 So, it's April of 2019 and I wanted to make a updated, concise list of the software that runs my company, Lauren Systems. And I made this list because there's a lot of questions from old videos. I was running something else back then, so this is what I'm running now. Now, my plan is actually going to be if we make any major changes to make an updated video. And this will be my response video because when I can, I'll reply with the video link when people just ask that question. This comes up in the forums and comes up, of course, in the contact form. What software do you run for this, for that? And I just want to send the list because I never reply and just satisfy that person. They want to know what else you run for this. Now I also don't understand other companies who are secretive about it. If you run the same software as me, that does not mean you do the same things as me. Or even if a competitor is seeing my software list, I don't think I have some competitive advantage based on the software choices I made. The effectiveness is in the execution of using said software to run your business effectively. So I made a list and we're going to start with how the video got to you. So the first software is Kaden Live, Audacity, and GIMP. There's over 700 videos on my YouTube channel here and those are the tools used for the majority of them. I think Kaden Live, I edited probably over 700 of the videos with. I still like it. They're always updating that software. Now of course that's not exactly core to the business. It's core to the YouTube channel. It's not necessarily an IT business but I thought I'd mention it that I'd use an open source editing workflow and you can find a video on that. I'll leave a link below. Now let's talk about the server stack, the server rack in the back and things like that. Now this isn't things not run in digital ocean. I will throw out there that we have servers spun up in digital ocean. We have other stuff we manage for clients and other platforms but stuff that we have is in digital ocean such as our forums. The forums run on discourse which is open, runs inside of a docker image. I mentioned that before if you look for my discourse video but if you're on the forums that is an open source platform there. XCPNG is the core of what runs our stack here in our server case. Now this is run on a pair of servers in a pool as they call a resource pool so there is the ability to just swap the VMs back and forth between each other and model the VMs I'm going to mention the ones that we host internally are all run on XCPNG. Now I did previous videos on Citrix on server and someone had asked me about that if we run Citrix anymore. We moved everything including clients or all moved off of Citrix and over to XCPNG. I think I have one or two left that we need to migrate over which we have some plans in place to do because the XCPNG platform I really do feel superior. I didn't take down any of my Citrix videos because they're still relevant. They're still accurate to the how XCPNG works. You just replace where the download link comes from because Citrix made some really poor choices in my opinion on licensing and the way they handle things. Now where are all those VMs stored besides running on those servers? They do have some local storage on those servers and I've done some videos about this in depth about how our lab and our rack is set up but FreeNAS is what handles some of the backend storage. Now I run both FreeNAS 11.2 and 11.1. We have two FreeNAS servers. One backs up to the other. I keep an older one for clients and consulting jobs we do where people ask me things and a lot of times it seems like some of the consulting is with the older ones. So having a system running the older legacy version is helpful because if I have to test something because a lot of this is very important in a lab environment to me because we get clients, can I do this or can I do that having the same tools here in our office both in our rack and even more of them sitting behind me. We do a lot of lab testing experiments and learning to make sure we do this and I even set my employees on task. This is how they learn. They'll take some of the lab things and spin it up in either in our main stack of server environment or back here to make sure they understand our product or a detail out a specialized project where a client has an unusual request. Now PF Sense, you can run or virtualize. That question comes up. I do not though. My preference is running it on hardware especially even at home now they're really still smaller boxes. I really like those work wonderful. But PF Sense on hardware to me just feels better because that way if I'm ever troubleshooting something going on or have to restart the stack, I don't have to wait for the internet to come back. Of course, you could go HA and then there's less worry about it. But I just like it being a separate piece of hardware. That's my preference. There's no little gotchas when you run it in solid hardware. I know it does effectively run in other places, but this is my preference. If you want to run it inside of virtualization, go ahead. I run it as hardware. Ubuntu Pop OS on the desktop. So Ubuntu based distributions for desktop slash