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Justin Esgar:
<Silence>
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, so I've been up since 4:00 AM central time, which is 5:00 AM our time, which, you know, time zones are a construct. So I don't really understand how many of that works, and I
Eric Anthony:
Don't like them, period.
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>, well, the thing is like, I'm so tired because like in my head I'm like, I got up at 4:00 AM but now that I'm back in New Jersey, I'm like, I got up at 5:00 AM but really I got up at 4:00 AM and because I was in Iowa, because there's only one flight, or like one Allegiant air only flies to and from Des Moines from the airport nearest me Mondays and Fridays. So I flew out Monday. I came home today, Friday, and I spent, you know, a good four days there. And then one of my team members came up from Columbia, Missouri, and we went and just hit up all of these clients and just did like, we did four ubiquity stack installs, and then met a new client who's met a client who's moving and then sent them a cove for an entire UBI ubiquity stack install, which will happen in October.
So we just like bum rushed around town all over, you know and just crushed. That's what you gotta do sometimes as an owner. You gotta get your hands dirty. We went into a client who's like, they had their old internet provider ran the fiber in like a two inch metal conduit pipe, and the new internet provider was digging outside to run their fiber, and then it rained rain, and so all the water pulled up and then went through the two inch pipe and poured mud water all over their networking gear like two weeks ago. Like, they knew we were coming to swap out the networking gear anyway, but like two weeks ago, all of their stuff just got mud all over it. And so we had to go there and like remove all of like, like a Mac mini server and a Pegasus rate, or some raid and some like networking and their ups, it was just all covered as brown mud and like this, the outlets are all singed and such, and we're like, maybe we shouldn't end these. But clean the whole thing up. Took a bottle of 4 0 9 to the whole thing. That's all they had in their kitchen. <Laugh> took a swig of it just to deal with all the mud and went to clean and, and put a rack, put a give him, give him a stack and a rack and a pat on the back and then away.
Eric Anthony:
Oh, yeah. I'm still recovering from ChannelCon because I don't do time zones well, like, I don't know, going like to Europe, I'm fine, right? But going out to the west coast of, of the US it just kills me. And I don't know why,
Justin Esgar:
Because it's too little of a difference of time, right? When you go to Europe, London's five, six hours ahead, depending on when you go, that's a half a day, right? When you go to LA you're spending half a day on a plane and you're losing, and you're gaining, you're losing the three hours on the backside, so you don't feel like it's that much of a, of a and you're like, oh, I, I should stay awake and do these things. Like, I remember I went to LA a couple years ago for work, and we went out for dinner with some friends at like eight o'clock at night, and I'm like, it's 1130 my time. And I'm first having dinner, I'm like falling asleep, eating bucatini or whatever. I was eating <inaudible> <laugh> some sort of pasta because you know that and I like falling asleep, like in it like, because I'm so, because it's like 1130 at night when reality, it's eight 30 at night time zones are a construct. Time is a construct, is best aligned by Hann in that movie tech. What's up everybody? Justin here from the All Things M S P podcast. I'm here with my good friend, OG host and podcast producer extraordinaire, Mr. Eric Anthony. Today we are talking about work, travel time zones and what I like to call rack stacks and Pat on the backs. I got a good, I got pretty good in two, considering how tired I'm <laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah, well, you know, it was a lot of things that rhymed and alliteration and stuff like that all in one sentence. So <laugh>
Justin Esgar:
We were gonna talk today a little bit about racks. Basically what you have in your rack at home, what I have in my rack at home, and basically what we install or what you used to, and what I currently install as our network stack at our clients. Because I, I have a, I have a really weird opinion on, on what people choose and why <laugh>, but it wouldn't be a show if I didn't have an odd opinion about things.
Eric Anthony:
That's true. It would be absolutely boring.
Justin Esgar:
It would be. So you just get back from Channel Con. How was that?
Eric Anthony:
It was good. I mean, you know, it's Channel Con. It's not your traditional vendor forward show, right? It it's industry forward show. So there was a lot of great stuff on you know, diversity, equity and inclusion. Marketing. There's a big push on like video content, which was really good. And then just security still is the hot topic that everybody's talking about. And of course, one of the fun things about Channel Con when we have it in Vegas, it's usually right around the same time as Black Hat, right? Because Black Hat was this week, channel Con was it was last week. And so about halfway through the week last week, the hotel wifi got compromised.
