@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.

We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out

Perhaps it's time to fire the first person for buying Cisco.

That would be the first step. Find the root cause of the problems.

That's my CIO who thinks Cisco is the way to go since it's Cisco. I tried telling him about Vonage and other far cheaper voip solutions but he doesn't really hear what I'm saying.

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.

http://www.goldfax.com/

oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!

That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.

We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.

So your CIO isn't even an intern level? That's basic adulting, how do people like this even get employed?

He's a friend of the owners of my company. He makes over $150k per year but he doesn't know much about IT at all. He more or less deals with businessy stuff and policies and "vendor management"... he works about 25 hours a week and is kind of a spendthrift. I can't do anything about it except try to "manage upward"..

@travisdh1 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.

http://www.goldfax.com/

oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!

That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.

We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.

So... asking a sales person what you need instead of telling them what you need, of course, it's their job! http://www.smbitjournal.com/author/admin/page/9/

I'm no longer so surprised when people in management fall into this trap. It's the Wizard's First Rule after all (yes, I'm reading Terry Goodkind's fantasy series currently, expect more references to the Wizzards First Rule.)

Ah yes, I know of Wizard's First Rule!!! I read that when I was back in high school. Good series!

And yes, I know about not asking sales people for advice now that I've gotten flamed by Scott Allen Miller (LOL). We just had the meeting to see what they offer but I know what I want, and they don't offer it.

@marcinozga said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

We use RingCentral for VoIP, so faxing is included. They have 3 options for sending faxes. Emails to [email protected], through deskphone app, or printing to virtual printers installed on desktops.

We're going with a new Cisco voip and I guess they don't have a fax solution... rips hair out

@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.

http://www.goldfax.com/

oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!

That's the way that I think most companies are going today. Not that service specifically, just fully hosted fax services. It's worth just making that whole component go away.

We just had a meeting with our printer support vendor and they want to sell us this solution involving a virtual fax server and stuff that's ballpark $8,000. I'm just silently ripping my hair out while my CIO eats it up.

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

You might want to check eGoldFax and see if they can do what you want. Folks here have spoke highly of them. Their cheapest eGoldFax plan was around $30 / month, and for our volume (or lack thereof) of faxing, the pricing didn't make sense.

http://www.goldfax.com/

oh wow, eGoldFax looks perfect. Completely cloud hosted with no hardware or software to install... thanks!

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@dave247 said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

For that, if I used voip.ms, I'd probably have to have a separate DID for each department. I'm in a situation where that's not a requirement, and we just have one place for faxes. That being said, the aforementioned mailbox is a mail-enabled public folder, to which I've only granted access to the people in the office who would have been the people would could access faxes anyway.

Yeah that's pretty much how we have it set up now. I have a couple extra phone lines I could be using for fax to different departments...

@eddiejennings said in Need some help with a better fax solution:

This is the solution we chose for faxing was using voip.ms's virtual fax service. I ported the number we were using for faxing to them. I setup E-mail to fax so inbound faxes are sent to [email protected]. You could set that to be the address of your fax E-mail group. For outbound faxing, users (who I've authorized to fax) send a message to [email protected] with an attachment. Our printer doesn't have a direct scan-to-E-mail option, so if my users don't already have a digital document of what they want to fax, they'll need to scan it. The system is pretty bare bones, but it meets our needs.

I was hoping fax would just go away for us when we moved to FreePBX + Twilio SIP trunking, but On High requires it, and I decided that wasn't a battle worth fighting.

What about if you want faxes to go to different departments? Would you have a separate fax line for each department or is there an easier way that I'm not thinking of?

Also, turns out our Bizhub C454e has a PC Fax driver so users can just send faxes from their PC. I'm hurrying to install this now.

My company still uses fax as we send and receive a decent amount per day. We email documents as much as we can but we still have to use fax.

Currently, we have one fax line coming through POTS. When we get faxes, our printer/scanner/fax system just converts the fax to pdf and mails it to the company fax email group. When people need to send a fax, they are manually printing, scanning and faxing.

I know there are solutions that let you send a fax right from your computer but I haven't dove into the research yet. We are also in the process of getting a new voip system (old one is very old and messed up) and I would like to make use of that with our fax situation so users can get faxes to their email.

Also, let me just say up front that I don't want this to devolve into everyone criticizing why we are still using fax or something.

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

If for home, I assume that the goal is learning ESXi itself? Otherwise, just use a different hypervisor. KVM seems to be the hypervisor of prominence today.

Well, I use ESXi/vSphere at work. I wanted to try out the free version of ESXi at home for S&G, but I may also experiment with other Hypervisors, depending on what will work with my system. I would like to check out KVM.

@scottalanmiller said in I can't even:

@dave247 said in I can't even:

What does IoT even mean in this case? I've always been unclear on it..

