 And I am live. Welcome to Vlog Thursday number 346 Unified Competitors. That's the first thing I'm going to talk about. And actually most of what I want to talk about here. This is a topic that is, I just want to blanket address. And this whole blanket addressing of the topic is because there isn't really an awesome, amazing Unified Competitor when you scope things down to a couple things. Specifically, do we have a self-hosted controller option? That is the number one thing that many, many of you commented when I did like the ALTA video recently on their switches. By the way, I got some more ALTA switches. They're sending them out to everybody. And you know, the ingenious ones is another example along with who else is their TP-Link. Now, I see these not exactly as competitors because it starts at that self-hosted controller. And we know TP-Link is one of the only companies that does offer the self-hosted license-free controller. My problem with TP-Link is the same as it always has been since I did the review of them previously. I don't trust them in security. Bottom line, I just don't have any confidence that they build a secure, well-tested product. Matter of fact, from the consulting that we've done, I always feel that they're a buggy product that resetting them fixes random things that we're not sure what caused. And I think they're okay. They're probably, you know, they're kind of strange in terms of the way they handle security, like not very well. I've reviewed some of their switches. I believe one of the switches I've reviewed from a long time ago had the ability to do VLAN hopping, which I thought was interesting, right out of the box. And I'm like, well, there's security problems with these right out of the box. This is kind of the problem with the TP-Link. I just, I feel like they copied Unify just enough, made the price just a little bit lower and stopped. Like that's as far as their innovation went at all. And this is one of those things where people just, you know, point to the product, that product, but the whole cloud lock-in thing drives me crazy. And I know it drives a lot of you crazy as well. It's just one of those things that I kind of think it's a non-starter for most people. And the reason why is because we use so many of us have been burned by the cloud. And the cloud starts here as either it'll always be free until it's not. And we can rewind a little bit. We'll go back a few years, because it's not like I've been doing this just recently. I've been doing this for quite a while. And now, actually, let me turn my watch off because it's making noise. There we go. I forgot to turn off my distractions before I started. But you go back and OpenMesh was one of those devices that for a long time ago, when Unify came out and OpenMesh came out, I said, hey, let's check these products out. And I had deployed a couple of the OpenMesh, but I was like, I don't like this cloud-only lock-in thing. But OpenMesh promised the cloud will be free forever. I should pull up the Wayback when machine and see if I could do that. Because OpenMesh was one of the devices in the early days before, well, I mean, I guess it's really popular now that devices do this. But OpenMesh had no local controller and no local admin option on the device. But the devices themselves worked really well. And you're probably thinking, Tom, I've never heard of OpenMesh. Yeah, they got big enough to get acquired and got rid of their free cloud and went to a paid proprietary service. So you kind of got burned on this. And I can swing it all the way back around because having the Ulta switches and the Ulta Wi-Fi. And I've done a review on the Ulta Wi-Fi. And I'm playing with the Ulta switches because I think the switches are pretty cool. They haven't got me excited yet, but I have been engaging with them because they're working on the local controller option. And I told them that you can excite me with your products all you want and all the features, but until there's an option where I don't feel locked in. Now, this goes all the way back to me reviewing some of the Cisco Small Business stuff. I've been kind of, you know, playing with different ideas and different things and testing them out. That's why I wanted to talk to people like about the Cisco Small Business. I actually had, for a moment, just a moment, hope, just a little hope. Cisco gave me that the Cisco Small Business stuff was going to be like, ah, this is great. They're going to give this dashboard. It gives you the first 25 devices, I think it's 25 devices for free. It's Cisco. The fact that they go out for anything for free that can be managed is amazing until I realize just how bad the dashboard was, how goopy the Cisco products were. And then to top that off, I did that specific video just to talk about the end of life. Now, I'm happy that Cisco hasn't end of life policy, but that's a really short notice. And when you think about what, you know, we do at CNWR, you know, with a company we emerged with, the IT services we provide, we have to make a decision that is our long-term look at a client. So if a client says, hey, I need 30 switches, 40 switches or more, they're going to make a capital investment. They're going to trust our expertise to install something. And if I were to install something from a company that goes away in a year and I don't have any local way to control it or support it, I now have a problem that I may have told a customer to commit a $50,000 project, $100,000 project or more to a product that I can no longer support and no longer even log into if it's cloud only. You know, this is what makes a lot of these companies go to things like Meraki because Meraki may charge you through the nose, but I guarantee Meraki has a business model that will keep them in business. It's called, we will charge you through