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>, well, actually I have a kind of a similar story. So I was in Iowa this week and we were sitting at a Holiday Inn in Urbandale, and the wifi was, and one of my guys from Columbia and I were up in were in town. We were doing a bunch of ubiquity installs and he couldn't get the wifi to work, so he just plugged right into the network and went to 1 9 2 1 6 8 2 0.1 or whatever the route ride is, and it pulled up a unified console and he is like, oh, we should tell them that we can fix this. And so I went downstairs and we had already kind of become friendly with the general manager who was there, and I just went to Jody and I was like, here's my card. Your wifi is not working, we can fix it. And she's like, I'm gonna call my boss right now because our current IT company has not called me back in four days or whatever it was.
And we went out for dinner and we came back and she's like, I called my boss and they said, they're gonna call me in the morning and we'll figure something out. And by the next afternoon, all the wifi was working again. So I'm pretty sure that we, whilst we may not have gotten the job the boss has called and said, Hey, there is some guys in my lobby right now who are pitching on fixing the thing that you haven't fixed in weeks. Fix it now. And all of a sudden the wifi completely changed. The, the router address changed. The splash page changed <laugh>. Yeah. And now didn't say powered by Unify, it said Powered by Holiday Inn. Like all of these things got put into place and look, so worst case scenario is I fixed the wifi for everyone in the hotel while I wasn't there. Maybe we'll get it, maybe we'll not, but it's just really funny, those kind of scenarios when you run into them, because you have to be able to take advantage of those also. Like, oh, you, it's ubiquity. We do ubiquity. Let's, let's, let's help you out, kind of thing. So.
Eric Anthony:
Well, and I, I think it's, honestly, I think it's kind of all of our responsibilities that when we see something that's not working or broken, that we should say something about it. <Laugh> now I know this is not what we said we were gonna talk about, but we've gone, we've started down this road anyway with hotel wifi. What what do you do when you're on the road? What's your standard? Keep myself secure while I'm traveling on the road configuration.
Justin Esgar:
Don't ask me these kind of questions. I don't care. No, I I'll connect to the hotel wifi, but I will not, I will not do banking like I, I, as an IT provider, knowing I know what the IT provider of the hotel can see me do, not do whatever. So I will not do banking off the hotel wifi. If I had to do banking, I'll do it for my phone or I'll connect to my phone as a mobile hotspot. But for the rest of the stuff, you know, it's, it's normal HT T P SS traffic, 98% of my, my work. So I'm not terribly, terribly concerned. As long as I know I'm on the right wifi and like they give me a password or I have to go through their, their splash page and their terms of services or whatever, it's but I will not I will not connect to like the airport wifis ever Newark Airport has free wifi in like, in a, in a pinch.
Or maybe I'll just throw my phone on it if I just need to like download a file off of Slack or something. But I do not trust the, what is it, the Boingo Boingo network that's in all the airports, right? I, so I, I don't, I don't, I don't join that one because I've seen the, the Newark airport is like underscore free E w R network, and I've seen it list more than once, which tells me that like somebody's spoofing or doing something silly. Yeah. And most people wouldn't recognize that. They would just think it's some sort of like UI glitch or whatever. It's, so I, I will try not to if I don't have to connect to an airport wifi, but in the hotel especially, I was in, I was in Iowa for four and a half days, like I'm not gonna not connect to their wifi.
And also you never know about cell service. So yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do. You know, there, there are certain things also keep mind. I'm on a max that's a little bit different. I think if you're on a Windows machine, you should definitely be running, you know, some sort of Windows firewall, windows Defender, whatever they're calling it these days. I don't necessarily, I don't necessarily go with the flow of like, you have to use A V P N to do everything, you know, because those are the people who have like, Nord, V P N, and like, not saying that like, I don't like Nord V P N 'cause I would love for them to be a sponsor, but at the same time, like there have been VPNs in the past where like they claim that because their data's in a non extradition country that it means that your data is safe and you can do whatever you want on it.
