 Bigby That okay Lawrence technology services powered by Bigby coffee So we'll start with hi. It's Thursday. We're being consistent and we're being fast today because I'm supposed to be doing Thing like I'm always doing Tom has 50 minutes to get somewhere that will take him 45 to get Absolutely. No, it's not that bad. No, not quite. Yeah, so I'm stickering things today And that's one of my things people asked about marketing tricks I'm like, there's not really a marketing trick. I sticker everything That's simple when we go to a client. So I'm like, can I put a sticker on that? Can I put it in all the things we touched that way? Someone who knows the last person to touch it was me because I put a sticker on it with our company name And who'd call because you touched a thing Or pull the wire out of a thing or switch the wire to a different wire out of a thing or did one of the Things or did the cool trick that I learned earlier this week if you plug A wire into two ports on a switch and what happens we we taught Marvin stuff Yeah, we taught Marvin what happens when you don't have spanning tree on a managed switch Because that was one of the things someone had done Clients that kind of managed the network themselves. So we have a client that wants guarantees and we have no problem giving guarantees But one they like using lots of cheap switches. They have no less than eight switches in their building Not because they're a big building because they don't want to run wires to a single switch switches being Networks routers and not like switches and stuff like Yeah, so what they've done is hodgepodge their network and we took photos when we put the stuff in They've expanded told us they want to do everything themselves. So there's a mess of wires They unplugged our wires. It went down. They wanted us to cover it under warranty I went out there and I pulled up the picture. I said, this is what I got me left. They go. Yeah I said, who did all this? Well, you know, my cousin came out and uh, That is friends that he had some free time after work and he said he worked for AT&T. So, um, I'm like, well They had plugged them all in wrong and that's why they're network quit working So I all that I do is start unplugging everything and work when we got to the base and we plug things in slowly Until we figure out where they could dilute. But yeah, this is Don't touch the things and that's we do document and we do take photos and it goes in the customer file and You know, there's no blaming me for that. I mean, we're very we if we mess up don't worry We'll take care of it. But you can't look at this giant hodgepodge mess of wires that I won't show That I did take a picture of in their customer file of what I encountered when I got there It does make a nice light show though when you do the whole oh, yeah, all the blinky lights. Yeah. Yeah Blinky lights. Um, so a big topic over this last week has been security breaches And uh, even though you have the best firewalls and threat management systems and everything else It's hard to stop employees who take complicated passwords save them as a file on their desktops and Yeah, then when someone gets a hold of their personal laptop They have all the credential information to log into the other things That that play had access to if you do for whatever reason feel the need to do that Maybe don't name the file passwords. Yeah. Yeah, especially it says company names login information So and someone compromised their laptop and then I got there that's and this is this is a common occurrence This happened. Um, well, we're trying to get the IT contract from the company has happened at my friend's company So it's yeah, that's they got into every day and every all the credentials because the And it turned out to be the owner's fault because the owner was the the uh, well partner whatever one of the owners Yeah, but he's an owner. So he has people to blame that stuff on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah So yeah, that's the one thing is protecting people from themselves It's not, you know, they had good equipment It's um that but then the dealing with the breaches also the uh, IT company and we were joking because I think we were talking about it Last week, um, it took them like six days to restore everything. That's where the real failure was. I mean Okay, breaches can happen How long is it going to be down how's your disaster recovery planning and they found some holes under disaster recovery planning So yeah, it took them a lot longer to get everything restored. Well, finding the holes is a plus I suppose found the holes Yep, we have I installed more of the failover systems that we're putting in so people who have two internet connections Because internet connections are relatively inexpensive compared to the overall business costs And downtime when you don't have internet is huge for businesses right now because well, they can't send emails They can't process orders credit cards everything So we're putting in a lot more redundant internet, which is wonderful. Those uh, they're not too expensive I mean, it's it's a few dollars to put it in and you got to have two bills But uh, not horrible It's not that bad compared to what you can lose. You know, you look at a second AT&T backup connection DSL Which is enough for a lot of the clients, uh, you know to run the credit cards Uh, they got to deal like 50 bucks or 60 bucks a month. I mean it sucks. It's recurring But it's kind of like insurance. You have to pay it even when you don't use it It's worth it