@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@bnrstnr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Then there are others that actually only email and submit a ticket and you need to go through every single question in the world to get to the answer which they don't provide until like the 10th email and by then your time has been wasted.

Yes, this too! I usually cant diagnose a problem via email. I believe Scott has even said something to the effect that users have no clue what they're talking about 99% of the time. So why all of a sudden is a single email the most efficient way to help somebody? I just don't think that's realistic at all.

Sometimes after 9 emails and 2 hours of going back and forth, it's just way faster to call somebody and figure it out.

Calling someone back is different when it's already an established priority than using a phone call to determine what that priority is and to do so with the tech.

We use phones, but only call center picks them up. They do triage. So if you have an emergency and, say, email is down you need that. But the call is guaranteed not to interrupt something critical already in motion and any conversation about additional details can be done, and written down, prior to the engineers being interrupted.

Gotcha. I guess we'll just get a call center then lol...

We also have this thing called voicemail. Similar to email, it also comes to my phone, and my phone magically converts it to text so I can read it if I'm doing something else. It's crazy. Usually I get voicemails immediately too, unless I have no service, in which case I'm not getting emails either. So pick your poison.

Like I said before, we aren't in the business of supporting people. It's a minor task that we do sporadically.

@dbeato said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Then there are others that actually only email and submit a ticket and you need to go through every single question in the world to get to the answer which they don't provide until like the 10th email and by then your time has been wasted.

Yes, this too! I usually cant diagnose a problem via email. I believe Scott has even said something to the effect that users have no clue what they're talking about 99% of the time. So why all of a sudden is a single email the most efficient way to help somebody? I just don't think that's realistic at all.

Sometimes after 9 emails and 2 hours of going back and forth, it's just way faster to call somebody and figure it out.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@bnrstnr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@bnrstnr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I'm much more likely to notice the ringing. I believe it's pretty standard in manufacturing that email is the least urgent form of communication.

But would it go to just one person? Isn't going to a single person alone a mark of "not a priority?" Because if you're busy, in either case, or sick, or out, etc. what do you do?

We're a small company, I'm their contact for the project. If I don't answer, they usually call the office immediately after. If it's an emergency they always call. Sure, that might be bad, or our own doing, but it works... :man_shrugging:

We aren't a support company with an entire staff dedicated to doing just that. I'm rarely supporting customers, but when I do, they call me with urgent problems.

So when you are out sick, at lunch, not on the clock, or already dealing with a fire, in a meeting.... all calls pre-empt all those things?

Not all, and not always, but usually yes. I'm not so overworked that I can't take a call every now and then, even if it takes 4 hours of my day. If it ever became enough of a burden to require a full time position to deal with support, then we would consider it. But it just isn't necessary at this point.

Sometimes I only do the triage then pass it off to somebody else. Sometimes when I'm not available they call the office and somebody else handles it. Sometimes we have to tell people that they're just going to have to wait. We aren't under any strict support contracts.

I was at a funeral on Monday and got a call from a customer. I reached back out to him a few hours later when I was available.

Also, I totally get what you're saying about how we chose to make calls have higher priority over email, and it probably was a bad decision. I don't know. Similar to @WrCombs said, if I'm having a heart attack I would hope that my wife doesn't email my doctor, and instead call 911... Obviously the things we deal with usually aren't life and death, but I think people get comfort in knowing that somebody is on it, and that they're not lost in a sea of spam emails.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@bnrstnr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I'm much more likely to notice the ringing. I believe it's pretty standard in manufacturing that email is the least urgent form of communication.

But would it go to just one person? Isn't going to a single person alone a mark of "not a priority?" Because if you're busy, in either case, or sick, or out, etc. what do you do?

We're a small company, I'm their contact for the project. If I don't answer, they usually call the office immediately after. If it's an emergency they always call. Sure, that might be bad, or our own doing, but it works... :man_shrugging:

We aren't a support company with an entire staff dedicated to doing just that. I'm rarely supporting customers, but when I do, they call me with urgent problems.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

This is like the restaurant where you stand in line and when it is your turn to get help, some yahoo calls and the cashier takes their call first even though you were there and waited in line.

This isn't a good comparison, IMO. Any distributor, manufacturer, etc. that we deal with, a call always takes priority over whatever orders they're processing via email. If I call xbyte and want to order something, do you think that they say "alright, let me put you on hold while I reply to these 3 other emails first?" nope, they don't. At least not when I've called them.