But like, that also means you don't know what they're doing with your data. Yeah. Right. So it's, it, it's, it's, it's not, it's not always peaches and cream when it, when it comes down to that kinda stuff. So I don't always believe that if I have to do client work, I, I try to connect to their V P N and be on their, on their network back when people had servers in-house. But now that most of my clients are on this amazing cloud file share fillers that I, that I found that has like an amazing subset with workflows and tasks and an entire department dedicated to security, security and governance. <Laugh>, I won't say who, it's not Dropbox. But you know, since most of the stuff is done through that, I don't really have to worry about it because it's all HTPs traffic anyway, so it's not that big of a deal for me.
So I'm okay with the I'm okay with the hotel wifi. I'm not okay with free wifi in Starbucks or in the airport or anything like that. I'll say my, my Starbucks. My Starbucks, I will bend on the Starbucks thing if I'm in another country. And I do not have data on my phone. So like, I was in Japan, I mean, we're talking about years ago at this point, and I needed to get online and if I used any data on my, like, Japanese sim card that I borrowed was immediately like $20 and I was in a Starbucks, and I was like, I could just use their wifi for free. And so that I, I risked it for the biscuit because
Eric Anthony:
Yeah,
Justin Esgar:
You, when you, when you look at wifi names in, in, and they're all Japanese, and there's one that just has Starbucks, you're like, got it, <laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. You know, I'm probably a little more paranoid than you are. Yeah, so I, I actually, well, and I, I, at least last year, this year not so much, but last year I was traveling a lot. I, I was going, I was in a new hotel at least every other week right. If not every week. And so I, I ended up buying one of those little portable routers, you know, it's like four inches by four inches by an inch tall mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it allows you to not only plug in if there's a cable, which is great, but also it allows me to connect to wifi through that router. And then my devices connect to my router. It gives me another basic firewall. So it's one more step than all the other guests in the hotel that somebody's gotta break through. But it also gives me the convenience of being able to run all of my devices through my router instead of having to connect each one to the splash page and everything, and maybe only, you know, be being limited to one device at a time, which is ridiculous, right? So, so I do that, and then if, if I'm not doing that, I'm typically hotspotting through my phone.
Justin Esgar:
I've seen, I've seen ads for those routers, and I think conceptually speaking, I think they're pretty, they're pretty cool and they're very secure, right? Because like most of them are basically just like raspberry fives with some edit things, which is nice because like you could, like you said, have multiple devices connected and you only need to go through the special page once you could throw things in there like pie hole which is for, you know ad blocking and, and security, things like that. So yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of benefits to using those things. You know, again, when I'm, when I'm at a hotel and I'm on site all day long, like when I get back to the hotel, I'm, if I'm on my laptop, I'm reading C n N, I'm looking at Facebook, and then I'm on my phone watching TikTok or playing like Pokemon Go.
I'm not I'm not doing a whole lot of client stuff at night in the hotel anyway. I'm doing client stuff at other clients, which I'm setting up their networks. So I don't care what's seen or done because I'm the one in charge of it anyway. But then I, what, what ends up happening and what I should have done this morning when I got back was like, I have to now do all of my, like, banking for the week because I didn't do it while I was vice. Right. And now I can like, catch up on all that. Right? but I do like those little devices. I, I also, the, the other thing is for me, and again, I don't like carrying anything. Like I hate having, like whenever I'm carrying bags, like if I go shopping or whatever, it's carrying bags.
I have this weird thing where like if my hands are not free, like I feel like I'm always gonna get into a fight with somebody <laugh> and I need my hands free. So I don't like having anything in my hands. And, and that translated to like how much stuff I have in my backpack, right? Like, I have this really awesome backpack. I bought an EBAs backpack, I got a Virtua Patch on it. It's our logo. It's the whole nine. It's got, and it, it's got like all these pockets and slides and whatever. And like, it could hold like a lot, but like, I don't wanna just have all that on my back, right? I just, right. I just want my laptop. Like I just wanna take out my laptop and use it. And because it's a MacBook Pro M series, the battery lasts all day.
