Email provider Rackspace down after Security Breach.

[alexsmith2709]

@alexsmith2709 Most of the franchises I work with use Google for everything, pairing that up with a locally owned M365 tenant that provides the Office Applications, or even a full M365 license to get Teams and whatnot on their own domain, while the local Outlooks are actually aimed at a Gmail isn't uncommon.

So you could help your local franchises do all of that, and have email running on an "unofficial" domain for emergency use. Though it is tricky here... because diluting the trademark is a very bad thing for many reasons.

The email can be used and it's been added in outlook for all users for months. I told them they could use that if they wanted but they don't seem to want to.

 

[brandonkick]

After I think about it some more... and reflect. I don't think we are EVER going to get those lost exchange RackSpace mailboxes back.

Their post about "restoring access to 1000's of users" was in my opinion vague on purpose. They mean that they started getting people forked over to their reseller M365 licenses and got email services "restored" that way.

If it has been this long without any report of anyone actually being able to get back into their exchange based mailboxes... I just don't think it'll happen. Damn.

Speculation, but I misinterpreted that post the first time around.

 

[nlinecomputers]

After I think about it some more... and reflect. I don't think we are EVER going to get those lost exchange RackSpace mailboxes back.

Their post about "restoring access to 1000's of users" was in my opinion vague on purpose. They mean that they started getting people forked over to their reseller M365 licenses and got email services "restored" that way.

If it has been this long without any report of anyone actually being able to get back into their exchange based mailboxes... I just don't think it'll happen. Damn.

Speculation, but I misinterpreted that post the first time around.

Yep. It’s gone and not coming back.

 

[callthatgirl]

I just took a call today, client I only help every few years called me to do some fine tuning after his tech got him on 365 after RS slayed his mailbox. I asked where is the old profiles? The tech deleted them.

So I ran Remo data recovery, found a 5 gig OST from July. Crossing fingers some data is there, no data from a few days ago when the tech deleted the profiles. I have a feeling I will be seeing these coming up.

28 jobs, this week. 60 calls, $10k. Not all from Rackspace but many many many.

 

[brandonkick]

I just took a call today, client I only help every few years called me to do some fine tuning after his tech got him on 365 after RS slayed his mailbox. I asked where is the old profiles? The tech deleted them.

So I ran Remo data recovery, found a 5 gig OST from July. Crossing fingers some data is there, no data from a few days ago when the tech deleted the profiles. I have a feeling I will be seeing these coming up.

28 jobs, this week. 60 calls, $10k. Not all from Rackspace but many many many.

Good for you. Seriously.

Your a proven expert in the arenas you offer service, and I'm sure you put in a lot of hard work to get the customer base you have that are willing to pay your rates.


One thing I realize in all this (which I've known all along) is that I don't charge nearly enough. My way of dealing with that was to basically abandon SMB support (and I gave up break fix WAY before that). Admittedly, I'm not an expert or skilled enough that I'd go around trying to sell my services to people in terms of the 365 migration I just did... this was more or less me just helping out my last remaining SMB client. But even just knowing enough to be dangerous.... still not charging nearly enough.


I'll amend the Jokers quote from The Dark Knight.... "If your good at something never do it for free. If your really good at something never do it cheaply."

 

[callthatgirl]

If you don't do SMB support or break/fix, what do you offer? MSP? I'm a bit slow here as I only do b/f lol.

As of today, 206 new clients for 2022. In 2021 I had 215 and go back to 2013 when I was alone, so that base does keep calling. Some not so much, some call more for their team or 365 admin stuff. Those are probably my "managed clients" as they don't have IT.

One thing I learned about my consultancy is that I stopped selling prepaid tickets in 2020. I finally got to the point that my 1 hour sales make me more money in the long run that discounted hours.

 

[callthatgirl]

What are you charging now for an hour? Here was my rundown when I started. I raised my rates to slow down business and as I got more experience, I was much faster.

2013 $109-$129
2014 $119
2015 $119-$139
2016 $139
2017 $139
2018 $169
2019 $169-$199
2020 -$199
2021 -$225
2022 -$240
2023 -Goal of $300

 

[brandonkick]

@callthatgirl

I went to school to become a software engineer from 2007 to 2012. Took me to 2014 to get my first gig actually doing software development. In the mean time, I got a job at a local company... to keep me from going totally broke, in something completely unrelated. $10 an hour. But the company needed major, major help in the "IT" department. They basically had no one. Hotmail. Yahoo mail. No server. One desktop from walmart with the entire C drive shared as the "server" only backed up to removable usb hard drive when someone remembered.

While I was no where near the level I am now, or even someone who should have been doing it, I got them to a much better place and then slowly over the years got them better and better.

But software engineering was my focus since getting that job in 2014. In 2020 I was basically ready to quit everything else and 100% do only dev work. I had quit break / fix by then, and was only supporting that original client by that point (same one I just migrated their entire ecosystem to M365).

