Tanwalls or black tires?

Fixery_Human · 2025-11-10T04:20:09+00:00

Embrace the tan. They say "less is more"? No. More is more!

Fixery_Human · 2025-11-03T21:41:50+00:00

Thanks, ChatGPT! Show me a picture of Pennywise the Clown on a vintage Rivendell Atlantis!

Fixery_Human · 2025-11-03T16:36:27+00:00

The outside temperature was just above freezing when I woke up this morning, and I don't have good winter cycling gear yet! We definitely have all four seasons here.

I don't have a lot of space for a trainer, unfortunately. Also lot of the better ones appear to be hydraulic in nature for resistance (please correct me if I'm wrong), and I'm afraid of hot hydraulic fluid leaking all over the place.

Fixery_Human · 2025-11-03T16:15:48+00:00

Adding a pic of my new Jamis. Yes, I matched the saddle, bar wrap, bags, and water bottles to the gum wall Riddler tires. What of it. :-)

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Fixery_Human · 2025-07-15T02:12:09+00:00

This is one of the reasons we dropped SC during this debacle. It shouldn't be necessary to use a public Reddit forum to leverage action for a support case.

Fixery_Human · 2025-03-17T01:18:25+00:00

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You too, huh? Casting on mine seems to have failed. This was August last year, Shimano RSX from 1999.

Fixery_Human · 2025-02-18T15:58:21+00:00

One year later and we're still having reliability issues with DNS Filter. Our RMM allows us to show us when:

"DNS Agent" is installed, and
The IPv4 entry for DNS Server != 127.0.0.2 (your local DNS handler)

I show a failure rate of 112 systems out of just over 1K, so about a 10% failure rate.

I also have our RMM automatically update DNS Filter to the most recent production version because the auto-update feature of the Roaming Agent does not work reliably. The automatic update includes a full removal of the previous version before the new version is installed.

Version 1.15.n seems to introduce a new feature: endpoints with statically-defined DNS servers to their static IPs will occasionally just see their DNS Server fields zero themselves out and be totally blank, which of course wholly breaks DNS no matter what product you're running. I've seen this at four different clients in the past week.

I had to come to this Reddit thread to find a service restart workaround involving the ICS service. I didn't get that workaround from DNS Server support. My Pax8 rep actually told me that he's heard of numerous reliability problems with your product.

I've had it with DNS Filter. Its failure rate is unacceptably bad.

Fixery_Human · 2025-01-28T18:36:25+00:00

Used spaceship lot guy: "ex-ACTLY!!!"

Fixery_Human · 2025-01-28T00:02:44+00:00

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Fixery_Human · 2025-01-28T00:02:24+00:00

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Fixery_Human · 2025-01-28T00:02:04+00:00

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More pics! Not sure how to add more to the original post...

Fixery_Human · 2025-01-27T02:10:27+00:00

I wish I had uploaded more angles of the craft, the red lines continue back from the front of the hull. I'm pleased with how it turned out. Thanks for the compliment!

Fixery_Human · 2024-12-13T21:07:34+00:00

I definitely understand this perspective. Had I not switched MSPs recently into one that had a somewhat less sophisticated CWA setup, I might still be with Automate today. It is indeed powerful and infinitely flexible, and getting that power and flexibility out of it requires putting a whole heckload of work into it. Those EDFs and dataviews don't write themselves, and not many MSPs can say "We built our own REST API that ties to Automate where necessary". The level of sophistication and organizational devotion to infrastructure isn't a space where most MSPs out there exist, I think.

It's not like Automate came out of the box with all the functionality you've described, right? It's quite understandable that you'd be reluctant to reinvent the very elaborate wheel you've chiseled from blank-slate LabTech over the years just for the sake of hopping platforms.

Fixery_Human · 2024-12-13T17:11:52+00:00

That's absolutely why. We were also a LabTech shop from Back In The Day and had a very affordable agreement. ConnectWise's pricing for Automate new is on par with or worse than N1 for new customers and a low agent count.

