On The Road #7

[Music] welcome to crosstalk solutions my name's chris and we are on the road yet again this time uh two stops to make today and i'm actually so so happy that i am doing the fifth of five offices where i'm completely ripping out their network replacing it with something decent and then switching their phones over to a new phone system so that they can actually make good use of their phones this client's main complaint about their previous voice over ip phones were that they couldn't use them they couldn't use their phones at all and they were paying a ridiculous amount of money per month for those phones so by going in tightening up the network at every single one of those locations making sure that the internet bandwidth is good at all of those locations making sure that we have good quality of service for voice over ip at all of those locations and then by just making sure the phones are connected and working properly and that the pbx is designed in such a way that they can actually make good use of their phones rather than just you know they can make and receive calls with them well a pbx is so much more than that you have to design it properly so by doing all of that this customer is incredibly happy with the four offices i've done so far we're getting the last final one done today and uh yeah it's gonna be a relief to have this project uh completely done i should mention also that throughout all of this you know the customers getting a brand new network at all of their locations they're getting brand new phones at two out of five of the locations they're getting a new phone system and their roi is about 11 months on this whole thing they're paying so much money in internet and phone uh service for these five locations that we are essentially cutting their bill in half on a monthly basis once this is all said and done and so the money that they're saving from that bill being cut in half translates to about an 11 month roi where what we have done today 11 months from now is going to be saving them just a ridiculous amount of money and it's going to completely pay for itself within one year so that's just the icing on the cake so the first stop that we're making today is one of the past locations a very simple stop hopefully i i never like saying that because you never know but they have one of their users that's having trouble with the printer on the new network so it's probably just a matter of you know connecting their printer running a couple printing test pages maybe doing a little bit of training and we should be good to go there and then after that i'm heading half an hour down the coast to a little town called yahats where we're going to do the fifth of five offices and this one just like all the rest is a complete mess so i'll i will film what i can and sort of show you guys uh the before and after but uh yeah first we have to go up the coast and help someone uh with their printer problems we all know users and their printer problems right that's kind of a familiar trope in it that is actually what i'm doing today is helping a user sort out some printer problems all right let's get to it everyone please pardon the brief interruption but i am excited to announce that crosstalk solutions has our very first channel sponsor skillshare now skillshare is an online learning community where you can watch thousands of videos on various topics ranging from almost anything you can think of in it but so much other stuff too like video production graphic design marketing productivity i mean the list just goes on and on now being in it i first wanted to learn something new so i watched devops ansible for the absolute beginner and after an hour i had a really good understanding of the basics of ansible now skillshare is great for it stuff but let's say you're looking at becoming an independent consultant i mean there's so much more to running your own business and you're probably not an expert in all of the essential skills that are going to make your business successful well skillshare can help with that too for instance accounting in only one hour teaches you the basics of your cash flow balance sheet and income statement or how about getting started with email marketing which helps you utilize mailchimp to create effective email marketing campaigns and there are many many other videos on topics such as business strategy productivity and entrepreneurship now i love increasing my knowledge and skillshare is a great resource if you join skillshare using my link below you can get a two-month free trial of the skillshare premium membership which lets you watch unlimited videos and then it's less than 10 bucks per month after that for the annual membership all right thank you guys so much for listening and now back to our video all right office one is done and now of course i have to head to a different office so office one was really easy just did a little bit of training uh you know i made a couple of phone system configuration changes with these phone systems you know the devil's in the details right so if you are setting up a phone system for someone and this is what i tell people all the time like i am not a mind reader this phone system will absolutely do pretty much whatever you want it to do right so you just have to tell me how can the phone system work for you right so tell me your workflow tell me how you do business and then i can adjust the phone system to adapt to the way that you do business right so in this case for example they're really not using any voicemail they want all of their calls to come in and ring their desk and if they don't pick up just forward to the cell phone and end up in the cell phone's voicemail when