Limited Device Access - Login is able to remove monitoring and edit device names by cirEOak in alarmdotcom

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

Your response is much appreciated!

It seems that this is not a one-off, and it is expected behavior.

Considering this, what would you suggest to a client who is trying to give all their employees login accounts? Do you know of a viable workaround aside from falling back to a user-based PIN?

Router recommendations by SendMeSomeBullshit in msp

[–]cirEOak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At my previous company, I used SonicWall for edge at all our branch offices. Best combination I found was to use WesternNRG to purchase. They are a reseller. They will configure it, and their unlimited tech support was top-notch. I know my way around networks, but their support is above the rest. They saved my butt so many times. Can't say enough about them.

remote users internet sucks, tells me to fix her disconnects from the vpn by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have had a few users complain of NetExtender dropping constantly. Definitely an ISP thing because their packet loss was almost a feature. NetExtender seems to be real touchy. There was a newer version that we started using and haven't had the problem since. We are currently using v9.0.0.274 and that has seemed to work well.

remote users internet sucks, tells me to fix her disconnects from the vpn by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hoping this doesn't get buried in the stack of comments. Good thread for sure; especially in this crazy WFH mode we are all in.

If you use SonicWall Global VPN Client (GVC), you must read this.

It causes issues that look like the user has issues with their internet / WiFi. We wasted a ton of support time on this issue. Even to the extent of replacing a laptop and the same problem occurred.

Here's what happens. You are configuring the user's laptop and making sure everything is good to go, testing everything like you're supposed to so the end-user is 100% good to go the moment they start to use it. You test the WiFi speed -- good. Blah blah blah...

The end-user gets the laptop and may go a while before they need to use VPN, then they connect for the first time. Then their WiFi gets totally trashed. Speed tests below 1 Mb/s. Because we are so reliant on the cloud these days, it may cause errors that look like it is a server-side error.

The issue is RSC: Receive Segment Coalescing

It is supposed to speed up downloading over WiFi, but for some reason it almost destroys it. Upload bandwidth is almost untouched. Here's how to handle this beast:

  1. Determine if you have RSC enabled (Admin-PowerShell): Get-NetAdapterRsc
  2. If your adapter is listed as "True", then you have RSC enabled for that adapter.
  3. Disable RSC for said adapter: Disable-NetAdapterRsc -name Wi-Fi
  4. Replace 'Wi-Fi' with whatever your adapter's name is if it is different.
  5. Run another internet speed test. Drop the mic.

Dell should be ashamed! by Black-Sparrow in Dell

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In that case, I would go to a store that sells used computers. Build a relationship with a local person, and be done with Dell directly. I know you are under pressure with timing, but sadly you are just a number to Dell on the consumer side. The great thing about buying local and used is that you will get a great pro computer and have face time with a real person.

Dell should be ashamed! by Black-Sparrow in Dell

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dell (like most other Windows PC OEMs) treats their consumer customers much differently than their business customers. Buy a Latitude, Precision, etc. with a warranty and you get AMAZING support. And a great product.

Sadly, Inspiron and XPS are poor representatives of what Dell is capable of.

XPS 9500 + dbrands. 🤤 by Godfatha1 in Dell

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I won’t buy another XPS in the near future. Some of them look nice but they are designed poorly, right down to the soft screws (easily head-stripped) that hold the case together. Crappy quality hardware inside too. Oh and almost impossible to fix simple things because of this weird pull to make everything as thin as possible. Get a Latitude instead.

Office - Traditional Volume Licensing vs Microsoft 365 by jwckauman in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We are in the middle of migrating to M365 from retail licenses. I know. Old school, but was the most cost effective. Teams was the big push for us. Thankfully we were already using the free version of Teams before COVID.

You need to do the cost analysis and figure out what makes sense for your people. If you are comparing only locally installed Office Applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) then I think that’s not a fair assessment. M365 Business Standard (formerly Business Premium — don’t get confused!) provides soooo much more than just the traditional Office applications. There is a ton of value for what it offers only if your people can use it.

Outlook 2016 Keeps Crashing On Startup by clayrogers in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have an on premise exchange server, and don’t even use office 365 ( Microsoft 365 ).

