 And it says we're alive awesome Welcome to vlog Thursday episode. I forgot to look 246, you know, I just keep tweeting these things out I don't actually pay attention and that just I just keep incrementing a number plus one Yeah, and I got Ray or city here and me and Ray did a couple videos about VoIP and the nightmares that were going on with it that seem to be settled down You see the statement that bandwidth commade Yeah, I did they put up another one yesterday. They've put up a couple so far. Yeah It's very anemic. Unfortunately, they're not putting out a lot of detail and things are still changing Yeah, it's I wish they could give us more but I kind of get it that they can't and Me and Ray, you know, we talked back and forth about this like why isn't it bigger news? But it's also really hard to turn it in the news because unless you're someone feeling the pain of it directly No one else cares someone's like, I don't know and it's kind of a it's a story without any Leads behind it because we we don't know who did it. We don't know what why they did it We don't know why they stopped doing it or if they stopped doing it or if it just got mitigated And here we are with a week going by and there's simply no news on the subject And and so and even like the statement they said it's still going on, right? They're still receiving attacks, but they've been able to mitigate it up to now They're much lower in frequency much lower in throughput And we sit like if you you know, we've been monitoring the routes, right? You can easily say start seeing when you know, they start announcing the slash 24s or whatever prefixes they have and when the routes start Changing and cloudflare is still very much in control of the routes So, you know, at least you put two and two together you read the tea leaves the the DDoS attacks are still going on Or at least confirming what the CEO said. Yeah, just there's some noise Out there and we've seen other people reporting it but it's it's all those things like I it's such a weird thing to do Because you're burning down your own botnet like I don't get it, but Well, that that was the crazy part right that's what we were talking about where like It costs time money and resources to do this and you know, whatever agents you have out there Whatever, you know PCs you've compromised and you have for a control agent They're for command and control agent like to have those resources if you're one of these people you those are that's gold to you That's your money. That's your that's that's your those are your toolbox and to sit there and say I'm gonna keep hammering it And they're gonna keep getting knocked off the internet until you and you have to move to the next one to sustain it this long and have that much Resource again, I mean this is that's that's the amazing parts of me that in the lack of news coverage, which yeah Kind of I kind of like what someone said here. We'll start throwing some of the comments up We don't let Facebook engineers do our BGP updates and we don't eat pineapple on our pizza society will come to order I support that a hundred percent Facebook took a day off or at least half a day off You know need a little break shut them data centers down save a few megawatts of energy because that was wild that that was megawatts of energy That they were talking about like that's an interesting thing to talk To me that was the best movie like I don't think I'm gonna go to the movies this weekend That was the most entertaining thing to watch both what occurred the updates that were coming out of you know The different engineering groups the updates at Facebook and Cloudflare and everybody else put out Just the house and the wise and the the engineers that had the skill sets to make the changes on the local Devices didn't have access the guys that had access couldn't get in the building It was just like this cavalcade of events. It was amazing. It was horrible, but awesome So did you see that Facebook's domain was for sale? Yes So you saw that did you see did you see that on a GRC or I was watching that the other yeah, I love that You know, it's just they were their own Okay, so it went for sale because you couldn't contact the registrar for its availability So the sniping tools basically put it up that they have I'm like, this is beautiful but but my friend drew Hackman put out on on Socials the other day he was talking about how the internet's made that's basically shoe strings WD 40 some duct tape and you know Sharks with lasers on them. Yes, and you know, you start to look at this background We're like anybody can announce BGP routes and or anybody can announce BGP and literally take down states and our countries And it's happened regularly It's happened and then you see stuff like this where the registrar is until Steve said I had no idea that like They're looking at other registrars and if you don't have the name It means we can use the name and that is such a backwards way to handle No one has it who wants to buy facebook.com Right Man, I thought the the auto discovery thing was bad. No, it's no no There's there's just there's a more calamity of stupid Yeah, so my friend Phil has he calls it his flappy thing theory and He says everything on the internet was a flappy thing that someone fixed But then that started flapping so they have a thing that checks the flappy thing and then later There's another thing that checks the flappy thing and then there's another Bass script that keeps running to stop that bass script from doing the thing and then this other one runs this and he's come in and re-engineered some very large companies and It always blows my mind because you're like how did that you worked for who and they had what it was just like He's always got these fun stories and you're like it's like you said it's WD 40 some duct tape some string here and there You know, it's I liken it to what I used to I used to be DJ back way back in the day and new events and stuff like that and so when you were going to events you'd have You go through the kitchens or you go through, you know the back rooms of these ballrooms and hotels and stuff like that and you'd see the back areas and While the front is all beautiful and marble and shiny and all that, you know Everything is gorgeous you go to the back and you go to the kitchens you go to this place You're like, I would never eat here. I would never touch this stuff It's like it's out of a scary movie and anybody who's worked on like the background and engineering on big iron stuff It's just that bad. It's little it's the it's we're in time for Halloween. It's perfect Yeah, absolutely so kind of on that topic because You know me and you started the conversation right away and let's give you a little background of who Ray is other than my friend Who I've been talking to and having some laughs with her a few weeks now Ray saved my bacon and that's where some of this all started. We actually engaged with Ray's company We will I know it's not how probably Ray wants to say what we'll call it white boy because that's what my staff keeps saying Yeah, that's a running joke with my friends they do it on purpose at this point. Yeah, that's I figured you wouldn't mind And if you did it's okay, we're gonna do it anyways But uh Ray's company is someone we were engaging with and doing because they do not like sip service But like full service phones and everything else We're engaging with them and had some other projects we're working with and you know We as people who follow this channel that we use VoIP MS for like strictly really inexpensive zip trunking But obviously VoIP MS was the first to get attacked and we dog food here We were on VoIP MS and no one could call us and the few people that we sold on it didn't and Ray was right in there We'd already worked with some other projects. He jumped in and helped us and got us out from under that kind of Immediate problem things like that, but also, you know, then Ray joined me for a couple videos and He's got a really interesting background because that's why we titled this doing large-scale networks when he says big iron That's actually stuff you've worked on you've built some of these large-scale networks So if I'm not mistaken you had before you were in VoIP you did the MSP thing and kind of migrated over into the voice thing Yeah, so I've been doing IT since the early 90s You know my first PC was a the first PC. I built was a 286 DX and went up from there So, you know, I went through like the web design days and the ASP net days and you know that all that fun stuff And then you know in the early 2000s went MCSE CCIE So my background is actually building complex and distributed networks right multi-city multi-site multi-continent. That's my jam That's what I've been doing then I went the MSP route Then I realized I liked working with MSPs more than I liked working with any users Right and then so, you know that paired with my networking background paired with my VoIP background I got into VoIP in the early 2000s. Also You know I decided I'd rather work with MSPs and partner programs came out And that's what I do today and we run our own VoIP network. We're not reselling anybody else's stuff and It's fun. It's challenging. It's scary sometimes because you think that could happen to me easily But I love it. It's a blast. Yeah, it's pretty cool and especially that long history when you said ASP. Oh, yeah Man, that's that's some old old stuff. I mean I did I used to have a developer I staffed years and years ago We built a few ASP things forever ago, and I'm so glad we don't do any of that now like that was that stuff I feel bad because some of it's still running and Stuff we can't completely disclose publicly me and you were talking about here of some of the tooling that is used in the industry That is still built on that really archaic language and because no one wants to pay the technical debt to rewrite it in a modern language You can see it you can identify like every time I see an ASP page like it just hurts a little bit, right? It's like and they're live. They're out there. Yeah No software here in 2021 should require IAS as a base can you know thing it needs to run? I'm just throwing it out there Anytime you have a we have a Linux version and we have a windows version and we recommend the windows version because that's more reliable That means you're building it wrong. I'm just I'm gonna put that out there. Yeah One of the things that you definitely have a lot more experience with is Gonna be some of the enterprise networking gear and we talked about a few of the Networking gear, but you go a step further. You're probably a what's some of your like favorite high-end routers that you work with some of the big iron stuff So I like to say I got into void because I hate phone systems I get I got my CCA and that's why I'm qualified to say I hate Cisco These opinions are mine in my own not my companies, but what's them call it? So yeah, I mean I've worked on the big Nexus 9k's and that's fun stuff. We're actually moving to Moving over we swapped Most of our data centers now are running Palo Alto We're swapping over to Juniper stack just because I like the end at the SDN composure Position of it and so we're getting our guys trained up on that because most of our guys have Cisco certs But Juniper has a very nice training program where you can migrate over use your same training and then they just translate from, you know, Cisco to Juniper and It's really nice. So hopefully by this time next year will be full Juniper stack All their stuff is all BSD based still isn't it for Juniper? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So and I like that because you know It's that technical debt you were talking about right like on the Cisco side of it and I'm not bashing Cisco They're not the only ones. There's plenty of manufacturers out there. I'm not trying to harp on them. It's just right It's what I want on But they have so much legacy code They've just dragged forward and forward and forward where the ice is more on Backwards compatibility because when you have a two million dollars switch stack, you know, that upgrade doesn't happen all that often, right? You're not even changing blades all that often But when you have So, you know, and at any time you incorporate something new it has to be able to you know Maybe swap out 25% of it. It's got to be able to handle be backwards compatible with the rest of the stack And so Where you look at stuff like that's why I really like the SDN stuff and we considered going white box For a little bit, but we wanted that commercial support and I think juniper was making the right decisions And so knowing that their stuff is BSD based they have an eye on security first It just it made a lot of sense to me Yeah, they they seem to have a I've got one of my other friends really likes their stuff, too That's why I learned it was BSD base. I'm like, oh, it's interesting and They aren't in the news for a egregiously bad horrible programming practices and I've definitely I have an entire video where I dump on 40 net for some of their just poor poor life choices You mean you mean a hard-coded backdoors? Yeah The multiple hard-coded backdoors every time there's a problem. It's like it's static key or static password It's like great static. What do you mean static credential? How does this thing get shipped like this? And I don't get that, you know, and that that's one of the things, you know Not to go back to Steve, but that's one of the things Steve Gibson talks about regulates, you know Nowadays, I have a lot of healthy respect for you log into a device and the first thing it asks you is to set your credentials We're not even a hard-coded username like forget the admin right like just hard just set brand new credentials period As opposed to saying here log in with admin admin and then change after the fact So, you know, I really appreciate that anytime look at a vendor and I looked at their help docs and I searched for Default password and they don't have something there that that's a minor win in my book. I'll take that Yeah, eventually mean you were gonna dive into this topic of vetting the vendors and just make a list of like You know, do they have this do they have this everyone has security flaws? And it's never just going and looking at a list of EVs is never a reason not to go with a vendor It's if it's a really popular product There's probably a lot of CVE's and Something else we mentioned once you get before was we won't call it any specific tooling in our MSP industry But some of them don't even have CVE's but had some egregious problems and there's still no CVE's because they don't they're not part of that They don't get listed as CVE's. They're not big enough. They're not companies. They're very specific to our niche of market So you can't even use that as a as part of your scoring like you almost have to throw that out but if there are CVE's and they're from hard-coded credentials and Really dumb ideas like that then well, then we can throw them under of us Yeah, that's fair game. I mean if you're gonna walk in traffic, don't get mad you get hit You know what I mean? And that's yeah hard-coded credentials. It's definitely that that line in my opinion No And that's one of things a good friend Jason Slagle talks about you know talking about openness of vendors, right? How transparent are they and in our industry? There's some good. There's some good actors bad actors in my opinion But yeah, it's identifying that like you said having having CVE's having security events Everything is an opportunity in my opinion. I'm very much a subscriber to that right So if you had something bad that happened, how did you respond? It's the old Batman? You know, why do we fall so we can get up, you know, I'm good with that It's just but a lot of times when you see absolutely nothing for a vendor that's been in the business five ten years And they don't have any security events whatsoever. That's a red flag to me, but we'll we'll cover that when we do God there's gonna be so much to talk about there But you know in the goal when we do that videos, of course to give you the understanding and tools so you can apply it To any vendor? Here's a set of good rules to follow and or questions you can ask them You commented on Something I think a lot of people think but I'm see people complain about this is when a vendor offers like a channel partner program And then also does direct selling well There has to be some type of guideline and agreement and you know said this on reddit where I seem to come right away I'm like, well, what's the agreement saying a person didn't know because they didn't they didn't have one and I'm like, well And that's kind of the trick, right? It's I get not every vendor is gonna have these full pages of all these answers you You you need to ask and all that stuff, but I think the goal is let's get a baseline of questions We should be asking our vendors and and I keep seeing the vendors like I get I'm a vendor today But I still consider myself an MSP like it's just it's in the blood, right? But like that, you know, that was my first thing when I see somebody complaining Oh, they did this and they took away my lead registration and they sold directly and they undercut me and we've seen those vendors Do that? We've all had experiences with that My first question is well ask them for their if they sell direct and they sell to the channel What's their channel conflict policy? If they don't have something written down? That's a problem. That's a vendor. That's a red flag and of course I followed it with my own channel conflict policy Because everything is opportunity, right? Yeah, but I think that's the goal. It's that baseline of questions of Do you do this? How do you handle that? What's your policy on this so that they can answer? If they can't answer your follow-up should be okay. Well, what are you gonna do about it? And I definitely want to get that list together with you so we can empower the MSPs out there Yeah, they they need some help because it goes around and circles a lot with them on that idea You know what's all this one up here? I don't know if you've looked at this at all But what do you guys think of unified VoIP service in Europe? It isn't launched yet. How's it going to USA? I have So I don't you know the history of unified VoIP rate They actually had launched a previous product that torpedoed down pretty quickly and it kind of abandoned it It was pretty though. It was it had a nice big screen. It was very pretty. I think it was Android base Wasn't like an Android tablet would do a phone or something Yeah, yeah, but you know silver, right? I think I remember with silver or something like that They had two models. I had one with the big screen with the small screen We played with it because it was open step and my thing is and that's kind of like when you and I were And I feel bad because you say I helped you out But I also kind of between the VoIP MS thing and then the bandwidth thing I took you out of the pod into the fire. Yeah but you know but You know, but that was one of the things like you guys were running a certain PBX and We have a lot of experience with different PBX is right whether it's elastics free PBX 3cx whether our hosted thing Has nothing to do with it. We have experience with all the other stuff So we were able to help migrate and that was you know, it's cool So I did play with the unified stuff when it came out the very first time And I got it working for the most part, right? It's you got it registered got it making calls got a voicemail and then within what did it take them six months to shudder that one And it just like appeared and then this is what two years later a year later They start this back up. So I don't know if I trust that that's how I feel about it, too And voice is one of those things that's kind of unique because you're talking about something It's got to be on someone's desk for at least the easy five six-year lifecycle or more I mean, I I only recently threw away. I forget they are there We finally decided it was enough. We had one in the corner We had old Cisco phone still tied to our free PBX system. That was probably 10 11 12 years old works Nothing wrong with it. We just said we don't really Never die. Yeah, never never die. Yeah Yeah I mean it would want to register because of some problem with free PBX and