The Primary Open Source / Closed Source Software That Runs Our Business as of April 2019

so it's April of 2019 and I wanted to make a updated concise list of the software that runs my company Florence systems and I made this list because there's a lot of questions from old videos I was running something else back then so this is what I'm running now now my plan is actually going to be if we make any major changes to make an updated video and this will be my response video because when I can I'll reply with the video link when people just ask that question this comes up in the forums and comes up of course in the contact form what software do you run for this for that and I always want to send the list because it I never reply and just satisfy that person they want to know what else you run for this now I also don't understand other companies who are secretive about it if you run the same software is me that does not mean you do the same things as me or even if a competitor's seen my software list I don't think I have some competitive advantage based on these softer choices I made the effectiveness is in the execution of using said software to run your business effectively so I made a list and we're gonna start with how the video got to you so the first doctor is kdenlive audacity and there's over 700 videos on my youtube channel here and those are the tools used for the majority of I think kdenlive I edited probably over 700 of the videos with I still like it they're always updating that software and of course that's not exactly core to the business its core to the YouTube channel it's not necessarily an IT business but I thought I'd mention it that I'd use an open-source editing workflow and you can find a video on it I'll leave a link below now let's talk about the server stack the the server rack in the back and things like that now this isn't things not run in digitalocean I will throw out there that we have server spun up and digitalocean we have other stuff we manage for clients and other platforms but stuff that we have is in digitalocean for such as our forums and the forum's run on discourse which is open runs inside of a docker image I mentioned that before if you look for my discourse video but if you're on the forums that is a open source platform there X C P and G is the core of what runs our stack here in our server case now this is run and a pair of servers in a pool as they call a resource pool so there is the ability to just swap the VMS back and forth between each other and model the VMS I'm going to mention the ones that we host internally are all run on X C P and G now I did previous videos on citrix xenserver and someone asked me about that if we've run Citrix anymore we moved everything including clients are all moved off of Citrix and over to XC PNG I think I have one or two left that we need to migrate over which we have some plans in place to do because the XC PNG platform I really do feel superior I didn't take down any of my Citrix videos because they're still relevant there's still a accurate to the how XC PNG works you just replace where the download link comes from because Citrix made some really poor choices in my opinion on licensing and way they handle things now where are all those VMs stored besides running on those servers they do have some local storage no servers and I've done some videos about this in depth about how our lab and our rack is set up but FreeNAS is what handles some of the back-end storage now I run both FreeNAS eleven two and eleven ones we have two FreeNAS servers one backs up to the other I keep an older one for clients and consulting jobs we do where people ask many things and a lot of times it seems like some of the consulting is with the older ones so having a system running the older legacy version is helpful because if I have to test something because a lot of this is very important in a lab environment to me because we a clients can I do this or can I do that having these same tools here in our office both in Iraq and even more of them sitting behind me we do a lot of lab testing experiments and learning to make sure we do this and I even set my employees on tasks this is how they learn they'll take some of the lab things and spin it up in either in our main stack of server environment or back here to make sure they understand our product or you know a detail out a specialized project where client has an unusual request now pfSense you can run or virtualize that question comes up I do not though my preference is running it on hardware especially even at home now that really still smaller boxes I really like those work wonderful but pfSense on hardware to me just feels better because that way if I'm ever troubleshooting something going on or have to restart the stack I don't have to wait for the Internet to come back of course you could go AHEA and then there's less worry about it but I just like being a separate piece of hardware that's my preference there's no little gotchas when you run it in solid hardware I know it does effectively run in other places but this is my preference if you want to run it inside of virtualization go ahead I've run it as Hardware a bun two pop OS on the desktop so a bun two based distributions for desktop slash workstations work really well I switched to a bun tube over around two thousand eight or nine and got rid of Windows seven I want to say I went full-time in about 2012 where I absolutely didn't use Windows at all anymore so now I've you know seven plus years of running nothing but that as my desktop I do and you may have seen videos like I did that SolarWinds one where you see inside of Windows I run VirtualBox and that's how I run my Windows 10 which is license that's how Windows 10 works for me if I need to use it and it's not very often but there's certain tools that may only require Windows so we don't really run any Windows we have no Windows servers in the building but we run a bunch of desktops and I have run other desktop software before but I I kind of like the a bunch of based ones I see a bun to Basin because I'm specifically running pop OS I like the Polish Papa West puts on things so it's been happy for me it's been very very stable very easy to manage and I like it Debian servers I really like Debian for a server operating system you know did I ever use seizure it yeah I started with Red Hat actually in the 90s that's when my linux admin days started was around 1999 1998 i was dabbling with it that i was an AIX admin in the UNIX world but then I moved over to Debbie and around 2002 I think so I'm seventeen years of using it so I'm familiar with environment I'm comfortable at that environment so that's what we base most of our servers on I like it it's lightweight it's predictable I like apt-get update all the things it works really well and most of the servers that we run that we spin things up on in xep engineer mostly based on Debian as well now free PBX is going to be an exception to Debian because we get the sangoma spin of it I know Asterix will run in Debian but I like the whole sangoma package which is mostly open source but it has some modules on there that are paid for if you want those but you can download the open source version of it I'm really happy that's what makes your phone's ring and it's been a great system Chris from crosstalk I have a video we co-opted Heath when it helped me set some of that up I'm not I like free PBX I can manage it but I'm not a go-to expert in all things free PBX but yeah definitely watch Chris's channel he's got a lot of great tutorials on setting it up zabbix running in Debian zabbix I've done a video on that's how we monitor our infrastructure no that's not how we monitor Windows infrastructure for clients I'm using SolarWinds for that but it's a zabbix is a great tool for infrastructure monitoring I say monitoring cuz some people say well it doesn't do this or does it do it's made for monitoring yes you can add some more features to it but it does keep