when you need it. That's for sure It's much better. You'd probably rather every month go. Oh, man Again 50 bucks as opposed to when the thing breaks going, oh gosh, what are we gonna do? Yeah, you know, and then getting that bill Exactly. And it's what some of this is and people understand a lot of what we do in IT is an insurance policy You put in a disaster recovery plan Because you want to make sure you have a process by which you know you can restore But you hope to never use it and we have a lot of clients that We went through an entire server lifecycle of seven years and never restored a single file Because nothing ever broke. They had the server seven years later. They retired it We took it out and put the new server in And yeah, it's kind of funny. We're on our third iteration of servers with some of our clients because we've had some of these clients You know since the beginning so now we're on your third iteration of server equipment Because they've been with us for so long. So the clients like yep that server's old. We got rid of that one We did that we did the migration. Sometimes how we got the client We did another migration and then we did another migration. So Yeah, like birds. We're just migrating everywhere migrating everywhere Also, uh IT people that aren't doing what they're charging you for Oh, god Oh boy So we took over and when we took over to this other managed client and we migrated to our system We noticed that it was an inconsistent install of the remote tools that they used So with an inconsistent install, we're like, how's he really monitoring all this? So we uninstalled all of his tools. We uninstalled all his backups. We installed all of our own We removed all the stuff that the other person had done Other IT company and we're being built for and we found that that's the key not a single notice Came to the client about all of that being removed And after we removed it on a thursday, we uninstalled everything migrated to ours ran all the backups We actually removed the backups on friday night because that way we could let them run over the weekend for the client Because they are open 20 literally 24 hours until uh, they technically closed on saturday So the backups kicked off on install them on friday kicked them off on saturday. So Tuesday they waited all the way till tuesday before they let the other IT company know they were fired. They were just like, wow Um, they so you want to solve all this lovely? I told the client. Yeah, they watched me do it That guy never noticed and so they sent him an email that we're not going to be using his services anymore officially We changed all the passwords too. So like we're in the system changing passwords removing his tools that are supposed to be monitoring That he's charging them to monitor and well He's still he never asked if he ever applied to email and today is thursday They fired him on tuesday and as of yesterday afternoon when I talked to the company He has still not replied even to the email. But of course, it's also his own responsiveness is why they're using us instead of them He was also fired. So I guess Yeah, maybe he's under no. I guess maybe i'm under no obligation to reply. Yeah, maybe I we don't know Maybe he knew he was fired when we uninstall all of his stuff The the funny part to that is that we uninstalled all of his stuff without him even batting an eye without him going Yeah, like we monitor backups if something in my dashboard says a backup did not occur on a server that we're managing We go. Hey, let's figure out. Why what's wrong? You know, I always laugh because we keep a local backup and a remote backup that way we can restore things quickly But we're also keeping it off-site We had where occasionally the local backup had a problem because we keep it on some usp drives No big deal that they have a problem that the system notifies us and we're like cool It's off-site But the backup drive has some error and we showed up at a client. They're like, is there something wrong? I'm like, no, not really. We just seen an error on the backup drive So I was I brought a new one and dropped it off and plugged it in and we re-synchronized and we go That's it. Oh, no big deal You know and you're like, oh, I'm like, yeah, I don't know that drive seems to have an error on it We usp drives are less than a hundred dollars So we so we just bring a new one and then we'd bring we sort the old one out here Figure out there's something wrong with it. If the hard drive does went bad But I mean, it's like we watched these dashboards. This is part of the morning ritual. Yeah. Yeah get coffee Make log make check backup logs. It's just well I wouldn't give it for 30. I guess. Well, yeah, technically you would check the backup logs at like 4 30 when you wake up So I guess recheck backup logs. Yeah recheck Which they are monitored and checked throughout the day. So, you know, yeah We keep an eye on everything we got dashboards for all of our managed clients and really else and that's you know I've just the early morning riser of make sure there's no issues that we before even leave my house I know if I'm going to the shop or if I'm going well, I guess I'll drop the kids off at school But I'll make that's not a metaphor for anything. He literally drops the kids off at school. Yeah, not the pool That's much different much different Well, he drops the kids off of the pool, but he also drops the kids off at school All part of the morning ritual Terrible terrible anyways for this blog is not safe. Yeah. Yeah, but today's