567 Tech Audit: Hyper-V for RDP

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here and welcome to another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals. If you support businesses in any manner a managed service provider, solo tech computer repair shop this is the show for you, where we do everything we can to help you support those networks and run your business better, smarter and faster. This is the Wednesday live show. I should probably say it's good to be back. I took last week off. Well, that's probably not the right way to say it. I didn't take the week off. I missed you guys, but I was working. I was finishing up a visit to the big house up in Palm Beach. Some of you saw the social media pics that I put up. That, of course, I was asked to take down because they were of a rich person's house and they didn't want those on there. So that was something that happened last week and I was getting ready for this big project.

Now, some of you may remember that I've talked about this from time to time. This is the $150,000 network upgrade for my client with multiple offices. It was a hodgepodge of different things. I will get into that and, of course, I will tell you the good, the bad and the ugly and you can tell me where I went wrong. You can tell me what you liked, didn't like, and I will have my own personal tech audit, which may put me into tech therapy afterwards. But we'll see how it goes.

I know that some of you are excited and I've gotten messages from people that will either be watching or listening in the car. So for those of you that did that, welcome, and I hope that you enjoy this. I'm also going to be. I've got two big press announcements that I think are going to be good and let me see here. And I've got a great, a great Florida man story for you tonight. How good is it? I'm leading off by telling you it is a great story, so you are going to love that tonight. Let me begin by saying the IT Business Podcast is presented to you by Net Ally, your number one ally when it comes to handheld diagnostic tools. I use them every day. They are a wonderful sponsor and thank you for that. We will mention other sponsors later, but let's get right into it, because I don't want you to turn that dial.

So this project that I have been chatting about over the last probably three months is a law firm with. They used to have seven offices, they're down to six, they'll probably go down to five, but they are not decreasing users, they are actually consolidating space. Because of the pandemic A lot of people are working from home, so they are accommodating those users and we turned one of their offices. Well, let me rephrase it this way so two of the offices were actually on domain, so they had the main office on the East Coast and then another office on the West Coast. Those were all domain computers. We had servers in both offices. We had six servers in the West Coast office, eight servers in the East Coast office, and then the other offices were all branch offices that remoted into terminal servers at the main office.

They decided that they wanted to make the West Coast completely remote as well. So we consolidated I think it was 44 workstations. We didn't consolidate them, we converted them from domain computers to remote computers. So we ripped out all the servers there, took them off the domain, no domain controller, no SQL server, because this company had an application, two applications, their case management system, which is called Time Matters, and their billing program, which is called JURUS, and those were all SQL based databases that they replicated between the offices and maintained two SQL servers. For that the file servers were also separate. They had a file server in the West Coast office and a file server in the East Coast office. So we migrated those files from the West Coast to the East Coast and we took a total of 51 users and moved them to brand new RDS servers in the main office, and normally we would do one server per office.

The other offices always had less than 30 people, so 20, 25-ish. I always try to keep this company at less than 30 users because they have some pretty robust programs. Time Matters is a network hog when it comes to performance and running Time Matters running JURUS, the billing program, running the full version of office with Outlook. They are heavy Outlook users and they are using Adobe Acrobat and they do a ton of PDF manipulation where they'll combine documents and strip documents and they'll take documents and make 300-page PDFs that they will use to either upload to the court or take to trial with them. They are just hammering these servers. So I know that when I was talking with some people on how it sized these servers they were like oh yeah, the full servers will run plenty, plenty. Well, let me give you the specs of what I did and then you can give me your opinion.

So instead of doing two separate physical servers, we did one physical server and did two Hyper-V servers, one for each remote desktop. The server itself was a 12-core Intel system. This was the first time in a long time that I did not go HP, so I partnered with another MSP that was able to get very good pricing on custom servers, so they got that for me. When I priced out the HP server back in June or somewhere around there, maybe even May, the HP server was going to cost me 40 grand. These servers cost less than 15. So I got a full server. Now I still had to buy the operating system, but all the hardware was under 15 grand. So that worked out great for me, and so I did the main server 2022 and two RDS servers in Hyper-V. The physical box had 256 gigs of RAM and the system drive for that system was a RAID 1, 1.92 terabyte or 2 terabyte solid state drive. And then I did two sets of RAID 1, 4 terabyte drives and I did one VM on one set and the other VM on another, and that kept them separate. And then we also put in 10G network cards so that I could create virtual NICs for the RDS servers and be able to run them at 10G.

