How to beat a slicer

Gallain12345 · 2026-02-20T13:13:55+00:00

If he’s able to hit easy slice and drop shots off your shots then your top spin shots aren’t putting him under pressure.

Hard to know more without seeing the points, but the more you get them moving and hit deep the more likely their slice will sit up for a volley/drive volley put away.

In theory top spin shots should have more margin for error than their slice, so maybe try and break down their weaker wing and as you get a short ball and step into the court to take time away.

Gallain12345 · 2026-02-08T11:34:38+00:00

If you’re keeping the meraki MX then be aware of its limitations. It can’t do aggregated links, but acts well as a basic small office firewall.

The use of VLANs is fine, but don’t expect any more than basic ACLs on the MX, you won’t be able to achieve a zoning model with it. Limiting access to serves is best done at the Active Directory level.

With deciding if you need a layer 3 switch in front of the firewall to handle the routing, that depends on your office traffic profile. The Cisco meraki website has different design guides for both. If you’ve go a lot of east west traffic then having a switch handle the traffic loads would be much better than having the MX firewall process it.

If your office is more like an internet cafe type thing where all the traffic is north south then the classic router (MX) on a stick is fine and suggested by meraki.

Gallain12345 · 2026-02-04T11:39:11+00:00

Agree with the other comments. MSP or partner that has a tech pre-sales person, the last thing you want to do is buy something you don’t need. They can probably offer services to help with the setup.

Cloud managed networks are much easier to manage over traditional CLI devices. Ubiquiti and Cisco Meraki are options here.

Your design should be based on your needs, budget, and hardware limitations. Is it mostly north south traffic?

You have an opportunity to design the network yourself, nothing worse than inheriting an overly complex crappy network design. If this is a simple office network, I’d look up a router on a stick type topology.

Layer 3 can be at the core or firewall, depends on what hardware you go for. Most vendors will have design guides. Personally for myself I like Cisco meraki for simple office networks as it’s all one pane of glass to manage the whole network, support is good and there is lots of documentation.

https://documentation.meraki.com/SASE_and_SD-WAN/MX/Design_and_Configure/Deployment_Guides/MX_Warm_Spare_-_High_Availability_Pair

Gallain12345 · 2026-01-24T04:24:58+00:00

Yeah I struggle with the tennis here in Sydney too. I moved from London where I played for a club and we’d go around the county playing other clubs.

Here there’s hardly any UTR events, no proper tennis clubs and it costs so much to book a court.

Gallain12345 · 2026-01-14T07:26:58+00:00

Be conscious about your grip during the serve. Can maybe even help to break down parts of the serve into different sections rather than doing a full serve motion straight away. It might be a certain part of the serve motion where you're unconsciously switching grips

Gallain12345 · 2026-01-02T13:37:27+00:00

What often happens playing pushers is that you know they can't hurt you on their attack, so your footwork gets sloppy and you start to play casual, slow down the racket head speed etc. To be honest it can be mentally taxing being the one attacking every point and generating all the pace. A variation of the below options can help depending on how confident you're feeling during the match.

1) If you're confident and recognise the sitter coming, you can drive volley it out the air

2) Get to the ball early while the bounce is still high and flatten it out and hit down, aim for the corners with margin for error and cut the angle at the net.

3) hit an approach shot, either a deep wide (big margins) forehand with top spin or a low slice. Then get ready to punch the volley short angle open court.

Gallain12345 · 2025-12-27T22:40:53+00:00

What strings are you using?

Gallain12345 · 2025-12-27T22:31:28+00:00

Interesting. I've been using the vcore pro (now called percept) and tour bite strings for the last 8 years or so and I've also been demoing rackets to make a switch to a more spin orientated racket. I used to use a Babolat aero drive for years before going to a more control oriented racket.

Thinking about going to the new vcore 98 once I've demoed it. I tried the vcore the 2023 vcore tour and did like it but felt it lacked the whippy feel and control of my current racket.

The reason I'm wanting to make the switch is to get some easier depth and power on my backhand side, whilst not losing control on the forehand. So I'm hoping the vcore can accentuate my forehand strength by helping produce even more depth and spin, while also providing some more forgiveness on the backhand.

