OP.
Though to answer here - They are 5+ calendars belonging to other users in the company, they are owned by those other users.

@scottalanmiller said in AVImark support has stated that running virtual servers can result in a 40-50% data loss or complete destruction of your server.:

@Dashrender said in AVImark support has stated that running virtual servers can result in a 40-50% data loss or complete destruction of your server.:

@scottalanmiller said in AVImark support has stated that running virtual servers can result in a 40-50% data loss or complete destruction of your server.:

@Dashrender said in AVImark support has stated that running virtual servers can result in a 40-50% data loss or complete destruction of your server.:

In order to make the world a better place, it needs to be done, so the offending company has at least a chance to become better because they become aware of a problem, but I also see it as who takes it on the chin time/money wise to inform them?

There is a problem here, though. That's that if the offending company doesn't care, then anyone paying or putting in time to deal with this, is just losing money. Donating their time and money to a company that throws it away. It's not the customer's job to try to cajole a vendor into caring. Sure, it's a great theory, but we deal with the same vendor(s) day in, day out that get told that they have these problems and don't care no matter how high it goes.

I suppose you argue that the company doesn't care because they have crappy old software. But how is a vet supposed to know that? I suppose your answer is - well, if they are running a business - they hire IT to find the correct solution. But this assume they found good IT.

Correct. You don't know what your dog needs to make it well till you talk to a vet. You don't know good IT till you have an IT pro help you. It's really not hard and doesn't ever require special knowledge, it's all common sense and high school level business basics.

Imagine if we were talking about needing a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. Why would IT be treated differently?

Great question - to which I have no answer. Several of those pros feel they can just take care of their own IT buying, and never consult a professional.

Of course I can just go out and google headsets, but I'm wondering if you all have any headsets you have deployed in your office or home for use with softphones/video chat solutions?

We currently have Plantronics M22 amplifier plus headset. These work reasonably well on our Mitel deskphones and I've tested them with yealink T22P, but definitely not an option for use on my laptop.

@siringo said in Meshcentral Agent creation?:

OK, all fixed. All I'm going to say is that I need to slow my typing down & take more care.

LOL - that leaves a lot to the imagination...

What is this magical Linux box you're going to put these VMs on? Do you have it already? Does it have enough storage to hold all of the VMs from the three hosts?

KVM and Proxmox seem to be the go to Hypervisors right now.

As mentioned P2V the installs from their current location to the new VM host. Then your old backup solution should continue it work (at least in most cases).

@travisdh1 said in Windows folder auto sharing:

@AshKetchum said in Windows folder auto sharing:

@JaredBusch said in Windows folder auto sharing:

@AshKetchum said in Windows folder auto sharing:

I noticed my windows 10 machine (domain connected) automatically shares the drives (c$, d$, e$). how to prevent windows from automatically sharing d and e drives?

Those are administration shares. Unless a person has administration rights to the device they’re not accessible.

is there a way to prevent windows to share D and E even to the domain\administrators?

Sure, turn off the sharing. Better get permission from your domain admins tho.

If you are the domain admin, you can always create a GPO to remove the default shares.

Exactly.

If you are not a local admin, you can't make these changes once you join a domain, so you're kinda stuck. Plus being on the domain, assuming GPOs are running, they could always change it back. (and by so much more than just GPOs too.)

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@Dashrender said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@JaredBusch said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@Carnival-Boy said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

I've also found Teams getting used more and more by companies compared with Zoom. At the start of the pandemic it was all Zoom.

Zoom was very much the "I don't know what to do but people are talking about this Zoom thing" fallback.

Zoom is flat out easier to get into them teams. That’s the biggest reason it was first. Now because people are going all in with Microsoft teams is becoming dominant.

Teams meetings have gotten significantly easier for non Teams users since the beginning of the Pandemic (that's not to say it's still as easy as Zoom - personally, I think they are about the same), so that's a major help there too.

That's definitely true. At the beginning, even halfway through, I couldn't even join them. Now they mostly work just fine. I still don't like them, but they are much closer to other services than they were. Now they are "nearly as good" instead of "completely didn't work".

What's just so amazing is MS has has Skype for 2 or so decades.. and they still can't seem to get their heads out of their asses.

If you are looking to deploy APs for wireless as well, I'd just go with a USG from Unifi and a UAP Lite. You'll need to setup a controller for it, two options - setup a $5/m vultr instance that you have to maintain, or just buy a cloud key and publish it through Ubiquiti's system for anywhere access. it's about $100 but it's a one time fee.

@gjacobse said in Pre-Planning new domain and environment:

I respect the owners stance, but wont have that information until then... and from that stand point, not important right now.

But - I have every intention to do right by Enterprise IT standards.

If the owner is giving requirements like - files must be stored locally onsite ...

These these two statements don't really mesh.

@scottalanmiller said in Pre-Planning new domain and environment:

@gjacobse said in Pre-Planning new domain and environment:

But - I have every intention to do right by Enterprise IT standards.

If this is the plan, then how do you intend to deal with the owner making IT decisions that might run counter to that.

Exactly!

Now, it likely will be that local storage for these CAD files will be necessary for performance issues, etc... but he shouldn't be mandating/requiring this. He shouldn't care where they are stored.

But something like - personal need to have 15 second load time for 1 GB files because we are looking to reduce wait time of our staff, as that wait time for files to load costs us money... then we're setting the expectation without setting the how, because he shouldn't give a shit how it's done.

@scottalanmiller said in Firewall for small Windows network:

@Dashrender said in Firewall for small Windows network:

$60 hosting vultr, plus an assumed 15 min billable (smallest likely increment allowed) monthly at what $100/hr, so $25/m. So min annual cost is $360 assuming no issues of course... maybe you can't get this accomplished by an internal person for that?

No, the min cost is zero. You are right on the cost, if you were dealing with someone in house doing a one off. But why would you do that? My entire point is that when you are this small, having any infrastructure all for yourself is too costly to do.

I guess I'm confused - So this client contacts you NTG for this - you charge them what? Just the cost of hardware (or they buy themselves), you charge them an install fee and that's all? from there on out it's free? i.e. you pay the hosting cost (sure ok, no problem, you already have a controller, adding more sites/devices to it is likely no big deal), but what about the monthly updates? you don't charge for those? and by updates i mean pushing the button that pushed out the update to the devices, not the controller, you've already absorbed that. I mean, maybe you do, in the hopes/expectation that you will have other business from them and that clicking the button takes such a small amount of time that you don't worry about billing it specifically??