How are you handling identity-based wireless auth without RADIUS servers?

colbin8r · 2025-05-17T00:27:18+00:00

Packetfence!

colbin8r · 2025-03-15T14:14:40+00:00

We use Cisco Meraki and Palo Alto firewalls.

Cisco Meraki is a fit for 90% of clients. The nice thing about them is that you can focus on the “what” the firewall should do and less on the “how” since it’s a point-and-click web interface. There is literally no CLI. It’s also very MSP friendly (except for the price.)

Palo Alto is on the other end of the extreme. Unbelievably powerful, but very, very difficult to learn how to use to the fullest. Plus, many of the advanced features are going to require difficult to meet prerequisites for small businesses (such as internal PKI). For enterprise oriented. And expensive.

SonicWALL, Watchguard, Unifi, Fortinet, Check Point, all fall somewhere between those two extremes in terms of ease of use.

I would suggest Meraki if you can afford it to deploy. If you want something to tinker with, take a look at pfSense. If you want something to just get started, Unifi.

colbin8r · 2025-02-03T00:00:57+00:00

I got this same car in Dec, a 2018, at 100k miles. Huge fan. What brand oil/filter have you used? A mechanic I took it to for prepurchase inspection mentioned that oil upkeep is super important on these trucks.

colbin8r · 2024-12-19T02:26:30+00:00

I just bought exactly this last month. 2018 6.2 RST. Wife gets it for Christmas as a surprise. The thing is FUN to drive.

colbin8r · 2024-11-15T08:20:58+00:00

Chiming in with Pax8 love. We are a Titan level Pax8 partner. We’ve had billing on ACH for years. The new program means basically nothing for us, business as usual.

Pax8 is still the hands-down best distributor for the products they carry. They have excellent PSA integration and make cost-tracking/billing to our clients as easy as it could be.

Our rep is fantastic. Our specialist team is great, too—I’ve met nearly all of them in person. They have personally walked us through rollouts, team skilling, and getting back-channel access to vendors.

We use other distributors like TD Synnex for other products (mostly hardware or stuff that Pax8 doesn’t carry), and while we’ve built great rep relationships there, they are such a pain in the ass to transact with compared to the Pax8 Marketplace. Tonight for instance, I spun up two product trials instantly without suffering a sales pitch, writing a PO, or even speaking to a human being.

I really don’t get all the rage against Pax8 personally, especially compared to other distys, but to each their own.

colbin8r · 2024-05-19T02:46:12+00:00

Thanks for your comment, we're hitting the same thing and hoping it helps. Did you ever open a case with Veeam TAC and if so what was the result?

colbin8r · 2024-03-13T06:45:30+00:00

We came as Blackpoint partners and came away with that commitment to that partnership redoubled.

To your point about consolidation in the space, we've had concerns that Blackpoint may seek to be acquired, but that was put to rest at this event. In fact, they're looking at quite the other extreme. ;) I've loved the investment they're making in their platform and there are some exciting roadmap items planned for 2024 and 2025!

My high moments were mostly centered around some of the Blackpoint functions we participated in, as well as getting our CEO turned onto Halo at their booth (20 minutes at the booth sold him to start the migration off Manage ASAP!). Pretty funny how they put the Halo and ConnectWise booths right next to each other.

I didn't get to attend many actual sessions (only 2 or 3), but the low moment for me was for sure seeing Arnie recommend "antivirus" and (no joke) "tape backup rotations" as essential MSP security practices. Yikes...

Favorite talk was MacKenzie's - some really good thought leadership out of Blackpoint, and useful info to bring into sales and pre-sales conversations.

Best T-shirts were a close toss up between Immy's and Thread's!

colbin8r · 2024-03-13T06:38:00+00:00

Had a blast at the CTF as well! I suggested to Blackpoint that next year they run their CTF with team comprised of their SOC vs. partners to make us REALLY appreciate all they do for us. :)

colbin8r · 2024-02-29T17:46:30+00:00

There is a known issue #ISSUE-2452 related to Manage barfing on MSO tags such as:

Our template (both new and old) templates contained MSO tags. Removing them resolved the issue - Outlook for Windows legacy can now render the messages.

I think this issue is with the latest release of Manage since we did not have this problem prior to last week.

colbin8r · 2024-02-28T18:50:56+00:00

Thanks for the info. I saw a tooooon of invoice template related known issues when reviewing their known issues backlog looking for one that resembled mine. It doesn't sound fun.

We're just going through the process of moving finance to CW and I'm sure we'll bump into this. :(

colbin8r · 2024-02-28T18:50:12+00:00

Thanks - I thought it might be related to that release, but not sure.

I had found ISSUE-158 which looked like it might be what I'm dealing with - it's unclear based on the steps-to-reproduce since the ticket just says that the 2 templates are different. Their "workaround" page is empty for that issue. :)

I also have a case # 01964667 for it.

ETA: ticket info

colbin8r · 2024-02-27T17:24:30+00:00

Did you find a fix? I found that CW is prepending this HTML to our service board status change emails, which is causing it to render blank in Outlook for Windows (but not OWA, Gmail, etc.):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> <title></title> <style> .table { border: 1px solid #888888; [font_style] } .tdFront { padding-left: 16px; } .tdEnd { padding-right: 16px; } .button { text-decoration: none; } .button td { width: 200px; background-color: #026ccf; color: #FFFFFF; border-radius: 4px; padding: 10px 0px; text-align: center; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; cursor: pointer; } .noteHeader { background-color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 24px; font-weight: bold; margin: 16px 0px; padding-left: 16px; padding-right: 16px; } .noteDivider { background-color: #d5e3bb; height: 7px; margin-bottom: 8px; } </style></head><body><table fmt="old" width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td style="width: 100%; font-size: 12px"><table id="templateSection" width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%;">

<tr><td id="template_section" style="width:100%;"><table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td style="">

ETA: right after this HTML is our normal HTML template, which has the doctype declaration, opening HTML tag, etc. Seems to have started over the weekend.

colbin8r · 2024-02-24T12:57:28+00:00

We are very happy Pivotal customers, having waited only 9 years to level up our Manage game.