So I don't even have to charge it at night at the hotel. So it's just my laptop in the back and like, that's it. Yeah. the less I have to carry, the better. The other thing that's like, I can't imagine trying to go through t s a with like all this gear. 'cause I never check a bag or Sorry. Yeah. I never check a bag. I just carry on. Right. So imagine like trying to go to through TSA and they seeing like, because all those portable routers are always like, they got fins and they're purple and yellow and cool and weird looking and, and techno dizzy bullshit. And like, you know, a TSA agent's gonna be like is this a bomb? Like <laugh>?
Eric Anthony:
No, I get it. And actually another funny t s a story somebody that I know well may or may not have accidentally taken their Swiss Army knife all the way through T ss a twice two Vegas and back last week without getting checked.
Justin Esgar:
Nice government's keeping us safe.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. The only thing I can think of is that it was I think underneath an iPad. And that's probably the only thing that kept it Oh, like
Justin Esgar:
In their backpack?
Eric Anthony:
Yeah.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. Yeah. true story. My dad used to be in vending and I remember we were traveling with him somewhere and he had just done his route before we went to the airport. So he had a bag full of coins and a bag full of like, just dollar bills in his carryon suitcase. And they pulled his bag across and they like really started questioning him. And my dad, oddly enough was just like, what? There's nothing wrong with it. What's wrong with having begging coin? And they're like, that could be a weapon, <laugh>. And I, I just looked, I go, does he look like the kind of person who knows that's gonna be use as a weapon? Come on. Like, my dad was like 70 something when this happened. I was like, he's not swinging that bag around. He's gonna try to pay a taxi cab driver nothing but quarter in quarters. <Laugh> I love you, dad. All right, so back to back to networks and stuff like that. It's kind of, we're on a little bit on topic. What's your, what's your network brand of choice? 'cause Everyone has one, like a, like an ice cream flavor.
Eric Anthony:
So, I mean, I, I don't really anymore because I, you know, obviously I don't do that
Justin Esgar:
Because you're outta it. Yeah,
Eric Anthony:
Right. 'cause 'cause I'm out of the day-to-day. Right. But I would say that back in the day it was pretty much SonicWall and Juniper. Oof. Now we would use some Netgear for some from, for some really inexpensive installs. Right. but we're talking about, you know, I go back to the days where we had dual modem netgear routers where you could plug in two fifty six K modems on two phone lines, <laugh>, and get double the speed.
Justin Esgar:
Tell us what it was like back in the day. Dad <laugh>,
Eric Anthony:
I mean, that's the way it was. Wait,
Justin Esgar:
Rocket, what do you Well, yeah, you had, you had to wait, so I don't need anything now. But what do you have in your house now? What are you using for a firewall at home?
Eric Anthony:
So now I'm, I'm, I'm using a, a decent asus router. I, I, I like those. Okay. You know, they, they tend to have less issues from a security standpoint. Of course, I lock it down as much as I can. Right. And it, I, I've used it in the, in the whole house, you know, three stories without having to do any kind of repeaters except for I do have a repeater for the ring cameras. 'cause Those are a little bit farther out than, you know, what somebody with, with a computer or a phone or a laptop is going to use.
Justin Esgar:
I hate those extenders, those extend. Oh, they're a pain in a lot extender thing. They're horrible. We went to a client this week while we were away and he said to, he showed me a picture of his network sack before we left. So I knew what he had. Right. And he had a Meraki firewall, which we ended up taking out because he's had a license and he had a Zytel wifi. And he goes, this is covering the wifi for our, our location. And we said, okay, fine. And then we got there and we go, what's your sss i d And he tells us what it is and we see his sss i d then we see the SS i d two ssc ID under xt, XT two, XT three, XT four. I'm like, which one of these do you connect to? He's like, oh, whichever one works. And I was like, that's not how WiFi's supposed to work, man. Yeah. and you know, these companies, they make it sound like it's so easy that you can mix and match the extenders, which you definitely cannot. I hate those that I think the extender market needs to go away. And I think people need to, and at least at home adopt something that does meshing, whether that's Amplify or Eero or whatever Google's Yeah. Is it called Google Nest now I their network? Something that,
Eric Anthony:
Something like that. Or just Google wifi. Maybe. I, I looked at those and my problem was because I really want to segment out my IOT stuff from the rest of the network. Yeah. And, and I, I segmented the kids off on their own network as well, so that I could combination of security and qo s or yeah. Qos. Right. You know, so that I can control that a little bit more with different SSIDs, the range extender, it's very single purpose. Right. Nobody else is connecting to it. It's literally the one camera that hangs off the garage on the way far side of the house from the router.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. I mean, for you it makes sense, right? You, you know, you have a purpose, right? So many people just get 'em 'cause they don't realize, you know, what kind of coverage they have. Right. I like the heroes personally I even be, I liked them better before they were Amazon. But Amazon, if you wanna sponsor ATP slash link atsp.link/sponsor the, I like it because one, as an M S P you can become an hero pro pretty easily, which is pretty awesome. So I can actually remotely take care of client's heroes without needing their login, which is super, super helpful. And two, they're great for my residential clients, especially in Manhattan, where all the walls are made out of concrete.
