@JaredBusch ZeroTier for the win! Once we got the Ubiquiti VPN configured and working, it proved to be unreliable. At first we thought it was the user, but after watching what he was doing and checking the stats on the ER, we found it was nothing he was doing - it just wasn't reliable.
I tried ZeroTier myself and then set it up for the client and it works just like I wanted it to.
@coliver You're right. I should have been looking up i5 vs G4400
HP has a business desktop on State contract that has the H110 processor. (HP 280 G2 3.3GHz Pentium 4GB RAM 500GB HD - Z2G20UT#ABA) I'm having a hard time figuring out how this stacks up compared to an i5 processor for business applications. It looks like the H110 is only a dual core (so like an i3) but do the other features make it faster in real world tasks than an i5?
@dustinb3403 said in Mac Book Air and Ubiquiti VPN:
So you're billing him by the minute to do research. .
That's pretty much how consulting works... Don't you wish every request from your users had a price tag on it?
OTOH there are days like Monday where I spent all day with a managed contract client waiting for Verizon to get the internet up.
@dustinb3403 said in Mac Book Air and Ubiquiti VPN:
It's 2 clicks with the mouse!
He owns the company. I'm getting paid to see if I can save him two clicks.. 
@dustinb3403 said in Mac Book Air and Ubiquiti VPN:
@mike-davis said in Mac Book Air and Ubiquiti VPN:
It would be nice if it connected every time he turned his laptop on. That way he could just launch the RDP connection and log in.
It's 2 clicks with the mouse!
I know, but before I took over the network, it was no clicks because he was using a Server 2003 as the firewall and his desktop was mapped right through. So now that I made things so cumbersome by putting in a real firewall, I need to make it easy for the owner...
@JaredBusch You're right. I set it up with L2TP over IPsec. With SonicWalls, they have their Global VPN connector and others have "Net Extender" and Cisco had their own VPN software. (forgot what it is since I haven't used it in so long.)
So I'm using the built in Mac VPN connector configured to use L2TP over IPsec. The client is never in the office with his laptop, but wants to connect back to his desktop. It would be nice if it connected every time he turned his laptop on. That way he could just launch the RDP connection and log in.
@DustinB3403 thanks for that. I'll be checking it out later today. Do you know if it's normal for the VPN connection to start automatically when wifi is on, or do you have to connect each time?
I have a client on a Mac Book Air that wants to remote desktop to his Windows PC at the office. We put in a Ubiquiti Edge Router X and set up a VPN connection. Tested out fine on our PCs and we sent the client the instructions. At that point he told us he was on a Mac Book Air.
We found some instructions for setting up the VPN connection and got it to work once. He's had some issues with it connecting. Does a Mac automatically reconnect VPN connections or do you have to do something to get it to connect each time? If so, what? This is probably very simple, but I don't have any experience with a Mac.
If you have to migrate users desktops, download the User State Migration Tools (USMT) and find a tutorial on scanstate and loadstate. You can keep it really simple, or get pretty involved depending on your needs.
@scottalanmiller said in Bookkeeping Showdown: Wave vs Xero:
Oh yeah, iOS App for Receipts, that's nice.
But at the end of the day, I don't think anyone with any more than a hobby business should consider it since you can't back it up.
Why is it Xero vs Wave and not Xero vs FreshDesk?
I think Wave is for the person that has a side business and wants to kick out invoices and accept credit cards.
Real accounting stuff like being able to take a receipt and split it between tax deductible stuff and personal stuff isn't possible with Wave. Another major issue is that there are no backups of your data - nor is it possible for you to make one. I had an invoice just go missing out of wave. Fortunately I had an email correspondence with a client about the invoice, so I knew the invoice date and the invoice number. Even with all that information Wave told me there was no way to get it back and they don't have backups of their system.
For the positive side of Wave, it's free, they allow you to take credit cards, and they have OCR for receipts, so all you have to do is confirm that Wave read it correctly and it will automatically find the date and total.
@coliver said in Battling Ransome/Crypto-ware: Drive Shares:
So one of the protections would be to implement snapshots on those shared drives. It's fairly easy to do and, surprisingly, doesn't use that much disk space in modern Windows server versions.
Snapshots don't take up much space under normal operations. When the entire file changes, such as when it's encrypted, you're writing a lot of changes and usually it runs out of space so you can recover some stuff, but not all your stuff.
@JaredBusch That is really cool. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I can't wait until they flesh out the rest of it.
It's not worth it to get ride of drive mappings for two reasons. The first is that many crypto infections are run by humans that gain access to a system and then start encrypting it. This is the worst case because they will knock out your backups if they have access and then start encrypting stuff. The second reason is that new variations of crypto locker seek out network shares and don't rely on drive mappings.
The not mapping network drives thing was a short term fix that lasted until the hackers read about it and changed their code.
Remote desktop management
patch management solution that pulls patches for multiple vendors
@dashrender Off the top of my head, it's a sheet of expenses, mileage, taxes, and income.
I'm not sure if your goal is to track warranties of things installed, or track expenses and the financial side of it. (or both) Have you talked to your accountant? My accountant told me what they wanted to see, and it amounts to about 4 spread sheets. All of my other documentation goes in to some google doc folders.
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@breffni-potter said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
A lot of accountants are on a referral scheme for QuickBooks/Sage/Xero and other tools, so recommendations are often skewed.
Yes, when people say that "their accountant recommended it", they forget that their accountants are sales people, not their advisors (in nearly all cases.) The accountants are literally paid to sell this stuff. So ended up with QB is often a direct violation of the most basic of IT best practices... getting advice from the sales person.
Xero does this. Should we rule them out?
https://www.xero.com/partner-programs/affiliates/
I agree QuickBooks sucks to support. Getting people to switch is even harder...