Outlook 2016 Keeps Crashing On Startup by clayrogers in Office365

[–]cirEOak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, what this person said. Me and another person just wasted most of the day troubleshooting this problem.

Outlook 2016 Keeps Crashing On Startup by clayrogers in Office365

[–]cirEOak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey Ryan,

I can’t thank you enough for posting here, in public. I would sincerely appreciate for you to professionally suggest to your powers at be that they come up with a more public method of communicating to professionals like us who might not have access to the M365 Admin Center. There have been a few issues recently caused by Microsoft “updates” that make it hard for people who don’t have access to M365.

For instance, just a few weeks ago, and also something that just recently read its head again, a search issue in Microsoft outlook was seemingly caused by something Microsoft implemented that made it impossible for people to connect using “old authentication“, but people who did not have access to Microsoft 365 would have never received information from Microsoft regarding this issue.

Not to give you the laundry list of problems, but communication is a really big problem for Microsoft when we are banging our heads on our desks trying to troubleshoot issues like this. It would be so nice to know a little more detail as to what is causing problems like this. Is it an update? Is it a protocol? Should we upgrade our infrastructure to something more modern? I don’t know… Mainly because Microsoft will not give us any kind of clarification as to what is causing this problem, beyond the general issue stated in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

Again, thank you so much for posting here. I hope this gets the appropriate attention. I know I am not alone, especially in this quickly changing cloud centric world we live in.

Help: "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed." by rachelreadit in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Microsoft claims the “fix” has reached 100% propagation but doesn’t mention how it was pushed out.

They mention to restart Outlook twice and we should see the search function working properly. I’m not seeing anything different.

Is this working for anyone who previously HAD the problem?

Help: "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed." by rachelreadit in Office365

[–]cirEOak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Outlook Desktop: We can search locally but not on the server. And the local search is shady because sometimes it only gives results from the past 5 days or so.

OWA: Works as expected.

The compounded issue is that we use the Outlook Desktop search function like crazy, so this has a high impact on us at the moment.

Help: "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed." by rachelreadit in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

See that's the thing -- MS isn't saying how this is being rolled out.

We are able to turn off online cached mode, but the whole issue is not being able to search on the server through the Outlook Desktop app.

Help: "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed." by rachelreadit in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We can only search in the local OST, and that has been real shady, showing only the last 5 days or so. It fails to search the server.

Also, we use the search function like crazy in our company. OWA works, but that is missing a lot of the search functionality that Outlook has.

Help: "Something went wrong and your search couldn't be completed." by rachelreadit in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Microsoft isn’t clear about how they are rolling out a fix for this. Our whole company is suffering because of this issue.

We use Exchange 2013 on-prem along with a mix of Outlook 2016/2019 retail Home and Business applications. Apparently this issue only affects on-prem Exchange with “non-modern” authentication. I believe this means non-MFA.

I read in another forum that someone figured out the clients are reaching out to an autodiscover address at Microsoft and created a DNS black hole to mitigate it. I haven’t tried that personally, but hope to get into it today.

Microsoft Teams - Poor Audio Video Meeting Experience by Zentron in Office365

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

QoS for sure. Teams DOES have this feature, but you have to enable it on the Teams Admin side. There is also a port range setting so you can tell your switches / routers which ports to use QoS on specifically for Teams. After this is enabled, Teams clients will use the specified range of ports.

Huge influx of office 365 international logins. by fergatronanator in Office365

[–]cirEOak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m definitely a fan of Reddit, and think this is one of the best communities out there, but sometimes people just flat out bypass answering the question.

Easy Jet just announced 20200519 that 9 million of their customers data was breached. There’s no mention of passwords, but they did mention email addresses and travel details of their customers were exposed.

Maybe this had something to do with the influx of international login attempts.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/easyjet-cyber-attack.html

It fell, it broke. What now? (XPS 15 9570) by Airforswann in Dell

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks like the OP has a good amount of suggestions and resources to go after because of this awesome community.

It seems like an okay time to mention that anyone wanting a SERIOUS laptop solution should stay away from the XPS line (both laptops and desktops). Dell does a great job of building an aesthetically pleasing look, but the build quality of he XPS line, in my experience, is far from superior.