Eric Anthony:
Yes.
Justin Esgar:
Right. You have a, you have a nice apartment on 72nd and Central Park West. It, whether it's three rooms or 30 rooms, every one of those rooms is two inch poured concrete. Right. And so, you know, an extender is not gonna do any good. You need to be able to find, have that line of sight and the way the heroes worked, especially before when they had the beacons that just plugged right into the wall like a, like a, a VIX air, you know, air freshener thing. Those things were clutch and they were so good. I love that product. I'm, I'm, I'm annoyed that Amazon, I mean, I'm not shocked, but I'm just annoyed that Amazon botched that one and did what they did with it. I have at home, I used to do a full Meraki set at home. 'cause I had ss sced up spare parts and then I had to buy licenses for it.
And I loved it. Except that all of the time my, I had the Nest cams. I also had the drop cams and whatever they were called before that. The, the, they would always go on and offline a lot because it, for whatever reason, like the older drop cam versions would only work on certain frequencies within 2.4 and whatever. And then it came time for me to re-license my Meraki equipment. And for like half the price of me re-licensing my equipment, I bought a unified stack. And so when I moved here, I brought over the unified stack with me. And so I have a, I have a U D m pro u a unified Dream Machine Pro two switches, 2 24 port switches, full P oe. And then a couple of access points throughout the house. And then when I moved here, I actually wanted to like, build it out a little bit more.
So I bought the new unified R p s Redundant Power System, which only worked if my U D M Pro doesn't work with my switches. 'cause I have the cheaper switches, not the enterprise switches. Which is kind of an annoying. And I bought a U D M power distribution unit, which is really cool 'cause you can control all the outlets. There's four U S B C and then I think there's like 16 outlets. You can control all the actual outlets over the network. All of these devices are networkable. And then I also bought ubiquity Smart Plug. So it's a small little plug. And what's cool about it is there's a, a built-in option in the settings that says if internet is not detected, reboot switch. And so, or reboot power because you're supposed to plug your cable modem into it.
So if the cable modem goes offline, it detects that it's offline. It will just try to reboot for you so I don't have to go back in there and try to do it. Which is cool. And then I bought a couple of the, I bought a couple of G three flex cameras, which give me two K and I only put them outside. But they gimme really, really good coverage. But more importantly than all of that, I found this really awesome product. And I, I wanna talk about this product real fast and maybe in the edit you can like show a picture of it on Amazon or something like that. There's this company called Rack Studs, and I have a full, I have a full rack, like a full whatever that is, seven foot tall rack in my mechanical closet. Because I'm a psychopath and decided to buy one, one day.
And I hate dealing with cage nuts. So I have that, like that cage nut crimper thing. I call it the nut squasher. But oddly enough, I keep in mind I also bought a cheap rack. The metal on the left side is thicker than the metal on the right side <laugh>. So getting the cages in and out, it's like a real one of, so rack studs is a plastic solution or a plastic com composite or whatever. It's Right. And they make, they make two pieces. They make one where they make individual ones, which on the thinner side just slip right in, click, and you push like a separator in to like hold it open. On the, on the thicker side, it was a little bit tricky. I actually gotta use a flathead screwdriver to pull 'em through. And they make a new, they make a new one called the Duo, which is just a squeezable piece.
