Author: admin

Telstra DOT- Router Replacement

I’ve been looking at this for a long time because we have a client who has issues with their system (we didn’t install it, luckily)!In case you’re wondering, DOT (or Digital Office Technology) is a Telstra hosted VOIP product, designed to be simple to install and use. But it’s absolutely plagued with issues if you want anything ‘non standard’- you

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Backups For Normal People

‘I’m on my way to JB Hifi, what drive should I buy for backups?’ That’s usually the first thing I hear from mates who have suddenly realised that their data is not immortal. In my day job I have commercial clients whose businesses would literally STOP DEAD if they lost their data, so they’re prepared to fling a bit of

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Tips

Pi-Hole v4 on Synology in Docker- the Easy Way

[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.22″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.25″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.27.4″] (There’s a newer version of this post that overcomes many of these issues and works with Pi-Hole 5.0 here-)https://servicemax.com.au/tips/pi-hole-in-docker-on-synology-the-best-way/ Here is the simplest way to get Pi-Hole v4.2.2 working in Docker on a Synology unit. I made the mistake of trying to upgrade from v3 to v4 and blew up my

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Web Help Desk Upgrading MySQL to Postgres

Warning- this post has a lot of words, and some of them are very sweary indeed….This job took me 10 months. Seriously. None of the solutions are particularly difficult or hard to understand, but I’d like you to know that while a lot of it seems easy now, I was constantly tied in knots because I didn’t know what the

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State of The Mac 2019- Updated April 2019

We like Macs, but there are some er, less desirable models in the line up- so If you’re buying a new Mac this year, what specs to recommend? This post was originally written in March 2017, and since then Apple has updated many of the models- I have updated each of the categories with new recommendations as needed. All prices lifted

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Adobe Creative Cloud Alternatives

We’ve had a love/hate relationship with Adobe going back many years. When we sold $100k per year they were great, but as soon as we started Servicemax, we realised that they have a very different attitude towards smaller dealers. Basically as a smaller dealer you have to buy from another dealer until you can generate enough income to deal direct

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Mac VPN Setup Guide

How to set up a VPN on Mac OS Firstly, you’ll need these credentials to be able to connect Username (also known as ‘Account Name’) Password Shared Secret (this is just another password) Server Address (will be either a URL or an IP address) Already set up?  Modifying an existing VPN (this bit not done yet) Setting up a new

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Support- Who Does What?

People often ask how we can offer an ‘unlimited’ plan for support that includes both remote and onsite support, so I’m here to spill the secrets. It’s also a handy guide to how we make decisions on how to fix things… The Prime Directive Our primary goal is always to get things fixed as fast as possible, with the least

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Unifi Cloud Key Can’t Connect to Cloud

My own Cloud Key Gen2 Plus had a problem recently, and would not show up in my dashboard at ubnt.com and locally said ‘managed by other’ I could still log in locally but could not upgrade firmware etc. Because I’ve been having problems with my DNS recently (been fiddling with my Pi-Hole setup) I figured that it couldn’t log in

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Mac Pro 2013 Upgrading SSD

First some background- the ‘trash can’ Mac Pro from 2013 has not been upgraded much over the years. In fact the only thing that I can remember is that the internal SSDs basically doubled in speed very early on. Early versions had around 800MB/s transfer, but soon after launch these went to a version that could transfer ~1500MB/s. I’m lucky

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