the fact that was ancient But whatever it once you manually registered it to work But yeah, I'm like you though. I'm like we went we took over we take over hospitals And so like those 7941s and the 7901s were everywhere or banks loved them, right? And so I know you can convert them from skinny protocol to you know to open sip and hey I'm a Cisco guy. I can do this. So we took 50 phones to the office This was like this is five six years ago took 50 phones to the office And we stayed up till two in the morning. We got three flashed that we're able to register after that we're like Went back to the client look will help you just replace the phones there. We're not gonna fight this battle The phones still work if you you know plug them into a cube or you know a similar system, but yeah, some things need to go Yeah, I See that George says he'd like to see that list just we will give this together sooner than later on that Now we want to help vendors list, you know, this is something me and Ray Well the reasons we hit it off and talking so much is we're both really about not just you know Doing things for ourselves so to speak but actually doing a bunch of community driven things where we want to see the community get better I give out a ton of information on this channel rays got our YouTube channel By the way, I believe links to that down in the description below and he's done some tutorial videos He's done some different things on documentation even you got a whole video on how to set up Who do I watch that, you know because I was looking at the documentation platform like that's uh, You know, we really want to we're very aligned with throwing a lot more information out there From based on our years of experience because just like Ray I started in the 90s If we can help people and it's not is there's this weird concept too many people have of Everything's a competition like yo, this is my secret sauce And I will link bait you into buying my book or buying my Horses not like really guys like at some point give a lot of out there in the big picture It works really well for it people last time How do you get a lot of customers like it turns out if you're just really nice and engage people a lot and Give away a lot of information people kind of gravitate towards you and you end up doing pretty well It's kind of weird. I mean it's as if it's Right, it's like don't be a jerk. It's not that hard. It's there's a there's a book I love called they yet they ask you answer and it talks about exactly that this guy was selling pools And he was he'd start getting these questions that people would ask him about, you know, what is this pool? What's the best? What's that and should I get a whatever? I don't remember half like the pool jargon But like should I do this and he started getting the list and then he just started answering them in advance putting Up on the website putting them on the market materials So anything people would ask he'd already have that those answers ready to go then he started reviewing other pool companies in the area Talking not trash talking talking about if you're gonna get a preform Pool this is the best company to do it in the area if you're gonna do this This is the best company and he started like, you know, and it's not exactly the same thing But you know, that's why I do the product review videos That's why I do like other stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with boyp even though I I'm very happy. I can start talking about this now. There's a CP 925 just got released today I've had it for like two months couldn't talk about it I'm sure you have a big stack of equipment like yeah, I'm looking at things that are That's how the start of every video is right like move stuff off-screen so you nobody can see it But it's funny because we get two Christmases right We get the first Christmas when we get to play with it And then we get the second when we get to actually put our stuff out it publicly But that's the thing so he became the subject matter expert for and for those IT people and MSPs out there They're watching right this down this will this will serve you He started taking becoming the subject matter expert for pools period not just for him for others So people would start asking him what do you think about your competitor? What do you think about this and he never had to respond negatively But he was the go-to guy and that turned into getting business It doesn't have you don't always have to preach by my stuff by my stuff Set yourself up as the expert and people will come eventually In yeah, and someone asked me though and I will warn this I'm not a someone who does like gatekeeping to tell you not to do it But people like well, you know should I do a YouTube? I'm thinking about getting into it. Is it a great way to build your MSP? I'm just gonna start I'm like well It took me several years and about a thousand videos to get popular So as long as you have a few years on your arc of Planning on there. It's there is a lot of work that goes into doing this But do it alongside other marketing things you have I don't say this is the only marketing But it is a good component of it. It's just keep building a lot of that content around it So, you know, especially when you're people always ask is hey, I want to start up an MSP business and God help you if you do The marketing part is that you may have the most amazing technical chops. You may be the most technical Best at running all these things best in class procedures and everything but the marketing side boy That's even for me and Ray. We've been around a minute and we will tell you this is not easy It's it's not it's not easy at all I was I was talking to another MSP group this week and they were asking, you know marketing tips and stuff like that I by no means have it dialed in at all Just the opposite Tom's always sharing information with me saying, you know showing me stats and show me things I should look at and I'm like I'm deeply appreciative of it But like I was talking I was talking about the thought leadership stuff And I was saying it should be a component of what you do but when you're starting out and you're building it can't be everything that you do because It takes so much of your time, right? Like you have to have other avenues of getting the word out there and stuff like that Because while we're doing this we can't do anything else So we can do this because we both have staff and people that yeah, like you've talked about bread and to handle the Operation side and letting you do the fun stuff. I have my people so I can do the fun stuff like this And so but that takes a long time to get there. You know what I mean? So Yeah, but that's do it. I mean if you enjoy it go for it It's that old saying half the money I spent in marketing doesn't work. I don't know which half Ricardo I Still I still like some of the pre ppx stuff the good and bad and one of the reasons Honestly, the reason we're engaging Ray is it comes down to support problems of you have to support everything that you Deploy, do you have the time to support it? Are you gonna take the time to be an expert at it? And I know a few other people that offer free pbx support and they're Overwhelmed right now because they can't find enough staff to keep up with the amount of support So it's not something you can easily outsource you kind of have to do it a little bit in-house The demand is really high for people that know free pbx So as long as you think you can support it with your client I would say go for it but one of the reasons like I said, I'm engaging with Ray is because Ray's with his own platform It is very different than the way we'll similar with different so phones and everything else The client is a very similar It's the back end right it's and that's the thing I love free pbx I absolutely do from a platform from a stability that the software There's no better way to learn something on premises or in a VM or however you do it I love being able to dive into asterisks and be able to figure stuff out There's a lot of stuff you learn But it comes to a scalability, you know my own process, you know I deployed between free free pbx elastics vanilla asterisk Isabel with good friends that were on the Isabelle team the graduated from elastics and went over to Isabel Fusion like a free switch. I built I've deployed probably thousands of on-prem or VMs or you know It's or worked on other people stuff in some way shape or form It gets to the point after 5 10 15 20 where the management of them, right? The the firmware upgrades the support the alerting the the monitoring You know it gets to the point where you start to have to start to build orchestration systems and automation systems and monitoring systems Then you got to start, you know when you have upgrades how you can start planning rolling upgrades because that's their only pbx Right or there are ha ways to do it where you can do active passive failover with free pbx But even that there's it's complicated. It's complicated. Yeah, I looked at that And by the time you get to doing all that you started looking in this this was my path I looked at it. It was like I can just get a nice class 4 class 5 soft switch Whether you're working with a reseller or hosting your own or whatever that's irrelevant But you start saying okay Well hosted versus on-prem this is why right and I'm saying on-prem being Hosted versus a pbx appliance whether you hosted in digital ocean vulture linode whatever or on-premises is relevant But pbx versus hosted you start to realize you don't have to worry about all that stuff You know what I mean? We have multiple data centers and I mean with the recent VoIPoC ellipse I Gotta get you the shirts. We're making the voypinning shirts. I saw nice. Yeah But you know once you get to that then you start realizing It's just too much to manage but to learn it go for it I would even say don't even do an appliance do it on a VM learn it. Yeah Yeah, my first one was on a VM that I you know We had it when we set up the first time years ago when we started using it in the office Because they had one point time we were on range central and we migrated off of them That's what we went to it's just VM running free pbx like this is actually pretty easy This is Well, it was easy to me Training up all my staff on it when they're also doing everything else and running everything They're like, oh great Tom give you something else to do That was the that was the thing right when I was working with Eric I'm sitting there and we were migrating you guys over and I'm like, okay I had to go back to my notes and I had because it been a couple years since I played with the phone systems The Astros based phone systems and so like I'm looking at it and I'm thinking okay Well, I'm helping them and I'm you know doing these this stuff and then I'm like Well, maybe I should get one of my guys or my girls like on the tech teams to come help out And I realized I'm one of the few on the team with that experience And it's like and that was part of the problem because it's it's a complete niche thing to keep up with It's not it's not hard to get started deployed 3cx You can be up and running in 15 minutes if you already have windows stood up free pbx I so you can do the same thing you can go from From booting up the VM to dial tone within 30 minutes very easily with a walkthrough But then when something doesn't work Or you don't have configurations working or you're getting you know calls being dropped because you're not you're allowing anonymous or not allowing anonymous You're getting sips scanning. That's the hard part. Yeah, which is awesome to learn It's a big great learning experience I see the question I'll just throw an answer out real quick for and I I don't have every model number of every network card memorized But I'm pretty sure the OHM 9j y is an Intel 4 port netcard. Yes, it's still a good one to use I'll just answer that real quick for someone Um, I remember because I remember it's uh somewhere in one of the video links when I've done my pf sense videos Which by the way, I'm working on for those of you wondering. Yes, I'm gonna do a 2021 edition Well life happened a lot. I jumped around and uh, you know me and jay from learnlinux tv We we do this thing every tuesday night. We just start bsing about youtube invent at each other about Life a little bit But one of the things that we come up with is we need to refocus things You try everything as a youtuber as you get bigger. You're like, I know these are videos are popular Maybe people like if I did these other things But then you said yes to too many things and there's a pile of things on your desk that you promise you do reviews for And uh, I kind of got caught up in it So I've actually been working to clear my queue so I can get back to some of the popular videos I do like on pf sense and network engineering Yeah, that's the thing right like you you know and you've helped me a lot with like, you know Planning my video series and stuff like that like I want to do an obs series But in the meantime, I was I was recording stuff on the new t58 w's and uh the w pro and the 925 and the 965 And like there's only so much you can juggle at one time, right? Like it's sitting there and you don't want to forsake one to get the other out. It's like it's tough I have 20 or not 20. I probably have five or six hudu videos. I want to do but I have other stuff That's more important right now. I want to get out so That's yeah, and who does a pretty neat system. I mean we evaluated it I'll be doing actually some videos talking a little bit about it documentation. Hopefully in a near future I think it's all of the other ones I've looked at and if you spend any time in the reddit rmsp you will see Lots of talk about those documentation systems going down. It's it's just part of the Yeah, and if they don't go down they slipped in a three-year agreement somewhere Just head over to reddit rmsp and uh enjoy go go jump in on the drama and about if you if you sort by Time or do a search for it documentation about once a week. There's a long heated argument about who has the best one I I have a private discord with some friends and uh The 2.0 and we were talking about that literally minutes before we got on here about it glue versus hudu versus past portal versus And it was like and it like everybody's like this is my badge of honor, which it shouldn't be I mean you can't get like that serious about it But you know if you research it before you do it you have your reasons for why you selected your product And it's it's always funny to watch the the heated conversations on it No, because your product's always going down and your product has security flaws and and there's no perfect product Let's be real honest. Nothing perfect But you know educate yourself and pick the best one Yeah, I think what really fits for your workflows and things like that and I think that's you know That's just something that's a fun conversation because you see it as you go through being a more mature In the it industry as an manager provider and things like that. One thing you can look back on is when I see people Hopping between different tools all the time and spend a lot of time searching for the tools Or complaining about a couple really small price differences between the tools one my payroll far exceeds my tools That's right. You figure that out real quick Um And it's also there is no perfect procedure of any of these tools They all have their own flaws what you really need to focus on is having clean process and procedures No software will magic your way into being a better msp. That's just the reality Yeah You can give your text all the best documentation But it turns out if the text aren't following procedures to properly update that documentation It's as useless as no matter what and uh, let's see the The most frequently This is both in discord and on the reddit sub the most frequently heard recommendations are you should fire your client Whatever you complain of asking question about a client and you should switch your rmm That is like the two most popular comments It got to the point where like we have a running meme that uh, we switch rmm's and fire clients on wednesday Like that's the running gag and what people forget is it takes a lot of work And i'm not just talking about rmm rmm psa remote control whatever you're doing It takes a lot of work to get really Proficient at these tools and then you got to pass the knowledge on to the rest of your team Then you got to build your processes and then you got to handle migration And then you got to handle updates and deployment That i mean there's no tool where it doesn't it takes less than six months to get up to speed on Regardless of the tool and so to sit there and look and i'm going to switch for 20 cents an agent or a dollar an agent or whatever it is. It's not worth it. It really isn't It it's the it's just a real challenge in there You know people have asked me why because I did some videos and we're still use enable Previously solar winds and we did some videos on it and but and I plan to do some more because they've changed the interface a lot It's still in some ways the same but there's you know enhancements to it But then the comments start well, can you review this one too and review this one? I'm like you guys realize I have I don't know 50 customers in here and then all the different sites and then all the different computers at all these different sites You know like I can't just switch to another one and really give you the experience I'm just sharing with by the way when I share all that knowledge. There's no offer code. No nothing The weirdest thing I got there. I think this is funny. I got this weird phone call from the VP over at solar winds He says I have no idea who you are other than you did a video About my product and he goes we he says I don't know how to explain or why you did it because he says I just want to let you know that when they check the boxes of where they found it Your name comes up and I don't I said are you on the payroll because there's a sales meeting he goes. Who is this guy? He's just like he's just so On the phone with him. He's just like this is kind I know what you did, but I don't understand why you did a type thing It's kind of his conversation And I was like no, I just want to show people what it looked like he goes Yeah, like 20,000 people watched that video and they're calling us I love that. Yeah, I get that all the time people ask. Oh, are you uh, you know Are you do you have a financial vesting in hoodoo or any of the other stuff because I review other stuff regularly? I'm like, no, I just it's interesting and I want to share my experience and it's out there and it is what it is It's funny after our video Talking about the DDoS mitigation techniques and calling out specifically The other vendors that have those tools for VoIP and cloudflare did not I got a contact from cloudflare and we're meeting next week to talk about it. They were actually a big Component of the bandwidth mitigation If you check the the routes right now bandwidth has cloudflare in place They did other stuff too. It's not just that but Cloudflare jumped in and you know now they're offering wave service specifically I don't want to say because of the video But there's it's in line. I mean they they're like, yeah, we saw you said we don't do this Now we're doing this and they put out a bunch of blog posts. I thought that was pretty funny Yeah, it's really interesting doing some of these Um, that's that's how I came in contact with hd more was I just I thought rumble was so cool when I played with it I did a video on it and once again, they reached out to me. So you did a video on our product. Um, hi They're like, we've gotten a lot of phone calls That's awesome. Well, there's fun fun things that happen sometimes. So yeah, uh, let's see I see people talking about switching to pf sense. By the way, there's like a 140 people But there's only 37 likes So please smash the like button because our lives are driven by algorithms And we want this algorithm to let people know they should watch the video Um, and you're feel free to ask questions. That's what me and ray are here for I mean ray will just have a lot we can just talk forever But feel free to throw a few questions in here, uh, especially rays got way more of life experience than me Plus he's