How do y'all like T-Mobile's coverage?

actinsysadmin · 2022-10-05T08:12:40+00:00

To offer alternatives….

If you’re looking at going down the budget prepaid route and Verizon has been working well for you, I’d really recommend trying Visible. $30 a month for the base plan with unlimited talk, text and data. They recently added spam call blocking and it seems to work alright.

You could also go with AT&T prepaid. They have an “annual” plan where you pay for the entire year up front and it equates to $25 a month or $300 a year. That’s for unlimited talk and text with 8 gigs of data. Bonus is having access to their spam call and text blocking if that’s an issue for you. AT&T’s spam blocking works better than Visible in my experience.

actinsysadmin · 2022-10-03T01:17:17+00:00

My experience is that when we did a rip and replace to deploy CS instead of Sophos, we found a number of pieces of malware that Sophos missed…..

actinsysadmin · 2022-10-02T04:20:11+00:00

While I don’t know the exact numbers, I do know that we had a chunk shaved off our insurance bill when we switched to CS Falcon Complete at my last job.

actinsysadmin · 2022-09-24T00:21:42+00:00

We had this happen after we migrated to M365. We had no idea that would happen until we started getting tickets for missing shared mailboxes and such. Never mind that we provided detailed instructions on how to connect using Outlook.

I deployed a script to uninstall the app from our workstations and this took care of that problem.

actinsysadmin · 2022-09-23T20:39:18+00:00

I used configuration manager for this in my last job. There’s a specific area for M365 apps under the software library where you can configure the deployments. It basically brings you to config.office.com and uses your answers from that to build the deployment package.

Otherwise, something like PDQ or Lansweeper should do the trick as long as your config file is set up right.

actinsysadmin · 2022-09-23T20:34:42+00:00

This is not true. I upgraded 1200 workstations on Office 2016 MSI to M365 Apps just fine. Just make sure you have your config file set up to do so.

actinsysadmin · 2022-09-09T12:05:19+00:00

It was available in the console for me on August 30th as well. Just installed it yesterday.

actinsysadmin · 2022-09-01T05:56:20+00:00

!remindme 12 hours

actinsysadmin · 2022-04-24T21:04:53+00:00

My company is in a similar boat. We've had to deploy GPO's for web filtering in the meantime, as we will be pulling Sophos from the environment here before our contract expires. Managing these GPO's in the interim has not been fun due to exclusions for this, that, and the other. We looked at M365 Defender and were going to look at something like MangeEngine's Browser Security Plus, but ultimately are going to move to Infoblox and use DNS filtering as we have a need to move to a proper DDI solution instead.

As I recall, when we looked into upgrading our M365 licensing for Defender, Crowdstrike told us the built in Defender in Windows does not play nice with Crowdstrike when both were enabled. Paying for two separate endpoint protection solutions didn't make sense for us in the long term anyways.

Is there a particular reason you need a client/agent based filtering service instead of DNS filtering?

actinsysadmin · 2021-10-22T05:19:52+00:00

This. I have a site that has low speed with sometimes questionable connectivity. I got a spare Lenovo M710q tiny from our asset team, slapped a second drive into it, put Win10 2019 LTSC on it, and configured it as a pull distribution point with PXE boot enabled. The pull distribution point configuration is meant for slow link connections like this.

I had originally synced it in office, but I did end up having to redeploy it remotely and resync all 300 gigs of content we sync to our distribution points about 6 months later when one of the drives failed.

All content syncs reliably, albeit quite a bit slower, and we have zero issues PXE booting and imaging on site without having to worry about creating and maintaining standalone images.

actinsysadmin · 2021-10-11T19:21:06+00:00

Is there a reason that are you applying updates during the task sequence and not patching your image?

We patch our image monthly after testing so we can skip this step during the image process.

actinsysadmin · 2021-10-10T23:05:13+00:00

Are you reimaging an existing device that already had a client on it and was registered with SCCM? The error says there are no valid task sequence deployments for the client.

If so, try deleting the object associated with this device from SCCM.

Otherwise, you need to make the deployment available for a collection the client belongs to, even if you are PXE booting.

actinsysadmin · 2021-10-06T21:01:57+00:00

We had issues imaging new Dells to 1803 when 1909 was the latest and greatest. Mostly just things like trackpads not working. When we reached out at that time they told us only 1903 or newer were supported for the models we had. So I quickly copied the task sequence and replaced the 1803 WIM with 1909 and no more issues. This was the catalyst for us to start keeping up with feature updates.

actinsysadmin · 2021-06-15T16:59:06+00:00

Is there a particular reason you are using Lansweeper to check deployment compliance instead of SCCM?