morning ritual a little different. It turns out I didn't know this so we had a client who Decided to let their domain expire and lost the password to their admin of their g-suite Google hats off to google. They will absolutely absolutely impossible They had to the last couple of weeks such a pain in the butt for us But in a good way in a good way Despite having control of the domain and everything else There's just certain information that both the client doesn't know and we were it was well They changed the password so we don't know it Um, because the owner was the admin account anyways Owner was the admin account He let it all lapse he changed the password and then forgot about he owns multiple businesses So he quit logging into that one because he focused on this other one and made a new office manager And then he tried to log back into the password He just doesn't know it and he also changed security questions and he doesn't know what he changed him to I'm not going to talk about the ridiculous of that I'll talk about how difficult because of them not knowing it and not having access to the backup email that was on the account We simply because they don't have that password either to the email They had set it up But so like literally google's like we can't do anything for you. Well, so here's the solution though short long story short We use those words We have to delete the account But before you can delete the account we get to back it up now the good news is the users know their passwords So we thought okay cool. I'll just use and I've done it before I've used fire fire. I'm sorry thunderbird to download all the email turns out thunderbird's got some size limit issues and they Gmail doesn't so they have saved so many emails over the years that exceeds what thunderbird can download So I'm like oh crap and downloading it off a vault off google wasn't really easy either because this has to kind of be done fast so at 430 I realized my backup I started yesterday and thunderbird had reached its capacity, but they had only downloaded up to 2016 emails and their emails go all the way of course till current day So and I'll I'm gonna probably do a video review on this because I didn't know about this tool I looked at it yesterday and said I think I can do it in thunderbird this tool looks cool It's written in python called gmail g vault. I think it is it's a python script and I'm being a linux guy I like python. I like scripting. So I learned it at 430 I learned that the system was not working at 435. I was learning the python scripts and how to control it And it really cooled the way it used oauth tokens to Validate clients it launches a browser even though it's a command line tool it launched a browser I built all the oauth tokens for each one of the accounts and I copied them over to one of our local servers here in the office From my house and by five I kicked off and wrote a bash script that called and pulled all the clients down And store it created three different wrote for it created a vaults for each one of the clients only three of them Which could I'm glad there's only three so it's downloading all of them on here I'm gonna do a review over the tool because I had heard about the tool. I never really used it It allows you to not just back up it synchronized to your local data store Your entire gmail now not only does it let you do this You can also just do a push and push all the data back into gmail Which is cool So you can set this script up just to back up gmail and you can have it run and it you know It'll keep synchronizing and finding new emails and things like that. It's really cool Yeah, so be on the lookout for tom's review of that. Yes, um, they'll start giving the review now and we don't have time for that. So Yeah It it saved us bottom line because the the account is being deleted pretty soon. Yep So And the thing I like about the tool and this is why I want to do review So one of my goals I have a goal before I do review. I don't just like to talk about things Why do but um, there's a goal and the goal is by the time you watch one of my review videos You understand or know how to use the product From start to finish, you know, that's what the video is about if it's about a feature of the product You learn how to use that feature like my breakdown videos Or if it's a hour long video about pf sense It's because from start to finish from install to firewall We want to make sure you understand the entire process So the same thing with this it wasn't real clear on how to do it with multiple users Ideally the script was to synchronize your gmail account not a company's gmail account with a bunch of individual users So it doesn't say this but what it does is it stores everything in one database Which is cool because if I would have just followed the what looks like the instructions and just added the dash m For multiple users it lets you do multiple users, but it still stores them in one email database It would have just compiled all their emails into one pile So reading further through exactly how you do separate data stores meant writing a script that grabs each one and drops each One into a separate data store and then there's a restore script I put together But I'm going to break down the whole thing of how are you? Are you suggesting that reading the instructions actually help this time? No reading the code so I can understand how to change data stores I would say that this little situation also speaks to why you should have some kind of password and secure note management