@Dashrender said in Unifi Controller - Reinstall and adopt APs:

@DustinB3403 said in Unifi Controller - Reinstall and adopt APs:

@travisdh1 Yeah I'm thinking what happened is someone setup a Unifi Controller on windows at some point, then they engaged us and said yeah we don't have access to the AP's but its all still working. So they were sold a physical cloud key, and still the AP's weren't adopted.

Assuming you're at an MSP now, do you host a controller that you could just build a new site for and adopt the APs too?

This is what @Bundy-Associates and @NTG do.

That is the plan, but for now this is just janitorial work.

@Pete-S said in Formatting text instructions into html?:

@stacksofplates said in Formatting text instructions into html?:

I prefer asciidoc to markdown. Asciidoc has actual standards for things. Antora will build a pretty nice site with your projects written in Asciidoc as well.

Ifyou just want a single page, Asciidoctor will build a site as well.

I had a look at asciidoc and it looks very nice, especially for larger documentation projects.

I have a couple projects in an Antora site. We had a ton more at work, but I can't show it on here. You can include multiple projects and have them appear at the bottom left, each with versions. We used it so that teams could create documentation for tools (or really whatever they wanted) and then that documentation could be scraped and included in the central site. I just have a few projects included in my site, but Antora makes that pretty easy.

Here's my very bad/basic example.

https://docs.hooks.technology

I just confirmed, this system is only using the Intel controller, and not SS.

@scottalanmiller this is the ONLY way I make any money Scott, WTH calling me out on my BS?!

@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.

@Pete-S said in Changing Public PGP Key:

Don't know if this helps in your application but if you have old files you can just decrypt them with the old key. If it's important to store them in an encrypted state you can encrypt them again with the new key. After that you can revoke the old key.

Yeah I could do that, it just seems unnecessary when you can sign the new key with the old key and decrypt both. Turns out it actually chooses the right key so there is no problem

@Dashrender said in Defining the Hobby Business vs a True Business:

@Carnival-Boy said in Defining the Hobby Business vs a True Business:

My uncle ran a successful hardware distribution business employing dozens of people for over 30 years. His motivation was to generate work, security, and happiness, for owner and employees. He could have been more profitable, but chose not to.

I'll have to tell him he spent his life devoted to a hobby 🙂

But then he was a socialist. Maybe we just think about business differently in Europe? Scott likes to label things, but I'm not sure it makes any difference.

It does, to the point Scott as trying to make, though the posts were long so perhaps you missed it. IT is a Business Tool, as such when in a "business" as Scott would call it - it's pretty easy to know what to do - IT does what it takes to make the business the money money. When you're running a "something else business" (really hate the hobby term, it's pretty demeaning), IT doesn't actually have a cut a dry clear goal... now it has to fall to the whim of those in charge.

So the real question becomes.... why would anyone find the term "hobby" demeaning? Hobbies are what we love to do. Hobbies are the important things in our lives. Hobby is not demeaning or negative. It's just honest. It's only demeaning if the hobby itself is embarrassing.

LOL - yeah I read it like Laksh wants to knock it off...

NONE STUCK IN THE QUEUE!

Thanks for the help @JaredBusch, @dbeato @Dashrender

@hobbit666 said in Firewall for small Windows network:

@scottalanmiller said in Firewall for small Windows network:

We do too, but for customers who want US to do that for them, we charge. But of course, they are free to do it themselves as well.

It's just that we host the controller for free.

But just above you stated that your customers get Unifi for free?

We do not charge for the use of the Unifi platform since it is a pre-existing cost that is already covered and their portion of it would be less than the cost of the overhead to charge them.

Right, he said they don't charge just to have the equipment in their Unifi Controller. After that the customer has to decide between 3 options, manage themselves, enable auto updates or pay NTG to do updates after testing new firmware.

@Dashrender said in Pre-Planning new domain and environment:

It's the whole ZT/DNS

@Dashrender said in Pre-Planning new domain and environment:

and when I tested ZT in the past,

It is just DNS. You have to have it on EVERYTHING if you go that route.

Or, you make the ZT network the same subnet and not different.

