Tech Support Hotline

Ok well then we know what we working with. Depending on budget, Samsung EVO 970’s (and up) are VERY good reliable drives. Not always great for budget, but they are workhorses of note.

Currently what we sell via our company as “standard” SSD upgrades are either the sandisks or the Hikvision (not C series tho).

Here’s a handy SSD buying guide that maybe others would also find useful

As well as quite a good list of SSD’s with different technologies and a bit of extra detail if you want to 1 drive to another

Anyone know of a place that can repair a motherboard with some missing surface mount capacitors. Think this board took a bump which knocked them off. The caps are missing so will need to source new ones.

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Yeah personally i prefer the samsung evo series for my main. Great aervice and i think they come with lo g warranties still.

But any sata ssd will work perfectly fine if your bear in mind that you should never fill thw drive to capacity for long periods of time. Try to keep 10% free.

I tend to run multiple drives instead.

Check for a tv repair place near you they can solder it normally.

Juat check to see if you can find the capacitors yourself as they are actually very cheap.

Was thinking that as well. Just trying to figure out what value caps those are. The others do not have any markings.

The trouble is normally buying them in batches of less than 500! I’d say chat to the repair place first, they might have some in different packaging that’s the right capacitance.

@Darkstar: If you don’t come right with a TV repair shop, try a local electronics manufacturing company. They won’t take the job, as it’s way too small for them, but maybe the young artisan on the floor is willing to spend their free time on it, using spares they… found.

Where in the country are you?

I’m in the Joburg east rand area. The board is actually in my PC at the moment and working “fine”. Only noticed the missing caps a week after buying it 2nd-hand. Being a Asus Crosshair VIII Dark Hero I got at a very good price I would much like to keep it.

I actually found a few PC repair shop. One can do it, but they charge R1375. The other wont touch it because soldering work behind the CPU can warp the socket.

Out of pure frustrated desperation, does anyone have a connection at Telkom who may be able to help get our business lines sorted?

We haven’t been able to make or receive calls for going on 2 weeks now, and it’s a huge problem.

I think what has happened is the lines have been converted to LTE VoIP lines - something that we’ve been to and fro-ing with Telkom for months now - without them actually having the needed router and new phones delivered and installed in the office. I can’t be 100% sure though because there’s been zero confirmation of this from Telkom!.

I do strongly suspect that we currently have landline equipment that doesn’t work in a VoIP world.

We can’t find anyone to help, or even get a vaguely competent response as to how and when we’ll have functioning office phone lines again.

So yeah, desperate.

Apologies for the double post - should have just posted here first.

Have you tried the nearest physical Telkom store? They can’t ignore you if you’re standing in front of them.

When last have you been at a physical Telkom store? They most certainly can ignore you if you’re standing in front of them!
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I jest of course, my last two visits to Telkom stores in the past 6 months or so were incredibly positive experiences. Just not sure how enabled they are to service Business clients.

Only saw this now. Still trying to get a solution up and running? Message me and we can discuss ?

Thanks @Nimatek. We are still without working phone lines. Have made a little progress with Telkom, but not enough sadly.

We now have received the Yealink W73P handsets and base stations, received messages to say the service has been activated, but still no information and details of what our Registered Domain and SIP Sever addresses are.

I set the password on the lines, as needed in the confirmation email. But there’s no sign of where to go from there - no “click here to see your VoIP SIP” details, no “Log in here to access your account info”. I don’t even know if there is anywhere obvious to see the details?

I have managed to access the devices using their IP addresses on the Yealink web interface, but none of the suggested settings I’ve found online (mostly from a thread on the MyBB forum) have worked. The closest I’ve got is one that showed as “Registering” but it stayed that way for a day without change. Mostly it comes back as “Registration Failed”.

Tried to find the right info online in the Self Sevice Portal thing. But…. we can’t add the lines to the profile I created because it won’t let us link the account .

Every combination of info we try use to link the account fails with a “We could not identify you as a valid contact for this service on this account.” Telkom can’t/won’t give us any indication of who they have listed as a “valid contact”.

