Posts made by guyinpv

What are the current best options for self-hosted file sync?

I have tried both Own and Next in a quick home lab setup and found both to be somewhat buggy and even annoying.

What I need is extreme robustness of the core feature of file syncing, with robust clients on all platforms. Wingdings and feature bloat need not apply.

It's main purpose is to replace needing paid options of other competitors like Box and OneDrive, etc. Most of the syncing is in-office with only a few mobiles or tablets that might want access outside. One computer at another location would connect as well.

@IRJ said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

All the above is my opinion too.
@irj You aren't ripping at all. I need opinions from people who've been there.

My last bench job was over 10 years ago, even then it was about $13/hr after 6 years at the place!

My last job interview for bench/repair/onsite general tech at "the" local "big" shop was just a year or two ago but they maxed out around $17 or $18/hr even for an onsite tech who does business clients.

I've never seen a general tech position in my local cities anywhere over basic $10 to $14/hr. It's pathetic.
The highest paying IT job I ever found/applied for was for city government which was about a $45k job with full benefits, maxing out around $70k ish.
Even hospitals and town governments pay around $40k-$50k tops.

If the very best I can do in my city is government at $50k, there has to be something better I can do on my own. I just don't know what that niche is, what it looks like, what is my value/offering.

OK so if traveling technician is out, and MSP it out due to complexity and lack of experience, what other niches are there?
It seems obviously to cater to business rather than consumer, though there may be a small niche of consumers worth going after too.
Businesses must have a need for IT but not big enough to afford their own part time or full time staff. And not small enough where they just have one or two Walmart PCs and a inkjet.

Maybe I just need more examples of what people actual DO if they run their own IT business, and how much can be made doing it. I might as well not leave the 9-5 if going my own way increases work load by 40% and only make a few hundred more a month! Or I can keep applying for government jobs. eww.

I would say an MSP isn't impossible, but you should probably work for one for a few years first to understand everything required.

None of those in my neighborhood.

A guy tried to "partner" me into starting one with him, only what the deal really was is "you be on call and I'll have you do my work for me as needed. No guaranteed income or schedule or anything, and you can take 40% billable hours and do marketing and sales and B2B door-2-door on your own time for my new MSP."

@DustinB3403 said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@DustinB3403 said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@travisdh1

I guess the question is, does the sucker really need replaced? I mean really? Is this considered a "bad" drive and be covered by a warranty? I have my doubts. If I tell them "DSM says it has a bad sector, can you replace it?" They might laugh at me.

Why would use use RAID0 and then question if the drive needs to be replaced?

Huh?

It was a bit tongue in cheek, RAID0 provides no protection against a drive failure, one drive has partially failed. So you've likely lost the data that was in that section of the disk.

And you've asked if you should retry the drive, or replace the drive.

Well that's what threw me off. Even with the error and the message that it was "crashed", I could access all the files just fine. The shared folders were there, etc. It was even telling me to copy the files off just in case. So on one hand it said there was a crash, on the other hand, nothing was broken.

Many people said they just took out the drive and reinserted it and all was well. This is what I did and it came back to life, verified the RAID and so the only issue is that it now lists one bad sector on drive 2.

@travisdh1 said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv Did the Synology come with the drives already installed? If so I'd ask support. If they didn't come with the Synology I'd ask the vendor support.

What is the reallocated sector count in the SMART statistics?

It's actually performing the advanced SMART tests right now, at 40% complete. I'll know in a little bit the final details.

All the above is my opinion too.
@irj You aren't ripping at all. I need opinions from people who've been there.

My last bench job was over 10 years ago, even then it was about $13/hr after 6 years at the place!

My last job interview for bench/repair/onsite general tech at "the" local "big" shop was just a year or two ago but they maxed out around $17 or $18/hr even for an onsite tech who does business clients.

