@jmoore said in Why is the Third World Running Windows?:

@coliver I believe that's right. Lenovo does the consumer stuff and IBM still makes servers and a lot of software.

IBM exited the x86 server market as well as the PC (business and consumer) by selling these to Lenovo. IBM has shifted x86 to selling cloud (IBM Cloud formerly bluemix, softlayer etc) and Z and i Series PPC based systems.

@scottalanmiller said in Why is the Third World Running Windows?:

This is likely true for many, or several. But for most of the third world, exporting IT is not a thing.
Example... no third world North American country is an IT exporter, they are IT importers. Central America, even Panama, imports IT from Colombia and Mexico, rather than doing it themselves, let alone exporting it to the first world.

Costa Rica exports IT services. Services are a huge part of their economy (We run back office, and some GSS operations there).

@mario-jakovina said in Why is the Third World Running Windows?:

Slightly different: "If it's legaly free, it's probably not that good"

Microsoft gave away Windows 10 in China. In other countries, the OEM price they charge for embedded is a pack of cigarettes.

@scottalanmiller said in Why is the Third World Running Windows?:

Personally I feel that Linux on ARM, which can easily include Chromebook devices, is the ideal for most of the third world. Low cost to acquire, low cost to maintain, free to keep updated forever, high longevity of devices, low cost to operate, low impact on the environment and the power infrastructure.

Haswell i5 or Boadcom Intel NUC draws 9 watts watching youtube. x86 isn't all Xeon power sucking beasts.

@krisleslie said in Router / AP / Switch for business:

You know I'd personally only do ER but for this guy with the night hawk a USG is nothing short of an improvement but if the owner was being serious about his business then yea I'd stick with ER-4 or 6

USG doesn't do wireless so this is apple/oranges.

@jaredbusch said in Router / AP / Switch for business:

@krisleslie said in Router / AP / Switch for business:

I'd get the USG

Never.

Only issue I've seen is the same thing you'll see on any router/firwall. Turn on all the features and line rate drops. If it drops below what your line can handle it gets annoying.

Assuming he hasn't patched it in a while...

http://[RouterIP]/cgi-bin/;REBOOT

@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Managed Services:

hardware within scope of potential purchase for consumers includes that licenses whether it will be used or that, hence the "effectively." Unless you are in the 1% that build their own computers

The marginal cost of getting Windows Home Edition is like $50 for a large OEM. Considering that Microsoft funds huge portions of the marketing of the OEM's to MDF, I'd argue it's a loss for OEMs to try to push other OS's.

$7 per user per month is a trivial marginal cost for the US and EMEA. The real question is if they will do regional based pricing or discounts (A $3 China or India subscription).
If I have to rewrite or migrate an application to get it off Windows, if I have to retrain users on how to use an application it's going to have to be some market where my labor cost is low and my volume of staff is high (Call Center, Retail). Even call centers can absorb that (Average revenue per minute if 76 cents a minute make that a joke to justify).

If the value proposition of Linux was $7 a month (and the ability to retrain and move apps and hassle of migrating was that low) I'd argue you should likely have been on Linux.

If anything this is great for Microsoft as it turns the OS licensing discussion into a monthly "drip" vs a large sunk cost, or 3 year ELA renewal/negotiation.

@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Managed Services:

Normally they are purchased in the US. While possible to rent, I know of no one with a plan like that.

The old Toshiba systems were always lease/rent.

Just had IBM come by the house today and swap batteries on my 3 year old Mac Book Pro, clean the fans and swap the lower chassis. I swear this thing feels lighter (was a lot of dust).

Are browser plugins a thing on ARM? Is greeseMonkey there etc?

@dave247 it’s basically a people management platform. Can have a system do a sales manager can tap calls and recordings and do all kinds of metrics they integrate to the CRM. I’d argue avaya is more powerful, but call manager isn’t something you Casual replace with an open source PBX.

Now call manager express (its little cousin) is a basic PBX with unity for voicemail. If you went call manager instead of express I assume someone had some fancy needs.

@kelly said in Cisco SmartNet:

Pay for Smartnet, especially if you have any legal requirements for patching

Smartnet is required for advanced placement, product support, and bug fixes. Typically legal requirements don't fall under these unless you have downstream customer SLA's.

Keep using the Cisco (sunk costs, etc.), but do not get any patches

Not quite true. You can get security patches out of them but it's kind of a pain.
https://damn.technology/free-cisco-ios-updates

Recognize that the ROI on that investment is going to be negative, sell your kit to someone else (or back to the reseller since they didn't educate you properly on your ongoing costs), and purchase something else

Depends on what you bought it for. If you bought a Call manager, and need some weird app integration Cisco has, then maybe there was ROI somewhere else (just not the IT budget).

Note, Used Cisco gear is kinda useless because the next owner can't obtain a smartnet on it, and legally may not be entitled to use the software. So for those phones, they would need to acquire a new Call Manager license for each of them. In short, that money is likely as good as gone. Cisco will torch a partners, ability to resell or service their gear if they catch them reselling used gear.