someone calls their real estate company they live off their cell phones so that works great and so they just needed to tell me that and so i went ahead and set it all up and now they're super super happy and a lot of times that's all it boils down to is just listen to the client and figure out how to make the technology work in the way that they want it to work and if the way that they want it to work is totally off the bat off the ball crazy then explain to them the best way that you can make something work all right so while i was there they came up with two problems two other problems one of the other offices the internet's completely down and i suspect that it's just the provider is down so we're going to just have to call the provider and see what's up with that office the other office that i'm going to stop at right now all of their phones are offline and this is something one of the things that i was afraid of with this phone system so we have the ability to you know authorize particular wan ip addresses that can connect to the pbx there's also a thing called the responsive firewall which should kick in even if you don't have an authorized ip address it allows you to kind of send a few little packets through just to you know authorize a phone with the sip username and password but if you don't authorize within a certain number of packets it basically locks you out of the phone system so i suspect what might have happened at this other site is that they may have gotten locked out of their phone system because their wan ip address changed and then maybe all of the phones were trying to re-register simultaneously or something regardless that's what i got to go figure out is why is this other offices why are all their phones offline and i also have to have the discussion with them about hey listen this might happen from time to time if you don't have a static ip address none of these offices have static ip addresses and so yeah that can be a problem if you are going to securely connect to a hosted pbx system it's highly recommended to have a static ip address just so that we can you know authorize that ip address for connectivity to the pbx and then know that it's never gonna change right so that's exactly what we want to do uh okay so in the meantime they also have me uh delivering a fedex uh envelope from one office to the other so i am i.t guy and delivery guy at the same time and uh we're gonna get down here fix these phones get them back online check out what's going on with the other office where the internet's down and then finally head down to that fifth office where i'm actually gonna have to do the complete network rip and reinstall all right location number two was super super easy they did not have an outage with their phones there was just some configuration stuff that they were not aware of i fixed that got them all straightened out there is an internet outage at one of their other offices so we contacted the isp isp is rolling a truck out because they were not able to get any signal to their own equipment their own modem was was not responding back to them so they're rolling a truck out to that other location which hopefully i don't have to go there because it's from now where i am in yachts it's an hour up the coast to get up that way so you know hopefully i don't have to go up there after i'm done with this location but this location is where we're doing a complete network rip and reinstall i'm going to install an edge router x a uap ac pro access point and then maybe i'm not sure i might install a 150 watt switch i'm gonna have to get in there and look at the situation and sort that out as i get started on this fifth of five locations so that is the next thing and uh yeah luckily it's a beautiful day out here so let's get to work [Music] six hours later and i am finally done this ended up being one of the more difficult offices that i've switched over just because of a couple quirky weird problems this is a really old office they've got some really old wiring so we'll talk about that a little bit but here behind me you can see the finished product so there we have it looking much much better than it did originally there was this big samsung phone system up here the power strip was not on the wall it was just sitting inside this little area down below which is now completely clear so i took the power strip out of here and i moved it up to this part right here mounted it on the wall looks so so much better then we have our edge router x the us8 150 watt switch which i did end up needing and then charter came in and put their equipment here that's for the phones and that is for the internet now charter's wiring is always a little goofy you can see like this is their wiring down here this sort of stuff i cleaned it up a little bit but again not the world's best wiring job but i've kind of run out of time here and i think it's good enough certainly a heck of a lot better than what it used to be one of the challenges i ran into was with this cable right here this cable goes out here and then all the way up and then upstairs by the way here you can see the uap ac pro mounted on the wall uh this goes all the way upstairs directly above and then across the floor to the other side of the building and that cable gave me a lot of problems there's a phone on the other end of that cable it's one of those yay-link t20ps and when i would plug the phone in it would get power but it wasn't able to obtain an ip address from dhcp so then i would plug my laptop into that same connection and the laptop was able to get a dhcpip address no problem so it's like well what is going on here after a bunch of troubleshooting i finally just re-terminated the ends