And look, already a question here, Tim Golden only one host VM and not two in a cluster failover. Well, here we go. So this is a client that, if I had to go back and explain the history with them, they just baby steps, is basically where we are with them. They I got them at a point where they were just under 70 users and they had only one terminal server. Back then and in the beginning they were just novices and when you talk about children on there, they really did not want to do anything. That was complicated when, when they decided to set up this time matters program and set up the databases, to begin with I recommended that they do DFS and sync files back and forth. So the West Coast had their files and the East Coast had their files and they tried to tell me oh well, we don't share files, we don't need that. East Coast people have their files, west Coast people have their files.

So they spent probably the first part of our relationship keeping everything as separate as possible, which is why we ended up with the two SQL servers and why we ended up with one terminal server per office, and I did mention to them a few years ago why don't we put it in a terminal server farm. We can do a single gateway and load balance and they couldn't wrap their heads around it. We like what we're doing, we're fine. So money is really not the issue with them, it is the technology understanding. So trying to keep things as simple as possible for them is what we did To get where we are today. Who leaps and bounds? So? And yes, Tim, raid 1, not RAID 5, only because of the way that we set these up, each, as I mentioned, the system drive is just RAID 1 for that, the RAID 1's for the terminal servers. I will be doing some backups of those virtual machines to other stuff. So this again, keeping it simple, not going super techy on them with doing.

Originally we were thinking about a RAID 10 and just making one big RAID 10 cluster and then being able to section off stuff. But every time I explained to them that if we spun up a virtual machine we'd have to get licensing, and they were like what do you mean? We bought the machine. So this is where we are with that. So that's what ended up happening. So did I finish the specs there? So that was pretty much it.

I just mentioned the 10 gig NIC cards. So each RDS server has 10G capability. Now they're not anywhere close to 10G on the network, but everything that I got from them the RDS server, the SQL server we bought them a new SQL server. Other specs 256 gigs of RAM, 16 core processor and we ended up doing four spindles for them All RAID 1, we did a system drive for the OS and the program files, we did a spindle for the database itself, we did a spindle for the logs and transactions and then we did a spindle for their backups, because they do their own internal SQL backups and then we push those backups off to somewhere else. So this is where they are with the SQL server and we got them from the two. No more replicating data across the VPN. So we are now down to one server in their main office and again, since everybody now remotes into that office, we only have to worry about the one SQL server there.

So that was the big thing we did with that I was going to mention. Yes, so on the SQL server we also put 10G NIC cards in that. We got them a big old and not a big old it's not the big one but a 3622 Synology Drive for their file servers. They have right now about 12 terabytes of data that they're using just their Word files, pdfs, nothing super major. So we did a Synology for that 3622, which has a 10G card in there, and, if you want to know the switches, I did the EnGenius 10 terabyte switch. There I actually did an 8-port drive directly connected to the servers and then we also put in EnGenius has a multi-gig 48 port switch that we did for connecting the desktops and everything and that has a combination of one gig, 2.5 gig and 10 gig channels in that switch. So that's kind of how the network sits on top of everything there. So that was fun and thank you, Mr. Tim. Good forward thinking for the 10G NIC.

Yeah, I told them if we were going to do this, we needed to think ahead. This is a company that they think they're only going to use this solution for one to two years, and I tell them no. The reason we're upgrading this, by the way, is that this is all the 2012 infrastructure and, as this law firm is an insurance defense firm, one of the requirements that they have from their clients is that they have to stay up to date with their software, their hardware, their cybersecurity and all of these things. So I had the conversation with them earlier this year that we've got to do these things because I'm not going to be the reason that these clients pull their files. And that's probably the one thing that, if you work with law firms, if you want to get to the heart of the matter with them, it's not about the money. Sometimes it's about the image, but it's always about the files. So, in terms of an insurance defense firm, where they have the big law, the big insurance carriers, giving them hundreds of files a year, threatening to lose those, certainly gets their attention. So that's the reason that we're finally doing this not because I recommended it or not, because even though it's in my agreement with them, we're going to stay up to date. It's the fact that you might lose files if you don't do this. So that's how we got to this point. So that's the framework of what I did this past week.

