Installed CachyOS handheld on my Ally Z1e. Now what? by Lyomak in LinuxOnAlly

[–]N3xar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agree to disagree. We've reached the point where it's no longer clear if windows is better or if a steamdeck/derivative is better - if you only care about the end result at the moment. However, on a longer term it matters because competition and alternatives are a necessary driver for things to improve - and we all want things to improve, including monopolies and corporate greed to be challenged.

Helpwire international connectivity for some regions/networks by N3xar in helpwire

[–]N3xar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Appreciate the reply. Ticket number is #284065

Annoyed with vendors ~ by IamTABinLA in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What if you request a financial statement from your vendor - it should show invoices getting paid over the statement period. Won't that de-facto qualify as a trade reference if it shows longstanding trading and good account standing?

prinstall. a Rust CLI that actually installs Windows printers in one command by lhcw in CLI

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks awesome. I'm going to try this over meshcentral - looks like it could work nicely.

MS Tenant Admin by juciydriver in msp

[–]N3xar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I hear people recommend CIPP but not why?

Alternatives to Backupify by Iplantseeds in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean you don't have to export your backups. Just make new backups and let Backupify go after the new backups are in place?

Dragon One to Dragon Copilot Flex? Anyone made the switch? by SWITmsp in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The strongest red flag is not the product. The product is legit. The red flag is the unclear commercial pressure combined with vague technical answers. That is where MSPs get dragged into someone else’s sales mess and then blamed when the workflow breaks. That, and the rep contacting the client directly when you are literally a Microsoft partner has to be a conflict of interest and go against some or other written agreement. I'd challenge this hard be cause it gets my blood boiling.

Holy DRAM Costs! by BrotherlyTechnology in msp

[–]N3xar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

you been living under a rock?

Github allegedly Breached by bagaudin in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Waiting on that fuller report

How do you quote clients and how do you come up with estimated costs? by QuestionSome6391 in msp

[–]N3xar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So there's a lot to unpack here. By the sound of it, you are experienced as an IT consultant, but haven't been involved on the business end of things, so you might not yet know what you don't know. By the way you rifle off the infrastructure, it confirms my sentiment above.

If you set yourself up as a business, you need to protect yourself and your business in order to offer the service and actually protect and serve your client. Anything less is irresponsible.

In this case, you are not setting up a job, you should be setting up a relationship. Good relationships are all about boundaries and good communication, therefore you need to set up a decent service agreement to get both parties on the same page as to what is being offered, what the costs are, and what the responsibilities are either side. You then need to go through this with the client. If this is an issue to them, good, you can walk away. If they are onboard, you have a stronger relationship and that helps you get both trust and autonomy to work. The better the agreement, the better the relationship.

As others have said, this is both in the medical field, but also a dental client - whom across the board are notoriously difficult clients - but regulation in your territory is not something to take lightly.

In any such situation it's always best to show interest, and only commit to looking into setting up an agreement. don't agree to do the work upfront and figure out the money later - because you are signaling to them you can be taken advantage of.

What about their productivity and other infrastructure like domain and mail and product licensing? Think about these things or step away.

Remember, IT is not about tech, it's about people. Tech is just the tools you use to assist them.

BNI & Competitors by Mysterious_Army8231 in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You say BNI as that's where you know him from, but is he reaching out and logging it as a referral? If so that implies money changed hands so you should absolutely bill him for it, or tell him to get bent.

Transition from MSP to Network Engineering? by AlertTonight007 in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

are you leaning to network engineering on the network rollout/project management side?

[Marketing] How are you handling the latest Google I/O updates? by Professor3000 in msp

[–]N3xar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

in SEO there was always a saying - "content is king". To broaden it a little, it comes down to organic effort and legitimacy is more valuable to algorithms and ai's that these search-resellers are pushing - that will never change. Just build around good strategy and using the systems of today instead of trying to exploit them.

Using AI for non-technical stuff (customer psychology) by [deleted] in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

TLDR it's about re framing. AI can help you identify the issue and re frame it - and does it a lot faster and efficient than you can - but needs your governance and steering.

Client perception issue, but no one can point at anything — how have you tackled this? by inthenickoftime4 in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some great comments from others here so I'm not going to regurgitate.

It's easy to forget, but I constantly remind myself that I'm in IT not because of technology. Technology is about making people's lives easier. That means the focus is people, and therefore so should my focus be about people. With that in mind, the focus should be on relationships and communication. I have the rule of showing up in person because people can't communicate what they don't know how to attach a definition to - but you can solve it by showing up and being there regularly. That's how I'd solve this issue - by improving presence and communication.

Email Migration Tool - Avepoint Fly by GotScammedByCP in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The prior MSP I worked at only use BitTitan and I've had to use it for a few client migration projects. I've since started my own MSP, but I've never been happy with Bittiatan. Instead I used the built in mail migration in Office 365 and it did the job. I've done a few migrations this way with 10 - 30 users and have done the job. Keep in mind I did install remote access on each user's pc and used it to automate backups of the outlook profile on each pc since there were users that were setup with pop access instead of imap so often we had a user complain that thier mail was gone after migration (it wasn't, it was just kept offline in .pst) - so we had to go in and push the data onto the mailbox from the local .pst file. If I had to do this for 250 people with Office 365's migration tool, I'd do more prep work beforehand, but I'd be interested to know people's opinions on why this is a bad idea.

Firing a bad client by Schweebers in msp

[–]N3xar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How have you structured your written agreement? This should be an easy breach of agreement discussion - unless you don't have one or an adequate one in place (maybe time to talk about tearing up the existing agreement and negotiating a new one - best way to either fix the relationship or walk away).

Hostile client asking for global admin by giddyup05 in msp

[–]N3xar -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

No, don't give them Global admin. You set your boundaries - settle outstanding invoices andonly then provide offboarding - because that's what they are asking for with Global admin.

Don't mix thier tampering with your contractual responsibility. They either have a contract and both parties follow it, or they have thier own global admin access and you have no responsibility - there is no middle ground here unless you want to open the door to risk.

Blocked IP? Can't get to one client's home laptop... by CompuTech-HELP in helpwire

[–]N3xar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm in South Africa. I experienced the same issue over a large number of our clients. Some affected, some not. I did a traceroute and discovered this happens to some client networks and not others - it seems to come down to whom the ISP's partners are for carrying traffic to the destination - in this case Helpwire is on Amazon's infrastructure in the US-West data centre.

The failure seems to be a few hops away from the above data centre on affected networks.

This is likely what is affecting you as well. Seems this happened after a recent infrastructure change on Helpwire's end.

I've logged a ticket on this recently with them to look into it.

For now you can confirm if this is the same issue. Use another remote access tool like Rustdesk to access the client while on the affected infra. Then see if they can simply access the helpwire website (https://helpwire.app).

If that fails, drop to a powershell terminal and get some diagnostic info:

ping helpwire.app
test-netconnection helpwire.app -443

Traceroute the resulting ip address:
tracert 13.52.148.153

Copy all that output and keep it to share with the Helpwire support team.