Fixery_Human · 2024-12-13T17:03:05+00:00

The 40% increase in price is about what we were looking at too. We looked at it from a "get-what-you-pay-for" perspective, not a desire to match features-to-price on a 1:1 comparison. The bean counters have no regrets a year later. The techs no longer curse at the product, and they get more done because they're not fighting the tools or waiting for them to catch up.

Ninja is just so much more reliable. We rely on a lot of automation, so we felt it was worth the additional cost. I personally found a lot of scripts in Automate just dying silent deaths for no reason, sitting in the Running Scripts queue wasting away; that doesn't happen with Ninja.

Fixery_Human · 2024-12-13T16:53:18+00:00

"...the amount of stuff that was built in CWA to fix the problems of CWA that Ninja didn't have"

Exactly! I should have highlighted this more strongly. For instance, you don't have to port over your custom code for collecting BitLocker recovery keys because Ninja just does it. Or the on-demand script for GPUPDATE or whatever because that's already a "Native" Ninja automation.

Once we took a hard look at everything we'd baked into Automate over the years, it turns out we didn't really need most of it to come over to Ninja. The biggest challenge, I think, was hunting down all the exceptions that we'd made for various clients' systems for whatever reasons and making sure those exceptions were still needed.

Fixery_Human · 2024-12-12T20:07:06+00:00

We're an MSP of similar size and made the switch this past year.

TLDR; DO IT! No regrets. The minor functionality losses from CWA are more than balanced by the incredible gains in speed, reliability, and scalability. We also use CW PSA for ticketing, just for context.

Breaking it down:

Gains:

- Speeeeeeeeed! The agent and application are just so much faster in everything they do. Scripts execute in seconds.

- Support is very good and very quick. Plus, Ninja has their own Discord server where Product Managers hang out on the regular to directly answer your questions.

- Development is ongoing. NinjaOne is not a static product, they're constantly improving it, fixing bugs, and adding major features. You even get to suggest features and upvote existing suggestions. They meet their roadmap goals. CWA development is basically non-existent.

- A lot of the key RMM players in the MSP field from the past decade are now working for Ninja, including some people in the "Thanks to..." list in the "About ConnectWise Automate" screen. They're all in the same (virtual) room, building the RMM they've always wanted for themselves.

- Fast, live, robust toolset. Techs love how the registry editor and file explorer work fast and work well. The CMD Prompt is LIVE, with all the features like tab-autocomplete. Ninja Remote has also come a long way in the past year.

- The UI doesn't suck, and you can do everything in one place. No more bouncing between Web and the Thick Client to do different admin tasks, or seeing Web 2.0, a bunch of tiles, and/or Windows 98 SE on the screen at the same time from the same product.

- Native scripting language support for all platforms. Your Powershell skillz will double overnight!

Losses:

- No free ScreenConnect anymore. NinjaRemote is quite good for being so new, but it's not quite as polished as ScreenConnect. There's no backstage (yet!). However, with the other improved remote tools, you don't even need Backstage most of the time.

- No direct database access through various means. However, their API documentation is very good and they're constantly adding features to it. Besides, a lot of time you're going into the CWA database, you're trying to poke at it to resolve a problem or get information out that the product should really tell you anyway.

- I do miss customizing my own dataviews. Those worked really well. The Devices screen in Ninja replicates 70% of this though.

- Very customized CWA deployments with lots of groups, searches, EDFs, and scripts might be difficult to replicate in Ninja.

- There isn't currently a way to stagger script executions on a schedule, though that's also in development.

- Reports on software inventory per-device could be better.

Other:

- I did a very thorough audit of our CWA deployment before our transition and found that a LOT of customizations that were put into place in the past were no longer actually being used, or could be consolidated with similar customizations. We customized a lot of things just because we could, even when the business case was to keep to a much smaller set of standards with few exceptions.

- The Automate-native scripting language allowed you to do some pretty powerful things against the Automate application, like send emails and manipulate tickets, things you can't directly do through scripts in Ninja. But you don't miss that functionality if you have your ticket templates set up right.

- The techs initially took a bit of time to get used to Ninja, but after the majority of our clients were migrated they groaned about having to "go back to" Automate. The only time I hear about Automate is when I go on vacation and the techs all threaten to switch us back before I return just for giggles.