I've never seen a general tech position in my local cities anywhere over basic $10 to $14/hr. It's pathetic.
The highest paying IT job I ever found/applied for was for city government which was about a $45k job with full benefits, maxing out around $70k ish.
Even hospitals and town governments pay around $40k-$50k tops.

If the very best I can do in my city is government at $50k, there has to be something better I can do on my own. I just don't know what that niche is, what it looks like, what is my value/offering.

OK so if traveling technician is out, and MSP it out due to complexity and lack of experience, what other niches are there?
It seems obviously to cater to business rather than consumer, though there may be a small niche of consumers worth going after too.
Businesses must have a need for IT but not big enough to afford their own part time or full time staff. And not small enough where they just have one or two Walmart PCs and a inkjet.

Maybe I just need more examples of what people actual DO if they run their own IT business, and how much can be made doing it. I might as well not leave the 9-5 if going my own way increases work load by 40% and only make a few hundred more a month! Or I can keep applying for government jobs. eww.

@IRJ said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@IRJ said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@JaredBusch said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@travisdh1

I guess the question is, does the sucker really need replaced? I mean really? Is this considered a "bad" drive and be covered by a warranty? I have my doubts. If I tell them "DSM says it has a bad sector, can you replace it?" They might laugh at me.

Yes. Replace it. Unless your data means nothing. In which case, why have the data.

This

Why would you even want a somewhat questionable drive?

Because it's normal for drives to have bad sectors. They get marked and life goes on. If basic and advanced SMART scans continue to say the drive is normal, and even manufacturer utility tests say it's good, how am I supposed to warranty it? Some tool has to declare the drive is bad.

That is why you have high availability on anything important.

OK but that's not relevant.

This thread isn't about merits of backup strategies or opinions on RAID0, etc.

I'm wondering if other Synology users see DSM listing bad sectors, whether it's normal, how many are acceptable, and so on. I've even read some places that Synology can create the bad sectors via it's own reading/writing errors and they aren't "really" bad sectors at all.
Some people take such drives and do a wipe on another computer and reinstall to Synology and it's back to normal, no bad sectors.
Some people I've read are still using drives with over 3,000 bad sector count! Some others have hundreds or over a thousand of their own.

Opinions range from "replace immediately" to "format it, test it and reuse". Some people say to trust the advanced SMART scan and some say SMART means nothing. Some say 1 bad sector means the internal supply of spare sectors is out and this is the beginning of the end, some say it's just fine and normal.

What I'm looking for is actual experience or official recommendations from Synology. They don't seem to have a public post about it so I may have to do a support ticket to get answers. I'm wondering if anybody else here has drives in their Synology that show bad sectors. Plenty of people I've read continue to use drives with a count >1 and don't report issues.

@coliver said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@guyinpv said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@JaredBusch said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@guyinpv said in Currently Open Community Issues:

Not a bug, but a feature.

Is there a way to move to my own latest post in a thread?

A lot of times I want to start reading where I left off but there is no easy way to go back to my last post.

When you click on a topic title you have already read, it will take you to where you left off.

Normally I come back to threads via the status icon, not through the category listings. I'll get a notification about a watched thread "so and so posted" and this takes me to the bottom of the thread.

What I'm hoping for is a small link or button that specifically takes me to my own last post within the thread. This is even more handy as a thread gets longer and longer. This has to be inside the thread itself, not from the outside, home page or category pages etc.

If you go through the unread page to your threads it will bring you to the post that you read last. Very handy.

Not very handy depending on how old the thread is, having to scan through the list trying to remember which threads I wanted to read and may have unwatched to reduce emails, etc etc.

Typically the notifications say "so and so posted" and that link takes me to the bottom of the thread. Assuming nobody specifically replied to my last post (or I'd get notification for that), then I want to return to my last post, because that is naturally where I left off.
If it is a super active thread, or perhaps a non-active thread, it might not be right there at the top of the unread page. Or heck I might not even remember I was reading it if I'm bouncing around 20 threads.

