Topics created by JasGot

@JasGot said in Recording calls on a SIP Trunk to a local Recorder/Logger:

@Skyetel Is there an API or other method to automate the downloading of the recordings? Are they available through FTP or RSync?

They are available via API. Check that out here: https://api.docs.skyetel.com/

@JaredBusch said in Yealink T46S Pricing:

So far the Fanvil X4U I purchased for testing is working well. I'll likely be quoting the X4 and X5 lines along with Yealink phones for customers going forward.

Same here, last few projects have gone to Fanvil. So much cheaper than Yealink. We've got several in our own offices now and we are loving them.

@JasGot said in Worthwhile IT projects or products for small office with extra money?:

They though about a new projector in their board room, but it will not fall under the $2,500 mark.

Wonder why...

Also if the board room is not too big, a professional signage screen is usually better than a projector.
For instance a 75" 4K from Philips or Samsung will be sub $2K.

Larger screens such as 82", 86" will probably be on the limit budget wise.

Many of these screens has integrated media player/web browser as well so you don't really need to hook them up to a computer - if you don't want to.

@Dashrender said in VitalPBX and Microsoft 365:

@JasGot said in VitalPBX and Microsoft 365:

@Dashrender said in VitalPBX and Microsoft 365:

@JasGot said in VitalPBX and Microsoft 365:

@coliver Click a phone number in Outlook Contacts and have it dial the phone.

The phone on your desk, or a softphone?

Deskphone.

Interesting - Scott's above link leads you to software that should do this for you. I'll be trying it tomorrow... I have a few users that might like this.

This is standard click to call plug-in and not a new thing

@Dashrender said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@DustinB3403 said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@travisdh1 said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@DustinB3403 said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@Dashrender said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@coliver said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@Dashrender said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@coliver said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@DustinB3403 said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

@Dashrender said in Amazon Prime Day - Oct 2020:

I'm with Wire - it's definitely not a clean... I just installed a new power plug myself behind my TV... though not an outside wall, not that that should be that big of a deal...

Yeah, unless these walls are filled to the edge with spray foam, feeding a few power cables down isn't going to be an issue. With fiberglass you'd just push through the insulation in those specific paths and it still wouldn't be that big of a loss.

Yeah, It's a new building so I hope there is spray foam. But even then it might not be that difficult. Might just need a wire probe.

No one around here does spray foam by default.

It should be. But yeah I don't think it's the default where @wirestyle22 is either.

I wonder what the price difference is? I'm guessing it used to be huge, but perhaps today, not so much??

Now if you were renovating and doing this yourself you can pick up spray foam kits that cost ~$770 which while still pricey, would save money compared to fiberglass.

That's it? We need to replace the insulation in our attic. Might have to do it ourselves if the DIY spray foam is that cheap now.

Yeah, that's per kit, each kit covers ~200 sqf at 1". It wouldn't be unexpected to need 2 or 3 kits to cover a single crawlspace attic.

1" - HAHA, so it's $770 for 57 square feet in reality.

I've also watched it being done (online) - it's an art, like spray painting cars... it takes a good amount of practice to not over spray the amount needed and end up with a ton of waste... in the attic, if it overflows, not that big of deal, but in walls, you don't want to waste a bunch that you're cutting off and discarding.

I purchased a 200ft kit, for like $350 I think, to do my rim joists in my crawl space. It's super easy. I believe once you're spending ~$1000 on materials (depending on local rates) it ends up being cheaper to hire somebody to do for you.

For closed cell foam you can only apply so thick in one pass before it's cured, so to get the R rating you would need for an attic in a colder climate zone, it would be insane to use a closed cell kit. Not only is it stupid expensive to do yourself, but waiting for curing between layers and crawling around in the attic multiple times in a poor mans hazmat suit? No thanks. Typically if you're doing foam in an attic they do a single layer of closed cell, then open cell on top.

When I did my attic I pumped in ~20" (R60) of loose fill fiberglass insulation for like $200... most home improvement stores lend you the machine for free if you buy enough bags, 10 bags in my case. I only used 6 bags and returned the rest with no questions asked. I will definitely go this route again on my next house.

@Pete-S said in Would you put a MS SQL VM and a MS Exchange VM on the same host?:

@scottalanmiller said in Would you put a MS SQL VM and a MS Exchange VM on the same host?:

Vertical scaling is so much more efficient in so many ways, it's nearly unbeatable (for cost and performance.)

Not when you have many workloads and there are lots of things that proves this. But I know you're the master of relentless posting so I'm just respectfully going to bow out 🙂

How does "many workloads" even factor in? Nothing you've mentioned gives a reason for your position. There's no logical reason and nothing in the real world supports that horizontal scaling somehow saves money. This goes against all industry knowledge, common sense and observation. Even your own examples, you pointed out that the factors you were using were wrong and didn't show what you were using them to show. Just posting unsupported random misinformation and "bowing out" before we ask for some explanation just makes it seem like you were just saying those things to say them and don't believe them yourself.

