In this issue:
Growing your IT business thru charitable involvement, networking and fun. Working with Office files in Teams. Work from bed. Updated conference calendar. Plus lots more — read it all, read it here on WServerNews!
What are all these people doing in the Australian outback? And what does it have to do with IT?
HEY THERE! Our next issue will be on Monday October 4th. Please tell all your colleagues and friends about WServerNews and its companion newsletter FitITproNews, they can subscribe to them and other TechGenix newsletters here. Thanks!!
Got questions? Ask our readers!
WServerNews goes out bimonthly to almost 200,000 IT pro subscribers worldwide! That’s a lot of expertise to tap into. Do you need help with some technical problem or are looking for expert advice on something IT-related? You can Ask Our Readers for help by emailing us your problem or question. Do it today!
Editor’s Corner
This issue of WServerNews is devoted to something that many of us in our hectic IT profession still find time to give attention to: giving back though involvement in charitable activities. To illustrate the lengths that busy IT pros sometimes go in such activities—and to show how much fun you can have by being involved in them—we asked our colleague Craig Hollins who runs a small Managed Service Provider (MSP) business in Australia to share his story of a charitable event he was recently involved in. We hope that stories like Craig’s will whet your appetite for getting out of your office to help those in need around you. If any of you reading this issue have similar stories you’d like to share with the other 180,000 IT professionals around the world who subscribe to our newsletter, email us and we’ll include your story in the Mailbag of a future issue of WServerNews.
Growing your IT business thru charitable involvement, networking and fun
By Craig Hollins
Of late my life has been unbelievably busy. I burn several candles, both professionally and personally. I love the diversity of my chosen tasks and I’m always amazed how often they interact. Let me go through a few.
What pays the rent and puts food on the table is my little MSP business. Anyone who has ever run a small business knows how much work is involved and how many hats you have to wear. I’m guessing the majority of the readers of this newsletter already know this.
The next part of my existence is a little vineyard my partner and I have near Perth. Whilst grapes are strictly a summer crop, there is stuff do to every month of the year. If you think mowing and pruning a suburban back yard is time consuming you should try it with five acres. In summer we do pick your own grapes for the tourists and sell side lines of local honey, figs, eggs from our chickens, our range of pickled olives and some of the craft goods from neighbours.
Autumn (or “Fall” if you still use the imperial system) is our only quiet season and that’s when we try to get away from the property if we can.
Winter is pruning, mowing, re-wiring the vines and other maintenance chores.
Spring is wedding season with most weekends booked by couples who want to get married in a vineyard and have their reception in a rustic shed. It’s a lot of work but also a lot of fun. Our functions are very hands on with both of us in attendance to make sure the day goes smoothly for the bride. (Let’s be honest – the groom is usually having a far more relaxed time.)
As if that wasn’t enough, I also get involved in fund raising for Variety, the Children’s Charity. Each year Variety in Australia runs “The Bash“, a week long party where you take a 25+ year old car, drive down dirt tracks exploring out of the way places. At night there’s a party with 200 of your closest friends and you get up the next day and do it all again. Of course a 25 year old car is going to need a fair bit of work done on it to make sure it can go the distance (about 2,500km or 1,500 miles) so we spend a lot of time under the car, banging knuckles in preparation. I’ve shared a few photos of this event below at the end of my story.
Before you can go on The Bash you have a minimum amount of fund raising to do – it is a charity, after all. Different people fund raise in different ways. For me, I hold quiz nights each month at my local bar/restaurant. To save money I play the role of the quiz master which means more money raised for the kids.
What has this got to do with IT? To me, everything. Here are a few examples.
I meet people at weddings, on The Bash and at quiz nights. Many of these people have their own small business and have their own IT challenges. It’s a fantastic source of leads for any business looking to grow their client base. As you’re meeting them in a social environment and you’ve already demonstrated a common goal (e.g., raising money for kids, opening your home to them for a wedding, etc.).
I learn new skills that I didn’t know I needed. If you’ve ever tried to set up for a wedding you’ll know there are a million things to consider lest you incur the wrath of the “Bridezilla”. This has taught me the importance of planning everything, making sure you have everything you need on the day, maintaining focus on meeting the customer’s expectations etc. I have to manage casual staff often at short notice, co-ordinate with the myriad of suppliers, manage guests that have different expectations on the day and so forth. Sounds a bit like an IT project because it is.