the nose. And if we didn't keep supporting the product, we wouldn't be able to keep billing you for the product. So there's our business model. And it's one of those things that I see people complaining a lot about Unify and looking for the competitor. And it's a hard, it's a really hard nut to crack if you're a startup and you want to compete with Unify because who's going to fund you? Because funding requires, there's a lot of capital in building a hardware company. There's no doubt about it. So you go to your investors and you go, I need a bunch of money. I want to compete with those people. Oh, you want to compete with a company that has about a $10 billion market cap and massive market saturation and a whole mature product line and a distribution channel. Like, okay, let's sow some money at it. How are you going to get the money back out? I'm hoping to make enough sales to compete with them. Oh, okay. So you're going to charge licensing fees so we can have a recurring revenue model. And if you're not saying yes, your investors may not say yes either. You're kind of trapped in this. It's not an easy thing to have a startup not have a product lock-in model and get funding because the people who are funding this venture would like to know how they're going to get their money back out of it. And this is why you're in a kind of circle when you try to have competitors. It takes a company making a really committed decision to say we are willing to do this in order to overcome this. But what this is is hard because you're just, if you're not going to sell licenses, that means you're going to try to saturate the market with hardware until you make your money back. And hardware is a low margin because this is the irony of people thinking like the irony is probably not the right word. It's just when people look at TP-Link as a competitor, they're not much. I mean, they're cheaper than, they're not half, but they're a little bit cheaper than Unify. And that little bit of margin that they're able to cut out from Unify is enough to get people going, yeah, I'll choose this less secure device with fewer updates and way less documentation to save 10%. So when you're a hardware manufacturer, how do you even break into that market and do it at margin? That is, no margin means no future. No future means no future to pay back those investors that gave you $100 million to start a hardware company to compete with that. So it's kind of a big circle of challenges in order to do this. And I haven't seen anyone who's really like solve this problem at all. Even Mikrotik, I think Mikrotik's got a niche in the market. We see a lot of Mikrotik in the market. And where we see it is always the same. It's in budget constrained areas. Lots of people in Europe use it. It's less popular here in the US with the exception of, I mean, it is really popular in the Wisp market. Now the wireless ISP market loves Mikrotik, but they love it because it's a pretty well-featured device with a lot of quirks. But once you get over the learning curve of the quirks, you figure it out and you go, hey, I can use this. It's budget-friendly. And when I say budget-friendly, it has to be very budget-friendly for the wireless ISP market because their margins are like this narrow across. So I get why there's a lot of popularity there. Back to the kind of mid-market and where a lot of, you know, we dwell here with these servicing the small businesses. Unify is a good fit for a lot of these. I wish there was some better options just like everyone else does. And the home user market loves Unify because the other alternatives, the big player in the market is gonna be probably Maraki and Aruba. Those are the two I see the most used in the small business space. I think Aruba is not bad. I've reviewed them before. I thought about re-reviewing them, but they haven't added that many features, which is also kind of showing like, Aruba does hold true to having a free cloud. And I like that a lot, but not all. A lot of their devices do have local management, but the Aruba free cloud is so basic. I get it why it's free. They've certainly not put much effort into it. When I reviewed it, there was a few less features than there are today, but it's not great looking. It doesn't have a great UI. It gets the job done, which is probably adequate for most people. As long as you don't have any advanced use cases on there. And I think this is where I'm happy to see Unify kind of pushing the use cases up a little bit more. But that's kind of my rant on Unify of why they are where they are is because they were willing to do what others were not. And because Rob Praira and they built this model so many years ago, it is not easy to say, I want to start today. Even if you gave me $100 million to start a hardware company, I wouldn't know that that's enough to really compete with Unify and hence the problem because it's not just competing with them. It's creating enough market saturation in an existing market. How do you offset the incumbent in the market and make enough margin to make a sustainable business without charging licenses? They kind of just go in a big circle. I'm hoping someone does it. I have a meeting scheduled. Our friends at Alta, they have been in contact with me and they've said this very clearly and they want to make a self-hosted option. They want to do it right and I absolutely hats off to them for wanting to do it. It makes me happy. I like the fact that they're trying to compete in that market. Are they there today? No, I don't know how long it'll take them to get there but I absolutely would like to see them succeed. And I will talk probably at some point about their switches. I don't know if they're going to get a dedicated video but I set up one of them. I talked about it I think on my last live stream. We have more of them