got some enterprise networking experience. So he's gonna have different answers than me on uh, some of the things where he's got the Bigger stuff that he's played with. Oh, I did see someone asked a question about dns rebinding on a udm pro I just did a video on udm pro. Look, it may say pro, but that does not stand for professional That does not stand for enterprise. Just don't expect a lot out of the udm pro I didn't have enough time Well, I could have but it just wouldn't been reasonable to make a list of everything the udm pro doesn't do The weirdest question that has been sent to me many times on twitter is will the udm pro would do bgp routing? I'm like, what? It's a consumer thing. Why would you ask if it does bgp? Like You're you're muted muted. What kind of like memory would it have to hold the tables? Like it couldn't even do partial tables. No way I can't imagine announcing routes Matter of fact until we're recently recent formers It didn't even have the ability to have multiple ip's on the wan It was a that was a recent upgrade to it released without that ability To have a block of ip's assigned to the wan and it's still really limited in how it functions and how the firewall rules work for it It's not I mean it works But it's just compared to some of the other equipment out there and it's not their target either They didn't go out to unset juniper as the enterprise firewall. That is what they target. They they have Unify as a whole Got one of the things because yes, I'm reviewing some of the unify sixes in case people are wondering But the the whole ethos they have is this concept of they want to make network engineering simpler They want to be able to make it easier for you to deploy a segmented network with wi-fi across there And I gotta admit for that functionality they have It's a pretty I kind of like you create a vlan in their stn software and it propagates to every wi-fi device Whether it's two or two hundred of them It propagates to every switch whether it's two or two hundred and it creates that same entry with the rules Although the rules if you create a new vlan or any any between them That is the default setting which you check the guest box and it will create restrictions But they made it pretty easy It's a few clicks away with a mouse and you have vlands and distributed So I I kind of get where the unify is going with that But that doesn't lend them to being the professional solution when it comes to firewalls are hard There's a lot to them very hard And I think Ricardo said it perfectly udm pro like beats pro it pro equals more money Yeah, and that's the thing like you know as you get to the bigger stuff You have this very specialized equipment with these very specialized processors or asics or whatever they're using You know and they're not They're not high powered by any means like you know You can't compare them to a pc or anything like that But they have very purpose driven chipsets Whether it's to very quickly examine the packets and in the void world We have to look at this much more important, you know much more closely because Like we talked on the DDoS mitigation video You need to examine packets quickly and pass them off very very quickly Um, so usually you know and the more pieces you have in the chain The more hops you have whether it's multiple routers or multiple filters or whatever you have That's going to add a bit of latency and so it gets very dangerous. There's a Strategic decision you make on how much to do and when Because you're not just doing the network you control you also have to account for the ones you don't right So you control your ingress egress out of your your data centers and maybe you know, you're Handling, you know, you're announcing your routes to go out of certain pops or whatever to be closest to whatever customer it is Or maybe you're peering with different isps to get on net quicker But at the end of the day you're still writing somebody else's internet to get to the last mile And so you have to be very careful about, you know, you may add half a millisecond or you know 500 milliseconds of Sorry, not 500 point 500 milliseconds of Latency on your end and that may translate two and three fold going out to the client So you got to be very very careful about that So when you start getting geared there's a reason I like certain switches I like the ubiquity switches a whole lot. Um for most of like smb deployments. Yeah I use them all the time. I have no problem with them unify switching. I have no problem with them whatsoever Even back in the day when they became toasters. I was absolutely fine with it. Make some eggs on top. You're good. No big deal I mean the 60 Yes, it was great, you know if on a cold day in miami when it's like 60, you know, you just put it under your desk You're good but you know But you know when you get to the bigger stuff where you know, you need to be able to do, you know To handle the changing paths or route reconversions or announcing routes You can't do this stuff. You can't hold full or partial tables on any prosumer gear. It's just impossible Yeah, um, it would break it in a heartbeat Right, you know, this is a good question and I've not done any testing with it But uh microsoft teams in the world of void boy. I mean microsoft teams is its own So I was in a meeting with a lot of people Just the other day for this thing we do with enable and microsoft teams are a few times And we all froze and I'm just like, wow, I'm not I can't imagine running my way through it But I'll ask you what do you think about running your bike through it? So Software-wise forget that it's currently an electron app forget that it's a resource hog forget that it will slow down your computer Software-wise teams is one of the most reliable soft phones. I've seen period Um, I begrudgingly went to teams from slack last year. Um, I miss slack dearly But teams because of the ecosystem stuff. It works great and as a phone Even as a soft phone on your on your cell phone or on your pc It works really really well the application works really really well as a service That's the part I take issue with So I like, uh I don't look for tenon ads in my calls It's magic to your call interrupted like when you do a pc installation Pretending to interrupt in your call Let me let me go over your schedule. No, leave me alone So no as it is you get that like you finish a team's call and you get that how was the call quality? Well, I do 60 or 70 calls a day or teams meetings So I see that screen 60 or 70 times a day. Oh tries me bonkers. You can't imagine so Which we call it. So the thing with teams is Um, I we use teams. We've used teams internally since march of last year. Um, However, we pair it with our own void service. Um, and I'm not saying this to pitch oit void If you're going to use teams for your For your phone application. I'm absolutely all for that Pair it with a void provider that does what's called direct routing direct routing allows us to use our connections our phone switches So when you're hosted, it's called a phone switch. It's a soft switch. We talked about it in the other videos Um, so we do the advanced call routing. We do the call recording We do the auto attendance the music on hold the call cues the advanced stuff the resiliency and high availability that teams can't do We handle all that and then we just feed the call into teams So when microsoft 327 goes out as per the usual It's not a big deal because you can still get out on your soft phone out using the non-team stuff You can still have a desk phone that's open sip if you like yelling grand stream poly whatever And still use teams if you're using on a desk Teams is my daily driver. I just don't trust microsoft with the service side of it too many stories of actually teams had an outage today You know too many stories of Friends that a lot of outages and they're slow to communicate and that's the dangerous part You know when the bandwidth stuff was going on we were notifying our discord within 20 minutes Microsoft is routinely two and three hours behind any kind of outage doing notifications And whether it shows up in your outlook or shows up in the admin portal or whatever Or if you need to get on the phone and talk to somebody and say hey, my port's taking six months. What's going on? That's a real story. That's not exaggeration. There's nobody to talk to it's all portal period I that's too much to rely on for most people We saw last week the last couple weeks people without their phone service It's too much to to put on a company that can't respond to a phone call Yeah, so yes use teams don't use teams voice service Yeah, makes sense to me. Um, we have a super chat and So vince wants to know what is the best alternative for pfSense with almost the same functionality with Their package and other stuff. I don't really have an alternative for pfSense. That's free We the tube I talk about here is uh untangle and pfSense untangle is Got a paid version because people like the filtering and things like that. I think it's a great We we actually have this deployed for businesses that really dive into they need all those I call them the employee surf reports. That's from, you know, the old surf in the web and things like that So it's kind of cool. They got a lot of reporting on there a lot of filtering But it's obviously that comes all that filtering and the feeds that come into it come at a price If you like open sense for whatever reason, I don't use it, but that's kind of it's also a bsd It's a fork of pfSense, but my my preference is to use pfSense I don't really know why you wouldn't want to use it But if it's because it's missing the filtering packages I get that and that's one of the reasons that we do a lot of untangle. We're fully officially a Untangle reseller, but you can also buy it direct if you just if you're doing it for a home They have a pretty reasonable price for their home user stuff It's like 150 bucks a year and you get quite a few features with it. You get all their threat feeds You get their web filtering package you get all their tagging It's a it's a fairly intuitive interface too for a lot of people like a common request is home users Go I need to block the kids from going here or going there and filter the internet The untangle is kind of a good system for that. So hopefully that answers the questionnaire on that Then someone had a question that question the other day. I message you that was one of the questions I said, I want to replace my home router. What's your recommendation? Yeah, it was pfSense with that very quickly So this one's for a is a question for a fairly new tech super new aspirations to eventually get into building enterprise networks how do you start in that and uh I don't know if there's any way you can skip the help desks part of your life, but if you can Um, well first I want to call out brandy awesome. Um As the father of a daughter in tech, uh, she grew up and she decided to go into tech and she grew up into it Now she's one of my most experienced project managers. Um, we don't have enough women in the industry. So thank you first of all second of all, um You know, that's one of the reasons I we started going the j Jn cia route or j and jc n cia out of the juniper route. Um They have free training. Um, you can actually go to juniper and and here's the here's the real catch whether it's del or palo or juniper or um, or cisco The pro the concepts are the same. Okay layer one through seven is exactly the same for everybody Um, you know, the concepts are going to be the same. So what training you get is absolutely relevant Um, I would strongly recommend and you're going to have to spend a lot of personal time doing this I would strongly recommend go do the juniper set. Um, they have their version of ccna But it's absolutely free with labs. The only thing you have to pay for is the actual test The test they give you a voucher for the test after you do the training and the test is like a hundred bucks Um, and that gets you the juniper equivalent of a ccna That's a great way to start doing that. You have to start building those things With network enterprise networking It is one of those things that they're going to want to see you have experience at So you're going to go through the you're going to go through the levels, right? You're going to do the n a n p Are, you know over and over, you know all the way up the rungs um And my thing is i'm a big fan of apprenticeships I'm a big fan of finding somebody doing what you want to do and spend as much time as possible with them Get them to teach you get them to show you what they're doing I'm where I am today because I was with somebody when I was eight years old I was in a program called big brothers big sisters where my big was an ibm engineer And he would take me to his jobs working on these mainframes these as 400s and satellite communications and stuff like that Stuff I have my eight year old son today. I wouldn't let him touch in a million years But you know, that's the reason i'm here today So it's a lot of apprenticeship. You're gonna as much as nobody wants to do the help desk I think you have to do it. Um It's part of the logic the problem solving process part of the customer service process We all know the the the the back room knock engineers. They're not spending a lot of time doing customer service. Absolutely not But you have to do your your steps, right? You have to pay your dues Um And you and the thing that you miss when you work on the big enterprise side on the back end You miss the last mile stuff the help desk helps you with the last mile stuff So you start how the users are using it is is how they Um interact with it is it is kind of an important aspect to make sure you understand And something that help does teaches you that no amount of of classroom or online training or knock experience is ever going to teach you is Getting hearing people explain problems in a non technical fashion that you have to translate to technical The only place you're going to get that experience is the help desk hearing somebody say It's the equivalent of taking your car to the mechanic and hearing somebody say my car goes Every time I turn left, right the mechanics got to figure out. What does that mean? The help desk is the only place you're going to get that experience Um, and that's going to help you when you work with others because not everybody you work with At the higher levels is going to have the same training and background as you So they may explain something in a different way. You're going to have to translate and say Oh, he's talking about prefixes. He's talking about, you know, black holding around. They're talking about whatever That's going to help you it's going to serve you eventually Yeah, it's um And and users are just part of it. It's something we all had to do at one time in Yeah, I just I think back to some of the help desk stuff and I still I don't mind like I jump in and To this day will help anything that's going on here at the office And if someone walked in the door and my staff are busy, I will go up to the counter and you know, that's um Because we still have walk-ins even though we don't officially do retail anymore. People still wander in and so They were walking in and like recognize you and be like, oh, wait, you're that guy. You're the guy on YouTube So yeah, that's I that actually happens. Um, because they stopped by because they know who I am and our address is public So yes, that that does occasionally happen So there's sometimes surprise I'm the one that comes out there like because they don't realize that right behind this wall Is where the lobby is and so there's a door off to the side here So when I when I when you see someone on the camera right here, they're literally standing on the other side of the tv And I just open the door and say hi That's awesome. That's that's fun, right? It's like uh going into the magic kingdom and like seeing mickey pop out Like hey, what's up? So that's pretty cool um Open question you have any issues with pfSense and unify switches in terms of configuration Um, actually one of the things I in I might do a follow-up video because I was I tweeted about some Aware house we did I like to do follow-ups in some of the deployments on that particular job did have problems and this is the issue with the Unify certain models of their access points not a problem with their switches, but their access points They handle dhcp in a way that is Weirdly incompatible with sonic wall. So um, we don't really understand what we know if you google sonic wall Unify and dhcp you'll find tons of forum posts about it But when it comes to pfSense and setting them up We have an experience because a lot of those were made harder to troubleshoot those problems is before We ran into a couple jobs where the clients insisted because they already had the firewalls That we come in and do all the work We come in and set the switches up in the vlan do it all configuration based on their guidelines But they insist that they're going to use sonic wall and then all of a sudden dhcp wouldn't work Now the weird thing is you can statically assign devices and connect to the wi-fi. They work perfectly fine It just wouldn't dhcp But when it comes to using pfSense with all the unified stuff I've absolutely found it to be butter like it works really really smooth And untangle because we've got a handful of deployments with both of those. I have a zero issues at all and from I'm sure because I I think I'm trying to remember it was willy how he has another channel as well He does some of the juniper stuff too I believe he told me juniper works with mine which makes sense because juniper being bsd base probably uses exactly the same service stack So I don't have any problems that you'll you'll have with them Using pfSense it seems to work. It's very standard space My guess is because sonic wall being the odd one out and not a sonic wall fan Sonic wall does something weird with the dhcp. It'd be my guess So Yeah, I'd love to see those pcaps to see what's going on because we use sonic wall. We used to use sonic wall a lot more back in the day You know, especially when they had their secas program. It was actually pretty decent on the msp side Until we had issues with some stuff. So we stopped There's always sonic wall quirks that I've given I've given uh speaking engagements at sonic wall peak conferences For talking about using sonic wall and void because for the longest time those were bad words to put together, right? It's like saying candy man three times So, you know, but I was giving speeches on like or presentations on no, this works These are the gotchas. These are what you have to look out for, you know, and I've done them in enterprise deployments Uh and stuff like that uh micro enterprise, right? Like 5,000 10,000 users. Nothing nothing massive but like And they work. It's just a matter of tweaking But like you said not my go-to anymore, you know, I mean it's there's other better tools out there So yeah, yeah, there's nothing compelling about a sonic wall that makes you like them And I've even watched a few people in a couple forums who I know are big sonic wall resellers Also rant on how long it took service to help them with something I'm like, you know, I don't really ever have to contact pf sense And we've done some really complicated configs for clients Complete tie-ins with their active directory authentication everything with pf sense and it worked fine We never even had to call the help desk to get it working. But uh, anyways, um, this is a This probably applies not just to pf sense, but to other ones too like the best practices for void quality And you know the one thing of pf sense is they they have a wizard that sets up traffic shaping and they ask you for the Void provider using is and what the uh fully qualified domain name is for the void So whatever point of presence you are probably the closest one pf sense makes that pretty easy And it will do queuing and traffic shaping for that I have a video on how to do coddle queue with it. I haven't really dove into a traffic shaping video I need to probably reach out to there's a youtuber's been around a while. He does not very many videos anymore But he has one of the best videos on pf sense traffic shaping not because of the Content he does about the traffic shaping He's got an entire graphics that he did to show how