In your last "example", the more workloads you have, the more horizontal scaling wastes money. Vertical scaling specifically crushes horizontal in cost/performance the more numerous and disparate the workloads are. Vertical scaling is where you get the huge cost/performance benefits of shared hardware. And, of course, people trying to make shared hardware look bad with underspec it or misconfigure it and try to say that that makes it bad, but you can underspec or misconfigure anything. Mathematically, vertical scaling works better. It's plain physics, you can't just state that physics aren't real and act like you have special insider knowledge of the universe that no one else has and cannot be demonstrated with real computers.

@Dashrender said in PRI over IP:

no, then it's likely good enough.

This sums it up. That's like "it goes down from time to time, but not enough for people to complain". "Good enough" is a way of saying "noticeably not as good, but not so bad as to not be considered."

In IT, good enough is normally what we say when we know something's wrong - when we know something isn't good, it's just not quite so bad as to be bad. And like IT, in real life, no one truly wants food that only edible, they actually prefer what is good. And a company that only provides "good enough" consistently, starts to be sensed as a failure.

Think about yourself as an employee.... are you proud of where you work and the decisions that they make? If so, do you ever feel that way when you also say that the decisions are "good enough?" Of course not, it's what we say when no one's truly happy with it.

@JasGot said in MSDTC issues:

Well, we found how to fix the symptom, be we do not know why it is so.

This network is 10.1.10.0/23

The only users having trouble were on the 10.1.11.0 portion of the network.

There are no configuration mishaps anywhere in the workstation, servers, switches or routers.

It's just weird.

But the MSDTC errors have stopped, and the staff who were suffering are happy.

I'm in a network transition myself, and I've run along a sorta similar issue.. definitely a PITA to troubleshoot and solve...

@Dragon3303 said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:

@scottalanmiller said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:

@siringo said in On prem Exchange hardware questions.:

I did the maths and it worked out it would take them 4 -5 years on Office 365 before they would reach what they had to outlay for new server h/w, licensing etc. And the other thing was, that at that 4 year point, they may be starting to look at replacing h/w and O/S again, so moving to the cloud (O365) won out.

Exactly, it is a RARE shop that can make on prem cost less than cloud, even with O365 - unless the on prem is cutting a lot of corners, which can be perfectly acceptable depending on the business. At 100 users, that's $400/mo or $4800/year. Not very much considering what you get.

To do that on premises you need a moderate server, nothing crazy, but can't be some old junk just lying around. And to be anything like O365, you'd need at least two servers, not necessary in an HA cluster, but immediately available secondary hardware absolutely. So figure at least $6K for one server, $12K for the pair.

Now add licensing. That's Windows Server and Exchange licenses, then CALs and Exchange CALs. That's many thousands right there. That'll like take you to around $18K or more, and being on the skimpy side at this point.

Now we have to add HVAC and electrical costs for on prem, which isn't huge, but will be hundreds or thousands a year that people tend to overlook.

And now the IT costs. Running those servers, doing updates, supporting them when there is an outage. That stuff adds up, quickly. There's realistically no way that you can do this for under $500/mo and at some point you are getting a full time admin just for this and anyone qualified will be at least $90K a year in loaded costs! We'll ignore what you are "likely to need" and focus on the $500/mo which is $6K a year - just realistically no way to get below that with two Exchange servers, all of the associated infrastructure just for that, patches, updates, hardware, etc.

That puts it at $24K for that first year to have even a modicum of comparability to O365 and doesn't even begin to address things like enterprise hosting or redundant ISPs or anything like that. Figure you will pay that every five years, except the IT cost is annual. So add another 4 years at $6K and that's $30K over 5 years or $6K per year...

That makes it, ignoring all HVAC and electrical costs, real estate costs, ISP costs.... at least $1200/year more than O365 while getting quite a bit less in most cases. If you don't care about uptime or risks, you can shave a lot of costs off of that but only by not trying to match O365 in any way. Which is perfectly fine if that works for your business. But apples to apples, you might be able to match O365 somewhere north of 200 users, but only by taking on risks for trivial savings.

Now if you have thousands of users, of course, it's worth evaluating. But at thousands of users, MS will cut you some slack on the O365 price, too.