that we actually plugged in at the office. So there are, let me find the other one. I'll throw it up on the screen here. Functionality wise, they absolutely work well. I actually now have the bigger ones in. I started with this one which we tested for about a week. Worked fine. We got a couple of the bigger and 16 and 24 ports and I like it where they're going with it but I just wanted to make a quick kind of 15 minute rant me talking about Unify, get people's thoughts. Because the other thing that kind of, I don't know where these people get this information but there's a new trend and comments I'm seeing on my Unify videos where people add the comment, oh, I think Unify is getting rid of that self-hosted controller. I'm like, why? When? When is there somewhere you could link to me in this? And they never reply. It's almost like there's other people just wanting to tell me this but they never offer that evidence of where did you hear such a thing? What makes you think they're getting rid of the self-hosted controller? I see this is a common thread of comments but if anyone has proof, absolutely, I would love them to email it to me. I'd love to read up on this. I'd like to hear someone's theory on this. If you send it to blogthursdaylornsystem.com I will absolutely read and probably reply that that's an interesting article but I don't really see, like I said, Unify is in a unique spot. That's why a lot of people like them. We do a ton of consulting on Unify. I look at, me and Brett, our head of sales at CNPUR, we're talking about the whole Unify stuff. We were playing it back and forth. One of the big clients we sold, we asked the question, could we have sold this if we had Maraki? And the answer is no. The competitive price, and we made margin on this, by the way, it's important, but if we wanted to make the same margin and sell him Maraki, for example, he may not have went with the bid but other people were selling Maraki. Selling Unify to some of these clients, school districts especially, when you're looking at these really high licensing fees, high is subjective, of course. I mean, Maraki works. It's not an unworkable product but it becomes will you win the bid if someone else is doing Unify and these school districts we sold, these large warehouses we've done, I bring up the, I gotta probably follow up with them again. As I talked to the guy once and they're still using them, three years ago now, I think they've only had one of those devices die, maybe two. That's not a bad run for four years of being installed and 300 of them at a medical facility that provides Wi-Fi throughout, you know, six buildings. Roll that, you're not gonna get that same total cost of ownership with some of the alternatives out there. So, I don't know, it's just a lot to think about. Let me run through some of the questions here. Unify versus Aruba and Sonon. Functionally, as I said, the Aruba stuff worked, but I thought it was just really basic, but basic may be all you need, because that's one thing I always like to start with is, let's talk about the use case, because you can make the debate and people so frequently do telling me Unify is missing this feature, Unify is missing that feature, and I'm like, yeah, and I can also make that same silly argument of, you know, does the client need these features? And I say silly argument because I do the narrative or comparative the same. I say, all right, I need to go to work. I have a Dodge truck. It is a 2018, works fine, gets me to work. Do I need a freight liner? Because it will definitely get me to work just like that Dodge truck will, but it's not the ideal vehicle to drive back and forth to work in. I mean, freight liner makes a great vehicle. It'll probably get more miles. You know, it'll probably last longer than my Dodge truck if I just drove it back and forth to work, but it's not the practical thing. So if you line up the client use case of what does your client need? What is the needs that need to be filled? And you also kind of have to think about future. Is there a need in the future that'll need to be filled? Okay, if the answer is no, great. Use the thing that fits those needs. You don't go, I need the one that has a million features because there'll be people arguing, oh, come on, I need radius, VLAN authentication on each port and things like that. Does your client need that or you want that or are you going to turn that feature on? I mean, I'll admit the Cisco has more features than some of the client needs, but that you start with the needs of the client and make sure the devices fit them. You have to think about it like that. That's just something really important from a perspective of how you want to do these. If I seem a little bit distracted or noises, I have contractors building things at my house. Is a 16 light active PoE or passive? That's listed on their spec page. I don't have all the specs of every Unify memorized, but good news, they have a website on there. Sunny Florida, did it pass already? I heard it was Stormy Florida. Sadly, Unify here in Brazil are expensive as Cisco sometimes more when I started using Ubiquity in 2008. They had really good prices. Well, supply chain's been challenging. They're room for both solutions depending on the need. Roaming and shit suck on Unify compared to Maraki and Aruba, AutoChannel Unify sucks. If those matter, you might need another solution. And I still, JC, do you got to give me some Maraki so I can test this? I don't have a roaming problem on the Unifies. The only thing, the only thing I would say is that my MacBook seems to want to, it's slow to switch. All my devices with the exception of my MacBook Air switch really fast. The MacBook Air is a little bit slower to switch and I don't know why. I think I've, I'll make sure I'm going to test it as I turned on fast roaming