Author Topic: IT help for Union office  (Read 589 times)

AmbulanceDriver

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IT help for Union office
« on: January 12, 2019, 11:06:52 PM »
So my job is a closed shop - have to be a union member to work there.  Not a huge deal, I don't particularly care for the politics, but I don't give them money (since I'm a shop steward, I'm not paying any dues) and we actually have sensible policies that let us get rid of idiots without too much interference from the union.   

In any case, I also was asked to join the e-board of our local (which gives me a bit of inside baseball on the politics, which is nice to be able to counteract when possible) and ends up with the union actually paying me. 

All of this is preface to the actual question....   I just recently found out that we're apparently in the stone age when it comes to the computer stuff at our office.  Desktops on wired network, laptops on wireless, no biggie, but there's no guest network (if you want to get on the network they give you the main wifi password, which is of course insecure as hell).  That's the first thing I'm going to recommend they change.  But I also found out they're not taking any backups of the data on their machines, and lo and behold, an employee that retired recently was not doing a lot of things he was supposed to be doing, and to cover his tracks, wiped his machine when he left.  Well, that of course destroyed a lot of work product, and set some stuff back years.   Water under the bridge at this point, and of course I found out he'd done this *after* the new business agent was hired and they set his old machine back up as a basic machine for her to work on.  So recovery at this point is pretty much moot, assuming he didn't actually do a high level wipe on the machine. 

To prevent this in the future, I want to help them set up a local fileshare, with a secure on site backup of their machines and a secure cloud backup offsite. 

Unfortunately, I'm way out of date on anything more than basic setup.  Figure a dual bay NAS, with one drive set up as the local shared disk, and the other as a backup to the shared drive and the individual machines.  And then have the second drive backed up offsite to AWS, or similar service.

So I guess I'm asking for a sanity check from the folks that do this regularly and know what they're doing.  Does what I'm proposing sound reasonably doable for someone with just enough IT knowledge to be dangerous, or if this is something that's better off for them to find a local IT wonk who knows their stuff and can do this on a contract basis.

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cordex

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Re: IT help for Union office
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2019, 11:29:30 PM »
I worried you were going to ask for a recommendation for a Union shop IT provider.

For WiFi I really like the Datto stuff which used to be sold as OpenMesh, but as of this year they are partner-only and have a monthly service charge.  The hardware cost is pretty low, the monthly service charge isn't bad and covers immediate replacement of bad units for the life of the contract, and the units are pretty capable - up to four configurable networks, bandwidth limitations per SSID, mesh networking, easy install, etc., etc.  If you're interested I can get you a quote.

I've got a few clients who are moving heavily toward cloud-based storage for important files.  Domain level backups for O365 or Google can be pretty cheap.  So, use OneDrive or Google Drive for regular storage, enable versioning, then have third-party backup.  Hard to beat that for good stability.

Local copy I'm not sure I'd shunt a bunch of users to a consumer grade NAS.  If we're talking less than five, then maybe, but otherwise you're going to want something like a DiskStation.  Those are extra cool because they can integrate very easily with BackBlaze B2 or similar backup solutions which takes care of offsite backup.  A lot of my specific recommendations would depend on the number of users and the amount of data you need to store.

AmbulanceDriver

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Re: IT help for Union office
« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2019, 11:44:56 PM »
about 5 users, and its almost entirely word, excel, and pdf documents
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Calumus

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Re: IT help for Union office
« Reply #3 on: January 13, 2019, 09:12:35 AM »
Cordex nailed it on back up. I have most of my clients using Google services. Having Google hosting their email too just makes for a seamless, easy to manage set up.

230RN

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Re: IT help for Union office
« Reply #4 on: January 13, 2019, 07:40:18 PM »
I don't do that kind of stuff, but in other circumstances, I learned to consider the client's budget before suggesting going full bore on improvements.

That's the first thing they'll ask... "What's it gonna cost?"

I would guess the Google stuff would have the least impact, but I don't know.

Calumus

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Re: IT help for Union office
« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2019, 09:45:25 PM »
I don't do that kind of stuff, but in other circumstances, I learned to consider the client's budget before suggesting going full bore on improvements.

That's the first thing they'll ask... "What's it gonna cost?"

I would guess the Google stuff would have the least impact, but I don't know.

$10/ month a head or less.

cordex

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Re: IT help for Union office
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2019, 11:13:56 PM »
$10/ month a head or less.
Which usually works out to less than the loss of years worth of data.