queue buckets work And how each one and all the calculations is complicated. He too really took the time He created animations of how the packets need to be Reassembled in order and he explains coddle queuing. He explains that in a way that I can't so I may ask if I can just borrow His graphics and make a new version. Yeah His video his video is mark firman on traffic shaping if you look at oh, yeah And the guy did a brilliant job. He did a few pf sense. He was with their old I mean, it's the old interface or like four years ago, but the graphics that he did I thought about just you know, I don't know if I want a higher nanometer or just ask mark if I can use his I just want to read do it to the new video because I've cited. I just do my video. I'm like But it traffic shaping is a big part of what? Yeah, it's so I'll I'm I'm mixed on this and this is one of the other reasons I you know I prefer hosted we do all the heavy lifting on the back end right like we have our own spcs We do our translation so we make sure like stuff like sip algae, you know There's stuff like we can go tls if we need to that kind of fun stuff To avoid, you know double natting or whatever bs, but my thing is On the client side, there's a time and a place But I'm probably the most known for saying there's no such thing as qs on the internet from the client side It doesn't exist All you're doing is I'm sending traffic, you know, say I'm the endpoint inside the office and you know Tom's router i'm sending stuff to tom and tom is deciding what to send out first and what to take in first That's all traffic. That's all, you know qos is when these a lot of these routers do it Regardless of brand The problem that happens is remember I talked about when we add filtering we add all this stuff It starts you're introducing a delay And there's nothing tom can do in the world if you're getting Too much coming into you from the outside. There's nothing that tom can do right? So when you're talking about qs and traffic shaping and prioritization policies and stuff like that Most switches most layer two layer three switches already they already honor You know dscp markings, right every you know, they express forwarding the 46 that's set by default Most phones already have that set by default. It's a standard thing. So they're going to honor that You know, you can set up queuing if you have a lot of Where I really see the need is if you have a lot of switches that are stacked You have a lot of switches where you have multiple connections, you know When you're building out a network that has multiple departments or you know a big campus or something like that What you pass from one switch to the other right whether you're doing an aggregation layer your core layer whatever layer That stuff you absolutely have to have that queuing in place because you may be you know You may only have a two gig uplink, right? You know or you may only have a 10 gig uplink, but you're doing hundreds of or thousands of users If you're doing a flat network or a couple vlan's and it's one or two switches I wouldn't sweat the small stuff, you know, most of our deployments. I say don't even bother with qs Do vlan if it makes you happy security Vlan's not security, but you get what i'm saying But you know aggregate your traffic. I'm all for that. I absolutely do it. It's not one of the things I've always I've been a hard ass about because There's only so much on a small network. It's really going to make a difference And I've said this a few times in numerous videos. I get paid a lot of money to reset things to the fault for people And this is one of the problems they come in they come in heavy trying to over complicate it honestly Turn it all on don't change anything don't even go into the traffic shaping configuration start making some phone calls Does it work? Stop stop right there. It works. That's it. You're done. That's it. It's funny because you talked to IT people and they're like Okay, so I have this firewall and you know, what settings do you want me to do? What do you I'm like, stop Stop like, okay. Yes, you know set some routes. So like, you know, you're only accepting 50 60 and only You know from our sips servers and stuff like that or our pops You know set you want to start filtering that stuff so you don't get the sips scanning and that happens all the time We go calls Um, you know, you want to start setting that or you want to start setting your failover policy So if you have a 4g lte failover Only void and only stuff to your enterprise applications go through the failover anybody else You're not going to get spotify where you're on failover too bad. You know, you want to set that stuff? Absolutely Usually the biggest thing I see on any firewall period on any router period is Turn sip a lg off for please for the love of all that's holy turn sip a lg off You know, it's oh, it's it's like the bane of my existence Um And to a lot of providers remember, uh, most providers are using udp for for void Um udp is a connectionless protocol, right? I'm shouting you're shouting neither of us knows if the other one's done shouting It's not tcp. You don't get your handshake. So what happens is most firewalls will have a timeout to which They'll see the connection open and if they don't see any traffic goes through they'll drop the connection Well phones re-register every 60 seconds. They send a refresh every 60 seconds Most udp timeouts on firewalls are 30 seconds so The thing we do the most often is set a route to Using your firewall rules or whatever you need to do and change the udp timeout for our specific Connections to our pops set that to 90 to 90 seconds so that you have time for refresh. You don't drop a call That's it other than that. It's it's not complicated Yeah, and don't over complicated. That's that's the biggest problem Don't turn just because there's a lot of knobs don't press them all Uh xcp and g question. Are you aware of any way to isolate vm's? Network wise similar to private vlands on the switch. Absolutely. This is I've talked about this in a few of my xcp and g videos If you go to laurence dot technology, that's not my main website laurence systems That's where we organize all the tutorials. Uh, and there's a whole section on xcp and g I believe there's one about building labs in there Uh, one of the cool things now is they have not just vx land support But g re support encrypted g re you can build not just private networks You can have like one public-facing ip and build a series of them that tie between multiple physical Uh hosts or even go a step further You can go wild with it and have it between data centers And you can have private networks that your vm's attached to that are also encrypted tunnels with ip sec over to other networks They give you some really cool tools Uh to use zen orchestra to organize a whole lot of hosts or even separate Clusters and pools together with private networking. So it's not just supported It's supported in a really advanced way and they've actually gone a step further. I don't know very are you here with net box? Yeah, absolutely. So they integrated net box because net box allows for ip management and documenting There's a couple projects. They talk about them over on the blog at xcp and g And we've worked with a couple of these it's being used in data centers And to be able to manage all the ip pools and things like that They've started building tie-in with um The net box software so you can even do restrictions on what public ip's can be assigned But then you can build all your stack as a series of private ip's behind one public ip I hand it out. So yes, you can go wild with it. Um, it's it's one of the cool enterprisey features That's that's awesome. I have to call out. Um, I see somebody here They were talking about our camera qualities and I take a lot of pride I get I'm blown out right now in the background. I have to put up. Uh, I have to put a black Blackout curtains. I just haven't had the time. Um, my wife is telling me in chat She's like, this is the first webinar you're on where the other person has a better camera quality than you do Wives calling me out here But I saw somebody had asked about the I know you have videos on your your streaming gear Especially when you moved into the when you redid your space, right? Like that that was awesome Um, you know, but somebody had asked what capture cards, uh, you're using I know you don't want to get into full gear, but You want to talk about what capture card? Do you use it? Yeah? I already forgot But I know I can actually I can I will pull that up really quick though because if you go to uh kit.co slash laurence systems and uh It should be under I'll I'll throw it on the screen a second once I pull it up So it should be in my parts list I have um, I did a video and I talked about the capture cards, but they're the the elgato Um, I have one ever media still El uh elgato 4k 60. That's the one It's the big brother to this one. I got the hd 60. All right. Actually, this is a newer one You just got the 4k version. Yeah. Yeah, I have a I have a ton of elgato gear here. I have to Play with including the new I use the mk2, but I the excel, uh, but I have a stream deck mini. I want to do some videos on too um, But yeah Yeah, you have the built-in card. I have the usbc. Yeah Yeah, I have all the actually I take this one out I don't really I still have it. We just don't really do it as much when we were doing I rearranged it so we can't do this anymore when we're doing like the how they get hacked videos Um and a couple other ones we would line up microphones all setting in front of us Because that way we can all look at the camera and I'll have our own mic So we had a mixer the mixer physically is still here. We just aren't doing that anymore Um, but yeah, I have all the different gear I use. This is still this is the camera. I'm using the canon eos I keep all my kit.co links are pretty much in all of my videos that It covers all kinds of things and then uh embedding kit co is then the video that references It's it's a called the video references kit and then the kit references the video So whatever which way you land on it. You can figure all this out. It's this inception thing going on. Yeah I'm using an avar media One of the ones with an avar media capture card here because I prefer to use PCI cards when I can Um, so I'm using that and it has the 4k pass through. It's beautiful. I love it Um, I don't think with the except you know, most of this year I don't I don't think uh, and I have to say this knowing you have better video quality than I do right now It's the blowout. I'm sorry guys drive me nuts um But uh, what should we call it the capture card really doesn't make that big of a difference on the video quality Within reason, right? I mean, you don't have to go crazy on that for good video quality. Is that your opinion, uh, tom? Yeah, you know in for what we're doing. Um, I'm just gonna be honest You didn't come here to look at us. You came us to hear our voice. You wanted to hear real articulate Things so I mean don't overspend on the camera Do spend good on microphone and audio quality if you're doing tutorials Make sure your screen captures are good. I do. I mean, I'm sitting here talking from a behind real expensive studio camera, but um It took a long time to start into the world. Yeah Well, yeah, I mean I watched a lot of the guys like, uh, jerald undone and and those guys Um, I love their content. They're the first ones to tell you get an a5100 6100. I actually I'm moving from an a5100 to a 6400 Um, neither one being fantastic, but for streaming stuff. Yeah, and actually, uh, who was it? Um, rickardo again hit the nail on the head. It's the color balancing. Uh, yeah, I was playing with let's before I Got online. I just ran late on time Um, let's can't help you but good lighting better sound. That's all it really matters. Yeah Um, there's actually a video. I've recommended. I think it's all of 10 minutes long And it's kasey nice dad's guide to filmmaking and uh I like he's got a very realistic approach. He has to worry Holds up some crappy cameras and he's like this is what I film my hbo special that I got paid lots of money for on And then he walks you to say a series of Really inexpensive cameras and then he talks about like there's three million views on a video I did with this crappy camera that was like a hundred bucks and wow He's so much about the content Um, and I have I think some of my older pf sense videos They were filmed with a c9 20 camera that you can go pick up for $49 webcam And a yeti microphone that is out of camera still but I have this attached to my computer It's not what we're recording on right now. Um, but that yeti microphone combined with the c9 20 some of those videos have like four or five hundred thousand views Like you can't get much slower, but it comes down to the content the content, right? Unless you just want to be a pretty face on camera then get a really good If you have no content this year, you just want to be a pretty face and show things off right artistic Then you know and show beautiful scenery, then you do need to have a good camera So I guess you got to probably start a little bit of qualifier of the goal If you want to see a beautiful beautiful setup and this is And I you know like I said, I followed Gerald. I'm done. I'll follow you. I'll talk to a bunch of people He's why I love him. His content is phenomenal. Um alpha gaming is another one. He has great camera content audio content um but you know I this I was we did a cisco event where we did tech bar as the close of the cisco event and uh We were honored to be part with these guys uh from neft vodka And they have a youtube channel. It doesn't have a ton of followers But if you get a chance to go follow them they're they have a neft after dark show Every week that is phenomenal and their production quality. I mean it is tv quality on youtube um, they have transitions they have sets they have The the quality is just like I was talking to Sean. I'm like that's that's the goal right there um, and to give you an idea This is the logitech face cam or not the logitech. This is the algado face cam You see much wider. It's not framed properly, but um, All that really matters, you know the the differences the saturation The detail I still prefer having a dslr personally Um, but I have a 920 here. I just use it for a side shot Actually right now it's you working on my uh 3d printer, so I can't use it right now Yeah, this this question comes up a lot and I've I've got some videos where I compare open vpn and wire guard um, it depends as the answer and I I also kind of a rant of why you shouldn't use wire guard and I I cited some pretty good reasons The fact that it doesn't have a whole user management system and I I get wire guards the new fancy things so people like to ask about it um, but dive into those videos because You know, I don't rant but I I make some pretty strong arguments because a few other people said the same thing like Same wire guard. It has way less code than open vpn. I'm like, it doesn't have a user management system They just kind of rely on someone else to implement them. Oh, yeah I guess that's why I can't just use it because we had someone approach us in other business And you know they got caught up in the wire guard being exciting and then they realized Oh, there's not like a user manager like no, you can't just convert your pf sense wire guard people From pf sense with open vpn and having a radius server and authentication Over to wire yard. It's not a flip a switch and change the protocol. It's completely different. It works in a different premise So yeah, it really that's one of those questions that comes up a lot, but Search those two search terms on my youtube channel and I explain that in more depth What's your uh, how are you still feeling on tail scale? You still bullish on that? I still like that. Yeah We don't we never we seven deployed it. We have a lot of comments from people that told me they did deploy it Somewhere on that video a few people already shocked to me. I think someone posted my problems about it It seems to me that it works really well Overall like no one really had any complaints about it So I so I'm thrilled and I I may do some videos on nat because man I love their nat right up It is like a hundred pages of everything you ever wanted to know about nat traversal And so once hey in that earlier how we were talking about if you create a lot of good content and people start talking about you all of a sudden And uh, they have some great engineering Information on their blog unrelated to tail scale. It's just how they solved all that Yeah, um, so I think tail scale is a really solid product overall It's probably the easiest way to manage wire guard hands down. I mean it's you I did the video on it We are like this is this just works Well, we had done that you had told me about it just before we or just before just after we did the hot shots video And so I I went I researched it. I was just as impressed as you were Especially their documentation. You don't see companies that start doing stuff and have like Amazing documentation right up front. Um, so we deployed it. We have it deployed out through our enterprise. Um We use it for management. Uh, it was very easy to get on board I like that they're trust known by default. So, you know, even if you install an agent on somebody else They can't reach you unless you explicitly permit it. Um, you know, and I think that's great The acls aren't the hardest thing in the world is jason. It's not the hardest thing in the world to do Um, you know, it's pretty a throw in vs code and the formatting will take care of itself. Um But I really like it. We've been using it for what was that four or five weeks ago I think at this point we did our hot shots. Um, yeah So we I've been using it for a month and change and very happy with it Yeah, it's a it's a solid product. I just because the people that needed to help I mean we knew about the solution. Well, I think the solution exists to be for Um, zero tier which is different. They solve things on a different way But it works in in function because it's an overlay network. It works very functionally How wire guard works? Uh, well the way tail scale has wire guard It's not it's not as a VPN, but it's creating these overlay networks So you can have this private network between a lot of nodes. I mean in zero tier so good choice too, but You know, it comes down to how you want to solve it I actually think um, and I have a video where I dive into specifically just talking about those overlay networks I think these overlay networks are one of those management tools that we're going to see a ever-growing popularity in And I actually have a little bit of inside information because I'm friends with ryan huber who is the guy is the ceo of Uh, what's it divine? They're the company behind um nebula and nebula is what ryan he works for slack they built out slack with the nebula product And he is swamped mean him chat on twitter and things like that. He is they're that uh Company's doing very well and he said there's a lot of other once they kind of did that whole write up of how we did It at slack. I mean, that's a feather in your hand. Slack's a pretty big company. