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049: Discretion Is the Better Part of Valor

Broadcast May 6, 2014

TOPICS:

048: Stream of Conciousness

Recorded live on April 29, 2014

  • Thanks to our sponsor, Drobo. Check out the new Drobo Gen 3 with USB 3.0 – move your disk packs from a Gen 2 (four bay FireWire 800) model into the new Gen 3 for an easy upgrade path and 300-500% improvement in speed!  Visit www.drobostore.com and use coupon code CCP50 for $50 off your Drobo 5D or Drobo 5N.

TOPICS:

  • Joe discusses his own personal with his iPhone 5 battery drain and the article for troubleshooting by a former Apple Genius - The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain — Overthought
  • Sam has used iFunBox to remove unwanted files from his clients IOS devices.PhoneView from eCamm is recommended and Jerry has used PhoneClean from iMobie.
  • Creating email signatures and client frustration. 
    Chungwa Soft's - Graffiti Email Signature Plugin for Apple Mail
    Jerry used Joe Workman's Blog post from a few years ago to create his signature - Joe's Blog
  •  Reference to HBO's new series Silicon Valley and a great t-shirt "I Know HTML" - t-shirt
  • Joe makes progress troubleshooting a clients email issues
    How to send an email via telnet - blog post by Drew Moris
  • Mavericks Server Caching Service - Great overview from Krypted
  • A discussion about turning Software Updates on or off
  • PowerMac G4 to Mac mini
  • Team Viewer For Mac and PC - Team Viewer
  • Free Option join.me from LogMeIn
  • What's your fastest SpeedTest?
    SpeedOf.Me HTML5 speed test recommended by Kevin Ginger; no Flash or Java required
  • uninstall Flash Player in Safari for better full screen experience with multi-screen in Mavericks; YouTube's HTML5 player performs better than Flash will less CPU impact; in full screen mode using the Flash Player in Safari on Mavericks
  • fit-Headless recommended by Michael Reinhart to solve "black screen" issues in screen sharing connections

047: You Can't Make 'Em Drink

Recorded live April 22, 2014

Sponsored by Smile.  Check out PDFPen for Mac, iPad, and iPhone – our go-to PDF editor.  Add annotations, edit text, even script annotations using AppleScript.  Visit smilesoftware.com/restart for more information.

Topics:

- Jerry's Heartbleed email response and password changing using 1Password; comparison to Dashlane

- Jerry's client with a confusing email address

- AOL accounts frequently being compromised lately; AOL servers rejecting some messages temporarily; Joe's anecdote about a client changing his AOL password from a four-letter name to something slightly more secure

- Sam's 40-iPad deployment

- scripting PDFpen to generate PDFs; see "Imprint All Pages With Text" script included with PDFPen for Mac as a starting point

- Sam signed his first Managed Services client!

- including proactive monitoring using Watchman Monitoring in a Managed Services agreement; see also: Allen's Sample Agreement

- Joe signed his first subscription clients using MoonClerk

- 10.9.3 Beta Access

- Pebble is finally really good now; Apple's wearable coming soon?

- Dyn.com discontinuing free Dynamic DNS serviceno-ip offers a replacement service

- Joe's SMB Terror: for every machine on the network, configure: Login Items, Dock aliases, Documents aliases, other file/folder aliases (for each find kind:alias in This Mac, show original, show original, check connection, locate file on afp share, fix alias), Finder sidebar favorites, Keychains, Go: Connect to Server recents and server favorites

disable Bonjour service advertisements on the Mavericks server using this command:

defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array "/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder" "-launchd" "-NoMulticastAdvertisements"

see also: Apple's KB article

- disable SMB on shares not accessed from Windows machines

046: Secret Out-of-Band Show

Recorded on April 9, 2014

This week we are pleased to be sponsored by Drobo.  Check out DroboStore.com and use coupon code CCP50 for $50 off the Drobo 5D or Drobo 5N.

Topics:

Heartbleed; more resources: Heartbleed Hit ListBruce SchneierArs TechnicaCloudFlareNetCraft

Windows XP End of LifeLaplink PCmover ($60) can help migrate from Windows XP; to keep XP machines running or not?

- referring clients to the Apple Store and asking them to drop your name; providing written recommendations for clients to take into the store; introducing a client to a representative in the store

iNet, great network scanning utility recommended by Joe

045: Tech-Savvy Clients and Migration Assistant Woes

Recorded Live April 8, 2014

Thanks to our sponsor, Drobo. Check out the new Drobo Gen 3 with USB 3.0 – move your disk packs from a Gen 2 (four bay FireWire 800) model into the new Gen 3 for an easy upgrade path and 300-500% improvement in speed!  Visit drobostore.com and use coupon code CCP50 for $50 off your Drobo 5D or Drobo 5N.

Topics:

ARQ recommended by Jerry for backing up to Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier

ZyWALL USG50 recommended by Joe for site-to-site VPN tunnels, very stable router

- “cool” clients

- dealing with semi-technical “inside guys” at clients: “don’t open the box”; work from a checklist; “don’t touch the server” and “don’t touch the network”

Ubiquiti PicoStation recommended by Jerry for extending wireless networks outdoors or to another building

- Migration Assistant woes: Plan A, Migration Assistant, hung with less than a minute remaining; Plan B, Carbon Copy Cloner, detected I/O errors; Plan C, restore from Time Machine backup, worked like a charm

- Jerry called it: Migration Assistant was failing due to bad blocks on the source machine

- recommendation before starting Migration Assistant: fully update source machine, verify disk partition map and file system, rebuild disk directory, and check for bad blocks

044: Tales from Decrypt

Recorded live April 1, 2014

Topics:

- Sam is growing the practice

- freeing up time to do business development, plan projects, talk to clients

- travel charge?

- how to reimburse employee for mileage

- use PDFPen to strike through or highlight line items on invoice

- to send or not to send the zero balance invoice

- advising clients about billing for two techs on certain projects

- Jerry’s MacBook Air lockout; manual decrypt using command line

- issues with users connecting via SMB to Mavericks Server