Posts made by Brains

Thanks guys. I just wont worry about it. I had seen some reports of high usage, but have not deployed fully and monitored to confirm.

Im in the process of upgrading all of our servers to hardware based LSI Cards. They are not cheap, and are a little UI unfriendly, but we have not had a single problem with them and when I had questions during configuration (Because their UI sucks), their support answered immediately and gave me all the information I needed. LSI Cards are nice, the central RAID management is awesome and reduces maintenance costs

So I really like the Lock Screen images M$ comes up with, and I think little things like that make the transition easier for employees. However, I hate not being able to reduce bandwidth usage by pointing all of the computers to a central location and letting the computers choose from there. My Google Fu has not been productive, does anyone know how to practically accomplish this task or what the average bandwidth usage is? Maybe I dont need to worry about this at all.

@wirestyle22 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

@DustinB3403 said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

What the %^&# is going on here, I have no clue how to respond without calling this guy an asshole for even asking a question like this.

MBBS -- Magic Black Box Syndrome is now officially a thing thanks to @Brains

The sad thing is I'm infected lol

Ahh i finally have a claim to fame

Unrelated note, has anyone upgraded a Win7 laptop with dual video cards to Windows 10 yet? I havent spent much time on it yet, planning to this month, but my laptop doesnt even prompt me for the upgrade and doesnt run if I manually instigate the upgrade process.

@travisdh1 yay! Thats what I love to hear in my healthcare field! Microsoft randomly stealing our PHI! I am going to try to disable it all through GPO if possible, so that it stays static. Do you have any good references that I could use to make sure I get them all?

@brianlittlejohn Looks like Scott has a new nickname!

Spiceworks Jesus!

Ha! Reminds me of supply-side Jesus (Sorry if too political, just remove it if so)
Supply Side Jesus by Al Franken

Thanks everyone for your help. I was able to get my deployments down to 3-4 minutes hands on per desktop by using WSUS to deploy the upgrade. I did have to modify a reg key - AllowOSUpgrade, but everything seemed to work well. Does anyone have any GPO pointers for the transition?

Steps:

0. Created Windows 10 WSUS Computer Group. Approved Win10 Retail Upgrade only for that group.
1. Made GPO Change for AllowOSUpgrade
2. Uninstall Kaspersky From Desktop(s) (Says its not compatible even though it is - wont let me upgrade unless I remove) remotely via Security Center
3. Add Computer(s) to WSUS Windows 10 Computer Group
4. Log into the machine and click start upgrade (Remote Desktop Connection Manager is useful. I can remote into 10+ computers all at once with my saved credentials)
5. 5-10 minutes later, click upgrade now
6. Wait
7. Physically go to desktop(s) and go through initial 2-3 configuration screens. Disabling M$ spying.
8. Reinstall KES
9. Done

If someone could give me pointers to reinforce critical thinking skills with green IT Staff, I would be eternally grateful. Experience plays a large part in knowing which questions to ask during that process, but other parts are just "common sense" to some people while completely foreign to others. From reading error messages to services breaking, IT people need to dig deep sometimes to resolve an issue. When training staff, I usually ask them the same questions that I ask myself internally. Ex - "What is related to this process that could affect this failure" (Scope & Environment), "What does that error message mean? Break it apart and take it one part at a time"

I have a saying/theory/whatever: There is always a point where you look at technology and consider it a "magic black box". This is where your understanding ends and it "just works". IT people need to be many, many layers deeper than the average user.

The concern is how to prep IT People to push deeper when they hit the "magic black box" so that A ) They dont stop or get frustrated before they fix the problem & B ) Their understanding and knowledge improve which helps reduce the "magic black box" issues

Also I always stress consistent testing environments for new staff. Your hour of testing means little if important factors are not tracked that could influence this issue.

Feel free to improve my saying (or completely refute it if you disagree). Im always open to improving my management and training skills.

What version OS are you using? It works with Win7 Pro OEM

@Dashrender I was speaking to Microsoft about this situation late last year, and they hinted at purchasing 1 Win10 VL and using that. Im really doubtful due to licensing issues. Do you think it would work?

@wrx7m that sounds really good, but would it work with my licensing? Wouldnt I need VL for that?

So we are pushing forward with our free upgrade to Windows 10 in our office. All machines are domain joined and have Windows 7 Pro OEM licenses. We would like to upgrade each machine instead of pushing a new image to limit the impact to our users. Hardware is all compatible (we will replace/upgrade if we run into one we missed). We've tested all applications with Windows 10 and have manually upgraded a few machines for testing / feedback. We have our Windows 10 GPO configured to fix all of the issues we have encountered due to our environment.

Unfortunately since we are a small company we do not have any subscriptions to Microsoft's nicer products (SCCM, etc), but I could maybe swing a purchase if I can demonstrate cost savings.

Regarding GPO, this is the first time I have had to deal with transitioning GPO settings to new Windows templates. What is the best procedure for ensuring everything that needs to be moved to the new templates is done properly?