I've got a UBNT-HD-AC i front of me that's been powered on for 6 months straight without issues...

@kelly said in Domain Computers: Clock Sync:

At least Hyper-V has the clients pull time from the host by default. It doesn't matter what the settings are in the OS, it is a hypervisor setting that has to be turned off before your w32tm settings will do a thing.

VMware VMtools will also pull time from the host. From this, you should..

1. Check the Host BIOS Time (UTC)
2. Set the Host BIOS to draw from NTP (iDRAC/iLO)
3. Set ESXi (If also used) to use NTP also (Service off by default).

Note there are a lot of free NTP clocks to poll from.
time.windows.com is generally up.

If you are running ESXi there is a built-in health check (under vSAN health Checks) that will alert you to time drift between any hosts and the vCenter to identify this.

@gjacobse Is it Virtual? If so what hypervisor? (Different best practices)

EVIL SALES GUY TRICK #403. DESCRIBE WHAT THE BENEFIT OF A PRODUCT RATHER THAN SIMPLY USE A VAGUE BUZZWORD

If you Limit SD-WAN to just being "a separate control mechanism" then some Cisco stuff from the 90's falls under than and it's a meaningless term.

@scottalanmiller said in Barracuda vs Meraki - firewalls:

From Wikipedia: "SD-WAN is an acronym for software-defined networking in a wide area network (WAN). An SD-WAN simplifies the management and operation of a WAN by decoupling (separating) the networking hardware from its control mechanism. This concept is similar to how software-defined networking implements virtualization technology to improve data center management and operation."

Notice that what it IS does not guarantee or even suggest any of those things. You are working form revisionist marketing material and not what an SD-WAN actually is. Very dangerous because it makes it trivial for salesman to sell you an SD-WAN with you thinking that they sold you all this stuff, and get nothing. And they did nothing wrong, because they were being honest.

Or keep reading the wikipedia article and see that I was largely describing the feature section....

I'll argue it's pedantic to try to separate SD-WAN from Hybrid-WAN at this point as (the majority) of deployments of SD-WAN will be Hybrid-WAN. Wayyyyy to much of IT spend in companies is telco's, and the combined technologies are going to do what virutaliation in x86 did to compute, and what HCI and cloud is doing to storage.

@jaredbusch said in Barracuda vs Meraki - firewalls:

Bullshit. Those things all together are what makes it SD-WAN instead of some random guy trying to say all of his Ubiquiti ERLs with IPSEC tunnels are SD-WAN, because they are not.
@StorageNinja is exactly right on this.

SD-WAN in general simplifies management at large scale (and nore than just the devices, but also the links), optimizies performance in ways BGP, Shaping DSCP alone can't (and with a 1000x less work, no need for bespoke optimizations), enables unlimited choice on the WAN links without unlimited management hell as you try to deal with 10 different CLEC providers, and brings costs down for CPE gear (Virtualized, x86 rather than proprietary ASICs).

@scottalanmiller Some customers (Gov and larger shops) require it before they will sign you up as a vendor at all.

@scottalanmiller said in Barracuda vs Meraki - firewalls:

@jt1001001 said in Barracuda vs Meraki - firewalls:

I won't do manage sd wan from the carrier ever again! Ask around here how much I love carriers!

OH yeah, such a bad idea. Just a VPN that you don't control and pay a fortune for.

SDWAN is a hell of a lot more than VPN tunnels...

1. Link bonding. Mix MPLS/Cable/T1/4G etc.
2. Per packet routing. Have the same session use multiple links depending on requirements...
3. Jitter management for the above. Can strategically use buffer bloat to make 2 similar segments match on one way latency (Inflate the lower link to match the higher one). This reduces the need for packet re-odrering (expensive from a compute basis).
4. Per segment monitoring. Latency isn't symmetric. Using things like 2 party clock synchronization and packet tagging you can measure with packet stamps in real time the one way latency of a link (Critical to keep jitter under control).
5. Automated rules engines with multiple factors that can even handle encrypted. Massive centrally collected rules engines based on destination IP, Ports, CNAME on SSL Cert for encrypted, packet headers if not encrypted etc.
6. Packet loss mitigation. For bulk media store and re-forward to avoid TCP retransmits keep throughput up. More sensitive real time protocols that are narrower can benefit from duel transmit (send packet down both links) as well as parity injected into packet streams.

Reason why you would pay a 3rd party....

1. Management of hardware for disparate links. Someone to deal with all the 4G cards, Cable Modems etc.

2. Management of billing. Having to sort and verify through billing for 5 different carriers

3. Awareness of options and scale. WAN resellers who do this for a living tend to aggregate a lot more demand and can get better pricing, as well as already have the fiber maps and quote tooling backend hooks for the tier 1 players so they can quickly identify the best options for each site.

Here's the dirty secret about not wanting to deal with someone else reselling someone else's links.... You always are. Thats how the internet (and wireless Networks) work. Everyone is leasing lines and transit from everyone.