on both sides of that cable and it started working so with something to do with just being an old cable the ends were not connecting properly who knows what after a re-termination on both sides it started working beautifully so i'm very happy for that there was another spot where they've got some old wiring once again that goes around this office to a spot where they have a little like 10 100 switch that then fans out into a printer and one other phone even further away and that whole setup was giving me all sorts of problems too it was to a point where if i would sort of get it in the right place it would work fine but if i like touched the cable in here at all it would take that whole thing offline so again just a lot of trial and error a lot of plugging things in different places and wiggling cables and all that and finally i was able to get a pretty solid connection there as well though i still probably wouldn't want to uh wiggle the cables around in here too much but that's enough for now this office is completely switched over they've got 200 megabits by 10 megabits cable instead of the dsl that they previously had so that's really spectacular and they are switched over their phones are now ringing in and out on the crosstalk pbx phone system so i'm very very happy that this got done i might have to come back once more uh to replace a couple things i i ran out of uh two foot cables so i only had three foot cables for a couple of those runs i'd rather sort of shorten those up a little bit but we'll see for now we're going to call this one done and yeah that's it [Music] quick follow up to the last on the road video i talked about a client that i had visited that's a restaurant and on the second floor of the restaurant they had some switches that had been in their closet you know the network closet for five years and over the course of time the grease from the downstairs kitchen the the grease in the air sort of wafted up and has coated much of the equipment in greece such that when you plug things into the switch the connectivity is iffy right if you will because they're just everything's coated in grease and it just does not make good contact when you plug in network cables so after that video a number of people recommended that i try some of these dust covers and so i have two different sets of dust covers here let's take a quick look at these and then i'm going to plug them into my switch to see which ones i personally prefer alright so i will put links to both of these dust covers down below in the description but i think these are a really good idea especially if you have switches that are in you know more of a sort of industrial environment like a warehouse or a factory where they might be getting dust in them or certainly the restaurant example that i mentioned where there's grease in the air these are a really good idea to protect the longevity of your switches by adding these covers to any unused network ports so the first one here is the rj45 anti-dust cover cap protector now these are silicone protectors so they're kind of like a rubberized feel they're kind of squishy and let's go ahead and open these ones up links to all of this below on amazon by the way and here we go so these are just little protectors and they have a little tiny tab on them i guess for being able to pull them in and out of the network covers then we have these ones over here which i thought were interesting because these are rj plugs black rj45 dust cover blackout device and these ones are plastic the interesting thing about these ones is that they lock into the net the switch ports right so these actually serve a double duty where supposedly when you plug these in they've got this little tab just like an ethernet connector and but they're shorter right so they sort of go all the way inside the switch and then supposedly they're very hard to take out with your hands alone you have to have a set of needle nose pliers to pull these out of the switch both of these sets of covers were about they were in the 12 to 13 dollar range for 100 pieces okay so this is about as close up as i can get but here we have the two different sets of plugs these are the rubberized ones let's go ahead and try those first and they stick in just like so all right so there's four of them you can kind of see that on camera but yeah those are certainly going to work as dust covers but they are very easy to take in and out so they certainly are not going to provide any security if that's also something that you're interested in let's take a look at these ones now these are the plastic ones that sort of lock into place has a nice satisfying click to them all right now these ones i feel like i well yeah those are oh yeah you can't get those out with your hands so that you'd have to have a pair of pliers to get those out which again it's super easy if you do have a pair of pliers they'll come right out uh but yeah these ones are very difficult to remove with just your hands as far as aesthetically i think the black rubberized ones look a little bit better but again you know who cares right i think overall i prefer these ones just because they do give you a little bit of extra security so the winner here is going to be these uh these black security plugs here back out on the road today is thursday june 18th and man it is gorgeous outside today i'm kind of glad that i get to be out of my office for at least a little bit going to check out a weird problem that's one of my clients is having with a unified video server four of their cameras went offline no no reason in particular uh they've got a bunch of cameras that are connected to an edge switch some of the cameras in the ed switch are fine four