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@pmoncho said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@pmoncho said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

a few of my customers use Email on a daily basis to communicate with us , Not a big deal right?
Well One in particular has decided that's the only way he will communicate with us.

I just got an email 30 minutes ago. : ......... "oh and this is an emergency, the entire site is down."

Nope, must not be an emergency. You're emailing me rather than Calling.

Anyone else deal with people like this?

On a daily basis. I've tried to explain 911's require a phone call as I am not constantly in email, at my desk, or have a communication device directly in my hand or driving.

Mostly goes in one ear and out the other, or should I say "eye" for that matter.

Only reason I saw it was because emailed in again.
I called his cell, and got it working. then explained "emails - Not important. Phone call = Important. "
added that to my signature on my email now.. in Quotes.
Ha.

That is one way to get the point across. Works for me!

Doesn't this result in lots of calls that would have been way better for you being an email?

Calls interrupt and take lots of time and don't produce a paperwork trail. We won't do work based on calls alone because that's a way to blame IT for decisions made elsewhere. We require everything in writing because that's how we show who requested things, found things, etc.

If a site is completely down (for whatever reason it could be, Terminals not working, Credit cards dont work, etc.) and they email me , and don't call - then it's obviously not an emergency.
If you email me , you're understanding that I'm working on other issues. If you're calling me, then You need help Right now -because its a business critical issue.

I dont send a text to Emergency Services (police in this example:) when Someones beating the shit out of my car with a baseball bat then call them and tell them to read the text. That's Counter productive. and doesn't get the damn job done, Just takes longer cause then they have to find the text in a pool of thousands, and read it.

Same situation here; You got all your terminals looking for the back office server? You sent me an email 30 minutes ago, and you've lost an estimated 1000 in business because you called me an hour later?
Well I get hundreds if not thousands of emails a day from customers, error reporting, not to mention Being away from the desk, or working on something that I can't just stop and check my email.

See the difference here is "right now emergencies" Business critical issues- cant go through an email to just me, it has to come through the help desk because if i"m not at my desk. You're emailing me to fix your site, and I cant check my email- What happens? you're down, lose thousands of dollars because you didn't pick up the phone and call.

I can relate. If I'm away from my desk working on something, or driving, or one of a million other things... and a customer emails me, I get one little vibration from my cell phone in my pocket. If they call me it rings for at least 30 seconds. I'm much more likely to notice the ringing. I believe it's pretty standard in manufacturing that email is the least urgent form of communication.

Sure, there have been times where somebody abuses the direct line for support, but we set them straight if that ends up being the case.

@WrCombs said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@bnrstnr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to find a plumber in TX...

https://mangolassi.it/topic/21870/plumbing-haltom-city-tx

Hey Here ya go!

Yeah, there were like 10 of them this morning. Most I've ever seen :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_closed_eyes:

Trying to find a plumber in TX...

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I swear our Amazon deliver rate is down to 50%. A huge portion of what we order gets delivered to other people and Amazon will do absolutely nothing to change the predictable problems. They keep opting to use a service provider (USPS) that they know doesn't know where our house is.

And half the time "out for delivery" never arrives. My package that was "out for delivery" at 8am today is now "expected in a few days". What?

USPS is a hot mess. They are sooooo slow. Since COVID we've seen packages travel back and forth between the same 2 cities 3-4 times. It's so ridiculous.

We have an Amazon distribution center locally, and they've switched almost entirely to their own couriers, which have been awesome. Before COVID we were getting like 95% of things next day, now we're slowly getting back to 2-day deliveries, but it's usually still more like 4.

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@thecreaitvone91 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@bnrstnr said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Obsolesce said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@coliver said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.

In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.

This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.

My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.

The other solution is to not design an IPOD.

Exactly. Buy a correctly sized Scale box - no IPOD... sure, huge upfront cost, but who knows over the long term compared to Azure. etc etc etc.. We don't have any of the other needed information to know if going to Azure was the right move or not... but it's done, so we move on.

Literally everything is cheap compared to Azure. LOL. Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload.

Their serverless offering is on par with the rest. It's a million requests per month and 400,000 seconds of compute for free. After that it's only $0.20 per million executions and $0.000016 per second. That's not really expensive at all.

