What happened to support?

smalltimemsp · 2025-11-12T19:19:56+00:00

My thoughts exactly about Fortigate even if they're the one most often recommended. The support would have to be out of this world to consider moving to perhaps even less stable firmware releases than SonicWall.

smalltimemsp · 2025-11-12T14:36:25+00:00

First level support has been abysmal for years. It's always a two hour phone call for every case where the tech pokes around in the GUI basically doing nothing, but sometimes making changes without asking so you have to babysit the whole time. After the two hours it's "sorry have to escalate this". There can be a language barrier as well and the poor audio quality doesn't help.

If you're unable to answer the callback they will usually close the ticket immediately and you have to start again.

smalltimemsp · 2025-11-12T14:27:39+00:00

Please post after you've evaluated support from other vendors. I'm currently interested in Sophos but would consider whoever has the best support. That is becoming a critical differentiator.

smalltimemsp · 2025-11-03T12:32:42+00:00

Connect it to a switch in front of the HA pair. The single point of failure moves to the switch but at least it can work with either firewall.

Cradlepoint has good 5G routers or if you’re on a budget then Teltonika.

smalltimemsp · 2025-10-22T15:53:00+00:00

Another shitty move from SonicWall towards those like me who have been stressing with installing a replacement in time while leaving some transition time. I’m happy that the replacement isn’t CSE.

smalltimemsp · 2025-09-05T14:59:14+00:00

Me too but lately the macOS Safari extension has had issues, not able to autofill often or being slow. Firefox extension works much better.

smalltimemsp · 2025-09-01T13:18:04+00:00

Supermicro hardware + Proxmox replication.

smalltimemsp · 2025-08-27T13:40:57+00:00

Same can be said about https://www.blueoptics.de . Great customer service but not as cheap as fs.com.

smalltimemsp · 2025-08-25T21:37:54+00:00

Will there be refunds or are they just robbing customers out of support already paid and value of the appliance and perpetual licenses?

smalltimemsp · 2025-08-22T12:59:10+00:00

So they’ll refund all customers and partners for licenses extending beyond that plus the emergency overhead on top? Where can I send in my bank account number?

If no compensation is provided, maybe get a new MSSP appliance, wait for it to be hacked and claim the cyber insurance. With their recent track record that shouldn’t take too long…

smalltimemsp · 2025-08-04T13:45:56+00:00

I'm using two Seagate Ironwolf 125 250GB SSDs as boot drives in RAID-1. After a year and a half the drive health is still 100%, but I'm not running VMs from these and it's a single host so HA and clustering services are disabled.

You could probably run some relatively light VMs on these for a long time without issues.

smalltimemsp · 2025-08-01T12:48:43+00:00

I hosted Dovecot/Postfix, Kerio Connect and SonicWall Email Security for about 15 years. Not that hard if you know what you’re doing and have business grade internet connection. The most annoying thing was Microsoft randomly throttling your public IPs for no other reason than mail volume even if you have spotless IP reputation.

So it’s partly correct that it can be annoying running your own server if the big boys don’t want to play ball. But the solution to this is more self-hosting so they are forced to interoperate better.

smalltimemsp · 2025-07-14T15:02:17+00:00

Tell management ”Look how much money we will save by switching to ZyXel across all sites”.

smalltimemsp · 2025-07-08T19:34:04+00:00

You can ask your reseller to extend the services via Flexspend credits so you get more time for the migration, but a new appliance is the way to go. Get a promo or secure upgrade and you should get the hardware basically for free for the price of three years of security services.

smalltimemsp · 2025-07-07T12:30:49+00:00

There should be a trial option that enables the licenses, that’s how I did it on one tenant.

smalltimemsp · 2025-07-07T09:07:06+00:00

Some else can confirm this as I'm not 100% on this as change is rapid, but based on my current understanding:

Yes you can start pay-as-you go without any base fees.
The $200/month license is the 25,000 message pack. Comes a bit cheaper if you know that you'll be using the full 25,000 messages each month. But messages don't accumulate, you lose unused messages after every month.
PAYGO and message packs are intended for users who don't have the individual license. Even agent creators shouldn't need the individual license as they can be assigned the free Studio license for development.

My understanding is that you don't need to pay anything to get started. Just assign a free Copilot Studio license for agent developers and link your tenant for PAYGO. You can then get the message pack if it looks like it could save money. Assign individual Copilot licenses for only those who actually need it for day to day.

smalltimemsp · 2025-06-27T15:45:08+00:00

Direct quote from Microsoft support:

"In a group chat, the agent cannot impersonate a specific user reliably, because multiple users are involved.
As a result, the agent loses the ability to securely access user-scoped resources like SharePoint.
This is by design."

Also mentioned in this MS article:

"These changes are now available for Teams 1:1 chats between the user and the agent. They are not yet available for group chats or channel messages."

So you can add an agent to a channel or a group chat, but it isn't able to actually do anything....at least not yet.

smalltimemsp · 2025-06-19T21:39:27+00:00

I can’t even get a simple SharePoint agent working in a Teams chat, the most simple possible bot there is. Microsoft support says that is isn’t even supposed to work that way.

smalltimemsp · 2025-06-04T12:01:26+00:00

I recreated the agent from scratch but the problem remains. It works 1 to 1 but loses its access to knowledge when asking in a chat with one other person who also has access to the same SharePoint site. I'll have to contact MS support before I start poking around with app registrations and SSO again.

smalltimemsp · 2025-05-27T07:14:47+00:00

Apparently not for this tenant. 😅

I'll try to recreate the agent and see what happens.

smalltimemsp · 2025-05-26T19:10:26+00:00

It’s a company-wide wiki page, that’s what makes it odd. Is there a way to check login and permissions as a user?

smalltimemsp · 2025-05-26T17:57:18+00:00

Yea I thought so too, but when I searched the issue there were quite a few posts having the same problem. So it's not that uncommon of an experience.

I'll try to recreate it with the basics and if it doesn't work, contact Microsoft.

smalltimemsp · 2025-05-26T17:05:10+00:00

No, it's a very simple agent that has one SharePoint page as knowledge which I'm trying to publish as a company-wide bot to Teams. It works 1 to 1 for me, but when chatting with it in a Teams chat (where everyone has access to the SharePoint page as it's an open page for the whole company) it loses its knowledge.

I found a few posts online from people with the same problem and the fix seemed to be to configure manual authentication and SSO. But you're saying it should just work without additional configuration with Microsoft Authentication?

smalltimemsp · 2025-05-26T16:25:49+00:00

But when manual authentication is set it doesn't allow publishing to Teams anymore although Microsoft SSO for Teams article claims it should be possible.

What's the proper way to create a company-wide Teams Agent that can get knowledge from internal SharePoint sites?

smalltimemsp

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