of the cameras are offline so i'm not sure exactly what's going on there i don't have remote access to the nvr so i was not able to get in that way and so now we're going to drive down there i'm actually going to try to just pull up outside their business and try to make changes from my car connected to their wi-fi that way i don't have to go in and wear a face mask and all that sort of stuff if it's something that i can fix you know just right here from my car with my laptop i just certainly much rather do it that way so that's what we're doing first we will give it a shot and uh and yeah see how that works for us hopefully i can get it fixed that job is done all of the cameras are back online and it was a little bit interesting what happened so i had updated this customer's unifi video to the latest version about a week and a half ago and then three days ago you know the update to unify video came with new firmware for all of the cameras and they have about 20 cameras in there uh there's a mixture of like old-school g2 bullet cameras uh g3 domes and g3 bullets right they've been adding cameras uh to basically actually two locations that connect into this one nvr so seven of the cameras decided that they wanted to do their firmware update when they did the firmware update they didn't come back online so most of the cameras updated no problem seven of these cameras which were mostly the uvc g2 bullet cameras uh and then i think there was one or two of the g3 domes also they decided that uh the firmware update just was going to take them offline so label the ports in your switches folks i was able to get into the edge switch that i have in place at this location i have all of the cameras listed by switch port that they're plugged into and i was out able to just power cycle the power on these those switch ports for the affected cameras five out of seven of them came right back online they were fully updated and everything was working fine two of them one uvc g2 bullet camera and one g3 dome camera still did not come back so the g3 dome camera i had to take off the wall i walked it up to where the actual switch was and i plugged it directly into the switch and immediately it came on finished its firmware update and then you know reconnected to the nvr so then i had to i pulled that one i put it back in the location where it belongs and it came up just fine so for whatever reason it was just having trouble with getting the firmware update finished at its normal location the one that gave me the most trouble was a g2 bullet so for that g2 i was able to ssh in download you know w get the newest firmware onto into the temp folder and then rename that to fw update.bin and run fw update dash m which then went ahead and did the update manually via ssh when it rebooted it came back up and it connected back to the nvr just fine so yeah that was uh i did have to go in five out of seven of the cameras i was able to get done sitting right here in my car with my laptop connected to their wi-fi but two of the cameras did give me enough trouble that i had to put on my mask and go in there and finish those ones off so that's it it only took me about 30 minutes for all of that and i am now headed back to the office to get some more work done all right so this next part is not an on the road section this is me back at home doing some more home upgrades but i wanted to include it in this video because i always think it's interesting to see what people do with their home network upgrades and i have a weird situation here so let me show you what's going on so right inside this window here is my old office this is where i first started shooting crosstalk solutions videos now it's just a guest room but we also use it for some servers like my little server rack is in the closet in this bedroom now years ago this was where my internet terminated and eventually i had this move so on the other side of this coaxial connection into this room is basically just a coaxial jack and nothing else but i've got these two sets of cat5 cables cat5e actually but these are not outdoor rated cables and the reason that i have these two this one goes over to my new office so you can see it runs along the house around the corner into the next office over this one here goes up into uh underneath there and then over to basically an access point that i have in my house the reason i have it set up this way is because i had the access point run first and that was fine that's sort of when i had my office in here that's where my switches were and all of that and so my access point terminated to this office this connection though i put in when i moved both the internet modem and my office over around the corner right i moved it to the next office over so then i wanted to be able to cross connect to my server rack in the guest room etc etc and that's why we have these sort of two connections going into this room these are no longer necessary right so what i'm going to be doing here is i'm going to be going up to where the access point is over here underneath my back deck and i'm going to run a cable from the access point past all of this and then around the corner straight to that office there's no reason why we need to have these cables terminate here any longer in fact i'm not even using that server rack anymore in preparation for moving all of my stuff to a new house second secondarily i've got this other cable this one goes all the way around the corner to my office but this is for my sort of television area in my living room so that i have hardwired connectivity to like my samsung tv and my nintendo switch and my playstation and you know apple tv all that sort of stuff that needs you know network