@JaredBusch said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@guyinpv said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@JaredBusch said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@guyinpv said in Currently Open Community Issues:

Not a bug, but a feature.

Is there a way to move to my own latest post in a thread?

A lot of times I want to start reading where I left off but there is no easy way to go back to my last post.

When you click on a topic title you have already read, it will take you to where you left off.

Normally I come back to threads via the status icon, not through the category listings. I'll get a notification about a watched thread "so and so posted" and this takes me to the bottom of the thread.

What I'm hoping for is a small link or button that specifically takes me to my own last post within the thread. This is even more handy as a thread gets longer and longer. This has to be inside the thread itself, not from the outside, home page or category pages etc.

No forum I have ever used has had that functionality.

Lol, well by all means, we should not innovate, try new things, or do anything outside the status quo. We must only do what other forums do, lest we accidentally develop a unique feature.

@DustinB3403 said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@travisdh1

I guess the question is, does the sucker really need replaced? I mean really? Is this considered a "bad" drive and be covered by a warranty? I have my doubts. If I tell them "DSM says it has a bad sector, can you replace it?" They might laugh at me.

Why would use use RAID0 and then question if the drive needs to be replaced?

Huh?

@IRJ said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@JaredBusch said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@guyinpv said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

@travisdh1

I guess the question is, does the sucker really need replaced? I mean really? Is this considered a "bad" drive and be covered by a warranty? I have my doubts. If I tell them "DSM says it has a bad sector, can you replace it?" They might laugh at me.

Yes. Replace it. Unless your data means nothing. In which case, why have the data.

This

Why would you even want a somewhat questionable drive?

Because it's normal for drives to have bad sectors. They get marked and life goes on. If basic and advanced SMART scans continue to say the drive is normal, and even manufacturer utility tests say it's good, how am I supposed to warranty it? Some tool has to declare the drive is bad.

@travisdh1

I guess the question is, does the sucker really need replaced? I mean really? Is this considered a "bad" drive and be covered by a warranty? I have my doubts. If I tell them "DSM says it has a bad sector, can you replace it?" They might laugh at me.

@travisdh1 said in Synology crashed disk this morning:

If the drive is to the point of showing bad sectors to the Synology unit, the drive should be considered defective. It's run out of the factory assigned spare sectors, and is now having to dip into actual storage space to spare out sectors. If it's under warranty, time for a warranty exchange. If it's not under warranty, time to think about it's replacement.

Being that it's RAID0, it shouldn't be important data anyway, right? (Something like backup staging area?)

The drive is only about 3 or 4 months old as far as when I actually bought it. Not sure how old it is on the store shelf!

Is there a way to verify this somehow? Does DSM have a test feature that will prove a failure for purposes of warranty replacement? I hate that a drive MEANT for NAS boxes is showing failure in only 3 months of barely any use.
How common is it to see a failure this soon?

Also, you're telling me that because DSM knows there is a bad sector, the drive has completely filled up it's normal list of bad sectors? Not sure what you mean here. Some bad sectors Synology wouldn't otherwise be aware of?

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?

You are mixing IT and bench services, which I think adds confusion. Bench is relatively standard, not totally, but a bit. IT by definition is not standard as it is core business... nothing in core business is cookie cutter or profits would be predictable and investments would be basically a guarantee. IT, being a business item, is almost totally bespoke. Bench, however, is not, as it is like car repair and can be done pretty predictably.

But how viable is bench as a career?
You need to fix 2 to 5 computers a day with at least 5 billable hours at $75/hr.
That's 1300 billable hours a year for gross $97,500. Sounds good but take away tools, accountant, taxes, secretary or intern part time, whatever. You might make an OK $60k give or take.
But if 1300 billable hours is split into an average of 1.5hr jobs, I need 867 clients a year, 72 a month, 18 a week. These are hard numbers.
Not only that but just processing 18 people a week, the documentation, billing, phone calls, followup calls, inevitable customer support calls, emails, etc. 5 billable hours a day easily becomes a 10, 12, 14 hour day.