Now, this is only part one. This is a two-stage project. So you did not hear me yet mention the domain controller, which is yet to be changed out to get them up to a 2022 network. They also have well, they're still running a company webpage from SharePoint when they had small business server. That we upgraded, I believe, to the free SQL version 2014. So that needs to be upgraded. That is on a 2012 server still. They have a monitoring program called SysKit and basically that is a hosted on-prem version of Active Track where they can monitor when their users log in and stuff that is also SQL based. So that is a separate server as well.

So first point of advice that you guys can give me I am thinking of doing this as another Hyper-V system where I put in one physical host and run each of these in their own Hyper-V instance. I know that people don't recommend running SQL or any database as a VM, but as these are small servers and again they're both running on the free edition, their SysKit, I think, is getting to the point where they may have to pay for a full SQL license. But I'm thinking, if we have to do that, we'll just simply buy a two core license and run that and they should be OK. So that's the one thing that I haven't decided what I'm doing yet. So that again will condense them down from two physical machines to one physical machines, but yet we will do that, as Hyper-V is my thought and already a comment push that SQL to Azure. Well, they're not ready to go to Azure yet, but we're close.

Part of the reason that we can't get them there yet is they are on a hosted exchange with App River. They made that decision again back when they got started with Time Matters, which Time Matters integrates with Outlook, and their consultant at the time, I believe, preferred exchange, and I don't think that 365 was out there as much as it is now. If this was a decision that was being made now, it would be 365 all the way, but I think back then their option was oh, I remember they actually had a physical exchange server that was getting ready to die and instead of getting a new exchange server on-prem, it was suggested that they go to hosted exchange. So that's how that got there. So we are starting to get to the situation where they might be ready, because part of the new world that they live in is that they can't just simply buy the what is it called the volume license of Microsoft Office anymore, which is what we used to do for their terminal servers. Now Microsoft doesn't want to sell that. So you have to buy the 365 App license to run on those terminal servers. So those 51 users that we converted, they're now paying I don't know, I think it's $8 a month, I don't even know what the cost is but now they’re paying the monthly cost to do their Microsoft Word, excel, outlook on that virtual server. So now that we've got them into the 365 ecosystem, we can probably now, within the next year or so, move them to 365, which will then make it to where we can start doing the Azure Active Directory. We'll probably have to do that hybrid scenario at first, but that's where we are with that. So, yes, Tim makes the comment here, move them to 365.

E5, they're a law firm. Yes, yes. And Tim, you also mentioned the benefits of DLP and eDiscovery. Again, this is a firm. We've had this discussion and, for whatever reason, they won't pull the trigger. I think it's going to have to be one of their clients that tells them hey, you need to start doing X, y and Z. The hurdle that I'm trying to get over them with right now is simply their archiving. They are not doing archiving properly. I should probably have gone back. For people that may not have heard me talk about this particular client in the past. This is actually a co-managed client, so they have an office administrator or firm administrator, depending on which day of the week he wants to change his email signature who fancies himself as an IT person Not a professional, but somebody that is kind of the gatekeeper between the decision maker that I need to speak with and what we do, and he's also the person that anytime there's a project, his first response is well, can you show me how to do it?

And my response is always no, that's my job and you're paying me a lot of money to do it right. They also have a junior on staff, and this is for those of you that have known my junior stories. This is the junior that is Cisco certified and doesn't think he needs any help from me in managing the network. So every time I get an email from him that sends a request for help with the phrase please advise, I delete, because my response at that point is you're Cisco certified, figure it out. So that's what I'm dealing with Now the managing partner and his wife, who is the bookkeeper, and the I forget what the other term for the other partner is.

Whenever I do get to speak with them. It certainly cuts out a lot of the translation issues that we have. Again, this firm administrator likes to be the gatekeeper, likes to be the one that explains what we're doing, obviously messes up what we're doing a lot, and I've got more stories about that tonight. We'll see if we get to those. But getting to them, they understand it and that's another reason why we're doing a lot of this. They knew it had to be done. If it was up to the gatekeeper, we probably wouldn't be doing this. So that's where we are with the framework.

So what also came along with that is this is a client that is still running RDP naked and for those of you that don't know what the term RDP naked means, is that they are still connecting to their terminal service through an IP address, through the firewall, with no protection. Now, when we started to talk about cybersecurity and what we can do to support them, part of our agreement is that they are going to put together a secure remote solution. I sold them 85 licenses of TruGrid because that was the easiest solution to give them, because they did not want to pay for a VPN solution that I would have to manage. They didn't want to buy an upgraded hardware which we use, sonic Wall and we would have put in one of the Sonic Wall VPN units to help with that, because we're over 150 users Actually, it was almost 190 at the time we started talking about this, so it was going to put a lot of load on their network. I did convince them to upgrade bandwidth, so that was being done. So we sold them TruGrid and in two years, I think, only three people have been using it.

