IT WORKHOUSE acts as a built-in IT department, supporting your team, bringing technology elements together and offering the fundamental tools you need for your organisation to run effectively. We integrate with the fast, dynamic pace of small business and understand that time is a precious commodity. Small businesses get stuff done and, being one ourselves - we understand that! Benefits of working with IT WORKHOUSE include: Improved efficiency Reduced running costs Improved cash flow Increased reliability Business continuity Managing IT in-house can be prohibitively expensive for small businesses. You either hire an IT person, which is costly and time consuming...or invest valuable time investigating hardware deployments, understanding software licenses or trying to figure out why the printer isn’t working again! OR you don’t do any of this and “wing it” leaving yourself open to compliance and security nightmares. Proper technology, coupled with the right level of security and support helps small business thrive. Without IT Support valuable time can be wasted on troubleshooting technical issues or grappling with outdated systems. By minimising downtime and resolving issues swiftly, employees can focus on their core tasks, boosting everyone's productivity. So let us take on that responsibility. IT WORKHOUSE offer cost-effective solutions tailored to the specific needs and budget constraints of small businesses. With a predictable monthly Support Pack, you can avoid the unpredictability of IT expenses, making budgeting more manageable. We’ll manage your hardware asset register and schedule upgrades so you can manage your cash flow, no sudden capital expenditure necessary. Managed IT services from IT WORKHOUSE offer proactive monitoring, maintenance, and support, ensuring that your technology ecosystem runs smoothly. We setup your tools and accounts the right way, dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s. We promote best practices, ensuring that your tools are being used in the way they were designed which means less fighting the system and more productivity. We’re local and we have a team of friendly specialists on hand. We’re small enough to have personality and big enough to always have someone on hand. So why do you need IT WORKHOUSE? Because it’ll save you time, it’ll be done right and securely but most of all, it means technology can be an enabler to your business, not a time-sucking headache monster! 

Join our Director Alex for our latest Cyber Seminar where he will be discussing SPF, DKIM & DMARC - some key email authentication protocols. These are particularly topical at the moment as Google and Yahoo are starting to reject emails traversing through their systems which aren’t properly connected. So if you send marketing emails or use a CRM system that sends emails for you then this one is definitely for you!

Seasonal greetings 😊 For me, December is a time of year for reflection and giving thanks, so as we close this calendar year, I’d like to say thank you to all our customers, team members and friends, it’s been a blast! The technology market has seen the explosion of some amazing new technology including generative AI (see our blog image!) and quantum computing which has certainly made this year interesting. Though 2023 has certainly been another great year for IT Workhouse. We’ve helped hundreds of people and businesses all over the South Hams level up their IT, Cyber Security and communications. We’ve said hello to two new members of staff as we continue to build, and broaden our team, cementing IT Workhouse’s position as the go to technology company in the South Hams. As we progress into 2024, we have added some great new tools internally (such as Basecamp) and processes (like our SMB Checklist) to help make doing business in the South Hams, a more cyber secure environment. So, stay tuned for more free resources and videos on whatever the next 12 months throws at us! Have a wonderful festive break and enjoy this valuable time with friends and family if you can. Best wishes IT Alex

TL;DR - Yes, but no. It’s no secret that we use a lot of Ubiquiti UniFi networking equipment. It’s reasonably priced, capable and very quick to configure. Recently though, I’ve been testing some MikroTik equipment, routers, switches and wireless devices. This got me thinking, could MikroTik be a viable UniFi alternative? MikroTik and Ubiquiti both offer a variety of networking and wireless products, but their product lines and focus differ. My perspective in this is, can I get a quick, effective and reliable network with all the normal network security such as VLANs that my customers will actually want to use… Ubiquiti UniFi focuses on providing a unified ecosystem of networking products that are centrally managed through the UniFi Controller, or more recently, through the Network app on their dream series routers. Their product lineup includes access points, switches, security cameras, and entry systems. All things we’ve installed and our customers are using. The Network app offers a user-friendly interface that allows users to configure and manage multiple UniFi devices from a centralised dashboard. You get network visibility all the way through to the application layer! The UI is rather nice. MikroTik offers a diverse range of networking and wireless products that cater to various needs. They are well-known for their RouterBOARD series, which includes routers, switches, and even access points. MikroTik devices often come with a wide range of features, making them suitable for both basic and advanced networking scenarios. They have products tailored for home users, small businesses, and enterprise-level deployments. In fact many internet service providers utilise MikroTik products in their core infrastructure, probably. MikroTik products are cheaper than UniFi, generally, and they offer more variety and have more specialised devices useful for specific scenarios. A great example here is their vast array of 4G/5G routers. MikroTik also has the capability to manage multiple access points through common configurations using a built-in tool called CAPsMAN. Using CAPsMAN one can centrally manage a whole fleet of access points just like we do now with UniFi. This is definitely one part of the puzzle and a must! We can even control this remotely but we’d have to implement a SD-WAN tool like ZeroTier. Anyway, what does all this mean and how well does it work in practice? I setup a MikroTik RB5009UG+S+IN router and two WAP ACs (weatherproof wireless access points). Using a special 48V power adapter (bought separately) the RB5009 router will output PoE on all 8 ports! This saves me buying a PoE switch and is a bit like the UniFi Dream Machine. It’s all-in-one so to speak. I registered the two APs to CAPsMAN on the router and configured the wireless networks. Everything was working great and it really didn’t take me very long. The RB5009 will route traffic at full FTTP 900Mb speed and the access points deliver fast and reliable wireless. Was it faster than a UniFi deployment? Not initially but I can definitely script a bunch of this work to make it faster and easier to repeat. Is it better than a UniFi deployment? Nope. A bit cheaper maybe but I struggle to justify it being better. Some of our customers have access to the UniFi controller and can see or manage their network settings themselves. That works with UniFi because the UI is so good but the MikroTik UI is no where near good enough to be in “self explanatory” territory. So apart from having lots of fun, I can see use cases for MikroTik over UniFi. Especially if price is a key decision maker. It’s more customisable but harder to setup and monitor. I don’t think IT Workhouse will be jumping ship just yet but we’ll be adding this core knowledge to our repertoire and if an interesting use-case comes up I’ll write about it! I’m running this MikroTik setup at home and will do a long term review in 12 months to see how we get on in regards to reliability. Image generated using Adobe Firefly AI

After monitoring the ARC hit ratio as per our last article, we’ve upgraded a clients storage server (Truenas) RAM to improve performance. Originally the server had 64GB of RAM which is a good starting point to use with ZFS. As we discussed before, ZFS loves RAM. However, after monitoring the ZFS stats that Truenas gives us we noticed a low ARC hit ratio (and slower than expected performance) and have since upped the RAM to 128GB and have now not got mean hit ratios in the >90% which is great! This storage server serves several virtual machine disks through NFS shares, so having a high ARC hit ratio means that most of the virtual disks are running from ARC rather than disk resulting in much better VM performance. Using the virtual machines you would just guess that it was running on SSDs, not 8TB disks. So ZFS allows us to get the economy of spinning disks but through ARC (a.k.a RAM) much better performance, a bit like that of SSDs. This, I think, is good value for money as the RAM was 1/6th of the cost of turning to an all SSD server.