So on a, on a, in A one U, you got the three holes, it squeezes and clips into the middle one and just sticks, elbows out on the top two holes. And then they're just hand screwed little, you know, nuts that go on top. And you can use a screwdriver if you want it. It is simple. It is clean, it is gorgeous. You don't have to worry about sizing. Is it an M five? Is it an M six? Is it an eight 12, whatever they are. Right? Like eclipse right in. I wish the rack Stu Duos came in more than one U size. That's why I needed to buy the individual rack loads because like the power distribution unit Yeah. Is a two U unit without a gap. But I bought also a 48 port patch panel that actually had like, it's just female, female.
'cause I didn't, my electricians gave me terminated ends and I don't, I don't know how to do wiring and I can't punch down. And that oddly enough was basically it was, it's two one U frames with one flat 48 piece on top. So I was able to use two sets of the duos, but the only time I really needed it was for this two U unit. But by golly, those are some really awesome products. And I would love to be able to, we should, we should try to reach out to them and see if we can get them on. Because if you haven't tried rack studs, you should, and you're doing racks and you're, you're an M S P is doing a lot of racks. This is going to be a game changer for you in getting your work done. No more, no more cage nuts, no more matching screws, no more, you know, needing a power drill to figure out where everything fits. This is, this is where it's at rack zones and they're on Amazon but they also have their own thing. They make red, there's like a red one and a purple one and the duo, and then they make a couple other smaller components or something.
Eric Anthony:
So what you're saying is we need an affiliate account so that we can start making money on things that we recommend on the podcast.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We should do that too.
Eric Anthony:
And, and so actually the wiring thing I I'm gonna ask my controversial question of the day. Okay. <laugh> for the audience. All right, ready. This is for the audience to comment once they're listening to this podcast or, or watching it on YouTube 4 68 A or 4 68 B, what's your preference?
Justin Esgar:
Oh, is this, is this the which direction? The colors go inside the evening cable,
Eric Anthony:
Right? Yes. That, that's which
Justin Esgar:
See I know nothing about cabling then.
Eric Anthony:
It's the, it's the punch down pattern. Yes.
Justin Esgar:
It's a punch down pattern. What? Okay, what's the difference?
Eric Anthony:
I have no
Justin Esgar:
Idea for those that know, right. <Laugh>,
Eric Anthony:
I just, I always use 4 68 B because it's newer. I don't know. You know, do you
Justin Esgar:
Think it's newer just because it's B
Eric Anthony:
Yes.
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
Well, 'cause A obviously had to come first, right?
Justin Esgar:
What if B just meant backwards?
Eric Anthony:
I don't know. It always works for me unless I punched it down wrong,
Justin Esgar:
Right? Yeah. I don't do wiring. I've tried, I tried, you know, they say like I got a kit. And they say like, if you do it a hundred times, you'll be able to do it in the blind. Nope. Never work. I can never get, I can never really get them to work on, I don't have the dexterity in my fingers. Yeah.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. That, that was the thing.
Justin Esgar:
And
Eric Anthony:
Then once, once I found a cable guy, I was like, good, I'm not doing cables anymore.
Justin Esgar:
Exactly. Yeah. That's why I bought an entire company, Columbia, Missouri, to do all my cabling for me, because I can't do, actually, it was like after our electricians came and did all the work here, I said, I should have just had Kyle come up from Columbia, just do it here for me. Yeah. but yeah. And so, so for, so that's my own stack. There's a lot of ubiquity stuff. And then for my clients though here's where the great debate was is that prior to starting to acquire companies in the Midwest, we used to only do Meraki because people in New York would spend the money on it. And I would never do Meraki switches. I always think Meraki switches were so insanely expensive. So I would always ever do like a 64, 65, or now a 67, 68 or an 84 and Meraki access points.
And I would always just use some sort of like dumb switch because who cared for the most part, with the exception of like one client who has a, a Meraki switch. And, but now I'm getting to the point where Meraki jack of their prices, like their licensing went up. And I understand, you know, it's August of 2023 and like the economy is the economy and things like that. Everyone's charging 3% service charges now because we all think that's okay to do, so that way they don't have to eat the credit card fee. But like for, for companies like Meraki to, to like almost double their licensing pricing, when I would say ubiquity is maybe 80% to 90% as good as Meraki. I, I would, it took me a long time to get sold on it. I'm talking about, this has been three years in the making.