and I don't think it's done that since I turned it on. But Jason, find me some Maraki so we can do a Tom and Jason debate about Maraki. For those of you who don't know, Jason Slagle's president of CNWR, the tech company we merged with. So, yes. I'll give you a Wi-Fi phone and see how it works. Storm didn't hit Orlando. Cool. How about the Dodge Truck versus the Kia one? That's closer discussion here. No one is bringing in cumulus based switches for hardware. I mean, that might be, but I won't, I like Kia quite a bit. I think Kia makes a really good one and Kia's got some good vehicles. There's no doubt that they have, they aren't, I mean, they're a little bit less expensive than some of the domestic vehicles but I think Kia's pretty good. Unify doesn't manage client hands storming decisions are made by the client. There's still things that the Unify devices, the Wi-Fi devices can do to make sure the handoffs are better and the hand steering works better. But it's a challenge. I don't know, I want to do some comparisons. We got to set up and get a couple of Merakis, get a couple of Unify, put them in the same position, switch them on and off from each other and see which devices handover better. That's definitely something worth discussing and bringing up. Something else worth noting is this is going to be out soon. This is the new Unify network version 7152. Everyone seems to be pretty excited about this. It's novel to me. We've got pretty graphics. And I think, I don't know, I will say that Unify's done a good job of making networking UIs look better and that's a bar that they should all go for everyone because there's nothing wrong with having a good UI for things. There's the old school network people want a good CLI and great. I'm not against CLI. I like CLI. My problem I always run into with CLI is getting more people to understand CLI. The reason we have more, well, the reason we're not writing an assembly language and we started having languages, more advanced languages or the reason we have now really popular frameworks is not because you know, it's a better idea. It's actually in a lot of ways better idea, but it allows more people access to getting these things done. These are what a lot of times a nice UI will do is make it more accessible for people whose sole focus is not on a specific, very narrow task. So assembly language is great, but hey, most people are just going to write things in some type of framework and not have to actually learn all the assembly language code. And the same thing goes for networking. Now everyone's going to take the time to learn things and do it from the command line that's really, you know, detailed. They need a UI because they're daily focus. It allows me to have people that don't need that skill level just to get a VLAN set. And yeah, that's so I do appreciate and think there is a really good place for a good UI. Let's see, what do we got here? Does your company do phone systems, cloud or local, favorite 3CX and others? We don't use 3CX or free PBX anymore. We never did, I never did 3CX. We used to do a little bit of free PBX. I got away from both of them. The we use a hosted cloud solution. Is there any good documentation on scaling up Unify for large tenant multi setup see advice and split controller? Yeah, I've done videos called large unified deployments and I based them on Unify's documentation they have called large unified deployments and how to set it up. It's something it's like I think if you still type it into Google, I'm one of the top searches for that. It's pretty easy to find. I know if you search my channel for large Unify, you'll find it. I have videos talking about what to set. You can tune AP Power, but once the tuning is properly done, the decision is made by the client. Yes. CLI on switches and routers is easy. That's a matter of opinion. Easy for me. Not easy for everybody, trust me. Just the concept of VLANs even when they have a UI is hard. The number of people that we do consulting with that have trouble getting Unify setup with the UI is like I couldn't get in. It's just the skill level. Some of these people, I mean, it's not at all a dig on them. They're just not focused on this. So that's a really I think making YouTube videos is easy and other people go, man, that's a lot of stuff and how do you work all these things? It comes down to what your skill set is and easy as a really broad term, especially for CLI switch stuff. What's the point in having UI in the cloud really? Having UI in the cloud. Most people just want something to have one place to see it. This is, you know, we have like 70 customers in our Unify controller and we can see all 70 customers from one self-hose controller. That's the big thing. NDA compliant Camperas. The Synology ones are NDA compliant or NDA compliant. I know Synology Cameras. So, yeah, these I've reviewed them. They're good cameras. If you need something that makes compliance, I think the Synology surveillance station system is just nice. I have one of these cameras. So it definitely works well. All right. Let's see. Let's show you. There's going to some noise come through. You can see the contractor's got some stuff here. This is one of those cameras from Synology. It works. It works really well. No. Can you mute this? Oops. Yeah. Click on a different one. There we go. New deck is getting built right now. All right. We'll leave this up there because that's prettier and doesn't make any noise. Let's see. The other questions here. UI is great for first and second line support, simple, quick changes to UI. It's great for admins and automation. Yes. Now, if you're trying to build the automation system with Ansible or some type of scripting, obviously, CLI is great. I do Linux administration. So do we at CNWR. So that kind of stuff is awesome for us. And Jay from