connectivity it's great to have it hardwired so this one i would also like to replace while i'm doing it because you know listen i'm gonna have to run the wires right next to each other anyways so might as well just swap out both of these at the same time i already have keystone jacks all over the place so that shouldn't be too big a deal it's just a matter of running the cable and sort of stringing it up alongside the house which is not my favorite thing to do but but of course it has to be done and it'll make the new owners of the home much happier when they're not wondering why all of this stuff is networked the way that it is you know these things evolve over time right my network evolved just like any network you know and this is an evolution that's no longer needed so we're going to get rid of this and uh also replace it with some good cat6 outdoor rated copper wire right so this will be much better than the non-outdoor rated stuff that i have on there today and uh yeah i don't always look forward to these jobs they're not my favorite thing in the world to do but uh yeah we got to get it done so let's go ahead and get started i've got about three hours to uh to knock this one out and hopefully it won't take me that long all right so here's where i'm going to be terminating this cable the game plan is to take my cat6 cable and basically string two lines i wish i had two rolls of this because that'd make it so much easier but i'm going to string two lines all the way over around the corner and then up to where they need to be so that i've got plenty of slack to basically reuse these holes and just punch through the wall exactly where they are and i've got keystones on both sides so it shouldn't be too hard to terminate these [Music] another interesting network choice i don't remember why i made is that this is my this is my tv area right so this is one of the places where i want to run another cable the old cable i ran down here and then up and over and like so and then up into the tv area where i've got this little uh you know usw flex mini switch currently that's powering everything that doesn't make that a whole lot of sense though so when i rerun the cable now i'm gonna run it back here and poke through behind the television somewhere because i think that makes a lot more sense that way you can just run it into the tv straight or you can hang a little switch on the wall back here and it's going to be sort of out of the way in terms of cables and you could still possibly you know run some cables down the cable management uh for your other devices like you know an apple tv or whatever so i think that's going to be the better choice when i rerun this cable and i'll just cap that off with a blank faceplate so right here on my back deck that white cable is the old network cable that is the coaxial that charter ran i really don't need that anymore either but i don't know what the next owners are going to want so i'm just going to leave that so we're going to pull that out of there and i want to instead run it out over here in the corner so that i can go up and over the window and down uh basically kind of where this cable is right here but probably the next one up or maybe even the next one up after that and i can't quite get the cable through here from the bottom so we're going to take a drill and we're just going to drill it out right here just so that i have enough space in between these two boards to get that cable up through the deck i know a lot of people are going to say they're going to say cruz how come you didn't just run everything through the crawl space well on this part of my house i don't have a crawl space so i don't have the ability to go underneath the house that's why i'm kind of going around [Music] [Music] all right so i've punched through the wall right there i've got a hole that's just big enough to get a keystone jack in there cables coming through and then you can see the inside of this cat6 cable has this little like plastic separator in the middle right there and so we have to clip off that plastic separator clip off these little other extra little cables in here the little strings in there and then we're going to put the keystone jack on which is punched down with a 110 punch tool [Music] all right there we go finished product on the inside now just to plug everything back in and slide my tv back over and it'll actually cover that plug up all right so we are all complete you can see where they terminate it's right there i need to label the bottom one but other than that they are in tested and working great let me show you the outside all right so here we go we have these two different links going into the wall right here i still need to put some silicone on there i have some cedar colored silicone that will blend in with the siding real nice and then we have a drip loop and then you can see it goes all the way over and around to those two separate locations all right so there you have it all done with that project took me about uh three and a half hours to do the whole thing so really not too bad and uh it's certainly way way better uh when you take the time to do things properly i'm so glad that it's outdoor rated cable and the next owners aren't going to think that i was a crazy lunatic running wires all over the place with no rhyme or reason so i hope you guys enjoyed this look at some on the road stuff and some at the home stuff and we will see you in the next video

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 26,200

Keywords: crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, crosstalk on the road, ubiquiti, ubiquity, on the road

Id: iUGVqHTKT7Y

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020