I’ve learned to speak confidently to large crowds as a result of the quiz night hosting and addressing the wedding guests. This translates to also having confidence to deliver a presentation to a company board.
I’ve improved my ability to negotiate with suppliers and customers. I’m always asking for donations or sponsorship and knowing who to ask, how to ask and how to handle negative responses is great practice in closing sales. I know you’ve got to not only appeal to their kind hearts but also make it a business proposition for them.
I’ve learned not to be wary of breaking things that are already broken. If you’re crawling under a car in the middle of nowhere to try and work out why your steering is no longer working, a solution of not trying anything simply won’t work. I’m better at understanding how cars work, can trace most mechanical and electrical faults, and, most importantly, my mind sees any problem as something to be worked.
I’ve had to learn to manage my time more effectively because I now have so little of it.
Working in IT we can get caught up in making sure we know the latest technology and that’s often to the detriment of all the other skills we need in life. It is often said that IT people lack the vision to see the broader picture. We need to have interests, passions and activities outside just paying the rent and the more diverse the better. We will grow and be better humans as a result.
Am I busy? Yes. Would I give any of it away? No. Do I want to do more? Tell me what you’ve got.
And now for some photos:
Figure 1: Nessie (car number 42) shown above is our car, a 1978 280 SEL Mercedes stretched limo. Absolutely ridiculous vehicle to go bush bashing in – that’s why we did it. We’re going to use the same car next year to see if she’s got one more Bash in her.
Figure 2: Typical examples of the kinds of cars used for Bash events.
Figure 3: Australia has a highly developed extremely modern system of excellent roads!
Figure 4: But even on our first-rate roads breakdowns sometimes happen requiring immediate repairs.
Figure 5: Party time after successfully bashing it out in the bush.
Got comments about anything in this issue?
Email us! We love hearing from our readers!
Please tell others about WServerNews!
Enjoy this issue of WServerNews and feel free to send us feedback on any of the topics we’ve covered — we love hearing from our readers! And please tell others about WServerNews! It’s free and always will be free — and they can subscribe to it here. Thanks!!!
Tip of the Week
Working with Office files in Teams
Need to open, edit and collaborate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio files directly within Microsoft Teams? There are some different ways you can do this and this article by Annabelle Almer explains how:
How to open Office files with Microsoft Teams (Office Watch)
https://office-watch.com/2021/how-to-open-office-files-with-microsoft-teams/
Admin Toolbox
>> Got any admin tools or software you’d like to recommend to our readers? Email us your recommendations!
Does your company need to meet compliance requirements? If so, you should consider having a look at email archiving to keep your emails available and retrievable in the long run. We recommend MailStore Server
Lithnet Idle Logoff is a simple utility that allows you to log off users after a period of inactivity:
https://github.com/lithnet/idle-logoff
Hardentools is a utility that disables a number of risky Windows features.:
https://github.com/securitywithoutborders/hardentools
Learn Ethical Hacking and penetration testing with hundreds of ethical hacking & penetration testing & red team & cyber security & computer science resources:
https://github.com/blaCCkHatHacEEkr/PENTESTING-BIBLE
Factoid: Work from bed
We received no responses regarding our previous factoid/question but we did get this response from Steve Williams regarding our factoid “Insert floppy disk” from our August 16th newsletter:
Mitch, always enjoy the newsletter! Coincidently, going thru “boxes of stuff” recently, found this:
All I can say is, “Guilty as charged!”
Heh.
Anyways, let’s now move on to our next factoid:
Fact: 38% of remote workers work from bed
Source: https://www.axios.com/38-percent-remote-workers-work-bed-f8708125-a068-47ff-9519-bb7870011cd5.html
Question: Well what else would you expect IT pros to do when they’re in bed?
Email us your answer and we’ll include it in our next issue!
Subscribe to WServerNews!
Subscribe today to our WServerNews newsletter and join 200,000 other IT professionals around the world who receive our newsletter! Just go to this page and select WServerNews to receive our monthly newsletter in your inbox!