workstations work really well. I switched to Ubuntu around 2008 or 2009 and got rid of Windows 7. I want to say I went full time in about 2012 where I absolutely didn't use Windows at all anymore. So now I have seven plus years of running nothing but that. As my desktop I do and you may have seen videos like I did with SolarWinds 1 where you see it inside of Windows. I run VirtualBox and that's how I run my Windows 10, which is licensed. That's how Windows 10 works for me if I need to use it. And it's not very often, but there are certain tools that may only require Windows. So we don't really run any Windows. We have no Windows servers in the building, but we run Ubuntu desktops. And I have run other desktop software before. But I kind of like the Ubuntu based ones. I see Ubuntu based in because I'm specifically running PopoS. I like the polished PopoS puts on things. So it's been happy for me. It's been very, very stable, very easy to manage. And I like it. Debian servers. I really like Debian for a server operating system. Did I ever used to use Red Hat? Yeah, I started with Red Hat actually in the 90s. That's when my Linux admin days started was around 1999, 1998. I was dabbling with it. And then I was an AIX admin in the Unix world. But then I moved over to Debian around 2002, so I'm 17 years of using it. So I'm familiar with the environment. I'm comfortable with that environment. So that's what we base most of our servers on. I like it. It's lightweight. It's predictable. I like apt-get, update all the things. It works really well. And most of the servers that we run, that we spin things up on in XEP and JR, mostly based on Debian as well. Now FreePBX is gonna be an exception to Debian because we get the Sangoma spin of it. I know Asterix will run in Debian, but I like the whole Sangoma package, which is mostly open source, but it has some modules on there that are paid for if you want those, but you can download the open source version of it. I'm really happy. That's what makes your phones ring. And it's been a great system. Chris from Crosstalk, I have a video we co-opted. He's the one that helped me set some of that up. I'm not, I like FreePBX. I can manage it, but I'm not a go-to expert in all things FreePBX. But yeah, definitely watch Chris's channel. He's got a lot of great tutorials on setting it up. Xabix, running in Debian, Xabix, I've done a video on, that's how we monitor our infrastructure. No, that's not how we monitor Windows infrastructure for clients. I'm using SolarWinds for that, but Xabix is a great tool for infrastructure monitoring. I say monitoring, because some people say, does it do this or does it do, it's made for monitoring. Yes, you can add some more features to it, but it does keep an eye on all of our servers for us so I can have a dashboard and see how all of my infrastructure internal and external is doing. So that works really well. Security, OSAC, I know I'm not gonna do a video on OSAC, maybe I'll do a video on Wazoo because we're looking at moving to Wazoo. OSAC is very difficult. I had a friend help me set some of that up and it's a little bit challenging. I get it, it's hard to setting up, it's really effective for security. Sometimes it's so effective, it stopped me from doing things, but I was actually happy it did. I was trying to edit a table and it thought me as a threat. And it's really interesting to dig into a little bit if you haven't read about OSAC and Wazoo, they're really cool. They are effective at stopping attacks to an extent, all security's best effort, but I will say they're a pretty good product out there if you wanna check it out. I may do some videos on Wazoo if we do do a full migration to it. Wazoo's pretty cool. It's like a fork of OSAC but making it a little bit easier to manage. MediaWiki, we're still running. I have some videos on MediaWiki. I really like it, it's a great tool. It does our documentation management. It's very locked down, it has 2FA on it. It's only accessible internally across the VPN inside of our network and only a handful of people have access to it because it's a documentation management but I've done videos on this. It's still a great product for managing it. It's easier than a lot of the other ones I've tried but yes, it still has a learning curve. Yes, knowing some markup language and how Wikipedia works is helpful. But once you kind of templateize it, it makes it easy and effective to be able to find documentation, keep up with documentation, manage all the config files we have across many, many clients when we do updates. Now, money-wise, there's two tools we use. We have KMI Money, which is how I manage the bank accounts. We have several bank accounts and I use a QIF file, if you're not familiar, it's a standard for interchange, quick and interchange format. Maybe I don't know what the acronym stands for. I know most banks offer it as a download and we bring that into KMI Money and that's how we do our accounting based on actuals. I've got a video on that. It's hard to do a good tutorial on that because dumping all my financials and all the details out to the internet seems like a bad idea and a real security risk because if you knew exactly how much certain amounts where you'd be able