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A New Way to Troubleshoot VoIP
If you’ve deployed VoIP at any level then it is quite likely that you have received complaints about poor call quality. How exactly does one measure VoIP call quality and how does one go about troubleshooting the cause of the poor quality? VoIP Metrics Maintaining high quality VoIP calls can be difficult as VoIP is more…
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March Madness: Major Headache or Minor Malady?
So, did you get your bracket done this year? Yeah, I have to admit, I was surprised Wintermute lost to HAL in the first round, too. Oh, right, you didn't think I was talking about the SolarWinds Sci-Fi Bracket Battle. Let's talk about that other bracket, the one for the NCAA Men's Division I basketball tournament because,…
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3 Strategies for Managing the IT Impact of Classroom Technology
Omar Rafik, SolarWinds Senior Manager, Federal Sales Engineering Here’s an interesting article by my colleague Mav Turner with ideas for improving the management of school networks by analyzing performance and leveraging alerts and capacity planning. Forty-eight percent of students currently use a computer in school, while…
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What Causes Route Flapping?
What is Route Flapping? Route flapping can be termed as the stream of fluctuating routing updates received by the routers on your network as they are routing traffic based on pre-defined routing policies. A route flap occurs when a router alternately advertises a destination network via one route then another, or when…
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Writing Challenge Day 26: Adventures in Home Tech Support
There came a time when a decree went out from Caesar Augustus parents to their children to return to their own city to be registered fix all the IT problems. We’re right in the middle of Christmas festivities, and any other year most of us would be enjoying our free time and the company of loved ones. Having great food,…
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Writing Challenge Day 30: Monitoring Mixology - Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Bourbon
I hope this post finds you and your family happy, healthy, and warm during the holiday season. For those who imbibe, I wanted to share a couple of recipes with you. One for the warmer months, and one for the colder. Why both? Well, I don’t want to alarm you, but March is only 61 days away, making it a full year since…
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Writing Challenge Day 29: Things I h̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ loved in 2020
Let’s start there. That’s a tough sentence to finish, right? Massive wildfires, a pandemic, shelter-in-place orders, the tragic loss of RBG… To the questionable—yet I assure you it was real—Kanye West running for POTUS, toilet paper shortages, household Wi-Fi bandwidths stretched to their limits, and suddenly understanding…
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Writing Challenge Day 28: When This Is Over
When this is over, will we shake hands again? Will we make plans again? Or will it all be banned again? When this is over, will we commute again? Will offices be absolute again? Or will my car be moot again? When this is over, will we still carry hand sanitizer? Will we be any wiser? Or will we forget it all like a blur? I…
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Writing Challenge Day 31: What’s the Plural of Apocalypse?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This year’s theme is “accentuate the positive”– this post may or may not adhere to that theme. It’s tempting to shove all ambient turmoil into the strange 365-day-period we just experienced. Tempting to think the new year might just make everything a bit better by sheer virtue of the new number at the end of…
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Electronic Health Records (EHR) Privacy
For some of us, a trip to the doctor includes the doctor inputting our information into our medical record using their computer or tablet. The updated record saves to the medical office’s server. Your information can then go anywhere from a medical billing office, to your insurance company’s claims office, to your…