LearnLexTV has an entire video about how we use Ansible pull because he prefers that particular use case. And he's got a really slick way he does it, including all of the service accounts and everything. It's probably one of the best homelab setups using Ansible pull. It scales to some small businesses that may have some Linux use case in there. But if you learn all the command and the ecosystem, I mean, yeah, CLI is still the way to go. There's a reason the CLI isn't going anywhere. It just works really well for automation. I was on Synology changing my approach and switching to Frigate. I think Frigate's a neat tool. It's not something I would use for a customer, but I think it's neat. For homelab, I think it's great. It's about my list to test it. I went through it. I know what it is. I've just never actually built one out. I think Techno Tim on his channel is a great tool to use. There's another one he's used to build some automation tools around cameras. But it's definitely it's a neat project out there for homelab. I have my cameras tied together with my and you can tie Frigate together with this. I pull it up. Where did it go? Throw it on this screen over here. Oops. I clicked the right keys. I've got my home assistant cameras so it will put the last motion image on there. And then you can tie Frigate in here to go further to build your automations. Great for home. It's nothing I think I'd build commercially for a client because I wouldn't want to support it. But for home I love it and I think it's great. Yes, I was getting Slack notifications. I should probably mute my Slack for a moment. It's mid-day, so I didn't I didn't mute Slack. Actually, I'm just going to quit it so nothing. There's too many Slack's there. Which competitor and sector antennas would you recommend? I don't know. It depends on each one. I don't have a specific recommendation for that. I like CLA. I work in a data center. I'm assuming DC's data center. I know how MicroTik fails frequently. Device is just freeze and need reboots. Yes, welcome to the world of needs reboots. The biggest thing, honestly, is the true controller independent model other than captive portal, etc. Unify pushes out of config the AP. It behaves independently and has no coordination, so no AP steer. Let's do a deep dive on this. I've done 802.11 in our video, but we should probably go through as an updated one because then I can just refer back to an updated 802.1 in our video, walk through roaming and how it works on different models. There is some interesting things that different people do with different Wi-Fi on the back end down there. It's a good discussion. How the handoffs work and all that fun stuff. It's funny because I have an old video on de-offing and that is also a very big discussion. I get a lot of hate on that video. People say I shouldn't do a video about de-offing. Okay, cool. Jason just sent me something I want to open on how Maraki does it, so let me pull that up. Let's talk about Wi-Fi and Maraki. Where did this go? All right, client balancing prior to MR2.9 freeware information exchange. Each AP is a local database that stars a client's metrics, both associated and not associated information to share between each AP on the land via broadcast messages within CryptoPay. Note this message encryption is dynamically configured and secured by the Maraki cloud. AP is on the same land segment will automatically learn the information needed to make client balancing decisions. This feature was designed for nearby APs, which typically reside on the same land. I really feel like Unify actually has something that they're doing on this. I don't think that Unify has... Let's see. Can I find documentation on it, though? So, let's see. I'll have to look up to see if I know where the client, where the documentation is. I see it here for how Maraki does it and I believe Ulta has some documentation on how they do it. Let me try and look up, see if I can find it in there. So much to read here. I'm trying to find it from... If someone has the link, you can send it to me. It's a full-blown Wi-Fi fight here. Oh, let's see. It wasn't four years ago. Share this tab. So, do they support 802.1V? I'm not seeing it. At least it's not in this forum post, but this forum post is from five years ago. It's funny because there's people showing the 802.1R test client KENV. Oh, here's a... I kind of like the way... Maybe we'll just have to investigate this. Let's see. Hey, Tom, I'm going to use some videos that Greylog begins sending logs from a unified control PF Sense. And it's helping fix some ongoing problem. Awesome. Glad Greylog was helpful. Manual chain. Okay, you guys are arguing about that part there. And Jason has a good point. If you do it all manually, things change. But now I have a wire shark thing I want to dig into here. Beacon to Wi-Fi. Network is not supporting. This is interesting. Maybe I'll do a packet capture right on the here to determine if the network has this specific thing. This is the beacon for Wi-Fi network. Because I don't find the answer. Unify does not have documentation or whether or not they support the V. My pages still have links to Google+. What pages? What pages have links to Google+. I like the argument you started. I think this is a good debate you started here, Jason. I told you, me and Jason, you know, we need to have we need to do the Meraki debate on this. So I think Jason's right on the... especially the auto tuning features. So I'm going to try and hunt down whether or not I can find whether or not the Unify APs support the 802.1V. I can now dig into that a little further. Hey all, happy Thursday. But this is what we do as technicians. We toss around an idea. We throw facts at it. We're talking about what standards are supported. And then we determine whether or not it's the right solution. These