IoT is not a real term, it doesn't mean anything specific. It's a loose reference to devices that you'd not expect to be computing devices that are networked, but are. POS doesn't fall into that category. Your toaster, microwave, or fridge would. A sensor in your attic might. Thermostats really can't be considered this any longer, they are full computing devices and expected to be so, now. So they've left IoT, IMHO.

IoT is a useless term based around the cluelessness or expectations of the observer. It is always subjective and can't be used in any technical context.

Lmao, I love it. I always though it seemed like an odd/vague term.

@scottalanmiller said in I can't even:

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2085058-is-windows-10-iot-os-secured-enough-to-be-deployed-in-your-organisation

when no IoT exists, and people fearing Windows 10 compared to 7. WTF people?

What does IoT even mean in this case? I've always been unclear on it..

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

@dave247 said in Pfsense:

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

I actually made a video on LAN sizes just the other day. I'm waiting on it to be edited.

I'm finally going through and watching all your videos.

Remember to like and subscribe

Yeah I subscribed. Be prepared for me to come to you with questions and things..

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dave247 said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dave247 said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

Is there a reason that you want hardware RAID for home use?

Because I want whatever I install for an OS or Hypervisor to only see the volume presented by the RAID controller rather than multiple drives. I don't really want to use the fakeRAID on my motherboard like I currently am.

And software RAID is not available with your chosen hypervisor?

It doesn't seem that my motherboard will work with ESXi but I haven't finished looking into it. Regardless, I'd rather use a hardware RAID card this time.

ESXi requires hardware RAID, it is as simple as that. Hyper-V is acceptable to use software RAID in a lab or home use. KVM or Xen have enterprise software RAID, so you have no need for a RAID card at all for them, business or home use.

FakeRAID is never the right answer and is part of the software RAID family, not hardware RAID family, so as ESXi must have hardware RAID, FakeRAID can't work there.

Yep... that's why I asked about a hardware RAID controller in my OP

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@dave247 said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

Is there a reason that you want hardware RAID for home use?

Because I want whatever I install for an OS or Hypervisor to only see the volume presented by the RAID controller rather than multiple drives. I don't really want to use the fakeRAID on my motherboard like I currently am.

And software RAID is not available with your chosen hypervisor?

It doesn't seem that my motherboard will work with ESXi but I haven't finished looking into it (I'll probably have to build a custom image with the drivers). Regardless, I'd rather use a hardware RAID card this time.

@scottalanmiller said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

@dave247 said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

.... haven't had the chance to dig in as I am a freaking "IT generalist" where I work.

Youtube Video

I have a video for everything these days.

yep I just watched that one.. guess I can't call myself a Systems Administrator anymore (jk I totally am)

@reid-cooper said in What are some good true-hardware RAID cards for home server setup?:

Is there a reason that you want hardware RAID for home use?

Because I want whatever I install for an OS or Hypervisor to only see the volume presented by the RAID controller rather than multiple drives. I don't really want to use the fakeRAID on my motherboard like I currently am.

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

I actually made a video on LAN sizes just the other day. I'm waiting on it to be edited.

I'm finally going through and watching all your videos. I'm also trying to read through all your posts on SMBjournal

@scottalanmiller said in Pfsense:

A huge number of people think that /23 is weird because they don't realize that it is post 1993 and that class based networks haven't existed in 24 years. Their "what is normal" is based on 1970-1993 "standards" of class based networking and non-switched networks. The amount of insanely outdated information forming the foundation of myths like this are often totally crazy.

So I've noticed. I spent a good deal of time studying subnetting (when I was trying to wrap my head around it) and now that I get it, I realize that a lot of people don't.

@bigbear said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

@dave247 said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

@bigbear said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

@dave247 said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

@scottalanmiller said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

@black3dynamite said in Do You Need Two AD Domain Controllers? SAMIT Video:

All these best practices seems to be carried over from the days of physical servers.

The need for two didn't exist then, either. It's never been a best practice, always a complete misunderstanding of HA at best, a sales tactic at worst.

And besides... RDSH in the cloud or bust

I don't understand what you mean here..

I am a big fan of Remote Desktop Session Host on Server 2016, Microsoft officially supports DC on the same box. For $80/month on Vultr plus $16/month for Server 2016 license, and about $100/user one time license fee... you can support 15 to 20 users.

The "or bust" part is that I really wouldnt be interested in doing IT any other way.

oh you mean you have a hosted 2016 RDS server/DC? That's pretty cool... I currently have on-site terminal servers but they are 2008 R2 Enterprise and I have a separate server for the connection broker (I hate this setup). I have been meaning to take a look at going to a 2016 RDS setup but haven't had the chance to dig in as I am a freaking "IT generalist" where I work.