And at one point they asked me well, can we get this off the invoice? I said no, because this is the solution that you told your clients that you would do to secure your remote to desktop. And we're going to do it. Come hell or high water, we're going to do it. And this was the opportunity that I finally got to the point where I told them any new system that we put in, any new remote server, there will not be an IP address for it. Luckily, we don't have IP addresses to assign, even though they wanted to buy them. But I said nope, these two new servers will not have an IP address that people can get to from the outside. They have to go through TruGrid. So another part of this project. Remember, we are converting a domain office to remote, we're condensing two SQL servers to one. I'm ripping out four servers at the one office and, by the way, these 51 people have to use TruGrid.

So the Monday morning after the weekend, all that morning was all about getting people logged in and connected through TruGrid. We had put together all the documentation for them, sent them the PDF instructions, sent them the links for their authenticator app, their desktop app and for I don't know, 98%. It was wonderful. The 2% basically all ended up being Mac issues and although I didn't find out, one was a Mac issue I actually got.

One of the first requests was to open up Egypt, because one of the attorneys was in Egypt and I said well, you should have told me that no big deal, go into TruGrid, add Egypt to the allowed list. But they still could not connect. And junior was somebody that I said you know what? Why don't you take this? You run with it. It's one user, I'm sure you can figure it out. Well, it wasn't until the end of the day that he finally got back to me and said you know, we still can't get this to work.

And we started to find out that this person had an old Mac that wasn't going to work because TruGrid, obviously, as well as other products, are going to say look, in order for you to use our stuff, you've got to be at least at a certain version. So I think that with TruGrid you have to be at OS X 11.5 or higher. I don't know what the names are, but I think the name of the operating system that this person was using in Egypt was Mojave. I don't know how old that was, but that was something that was not going to be able to work. So that was a big thing. And then we had two people in Colorado that could not get in and we found out the same thing. They were using an older Mac version. But they were also doing something that I found interesting. They were trying to share one computer and it's a husband and wife team and the husband would log in and work for a little bit and then the wife would try to get on and switch to her session on RDP and they were getting all mixed up and then getting kicked out of TruGrid. And I realized that and said you guys, you can't be sharing a desktop. The security feature in this is one person, one TruGrid, one session. That's why you have the multi-factor authentication. So that was interesting.

After we got all that so the RDP stuff, the SQL stuff, the domain to RDP TruGrid, and then the joy that I had is what I would describe as backup migration joy. Part of the reason that I did not have a show last week not only was the trip to Palm Beach, but because I had to prepare for this project, I actually drove over to Tampa on Thursday. We started this project on Friday, and Friday I actually went around to all the desktops that were going to be migrated up to the terminal servers and I was going to use fab's auto backup and push their profiles over to the new servers. Bandwidth did not allow for that so luckily I brought two SSD external drives and went around to each of the desktops and backed up the workstations to the SSD drives, so that was not a big deal. Saturday I had a tech join me, my good friend Troy, who does a lot of work with me, so he and I did the physical removing of the desktops from the domain, turning them into brand stations, setting up an RDP connection, blah, blah, blah.

And the next step was to take their existing terminal servers. That were old and I thought you know fab's auto backup is such a great program. I would just simply pull the drives out of the servers, connect them with an external cable to the new servers and I can transfer the profiles from the hard drive to the terminal servers. Those of you that use fab's auto backup, you guys know you've probably done this before. Instead of doing each profile individually, you can literally select all and export and then when it comes time to upload, as long as everybody has an initial login to the server, you can do upload and it will transfer all those files up.

So one of the drives beautiful, connected it, everything came up, started, the transfer went to go do the second one. Now, what I did not realize was that if you have a drive type other than basic I was going to say standard, but other than basic or GPT and that drive type is dynamic, it won't work. So that second drive, which had about 24 of the profiles on it, I could not upload the way that I wanted to with fab's, so I literally had to run back to my office, get the server, bring it back to the client, put the drives in which there was one drive in that I could have probably just done one drive, but I put all the drives back in, fired it up and did the export of fab's manually, meaning I could export them all at one time. But when it came time to restore them to the new server, if it's not a transfer in fab's, you cannot do a restore all at one time. So I had to do 24 restorations manually, which turned out to be fun. So that was my joy with the backup.