I'm not saying working 12 hours a day is bad, or even that fixing 18 computers a week is all that difficult. The hard part is trying to get 18 clients a week! And even then, getting them all to bring computers in is annoying for them.
If I do onsite work, 18 a week becomes much harder.

Anyway, I know people who do it, but it takes a long time to get established, and then a lot of work becomes repeat clients over the years.

@scottalanmiller said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

@guyinpv said in Home business ideas for transition out of 9-5?:

In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.

Nowhere in America or Canada (or probably Mexico) is $75/hr an experienced pro. Anything less than the $110/hr of Geek Squad means you are a scrambling, semi-unemployed bench tech. Geek Squad sets the "floor" price in North America, fall below that, and why would anyone, consumer or otherwise, think of you as a "pro"? And GS employees are not even remotely at the level to be called IT or a pro, they are bench workers at the lowest bar of bench work. Good bench people earn double their takehome with much better conditions working for good companies and don't deal with consumers. Even bench gets good salaries when they are good at their jobs.

Interesting perspective. I assume retail locations like Best Buy charge that because of all the overhead and employees. The whole point of avoiding that and going with a mom-n-pop or road warrior technician is you can assume lower costs. Where GS charges $110, the guy in the Honda hatchback is probably $60.

Do you really think the average person is basing their decision on price in this way? Like "GS charges $110, but this traveling guy is $75, what? Why so cheap? I'm going with the more expensive option cause they just HAVE to be better!"
I think people will choose the cheapest, with almost no concern for quality. Average people I mean. They will find the cheapest option they feel safe with.

I also mentioned earlier, it just isn't practical to charge $100/hr for granny who can't figure out the Win10 start menu or how to find the email icon. She has a 9 year old computer that cost $299 on sale. She ain't paying $200 for me to comfort her.
It's hard to NOT do those jobs either. How do you advertise services and say "lonely cheapskates need not apply"?
I don't mind those jobs but I just feel really really bad when it comes time to show the bill.

@JaredBusch said in Currently Open Community Issues:

@guyinpv said in Currently Open Community Issues:

Not a bug, but a feature.

Is there a way to move to my own latest post in a thread?

A lot of times I want to start reading where I left off but there is no easy way to go back to my last post.

When you click on a topic title you have already read, it will take you to where you left off.

Normally I come back to threads via the status icon, not through the category listings. I'll get a notification about a watched thread "so and so posted" and this takes me to the bottom of the thread.

What I'm hoping for is a small link or button that specifically takes me to my own last post within the thread. This is even more handy as a thread gets longer and longer. This has to be inside the thread itself, not from the outside, home page or category pages etc.

Always fun to walk in the office and basically hear scary beeps coming from somewhere. Is it a server? Workstation? Battery backup?

Turns out it was the Synology DS216+. This has two 3TB drives in RAID0.
All the lights were off but it was beeping regularly. Pressing the power button didn't do anything. I tried to access and it worked fine, must have just been asleep? All the lights came back on but disk 2 was orange.

I was able to log in to DSM where it said disk 2 had "crashed" and I should try to backup my files.

This was already confusing. It's a RAID0, if one drive was crashed I'd think it would be total data loss, but I could still access the folder shares just fine, hmm. SMART listed it as "normal" as well.

Then I saw in the HDD/SSD section that disk2 had a "bad sector count" of 1. Apparently it found one lonely little bad sector and I assume marked it to avoid in the future as drives are supposed to do. But why did everything have to crash and burn over one stinking bad sector? I was hoping not to have to replace a drive for this.

I did some reading and found out that when DSM marks something as "crashed" it may disconnect it. Since I wasn't using a redundant RAID type but could still access data, I doubt that happened, but why not try?

I simply turned the unit off, took out both drives, sprayed some canned air while at it, and reinserted the drives.