are important things you need to have. Bard said it supports 802. Oh, you asked Bard? We can't ask AI if things work properly. Do you have any advice setting up a point to point 40 gig connection between Linux desktop and a NAS? Point to point, like wireless 40 gig? I don't understand the question very well. I mean you want to use SFPs bonded together like for SFPs? I guess I need more clarification on that. Think of warehouses where things really control the environment. You can manage it trying to do it in a hospital with patient monitors and phones on Wi-Fi. It does. This comes back to some of the use cases for some of these things. Use cases are more specifically the environment that's driving the product that fits the environment. We were talking about do you need shielded cables everywhere last week and I said, well, it's not needed all the time and a person says, oh, I always have to use them because I put wiring in around X-ray machines. I'm like, well, I don't have an X-ray machine at my house. So at my house, I don't really care as much about the shielded cable. I mean, it's better to use it, but I wouldn't say it's a must-have. But if your job says, hey, I'm going to work in a room full of X-ray machines all the time, shielded cables seem like a better idea. I have a client that has 11% packet loss for VoIP provider says it's local network issue. It also has has any on the phone server and any how to troubleshoot it set up pings on each thing. I mean, do you have a separate network for the phones set up a ping on that network and see if you're dropping, you know, there's free I think smoke pings free there's tools out there you can monitor ping times and determine if there's some drops going on ping plotter. That's the other one. Well, there's one more I haven't heard of in a while. Let's see if I still I think I still have an instance running somewhere uptime kuma will ping things and give you that but there's uptime kuma doesn't give you a short enough ping time. I think so ping plotter might look better. Server monitor I've done I've done forgot the password for this I think I'll just pull up the website for it because I had one set up I turned it back on but I don't know the password for some reason it's not in there this is a really cool project though it's open source PHP server monitor it'll monitor a bunch of different things and send you notices I think they have a they have a website for it. Yeah let's see if they have a demo yeah PHP server monitor this is another one you can set up it's pretty sick it's got really low requirements you can also tie it to like push over notifications it'll give you charts and graphs of latency history of outage so these are these are all the tools you end up using to you know these are free tools I should say that will help you trace things out like that going from 2x Tom to 1x is jarring yes it is PRTG does PRTG have a free version still the password the password forget about it yep I even logged into it I realized I had it and I was like oh I can turn it on oh I don't remember the login I know where it is if I wanted to dig for it but I don't want to dig for it I'll just show you this is a neat tool you can use that will give you these things it's open source it's free I'll drop the link right here because I got a few minutes before I got to wind this down I'm only going for about 10 more minutes here but PHP server monitor org definitely easy easy one to find tracking latency impacts across your networks nav nav.unit okay the password forgot well no it's saved in bitward and that's the thing it's not saved under the URL I have accessed it I got to remember what I called it in order to find it yeah PF Sense I have a whole video on that so I'm not I'll just say I have a video on PF Sense and tracking tracking WAN quality so that that's natively built in the PF Sense it does that out of the box so yes it's nothing you have to load it's the though I have a video on it if you type in like WAN monitor you'll probably find my video on it PF Sense has documentation on it and I did a video on how to set it up and how to monitor it yeah Zavix works for monitoring I have a client with astrology surveillance station notice issues with syncing between the station and the cams all are set to sync with astrology with cans are off by an hour you know I'm using I guess it depends on the cameras obviously the Synology camera syncs perfectly the Amcress ones I have I think one real link and five more Amcress and they all sync fine so I haven't I haven't run into that issue but but I have seen especially some of the you know maybe a firmware problem I've seen cameras drift which doesn't make any sense to me especially when they're supposedly syncing the time some cameras if you're the lower quality cameras have the lower quality problems is one of the things I would say look for firmware updates make sure it's got the correct time server in there and that the time server is working properly that could be a TZ data out of date but if it's one of those like really you know off-brand cameras getting an update can be part of that because I read that right that you have a camera is wandering off for now if it's if it's consistently one hour out of date you've got just bad time zone data or that yes right here so it's not it's always there's a difference between wandering or exactly one hour and that's going to be the time zone wrong somewhere hey Tom I think you remember you saying use Ninja RMM in your environment have you noticed the large number of failed auto patch deployments that especially for office apps this question you go over to reddit RMSP someone asked us about a week ago there's an answer for it I forgot what the answer is but there's there's there's a forum posted my forums you go into my forums and type in Ninja