will be at the
performing another Brain Explosion Pre-Day Training
Author Archive for amy – Page 2
Several members of the Third Tier staff have been nominated for the 150 most influential in SMB. This award is sponsored by SMBTN and SMB Nation. There are many reasons why people are nominated for this recognition but all of them revolve around one thing: commitment to the IT community. At Third Tier, we are fortunate to also have many MVP’s on staff; another award for commitment to the IT community. You might say it’s in our blood.
This year members of our staff were the top travellers on the all volunteer SMB IT Community Roadshow, sponsored by HP, MIcrosoft and SBSMigration.com, hitting over 25 cities in total. It was a fun show and we got to meet lots of great IT professionals committed to small business. The tour showcased SBS, MultiPoint and Storage Server Essentials.
We’re also frequent speakers at usergroups all over the Country. You probably know us too from the many forums we participate in.
If you have appreciated the volunteer time that we put into the IT community I would encourage you to recognize the individuals below. It’s a little something that can mean a lot. While you are there be sure to browse around and also recognize the other volunteers that influenced you and your business this year too.
Here are the direct links to our nominations. Click the green arrow by our names to place your vote. You will be prompted to login to prevent voting fraud.
Amy Babinchak http://smb150.com/search.php?search=babinchak
Cliff Galiher http://smb150.com/search.php?search=cliff
Jeremy Anderson http://smb150.com/search.php?search=jeremy
Steven Banks http://smb150.com/story.php?title=steven-banks-1
0 Categories : Announcement
As an IT business owner that has spent the last 14 months searching, trying and failing to hire qualified technicians, I know the pain of building a fully staffed small IT firm first hand. Even if you’ve been successful at hiring a quality crop of work-a-day IT staff there are still gaps. You fall into one of those gaps when a SQL or Exchange server goes sideways, group policy doesn’t behave the way you expected, the server migration project gets stuck or DFS just isn’t syncing like it should. No one likes to admit that they have gaps in their ability to cover every possible issue that their client might come up with, but we’ve all got them.
To help full those gaps, Third Tier will let you open a ticket on demand and work with which ever one of our staff picks up the ticket. A little over 400 IT firms open such tickets with us last year. But now we’re also offering what is in essence micro-staffing. Hire a super highly qualified staff member and only work them 10 hours a quarter or 10 hours a month. That’s micro-staffing. We’re calling it My Third Tier.
Here’s what Channelnomics has to say about what Third Tier is offering:
Virtualization Model May Solve IT Talent Shortage
The channel and the entire IT industry are in a talent drought. Vendors and solution providers alike can’t find the right people to perform the tasks they need at the right time. Even when they find the “right guy” for the job, they usually can’t afford to place him or her in a full-time position. The shortage has vendors and solution providers competing for talent – the vendors, with their deep pockets, usually win.
Perhaps there isn’t a tech talent shortage. Perhaps it’s just a utilization and capacity issue no different than a poor performing data center before being consolidated through virtualization. Perhaps infrastructure virtualization could provide the model for resolving the talent plague affecting the channel.
What got me thinking about this was an email I got from Amy Babinchak, a principle of Third Tier, a solution provider who now offers IT outsourcing support to other solution providers. Her firm is changing its service model, fractionalizing the services provided to clients to make them more digestible, affordable and available.
The Third Tier packaging gives solution providers two options: monthly and quarterly support – each $1,400. In each package, solution providers receive up to 10 hours of on-demand support services per time period. The quarterly plan charges $175 per hour for any additional time required; the monthly plan’s hourly charge is $140.
“We decided to add the fractional hiring option because our customers asked for it. In IT, speed to resolution makes money, and the more two IT people work together the faster they can resolve a problem. Relationships are important too. The more you work together, the better you work together. And where else can you hire a $150,000 a year guy in an increment as small as 10 hours a quarter? We’re giving IT firms an opportunity to add expertise to their firms that they otherwise couldn’t afford,” Babinchak told Channelnomics.
Read the whole article: http://channelnomics.com/2012/02/16/virtualize-channel-talent/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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So who wrote this blog and what do they do for a living anyway?
We’re Third Tier. We provide advanced Third Tier support for IT Professionals. 
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0 Categories : Amy Babinchak
Amy and Brian were special guests on the Datto video blog. We discuss why should should buy your Datto from Third Tier; The extra benefits we are offering at no cost to you and Brian shares his client’s disaster. That disaster was happening as we recorded the video! Ready to learn more? Head over to the Datto page of our website: http://www.thirdtier.net/datto
Amy and Brian at Datto
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So who wrote this blog and what do they do for a living anyway?
