NTP66's thread of IT

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Postby nocera » Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:50 am

I have no experience with extenders at all, but TP-Link makes good stuff. For $30, it's probably worth a shot. What router do you have now? And if you're about to tell me that you have one of those shitty ass Apple routers, then I'm going to tell you to buy a new router...
It's worse than that. It's the Verizon Quantum Gateway.

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Postby Lemon Berry Lobster » Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:50 am

Buy a real router...

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Postby nocera » Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:55 am

Any suggestions?

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Postby skullman80 » Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:58 am

The Verizon Quantum gateway isn't awful as far as company branded routers go. I had it for a while at my old house no issues anywhere and we had two of our boxes that were run off of wifi for the tv service. They do have a newer router than the quantum gateway one that we got when we bought our new house. It's a white oval shaped thing. Our new house is also not super huge (2000 sq ft), but it reaches all areas of the house with no issue. We again have one box hard wired in, and the other two are on wifi and no hiccups. I have probably 10-15 other devices on wifi throughout various part of the house and it runs like a champ.

If you are going to get your own router though.. Asus routers are the best IMO.

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Postby NTP66 » Fri Jul 17, 2020 10:58 am

My router:


Pretty sure that @eddysnake bought this one:

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Postby nocera » Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:00 am

:thumb: Thank you

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Postby NTP66 » Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:01 am

For me, I want to be able to control every aspect of the router, so I went with my own. It works for me because I don't see VOD services through Verizon, and replaced their router entirely. Some piggyback their own router on top of Verizon's, where you disable Verizon's wireless, and use your own router as an access point. For FiOS, you'd need to have ethernet running from your ONT to the new router if you wanted to replace it entirely with your own, so you know.

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Postby nocera » Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:03 am

For me, I want to be able to control every aspect of the router, so I went with my own. It works for me because I don't see VOD services through Verizon, and replaced their router entirely. Some piggyback their own router on top of Verizon's, where you disable Verizon's wireless, and use your own router as an access point. For FiOS, you'd need to have ethernet running from your ONT to the new router if you wanted to replace it entirely with your own, so you know.
Pretty sure the Quantum gateway has ethernet running from the ONT already, no?

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Postby NTP66 » Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:04 am

For me, I want to be able to control every aspect of the router, so I went with my own. It works for me because I don't see VOD services through Verizon, and replaced their router entirely. Some piggyback their own router on top of Verizon's, where you disable Verizon's wireless, and use your own router as an access point. For FiOS, you'd need to have ethernet running from your ONT to the new router if you wanted to replace it entirely with your own, so you know.
Pretty sure the Quantum gateway has ethernet running from the ONT already, no?
Dunno, I've never had one of them. Easy to tell if you look at the back of it. I THINK it does, because that router is reserved for 300MB+, and those speeds require ethernet.

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Postby mikey » Thu Aug 06, 2020 2:57 pm

As a non-developer, smooth-brain mutant...I'm trying to figure out what Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Forms do...anyone with any experience there?

Broadly, Power Automate can kind of act like a human doing a repetitive task...? Like, if I gave it a set of instructions: login to this site, using these credentials, locate [string], locate [this file], save as PDF, put [here]. It can do that?

For Forms, if I wanted to create a custom job application online basing on a real life paper application, I can do that, present it to a job applicant, have it retain the results and save them to [location] or enter into a designed workflow process...?

I gotta find a way to reduce some overhead and create some more custom solutions for our clients (also shift paradigms, break through glass ceilings, uhh, ride the walrus, whatever else biz buzzword boys say), and it looks like these things can help me...but I don't have a lot of familiarity with this suite of products...

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Postby NTP66 » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:00 pm

Hopefully somebody else chimes in, as I'm really unfamiliar with Power Automate. Microsoft Forms is meant for things like surveys and polls, so it may work for your purpose, though it wasn't necessarily designed to be used in that fashion. We use Forms for feedback about technology that we roll out to users.

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Postby dodint » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:03 pm

An in-house Survey Monkey, then?

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Postby mikey » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:16 pm

Thanks NTP. Yeah, so, re: Forms. My goal - to be more specific - is to create a custom job application that has certain regulatory requirements and will require many different versions (per client, per job title) that has e-signature capabilities. I'll need a way to push it to an applicant via a portal. The applicant goes in to our portal, the application is presented to them, they fill out, they sign, it gets pushed to us for storage.

I won't quote you on it naturally, but does that sound like a reasonably plausible accomplishment for MS Forms...?

Also, @shafnutz05 has some overlap in our similarly pathetic 9-5 life (which is really 9 to noon for me these days with hockey being on)...I wonder if he'll have some similarly pathetic input haha
Last edited by mikey on Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Postby NTP66 » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:17 pm

An in-house Survey Monkey, then?
Yes, but with a much lamer name.