I’ve asked again for the settings to be emailed to me, or for the info needed to link our account in the self service portal, but I’m not hopeful.

The worst part is now that the lines have been activated on the VoIP system, callers are now getting a “the subscriber is not available” message, which is somehow worse than the unanswered ringing that was happening before.

So yeah, pretty much at a stalemate at the moment. And to compound things, I’m going to be out of the country from later today for 3 weeks, so I’m at a loss for what to tell the team in the office.

I got given one of these ds-418play models with 4x4TB. I just don’t know what to do with it. Storage? How reliable are they? I have a 2TB google cloud that I backup with so not sure what I’d use a physical device for.

Suggestions?

It’s a solid brand. It runs linux with a custom GUI, and can run a bunch of different services aside from your local storage. There should be Google Drive sync apps too, so you could probably set up a 2TB quota for that directory, for example (not that I’m a fan of Google).

I think it can also run Docker, which means you can install Pi-Hole, a DNS server that blocks ads and tracking websites.

Ooooooooh nice!

These things do far more than just backup. You can pop an OS of choice on there, like Proxmox, and run a bunch of services. My home server has, in no particular order:

• Jellyfin, for when the internet decides not to internet and my wife wants her stories
• Caddy, so that some services are accessible from the outside world
• Calibre for ebook management
• Changedetection, a service that monitors websites, and then send me a notification when something changes. I use this daily for job opportunities, price changes, service notifications, etc.
• VSCode, code in a browser, on your own hardware. Makes version control a little easier if set up correctly, which I have not. Speaking of version control,
• Gitea, selfhosted Github replacement.
• Frigate, feed all your networked CCTV in here for person detection and notification. Needs a small piece of hardware to really unlock the power, though.
• Home Assistant, self hosted home automation software. I don’t do too much with this, just turn on some lights 30 mins before sunset, and turn on other lights if we get in after dark, sort of thing, but In December I really want to integrate my Jojo tank through a level sensor.
• Kavita, ebook reader in me browser, from anywhere I have internet.
• metube, a youtube downloader. Useful in conjunction with Jellyfin.
• Mosquitto, an MQTT broker.
• n8n and/or nodered, drag and drop automation platforms with loads of integrations out of the box.
• navidrome, a music player I control, so there’s no podcasts on there
• radarr, sonarr, nzbget, some apps I use for sailing
• smokeping, the best service for monitoring your internet quality
• stirling, a pdf management service. I don’t like putting Adobe Reader on my personal devices, so I use this instead.
• tdarr, transcode any videos file I have into the codec I prefer, for space saving.
• Factorio and Satisfactory servers for messing around online with some friends.

I have yet to set up pihole or adguard, as @murfle suggested, because every time I try, I realize that the ports it asks for is used by caddy already, and then I bravely stop trying.

If you want inspiration, take a look at /r/selfhosted, or Awesome Selfhosted or https://selfh.st/

There’s also a self-hosted discord

The Discord server is centered around the Self Hosted podcast, though, which I’d rather recommend than the Discord. Some really good discussion in the ~5 years of content.

We own a smaller Synology NAS, and we use it for making backups as well as putting all our media on it so we can stream to our projector.

Also, you can never have too many backup options, in the incredibly unlikely event that something happens either to google or to your specific google drive, you would then still have the NAS as a backup-backup coupled with the fact that it is on your local network, means if you have internet problems there would be no issue getting your files locally. I would recommend putting it on a UPS though, Hard Drives don’t like loadshedding or disgraceful shutdowns

Thanks @murfle @Avatar and @TechThief. Those are solid suggestions and have given me some ideas to work with.

I think I’ll look at getting a local copy of my drive files. I do worry one day Google for some reason decides to block my account, there goes my whole life history basically.

Then I like the idea of having local youtube something something in case the internet dies. I currently have a flash stick permanently connected into the tv with a handful of shows on there but I haven’t touched it in at least 2 years.

A Satisfactory server? Didn’t know it could do stuff like that. I wonder if it could host a Minecraft server.

Any suggestions for the raid setup? 5? What do you all use?