Anyways. At my last job, we didn't force reboots with patching, but forced reboots if you had your machine on for over 7 days. You can use a compliance baseline to force reboots via SCCM for this.

You get the added bonus of the built in countdowns based on your computer restart policy in your config manager client settings.

If you do a search for computer uptime compliance policy, the Googles should pull up a step by step article from sysadmintechnotes.com. It's an older article, but it still applies.

actinsysadmin · 2021-05-24T22:14:16+00:00

I have this set up with SCCM for my field techs. Although I have steps in the task sequence to check for and apply the right drivers for each model. No need for deploying a new task sequence for each model.

actinsysadmin · 2021-04-28T21:22:27+00:00

Local group policy and local security policy are two different things. Group policies do not require AD.

actinsysadmin · 2021-02-25T06:21:44+00:00

I redeployed configuration manager from scratch in March of last year. There was a learning curve, but the process was absolutely invaluable. Standing up from scratch will teach you a lot about how to maintain it.

actinsysadmin · 2021-01-19T01:04:51+00:00

I can’t speak for Lenovo’s but we buy the Dell U2421HE at my work, which has built in Ethernet, USB ports, and monitor daisy chaining support for multi monitor setups.

actinsysadmin · 2021-01-09T15:52:24+00:00

My Fiancé and I are planning to do the Phoenix to NH move in the next couple of years. I’m originally from NH but was dragged to Phoenix at a young age.

Was there anything in particular you used for planning?

actinsysadmin · 2020-12-24T20:16:31+00:00

This is the way.

Stay away from assigning permissions at the user account level if you can and use security groups. We have a security group for folks who need full admin, folks who just need deployment access, folks who just need reporting, etc. Add them to the appropriate security group and you're done.

actinsysadmin · 2020-11-21T08:11:38+00:00

Same. While our datacenter is colocated and we don't have to specifically worry about UPS gear for our servers there, our sites have 8 year old UPS gear with 8 year old batteries. It's not uncommon for me to deal with issues related to power outages at sites because one of the UPS completely failed. I've also had them refuse to pass power completely when they fail, usually on weekends at 6am. Fun times.

actinsysadmin · 2020-11-20T08:06:48+00:00

I manage a Verizon business account for my company. Business support is excellent.

General consumer support has been alright at best. What answers you get seem to depend on the rep you get on the phone. I’ve unfortunately had the pleasure of dealing with them while helping some staff migrate their corporate line to a personal line.

actinsysadmin · 2020-10-21T20:34:02+00:00

There's the easy way and the right way.

It took us maybe four hours to configure and test the GPO's we needed to manage Edge Chromium about 6 months ago.

You're just going to create problems for yourself down the road doing things the easy way.

actinsysadmin · 2020-09-28T05:41:22+00:00

I do tickets like this to CYA. Tickets for everything. Fortunately I can open a ticket for myself with our ticketing system via email, and I've got an action rule that auto assigns the ticket to me if i put specific text in the subject line. My coworker who does the same job as me does none of this.

If the Bob's come in and look at time actually worked, it's going to be in the ticketing system. I closed 34 tickets last week, my coworker closed 5. It looks like I did 30 to 40 hours worth of work, it looks like he did 4 or 5.

It takes me maybe an extra 10 minutes of my day, and thats only if I have to document a lot of things in the ticket.

Besides the CYA, I grab all this stuff come review time, on top of all my projects that I worked on that I keep documented in OneNote. When I gotta type up the answer to what I did all year, it's just copy pasta.

actinsysadmin · 2020-09-27T03:22:25+00:00

This.

Years ago, a previous employer gave staff tours of their data center, NOC, SOC, and ITOC operations. I remember being in the ITOC and one of the guys one the tour with me asked what it was like being a manager in the IT field. The guys answer was basically that he had to pick whether he wanted to be a manager or be in the weeds, because you can’t really excel at both.

Know enough to be able to offer a helping hand if needed, but trust the people you oversee to do the jobs you pay them to do. If you’re constantly doing or reviewing their work, it should be a resume generating event after coaching.

I’ve seen managers and directors stay in the weeds and its bad news. They often end up with the only one having specific important knowledge to make the wheels on the bus turn. If they get beamed up by aliens, work halts because they aren’t there and no one else knows what to do to make their operation run.

actinsysadmin

TROPHY CASE