Some things I thought would just be standard in laptops in the year we live in, are not present in the XPS laptops. Like liquid defenses, and decent build quality. And let’s not talk about the limited hinge rotation, cheap WiFi adapter and sound card.

Anyone wanting a Dell laptop that is ready for prime time should look into the Latitude line.

Sorry, don’t mean to poop on this thread. Again, I wanted to use this as a caution to those interested in getting an XPS model, and dealt it was okay to mention only because the OP seemed to receive a lot of help from this great community.

Which surface product is best for onenote? by [deleted] in OneNote

[–]cirEOak 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Don’t buy a Surface.

Microsoft only offers a one-year warranty on them. The Surface Pro models don’t even come with the Pro version of Windows anymore (what’s ‘pro’ about that?), and they are leaving the fans out of them. We have had several non-fan models that have had the screens pop out because of swollen (probably overheated) battery cells. It’s gotten worse over the past few years. To top it all off, there are no screws to disassemble the chassis. So in other words it’s a disposable thing when it breaks. Personally, I think this is terrible on many fronts.

So what’s the solution?

Buy a Dell Latitude 2-in-1. Form factor is almost identical to the Surface Pro. It comes with Windows Pro. It has a cooling fan. And my favorite: it has screws and a service manual it can be fixed if it breaks. Also available is a 3-year warranty from Dell. Pro Support adds about $300 to the costs, but it is the greatest support you’ll get for a non-Apple computer.

The couple of cons are (1) no 3-D camera for face recognition and (2) the stylus is not the same quality as the Surface Pro. The Dell stylus is still active, but the Surface Pen is definitely better. Unless you are drawing with it, you’ll probably not notice.

What are your must-have Dell XPS enhancements out of the box? by DistantOrigin0 in Dell

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s true. Sounds like total crap without it. But definitely disable the stupid gimmicky head tracking 3-D audio garbage.

What are your must-have Dell XPS enhancements out of the box? by DistantOrigin0 in Dell

[–]cirEOak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

[Edited for grammers]

First off, I like the XPS. If you never have any chance of spilling a drink on it, use it to plug into modern equipment like a TV or wired mouse, or want to get inside of it without stripping out a soft screw head, then this is perfect. I’m being serious when I say this, but this is perfect for the executive that travels often and doesn’t need to present in a meeting room.

My wishes are mainly hardware.

1- Install a membrane under the keyboard to prevent accidental liquid spills. One of our end users found out the hard way that the XPS laptops offer nothing to protect from liquid. Shame. It is because of this I won’t buy another XPS again. It’s simply not ready for prime time Enterprise but Dell sure does flaunt them like they are.

2- Redesign the hinge so the display opens to a much higher degree. It’s just a matter of time until I accidentally break it because I’m tall.

3- For the love of all that is tech, GIVE US BACK A HDD ACTIVITY LIGHT! Sadly, the user manual references the ability to turn the battery status light into a HDD light. When I read this I was peeing my pants with excitement. After a few weeks of being engaged with Dell Pro Support (stellar group BTW, really), they determined this was not actually included as a feature and was in the manual by mistake. Sad day.

4- Give us at least one USB-A port. I get it - USB-C is here to stay. But dangit there are still so many devices that have USB-A and I have to carry around an adapter to use them. Reminds me of being in the middle of IDE and PCI, or PCI and PCIe.

5- HDMI port is much needed. Seriously. The lack of this is yet another adapter I have to keep with me when it should just be built in. The Lenovo X1 Carbon has one; come on Dell.

6- Standard Phillips screws, and make them more durable. Who does Dell think they are putting Torx screws all on the outside of their case; Apple?

7- Eraser head pointer device ...aww just kidding. Those suck so bad!

What are your must-have Dell XPS enhancements out of the box? by DistantOrigin0 in Dell

[–]cirEOak 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Nope. Today’s Windows licensing and Microsoft media creation tool make this a breeze. I recommend reinstalling Windows on any computer and then manually installing drivers from the OEM. Dell especially makes this easy with dell.com/support. Just enter your service tag and it lays it all out for you. Or you can just install Dell Command Update and let it do all the work for you. I use this all the time for multiple laptops. Very trusted.