Yep, UK based.

@travisdh1 said

It only takes chocolate, heck, I make my own.

Don't give the interns all the secrets on day 1, Leave a bit of mystery.

I think the thread doubled in size since scott's arrival.

@IRJ said:

Any difference between free and spiceworks free?

Spiceworks Free
Utterly slow performance.
Too many features, not enough good.
Plus you get adverts galore along with a not great UI.

Actual Free
None of the above.

Oh sorry, you were asking about Spiceworks free

If Liam Neeson was coming to kill me, or I lose my biggest client.

Well, it's a no brainer Lose 1 client, keep the rest.

@thanksajdotcom said:

Welcome to the norm of posting on the same community at @scottalanmiller ...lol

So basically, don't post anywhere on the internet. He's everywhere it seems

@IRJ The Helpdesk, inventory, purchasing, Spiceworks software install yes

Unitrends, never used it personally so no comment.

@Dashrender said:

The tiniest amount of complexity added to SevenTimesSevenEqualsEleven, say SevenTimesXSevenEqualsEleven Dramatically improves the security of this password.

There is always a more secure password out there. Someone can easily add a 1995 to the end of the above password and it becomes infinitely more secure.

This is more about encouraging length rather than pointlessly short passwords for our users such as C0rP123!!

Straight off a cliff, Let's blame Scott.

Moving back to Pertino, how many people here are using it as a paid service in production?

Just did the currency conversion, yeah the $80 is insanely cheap. I'd go bust at that. Mine is $130 for comparison as standard, discounted if it's bulk hours project work but for a one hour drop in and fix something it's $130.

@DustinB3403 said:

SevenTimesSevenEqualsEleven is probably the better password.

And 20,000 people just lost their secure password to the internet, good going @Breffni-Potter !

I'm trying to help the 500000 people who still use Pa$$word1 as a password. , it meets the AD complexity requirements.

The good, the bad, the ugly and the amazing.

Go!

To help you out, because I'm in the exact same boat.

My process for any job/task is a spread-sheet with macros, the fields are.

Freelancer cost (Am I paying someone else)
Travel Costs
Misc Costs
My cost of time per hour
Hours needed
Current costs
Sale Price
Gross profit
Minus overhead percentage costs
Minus unforseen expense costs
Minus tax
= Net Profit.

It does the hard work for me, I just need to get the figures correctly, then I can price up an entire project.

1 & 2. Sure.

3 - Well Hyper-v and Xen-server are free.

4 - Is an all your eggs in one basket model. Which can be risky too.

Met a Webroot guy at a spicecorps last night, pretty much sold me on it.

Just have that niggling "ahhh but what do others think"

It seems too good to be true that the product can be that good.

Think of the soft hours, the phone calls, the email answering, time that you effectively lose and cannot bill for. The paid work needs to account for this as well. The math can get a bit scary when you dig deep into it.

@dafyre said

4... Backup, backup, backup!

Backups funnily enough don't work for.

• Hardware availability. Can I get a replacement node? If so how quickly.
• If the software part of the hyper-visor all in one magic box breaks and I lose all 3 nodes, what then.
• Scale takes away a lot of the tech from the technician to make it easier which is good but when that tech fails, what can you do.

Now, I like the Scale model but it's still a magic box in the corner.

@Kelly said:

You might be able to get hands on time with the console and see more for yourself on the admin side without actually having to install it.

They've already got a demo on their site, I've already been through it, Not much to demonstrate apart from showing how I turn on feature X. It's not a Symantec console.

In the times that you are doing a favour or charity, Note the actual rates on the invoice, Then mark a substantial discount so that it is clear. When you are billing $100 for what should be a $500 job, you should make a note of how much of a saving they are getting, If they ask you to do yet "another" thing and query why the rate is so high the second time, you can point them to the favour you did. Though in some cases you might decide to donate the work completely for free, still send them the invoice with the payable total as $0. Just make a note of what you did and the list price of each time.

@dafyre said

But you could still run into that with VMware, or Xen, or Hyper-V, or KVM, or any piece of software.

Yes but there is a world of difference between those 3 and Scale in sheer volume of installs alone.

How many Scale competent guys can I get versus someone who works in any of the above?