@black3dynamite i use 1 hdd

I want to go find the programmer who created ALG and throw him in a cage of lions!
#frustrated!

@scotth very few if any tell you to turn it on. I could see maybe a scenario if the SIP provider provided you the equipment then sure if they want it turned on cool, since they may have certified it. But in general it I think the problem is whatever ALG is doing messes up with the firewall and I think basically the traffic is getting probed and flagged!

Wait a minute how can I use this "SODIUM SUITE" ????? I wanna be in the cool kid crowd.

@fateknollogee thank you sir!

@scottalanmiller WOW can I become one of the IETF that proposes things to break things! I'm sure I can do a good job lol

Hackers are probing us just not in high volume.

The SIP/ALG I forgot to turn off last night as I was too busy trying to test out my WDS server

If I stay late tonight and the office is clear, I'm disabling that ALG it seems to be the common cause of all issues and then as far as IPS getting disabled on the Edge Router I dunno how or even if I should!

Scott I caught an article on that also this morning how SIP/ALG and IPS need to both be off. Why is it that the things intended to make things "better" tend to need to be off lol. Then when we add STUN to the equation it can also negate any other changes made due to it!

For the most part the server is working fine! I'm actually gonna nuke it soon so I can re-attempt Hyper-V 2016 then KVM.

Scott it will work but your mileage will vary. There is more than one kind of PDF version so it really depends on the source of where you "pulling" the pdfs from. Are they PDF's they are getting from other companies (like marketing stuff) that they wanna pull data out of? Those are the worst usually.

As an suggestion also ignore using those free websites that convert them to word docs. Some actually do a great job. But some end up creating crap from their output. We tried that 2-3 years ago. Some folks (less than 3) still clamor on to that method, but in my office as much as possible I try to keep our data in a database which can export to word or pdf as necessary. I know I know different topic you want to open/edit them not just view.

I still have a version about 10 years old in the office!

Ah well I'll take one for from your playbook you gave me consider possibly hosting Adobe Acrobat in RDS. I think I did about a year ago and worked fine from my Chromebook. Otherwise I hate Adobe's pricing. Even for me being a non profit they cap us off and still charge us premium rate for Acrobat. At best I'm able to get cost around $50-75 but with caveats, aka being forced to use the online service, not the actual desktop app.

@scottalanmiller I could still see how if you didn't setup a RDS server, a Powershell and remote access to the registry can accomplish this. Of course it would be "fun" to write it, but after that one hard time automating it wouldn't be so hard.

Just pull a list of all computers in AD and focus on a group, then change their ports. If there is a way to automate the usage of #'s then you could setup a string to change a list of pc's ports similar how we use MDT with computer naming conventions.

If you want to keep it simple, if you head over to ninite.com they have:
Foxit Reader
Alternative PDF Reader 9.0.1.1049
LibreOffice
Free Office Suite 6.0.2 (JRE recommended)
SumatraPDF
Lightweight PDF Reader 3.1.2
CutePDF
Print Documents as PDF Files 3.2
PDFCreator
Print Documents as PDF Files 3.1.2.10844
OpenOffice

I have a side question, is this for the legal industry or just general use? I use to work in legal industry with a few leading firms with as a billed out MSP model to companies who didn't want to handle those types of services internally. I played with PDF's professionally at scale. We are talking 100K to 1M + in documents management. While I like how the pdf format is open per se to other vendors using it, there are sometimes quirks that happen with PDFs especially when someone is using a passworded version or a version done at a high level but someone with a low level version trying to use it and last but not least conversion issues especially when trying to convert from say a crazy windows doc / docx to pdf.

In my opinion, I prefer to working in Google then save to pdf which eliminates most of the issues (short of formatting) but for those few times I have to actually edit and manipulate them, Acrobat is tried at true but Sumatra PDF & PDF Nitro are also my go to.

Actually scratch that, I forgot I'm suppose to be pushing to get off of Quickbooks (LAN based) and move to Quickbooks Online. I personally don't like either, but at least with the online they do spend more time developing it and keeping it semi-modern.

@jaredbusch I totally agree. I would rather deal with 1 port vs potentially 50 to 100.

Scott so let's use me for an example, I almost roasted my assistant for opening up a financial server to RDP (since Teamviewer changed over their licensing model) but that was only due to it not having a strong user/pass combo. Also it was due to wanting to move to RDS /w a Gateway so we wouldn't have to spending too many hours trying to poke holes in the firewall.

But with this all in mind Scott am I wrong in thinking that couldn't we build a script in power shell to help automate some of the changes at least for the client end? As far as the Edge Router, I assume some scripting can be done too vs using the GUI. Going through the GUI isn't an issue per se, until you do more than 20+ which I can under the point of wanting a easier way to automate this.

In my case I plan on having 2 RDS farms, one for the financial side and one for the staff side and eventually a 3rd for our students. In theory it's almost cheaper for me to work on handful of servers and add our proper licensing than to even consider doing VDI which by the way thank you for your advice early on, it's crazy expensive even with non profit provisions!

So Scott, in my network we use RDP (obviously) but I'm an open to using other tools such as Chrome Remote Desktop, Team Viewer and even CloudBerry Remote Assistant. They all do a good / decent job imho.