There's an apt phrase that I picked up while in Africa that applies well to this. It's not broken, it's just cheap.

@DustinB3403 said:

@gjacobse said:

Looking for a MP3 player.. Started laundry and dishes.. wondering what else to get into..

Sounds like you have the day off. . .

No. He doesn't. LOL

Is tcp correct? Shouldn't that be udp for that traffic?

@gjacobse said:

@Minion-Queen said:

Yes it is. I am there just to meet with the client @art_of_shred is going to actually be working

What - He actually works? Seems that all he does is give me a difficult time about my spelling. There has to be something else for him to do than to correct my spelling all the time.

FTFY

/facepalm

@dafyre No, but it's 20 degrees outside today, here in NY...

@MattSpeller I'm not sure that was the intended use for the large magnet, but I like how you think. Real problem-solving skills.

@MattSpeller said:

Second Monday is getting better, exchange just fell on it's face and came back up but only with internal LAN access.

I need a drink.

Today is TRULY a "Second Monday"!!

@Dashrender Or a scary one...

I also wonder if the NSA shares info with the FBI, and if I will be getting a knock at my door in the next 30 minutes.

@MattSpeller I was simply thinking that whatever effect, if any, would be far less from a 2V LED than a 110V string of incandescent bulbs.

@dafyre got tired of that stuff, so I put in a pellet stove. Bags come on a pallet. Carry them in and keep a stack next to the stove in the basement. (I rigged up a forced-air system, so it acts as a furnace and does a great job.)

@JaredBusch said:

@DustinB3403 said:

For a SMB (180 Employees) not heavily focused on troubleshooting our network (mostly because it's a one off issue) what tools would you recommend?

I looked over their stuff at SpiceWorld and asked them to host the St Louis SpiceCorp last fall. The LinkSprinter is awesome for the simple tasks like that.

Yup, we have a couple of those, and they are great. Very handy little tools!

@dafyre said:

@art_of_shred said:

@dafyre got tired of that stuff, so I put in a pellet stove. Bags come on a pallet. Carry them in and keep a stack next to the stove in the basement. (I rigged up a forced-air system, so it acts as a furnace and does a great job.)

Do you have that tied in with the AC as well?

Pellet stoves don't do AC too well. Nah, no AC. I live in NY, remember?

Speaking of wall jacks... what tools do you have that can verify correct voltage to a wall jack, for things like AP's and VOIP phones?

@scottalanmiller said:
at the end of the day we have only a single job: to do this better than a business could do without us (hopefully by a margin large enough to justify our cost.)

This is easy to agree with, but then I think that we're using a poor example to prop this up. If IT's job is to save the business money and make things run more efficiently, why not talk about actual IT concerns, like servers, switches, virtualization, VDI, etc.? Why QuickBooks? Should the decision of what accounting program to use be an IT-based decision? It might be, but I doubt many business owners would see it that way.

@coliver said in Vitelity issues?:

@art_of_shred had similar issues in the past and had to do something special as far as incoming and outgoing trunks were concerned. I don't remember if there is a write-up for that or not.

Yeah, but our issues were just load balancing on Vitelity's side of things... or rather our not being set up to use their load balancing feature. It was loss of service, not loss of quality (I'm glad... that would have been hard to track down). We would get tied to a single SIP server at boot-up and then if that server got full we lost the ability to make/receive calls until it cleared up. They changed the rules of the game and didn't bother to tell us. That's not the first time and surely won't be the last.

A pallet of pellets is typically (50) 40# bags = 2,000#. $250 is an average price for the mid-grade stuff that would be available at HD.

D'oh!

We have customers who use QB, as well as Office 365, etc. The decisions about what the business owner chooses to use is not left to us. It is our job to support all of the above, whether we like it or not, or think it's good to use. Hence, the note that this decision is nearly always not left to the IT department to decide. If we're talking small business start-ups, there probably is no "IT guy" when that decision is made. Again, you are judging the whole process from the perspective of IT, and not the perspective of the owner. I agree with your "ideal" process, but that's just not how it usually works. If the IT department gets to weigh-in, smack down QB. If not, the world doesn't cease to spin. The picture you've been painting, whether you mean to or not, is that it does just that.