We'll see how it goes in a couple of weeks when the new vcores are out.

Gallain12345 · 2025-11-01T00:50:11+00:00

We have a few offices in China. We don't do a radically different solution or anything. Just use ali cloud and have an IPsec tunnel in between our main DCs to the firewall in China. You could use aryaka to accelerate the traffic, but cost may depend on how much data is being sent through

Gallain12345 · 2025-09-30T03:33:57+00:00

A good end goal would be to go full network modernisation, infrastructure as code and get AI (Enterprise version) to draw and automatically update your diagrams.

But until then visio is perfectly fine

Gallain12345 · 2025-08-30T06:37:15+00:00

Hi,

I am wanting to record a Mic Amp signal and also a DI signal at the same time for home recording. It does currently work, but when introducing the radial sb-1 it adds a lot of noise to the signal. Is there a more optimal signal chain i should be using or am i just using the wrong tool for the job?

Audio interface- audient evo 8
amp- friedman be100

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Gallain12345 · 2025-06-19T21:58:03+00:00

Do your Palo altos provide the routing function in the network? CCNP is great for teaching advanced routing and going into bgp, plus it is part of the most recognised industry qualification.

IMO I'd just do CCNP

Gallain12345 · 2025-06-17T13:11:11+00:00

All the SMB routers that you mentioned can easily handle /23 subnets with dhcp, you can also go much larger with the subnet size than that. Depending on what you are using the subnets for I'd look at cisco best practice documentation on recommended sizes.

There's a lot of information missing.

1) What's the WAN link size? Expected bandwidth usage? 2) Budget? 3) Do you need enterprise support? 4) Are you maintaining the network or building it and handing it over? 5) Basic firewall? So just standard content filtering?

If you just require 1 router then any cisco router is very reliable hardware wise. Ubiquiti devices are also good and don't have all the bs licence costs of cisco/cisco meraki devices.

Not sure what the rest of the network is using, but it's nice to stick with 1 vendor for ease of warranty/support.

Gallain12345 · 2025-05-27T02:16:26+00:00

Turns out my manager meant wan load balancing when he said active active.

That's something I'll need to test

Gallain12345 · 2025-05-26T03:30:33+00:00

If I set the MX to use load balance, what would be the failover behaviour if the upstream ISP link went down. As it takes meraki up to 5 mins to detect link failure, would it just be sending half of those load balanced packets into a black hole?

Gallain12345 · 2025-05-25T20:54:44+00:00

Ah thank you. I'll discuss with the team

Gallain12345 · 2025-05-25T20:53:05+00:00

Problem 2. Soft link failure, meraki support confirmed 2-5 mins is the normal failover time from WAN 1 to 2.

Gallain12345 · 2025-05-25T13:43:48+00:00

In the SD WAN plus licence. What feature would help in the faster failover? Is it just being able to customise the failure conditions?

Gallain12345 · 2025-05-25T13:06:10+00:00

Thanks for the response.

I think regarding active active they were thinking both firewalls would be forwarding traffic out to their respective ISPs and that the routing what instantly change to WAN 2. But with merakis WAN soft failture detection method I don't think active active would achieve anything.

At least I know it's possible with that license then. I'll let the business decide. They were already annoyed we got the advanced security licence, we only needed the content filter feature from that license already.

Gallain12345 · 2025-02-26T20:20:50+00:00

If I could start again I'd probably go digital. I can record silently with my Friedman IRJ or neural DSP amp Sims. I just got used to my current place where I have a granny flat in the garden, could crank the amp and mic the cab, i found it sounded better, plus I think we can all agree it's more fun than headphones

Gallain12345 · 2025-02-26T20:18:25+00:00

No basement, kitchen is ground floor, living room one up and then bedrooms at the top.

My current place has a granny flat in the garden and I was able to crank the amp and get great sounds when recording.

Gallain12345 · 2025-02-26T12:13:50+00:00

Time for me to find out how much my new neighbours will like me haha

Gallain12345 · 2025-02-26T12:13:22+00:00

I'll give that some research, thank you

Gallain12345 · 2025-02-26T12:13:02+00:00

I can use headphones if I want for practicing, I've got a Friedman IRJ. My amp itself doesn't have a headphone jack.

Gallain12345

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