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah They solved it and we can it's kind of the whole thing is like, yeah, we can solve it for you too And so he said they've been they can't talk about it publicly, but just in general they've been very busy Because it solves the how do I get to all my equipment in a very secure way without publicly exposing a bunch of things And the way the protocols work and the frameworks work that control these overlay networks They're very quiet. You don't see them. You're not like looking and seeing a bunch of ports open is You don't realize it's there and it gives it really reduces the attack surface and Nebula all of them is one of the harder ones to use. It's very focused on DevOps It's probably the hardest one to deploy. It was hardest one to make a video on for sure But I like that though because like especially in the msp space where we're talking about RMMs getting compromised and we're being an attack vector, right? Or, you know, whether it's your control You know, whatever you're using for remote control or whatever Suddenly we can start putting these devices having they don't have to think about establishing connections Or whatever they're doing to their home base if you can do it over these private connections Um, it it adds that extra layer of security that I really like Um, and we're doing stuff like cdr. Uh transport and You know in some of our other monitoring we're now pushing that over the over the nix The virtual nix that are created by tail scale. Um, just because it solves so many challenges, you know And it's working really great 70 milliseconds good for boy, I'm sorry So I'm gonna share in the chat I have a void glossary with what's good and what's bad and these are all universal. These are not like Only us kind of things. Um Um, send me a private message because it probably won't let you actually Post a link in chat. Thank you to band links and chat Oh, okay. I'll drop it in though. Send it to me through private. Yeah, I put it in the chat um So Gold is under 50. Uh 30 to 50 you're fine 50 to 70 you'll hear some kind of signal You'll you'll hear some kind of something that the call won't sound great But if you're sub 100 you'll still be you'll still have an intelligible call um At the 100 millisecond mark, uh, you will start seeing Um, the call will be unusable after the 100 millisecond mark When we start building stuff out we and we do void tests. We want to start looking We want to start it's under latency. I think And we have numbers there. We have values there for jitter and packet loss and the codex and the different fun stuff But yeah under fully under 50 milliseconds is preferable and 100 milliseconds is usable Um, so, you know, you do a quick void test and nowadays speed test dot net whatever They have, you know, they have packet loss jitter latency and uh, And uh, Moscow, which are the four horsemen of uh, OB detectors, those are the four horsemen of void. Um, they can tell you on a quick speed test 70 is good for a walkie talkie Not wrong talkies have great audio compression too. So, you know, i'm not going to knock a walkie talkie. Yeah Uh, yeah, there's uh Ray's got a lot of good, you know, I dropped that link in the chat there. There's a lot of uh, good articles you wrote on there You know, hey, we we didn't just suggest how we do some of our marketing. We kind of revealed it like I just mentioned. Hey, there's several videos I have on several of the questions that get asked here. So Oh, yeah And that was it's the stuff that comes up and I go I use my own docs all the time Like that was the thing I was saying when I was like working with Eric to like Convert your pbx is transfer this stuff over I had to go back and double checks up now I will say like you were saying when we were talking about the question for brandy It is fun every once in a while to go step back into the help desk and go flex those technical muscles, right? Like to sit there and like, oh, yeah, I remember doing this and this was fun I told people I feel bad for everybody that was affected by the way PMS stuff Um, but I was telling people that was my most enjoyable week just because I got to work on all these systems I don't normally work on And it was just it was fun for me. We do this stuff because it's fun, right? Like we enjoy playing with the toys So for sure now something that I realized we have in here. Well, let's bring it up We have the word maraki in the title somewhere and uh You have some opinions on maraki. I one of my staff actually wanted to join goes Oh, can I rant with him on maraki? I don't really touch it much Um, but a few of my staff do they have some choice words of how much they don't like it I've said I don't like it, but I can't I didn't I've actually avoided it I'm like, oh look there's a maraki thing that we need we have a couple clients that we do co-manage it and they happen to have it So, um, we're not a rip and replace type of it msp where when we do like a co-manage work We'll let them keep their stack provided it's rational and maraki's not Well, it's not the best not the worst for what they wanted to do works but uh It works, but some of the the multiple vpn stuff. I know my staff was ranting about not working properly So, um, where's all the issues you see with it? So, uh, well for one they did have their own boy of service. I think that died too, right? But they did have their own boy of service. I think it's on life support They don't push it anymore, but they still support it because At least if they can make money off selling the contract, they'll keep doing it I don't I don't see it average And they're just reselling telnex anyway, so it's not the end of the world. Um, so My thing with maraki is it's the easy button of whip there and and i'm not against that There's a lot of things like sonic wall is notorious for if you don't use the wizard Excuse me if you don't use the wizard you're going to break something That's just sonic wall works that way. It's a pain in the butt Maraki, unfortunately, it's all wizard right like one of my gripes And one of the reasons I personally use a lot more ubiquity gear or you know, um edge gear than I use unified gear I'm a cli guy. I love the cli. That's my happy place Unify if you've ever played with cli, you know the minute you do something on the ui you're going to wipe it You know, and it's just one of those things You know, and that's it's not bad because unify gives you a lot of controls you can you know do things as needed, right set up I'm it does support bgp. Actually, there's some Edge gear that supports bgp. So whatever um You can do things maraki hides so much from you In my opinion If you're just getting if it's a you want to ship something to a client have them plug it in It just works and you don't have highly technical resources on staff and you have no intention of having highly technical resources on staff Maraki's an acceptable solution because chances are your networks aren't going to be complicated Now the minute you start doing multi site vpns where you may have overlapping land segments, right? Or you may have multiple vlands per Per client site or you may have to have certain sites being able to connect over certain traffic On one segment and then another set of sites Using a whole separate vpn tunnel and the two tunnels can't talk to each other maraki is the wrong place One of the last times I touched maraki You can't have multiple vpn tunnels that don't know about each other that doesn't exist Whereas anybody who does any kind of you know, multi site routing with vpns, you know, that's a common thing That that is absolutely normal And and those kind of tools like We've had issues where VoIP right and I say wait remember i'm a network engineer. It's just my current thing is VoIP But we've had where you know for the most part most firewalls most routers you plug and play with VoIP It's you plug it in you're good to go However maraki used to push out updates on their own and you couldn't control them And they're making the decisions that they're making the judgment that they have all the decisions made They know what they're doing and they'd push and something would break And you couldn't turn off sip alge This was a couple years ago, but it's not the case today today. You can control updates and stuff like that and centrally manage them But it was it was frustrating because if you knew what you were doing and you knew what you needed to fix You couldn't do that Plus on the maraki side, I have a big problem with if you stop paying licensing the things a brick I have a major problem with that Don't let me update. Okay. Unless it's security. I think security should always be updatable, but You know if I don't if I'm not paying for current licensing Don't let me get new firmware versions. I'm absolutely okay with that Don't tell me my I can't reconfigure a switch because I stopped playing paying for the licensing that that I have a hard stance against Yeah, just And the licensing is another thing and I don't know maybe you'll consider this a dick move because I did do this once We were competing and the the person who was Competing and offering a maraki bit kind of ranting a little bit of our ubiquitous junk And those guys don't really know what they're doing and perceiving not talking about ubiquitous. No doing specifically us because our bid was obviously substantially less and I had actually retorted to them I said, well, how much is your commission on it? Are you willing to forego your commission that you make on that recurring licensing fee? And the person that was kind of intersecting the bid goes you guys make commission on the licenses And I was like, oh, he didn't tell you about that and it was like a really Yeah, it's true. I mean, but that's the thing like it's something the client's not going to consider That like if they stop paying the licensing they have to swap year Right. So do I pay for the three-year enterprise protector? Do I pay, you know, buy a new switch or firewall at the end of the year? In the school that we helped get off of that in the end they they go with ubiquity. They were happy Their licensing fee was 20,000 a year. They were spending a fortune and it's just like I this it was so much money and they're like, this just seems like a lot of money to be spent. I'm like, it is It's not he doesn't seem like a lot. It's a lot for your licensing to keep the wi-fi Uh off and running and then they were pitching well. Maki has next day air and I'm like, well for one maraki I can buy three of these so how about you just buy extra and they're like that seems like an easier solution I say you don't have to wait next to here then That's and that's the thing like, you know, especially in the enterprise in the data center space, right? Like it is very common to have two or three cold spares sitting in the rack ready to go That is a normal process And we do it we all our data centers We have extra servers just sitting dark and extra hard drives and extra everything because in engineering you have at least three of everything Plus their backup And so, you know, and that's the big difference between smb and enterprise, right? When you're building enterprise stuff I'm not buying one of something. I need to I need to cost building out buying three or four of something, right? So That that those pricing models make a big difference now if I say I got to spend licensing on The the ha pair and then I got to have a redundant backup You know cold storage or whatever and I need to keep those licenses going first a device I may never use in the next three years before a hardware refresh I data center space three years is not hardware fresh. It's like five or ten years but whatever but you know I don't want to pay for a license for something that's just hanging out Yeah, just to hang out And a lot of the bigger partners they have a much cheaper license when you're buying an ha pair or they just account for it Um as part of the the model because they know you're just going to buy two devices anyway. That's just the norm Yeah, it's part of how the business model works. You know, I I've heard a lot of people complain about this I've seen someone mention Doing sd-wan over muraki. I have heard that their sd-wan is not a full seamless solution I don't do you have you experienced at all or I? I have not seen it myself. Um sd-wan qs over over public internet hd 5g overuse terms, um, and they don't always mean the same thing to everybody Um, I did a video explaining that one too because it doesn't it's such a buzzword sd-wan's a buzzword and then I dive into what the different types of sd-wan are and then you'll wait How does one word mean two things? I'm like exactly my point you have to then Qualify what type of sd-wan you're talking about if I have a friend that builds stuff and you know We all have these people we look up to is like wow That's the brilliant person and I have this friend to look up to where you know He has it set up where he has it automated checking latency and checking packet loss Over multiple hops and if it reaches certain thresholds, it'll change the announcements Uh on the community string so that it will start announcing its routes on different pops by itself That is sd-wan people. Okay I guarantee you what maraki is doing is not sd-wan That is not the same thing if you can take one box and turn it into 15 boxes make them act as one device And then change what they're doing and have them change routing automatically and you have orchestration and That is sd-wan What I guarantee when maraki you can't even fine tune a vpn. That's not sd-wan Yeah, that's a very different thing. Uh, there's a question. I'll I'll get back to and this is um few people have asked me about this I have not checked it out yet I don't know if you have mesh central for having uh self-hosted rm. I'm not relying on third party servers Um, there's a couple projects. I know people are working on like an open source rm. I think it's called You remember the name of ray tactical is the one you're talking about? Yes I'm part of their discord. I watched them, but I haven't used it yet Yeah, um part of the problem with these is they really need to be Tested thoroughly before you can get someone like me or a to trust them like we we're excited We're both open source advocates here and we would wish to know if we thought they were the best solution But I need someone and this is where the funding problem comes in Uh, you got to pay a release these people like my friend xavier who's been on a channel before Xavier means a lot of money doing pen testing and application testing It's uh follow on twitter and you'll get an idea of some of the stuff he does at scale for large companies We need someone with that high skill level to really poke at it to say yes This is a good product that can survive You know, uh an onslaught of things when it's on the public internet, of course you could get uh Combining things, but it just makes it hard to run where you could say all right I'm going to run mesh central and tackle rmm, but then we're going to run zero tier So we bridge all the networks together and tie everything together and write a bunch of rules That way you're not exposing it and mitigating the risk I just mentioned But now you're talking about managing a really complex system Uh And is that a tenable thing you can do is this going to be reasonable? So I haven't used it to actually tell you enough about it But it's still it's going to come back to it hasn't been security tested and um, then again, there's kasea so It clearly not trying so hard not to say anything I don't mind. I have no I have no love for them or anything like that. I don't As a matter of fact, uh, my favorite thing was my videos did so well when the breach happened because every time he did a video And I incognito this and even changed goip every video that uh, he did my video was always the next suggestion I had so many views And there's there's no one else who could see a video So he would do kasea breach and I had the same title But I have a higher position in youtube ranking So it couldn't help it autoplay my video after this That I and that's why you we know you're a better person than me after and look I have nothing against fred He's a really good guy anybody knows him personally It's not a personal yeah, but like the video he did with the multicam where he was addressing the users I would have done a response video with a multicam. I really would have like I would have had fun with that I wanted to go petty level too because I was like what amateur film documentary kid was bored and filmed this for him Like why did you switch between cameras? It's why are you doing these different? It's not a documentary It's just please talk to the camera and just give me what happened dude. I mean just be honest on it It sucks. We're doing the best we can we're trying to you know help our partners You don't got to do the you know guys There's no void qo s Void qo s is not the true thing like you don't got to do that. That's not necessary Yeah, I love OBS. I play have too much fun with OBS But no, I mean, but it's nice, you know, it's nice to see and we go back to the DDoS attacks and stuff like that Um, and even like the facebook engineering stuff They put out some information but the information we got from third party sources was so much more detailed when it happened And that stuff is really important, right? It's not even a diagnosis of what happened in the play by play But also what should we be thinking about after as the outcomes of this, right? What should we what should be our takeaways? Because a lot of times the public statements by the publicly traded companies can't give you that level of detail It's far more important. That's why I appreciate when guys like you do this stuff and the hunter's guy is awesome You know, they start putting this this stuff out because you start looking. Okay. Well, I should be paying attention to this I should be paying attention to that And that's where the real gold is when this stuff happens Uh, I know it's the camera films me too It's fun. I mean, we got I mean user for an overhead camera or something. Yeah I know just overhead what's going on here It's why I got well you guys can kind of see I got that mat in front of me That's and I have the overhead camera you can switch to for things. I don't have it's not up there right now So I can't do it. I don't have my other cameras on I was just going to do this one camera thing I your one camera looks good, man. It's nice. You got the tv in the background. It's Well, in two we add so I can do the I got a really short depth of field. It's an f2 art lens. Actually, it's it's set at f2 It's an f1.8. So Yeah Mine's a 16 mil fixed. Uh, 1.1 point six Nice, uh, no 1.6 or 1.4. It's uh, the sigma sigma is 1.4 Yeah, yeah, there you go 1.4 16 mil. Um, and I love it, but that's that's the reason I use sony. It's for that, uh Let's see if I can do this is that autofocus. Let's see if it works. Oh, yeah, it did work. Okay, and that depth of field I really love that that look so Yeah, sony, um, I that's I have that camera over there. It's on one of my other angles I like the sony camera. I because I used to be a wedding photographer who always shot canon I went right away with the um canon c100 Because I sold all my actually it was funny when I started buying all this I'd actually just recently sold except for some of the lenses a lot of my canon gear for wedding photography So it's kind of just an easy drop-in for me to go ahead and uh use the same lenses and things like that because these are all Did you use for that? So, um, yeah, because the speed boosts never work Like I don't care what anybody says like I have some canon gear I have an old t3i and a t7 and like, you know, I'll sit there because all my stuff is apse or micro four thirds And so like I'll sit there and I'll try to use the speed boosters to swap lenses and use a canon lens on a on a sony gear and stuff like that and The zoom never works or just it never works the way it's supposed to So yeah, it's a little tricky. So that's why I went with that. But then I I'm using sony lenses on my sony So now I have but I I finally one of my photographer friends who I um sold some of the gear to I ended up selling some more gear and I'm trying to justify all of it to sell like one or two things. I haven't sold yet. I think It's it's funny We were talking like in the beginning about like people get like so like defensive about which rmm and which documentation but As an old dj working a lot with photographers videographers Photographers are just as bad, right? Whether you're talking sony or canon or, you know, whatever it is Like they get really hardcore about like what gear they're using. I'm like, oh, okay They do I and uh after I didn't wedding for a number of years I actually became a trainer for a studio. Um, that was part of why we do it Is I would bring people in and train them And I would have to slow them down and you know the thing I had to teach I made one Especially when it comes specifically to photographing people and weddings is a good wedding photographer is a good director of people Stop there before you start buying every piece of gear learn how to direct and understand people And as most of my training had to do with not how to get the right f-stop that was actually irrelevant it was more about How to interact with people in a way to Get them to smile to the camera. They're not smiling the camera