A K12sysadmin’s Musings and Recap of the Past Few Years

1

XCP-ng

Now more than ever, we should be considering using Free and Open Source technologies before rushing out and buying products and services. Automation tools like Ansible, or software management tools like Munki are high quality and free. Even traditional needs like storage and firewalling can be augmented with high quality open source products like PFSense or TrueNAS. Hell, Packet Fence can even give you an extremely competitive product to Cisco ISE for free. Remember your annual renewal for Track-IT or whatever ticketing system you are using? Maybe you should consider using osTicket. Even FOSS virtualization platforms like XCP-NG and Proxmox are really coming to their own. With all of the instability over at VMWare, being bought by Dell, spun off, and now bought by Broadcom, I don’t know what I am going to do.

#Cloud Computing #Virtual Machine Management #Virtualization Platform 37 social mentions

2

osTicket

Now more than ever, we should be considering using Free and Open Source technologies before rushing out and buying products and services. Automation tools like Ansible, or software management tools like Munki are high quality and free. Even traditional needs like storage and firewalling can be augmented with high quality open source products like PFSense or TrueNAS. Hell, Packet Fence can even give you an extremely competitive product to Cisco ISE for free. Remember your annual renewal for Track-IT or whatever ticketing system you are using? Maybe you should consider using osTicket. Even FOSS virtualization platforms like XCP-NG and Proxmox are really coming to their own. With all of the instability over at VMWare, being bought by Dell, spun off, and now bought by Broadcom, I don’t know what I am going to do.

#Customer Support #Help Desk #Customer Service 38 social mentions

3

NxFilter

There are market disruptors in all aspects of our field. Gravwell can provide you will centralized logging at a fraction of the cost of Splunk. Ubiquiti makes highly competitive access points. NXFilter can provide high quality DNS filtering for substantially less than Umbrella. Lenovo is seriously undercutting NetApp on storage, and they are literally using the same OSes and Lenovo is even making the hardware for NetApp. Synology can backup your VMs, your O365, your GSuite and just about anything else without any annual license cost. You can leverage VDI and something like Liqid to build highly cost effective “virtual” computer labs to run even the most demanding graphics intensive labs without buying any new endpoints.

#Web Filtering Software #Website Blocking Software #Web Content Filter 5 social mentions