After turning back on, it was no longer crashed, both drives showed "normal" and the RIAD0 self-tested as healthy. It did suggest that I do an additional data validation scan which it said would be about 25 minutes per 1TB of space. I said ok, but I guess it finished in about 2 minutes while rebooting cause I didn't see this happen.

The final message I got was that there was something wrong with a SCSI LUN something or other, I wish I took a screen shot. I'm not using the iSCSI LUN features and DSM says there is no iSCSI LUN in the system, so not sure how that message was relevant.

In any case, I'm writting this for the future. If your Synology is beeping and talks of crashing drives and end of the world events, just stay calm, it may just be a bad sector and it's throwing a hissy fit.
If SMART says your drive is fine, try turning it off and reseat the drives and turn back on.

You might even remove the drive and run a test from another computer to look for further sector issues, then put it back in.

Also I'm writing this to see if this has happened to anybody else and if I should be worried about this one bad sector issue. Drives develop bad sectors all the time, I don't know why the entire thing flips out and dies over it. I'm disappointed how the Synology handled something so simple as marking a bad sector and moving on.

Not a bug, but a feature.

Is there a way to move to my own latest post in a thread?

A lot of times I want to start reading where I left off but there is no easy way to go back to my last post.

At the end of the day...

In home repair is not horrible if you have clients with money and care for their stuff.
I just did a job yesterday for a guy on a $2k custom computer who wanted his Win7 to Win10 upgrade. He had two SSD drives and a partitioned platter drive. He was nervous about all the drives and doing backups and how Win10 would work on the SSD etc etc. In the end it was 4 hours of basically explaining lots of stuff and letting him watch me all the way through.

Regardless, that is just one 4 hour job. I would need two of those every day for a decent living and it would take all my time when adding in driving time and note taking and billing and so forth.

In a small town where mom-n-pop shops seem to come and go, I'm not sure I could work up at least 5 hours of billable time every day. Not only that but you can't charge any less than $60/hr if you have any hope of hiring other people and having free time. Even in my small town $75/hr is the minimum for the experienced pros to do in home. Over $100/hr for business work.

MSP is an interesting concept. I don't want to limit myself with negative thoughts but I just have to think, why would some company that has been chugging along for 10 years suddenly needs hundreds of $$ a month in IT services when they never needed it before?
I assume you will tell them how awesome it is, how they will have tech when needed, discounted services, better security, a proper network layout, maintenance work, remote help abilities, etc etc etc. But if they say "never needed before, so no thanks." What then?
Many IT services are just back-end things, hard to directly correlate with an increase in profit which is all the business owner wants to see.

That said, how many clients can one person manage with MSP anyway? It's a lot more work I assume, more parsing logs, more allotted time slots for maintenance, more phone calls and emails from clients. We talking 5 clients? 10? 50?
If I can only manage 10 decent-sized MSP-style clients, they need to pay at least $500/month for services. Preferably $800 or even $1000 (not sure what standards costs are). How many useful services can I pack in an $800/month package to make it worth while?
I'd rather manage 10 clients at $800 a month than 50 clients at $160 a month, even if it's fewer service offerings. It's just less overhead and paperwork.

If I split $800 into $60/hr that's 13.33 hours. If I schedule 140 work hours a month, there is only support for 10 clients using this math. I couldn't give them more hours or they would have to pay more and I'd need fewer clients. You get the idea.
How viable is it to have $800 a month in MSP services provided by one person? Maybe it's too much? If I can only provide $300 worth of services, I need to spend far less than 13 hours a month, and find more clients!

Web design and online services are another venue. Speaking of restaurants, they always need websites with fancy pictures, menus and occasional specials and deals posted. Managing a website could be part of a service package. Just bundle in their design, updates, maintenance, hosting, and everything else into $100/m or $200/m or whatever with dedicated hours and I pay all the necessary fees to run it.