to call a bank and et cetera, et cetera and try to pretend to be me. So it's hard to do videos on it but that is what we're using for ledger management. So our general ledger, profit and loss, monthly statements. I have an outside accounting firm that audits and checks all this against bank statements because IRS is a headache here in the US. You use best to avoid them and best to pay an accountant to do it right. But invoicing we do with invoice ninja. Invoice ninja has some ledger features but we don't use any of them. We just use it for invoicing and quoting and it works great for that keeping track of who owes us money, how much they owe us and sending out invoices fast and effectively I've got a handful of videos on it. I love it as a product, it's really great. It's actually really well written. I'm really happy with all the updates and all the features it's added from the time we started using it to a year later and we've got right now like 22 or 23,000 invoices in it. So we've used it like a lot and it's still a great product. These are a couple of proprietary pieces of software. Yes, I know there's mail servers out there. Someone's going to link about 10 different open source mail servers out there. The problem with mail servers is getting mail out just seem to go into spam systems a lot. I ran a mail server for years. I was a mail server admin for a few companies. That was something I did early into 2000. In my opinion between G Suite and Office 365, the war is over with email. They do an effective job. They're great for business and I don't have to spend any time trying to figure out why someone didn't get my invoice. And first you think it's an excuse then you find out it's reality. They didn't get the invoice because you are somehow on a blacklist by forms of internet magic and then you can't contact the company that's blacklisted you because they have no easy way to contact because they're bombarded by spammers that are also contacting them. So we moved to G Suite. That's the short answer there. That's why G Suite also in terms of document management, being able to collaborate from my phone. Yes, I know there's other softwares like NextCloud that offer this. I tried it. I don't feel as though it worked near as good as G Suite does. Sorry, I mean, I really like those products but when it comes to running my business that on critical things, sharing documents, sharing spreadsheets in real time with the staff that are on site and working with even remote people and working with other clients. Hands down, it just works really well. Making sure all of your emails get there especially because we use G Suite as the back end to send invoices out through invoice ninja works. Every time they get it, it doesn't tell them that the PDFs attached with an invoice are some type of crazy threat. It just works. And that's an important aspect for this. Other proprietary software, Screen Connect. That's how we handle remote access to take control of our clients' computers. It works wonderfully. Yes, it's proprietary. It's a ConnectWise product. I think it's actually called ConnectWise Connect. It was called Screen Connect. We bought it way back then. We use a self-hosted version of it. I'll leave links to all these in below so you can check it out but it's a good software. I've not found anything and I've tried a handful of them. Open Source, it's been a long time since I tried everything. So once I switched to Screen Connect, it works so well. Their license fee seemed reasonable to me. I pay it every year. Cost to do in business but boy, does it work well. SolarWinds, I have not come close to finding an open source solution that works as well as SolarWinds for the overall. Yes, I know the updates because someone always complains they don't update well for things. Yeah, no one really does update well because Microsoft doesn't update well. So they're all dealing with the chaos that is the Microsoft Windows update system. Insert stupid meme about Windows 10 updates here. Lastly, you know, primary to our business at least is gonna be Unify. No, Unify is not open source. Yes, Unify is a proprietary system that runs cameras, that runs the Unify software to find networking tools for all the Wi-Fi. We really like it. I think it's a great product. We have it installed, you know, hosting it ourselves to manage clients and we do install it for clients. And I bring it up because, you know, we really like it. We do a lot of other software that's not quarter our business in terms of what supports our company, but we are familiar with a lot of other proprietary products out there. So, but I wanted to cover this as the software that runs our business here in April of 2019. So I can just send this as a reply when people say, do you still run this or this from some old video I did? And like I said, I'll update this video if anything changes and go from there. All right, leave links below and everything and continue the conversation on the forums. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to LawrenceSystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.lauranceystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you want to help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time.