I'm confused...Didn't you just say a few posts ago that you agree that cloud is almost never cheaper? And now you say in this post that it's a rare shop that can make cloud cheaper than on-prem? I'm going through the same math and trying to decide which way to recommend for 75-80 users. We're pretty stuck with office due to how a couple of our teams use macros behind Excel for several things. Management folks would potentially like to take advantage of Teams and maybe SharePoint. So it may make sense. We already have all the hardware, hvac, ect. in place because we're already hosting multiple virtual host servers, so the infrastructure is good. We're also one of those places that hasn't had an Exchange outage (specific to the Exchange server) with our on-prem solution. We've had a couple extended power outages or Internet outages over the years, but nothing really to speak of. We've been on Exchange/Office 2010 until now because there's been really no compelling reason to change. The way it looks to me is at 75/80 users the costs over 6-7 years (if you keep your Exchange and Office suite that long) are then starting to equal out, and at that point you're probably looking to upgrade again with a large capital cost so it maybe makes sense to go Microsoft 365 and stay current, have access to Teams and Sharepoint, etc. But your statement on both sides of the aisle there (both on-prem and could almost always being cheaper) was kind of confusing to me.

I forked your question so that we can dig in.

It's complex, email is a commodity service so a service hosted on a cloud is going to be hard to beat because you are getting a small slice of a big pie. Running on prem means you have to spend more to get up to the minimum size in order to run it than the entire solution could cost.

When looking at IaaS, cloud almost never competes with on prem. When looking at SaaS, the opposite is true - because you are shifting all of the parts that matter rather than simple doing the same thing in two different places. With SaaS, we don't actually know if it is a cloud under the hood, for all we know O365 is doing Exchange on bare metal (they aren't, I'm just saying, we'd be unable to tell) - it's the SaaS that matters in that case.

What actually matters here isn't the cloud aspect at all, it's the hosted aspect. Third party hosting of a commodity service is all but unbeatable. Running cloud on your own premises here would solve nothing. That O365 is cloud and on prem Exchange is not is confusing because that's an artefact, not the core of what matters. It's hosted as a service, versus not hosted, and not a service.

@JasGot said in US Based Sonicwall Support:

@dbeato said in US Based Sonicwall Support:

Sonicwall has a default of 30 Seconds UDP Timeout

What do you set this to?

I set it to 300 and some up to 600 depending,.

@JasGot said in Who do you use for a 1U RackmountPC?:

@Pete-S Yea, I called our Partner rep. they are building it for me now. I think it is going to be pricey......

May end up building one from the ground up. Haven't done that is over 15 years!

This is definitely a case (pun intended) where whiteboxing is going to be the way to go, or near white boxing, with a SuperMicro partner.

@JaredBusch I've used 960 with remote mics - works well.

@JasGot said in Finding owner of gmail address:

Is it possible to find out who owns a gmail address?

No official way, no. Mostly because they don't collect any information when you sign up. But also because they will never disclose anything even if they knew.

@JasGot said in Hosted PBX with on site Appliance - Specifically: VitalPB:

@gjacobse said in Hosted PBX with on site Appliance - Specifically: VitalPB:

With that as a known environment - cell coverage - you could very easily offer Soft Phones

I have this on my cell phone. It works really well with the exception of battery drain. 😞 I only run it when needed.

Before anyone tells me it doesn't take much battery, My phone lasts about 36 hours between charges. I EXPECT it to. If the charge lasts less than 24 hours, I go nuts and address the apps using power.

For those who frequently place their phone on a charger, it may not be an issue.

Don't lose sight of the fact that I do really like the softphone......

Oh - very much so ,.. the soft phone would chew through my battery as well. But - it's also a small price to pay for that extra..

I tried this tonight because I was curious. Man, that is SO much easier to get everything installed and working together.

Basically, without a plugin for it, static pages can't be displayed out of the PHP application. NC is a single app, not a collection of pages with some PHP inline. So a plugin approach is necessary.

@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.

@JasGot said in How to start taking a company to Microsoft 365 based operations.:

If a customer is asking to go "Cloud based" and they want to stay MS based. What would be you path for a customer who has standard server now.

The real trick is getting them to talk about their goals. Going "cloud" or "Microsoft" aren't business goals, those are means, not ends. So we have no idea what they are trying to do, only how they think they will do it.

It's like stating your goal as "using a hammer" without stating why or to accomplish what. A hammer is reasonable, maybe. But just knowing it's a hammer, you can't go any further without just making up what they might want to accomplish.

@JasGot said in Sending Secure E-Mail?:

The dept is engaged in a grant program with the State Department of Environment…, which requires us to include our banking information on every reimbursement application.

Come to think of it, banking information is not really sensitive info, is it? If you send an invoice to anyone, they have your banking information.

The only risk here is a man-in-the-middle attack where banking information is changed on the application while it's being submitted. So that the money is transferred into another account.

So do the company send all their invoices and ordinary mail containing banking info by registered mail in locked containers, so it is secure from end to end?

If not, then email isn't any less secure.

I have the 2nd and 3rd one along with some other models. They work as advertised. I really like how Samsung and HPE have made some excellent chromebooks without breaking the bank.