one you'll see a recent forum posted an answer for it there's there's some switch that you have to hit and to make Microsoft do a thing Microsoft screwed up some updates doing the last network in my home any advice for cat 6 cabling use cat 6 cabling I don't know what the advice you're looking for is the only cameras I've not seen time issues being synced directly is the Sinnoh NTP is when the our Synology cameras because all things are done with Synology yeah that's one thing the Synology cameras are dead simple because they're all done completely with the Synology let's see I think I can I can pull up to the Synology one I did this when I reviewed the camera one of the things I want to point out here share this tab instead go to the cameras if you're using a Synology cameras you don't have to log into the camera and everything because it's all done right here so anything I set in the camera you just change the setting here and it pushes everything right into the camera you don't have to do anything special when you're doing it it's all done right inside of here I covered that in my video so Travis is very right like if you go with the Synology cameras combined with the Synology's family station they just work they work really well plus they do the little people recognition and stuff like that so you can track through them the Synology cameras work great with the Synology surveillance station like they obviously because they're made by Synology you're going to get that integrated experience on them that's going to work really well what switches should I be using also looks like I should be using Synology for my CAM solution I mean any PoE switch will work when it comes to the Synology PoE switches I mean get a quality one the Cisco small business one I think works fine with the Synology cameras we set some of those up on there Cisco makes a quality product and if you don't care about like the ease of use of the UI being a little quirky because it's Cisco but it functionally it was great and I trust Cisco and their power budget to be accurate and the switch itself to last quite a while anyone using the nifty app network Chuck just featured you know it's funny because nifty's been around for a little while and I was thus cool that network Chuck did a video and brought them up because it's certainly going to make them a lot more popular they were looking to buy they reached out to me a while ago I just I thought it was novel but I didn't take it on as a sponsor so I but they had they got all the way to network Chuck got a sponsored video and he's definitely someone that more reach than me when it comes to getting some of that stuff out there so yeah it looks really cool and I'll bring it up in case someone isn't familiar with the way nifty works so this is we find their website because the problem they also have is there's actually a bunch of other things with the same stupid name see if this is the right one nope it's funny that a Google search you can't find it. I thought their name was bad and I think that's part of part of the problem with it I'd actually probably have to look to link in network Chuck's video it's a neat tool I definitely think it's great this thing it has a terrible name because googling the name finds like all these other companies that have copied the name let me find his little there we go it's ntfy.sh so let me throw that up here push notifications made easy they reached out to me for a while like I said a while ago but it's just like the I was like well it looks neat but I I'm kind of limit who I take on as sponsors so I didn't take them on as a sponsor and you know that was a few months ago and now they got network Chuck doing a sponsored video which is great like I said it gonna bring them but man having something called or ntfy I was calling it nifty it's notify like ntfy so I was spelling it wrong I'm but if you just search for it you find something else how can I set permissions of data set I have full control or you just be able to read and write files when I be able to delete your files well if they had read write permission they're gonna have delete permission so no and you've asked this question before and it was answered before matter of fact you posted it on several of my videos so I'll just mute your if you keep asking it it's it's probably best it posted in the true nas forums is your best way to get a better more concise answer on that so hopefully that makes sense alright I will wind this down and leave you with this so go ahead and check out if you're interested in this I'll pull it up one more time network Chuck did a video on it it's not where Chuck's latest video so if you're looking for a neat push notification system that you can integrate into Linux that's what this is pretty neat I don't I guess push notifications have their place uh it's kind of a neat service I don't have a direct use case for it in my head right now but the fact that it's easy to integrate and I think their pricing was really reasonable on here for sending the push notifications five dollars a month for twenty five hundred daily messages so that's not bad fifty daily emails three phone calls twenty thousand messages for ten dollars but this is to be prepaid annually it's only a dollar more if you do monthly so neat looking neat looking system alright any more comments have we reached the end of them all I think I okay I'm all caught up I think answered as many questions as possible I have videos on some of these other topics I have videos on the synology surveillance station so if you want to dive further into that or some of the other questions people ask I'm gonna get further along and dig into this 802 to confirm whether or not there is any support with uh Unify for this because I think it's it's gonna be a fun topic me and Jason will be doing a