smile at you It's a lot of nuance there, but you're right. They go gear crazy and they they try to think every time your photo is bad It's because they need another piece of gear and then you go to those conferences that sell them all kinds of trinkets that just Next, you know, you've got all this crap hanging off your camera But it'd be easy. Trust me. Don't get don't get me wrong I would love to go to bnh right now and just buy a c100 and start going the crazy I know my problem is lighting controlling my lighting and that stuff like I know exactly what's going on and it's funny like you say like And again back in the wedding dj days. It was you want to laugh right here, buddy? Do the same thing um You know, uh, which we call it and uh, but like as a wedding dj was a lot of that It was corralling people are hurting cats You're again, you're a lot nicer than I am but it was getting people I used to found one of the things we used to have to do was like getting them ready for the You know the introduction getting them in the first dance and stuff like that often They've been drinking or they you know, and or they're just amped up They're excited and to be able to like get do that. Hey pay attention over here Um, you'd have to find certain ways to grab their attention right where they're cracking jokes And so they turn around and focus on you and then you can do and it teaches you really good customer service skills for other You know stuff like msp and stuff like how many times have you worked with a client? Which is that's freaking out about something going wrong They're more focused on complaining about what's going on versus telling you what you need so you can get the job done, right? Yeah And you can use those same skills. Yeah, and I uh, man, I walked into uh, I helped another it company That was dealing with a incident where they were cryptoed and you know It come coming in being cool calm and just getting to it Everyone wants to start ranting about it's that well We probably should have updated this and by the way we're using all that I'm like, well, that's not important right now because they're in they encrypted. Well, are we going to recover it? Let's talk about your backups to see what we can recover. Let's see if I can pull snapshot from this You know, is everyone wanted to tell me story time and how they got here. I'm like you're here We can debrief it later. It doesn't matter. That's like, you know You got to have those skills to come in and be able to calmly go through it So you can focus on the task at hand, which of course is this was a big operation They had um 80 people not working at that time. So they're all on a payroll How quickly can we get these 80 people back to working? So that's one of the reasons our incident Incident response policies is We assign somebody to do the work, right? We assign somebody to be the liaison for the customer We assign somebody to do the communications Uh or to do the communications part of it Um and the idea is that the person working the last thing they want is somebody tapping their shoulder What's going on? What's the update? What's going on? They need to focus They need to focus on getting a resolution whether it's one person or a team of people or whatever it is Um But you know have them separate from the person communicating with the client because the person can let so I used to do this all the time I when I would visit a client, especially if it was if not vcio stuff Not, you know Glane handing glad handing and you know kissing babies and all that stuff But I mean like when we were going because we were doing a large cabling job Or we were doing a hardware refresh or or there was something down medical facilities. Oh every every minute down We're losing 200 billion dollars a year But we can only pay 5 000 a month at msp services. Yeah, whatever But like we wouldn't when we would go I would always do two person I would go with the tech I would be the one that would sit down with the office manager. Oh, let's go talk. Let's catch up Let's use this opportunity So you tell me what's going on let the tech go do their job let them actually get the work done Um, and it cost me a little more in terms of labor and time and personnel But we got the job done much faster and almost always the client was happy because they were still They were still handled that you still had the conversations with them But the job got done because it's very hard to do both if you're one person Yes, because I've certainly been there when you go to the client It's late at night You're trying to fix something and they want to hang out in the server room with you asking questions Why'd you type that command? Because I needed to It was an arbitrary. Let me tell you I don't know how else to answer you right now Or my favorite I watched a youtube video from this guy named tom so I know you're supposed to do this It's like let me do my job, man. Let me do Yeah, what Eduardo say I had a non-technical client who wanted to be on the engineering bridge when bandwidth is getting attacked Oh, I can't Wow Yes, yeah And that's like doctors that don't want you to get full body scans because you're going to find something You don't understand and you're going to freak out about it. Yep Yeah, and that was I have to give Well, Eduardo said it so I can say it now So we weren't supposed to talk about it Don't come after me bandwidth But bandwidth actually besides their public status pages, which they updated very often besides the multiple communications From their cto and from the ceo bandwidth held calls several times a day twice a day 12 o'clock and 5 o'clock To their partners where they there were open calls where you could ask questions They would give you real-time status stuff that you couldn't talk about publicly But they did really well on the communication side and And as a customer, this is exactly what I was saying as a customer I felt good because I was hearing the information as it was going on And I know the ceo is not the one fixing the stuff the cto is not the one fixing the stuff They have other people doing that, but I was still getting communicated to And I thought they did brilliant the way they handled it You know, this is that's a tip I give to a lot of startup msp's is everyone They'll remember when you didn't communicate And my answer even to my staff and I beat them over the head with this because it still requires beating over the head You can remind them communicate What it's not done. I know it's sitting there at like 2 and when they called 15 minutes ago It was at 2 but still don't it's still a 2 let them know just Hanging away at them. We used to back when I worked in corporate. We actually uh Built a ton. One of my things was building automation tools and this was in 2001 2002 One of the ones we built built those the early days of text messaging I remember 20 years ago text especially went a big deal So we built we found out and this is common knowledge now, but this was not something that was easily available For that or I don't know how common was when you think about this How would you email texts automatically convert emails to text without any special At the time it would have been blackberry because they were all the popular ones back then How would you send texts around 2000 directly out of your mail server to each client at locations? Let them know that your trucks are arriving late I mean the only ways you could do it were sms gateways back then now now everybody has the email address Well, like the gateways, right? So the um the way we found out in Verizon was the first one to do this and other people followed suit Is we went and got Verizon phones and sent them to some of the plants And it was kind of a cool thing just given the plant leaders a free phone But the reason we gave it to them is so we could text them and what we our system could do is text them by the number at vzwtext.com they turned that on all the way 20 years now addresses. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, the trick is now But how did you how did you qualify what services they have because now that's just an api query? That's right. It's a paper. Well, that's just we bought them the phones That was part of the trick we bought phones for the managers of the Ford plants We mailed them the phones It was kind of like a gift thing and who doesn't want a free cell phone in 2000 back when these things were damn expensive So we get them, uh, it would have been the palm trio is I think it's the ones we got remember the Those were good man. Yeah Because we did explore the backwards but it allowed us to give these automatic updates that our system generated But they we thought it was us talking to them because no one knew we could write a system to talk to someone And we did these things back and forth. It was just some fun stuff I ought to be you had to learn the uh the handwriting like it had that little app where you had to practice handwriting with that little plastic stylus Um, but it was good huge. I have had many Yeah, I was a huge fan of all the palm stuff, man. They there's a company. It's uh My favorite statement I heard I was listening and I've heard it said different ways But it's essentially it's so hard to tell a guy who's making 100 million dollars a year He's doing it wrong because you you ask the question why these big companies fall And palm had it palm could have been what ran all of our devices. They already had the market They just needed to keep modernizing with devices, but they didn't they the palm fell off never thought the world would change until it did Um, and this is one of those things where you you how you watch these companies fall You're like, how do they not see the end coming? How did blackberry not? You know maintain such a hold on the market An hp still owns it right like palm os still exists. It's like a tv platform or something now, right? Yeah, I don't know what they do with anymore. It certainly isn't what it used to be. But yeah No, it's not but it could have been right like and look at the days like you had the ipak you had What's the clio? You had like sony's was a clio. You had the ipak from hp And they were great. They were great devices ipak had that little sleeve so you could put a 3g modem on there You know modem on there put pc mci cards You know, they had really cool tech the palm was always the best in my opinion Then you had the color the color palm. That was phenomenal But it could have been you know went down the road. I had the did you ever use the sony version of it? Yeah, the the clio that was uh, yeah Yeah, yeah, I I love that one and so palm even had the concept of licensing a ton of people do hardware Just like android. I mean it was like that They had a you know a clunky but cool at market I still have I just because i'm a me were you talking last time a digital tech quarter So I still have all my palm os games. Uh, there's a dungeon crawler. I have for it I like emulator. So sometimes I'll pull it up. Is that what I want to say? Are you doing it like steve gibson? You're putting his ziploc bags and storing your freezer? No, not the hardware. I just I have palm all the simulator somewhere There you go. Thorsten says palm os is now web os on lg tv's. Yeah, I knew it was still alive Yeah, I didn't Yeah, if that's called alive, I guess the code's still no. Yeah, it's not Until you can flip over your tv with a stylus and start Writing I don't think that's the same um You can write on the screen. Would you call it? Right. I I saw some questions. I I feel bad because I Geeking out. I saw I saw a bunch of wi-fi questions on there um That was one of the things uh sonic walls were really bad at sonic wall access points. Oh man, that was so bad That was really hot garbage. We pulled so many of those out and replaced them with different things um The question is do you have center around wi-fi 6 now? If you can find these which they were limit 2 per customer now, they're limit 4 per customer um, they're just hard to get a hold of and I I don't think wi-fi 6 is bad or anything like that. But if Do you need it if you're looking for the ultimate speed and you need the fastest just hardware to thing um for the most part you can get away with One of my clients and this is from the business perspective we have when we do these wi-fi deployments Like the warehouse jobs we've done. We're putting in, you know X thousand square feet warehouse. They're not asking me for the fastest speed most of the time because like there's a bunch of tablets attached to a high-low And the only thing they care is that when they scan a skew off a box with a scan gun Or if they type in something on a tablet that tells them what doc they're at they care about the connectivity Not how fast they're literally moving kilobits of data If you look at the data streams on on cumulative image data You're showing like that's it you installed 50 wi-fi access points and they use like a few megabytes of data. I'm like yep They really care about connectivity now wi-fi 6 does have a little bit advantage over that. So it's uh, a little bit better over in high density Things but are you doing high density at your house? Do you have that many devices? For the most part you can get away with still the older wi-fi because you got to think about this Like my wife she watches netflix all the time. So they're my kids Um, they got a chrome cast in each of your rooms. It doesn't take a lot to run this You don't have to overthink it. You can still get a lot of the wi-fi Previous gen stuff for a pretty good budget or if one or two of these because they are sometimes not sold out on ubiquity They're not bad. This is the one that I was working on a video before I got sidetracked This is what i'm using at my house right now. It works perfectly fine But if you're budget oriented or you can even find some of the people who have to have the hottest and latest and greatest Buy a used one off ebay and uh, go with one of the older unifies like the nanos or the the older acl R's are still to me completely relevant here in 2021 I mean If you're that person that's that's deploying cat six and fiber all over your house because you're doing new construction or something Yeah, go for it. But yeah, I'm with you. I and that's that's kind of the thing that like going back to the enterprise space stuff You don't we don't always go the latest and greatest It's very rare that we'll go latest and greatest We go with tried and proven That is that you know, so it's not and that's why I say like a five or ten year refresh cycle in enterprise It's not uncommon at all. It's it's typical game because you want stuff that you know is going to last a long time so You know qualify my opinions when i'm saying like I have problems with unify or not unify with muraki or unify void Um and stuff like that stuff that disappears. Um, somebody was telling me I've been trying to search for it. I hadn't had a chance to look at it yet, but that the unify store now has a What they call it the it? The it section. Yeah, let's see what eric told me. Yeah, yeah, they're so they have this weird thing There's they sell super microservice on the unify store now. I don't The the the company known for not having stock is now selling additional items like I don't get that leak Yeah, I don't understand that in any capacity Oh Where the So there's the ubiquity store. Yeah, uh, where was it at? Is it under? I can't see it It said like the it where there you go it marketplace right on this Oh, it says labs. We're not supposed to show this in the live stream, but yeah, they're doing this Well, it's on the public. I'm not logged in. It's showing it to me. So okay. Oh, you're right. I'm not logged in. So, okay Yeah, I was like that's the thing like but why I I don't understand But yeah Then uh, nothing against absolutely nothing against, you know, super micro obviously not we're both fans of super micro But it Sold out the stuff I'm going to you to go look for Are they just trying to take advantage of the traffic? Maybe Yeah, I don't know not really that was a weird one that they've got that on there, but they uh You make me sound so pretty nice and everything else. So I I think it works good for home users because I I don't like any of the generic Home user stuff anytime. I've looked at it. It's always just kind of a pain doesn't work very well The interface is horrible. It's never going to get updated probably has CIP ELG turned on And there's no way to turn it off. It might even have the admin port open and there's no way to close it Well, that that was the thing for a long time and not now I'm talking about like, you know The sg's and the the older unifier routers But they had CIP ELG enabled the only thing you could do is is go into the cli and disable it and then Don't touch anything. You're right. Yeah, so it doesn't get wiped out Push it That's one of the problems of the usg is when you push it it re-updates that json file and Reflips all the switches you did from the command line. Yeah. Yeah You know and and the whole point and that's the thing the whole point of unify is so that it's all Easier to manage right like once you adopt you cloud manage and all that stuff. It's supposed to be easier Um, and it is for the most part. I I'll take the unify over morocchi nine times out of 10 10 times out of 10 So I got nothing how much fun was that uh That video you did with the uh, super micro the super server. Oh, that was fun Uh, my staff thought it was less fun because I was in here It was in it was in my lab area Which not which is not in the back of the building. Um, because I don't have any 25 gig cookups in the back of my building So it was screaming When I was doing this thing was just like And they're like, is that gonna stop anytime soon? I'm like out of videos almost on I love those. I had a in my other office. I had a pair of del 2900s Uh, and you booted up and it was like like a 787 is taken off next to you. You know, and it was Yeah, it was bad. It was like you couldn't turn it on and it had in the closet I had it, you know and locked in I had it in a closed rack with ventilation. Um, specifically for noise isolation But yeah, even in that it was still it was loud It's I get it Yeah, and what what's worst about it is the way it makes noise. Um, it's a wine It's not like just the air noise. It has this weird. It's it's kind of annoying. I I won't lie. You recognize it And that's the thing when you're in it you recognize fans. Yeah, you get it immediately. It's just unpleasant I saw I saw frank ask a question. Um We talked on the DDoS video about resiliency. Uh, he put a question at 543. Uh, there you go. Um, If we take out our pbx, we can save money. Do we need two service providers to secure internet connection? We don't want downtime. Um Frank so I when you're talking about a dr strategy, right? It's disaster recovery strategy Um, there's going to be acceptable loss and there's going to be acceptable workarounds And this is not just wait. This is all it period and systems all systems period Um, when you say you can't have downtime are you look at for yourself? Do you mean downtime that you can't redirect calls to a cell phone and use cell phones while the internet's down Or are mobile applications? Okay Or do you have to be using that desk phone? Um, I have a desk phone here. I can't show on camera because it's still under I can't show yet But or do you need a desk phone working because if you need the desk phone working Then make sure you have the poe switches. Make sure you have ups is backed up, you know Running everything then yes, absolutely get dual isps If cost is a concern get a second isp That's maybe a 4g if if you have it the the number I use is 100 kilobits per user Um, so you 20 users 2 million 2 megabits easy enough math. Um knowing the wave is going to use a little less Um, and you're not going to have everybody on the phone at the same time Um, but if they absolutely have to have the desk phones working 100 of the time Get two isps that you know have some kind of sla or some kind of backup Um do it, but if it's purely cost-concerned and you're okay using a cell phone for a little bit or the soft phone apps for a little bit Save the money on the second isp if it's expensive nowadays, you can get an isp for like 40 bucks for You know for 200 300 megs pretty cheaply in a lot of areas. Yeah, not everywhere We're lucky here in