And it's like a six, the price. Like, I, I, I kind of feel like that's a no-brainer at that point. The downside is you don't get as good support from ubiquity as you will from Meraki. But I think they're working on that. I think they're, I think they're email support's fine, but like if I need help with something in Meraki, I can call a number, give them eight digit code, and I have someone who can immediately help me without any questions, problems, or issues. Yeah. so a lot of my New York clients, Meraki, a lot of my Midwest clients are Ubiquiti and any of my home clients are on Euro. So that's my stack. So I wanna hear from you, the listener once you decide which color coordinated ethernet cables you want to go with which I still want, if anyone can find me a place who does custom dyed ethernet cables.
We've talked about this on, on previous episodes. What's your stack? What's your stack that you have at home? What's your stack that you have that you sell to your clients and why? Right. The one reason, I'll give you the one reason I, I groaned earlier when you said SonicWall was, and granted, I haven't been using SonicWall a long time and I'm pretty sure it's changed, but at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not. I hated the fact that I couldn't make a change to a SonicWall without it rebooting. If I have to make a change to something in the middle of the day, I'm not waiting until six when I'm gonna go have dinner with my family because you wanted a change in your firewall. Right? Meraki and Ubiquity change, or they're cloud-based, they change on the fly and they happen immediately.
They do not reboot or take down the entire network. And I feel like any firewall company, Fortinet Sonic Wall, whatever, they all still do that. And that's such a like old school mentality to doing things. Like there's no reason why it needs to reboot in the middle of the day or make, it's like it's a lose lose. It either reboots in the middle of the day or I have to like ruin a part of my evening to do something which I don't want to do. So that, that was why Oh, scheduled rebo. That's why I was big on a rocky, huh?
Eric Anthony:
It's called scheduled reboots.
Justin Esgar:
It doesn't matter if they're scheduled or not. They're on my schedule. And if something goes wrong and it doesn't reboot or it does reboot, it doesn't come back up. What, what am I gonna do?
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. Number one, fear of an IT guy dealing with routers or servers, if I reboot it, it's not going to start back up again.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. That's why I like the Meraki, that's why I like heroes, why I like cloud. Any, any of the cloud providers, ubiquity, Meraki era, because those configuration changes happen immediately. There is no there is no reboot necessary for those. Yep. And that's, that's why I like those. So that's, that's my stack. And what I think about that, that's my take on it. That's my hot take folks.
Eric Anthony:
Well, and guess what? We've expired another podcast.
Justin Esgar:
I think it sounds so terminal <laugh>.
Eric Anthony:
Well, we've threatened before. Right?
Justin Esgar:
Why don't you just say like, we've reached the end of our ethernet line and we need a new box.
Eric Anthony:
Because it's a
Justin Esgar:
Pulling cable Joe,
Eric Anthony:
That would be called terminating
Justin Esgar:
<Laugh>. Wow. I see you're going. It's been a long day. And for those who, whether, whether or not this made that in the cut, in this cut, I've been up since 4:00 AM Central time, which might as well just be before I am Eastern Time. And we record this late in the afternoon on, on East Time east Oaks time and I haven't slept so <laugh>
Eric Anthony:
That's okay. It makes for a better podcast.
Justin Esgar:
There's nothing like zany Justin for a good show. Well, thanks for all for listening to a the All Things MSP podcast. Follow us at facebook.com/groups/all things msp. See the YouTube of this and my horribly gross, I haven't shaved in two weeks. Beard at youtube.com/at all things msp. And if you wanna be a guest or a sponsor, ATP link slash guest or ATP link sponsor, don't forget to like and subscribe. Leave us a comment. Five stars, one star. We read them all. We love them all. We love you. Thanks for listening. Bye.
Eric Anthony:
And now that you've watched that mess of a podcast, don't forget to watch one of these and go ahead and click that subscribe button so you get to watch more. Yeah, just go ahead and do it. Click the button and then watch one of the other videos I'm watching. I.