We’re Third Tier. We provide advanced Third Tier support for IT Professionals. Get Support Blog Twitter Facebook LinkedIN
0 Categories : Amy Babinchak, Brian Higgins, Datto
Now purchase your Datto Siris business continuity appliances from Third Tier. We’ve done our research and decided that Datto makes the most complete solution in the industry. In a crowded field, Datto stands out as Third Tier worthy so much so that we have chosen them as our very first product offering.
The question I know you are asking is why you would purchase from Third Tier when you can go direct to Datto? We have a simple answer:
· Our price to you is the same as direct
· You still get your own management portal
· You get all the same features
· AND you get Third Tier support hours with every purchase. These hours will be issued as a credit to your Third Tier account. You can use them for any ticket you with us on any topic. Not limited to Datto support.
Datto’s business continuity solution includes all of the features that your clients need. It uses the ShadowProtect backup engine and you get the bells and whistles of data restore like Exchange mail item, and Sharepoint document restore. Of course the backups are images which you can mount locally on the appliance or in the cloud at no additional charge. Cloud seeding is included too. There are a lot more features too.
The real question is does it work? I can tell you that it does. A member of our Third Tier team has a client with a failed server. They have been running from the image of that server loaded as a virtual machine for over three weeks! Why so long? Because the performance of the disaster recovery solution is exceeding the performance they had previously when the server was working! The Datto appliance has not only saved the day, provided great performance as a virtual server when needed, but most importantly it has given them the luxury of time to make an informed decision about their next server purchase during what otherwise, without Datto, would have been a crisis decision. Don’t we wish that for all of our clients?
We’re going to have a webinar soon to demonstrate the Datto appliance to you. Please keep a watchful eye on the blog for your invitation.
This trick comes to be via my Active Directory study group. I suggest that everyone join a usergroup and/or a study group. It’s not that we don’t know AD, it’s that we forget or miss new features. A refresher course is fun too.
Occasionally a computer will come “disjoined” from the domain. The symptoms can be that the computer can’t login when connected to the network, message that the computer account has expired, the domain certificate is invalid, etc. These all stem from the same problem and that is that the secure channel between the computer and domain is hosed. (that’s a technical term. 
)
The classic way to fix this problem is to unjoin and rejoin the domain. Doing so is kind of a pain because it requires a couple of reboots and the user profile isn’t always reconnected. Ewe. Further if you had that computer in any groups or assigned specific permissions to it those are gone because now your computer has a new SID, so the AD doesn’t see it as the same machine anymore. You’ll have to recreate all of that stuff from the excellent documentation that you’ve been keeping. Uh, huh, your excellent documentation. Double Ewe.
Instead of doing that we can just reset the secure channel. There are a couple of ways do this:
- In AD right click the computer and select Reset Account. Then re-join without un-joining the computer to the domain. Reboot required.
- In an elevated command prompt type: dsmod computer “Computer DN” – reset. Then re-join without un-joining the computer to the domain. Reboot required.
- In an elevated command prompt type: netdom reset MachineName /domain DomainName /User0 UserName /Password0 {Password | *} The account whose credentials you provided must be a member of the local administrators group. No rejoin. No reboot.
- In an elevate command prompt type: nltest /Server:ServerName /SC_Reset:Domain\DomainController No rejoin. No reboot.
2 Categories : Active Directory, Amy Babinchak
There comes a point in every successful IT firm when you realize that you need someone with technical expertise that is greater than yours. Then you go into the marketplace to look for one and realize that people with THAT level of skill start at more than you’re making. Ouch.
Third Tier can help you with this problem.
If you’ve been opening tickets with us then you’re familiar with our staff. You know that they can fix problems in a jiffy that would take others hours to resolve. Well, we have a new program that will allow you to add a Third Tier staff member to your business.
Here’s what you get from us:
We have two programs:
Quarterly Block Hours: $1,400
Monthly Block Hours: $1,400
Ready to get started? Head over to www.thirdtier.net/my-third-tier and send me an email from there.
0 Categories : Amy Babinchak, Jeremy
My usergroup has an Active Directory study group going of which I am a member. Each week we review a chapter in the wonderful “Configuring Windows Server 2008 Active Directory 2nd Edition” self-paced training kit. The authors have done a fantastic job. All the members of the group are experienced long time IT professionals. We have 3 consultants, 2 internal IT and 1 looking for an internal IT position as members. We all have many years experience but decided that a refresher course was a good idea. Sure we all know how to use the basics in AD but we have probably missed some Best Practices, Tips and Tricks along the way. We’ve probably also forgotten some things that we knew but didn’t use often enough. This is the reason for the study group and all of the above has been absolutely true. It’s been fun as well, since we all have years of experience we bring those examples to the table and it makes for great geek conversation.
Here are a couple of the items that have made my Best Practices list so far:
Protecting from Accidental Deletion Now here is an under the radar item that is going to prove very useful. You can now protect OU’s, Containers, Groups and Objects from accidental deletion. It is as simple as a checkbox and for most new items in AD the box is checked by default. But for existing items it is not. You’ll need to go in and retro fit those with protection.
