Tech Blog
Why We Love Continuing Education and Certifications
This post is part 1 in a three part series which includes How I Study for IT Certification Exams and What Certs Should My IT Team Have? My First IT Certification When I graduated from UNC Asheville in the spring of 2003 with a Computer Science degree, I had assumed...
Connectivity for Remote COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics
Portable Internet Service One of our healthcare clients needed a solution for running COVID-19 vaccination clinics in a parking lot or pavilion. They wanted to provide secure connectivity to electronic health records (EHRs) for a team of doctors, nurses and their...
Who is Still Vulnerable to the HAFNIUM Threat in WNC?
Vulnerable Exchange Servers In the wake of the Exchange Zero-day vulnerabilities, Advanced Data was concerned about how many vulnerable servers were left in our region. We pulled the blocks of IP addresses that are used in our region by businesses and entered them...
Exchange Server Zero-Day Vulnerabilities
Last week, Microsoft released patches to resolve four severe vulnerabilities in Exchange Server that are being exploited by a Chinese state-sponsored group called HAFNIUM. At the time, Microsoft said that the bugs were "limited, targeted attacks”. Six days have...
Review of Teams Microsoft Business Phone System 2021
Now that we have installed Teams with Microsoft Business Phone System for clients (and passed the Teams exam) we want to share some thoughts on the product. We've been doing VoIP phone systems since Cisco CallManager 3 back in 2003 when it still looked like Selsius...
Passed MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams Exam
Today I took the Managing Microsoft Teams (MS-700) exam and I passed! Lately we've had some clients express interest in using Teams as a phone system and I wanted to take the opportunity to fully understand the capabilities. Before I share thoughts on the exam, I...
Microsoft Teams Phone Missing Dialpad
Recently we setup and installed Teams with Microsoft 365 Business Voice using Yealink MP54 / T55a phones for a client. A post about replacing your business phone system with Teams will be forthcoming, but I wanted to post a quick resolution to a nagging issue we...
FortiGate IPS is Blocking Everything
This afternoon we received several reports all at once that the internet was down. Interestingly we were able to reach client locations, all SNMP monitoring looked healthy and no outages were present. We did however notice that bandwidth utilization had dropped to a...
Remove Pending patches in bulk – Windows Server
The following post was submitted by Jon Worley in response to a server stuck in a boot loop due to pending updates failing to install: This is a summary of what I did to avoid manually removing 28 different packages using the long form name of them without access to...
Unable to remove FortiManager from a FortiGate
In order to resolve a failed relationship between a FortiGate and FortiManager we needed to remove the FortiGate. In FortiManager this worked fine, however in FortiGate the relationship still persisted (under Security Fabric -> Settings -> Central Management)....