I imagine in the coming few months I'll have them offloaded onto someone who actually does his for a living. The agreement I made with them in 2020, when I was ready to hang it up entirely, was that I'd offer guidance but wouldn't be actively managing or responsible for the IT stuff any more. This whole fiasco over the past two weeks really wasn't even in my domain, shoulda been someone else (some other company) to handle it. But. Yeah. I'm good friends with a fair amount of people there and I knew in a disaster setting... you can't wait weeks to get someone lined up to come in and fix it all. So I jumped in and dealt with it. Even if I do nothing else for them this month (I'm on a salary).... this entire migration cost them..... pennies compared to what any local IT resource would have charged them.


2014 my first SE job paid 38K a year as a junior engineer
2016 I was up to 55K promoted to SE 1
2018 I was up to... 67K
2020 it was around 72K and promotion to SE2
End of 2021 I joined a new company... SE 2.... just over 100K a year


So... works out to around like $60 an hour as an SE2.

Should be senior engineer. Is what it is. The company is supposedly soon re evaluating their salary ranges to keep competitive and keep people from job hopping for more money. Who knows what that will mean. I'm supposed to (or was supposed too) be getting promoted soon to SE3 / senior. That band starts well above where I am now... who knows where I will land in that band if I get promoted there.



I do rather like the 365 migration work I just performed. I need to be better at it, to actually support and do it as a job.... I'm not sure I'd make that leap as I am good at what I do now and fairly comfortable. But again, it was pretty cool to see the whole project come together and turn into a nice, working solution.

 

[callthatgirl]

@brandonkick Ok, didn't know your background. Seems you graduated to a decent salary though in a few years. I still can't believe these kids on Tiktok who go online to a tech school for 3 months and get out coding at tech firms for $150k a year. This will not end well for them, the layoffs now are insane.

365 migration work is a bitch to learn. If you do manual, you need to know just about everything about all email platforms if you do break/fix ones like I do. For starters, most small businesses still use old tech, icloud for everything sharing, personal Gmail and a half baked personal MS accounts with many oddball emails and of course, all their computers were bought at Best Buy, logged into their MS account with the same email, 2 OneDrives and the fuckery of other messes. Not to mention, you need to know iPhone, Android, all versions of Outlook, how local PST's break, how to fix, this is day to day stuff I encounter while doing a migration, so I have to do a lot of "ok, now we have an issue..." Ugh. Years ago I would get so ******, now I just stay calm and explain and move on.

In 2023, I will be raising my fees for migration work as it's the most complicated work I get, I am fast and have done a couple thousand now.

If you are serious about doing them more, I can use some help on bigger migrations I get. I can only do so many by myself and have to turn down larger jobs sadly. I wish I had a dream team to knock out the big jobs lol.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I do rather like the 365 migration work I just performed. I need to be better at it, to actually support and do it as a job.... I'm not sure I'd make that leap as I am good at what I do now and fairly comfortable. But again, it was pretty cool to see the whole project come together and turn into a nice, working solution.

This has been my focus for a few years ago, while we've been focused as an "MSP"....and I've been doing the "IT for SMB's" thing for a solid 30 years, for the past couple of years I've really focused on 365. I'm more excited about moving clients to an all 365 environment than I was introducing clients to Microsoft Small Business Server 20+ years ago.

We're approaching 200 client tenants in our 365 partner portal that we CSP...collect those nice monthly margins on. We have a good % of those as MSP clients, and I'm working on converting a lot more clients over to monthly MSP plans. And THAT is where you REALLY start making the recurring monthly money and profits.

Migrating clients to 365 is only the beginning, "managing them"....with current security best practices, and protection of their data, is where it becomes quite a task, and profitable. As the amount of 365 tenants you manage grows....having the tools to keep them proper, becomes important. Centralized 365 management tools, a standardized backup for each tenant, etc. We're onboarding SkyKicks 365 management and security products and I'll be posting some details about it here soon.

 

[putz]

This has been my focus for a few years ago, while we've been focused as an "MSP"....and I've been doing the "IT for SMB's" thing for a solid 30 years, for the past couple of years I've really focused on 365. I'm more excited about moving clients to an all 365 environment than I was introducing clients to Microsoft Small Business Server 20+ years ago.

We're approaching 200 client tenants in our 365 partner portal that we CSP...collect those nice monthly margins on. We have a good % of those as MSP clients, and I'm working on converting a lot more clients over to monthly MSP plans. And THAT is where you REALLY start making the recurring monthly money and profits.

Migrating clients to 365 is only the beginning, "managing them"....with current security best practices, and protection of their data, is where it becomes quite a task, and profitable. As the amount of 365 tenants you manage grows....having the tools to keep them proper, becomes important. Centralized 365 management tools, a standardized backup for each tenant, etc. We're onboarding SkyKicks 365 management and security products and I'll be posting some details about it here soon.

have you looked into this tool at all?

CyberDrain Improved Partner Portal

Discover the ease of Microsoft 365 management with CIPP, the open-source solution tailored for MSPs seeking expertise and efficiency

cipp.app

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

have you looked into this tool at all?

