Computer Guys - Need Your Input

[Sam]

Any computer guys out there????

If so, can you give me some guidance on the following?

CLOUD

I am seriously thinking of going to the "Cloud" backup system to sync my office and home computers and for backup. Any suggestions regarding if the "Cloud" system is a viable alternative and which ones do you like?

PRINT PORT IP CHANGED

It took us over two hours working with the copy machine tech to figure out that the computers in my office changed the last IP port number from a 4 to a 5 causing all print efforts to fail. Anyone have any idea of how this happened?

Thanks in advance for your input. I sincerely appreciate it.

[GrundleLove]

Any computer guys out there????

If so, can you give me some guidance on the following?

CLOUD

I am seriously thinking of going to the "Cloud" backup system to sync my office and home computers and for backup. Any suggestions regarding if the "Cloud" system is a viable alternative and which ones do you like?

PRINT PORT IP CHANGED

It took us over two hours working with the copy machine tech to figure out that the computers in my office changed the last IP port number from a 4 to a 5 causing all print efforts to fail. Anyone have any idea of how this happened?

Thanks in advance for your input. I sincerely appreciate it.

CLOUD: The best "cloud" backup system ...correction, maybe not the "best" but one that is viable is to do it in house. Setting up a machine running windows server 10 (or 08) or windows SBS could do it all. That way all of your office workstations log into the domain, and from there you can turn on RDP ( remote desktop services) and Virtual LAN so that when you are at home, you can connect to the Virtual LAN and access all shared drives, folders, etc. As well as if you have a laptop at home and a computer at work, you can RDP from home and basically log into your machine remotely.

As for the backup portion, there is always the option of removable media i.e. tape, external hard drive, and the best is ISCSI device that links data and storage over the internet making it possible to backup from anywhere. OR you can pay for a service. Our company uses a branded version of Incronis backup for all of our clients in which it runs on their server and gets backed up over the wire to Incronis, this would be a "off site" backup.

The problem is that this costs MONEY. ISCSI's alone are anywhere from 15-70 grand. the server ( if you don have one) can range from 2200 to ...well...a lot.

PRINTER PORT CHANGE: What i am seeing is that printer X has an IP of lets say, 192.168.1.101. And all of your office workstations have an IP port of 192.168.1.101 for that printer. Same port, yay you can print! But what happened is that 192.168.1.101 on the PRINTER got changed to 192.168.1.102...which makes all workstations print jobs fail because the port is different. The easy way to solve is to switch the printer IP port back to the original one that is associated with the workstations. This could happen if for example, when setting up the printer, you did not use the default IP address the printer assigns, you decided to use a different port, which is fine. But if for some reason the printer loses power or RESETS back to "factory default" the IP address changes with it, voila. Also, if it took 2 hours on the phone with support to come to that conclusion I would recommend firing that tech, or call your printer support company ( i.e. Brother, Epson, HP etc) and request his incompetence be addressed. I say that only because often with printer support they bill you.

If you have any more questions I would be more than happy to answer.

[David301]

Sounds like you have the printers set up for DHCP, which a host obtains this IP address from the DHCP server for a specific leased time, example 30 days. After the specific leased time is up the host will obtain a new IP address from the DHCP server, and it will not always been the same IP address. I would change the printers from DHCP and STATIC and assign the printers a specific IP address and on the DHCP server assign that host the IP address and remove that IP address from the POOL (POOL is the block of IP address's that are available to be leased out).

[Sam]

Guys, thanks a million.

I sincerely apprecaite the feedback.

The "tech" was the copy machine guy.

I had placed a call into the IT guy but after we noted the change in the IP address and I corrected it I cancelled his visit as the copier worked.

Maybe one day we will have everything the same on all computers and we will no longer have these problems.

Sam

[NateFollmer]

Kept having that problem at work. I set all the network printers with static ips to fix it.

How much data do you need to backup? I use dropbox to save my files to a 'cloud'. Free accounts only give you 2GB of space, but I only use it to transfer files back from work and home (I always lose usb sticks lol)

[Sam]

Nate, thanks for the input.

I have no idea how many gigabytes I need.

I will investigate the Cloud system and I sincerely appreciate the feedback.

As for the computer resetting itself to default after we put in a new code, we still can't figure that one out. Never happened before.

Thanks again to all for the feedback.