michigan. We have uh, literally My building is available for two different fiber and three different Non-fiber providers. It's just it's a weird competitive space. We have here. I don't i'm at the weird intersection of it so We even can do site-to-site because there's a giant ass building right behind us and uh one of Company we work with from time to time at this fiber They happen to have all their uh site-to-sites up there So they said we can offer you a line of site backup off of that for a wi-fi for even Because they cover this area there's one there's only very few buildings very tall We're in suburbia here and there's just one odd ball building Everyone always asks why they don't tear it down and I've always said because it's been vacant the building has had It's like a 12 or 6 12 or 16 story building. It's huge with nobody in it has no tenants forever It's like out of grown-up parking lot everyone's like it's like this big ass ugly abandoned building I'm like the only reason it's there is because it has all it's a cell tower multiple cell towers And it's got the entire top of it has just an array of That's good money renting out that stuff renting out rooftop space for these towers. That's major major money. Oh, yeah Yeah, it's kind of neat. We have a couple I looked at building a I looked at building a wisp a while back. Unfortunately in miami the the bands are saturated really really saturated So like, you know, whether it's unlicensed bands or licensed bands. There's no options here Like the the people in play are staying in play um And so But yeah, I mean we're fortunate here like right now I'm working from home I have my office but you know working from home most of the time and I have Comcast here where Comcast is like 100 200 bucks for a gig Uh, and then I have his backup. I have 18 t fiber. I mean, it's home fiber, but whatever But it's 60 bucks for for a gig. So like, yeah, okay. Why not? Um So hey, awesome. Yeah, so uh, I was gonna bring it up though We're gonna wrap it up a few more minutes. We'll go a few minutes. So throw us a few more questions Throw me a few more likes. There's 150 you and 107 likes I don't think the 150 you are the same people we started with because I know they kind of rotate out doesn't tell me that But I just suspect that I see different names in here. So Yeah, and sorry guys like, you know Every time tom and I get together we start like nerding out like if you have questions That's what we're here for. We'll do other videos, but like, you know, we're live ask whatever you need to ask Ask away throw some rapid fire questions in there. Um, I don't even care if they're slightly off topic because that's usually what I do at the end I don't like just ask me anything Uh, because that's how no one's brought it up yet, but I thought it was funny. Um I was house shopping and so one of my off topic things was weird Just I I didn't know what a Pittsburgh toilet was and so I had showed it on the live stream So it turned into this discussion where Someone said I should make shirts with it But I it's funny because now we're looking at houses for my daughter and I I seen a house. They had a Pittsburgh toilet I was excited and I explained to her what it was. She's looking because why do you care so much dad? That's my daughter's answer. Like you seem excited that this house has a toilet in the basement That was one of those things that came up on tech bar and it was like It's that toilet that's in the basement that's like just freestanding by itself And it's one of those things I had never seen in my life and shan told me it's a Pittsburgh toilet And now like I can't unsee it now. It's like when you buy a car and you start seeing your car everywhere Yeah, and so it's like yeah, it's like finding a pot of gold. It's so cool Yeah, ATT fiber routers or trash with their ak state table. Listen, I'm not arguing My thing is I have backup connections. I have backups for my backups And even then I I have my cell phone with my house about google fi I have we're launching an mvno in november at it nation Um, we have I have the two internet connections here and still this past thursday when I was doing a live stream Uh, or what was it tuesday? I was doing a live stream all three went out at the same time simon had to take over the live stream for me I mean You know, I don't think I'll run five isps to my house Maybe yeah, all right, maybe maybe so It's it is that and you know concast was here yesterday and they had trouble and it's It's always something with them And even uh, thanks ck saying, uh, love watching you guys. Thank you ck. Appreciate that. Oh, yeah Yeah, there's simon in the chat He had never hosted any of these videos before he always comes out, you know, he he comes on to help out And uh, he like a champ he took over he hosted it. I mean he handled it so Yeah, the starlink backup is um interesting I think that's cool that we're getting more things like that out there more options Uh, it's it's uh painful. We're north of me. I'll use my hand because we do have a michigan So i'm here in detroit We're right here by the cananda and we have all these isps my parents live or my dad lives way up here and uh Yeah, there's nothing up there. There's a single wisp and he's at the very edge of it They actually made it. Well, I had to strike a deal So my dad doesn't really use he just wants to be able to watch some netflix But uh, they had to build a tower in his yard. He's got a bunch of acres Um, and the deal was if they could build the tower there because on the other side of the lake he lives on There's a few other people they couldn't reach at all because they're down in a valley And my dad's on top of the lake. So like it's so hard to get internet So even with all of that there's this one provider and then their tower got hit by lightning And it was their internet was down for like three weeks. Nothing they can do to get hit by lightning That's the bane of wisps. Yeah, you know the amount You know and I talked to these I'm a member of wispa Like even when I was investigating and decided it wasn't we weren't going to do it I we service a lot of isps and wisps And they say all the time there's certain gear that no matter what grounding you have no matter what isolation you have No matter what stuff you have in place The lightning is going to get you it's going to happen Um, yeah, I feel bad for those guys man It is it took out it took out not the tower in my dad's yard But the tower that they had broadcast from so it took out a huge area because they have several towers across northern michigan Like they're they cover a huge part of the state as one company But when it hit it it took that out and they're like we we're trying to get as fast as we can but This is how long it's going to take to get this it hit the equipment and yeah um Do you know anybody is using starlink? I know every I know a bunch of people that have ordered and on back order I don't know anybody actually use that uh chris from crosstalk solutions. He has it He's done a series of videos on it. So uh, he's got like a bunch of videos He even did one of his live streams He did from the starlink. So he's got some good breakdowns of how it works and what he thinks of it um This is a question that I I'm I got to do the math on to explain better But 25 gig networking reasonable for a churnass using 500 meg ssds. This is where um The answer is very complicated wendell from level in texas dove into this topic of how hard it is With mv me's not ssds ssds. No, you don't need 25 gig uh connections for ssds You could use it for mv me's But start digging into and watch level one text videos on uh obtain mv me rdma How the network drivers are uh line is tech tips did a video on it because they built an mv me array And he thought he could edit on it with 100 gig Um, there's some trickiness to that there is some literal bust problems driver problems And uh, one of things wendell has a video and if I can remember it, I'll uh, I'll I'll tag ask wendell and tag him in twitter so he'll know his video the great video where he breaks down He had to work with kernel developers to do the testing because there are some alignments on pc i timing with the brand new xeon gold processors He was using to get the throughput he wanted He had to compile a custom kernel with certain flags in it to get it to work There's it when you start getting these really high speed storage stuff. There's it goes out of there now Back down to more realistic Yeah, 25 gig with mv me. Um, I did that uh, we exceeded some of the in the video I just did with that super micro which had a 25 gig the mv me kioksia SSDs the enterprise one's in there. Yeah, you could load that up and probably saturate the 25 gig pretty good But your standard ssc generally don't you just run into some problems of getting Aggregate bandwidth across the bus over to the 25 gig and out With all the other things that are in between so but I if you can afford 25 gig absolutely build it Like I mean if you don't need it, but it's not that expensive. You can pick up The card I used I think is 200 dollars on ebay for a 25 the sfp 28 25 gig card Unify maker chick has some cheaper ones, but the unify aggregation switch aggravation switch That one uh, that switch is under a thousand dollars with four 25 gig sfp 28 ports and uh, yeah build it out or It's just ridiculous like I remember like finding switches that were you know 24 port gig with you know two 10 gig up links And you know I was paying five six seven grand for smb switches with those capacities And I didn't get full 10 gig switches like nothing Like yeah, and in maker tick for my love and hate relationship with them because of the overly complicated ui If you use their switches not their router os I like their switches with switch os and I think you can do some pretty reasonable things with them If you can start out the model numbers That well, that's my problem with super micro too. I love super micro I I have a lot of healthy respect for micro tick or micro tick because Everybody especially in the whisk community. They all use. Um, you know what? I mean And that was one of the things like I tried to practice queuing and all this stuff on the routers on router os And it broke me it absolutely broke me. I reached out to Uh, I think it was howard I reached out to and I'm like, can you do this for me? I I can I don't even want to be taught just do it because I'll I'll pay you Um, because it was one of those things that it's rough Speaking of switches tom crawford's asking about switches if you want to Answer him on that is a 24 port, uh, just above that. Yeah Uh, we need 24 port with a 10 gig sfp. We don't need poe because wi-fi and phones are pre-installed in the building um You know, I haven't tested the maker tick one of that Uh, I you know, obviously the unify one's an easy answer They make one their their pro series has that 10 gig ports on there with it does come with poe If even if you don't need it, it does come with it I like the unify ones But if you want to take the time to switch it to learn switch os not too hard And if only thing you have to do no layers pre routing functions or anything more than just a few basic vlands That's actually relatively easy to configure on the maker tick switches If you want something standalone that you can log into uh, that's budget friendly Oddly though, uh, someone pointed this out and I I'm a I'm a little bit mixed on them is the sysco c 1000s I did a review of them But overall i'm kind of impressed with how inexpensive they are for being sysco gear and They are sysco for love hate with certain aspects. They're reliable like I Ray will probably bet his life sysco in for the next 10 years. It will probably run until it's obsolete I have some catalyst 3600s. I still use today and those are 15 year old switches and they have their use cases I mean, there's there's certain things they're fine for their test benches, but they still work But um the c 1000s, uh in there They don't have any licenses the confusing part and I did a video on it Where I break down a little bit of the confusion I had with them and even my sysco friends did too Uh, there are certain things you can't do with them that you would expect They kind of nerfed out a few things. They just decided that it didn't need to have But they don't document that very well one of those things that is Weird is the command that lets you use non sysco sfps in the sfp port. Yeah, it doesn't work It's they were literally removed it only from the c 1000 switches So you have to use sysco sfps and I've had so many people tell me i'm wrong look I had my friend who is a diehard sysco lover. He told me I was wrong. I said dude come on over I'll get you a beer let you show me out working man. I'll put money on the table and it's he's like Oh, he was swearing by One of my dirt moments You want to make a sysco guy feel stupid have him configure an sg 200 or 300 I I sat there and I was doing a takeover for I I did a lot of work for telcos for cb on and at&t and and those guys Uh, I still consult every now and again. Um, but I was doing a takeover for them, uh for them not from them And they had some this is a couple years ago They had some sg 200s and they're like, yeah, we don't know how to use it. We can get into the web ui But whatever and I'm like Open putty or mobile x terms what I use open it and I'm like, I'll see a lion. Don't worry about I'll have this configured in two minutes None of my commands worked. Well, that's not true Two-thirds of my commands didn't work And it was that frustrating It was that some stuff did some stuff didn't and I'm like it was driving me nuts I've configured thousands of sysco switches and so like I get really Cautious what I and I see the stuff that's not sysco sysco enterprise gear works Yeah, I can it'll works. Absolutely. It's worth every penny. I will never argue against it Um, I feel there's better options for a lot of things But reliable you're good. Um, I saw somebody mentioned, uh neck gear managed switches Um neck gear firewall you will have to fight me kicking and screaming to ever argue to ever use a neck gear firewall But they're managed switches. Um, I've deployed Not hundreds maybe dozens of their managed switches. Um, and they're reliable. They have lifetime warranties They have all the layer two layer three stuff you're looking for Um They have lots of features and now they have a central management system. I haven't used it Hasn't been my need but um, what should we call it? It's uh So I have a buddy. It's all xyxel. So that that threw me off for a second And I was looking at the picture to see if that was tyler or not because tyler's last name starts with the p2 So I was like, wait a minute. Um But yeah, the neck gear stuff the managed stuff the fully managed, uh, you know, they're Yeah, we we have new clients with some of the neck gear switches. I never I know no love or hate. They just seem to work. Um, the xyxel stuff don't use their routers, man back doors I mean they've had some The same things we talked earlier in the show just factor problems and things like that They seem to work longevity wise, but I don't think firmware wise are all that great Yeah, no, I I agree with you 100 percent. Uh, they have nebula for central management, but Yeah, which is also a little confusing on how nebula is their documentation I actually pointed out they reached out to me to a video on it I I was a smart ass and replied you guys have a lot of 404 saying your documentation That's how I replied I said I can't I said so Um, would you consider ubiquity such to be an enterprise solution? So Here's my problem is it's too hard to really Absolutely say something's enterprise until you say big iron and can it do bgp? So it really everything's about use case and uh enterprise is kind of a word that's thrown out there That's probably lost its meaning So would you use it in where ray has ray has a bunch of router announcements and some of these advanced big iron things No, ubiquity is not designed for that What I use it and have we use it in you know, I one of my install videos that I referenced Where we have like I don't know 25 ubiquity switches 300 access points across a pretty large area works great. They're fine. They don't need any layer through your outing Nothing they do requires it. Um, so the ubiquity switches were fine. They worked fine. Is that an enterprise environment? They have uh 8 000 users on there. It's is that enterprise? I don't know That's the problem It's better to ask the question of what is the use case you want to use it for What are the checkboxes you need to fulfill the order and then you can start looking at what switches work And if the switches don't have the feature in in some cases the unified just don't then you can't even uh, take them into consideration Uh, that's just it's a better way to look at it this thing. Is it enterprise or not? Yeah, because that's like what you were saying, right? Like when you're answering the question of the 25 gig with 500 megabit per second, you know hard drives The the answer is it depends I I do use edge switches in some of my racks in my data centers They're for very specific applications. They're not my top of rack switches They're not my my aggregation layer or my core layer But I do use them for very specific cases because they work well They have some limitations, right? Like you can't have more than one you can have multiple lags We can't have more than more than one port mirror. Um, so they have certain things that are a problem, but for like some out-of-band management stuff and you know, or or some Some management layer not not compute not storage layer, but for for management layer communications, they work fine Um, so I use them and that's the thing enterprise You know smb, you're gonna find gear and you're gonna say I want this one piece of gear to do everything, right? And that's a very normal thing. I want my router to do my wi-fi I don't think any of us recommend router with wi-fi built-in, but you get what I'm saying I want my router But even the router I want my router to be my firewall to be my ids my IPS my filtering my this my that When you're in the enterprise space your ids IPS is a different device than your router is a different device than your firewall They're whole different stacks So to say enterprise, it's very specific use case So don't get caught up on that. It's not it's a whole different thing And it's funny because um, I've had a lot of people to say, well PF sense isn't using enterprise. I'm like, uh, I have a video if you go back where I talk about open sourcing enterprise What I did was in this actually changed. They don't they hide this in an interesting way I'll get to in a second But I pointed out that a lot of these large companies which does include visa mastercard Uh, it's kind of odd. They're job posting listings were for hiring people with PF sense and that's and some people Well, PF sense doesn't support all the right filtering. I'm like those are separate devices in the enterprise They're using it in a data center because it can do really complex routing And that's what it's using for they're not trying to filter and and be an all-in-one device that Sits inside the network and does all this content filtering and things like that Like you like a lot of people have in their head like that means enterprise because it can do content filtering No, no We saw these in a lot of colos a lot of data centers And it handles a pretty high volume of traffic. It can do a lot of complex routing It does get into being able to do bgp style things and route announcements and things like that Um, and so it is used in in those spaces. The reason they don't do it anymore. Those a lot of companies are realizing it's a security problem and people were doing Open source intelligence and you would just go it was kind of we keep common knowledge in a lot of the Threat actors did this as well. You just go look at what they're hiring for. Oh look, they're hiring for people for this I know that we're running in their stack is this and then you can look for a flaw That is in that stack and especially if they're hiring They may not have that flaw patch because they don't have a staff member to patch it So it becomes an attack factor a lot of companies use um My friend worked for a fortune 100 and it's interesting because it's so obscure They won't even let them have