So don't know if anybody's ever went into that, because most people I know that have used fab's only use it for workstations. I use it for these terminal servers. Just, I mean, that's really the reason I got fab's, you know all those many years ago. I still use it for desktops, but this is where fab's is well worth its weight in gold or silver or any other denomination you can think of. It was just fantastic. So shout out to fab's for that great program. So ooh, so that was a lot. There were other things that were done, but that was the bulk of the project and thank you for the questions in clarification.

Now, of course, if you have comments, I will welcome them. I had meant to have ready for you all a link that you could go and enter your comments, suggestions and feedback, but I did not get that ready for you. So if you want to just simply go to www.itbusinesspodcast.com and send me a message, or you can email me or seek me out on any of the social media platforms, that would be great. You can find me, of course, on the Facebook, LinkedIn. Oh, I'm on the gram, by the way. If you looked up IT business podcast on the gram, I've got stuff there. Let's see here. You know what. I'm going to take a little break here and have a sip from my IT business podcast Mug.

By the way, this would be a great sponsorship opportunity for anybody out there that wants to do a sponsorship of the show. Get your name and logo out there in front of everybody. If you're listening by audio, you don't see it, but trust me, it looks great. All right. So I'll let some people get some comments together and since we're talking about sponsors, let me go ahead and do this real quick. We will say again thank you to Net Ally, the presenting sponsor. They basically provide sponsorship for every live show that we do here. I talked about their handheld networking tools that can help you validate network connectivity in less than 10 seconds and can help with solutions for planning, deployment and ongoing network troubleshooting. Netally.com.

The live show is also sponsored by Computers Done Right, a full service IT provider offering managed services and consulting in Venice, Florida, down here on the West Coast of South Florida. They include proactive monitoring, network management, data backup recovery, cybersecurity and website services. So computers done right can work for you with whatever you have and provide the necessary support. ComputersDoneRight.com and our good friend Carrie over at instant house call is a sponsor If you are an emerging MSP. Solo tech, this is a great remote support software designed for small business and allows customers to start a tech session by downloading a small app or clicking an icon on their desktop. The software offers lots of useful tools, just like the big boys cross-platform compatibility with both PC and Mac, full UAC compatibility, unattended remote access, file sharing and customizable branding. Carrie offers you a 15 day risk free trial where you don't even have to put in your credit card at InstantHouseCall.com. Thank you, thank you, sponsors.

Let me continue. Let me take care of these press releases that I told you about the first press release. Actually, both of these I got today, so this is how hot. Well, I shouldn't say that one of them I got today, the other one I actually got last week, so we'll start with that one, and this is a release.

Channel program and Syncro unveil groundbreaking channel technology map. The channel program, in partnership with Syncro, has announced the release of the 2023 channel technology map, a fascinating resource for anyone operating with the channel. It is a comprehensive map that categorizes vendors by product specialty and offers a single screen overview of the entire IT channel landscape. This is a program built by insights from more than 3000 MSP reviews on the channel program and they've got some key features here. We mentioned the vendor category categorization sponsored by Syncro. Let's see here. Syncro apparently played an instrumental role, ensuring its accuracy and re-biot reliability, in highlighting the power of collaboration within the channel.

You know, here's the question, and I did actually respond to them already and asking them to bring somebody on the show, because this sounds to me like a version of NaviStack, which was presented by the channel program as well. So both the channel program people, Kevin or Emily over at Syncro, I'd like to get more information from this. It sounds like a great deal the single screen view of the channel, data driven insights and an invaluable resource for stakeholders. I just need to know more. It's a great press release, I think, but I want to know more. Is it NaviStack branded or is this truly a new collaboration? So that is something we'll find out later. This is the press release that we have hot off the press and this is you know. Tim Golden is the person that was asking some questions earlier. He is in the chat with us. He was also on the show that comes on right before this, all Things MSP, with Eric Anthony. Tim was on their asking them questions about building a security stack. So that was right up his alley.

