Laptop Upgrades and VoIP Quality of Service
Laptop Upgrades
We’ve noticed that many customers buying new MacBooks are running into space issues because of hard disk drive downgrades. Some of our clients have replaced an older 1TB MacBook Pro with a 500GB MacBook Pro, and quickly run out of space. We recommend confirming how much space you are using on your current laptop before switching to the latest, fastest model.
Office 365
Office 365 has always had spam filtering built into their service, but until now you couldn’t administer it. Now you can go in to Exchange Online Protection and filter malware and specific connections, adjust spam (inbound and outbound) and check your quarantined items.
Mapping Drives
When mapping a drive, the best practice is to map the drive using the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) in the address string. This will help with name resolution issues that can occur when working outside of the network.
Meraki VPN
Typically a site-to-site VPN requires that both sites have unique subnets. Meraki’s VPN Subnet Translation solves this problem, allowing both subnets to be the same and saving administrators time.
VoIP Quality of Service
Most internet service providers will not honor any quality of service (QoS) tagging you assign to your traffic unless you are on a certain medium or service package provided by them. DSL and cable connections are best effort data transport mediums, and thus your QoS tags will be ignored. As a network administrator, you can only control the prioritization of traffic within your network, but this is still a good idea – especially if you have a larger network. QoS should be applied to the switches and the firewall to ensure that the voice over IP (VoIP) traffic is the first out the door. A separate virtual local area network should also be implemented whenever possible. If you are experiencing call quality problems with your VoIP system, please contact us for help.
If you have any questions about these tips, or anything else related to your technology, please don’t hesitate to call us at 970.373.5428 or contact us today.
October 2017 Edition