CyberDrain Improved Partner Portal

Discover the ease of Microsoft 365 management with CIPP, the open-source solution tailored for MSPs seeking expertise and efficiency

cipp.app

Yeah, didn't "demo it"...but read up on it, saw some YouTube videos on it. If it was 20 years ago I'd be into doing it, but I'm just not wanting to self manage another hosted server or spend time troubleshooting issues on my own.

 

[brandonkick]

@brandonkick Ok, didn't know your background. Seems you graduated to a decent salary though in a few years. I still can't believe these kids on Tiktok who go online to a tech school for 3 months and get out coding at tech firms for $150k a year. This will not end well for them, the layoffs now are insane.

365 migration work is a bitch to learn. If you do manual, you need to know just about everything about all email platforms if you do break/fix ones like I do. For starters, most small businesses still use old tech, icloud for everything sharing, personal Gmail and a half baked personal MS accounts with many oddball emails and of course, all their computers were bought at Best Buy, logged into their MS account with the same email, 2 OneDrives and the fuckery of other messes. Not to mention, you need to know iPhone, Android, all versions of Outlook, how local PST's break, how to fix, this is day to day stuff I encounter while doing a migration, so I have to do a lot of "ok, now we have an issue..." Ugh. Years ago I would get so ******, now I just stay calm and explain and move on.

In 2023, I will be raising my fees for migration work as it's the most complicated work I get, I am fast and have done a couple thousand now.

If you are serious about doing them more, I can use some help on bigger migrations I get. I can only do so many by myself and have to turn down larger jobs sadly. I wish I had a dream team to knock out the big jobs lol.

The dev world is a bit of a lottery it seems.

Aptitude varies greatly, but most of those kids who do a boot camp and come out making big salaries are usually either in very high cost of living areas, had really strong aptitudes to begin with or just got silly lucky. Without the strong aptitude, or the high cost of living (which pulls up the starting salaries a lot) lots and lots of em get churned out quite quickly.

You can't learn the fundamentals AND get some good intro level work / projects under your belt in 3 months. Discrete math alone spanned a full year in my college lineup. Data structures, algorithm design, programmatic efficiency, the discrete math and THEN you get to intro to programming... intro to database... actually start to build something. That's all the first two years. The final two years are where you really start learning something that resembles what you'd do in the real world.

Of course, that four year CS degree could maybe be boiled down to 2 if you stripped out all the other non CS stuff and worked at an accelerated pace. You can't start discrete math 2 until your done with discrete math 1.... make it all one course if you'd like, still the same... it's months worth of content.

These boot camps usually churn out young devs who can program to some degree... but start asking about big 0 notation, or start digging into a nasty debugging session..... you don't find any of that in the odin project or a lot of these boot camp curriculums. It's like being able to use a calculator well vs understanding the operations the calculator is doing.

 

[callthatgirl]

I figured it was something like that lol.

 

[britechguy]

The company is supposedly soon re evaluating their salary ranges to keep competitive and keep people from job hopping for more money.

Don't hold your breath.

The only way you get significant salary increases, and it's not just in the IT industry, is to seek out a new position every few years. I didn't want to do that, and my salary stagnated accordingly. I knew many people who changed jobs every two or three years, often coming back to former employers later, and each and every time it involved a significant pay hike.

If an employer knows you're willing to stay put, and it's not difficult to figure out who those who prefer to do so are, they are going to do the bare minimum they can to keep you where you are.

Those who want to climb the salary ladder the fastest are always going to have to change jobs in order to do it. I hated job hunting so much, and trying to adjust to "the next corporate culture" so much, that I was willing to sacrifice salary increases so long as I was reasonably happy where I was.

 

[brandonkick]

Don't hold your breath.

The only way you get significant salary increases, and it's not just in the IT industry, is to seek out a new position every few years. I didn't want to do that, and my salary stagnated accordingly. I knew many people who changed jobs every two or three years, often coming back to former employers later, and each and every time it involved a significant pay hike.

If an employer knows you're willing to stay put, and it's not difficult to figure out who those who prefer to do so are, they are going to do the bare minimum they can to keep you where you are.

Those who want to climb the salary ladder the fastest are always going to have to change jobs in order to do it. I hated job hunting so much, and trying to adjust to "the next corporate culture" so much, that I was willing to sacrifice salary increases so long as I was reasonably happy where I was.

I know, I learned that the hard way... from early 2014 to late 2021. The first company I've ever worked for. Stayed that long.

I loved working there, loved the team, loved the actual work, the company was pretty great in most ways. Pay and promotions were really the sole negative. And I flat out had a senior engineer tell me the same thing (switching jobs to rapidly boost salary) about 2-3 years in. But I stayed, mostly because I was very happy otherwise and partly because I believed I'd get the raises and promotions I deserved even if it was a long time coming.

Changed jobs late last year and got about a 50% raise in doing so. And yeah... the notion (though I can't say it was ever promised) that I'd soon be going up a level and into a new pay band.... that would work out to almost a 100% increase in pay from my first job.

Money isn't everything, but I know what the going rates are. That money is just as good in my pocket. Though it is, and will always be below the other things I talked about. I won't work at a company I can't stand, or with people I can't stand, not a second longer than I absolutely have too anyways... regardless of pay.