Yes, um, and I did a video call last past as hacked But why I'm still using it because something that annoys me and we we know what clickbait is We see these salacious headlines for anything that happens on cnn and whatever And it drives me nuts because it that that's a human problem This is a problem that we see in the tech world, you know everything is like these horrible headlines like last past hacked So if you care about the details about the hack and it's referred to as uh stacking attacks There isn't just a hack. There's a stack and a series of other hacks that have to occur to get to that hack Those are the hacks that uh the headlines kind of don't want to talk about they like the headline last past hack Well, you require these other hacks on your computer to be in place in order for that hack to work When it's there's that level of threat is more complicated and it makes for a great headline, but it's really Yeah, it's not true. Take a look at tom's video. Yeah, so I got a video. I'll break down the detail on that I mean there are times when the product just has a giant Flaming security hole in it. Um, we're looking at sysco, uh and the cia leaks again because well sysco found out They had a big hole so well But any good technician should have uh protected against it But either way there are hacks that are referred to as zero days and are they're non-trivial as in yeah There's just a flaw where I type this in Someone found an amazing hack uh for local user account. They they actually posted this They said I don't know if this is a hack or this is a feature of windows But watch this and it allows users even with locked user accounts It allows other admin users just to get control of that account And now granted you need to localize this to the computer, but it was internally interesting It'll grab sessions and I'm like Wow and we're not talking like the guy typed code He typed a command in and added a session key to it Something that you don't need any tools for so literally just sitting at the council He typed in the command and it did it so he's like is this built into windows for a reason It's kind of a zaskin. It's not a bug tom. It's a feature. It's a feature It's a big difference between bugs and features. Yes, but bottom line get yourself some kind of password management And secure note management like last pass. That's what we use and we like Yeah, don't look around the headlines. It's still safe product. It's still a solid product They had it fit. They last pass themselves had it fixed like almost immediately. Yes This was done through your normal secure vulnerability Disclosure what happens is we have security researchers. We refer to them as white hat researchers They find flaws in systems and when they find them they contact the company and they go Hey, we found a bug in here Um, you have 90 days to fix this bug or it's going to go public is generally the rule because it's that's for google's project zero And then the company can go back and forth that for some reason the bug requires too much coding They will They may ask for an extension on it, but last pass fix it within 24 hours. Yeah, so So good stuff. So tom has to get to his other thing. So we got a roll. Yep, but thanks I'm going to go put stickers. We got a new client with another Uh, yeah, they fired an IT guy and they're like, look, we have all this stuff and none of it's documented And uh, we're huge on documentation like the new company We we were in their office and we vpn and we showed you to wiki and how we do documentation So we are there we outlawed into wiki and showed them their documentation on our laptop We don't allow client computers to install stuff. Anyways, um, we're showing them We, you know, we give them a copy of their documentation, uh, and we hand deliver it because we won't send it You know digitally we keep everything super secure, but they're like, wow We you know map their network made lists. I said that's important stuff. So also Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Last I checked there was over 35 hundred of you on our channel Yep, thank you. I'm rolling awesome. So if you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. Yep And if you're watching this on uh, the facebook's uh, go over to our youtube's and subscribe there or just like our page and You know look for our videos and all that other fun stuff and uh, big announcement coming next week We'll leave you with that. Ha ha big announcement. Yeah, we're link baiting and Look at that. Yeah, watch for more or whatever you want to watch next week. Oh, hold on. Oh, yeah Hold on things We've I've been wanting to do this in every video like what is this behind me and I won't tell you But we made a thing well steve made a thing because steve makes things And it's a like thing It's battery powered and steve likes to make things that you first look at and go now. How is that useful? Yeah, but maybe you turn it out. It's very useful. It's actually very useful And we'll tell you why later. Uh, we'll tell you why it's useful later. So but And this has nothing to do with next week's announcement. Maybe it does this is just This is just tom's adb going crazy. Oh my god. I know when my fidgety things are here. We're gonna do fidgety things too So, all right, that's enough. All right, enough of that I'm gonna take it in my office. It's a good call. I'm there you go. All right Well, tom's leaving with the thing. Uh, make sure you watch next week for our big announcement and you know, just because we're cool See you next week