an eye on all of our servers for us so I can have a dashboard and see how all of my infrastructure internal and external is doing so that works really well security well a sec I know I'm not going to do a video on Oh sec maybe I'll do a video on wazoo because we're looking at moving to wazoo o SEC is very difficult I had a friend help me set some of that up and it's it's a little bit challenging I get it it's hard setting up it's really effective for security sometimes it's so effective it stopped me from doing things but I was actually happy it did I was trying to edit a table and it even really thought me as a threat and it's really interesting if you dig into a little bit if you haven't read about a second wazoo they're really cool there are effective at stopping attacks to an extent all Security's best effort but I will say they are a pretty good product out there if you want to check it out I may do some videos on wazoo if we do for do a full migration to it while she's pretty cool it's like a fork of o o SEC but make it a little bit easier to manage MediaWiki we're still running I have some videos on MediaWiki I really like it it's a great tool it does our documentation management it's very lockdown it has two FA on it it's only accessible internally across the VPN inside of our network and only a handful of people have access to its documentation management but I've done videos on this it's a great product for managing it it's easier than a lot of the other ones I've tried but yes it still has a learning curve yes knowing some markup language and how Wikipedia works is helpful but once you kind of template eyes it makes it easy in effect to be able to find documentation keep up with documentation manage all the config files we have across many many clients when we do updates now money-wise there's two tools we use we have K my money which is how I manage the bank accounts we have several bank accounts and I use a qif file transfer it's a standard for inter interchange quick and interchange format I don't maybe I don't know that Ramin stands for I know most banks offered as a download and we bring that in and K my money and that's how we do our accounting based on actuals I've got a video on that it's hard to do a good tutorial on that because you know dumping all my financials and all the details out to the internet seems like a bad idea and a real secure years because if you knew exactly how much certain amounts were you'd be able to call the bank and etc etc and try to pretend to be me so it's hard to do videos on it but that's is what we're using for ledger management so our general ledger profit and loss monthly statements I have an outside accounting firm that audits and checks all this against bank statements because the IRS is a headache here in the US use best to avoid them and best to pay an accountant to do it right but invoicing we do with invoice ninja invoice ninja has some ledger features but we don't use any of them we just use it for invoicing and quoting and it works great for that keeping track of who owes us money how much they owe us and sending out invoices fast and effectively I've got a handful of videos on it I love it as a product it's really great it's actually really well-written I'm really happy with all the updates and all the features that's added from the time we started using it to a year later and we've got right now like 22 or 23 thousand invoices in it so we've used it like a lot and it's a it's a great product these are a couple of propriety pieces of software yes I know there's mail servers out there someone's going to link about 10 different open-source mail servers out there the problem with mail servers is getting mail out just seem to go into spam systems a lot I ran my own mail server for years I was a mail server admin for a few companies that was something I did early in the 2000s in my opinion between gcg suite office 365 the war is over with email they do an effective job they're great for business and I don't have to spend any time trying to figure out why someone didn't get my invoice in first you think it's an excuse then you find out it's reality they didn't get the invoice because you are somehow on a blacklist buy forms of internet magic and you can't contact the companies blacklist you because they have no easy way to contact because they're bombarded by spammers that are also contacting him so we moved to G suite that's the short answer there that's why G suite also in terms of document management being able to collaborate from my phone yes I know there's other software's like next cloud that offer this I tried it I don't feel as though it worked near as good as G suite does I'm sorry I mean I really like those products but when it comes to running my business that uncritical things sharing documents sharing spreadsheets in real time with staff that are on site and working with even remote people and working with other clients hands down it just works really well making sure all of your emails get there especially because we use G suite as the backend to send invoices out through invoices ninja works every time they get it it doesn't tell them that the PDFs attached with an invoice are some type of crazy threat it just works and that's an important aspect for this other proprietary software screenconnect that's how we handle remote access to take control of our clients computers it works wonderfully yes as proprietary it's a connect wise product I think it's actually called connect wise Connect it's was called screen connect we bought it way back then we use a self hosted version of it I'll leave links to all these and below so you can check it out but it's a good software I've not found anything and I've tried a handful of them open-source it's been a long time since I tried everything once I switch to screen connect it works so well there license fee seemed reasonable to me I pay it every year cost of doing business but boy does it work well SolarWinds I have not come close to finding an open source solution that works as well as SolarWinds for the overall yes I know the updates because someone always complains they don't update well for things yeah no one really does update well because Microsoft doesn't update well so they're all dealing with the chaos that is the Microsoft Windows Update system insert stupid meme about Windows 10 updates here lastly you know primary business at least is going to be unified know unify is not open-source yes unify is a proprietary system that runs cameras that runs the unified Software Defined Networking tools for all the Wi-Fi we really like it I think it's a great product we have a installed you know hosting it ourselves to manage clients and we do install it for clients and I bring it up because you we really like it and we do a lot of other software it's not core to our business in terms of what supports our company but we are familiar with a lot of other proprietary products out there so but I wanted to cover this as the software that runs our business here in April of 2019 so I can just send this as a reply when people say do you still run this or this from some old video I did and like I said I'll update this video if anything changes and go from there all right leave links below to everything and continue the conversation on the forums thanks thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and Abell like on and maybe YouTube will sense you and notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to Lauren systems comm where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion further ahead over to forums at Laurens systems comm where we can keep the conversation going and if you 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 27,402

Keywords: open source, open source software, open source software (industry), business software, business software applications, software, business, accounting software, crm software

Id: MZCwykBjft0

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019