@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on how I could improve my network security?:

@dave247 said in Thoughts on how I could improve my network security?:

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on how I could improve my network security?:

If you DO decide to go UTM, avoid crap like ASA, SonicWall, Sophos etc. I heavily recommend Palo Alto or nothing. If you can't do it right, don't do it halfway with gear I'd not even be willing to deploy at home.

What's wrong with Sonicwall? We have that where I work..

High cost, low quality, bad vendor. Reverse the question... what's good about them?

1. They are a UTM maker, something I think is generally fundamentally wrong as an approach.
2. They claim to be for security but have hidden configuration that isn't documented, a big no no in security and IT.
3. They intentationally set defaults to break things for no reason like SIP-ALG (SW is the #1 cause for VoIP issues.)
4. They are expensive, many times the cost of equipment I consider to be much better.
5. They essentially exist only, much like Meraki, to make sales people money. They are like Mary Kay or AmWay - no one buys them intentionally, they buy them from sales people to make them go away. They aren't good enough for people to go looking for them. But when the girl scouts come to your door, you feel bad and buy something small to make them leave, SonicWall is the cheapest thing you can buy from the vendors that sell them, it's a lot like unwanted Girl Scout cookies - you know they are expensive and unhealthy, but you feel you have to buy something.

1. So that's really just your opinion then..
2. Can you elaborate on the "hidden configuration"?
3. I have our VoIP running through a zone on our NSA 3600 with no issues
4. Seems like everything is "expensive" and what you consider better is a matter of opinion
5. I understand getting ripped off by salespeople who push products that the buyer may not truly need, but we've made use of our SonicWall NSA 3600 quite a bit. Its been rock solid. And it's not like it's just a dinky system that's been cobbled together by the manufacturer just to sell as an extra piece of expensive crap. There's a lot of depth to it and it has a lot of good tools and features.

I have our three ISP connections coming into the SonicWall with load-balancing. I also have wifi zones for corp and guest on their own VLAN. I have LAN and VPN zones (an others) which are carefully set up and segregated through firewall rules. There's a page to manage NAT policies. We make use of SSLVPN, Gateway A/V and anti-spyware, content filtering, IDS & IPS, and the GMS Analyzer, etc.

I didn't choose this product as it was on site when I got my job here, but as I said, it's been completely solid.

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on how I could improve my network security?:

If you DO decide to go UTM, avoid crap like ASA, SonicWall, Sophos etc. I heavily recommend Palo Alto or nothing. If you can't do it right, don't do it halfway with gear I'd not even be willing to deploy at home.

What's wrong with Sonicwall? We have that where I work..

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

The last time I looked at the fact solution for my 700+ pages per day the cost was going to be in excess of $700 a month for a hosted solution.

This is why I kept it in the house onto a machine that I already owned saving to a network share but I could have just as easily sent it to an email group.

Monthly reoccurring fees are $30 for a pots line.
My machine has a printer driver that allows printing to fax. So there is no need to print something and walk to a machine.

We do about 200 pages a month or so which is going to cost us about $30 per month and then it sounds like if we go over that, it's still quite cheap.

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

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

I'm not leaving this company for a while as I just got the job a year ago as my first IT job as sysadmin and I've been getting a ton of invaluable experience with a massive range of IT things, big and small.

That should read "I'm getting out of here as quickly as possible. I've been here a full year and already am dramatically left without mentorship and there is no upward mobility. The company doesn't care about business and my desires to do good IT work don't align with the organization."

I actually do have mentorship and there is upward mobility. Additionally, I have learned a ton on my own and I think I'm doing pretty good so far, despite some negative things. And of course my company cares about business, despite making some bad decisions in the past. Stop making such negatively absolutist statements.

We've signed up with egoldfax so thanks to the user who suggested that.

@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:

@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.

The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.

Scott, the person who hired my company's CIO was the owners of the company. There is nobody in-between.

I didn't suggest that it was. You have an endemic problem with the business approach. Not something that can be fixed. You have two options... stop caring about doing a good job because that's not the job they want done or leave.

Well I'm not going to stop caring because I have still been able to make a lot of difference here for the better, despite the CIO's bad habits.

I'm not leaving this company for a while as I just got the job a year ago as my first IT job as sysadmin and I've been getting a ton of invaluable experience with a massive range of IT things, big and small.

@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:

@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"..

Actually, the issue I'm seeing is that he's not doing business or vendor management - exactly the opposite.

Yup.

@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:

@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.

The root of the issue is whoever hired a CIO that isn't qualified to work in IT (or business.) That's not the logic of a business person.

Scott, the person who hired my company's CIO was the owners of the company. There is nobody in-between.

@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..