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Postby NTP66 » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:21 pm

You should be able to send a Forms survey to external people, though natively it's going to only allow your organization to reply. I think you can change that to "anyone who receives the link" similar to how you share stuff in Google Drive. As for e-signing, I'd be willing to bet that this isn't available for Forms.

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Postby mikey » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:25 pm

Ok good stuff. Thanks for the info :thumb:

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Postby NTP66 » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:26 pm

Now let me send you a Survey Monkey Forms survey so that you can rate my support...

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Postby mikey » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:32 pm

I'd be happy to ignore that email.

Surveymikey, on the other hand: You exhausted your knowledge on me and got a "good" "thanks" and a thumb up. That's the survey. You got a hat trick.

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Postby NTP66 » Thu Aug 06, 2020 3:36 pm

I've converted that into my own format, receiving a 10 out of 10. I've still got it!

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Postby mikey » Tue Aug 18, 2020 6:15 pm

I've recently started having some slower internet with Verizon Fios...I took all the normal loser steps, restarts, power cycle, etc.

A desktop with a PCI Express wireless adapter is generating about 6x to 8x the download speed compared to my USB adapter...

The USB wireless adapter is a genuine Sorny or possibly Magnetbox...MSRP 80 cents...which I have no problem replacing, certainly...but the nature of my question, is there a plausible way to narrow down where the bottleneck/problem is occurring if I'm an intermediate level computer user...?

I guess as I'm typing this, I guess I could take the USB thing and plug it into the other desktop...but let's pretend that's off the table, is there a way to tell if I'm interfering with my own wireless signal somehow, or if the adapter is dying, or [other possibility]...?

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Postby NTP66 » Tue Aug 18, 2020 6:27 pm

There’s always the possibility that the drivers of the USB card need to be updated, especially if you’ve kept Windows 10 up to date. You nixed it, but if you do have another machine, that would be the easiest first step. Try and download a large file (Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is a good test), let it run for a minute and see the average speed and how long it’ll take to download; cancel the download before it completes. Now insert the USB card, disable the other adapter, and repeat the download and compare.

This is also assuming that the devices are in the same physical location. If they are not, you can always survey the area for which wireless channels are crowded. Here’s a copy of InSSIDer:


When you say you rebooted, did you happen to reboot your router? Lastly, are you using the router that Verizon provided you? If all else fails, purchasing a quality USB wireless adapter is an inexpensive option. I don’t know how much the troubleshooting time is worth it in the end.

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Postby faftorial » Tue Aug 18, 2020 6:38 pm

There’s always the possibility that the drivers of the USB card need to be updated, especially if you’ve kept Windows 10 up to date. You nixed it, but if you do have another machine, that would be the easiest first step. Try and download a large file (Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is a good test), let it run for a minute and see the average speed and how long it’ll take to download; cancel the download before it completes. Now insert the USB card, disable the other adapter, and repeat the download and compare.

This is also assuming that the devices are in the same physical location. If they are not, you can always survey the area for which wireless channels are crowded. Here’s a copy of InSSIDer:


When you say you rebooted, did you happen to reboot your router? Lastly, are you using the router that Verizon provided you? If all else fails, purchasing a quality USB wireless adapter is an inexpensive option. I don’t know how much the troubleshooting time is worth it in the end.
With people WFH do IT people who do employee support have to help people with their home setups?

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Postby NTP66 » Tue Aug 18, 2020 6:56 pm

With people WFH do IT people who do employee support have to help people with their home setups?
We don’t officially provide support for home networks or anything like that, but generally provide ‘best effort’ support. I don’t know if our front line guys really get many tickets on stuff like that, but I know we go a little further on device specific issues than we would have in the past.

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Postby dodint » Tue Aug 18, 2020 8:29 pm

At my agency folks are having to come in, drop off their laptop, and take a loaner. Generally beyond a laptop and dock we do not provide take home hardware.

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Postby NTP66 » Wed Aug 19, 2020 7:15 am

At my agency folks are having to come in, drop off their laptop, and take a loaner. Generally beyond a laptop and dock we do not provide take home hardware.
This is an area of focus for us right now. Most of our IS folks have company issued laptops, so they brought them home. Some apparently have no computer at home, so they say. I refuse to believe that anyone in IS doesn’t own a computer, though. We bought $250k worth of these shitty **** HP Chromebooks, and had planned on giving them to home users, but the experience on them with regards to videoconferencing is atrocious. I’m trying to convince management to sell them back to HP or use them to level wobbly tables.

We may go the thin client route. We could either image an older laptop with the thin OS and let them connect to our Citrix environment, or drop ship them a thin client, monitor, keyboard and mouse. They’d be on the hook for connecting everything.

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