If you have a big complex AD then you can use PowerShell to fit the whole thing with this protection. But what is that Check box actually doing? It is changing the ACE permissions on the object. When that box is checked an ACE is added to Deny Everyone group Delete and Delete Subtree.
This isn’t the kind of thing that you’ll find yourself needing often (I hope) but now that you’ve read this, if you don’t go and set that check box you’ll kick yourself later.
Redirecting the Default Computer and User Containers New computers and users being left in the Computers and Users containers for long periods of time has long been one of my pet peeves. It distresses me that no one notice that this person or computer has not been subject to Group Policy, as the rest of the domain is. So when I found this little gem, it made my day.
The commands are: RedirCmp and RedirUsr to redirect anything that lands in the Computers container and the Users container respectively.
The command is entered in an elevated command prompt like this: redircmp “DN of OU for new computer objects” So simple! But you do need to be careful. Take a look at the Computers containers after you do this, there is no reference that it’s been redirected. Therefore, TODO make a note in the description of the container to remind you and future IT admins that this container is redirected and to where.
I have a few more items that have made my BP list but I’ll save those for another post. Keep reading!
0 Categories : Active Directory, Amy Babinchak
This post the a continuation of a series on using Sharepoint without visiting the website. We’re listing the options for integrating Sharepoint into everything you do without visiting the website. We started with Outlook, moved on to Windows Explorer, then mapped drives and of course search. In our final installment I’ll show how Microsoft Office uses Sharepoint.
Open Documents from Word and other MS Office Apps
This concludes the series on integrating Sharepoint into things you do already without visiting the website. Remember this: Sharepoint is not a website. Sharepoint has a website
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So who wrote this blog and what do they do for a living anyway?
We’re Third Tier. We provide advanced Third Tier support for IT Professionals. Get Support Blog Twitter Facebook LinkedIN
0 Categories : Amy Babinchak, SharePoint
The most difficult thing about troubleshooting a system is that such much of the skill is dependent on experience. When a symptom looks like something you’ve seen before but isn’t you can quickly find yourself going down a very dark tunnel. Such can be the case with a corrupt TCPIP stack.
The symptoms of a corrupt TCPIP stack on a server are: after reboot it hangs at applying computer settings, users are unable to browse network shares, network browsing in general is slow, user can’t log in to the computer with message that the domain is unavailable or your computer account does not exist.
These problems can look like a lot of different things: DNS could be down, if you think the problem is the PC then you might try rejoining it to the domain or checking its DNS settings, you might think that AD service is not started, perhaps the switch failed, maybe we should reboot? If you’ve gotten to the maybe we should reboot option that’s when you know that you’re out of real ideas.
But these are all symptoms of a corrupt TCPIP stack on the server. Sure not every user will complain about problems at first, that is because much of the work we do on our computers is async and not dependent on our computer being able to interact with the server in real time. So while it might seem like the problem started with one computer and then spread through the network in reality the bomb went off but not everyone noticed at the same time.
I can’t tell you what causes a corrupt TCPIP stack. But I can show you how to reset it. Fortunately Microsoft has made this a very simple task. Just visit this kb article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357 and use the FixIt. After you have run the FixIt you will need to re-enter your TCPIP settings into the NIC properties. Be sure to read the manual process so you understand what the FIxIt is going to do for you.
The reset command is available in the IP context of the NetShell utility. Follow these steps to use the reset command to reset TCP/IP manually:
- To open a command prompt, click Start and then click Run. Copy and paste (or type) the following command in the Open box and then press ENTER:
cmd
- At the command prompt, copy and paste (or type) the following command and then press ENTER:
netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
Note If you do not want to specify a directory path for the log file, use the following command:
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
- Reboot the computer.
When you run the reset command, it rewrites two registry keys that are used by TCP/IP. This has the same result as removing and reinstalling the protocol. The reset command rewrites the following two registry keys:
To run the manual command successfully, you must specify a file name for the log, in which the actions that netsh takes will be recorded. When you run the manual command, TCP/IP is reset and the actions that were taken are recorded in the log file, known as resetlog.txt in this article.
The first example, c:\resetlog.txt, creates a path where the log will reside. The second example, resetlog.txt, creates the log file in the current directory. In either case, if the specified log file already exists, the new log will be appended to the end of the existing file.
Especially note that the Parameters registry key is replaced. This explains why you need to reenter your TCPIP values but it should also alert you to the fact that if you have any custom settings in there you will need to reapply those as well. In a recent case, the server had IPv6 disabled to support Peachtree and that entry in Parameters/DisabledComponents had to be recreated.
0 Categories : Amy Babinchak
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Copyright © 2012 All Rights Reserved