I hate that all this is so bespoke and random. I mean, if you want to do in-home massage, it's pretty straightforward. But if you want to run in-home IT, it's like, there is 100 ways to try and niche out the business, there is no just "standard" thing an IT person can do. Do you add web? Printers and copiers? Servers? Consulting? Security audits? Wireless? Physical wiring? Infrastructure? Repair? Training? Monitoring/logging/access tools? Contracts or hourly? Laptops, mobiles? Focus on small biz, startups? Do sales/affiliates for certain product installs? Sales? Storefront?

There is no cut-n-paste, rinse-repeat business model for IT I guess.

This is the same old question. I want to discuss truly viable options for home businesses.

There is bottom of the barrel stuff like in home computer repair. And all the way up to MSP services or even custom application programming.

The situation is that I have a family and kids and not really interested in hugely risky business types. I live in a small-ish town of 40k people with another town 20 miles away with another 40k people. The type of business I do can't depend on living in huge cities to make it work.

I am skilled at the intermediate level in many different things such as web design, programming, IT, and graphics. Freelance work is often on my mind for example.

I mainly want to discuss options for a single-owner IT business. What can I do that has potential for good income and is sustainable by a single owner? I don't think I have the temperament for herding cats so I don't really want 5 or 20 employees to manage. An accountant and personal assistant/secretary is just about enough for me. That said, the business(es) needs to pull in anywhere from $60k to $150k.

I think computer repair is low hanging fruit. People buy $399 computers from Walmart, they don't want to pay $75/hr to move icons around and install printers. Most of my time is waiting on slow internet connections and slow computers to catch up. I feel like every in home job I do is a rip off. It's 20% work and 80% waiting for their Walmart special to catch up.

MSP is overreaching for me. It's more than I want to chew. It's the type of thing where, even if I could find some businesses to do this for, I would be limited to servicing everything myself, and thus could only have a few clients in the first place. One lost client could represent a huge chunk of income, which is risky.

Somewhere in the consulting space is where I see myself. Consulting has a specific niche though. If a business is large enough or complicated enough, they will have their own IT staff already. If the business is a cut-n-paste business, they already have an IT blueprint and use local providers.
The niche is small businesses without IT staff who don't lean on local providers, and yet have the funds and need for IT services.
In a small town, this niche may be hard to find? I'm not sure.
If a company "needs" IT services, you'd think they would have found it already. Either that, or computer stuff is easy enough to find and buy, setup, or rent online, that they rarely need IT in the first place.

I see mom-n-pop tech shops open and close regularly in this town. One week I'll see a car driving around some slogan pasted on the window "Call Bill's Super Deluxe Nerd Shop Today!" These companies are fly-by-night. I think home-based servicing is almost dead. Computers are fairly reliable, and when they die, you get a new one for $399. Plus people are going to iPads and phones for a lot of stuff. Most of my in-home stuff people only use them for email and printing things and shopping sometimes, etc.

I'm looking for actual viable businesses that will work for single-proprietors in smaller towns that are known for being successful for the most part.
This is likely going to involve a combination of local work, freelance work, and maybe even running smaller businesses on the side (think like gumball machine route, etc), anything easy that turns an ok profit without a ton of work.

I'm curious what some of you do for a living if you are in this situation. I know only a handful of you that are part of MSPs or what have you, but otherwise I'm curious what many of you do.

Is the in-home IT business dying too? Am I better off trying to work for a large company? Beside mom-n-pop "computer repair" companies, what else can a guy do?

@scottalanmiller said in Replacing Evernote?:

@guyinpv we use one OneNote per client. That way the data is portable per client. If a client wants a copy, they can have it. If a client leaves, we can archive their documents.

That's a lot of notebooks!

I figured my Rolodex-style tab system would work much the same once I can share the tabs, the client can get into the tab and all the pages within.

But I can see the benefit of one notebook per client. Just need an easy way to navigate them. The way ON lets me browse notebooks is annoying. Doesn't lend itself well to having dozens or even hundreds of notebooks.