linked in where he works and they also won't uh when he hired in He didn't know who he's even hiring for like all the interview questions He obscured the actual name of the company everything's like this contract company And then after your after you find out what job you get any pass you inside But they the kind of obscure so you don't get a lot of information. Uh, it was really weird Uh process, but then he landed a good job like that. So yeah, it's You know, it's hard It's actually been harder for me to find that information to do another video on it because companies use these kind of middlemen Even when I was talking about working with eric and you know and helping you guys migrate That's why I was very cautious not to say exactly what you're using Not that I think you care not that you don't have hundreds of videos out there But the thing is just I'm in that headspace that we don't say what we're using period publicly like that's a normal thing And it's not we all know security by obscurity is not really, you know, reliable But we're not going to give them that one extra piece of information to start Right, you know going after us the same reason we you know adjust our headers and adjust our stuff and to give you an idea Enterprise also has very specific needs depending on the type of enterprise, right? Some people need high throughput in my world connections per second is king We have a lot of connections that we have to keep in in memory And we have a lot of connections per second that we need to be able to handle and pass through quickly Now in other spaces where you're doing, you know, maybe something in aws or in azure and you're doing You know hosted compute or you're doing, you know vm's for other purposes You may not have those needs that that may not be then it's just resiliency or it's just you know being able to Change routes on on a need basis There's a two hour video right there Yeah, it's our video I mean me and rick are going to be of the same mind of uh p of sense over sonica. Well, we're not neither one of us are Big sonica wall fans. Um, I just yeah in sonica wall, especially they have a complex license history I don't know where they stand now, but I know some of the previous ones had some weird licensing on there Um, and and yeah, they they were also subject because of the way their stack works. They were part of that Man, it was uh, steve gibson did a good breakdown of it I mean I think you remember like the stack that a lot of them used sonica wall was on that list Because it's some weird tcp IP stack they bought from some obscure company that wrote it and oh, that's the one that did the um That they went off the reference spec that specifically said don't do this. This is proof of concept only I yeah, I remember there's been they've updated it since then but there's been a lot of flaws in sonica wall I mean But you have the choice Honestly open source because it gets a lot more looking at it and the core of pf sense Is that someone will point out pf sense is a fully open source because pf sense plus has a couple components in it Yeah, I know but the core of it is auditable Accessible you can command line in and see what's going on dive into the details of it Um, it's one of the reasons it's so popular and more and more, you know, even the large enterprise companies They're trusting more open source because they're scared after all these things that happen with some of these closed source companies Or just the track record hasn't been good with some of these that are enterprise companies At the end of the day somebody else gave good really good advice about the switch selection use what's in your management network Use what's in already in your current ecosystem. That's not a bad call For a lot of people If you're a sonic wall person, I was a sonic wall person for a long long long time Today if i'm going to deploy something new at smb, it's not going to be sonic wall The value the dollar per throughput through gigabit or through megabit just isn't there You know when you look at devices and that's the that's a concern, right? We were talking about isp's availability A lot of us have available, you know, either symmetrical gig or some in some cases two and a half gig, right? Yeah If you're going to put a sonic wall that's going to be able to do ids Full filtering ids on two and a half gig. First of all, I don't think one exists Besides, I don't think so Yeah, I don't think but if you found one you're going to be spending $30,000 and if you're spending $30,000 on a sonic wall You're making a mistake There's other devices which is why I like the pfs pf sent stuff because and that's what you recommend That's what tom recommended. That's well installed at home But you know, that's the kind of thing you can control your hardware. You can control So many aspects you can deep dive into making changes to it I have a lot of healthy respect for that the exact reasons. I have complaints about muraki. Those are the exact reasons I like pf sent Yeah, um and someone asked the question but you're asking the question wrong and that's why I bring this up How many clients would pf sent people to handle before considering having a dedicated dhcp server? No, you you don't want to create network segments that are so big that that's even a concern You start want to segmenting out the network into different ways. Um, it's really not the dcp I don't think there's I mean there is probably a limit, but I don't think that's where the limit is Yeah, I can't imagine it's just text in the table. It's not it's not a whole lot of it's not a lot of data But uh, and you've probably seen this someone's like just keep making the subnet bigger. Don't do slash 24 just keep Don't super net. Please don't super net super net and I um That's where I love that. Oh, we're running out of ip addresses. So let's just you know make it a slash 23 No, no, no do not do that. Please don't do that Yeah, start thinking about segmentation so it becomes less of an issue. Um, It would be it could be a whole other conversation a network design and things like that I will throw out there a lot of people ask me. I just don't have an opinion Myself I see both opinions. Some people love it. Some people hate it. I don't know. I haven't used sofos I'm not that interested in it and then I did learn something about sofos There's actually two versions out there because they bought they have their own product They bought another product and or they branded it all sofos Uh, is what someone explained to me, but it's not the same So you have to decide which line is it sofos or sofos ng. I think it's the new one But they're they're they're two different product lines. They bought I don't think sofos is a bad company. Um, I've had a lot of people tell me they're they're wayly Way over complicated with a bad ui to configure haven't used them. So I can't really answer It's funny because so I want to address real quick. Somebody said sonic wall is not good for VoIP Sonic wall does work for VoIP. I can tell you we ran sonic wall in our data centers for a long time. Um, You know lower much lower resources than we need today. Um, and you know, like I said I said at the beginning that side gave I've given presentations You can use sonic wall from VoIP throw that out the window Um, but uh, it's the same reason a lot of people VoIP providers back in the day would argue with you if you use neck gear switches Saying oh because they have sip a lg. First of all sip a lg is an application It's that resides on a router not on a switch. So the switches don't have it But it was that misunderstanding and they would argue it's it's a whole thing. Um But sofos on the sofos side, I like sofos for msp's Um And again, it's not going the open source route, right? Like, you know, obviously tom's very open source I'd like open source a lot. There's no question. I use a lot of open source tools myself um If you're going to go toward the msp side and you want to maybe look at sofos. I like them in their space Um, but do what works for you do what you're trained on do what you understand Yeah In someone says that the sofos the they said the supports top-notch Cool things they do is if you have the sofos Ad stuff along with the sofas firewall and they can get the full tie in All together in a dashboard. That's cool. Um, one of the worst things is and My friend was telling me we'll we'll talk offline raised. I gotta share and I sorry guys I cannot share all of this, but it's some crazy incident response But a lot of it had to do with someone who didn't understand the firewall and opened it up and caused the incident And someone got into their network One of the worst things you can do is choose a firewall based on something tom said but not because you know it And if you do that you could end up being the person that accidentally Sets an any any rule and lets a bunch of things into your network and misconfigures it because you don't understand the product So it's really important that you don't just listen to what tom and ray say Also take the time to understand the product if you know a product better You are probably better at securing it than we are because if we don't know the product And I'm at least smart enough to say I will hire someone smart enough to do it, but um the incident, uh I'll say this much because just I can't say you know real big details but essentially what happened was person let something in and um, they have really good logging It's kind of a situation where they had logs to what happened and oh person opened the firewall and The the script kitty got in because they were literally googling. How do I hack and how do I export files? And they did export files and stuff So I mean I can't tell you how many times I've seen that where like I'll get to a client and we'll take over a client and we'll take over somebody and Or we're helping somebody out And what's the first thing you do when like you're troubleshooting some kind of permission or right? You'll disable the firewall where you're able to disable av And as die not not the edge firewall, please for love god don't do that I'm talking about the endpoint firewall But like these are troubleshooting steps But you got to put the stuff back and it's only to see the full traffic so you can understand what's going on So you can fix it not that's not the solution to disable the firewall But I've seen stuff as crazy as like putting, you know Putting VoIP phones on the on public ip's on each of the VoIP phones mind-boggling You know and stuff like that. I mean, yeah, it'd be really easy to say. Hey guys Don't do any of this stuff. Just go grab some Palo Alto some pan 850s or some go spend a couple grand You'll be fine But if you can't configure it and you can't troubleshoot it You know what I mean if you think the solution just open it all up You're not going to really help your situation And there's far less videos on pan and juniper and the big, you know nexus 9k's Then there are guys like tom that are showing you how to do stuff with with pfSense So you're better off just you know stick with what you can find Uh documentation on all right. We're gonna wrap this up here But I will leave you with something that I didn't tell rave it You'll laugh knowing this because this is something I can disclose One of the clients we took over they had free pbx But um the other it people which is were really horrible and I my favorite Comment in they use pfSense too by the way was they created a lot of open rules and in the comments because you can get comments to the rules and pfSense It said we'll fix later. We'll fix later was like six months nine months old But that's where that's where the fun begins in the course of documented They did document. I love it. We'll fix later great You opened up the firewall and they just kept opening up more stuff to the free pbx system Someone got into the free pbx system and turned it into a robo dialer So someone got in and that's what they chose to do with it because they had a weak password for free pbx And then they were just spam calling everyone and the way the client found out was uh, they got the bill for all the phone calls And uh, they got blacklisted they couldn't call their customers anymore because they were on blacklist and blocked because they were Just illegal robo calling and it was like I'm like, how does all this calamity of stupid happen started with some open firewall? That's what would happen with a lot of p with a lot of free pbx They would go and they'd modify dial plans and the you know in the uh additional config files or the custom config files And they start doing custom dial plans in there so that anybody can call it and they can start calling out You know to international numbers that are high toll fraud Rate centers or they would set it so that any inbound call redirected to these fraud centers And they would rack up tens of thousands of dollars in bills before the phone company caught it It's it's scary out there There's yeah, it reminds me of the old phone freaking days when you would just war dial and find open stuff and then yeah All right, we won't go in there. I'm on the stretch A washer that works like a dime on a payphone. Yeah, man. Oh, yeah Yeah, I don't oh god. Well actually We're not really in reach. You have a blue box with you if you have a blue box in your office. I'm gonna A whole new level respect for you man No, I don't have a blue box. Um But the one thing I do keep that's not digital is I have All these for years and there's stacks of them behind me. So I and I've read all of them many even twice I'm a huge 2,600. This is you know, one of my Blue boxes right there to cover Yeah, yeah, the blue box on the cover Yes Yes So absolutely Uh this uh the phone. This is where I started was a lot of the phone stuff I loved I've always been like you long time tech nerd and things like that I will leave links down below where you can find uh ray's channel. You can watch tech bar We did a uh, well, you can also see the other videos we made on here when on ray's channel I did some videos where we ate hot sauce and I talked ray and eating hot things too Which he was simon regretted the most Yeah, I had to run off and go get you know Go get water because you had me beat see but you guys cheated though a little bit You didn't tell us not to chew The benefit of experience Yeah Yeah, but we uh, I will have I have video my staff did the one ship challenge I haven't done yet. This is actually mine and I gotta wait till I have some time Where I don't want to be busy because it killed productivity in the office for a while Man I love that you you were telling me you were identifying the changes they made to the chips Like it's not that it's already the hottest chip available. It's that yeah, the old version and now the new version and you're still willing to try it You are something else, man. That's amazing Uh, oh, but I have a captain crunch whistle You know, I on my to-do list is the 3d print one because I don't I don't have one So I thought about 3d printing a captain crunch whistle. So Google that for those you youngsters They have no idea what that even means and what a captain crunch is with a whistle and why it even matters And and how it relates to the title of this magazine here And while you're at it go watch war games because that was actually pretty realistic as far as you know, the Oh, yeah, wow war games. Yep, but then watch hackers completely unrealistic just a good That's always the fun And you can see pendulum his silliness of it That was a good stuff. It's still a good time to watch that still entertaining as a movie Oh, yeah, you know, there's a one of the funniest side stories that came out of it was, uh pendulum got detained Um when he flew to england for the filming of of that show in hackers. Um, yeah, he had, uh He had a couple of the new he's a magician and he also doesn't like the tsa He if you remember he's kind of someone like counterculture to that Uh, but he had the you're supposed to declare when you travel X amount of dollars like 10,000 dollars. I think it is He had 9,000 something dollars in cash And he was being a dick to the tsa people type saying this is before the actual 9 11 subs This is that old but what's funny is they found all these weird things on him because he's a magician and he had these giant, uh They were like solid balls are part of a trick you do but they actually don't open But they kept wanting to open them because he thinks he's a magician. He thinks there's magic So to be a dick he smashed one on the table and it cracked the table to prove it wouldn't open Then when he arrested them then they found the money and thought he was you know drugs and It was just he has a whole breakdown. He does but it's hysterical What led up to him before he actually sat down and read his script for the hacker I mean meanwhile, he's one of the most famous magicians in the entire world. I mean that's That's awesome. No, he's funny, man. I watched anything he comes out with I watch because he's hysterical He's just got all kinds of uh Fun, so I've read his books and then uh, his uh, he does his podcast the penn sunday school He just rambles on about magician stuff which is or just entertainment stuff and it's kind of just it's a guilty pleasure I got no tech reason to tell you to listen to it. It's just he's entertaining. It's it's good stuff Yeah, he didn't uh when he did his diet book because he lost all that weight You know how he prefaced it because the lawyers are like, oh, you're gonna have to have disclaimer He says if you get your uh, if you get your health advice from a magician, you're an asshole This is the beginning of the book No one should listen to this magician I love him because he doesn't respect stupid. He he expects everyone is intelligent and reasonable Like he was doing uh, I was watching something he did with um Oh, I I don't want to I'm not shaming her. She goes by fat amy. She was in the the You know the movies with the bell as I can't remember the name of it Anyway with the cups and stuff, um, but he was doing a magic trick with her and he was saying people aren't stupid Magic is stupid and magic is getting people To you know getting the person to believe to watch pay attention to the stupid thing and not realize how stupid it is But the audience absolutely real and he was doing stuff like cutting rope But he was showing them that he was using fake rope like and I love that approach It's not he just respects everybody's intelligence and I I love that it just it makes it a lot of fun You know the uh showing how the trick is done because in oh, yeah the deception uh It kind of related to that because his basis is a lot and if you uh, he only I think you died last year Amazing randy. Uh, you're maybe familiar with them There's a good documentary netflix called an honest liar and uh, it's about the history of randy and Not wanting to fool people and kind of debunk some of the things where people were kind of just scam artists And uh, he became famous because of debunking scam artists and they said oh, this is a better way to do magic You can do magic in not saying oh, I'm gonna mentally trick you and this is uh Trick of the ancient mystic l no, no, this is I'm gonna fool you're gonna try and figure out how I do this But I'm not gonna tell you it's gonna be fun or maybe I will tell you and it's still gonna be fun So I mean one of the one of the oldest magic tricks I this is how you entertain people and piss off your wife at the same time Um, one of the oldest magic tricks right the french drop you take it and you do that I mean that that is the everybody knows you're doing this Everybody knows and it's still fun to watch every single time you don't have to You don't they don't have to lie to you for it to be an entertaining thing And no, you know Completely different concept. All right. We're babbling on. I my way of messing. I seen I got I got food at home So I think I'm gonna go do that now So yeah, but thanks for having me on man. This was awesome We'll do this again sometime and uh, look forward to doing the video on the vendor stuff We'll we'll figure out that coming soon because man, uh, people need it people need it We all do All right Thanks, everyone If you haven't hit the like button hit it if you're watching this in the post world Hit the like button still it works after the life anyway. All right. Thanks guys