UPDATED! Conference Calendar 2021/22
NOTE: Conference dates and locations (real/virtual) are subject to change
European Cloud Summit — Sept. 27-29 in Frankfurt, Germany
https://www.cloudsummit.eu/en/
Open Source Summit — Sept. 29-Oct. 1 in Dublin, Ireland
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-europe/
VMworld — Oct 5-7 (virtual)
https://www.vmworld.com/en/index.html
Black Hat Europe – Nov 8-11 (virtual)
https://www.blackhat.com/upcoming.html#europe
AWS re:Invent — Nov 29-Dec 3 in Las Vegas, USA
https://reinvent.awsevents.com/
RSA Conference — Feb 7-10, 2022 in San Francisco, USA
https://www.rsaconference.com/usa
Cisco Live Amsterdam — Feb 7-11, 2022
https://www.ciscolive.com/emear.html?zid=cl-global
Big Data & AI World — March 2-3, 2022 in London, UK
https://www.bigdataworld.com/welcome
Mobile World Congress — June 29-July 1, 2022 in Shanghai
Cisco Live Las Vegas – June 12-16, 2022
https://www.ciscolive.com/us.html?zid=cl-global
Def Con 30 — Aug 11-14, 2022 in Las Vegas, USA
Big Data Expo — Sept 14-15, 2022 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
https://www.bigdata-expo.nl/en
Podcast Corner
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Using Azure Arc with Jeremy Winter (RunAsRadio)
Weaponizing Firewalls And Middleboxes For DDoS Attacks (Heavy Networking)
https://packetpushers.net/series/weekly-show/
Fortinet at MFD6 (Clear To Send)
Infosec’s bigfoot (Risky Business)
https://risky.biz/netcasts/risky-business/
Start Me Up, Attacks and Hacks and Win 11 Updates (Microsoft Cloud Show)
http://www.microsoftcloudshow.com/podcast
New on Techgenix.com
Using advanced filters with Microsoft Azure subscriptions
This powerful Azure Quick Tip shows you how to use advanced filters to easily retrieve all your environments, locations, and cost center subscriptions.
https://techgenix.com/advanced-filters-with-microsoft-azure-subscriptions/
Restarting your Azure Application Gateway with PowerShell
There’s no easy way to restart the Azure Application Gateway using the Azure Portal. Fortunately, it’s quick and simple using PowerShell.
https://techgenix.com/restarting-your-azure-application-gateway/
Using PowerShell to check your laptop’s battery health
Does it seem as if your laptop is draining quickly? You can use PowerShell to check on your laptop’s battery and get detailed reports on its health.
https://techgenix.com/powershell-check-laptop-battery/
Windows Server 2022 comes on stage: Does it deserve our applause?
Windows Server releases used to be big deals, but that has been blunted in the cloud era. So, is Windows Server 2022 something to get excited about?
https://techgenix.com/windows-server-2022-debuts/
Using a load balancer vs. exposing Exchange Server to the Internet
With the recent attacks on Exchange, it might be wise to consider using a load balancer that you expose to the Internet instead of your Exchange Servers.
https://techgenix.com/exchange-server-load-balancer/
Fun videos from Flixxy
Flying a Plane Through Two Tunnels
Race and stunt pilot Dario Costa of Italy sets a new world record with a 245kph tunnel pass flight outside Istanbul, Turkey on September 4, 2021
https://www.flixxy.com/flying-a-plane-through-two-tunnels.htm
He Is So Fast – Cups And Balls
This magician is so fast, you will still be impressed even if you know how this trick is done.
https://www.flixxy.com/he-is-so-fast-cups-and-balls.htm
7 Cycling Tricks – Riding With No Feet – Viola Brand
European champion of freestyle cycling Viola Brand demonstrates 7 cycling tricks of riding with no feet.
https://www.flixxy.com/7-cycling-tricks-riding-with-no-feet-viola-brand.htm
The Blues Brothers: ‘Do The Twist’
You won’t be able to sit still while you watch this clip from the 1980 movie ‘The Blues Brothers.’
https://www.flixxy.com/the-blues-brothers-do-the-twist.htm
Send us your feedback!
Got feedback about anything in this issue of WServerNews? Email us!
WServerNews – Product of the Week