But today the big news released Compliance risk receives $3.5 million investment from Bellini Capital will expand governance as a service solution for MSP's and they are rebranding. Their new name will be compliance scorecard and the name change reflects how the company's technology and support will simplify compliance, making it easy for MSPs to add the critical offering to the services they provide. And let's see here what else is. And for those of you that do not know, compliance risk governance as a service, it includes things like industry specific policy packs, including HIPAA, FTC Safeguard, NIST, CSF and CMMC. If you don't know those categories, you're probably not a managed service provider, but they also help with change control, tracking, end user training and they have a weekly MSP peer support group and some great stuff there. So we will have the links to that where you can get more information.

They will also be having a booth at this year's IT Nation Connect that will be held this November 8th through the 10th in Orlando, Florida, booth number 1218. Now I can say this I'm going to go check it out because I will be there. I will be attending IT Nation. This time we will be covering the PitchIT Contest that will be narrowed down to the three finalists which will compete for the Battle Royale Cup or whatever they call it. I actually have to go and shop for the third place set of steak knives that I will be presenting there. So, Tim, I will see you in O-Town for IT Nation IT Nation Connect November 8th through the 10th. So, folks, if you're near O-Town or if you've already bought your ticket, we'll see you there. All right, and let's see Tim has. I will get that link there. He's got the link for the press release and I will have the link to anything else in the show notes, all right. So I've got all that out the way. Let's see Anybody else have any comments or questions, suggestions or anything about my project.

But again, this is part one of the project. It is going to include some other stuff that I mentioned. I've still got to change out the domain controller, convert two more SQL servers. I actually have another file server that I need to add to the Synology and some other stuff there. So it is fun.

I will say this that one of the things that I think is crucial I mentioned that this is a co-managed client and I heard on Eric show earlier with, by the way, the guest was Craig. Willard was the guest and they were talking about when you engage with a client and Craig made a point of saying that he is an all-in or all out kind of guy, and I think a lot of us would like to be that. And this is a situation where, obviously, as a co-managed client, I am not all in, but we are about as in as we can get, minus the junior, and I am working on a plan that the next time we need to replace junior that it will be replaced by my staff, where we will have somebody in house and take care of all of that for them. But the point that I wanted to make is that there were a couple of things not related to the actual physical project that I did in terms of, you know, spanking out the systems, planning the migration, but because we are not fully embedded in this environment, we ran into a couple of issues where there were some merge applications that they were doing with Word docs, built into the time matters, where over the years they wouldn't link to a shared folder on the SQL server, not a part of the file share. That we did not know about. So on Monday morning, as people are starting to work, we thought everything was great.

The program was in the right location, everybody was pointed to the correct database, it was up, it was as fast as it could be with everybody you know merging and syncing up Outlook and all of that stuff. But the biggest problem is that people could not connect to some merge folders from the West Coast because, I mentioned earlier, this client kept East Coast files on the East Coast and West Coast files on the West Coast and when we migrated everything, we migrated the file server. All of that was fine, but we did not migrate their data directory on the SQL server. That was not related to the program. So they had thousands of forms that were in this sub directory that we did not know about and that server was offline. So we had to stand that server up to copy over that folder of forms and data and stuff. And then there was another part of the program, inside of time matters, where when they linked to documents, instead of linking to the shared folder by letter drive, they were mapping by UNC. So there were probably hundreds of locations where it was incorrectly linked to the old SQL server by name that they now have to go back and change.

And of course, the gatekeeper, who did know this, but because he would not sit down with me and do a full discovery plan of what we're going to be doing and is there anything that we need to know of that we need to make sure works. And he's like no, you're good, just transfer the server or blah, blah, blah. If we had done that, we would have known ahead of time to take care of those drive mappings, to get those squared away. But he decided not to tell us and he started to try to yell on me about it and I'm like look, that's not on me. You didn't tell us.

And one of the discussion points that we had is that if it's not a part of our scope, you're not responsible. Now, if you want us to help, it's going to be an extra charge or you have to do it yourself. Remember, they've got a Cisco certified junior on staff, so they haven't decided yet what they're doing the server. Actually, we stood up and I told them they have two weeks, because that is when I plan to go back and finish stage two of the project and at that point in time we're taking it down. So they have to have all their stuff transferred, converted or figured out by then. So that was just. Again, I can take some blame for that, because I didn't push for a full discovery meeting and ask for all the gotchas that might be around. But again, when you've got a situation where you're not fully invested which we try to be but we're not we know that we're not. We know that there are things that they do where they do not talk to us, they do not ask our permission. We're only told about it afterwards if there's a problem that they want us to help them fix. And we're getting better.