review more in depth on the Maraki versus Unify and talk about some of those features what is or is not supported once I have all that ready that's when I'll do the review video on that I think we got a couple Maraki's at the office I can borrow somewhere and yeah um our biggest competitors push over which is five dollars one time that's why I said it's not I looked at it and I don't think it's it's got a self hosted option I never really dug into it though because the problem with self hosting push notifications is how to get the notifications where you want them to go I didn't really dig much into it I didn't take them on as a sponsor um so I never really dug deep into that particular thing make sure this is a fight graphic it's not a fight this is this is a good video I don't have you know just opinion based discussions this will be something brought up about facts you know this is that video I did just the other day about the stupid Cisco end of life because it started with hey we think Cisco uh on the small business line has a shorter life span well it turns out Cisco made a global policy change and this is where you know I pulled back with the way back web machine and showed here's Cisco you you aren't remembering wrong Cisco did on their older product line have a much longer policy for the end of life from when they would do end of sale and they've now shortened that greatly now someone pointed out to me that some models that Cisco has even though they were sold under the new policy they have a longer they've still continued to support them and yeah Cisco can do at their leisure a well at their discretion that leisure at their discretion a out of band update for something will they I don't know that's kind of a them question but they're not obligated to based on their own policy and if they stop supporting something they're going to gesture the terms and conditions under which you bought that device under their current policy so that's where it really comes down to but nonetheless yeah a good intelligent discussion with fatality and flawless victory graphics I'm not saying we can't make it fun you know I really like a good debate that is one by facts and then you can still gloat over it you can still you know I one dance it doesn't mean you can't be happy about the outcome but the debate should be very like hey these are the features this is the you know some very clear evidence that is objectively true about the features of a device I think that's fun yes and me and Jason work together so so for me and Jason have not had any type of I can tell when we have discussions it's fun because Jason's like all right I have an opinion on this I need to know you know he's prepared if I were to object to the way we were going to change something he was prepared but I completely we just haven't had a time where me and him weren't aligned you know there might be nuance difference but like me and Jason have been aligned on things and you do a video because tomorrow marks 2 2 months since we merged and me and Jason haven't had a fight yet we we seem we kind of thought we thought a lot of like I think we still do so I think it's been kind of fun working together because we we haven't had any major like this or that disagreement so yeah it's been it's been a lot of fun but that's our next video Jason that maybe I'll go come on business tech business technicalities and we'll do a video 2 months 2 months after the merger which Jason's just now coming out of the fog that is sorting out the billing because Jason was like Tom I don't understand your billing I'm like hey Tom doesn't understand his billing sometimes either so how are we going to solve this and Jason's done a great job of bringing order to the chaos that I brought to the table so Jason has organized it he's put it in very concise ways so it's it's been fun almost there yeah he's been in the cocoon of billing I think is the way he's referred to it there's there's a lot you have to do this is why we merge so it's you know putting it all together a bunch of smart people got together and we're a better company for it so we're at CNWR so it's definitely been a lot of fun so oh Dynify do you know Dynify firewall yes Dynify copied OpenSense and slapped their name on it I don't think they made any major code changes from OpenSense so Dynify is OpenSense with different branding I best I can tell if someone thinks I'm wrong about that let me know I don't know that it's a competitor they they just copy the code from OpenSense now the question would be is how much code do they copy can they support that can they keep it freshen up to date I don't know anyone can fork a project it's it's not about forking a project it's about maintaining the project you forked that that I don't know I can't really speak to it so building agreements oh me and Jason are going to do some software talks pretty soon too we're going to break down all the software used now at CNWR there's a long freaking list of this stuff there's there's the software we use there's some things that get canceled out you know fresh desk is now dead long-lived fresh desk and it's gone which is fine I always told people I never love fresh desk it's just the solution I use at the time so everything has now been automated and then the whole I'm going to use the software that I use to optimize manage we use Roost a lot that that's a fun discussion so that there's so many things that we talk about regarding that so leave your questions and thoughts down below I'm going to bump off here because I have a few more things to do and then I got to drive my son got a job so I got to try them to work so there's that's why I had to do the blog now because I've got too many things scheduled for later yeah those little model things are huge so all right have fun everyone and talk to you later