Just take your 10.0.0.0/24 and make it a 10.0.0.0/23 instead.
have the local DHCP server hand out 10.0.0.101-254
have ZT DHCP hand out 10.0.1.101-254

or use ZT Bridging
Lots of ways to skin the cat.

Depends on the Apache version, what version do you have 2.2 or 2.4?

@JaredBusch said in Veeam Replication to Azure:

@Jimmy9008 said in Veeam Replication to Azure:

The replicas would be offline, so I would expect to only pay storage costs and data inbound costs but no other costs until in a DR situation.

That is not how anything works.
You have a replica sitting there. A replica is a full VM sitting there. You have to have the CPU and memory "reserved"... You have to pay for that privilege.

Right, it only works that way when you use storage (aka backups) as we were trying to answer. We assumed that the "don't pay for running capacity" portion meant that we were all on the same page.

If we approach backups / DR in the way that I've been describing, then absolutely you don't pay for that VM capacity while the data is stored there, even when it's ready to fire up.

@Dashrender said in Printer and UniFi AP:

Does that printer have a bunch of unneeded protocols running on it?

Might. I'll take a look at it again and maybe to a packet capture.

Excellent. Thank you guys. I'll pass the information on and hopefully they'll get in touch and get something good for them.

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@Dashrender said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@JaredBusch said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@scottalanmiller said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

@Carnival-Boy said in 75 User Exchange On Prem vs. Office 365 Cost Comparison:

I've also found Teams getting used more and more by companies compared with Zoom. At the start of the pandemic it was all Zoom.

Zoom was very much the "I don't know what to do but people are talking about this Zoom thing" fallback.

Zoom is flat out easier to get into them teams. That’s the biggest reason it was first. Now because people are going all in with Microsoft teams is becoming dominant.

Teams meetings have gotten significantly easier for non Teams users since the beginning of the Pandemic (that's not to say it's still as easy as Zoom - personally, I think they are about the same), so that's a major help there too.

That's definitely true. At the beginning, even halfway through, I couldn't even join them. Now they mostly work just fine. I still don't like them, but they are much closer to other services than they were. Now they are "nearly as good" instead of "completely didn't work".

What's just so amazing is MS has has Skype for 2 or so decades.. and they still can't seem to get their heads out of their asses.

@scottalanmiller said in Jared - OBS:

@DustinB3403 said in Jared - OBS:

@IRJ I've used and like openshot video editor

This is what I use currently, but plan to move to KDENLive

How are you liking it?

@hobbit666 said in How can we recover data from Hard Drives were on RAID 10 without controller?:

@CCWTech said in How can we recover data from Hard Drives were on RAID 10 without controller?:

You don't need a RAID card, in fact don't use one. There is a chance it will overwrite your data. Clone the drives, ONLY work on clones, never on patient drives.

UFS Explorer Professional
ReclaimMe Pro

What would you recommend for the cloning side of things?

If the drives are healthy, something like ddrescue does a good job. Cloning the entire drive (even empty sectors) is best.

If the drives are NOT healthy, you need professional data recovery equipment. (Ace Labs PC-3000 or at minimum a Deepspar DDI4). If you have a drive with a physical problem and you try to image it w/o professional data recovery gear, you have a good chance of never seeing the data again.

@black3dynamite said in RoboCopy Syntax:

@gjacobse said in RoboCopy Syntax:

I feel that I’ve made decent progress on the script, that said, I’ve run into a snag trying to grab Google Chrome User default folder:

RoboCopy “%src%\appdata\local\google\chrome\user data\default\” %dst%\chromeProfile\” /xa:sh /xjd /r:5 /w:5

I can’t seem to isolate the issue, this is almost the same syntax I am using to copy the profile.

Before you copy make sure Chrome processes is not running first. And last time I check, saved passwords doesn’t work when copying the chrome profile. I think Firefox is the only one that you can backup the profile without losing your saved passwords.

Good point, and I did run into that during a manual copy. I'm pretty sure that it would be a simple matter to added kill process - but I'll have to research that to see if it can be done by process name, not process number.

Yes - I'll do that. Seems easy enough.

@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.