The owners have told the gatekeeper that he needs to do a better job of involving us from the beginning of not just projects but any decision. If it has to do with a computer, a network or anything, even including the web, anything that has to do with tech, we need to be consulted. That's where we're getting. That is the one thing that I would recommend to everybody with new clients, old clients. Don't let clients think that they can make tech decisions without you. So I like the saying that Craig had listen, we're either all in or all out, so you let us be a part of everything or we walk away. Not always easy to do, especially when the client pays you a lot of money, and so as long as the check clears, we'll keep working for them. So that's my project. So I've opened myself up to Uncle Marv's tech audit. So feel free to digest this If you are listening. After the fact, I will still take your thoughts and suggestions. Again, I will try to get a link up on the site where it'll be directly related to the question. You can just go to the link and put your stuff in, or you can email me, marvin@itbusinesspodcast.com. You can track me down on the Facebook and ask me that way and we will continue the discussion.

Part two, obviously will be coming and if anybody else is out there and they're willing to do what I did talk about a project and get feedback. You know we do these things at conferences, we do these things in peer groups, but I think this would be a good thing for us to start doing here and having these discussions and getting you know, not just feedback. Sometimes there are some great ideas and somewhere out there tonight, you know, asking me why I didn't consider, you know, raid five, or why we didn't do the server farm and why we haven't moved them to 365. All things that we need to be challenged on from time to time. You know we're not always 100% right, but as long as we can help each other and provide each other with suggestions and helpful tips and be available for each other, that is what we ask for. So we will continue that discussion.

And now it's time for Florida man. So normally I would go through and find the craziest, wackiest story that is out there, but tonight I need to tell you about how big Florida man has gotten. So if you're able to watch the video and you're able to see on the screen, this is the picture that they are putting out there for something that is called the Florida man Games and you heard that correctly and I'm going to put a link in the show notes. I just put it in the chat here that, if you are watching and can click on the link, the Florida man Games is being called the wildest competition sporting events on earth. It is trademarked, folks. The Florida man Games is trademarked, so you can actually let me pull up my story that I had here, because I think it is just absolutely so.

The article starts off by saying Floridians are strange. Some of us say things like Jiffy Feet and we ask Google questions like what do I do if there's a gator in my yard? And we are known nationwide for spawning the Florida man. And now there's a chance for Florida man everywhere to prove themselves worthy of the name. We've had a Netflix series named after us. We have recent stories of the man trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a hamster wheel. We have the story Chad's favorite about throwing a gator through a drive-thru Wendy's.

But now if you're that kind of person and have four friends who are two, you can apply as a team to represent your county in the Florida man Games. So they are going to be doing a series of games, and the games are on the website titled weaponized pool, noodle, mud duel, evading, arrest, obstacle course. Category five cash grab, a catalytic converter, two bikes and a handful of copper pipes, race against time and the beer belly, Florida sumo. And this is folks, I am not making this up, I'm telling you, check out the link. They are going to be having former American gladiators as judges Dan “Nitro” Clark and Lori “Ice” Fetrick and trust me, I don't know who they are because I don't think I watched American gladiators past the first season. But if you know that, that was a great thing. And of course, there are other contests. There is a mullet contest, there is a Florida mam pinup contest, chicken coop, bingo, 911 fight, night brawl of the badges. And this one is for law enforcement, as officers take on firefighters In the Florida man games, so that, my friends, is your Florida man story of the night, possibly of the year, better than the Netflix special that they had. And if you are in Florida and, I mean Mike Smith, Ron Cervantes, all my good friends, john Reed, rookie, and there's others, ray Ann, oh, ray Ann, yes, but you need go, Tampa can have its own crew. There's a whole bunch of people over in Tampa. I think we should put together a team and represent the it community in the Florida man games. So reach out to me and let me know what you think.

Well, folks, that is going to do it for this episode of the it business podcast. I thank you for your patronage, for hanging out and for participating. Great questions and feedback tonight. Already I got some stuff off air that I haven't yet read. I've got some messages. I will get to those and I leave myself open for tech therapy after this, as you guys critique what I have done in my domain migration and hyper V RDP network set up here. So let me know what you think. I will be back next week with another show and we will continue on and let me see just another chat here. Great show, thank you. Thank you very much. Well, folks, be good, be nice. We'll see you all next time and until then, Holla.