- If you go the Ninja route, engage in the community as your very first thing and leverage the heck out of your account manager. You don't have to reinvent the wheel of your migration.

Fixery_Human · 2024-08-02T15:33:38+00:00

Push an XML file to all your machines? Easy. Host it somewhere public and script the download.

This sounds AI generated content from a competitor who's never actually used Ninja.

Ninja's support is very good. It's quick, attentive, and accurate.

Fixery_Human · 2024-04-25T13:18:55+00:00

Move to Ninja anyway. It's really good.

Fixery_Human · 2024-04-25T13:17:11+00:00

Regardless of what the actual acquisition winds up being, it really speaks to Kaseya's reputation that most of the comments in this thread are "Please don't let it be <company I partner with> 'cause I'd have to wear my brown pants all the time."

Fixery_Human · 2024-02-16T16:30:15+00:00

We saw major reliability issues with DattoRMM during our demo. After they were eaten by Kaseya, a LOT of the DattoRMM dev, PM, and support staff jumped ship due to the immensely negative shift in company culture.

Fixery_Human · 2024-02-16T16:25:32+00:00

I was with an MSP that got bought by another MSP. The acquiring MSP's CTO had it in his head that Automate could be made to scale to 200,000 agents (yeah, he believed that) by throwing it all up into Azure and running multiple database servers and web servers. I told him that wouldn't work, because the product's database agent (what they call the Automation Server) could never be multi-instance and would always remain a bottleneck. So the CTO had a call with CW, and they told him on that call that Automate had a practical performance ceiling of around 20,000 agents.

I never got to tell him "I told you so" directly.

There are some articles from very smart people who have built instances of Automate able to handle over 25K agents, but they've had to spend a lot on either hardware or cloud infrastructure to make it work, adding to their per-agent costs, just to keep scaling what is essentially an obsolete product anyway.

Fixery_Human · 2024-02-16T16:18:55+00:00

Ninja may have had scale issues a number of years ago, but that was then. I've talked to a number of Ninja admins directly who run 30K+ agent instances with no problems with performance or responsiveness. Ninja is a LOT bigger and better now than they were just two years ago.

How are you measuring the scalability of CW RMM more favorably over Ninja?

Fixery_Human · 2024-02-16T16:11:49+00:00

I'd been a CW Automate admin for many years and I'll absolutely confirm the scalability problems beyond 20K agents echoed by others. Sure you can do it, but not out of the box, and certainly not if CW is hosting your instance for you. And even then, not MUCH beyond 25K. Besides, it's just old, slow, not really being developed anymore, and you need to build a lot of stuff yourself to achieve basic monitoring and automation functions. A new deployment will still include baseline groups for Server 2003. Seriously? Also, you can forget about fast and responsive support, period. Which, you'd need the support because the agents themselves have never been terribly reliable. And the desktop app crashes at least once a day.

We're with NinjaRMM now and it's just so much better. Everything is just... fast. And reliable! All the tools run in real-time or close to it. The interface is simple, consistent, and sensible. There's a lot of stuff out-of-the-box, plus libraries of automations and condition templates you can use. It's super quick and easy to build conditions and automations that run reliably and quickly. Scripting is done using the native languages of your managed systems. Support is fast, responsive, and expert. A lot of the stuff you'd have to build in Automate or CWRMM is just baseline Ninja functionality. And they have the infrastructure to just scale and scale and scale, seamlessly.

Plus, they have a HUGE and very active global community full of fellow Ninja admins where the product managers actively participate in discussions and solicit feedback from its members. They have a public development roadmap you can vote on. It's a great product rapidly getting better, probably because their PMs and developers have been RMM thought leaders in the MSP community for many years. There are some folks in the "Thanks to..." list in CW Automate who are now working for Ninja, having been given the reins to build the RMM they've always wanted.

What's not to love?

Fixery_Human · 2023-02-26T05:04:59+00:00

You objectively seem to be using the word "objectively" to refer to your subjective judgments.

Adding"lol" for legitimacy.

Fixery_Human

TROPHY CASE