• How did everyone here do it in their small business environment?
• Do you think I could just shudder let the windows updates loose via our WSUS server on a controlled basis? shudder (I feel dirty even typing that)
• How much hands on per machine would be required and what level of technical skill would it need if we did allow upgrade through Windows Update? shudder
• Did you run into any strange problems?
• Is there anything that I should be aware of or plan for that might not be obvious?
• GPO Update Recommendations?

Thanks in advance for any tips provided. I appreciate all the help that can be provided

@dafyre said in Which IT Collaboration / Meeting Tool do you use?:

@Brains said in Which IT Collaboration / Meeting Tool do you use?:

@dafyre said in Which IT Collaboration / Meeting Tool do you use?:

I use WebEx or either meet.jit.si (https://meet.jit.si)

Thanks we will give Jitsi a try

The Meet.jit.si isn't good for remote control sessions, but it's great for meetings and displaying stuff on the screen.

that's fine, we don't really need remote control. It would be nice, but we are only sharing code and IDE usage information.

Thanks!

@dafyre said in Which IT Collaboration / Meeting Tool do you use?:

I use WebEx or either meet.jit.si (https://meet.jit.si)

Thanks we will give Jitsi a try

@jyates said in HIPPA:

I believe HIPAA only covers medical information, so it wouldn't cover your name, number, nor your address.

I suggest using a google voice number to give out to people.

It also covers individually identifiable information

We have some remote Analysts and are currently looking for an online collaboration tool for our staff. We have Dev and IT meetings and would like some software that would be conducive for both while still being cheap (or free) for a SMB. Is anyone using anything similar or have used something similar in the past?

What would you guys recommend?

Feature List

• Screen Sharing
• Chat
• Voice

@Dashrender said in Access to CEOs of a company - should you a consumer have it?:

@Jason said in Access to CEOs of a company - should you a consumer have it?:

Our CEO response to customers and helps make sure their issues are resolved. He doesn't type the responses himself he has his assistants type them. But he does work on the issues and make sure they are fixed.

I definitely understand that the CEO should be making sure these things are handled - but unless your company is small, that seems like something that should be mainly handled much lower on the tree than the CEO.

I have had to call Executive Support (Office of the CEO) numerous times for various companies and it definitely should have been handled at a much lower level. The problem occurs when you have failures in your support structure that cannot properly resolve the issue for the customer. If they have went through the normal procedure and followed up the chain of command to no avail, the CEO's office is the last stop before no longer being a customer. If the CEO doesn't care to attempt to resolve the issue, you learn why the rest of their support staff didn't seem to care about resolving the issue as well (Looking at you RingCentral). I would never do it to just complain or submit feedback, but in my quest to make vendors keep their word and promises, its a very important tool that should only be used occasionally.

Honestly I have no clue how busy a CEO at a company the size of EHR company would be - though I would expect them to be busy enough not to be fielding 100's of complaint calls weekly.

Ahh you see that's the entire point! They are too busy to be dealing with 100s of calls weekly, so they need to get the problems fixed to stop the calls from coming in. If you make the boss deal with the problem, most of the time he doesn't want to deal with this small time BS and will force people to resolve it for you

@PSX_Defector said:

@Brains said:

It's just bad timing and we are in the healthcare market and subject to Texas's Workers Compensation craziness, so its been a rough year or two for us.

Then you best not be using PPTP. Compliance audits will come down on you hard.

If anyone will be at Lone Star PHP in Texas this weekend, let me know. Ill be there and will buy you a beer.

I thought you were talking about Big Texas Beer Fest, which was last weekend.

I was planning on trying to use L2TP and darn for missing the Beer Fest. That's my kind of place! Well Whiskey Fest would be MORE my kinda place haha.

I also wanted to ask you about this as well:
3 Year Warranty & InControl 2 for Balance One/Balance One Core

I really doubt the cloud management would be useful for us since we only have 2 local devices (one active at a time). We will get free firmware updates AFAIK, so I don't really know why that is mentioned. Is there any reason we should get this package? 25% price increase for 2 additional years of warranty doesn't seem worth it to me.

@Jason said:

@Dashrender said:

@Brains said:

@Dashrender The IT Director does not want additional complexity (solid windows environment) and my staff is not Linux trained so there is a knowledge gap that would exist. Unfortunately I cant really do anything about that and I do not have time to be the main tech support whenever something breaks with the system. I have to work within the system I have. It looks like we are going to settle with the LRT224 due to cost concerns.... Thanks for your help though, I would much rather go with the Peplink ONE, but the $300 ($600 since we like to have a backup) price difference is enough to make a difference at this time.

I just don't understand why they are being so cheap on the hardware? Seriously, it's worth putting your company at risk, or have lower performance on your 200 Mb pipe over a few hundred lowesy dollars? If that's true, why not save some bucks and lower that internet pipe to 100 Mb or even lower?

How are 30 users even using a 200mb connection, unless your letting everyone stream video?

30 users? We really only need the pipe for offsite backups/restores and we got it for a nominal increase in our existing pricing. The main point was the tripling of our upload speed. But yea we don't restrict any music/movie/video streams at all. Not until someone gets fired for watching videos all day instead of doing their job.