Exactly. I'm using in a lot of places in production with ~10k users and twice as many devices that is using the serveless functions in many areas... basically for free. And, that's just the start (one example) of it... Having a VM with enough power to process that as frequently as it's getting done now along with all the other benefits around it, there's truly no comparison. Scaling it down to how a typical SMB would use it, well that's a no-brainer, as it'd be totally free and 100% beneficial. I don't think one's ignorance of a technology justifies it's disqualification of use in the real world.

This should probably be it's own topic, but here we are... I'm totally ignorant to Azure and serverless concepts in general. What types of real world services/processes are SMBs using (or could/should be using) serverless Azure for?

There's a few different scenarios. Anything reactionary essentially. Send a message/email based on an event, do some kind of work based on messages in a message queue, transform or modify data, etc. You can even use it to build and define APIs. I have an API running in Vercel (not Azure but another serverless offering) and I don't have to run the service in a VM full time.

Invoicing and Accounts Payable is a big use of it

I don't understand how those are serverless? There is software running - right? where is that software running? This is something I completely don't understand - and I'm guessing @bnrstnr likely doesn't either - but he'll correct me if I'm wrong and he does.

I definitely don't know, but I imagine it would primarily be using webhooks since they're charging by requests and minutes of compute per month.

@Obsolesce said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@stacksofplates said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@coliver said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:

I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.

In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.

This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.

My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.

The other solution is to not design an IPOD.

Exactly. Buy a correctly sized Scale box - no IPOD... sure, huge upfront cost, but who knows over the long term compared to Azure. etc etc etc.. We don't have any of the other needed information to know if going to Azure was the right move or not... but it's done, so we move on.

Literally everything is cheap compared to Azure. LOL. Even with all their specialty serverless whatever, never seen it cost close to what running your own would do. The cost is just so absurd per workload.

Their serverless offering is on par with the rest. It's a million requests per month and 400,000 seconds of compute for free. After that it's only $0.20 per million executions and $0.000016 per second. That's not really expensive at all.

Exactly. I'm using in a lot of places in production with ~10k users and twice as many devices that is using the serveless functions in many areas... basically for free. And, that's just the start (one example) of it... Having a VM with enough power to process that as frequently as it's getting done now along with all the other benefits around it, there's truly no comparison. Scaling it down to how a typical SMB would use it, well that's a no-brainer, as it'd be totally free and 100% beneficial. I don't think one's ignorance of a technology justifies it's disqualification of use in the real world.

This should probably be its own topic, but here we are... I'm totally ignorant to Azure and serverless concepts in general. What types of real world services/processes are SMBs using (or could/should be using) serverless Azure for?

@Grey said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

One of the absolute coolest things that ubiquiti has is this feature where it integrates an AR to your cell phone to help you find wtf is plugged in. Check it out:
https://prd-www-cdn.ubnt.com/media/static/media/bg.e5ecc7ca.mp4

This is super cool. I don't think I'd ever use it... but it's awesome nonetheless.

@scottalanmiller said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

lol I guess I thought something similar to this up until this very moment. I've apparently never seen it written, because "meet" makes it super obvious. Guess I never really thought about it.

Back in the office today because MI has cleared "Manufacturing" to be allowed to work again...

Missed so much stuff here over the past couple months

@IRJ said in Extending range for WIFI video cameras:

@bnrstnr said in Extending range for WIFI video cameras:

Have you thought about powerline adapters? I've strongly considered them before, but never actually went through with the purchase. I'm skeptical, but they seem to get decent enough reviews

I haven't looked at those in awhile. So they seem to be pretty reliable?

For the price it looks like you'd probably be better off doing a wifi mesh setup though. It's been a while since I've looked at them too.

@IRJ said in Extending range for WIFI video cameras:

@bnrstnr said in Extending range for WIFI video cameras:

Have you thought about powerline adapters? I've strongly considered them before, but never actually went through with the purchase. I'm skeptical, but they seem to get decent enough reviews

I haven't looked at those in awhile. So they seem to be pretty reliable?

16,000 four star average reviews for the first 3 results :man_shrugging:

Have you thought about powerline adapters? I've strongly considered them before, but never actually went through with the purchase. I'm skeptical, but they seem to get decent enough reviews

Laptop shopping... Why are ASUS laptops so much cheaper than Dell/HP?? Anybody have a higher end model (ZenBook, VivoBook, ProArt) to compare?

@jt1001001 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Setting up remote access plans for critical employees.

Just got done talking to one of the owners about this.

@stacksofplates said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I don't get why people want to use it

because games