Best posts made by Mike Davis

I have a number of non profits on the free E1 plan. Everything is the same except the bill.

@Dashrender said in Permissions between O365 systems:

How does billing work? All on one or are they somehow split?

It's all one. The billing is by mailbox. I'm not sure how they handle it on the accounting side, but they must have it figured out because the receptionist answers the phone for both companies so there are other shared services.

I would rather do things this way than have a portal for each domain and have each user have two mailboxes. There are a few reasons I say this and they may seem trivial, but they become annoying after a while.

Why I hate two mailboxes:
Stored passwords don't work. The URL for office 365 is the same so the magic "remember password" box in Outlook doesn't work. Every time you restart Outlook, you have to pay attention to which account is prompting you and put the right password in.
Two places to look for everything. Two inboxes, two calendars, etc. It sucks to have to look all over for stuff.
Multiple accounts to add to phones and other devices. At least the mobile devices do a better job than windows storing the password, but it's still multiple places to look for stuff.
It will cost you more if you are paying for the mailboxes. You have to pay for each mailbox in each domain, so it will cost you twice as much. I suppose you could have E1 in one domain and E3 in another, but you get the idea.

If I'm reading it right, it sounds like the drive may have been physically damaged, in which case there is little hope. If it was more of a case where it was unplugged while in operation, using something like testdisk might be able to bring some files back. If the data is really important, I would send it to a pro where they have a clean room and typically charge thousands of dollars. If it would be nice to see if you can get it back but you don't want to spend much on it, you can try test disk. I've used it successfully to recover files off drives that suffered corruption.

The reason I'm asking is yesterday a customer lost 4 hours of transactions (that 4 people were putting in) in quickbooks when the power went out unexpectedly. There isn't a way for them to save often.

@bigbear said in Best Practices - Securing your Windows Server 2016 VM on Vultr:

This https://rdpguard.com/ @scottalanmiller posted looks like something worth trying out first. Also appears to be actively developed. Anyone else using it?

I'm using rdpguard for a few clients. It seems to work well.

@bigbear said in Best Practices - Securing your Windows Server 2016 VM on Vultr:

However I wonder if Vultr ip ranges are scanned more frequently than Azure. I setup a couple honey potts and the attacks are 10 to 2 Vultr vs Amazon thus far.

I would have to wonder if it's also a matter of a weakness detected in the range once so now the robots keep pounding that IP or range. I say this because I had a server that had a vulnerability that went unpatched. After I patched it, the bad guys kept pounding the site. I even went as far as to move the site to a new server with a new IP and they kept looking for the vulnerable URLs for more than a week with thousands of requests coming in each hour.

I bought different colored cables for the different VLANs.

For the documentation I used Dia to do a diagram. It only maps where the trunks are. I never got in to the weeds mapping patch panel jacks to switch ports.

Each site usually also has a floor plan showing jack locations.

@scottalanmiller said in Hardware sources:

A good rep is necessary, but other than placing your orders quickly, what value do they add? You can't use them for anything other than quotes and placing orders and RMAs, that sort of thing. You don't even need an account rep, just place orders. Account reps, even good ones, are just in the way. No need for them.

Also when buying new HPE stuff, there are often "smart buys" that are preconfigured options offered at a lower price. If you just use a website to search for what you're looking for, you might miss out on those and pay more than you need to for the same hardware.

@scottalanmiller said in Hardware sources:

So you let a salesman determine the best fit for your needs? If you aren't doing any research, how do you know he didn't just screw your customer by selling the thing that earns him the most margin (CDW is famous for how extremely they do this.) And what's your role here? If the customer wanted to engage predatory salesman directly, they could. No need for an IT person.

My role was picking the specs for the laptop. When he quotes me the laptop and case, I can take a look and spot check the price if I want. After he finds a case, I can take a look at it and see what kind of reviews it has.

How would you handle a request like that from a customer?

If that's the case I would fix all the folder permissions before trying to move stuff. The problem will keep coming back to bite you.

@scottalanmiller said in Managing Hyper-V:

Not something that I've looked into yet. But if you use PowerShell to manage Hyper-V, is there anyway to get console access without another tool? Like can PS be used to activate an RDP session to a VM console redirect?

I've been able to install screen connect on it and manage it that way.

FLTG sold them in blocks of 20, but was limited by what was available in a particular area code. I don't know if that is standard.

@BRRABill said in Why BitLocker with USB key on a server?:

My point is the if @Mike-Davis took that USB key out, what issues would it really cause? In reality, very few.

I'm a MSP, so I'm not onsite. 3:00 AM automatic update server reboot would cause problems in the morning.

You don't have randsomware attack on the list?

I'm trying to connect to a few sites in the US and am getting blocked.

Screen Connect: So far I can get to the Screen Connect website, but when I try to connect to a host, I get the error: Error: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

my server in vultr: I can get console on the server by going to the vultr website. When I try to connect to my spiceworks install, I get the error: ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED I can ping it with ping times coming in at the 100ms mark.

Zoiper: I'm getting the error: SIP 408 - request timeout
Trying to register

another spiceworks server not in vultr: same "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" error.

Seems like my local router might be blocking some ports. I'm trying to think of a way to test that since ping works where ICMP is enabled, ping works, so I can't tracert to see which side the problem is on. I'm going to try to get access to the local router.

It is correct that I can't replace the device since it's a DSL modem as well as router. Also looking at this page, it's not clear to me if Fritz box is intentionally blocking VoIP ports, or if it's a side effect of them offering the service.
https://en.avm.de/service/fritzbox/fritzbox-7390/knowledge-base/publication/show/28_Cannot-make-outgoing-calls-over-Internet/

@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:

That's "unless a device is offline", though.

For the times when we show up on site to do something that we could do remotely, I write that off as marketing. I've seen it happen where IT does everything remotely and the customer doesn't realize they are doing stuff in the back ground. The monthly reports get deleted before they are read. Next thing you know another provider swoops in and takes the client.

@coliver said in Battling Ransome/Crypto-ware: Drive Shares:

So one of the protections would be to implement snapshots on those shared drives. It's fairly easy to do and, surprisingly, doesn't use that much disk space in modern Windows server versions.

Snapshots don't take up much space under normal operations. When the entire file changes, such as when it's encrypted, you're writing a lot of changes and usually it runs out of space so you can recover some stuff, but not all your stuff.

I have a client on a Mac Book Air that wants to remote desktop to his Windows PC at the office. We put in a Ubiquiti Edge Router X and set up a VPN connection. Tested out fine on our PCs and we sent the client the instructions. At that point he told us he was on a Mac Book Air.

We found some instructions for setting up the VPN connection and got it to work once. He's had some issues with it connecting. Does a Mac automatically reconnect VPN connections or do you have to do something to get it to connect each time? If so, what? This is probably very simple, but I don't have any experience with a Mac.

@dustinb3403 said in Mac Book Air and Ubiquiti VPN:

It's 2 clicks with the mouse!

He owns the company. I'm getting paid to see if I can save him two clicks..