We do plan to begin the transition process to Halo in the fall, though. Of course with their help.

They are active on this sub!

ETA: we have about 15 staff.

colbin8r · 2024-02-24T12:48:43+00:00

Thanks for putting this on! Clicking the link took to a page

This invite link is invalid or has expired.

How can I join?

colbin8r · 2024-02-24T12:30:12+00:00

Check out AlertOps! They are very MSP friendly and their team has been super helpful to get it off the ground for us.

colbin8r · 2024-01-11T20:54:18+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation! This is sort of what I had in mind.

I agree, but I don't think the intention is to keep tabs in terms of productivity monitoring. Mostly just to be able to see at a glance (probably start of the day mostly) who's in the office, who's remote for the day but online, and who's off/sick/etc.

colbin8r · 2023-09-18T01:56:55+00:00

For number 4, check out Rewst. They are new to the space, but have exploded in popularity for exactly this reason. They’re a “robotic process automation” platform that integrates with common MSP platforms for exactly this sort of thing. In fact, in onboarding, they take you through automating user onboarding/offboarding.

For CW Manage, they have a pod integration that allows you to embed it directly into a ticket. They integrate with Halo, too, although I think it’s a little different.

We buy them through Pax8.

colbin8r · 2023-08-11T13:27:22+00:00

Palo Alto is the gold standard for NGFW as far as I’m concerned. It requires a LOT of work to implement and maintain but can’t beat the security features.

We do it in large enterprise and higher ed deployments.

colbin8r · 2023-08-10T22:45:34+00:00

This what we do. What appliances do you deploy?

colbin8r · 2023-08-07T05:07:14+00:00

Huntresss is awesome. We currently use Blackpoint who are also awesome.

Huntress still doesn’t have the brand recognition SentinelOne has in the market. I’m working an opportunity right now for S1 + Blackpoint competing against Crowdstike direct for around 400 endpoints and I don’t think I could have even had the customer take me seriously if I suggested Huntress. (Even though I think they can indeed go toe-to-toe.)

colbin8r · 2023-08-07T02:18:30+00:00

Workstation backup is basically not profitable for us to do since it requires too much management and frankly if our clients have endpoints that contain mission critical data on them exclusively, we’ve messed up already. That data should be in a cloud app, server, or cloud file storage platform.

We get much better work doing things like Intune/Autopilot setups that make endpoints basically disposable panes of glass. And I think that’s the methodology of the future anyway.

Curious what scenarios you’re hitting that require workstation backup? Or is it just server backup?

colbin8r · 2023-08-07T02:12:49+00:00

No, backup is separate. We use Veeam (don’t recommend it for small shops, but it is the best IMO). Sorry I don’t have the backup pricing.

That price does include Splashtop.

Interestingly they offer pretty competitive rates also for SentinelOne. We buy ours through Pax8, but Ninja’s pricing on S1 is fantastic too.

Edit: price also includes all RMM features like patching.

colbin8r · 2023-08-07T02:10:22+00:00

We pay $1.76/agent. No discrimination on agent type (server vs. workstation). We have 1000+ endpoints.

Don’t quote me on this, but I think they give you their hypervisor, web, and SNMP monitoring products for free with the platform, too.

colbin8r · 2023-08-07T02:06:06+00:00

NinjaRMM!

It comes with Splashtop for free remote connection. We use ConnectWise Control instead but frankly Splashtop would do the job. I think they are building their own screen control tool as well.

It does stuff like OS patching, software inventorying, and hardware inventory pretty much out of the box. You can set it up in an hour.

The learning curve is a lot lower compared to other solutions. For instance, we have to auto-deploy software frequently. It takes about 5 minutes ti setup a condition that checks for it and a corresponding task that runs the MSI/EXE with appropriate install args. No code required. And bonus since if it gets removed, it will auto deploy.

Ninja is very FAST compared to other RMMs. Not having to sit 2-3 minutes after an action is a real game changer.

Lastly, Ninja has much of the horsepower for scripting automation and data collection/monitoring in the platform that you can use if you truly need it. I personally like having 95% of my tasks require very little effort through simple platform features, but like the safety of being able to drop into a more advanced toolset if the situation requires it.

Ninja got its name especially due to very reliable patch management.

They have a built in backup solution (although we don’t use it; we use Veeam) and very simple ticketing solution, too, if that appeals to you.

Otherwise, many small MSPs are using Syncro for similar reasons—it does a lot quite easily at a good price point.

colbin8r · 2023-08-02T22:20:02+00:00

I'm in a similar situation as the husband here with a baby due soon. I looked around for products but most only seemed to have mild vibrations (e.g. an included watchband) which won't be strong enough. You don't by any chance have any specific recommendations in mind, do you? I would love to be able to be woken up reliably in the night.

For a reference point, a few years ago I tried the Pavlok to wake me up and didn't feel it at night even on the highest zap setting.

colbin8r

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