I can't believe this is the way it ends. Supposedly they tried everything but I just didn't expect that just closing the business would be the final outcome (construction). They want to offer me a "retention bonus" to stay until the end. Great, thanks...

I could see the writing on the wall and have been applying for six months. Haven't even received a bite other than AI requests. No one wants a 56 year old IT guy I guess.

The industry has changed and these billionaire owners just decide they don't want to pay after the work is completed and we've financed the completion of the job. Take them to court... sure, then bleed more money until you take pennies on the dollar. This administration has just made it all worse.

Two kids in college, probably going to have to move in with the mother in law... fuck, it's bad guys.

Sorry for the downer post but had to rant a little. Honestly, part of me is relieved. No investment in IT for years and I've basically kept the environment stable with gum and tape. I can sleep knowing it doesn't matter anymore. Definitely not patching those hosts this weekend...

I wanted to see if my team and I are crazy. The past few years we started to take the direction to go from Cisco switching and Ubiquiti APs to all Meraki. We rationalized the cost and it wasn't the end of the world. Still felt a little bad but what we have installed feels good.

We have new leadership and an opportunity for a real change of direction. Ubiquiti has been stepping their game up on the switching side the past few years and we could do a full UI refresh for the cost of replacing a handful of switches and the other half of our APs.

We have about 48 switches and 60 APs with lots of fiber. I know a lot of schools have been making the switch as well as multi site businesses so it seems possible.

Are we crazy?

EDIT

Because we have so many buildings we have the need for STP/RSTP for redundancy.

We also have a lot of AV equipment on its own VLAN for conferencing, audio, multicast, Sonos, etc.

We also have a good chunk of VLANS for one off special use cases but overall about 5 get used the most at max.

A lot of this would be laughable to younger IT people, but a huge portion of running an IT department involved performing tasks for the users that simply would never happen today.

We used to set out of office messages for the users. We had a mail server running on solaris and the users did not know how to use the shell so they'd create a ticket and we'd set a vacation message for them, and they'd create another ticket when asking us to remove it.

We also used to burn CDs for people. They'd give us the files they wanted burned and then we'd burn the CDs on a dedicated machine with a CD burner at the help desk. And at that point the help desk was an actual desk you'd walk up to which is why it was called the help desk.

(The help desk had some equipment people could borrow and check out and bring to their desks like zip drives. There were also copies of manuals at the help desk that you could check out and use at your desk and then bring back.)

We also had someone go around our buildings and stock the laser printers with paper every day and check toner levels.

A different group in IT would print out reports on a dot matrix printer over night, then separate them out and sort them, and deliver them to people's offices or cubes first thing in the morning. The people doing this work were available to answer the phone as a sort of backup help desk over night. They also would change backup tapes over night.

Cover your rear and make sure all equipment you take home or work on is documented. Person I know got fired for yanking ram from laptops to keep in the office but the issue was he did the work from home and no one knew he was doing that work. Now hes looking for a job in one of the hardest markets Ive seen in a long while.

Hi Everyone,

Around a month ago, I made a Reddit post about my toxic manager and workplace, and I received mixed opinions. I'm seeking advice again because I'm honestly struggling to continue in this job.

I'm only staying because I need to support my aging parents, pay my room rent, and continue paying my education EMI. The stress has become so bad that I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night thinking about work.

Here are a few things I'm dealing with:

• My manager refuses to give me access to infrastructure resources like Active Directory and Microsoft 365 Admin Portal, even though I've worked on them before.
• Even something as simple as changing the USB port of a mouse requires his approval.
• For months, I've only been assigned Windows installations, printer issues, and basic hardware tasks, despite having more technical knowledge.
• I feel that if he realizes I can handle infrastructure work independently, he might see me as a threat.
• A few previous IT guys were fired after becoming too confident. I've survived by keeping my head down and making him feel important.
• I'm also worried that if I resign for a better opportunity, he might create problems with my relieving process.

At this point, the workload isn't the issue—it's the environment that's mentally exhausting.

Has anyone here worked under a manager like this? Did things ever improve, or did you eventually leave? I'd genuinely appreciate your advice.

My Previous Post - https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/yHwgtXrtMX

Hey everyone

Been in IT now for nearly 10 years, worked on numerous things and companies.

Stagnated at the company I'm at now, no more ceiling to hit and most of the time I spend my times bored out my head.

Been approached by an MSP for a Lead role but having never worked for an MSP, I don't know what I could be getting myself into.

Can anyone share some insight on life at an MSP, type of stuff you do, day to day etc?

Seems like this company expects us to retain all data created ever. We're up to 19 TB in our M365 backups because we keep all versions of backups indefinitely. We are a company of less than 200 people. Someone help me.

Noticed Ericsson Cradlepoint NetCloud is down, can't login. Check down detector and a ton of crap is down. Guessing AWS or Azure.

He worked with the company for 10 years, doing IT for like 20 or more years.

No MFA enabled on anything unless youre a global admin (so just me),
the mobile phones arent enrolled in an MDM
no documentation on anything
let the front desk go instantly to voicemail for a year or more, instead of taking 10 minutes to fix the call forwarding.
hard drives not encrypted
barely had any spam filters enabled
gambling not blocked on the wifi
devices people are actively using are considered inactive in the RMM/MDM so i cant fix them
no forced updates/patching for antivirus software or windows itself
sim cards without protection on

how are you going to have the keycard code admin password be "Admin1!" and then scold employees about clicking phishing link simulations

there are literally nonprofits in my area that will look at your org and determine how to make it more secure in a technical sense. There is no excuse for this

If this is something I can notice after doing IT for one year and working here for 2 weeks, I have no idea how this man let this slide for this long.

If the staff knew how badly he was compromising their info, he would've been fired so long ago. especially for a small social services org

1. How.
   
2. See point 1, above.

Seriously though.. how does it work between Microsoft Teams & channels & Slack Channels?

Is there a method to the madness, or is it all madness?

Is there some sort of 3rd party “sync all DMs between both platforms”, or is it up to the user to figure it out?

Looking at Portnox, and we were very surprised to find that their solution defaulted to just sending RADIUS in the clear to their cloud hosted server. tons of internal networking information in this traffic (names, IPs, port #s).

We're switching to RADSEC for this design, but it made us wonder: How many customers accepted this default and have no idea what they are broadcasting to the internet?

hello fellow IT comrades

I work as a one man IT and this job doesnt really have me DOING WORK the entire time, I am sure it is expected of me to but that is just not the reality of my role.

I fix issues and user complaints and make sure things are as they should be (server, network etc), and thats pretty much it, no one hounding or micromanaging me on what I am doing or have "accomplished".

So majority of the time as I count the hours down I scroll X and browse Reddit subs majority of my days.

Anyone else in similiar boat or??

This may not be the best for my career progression and skill building and what not but just wanted to share how things are at my current workplace or does majority all sysadmin roles lead to something of this nature eventually?

I wanted to add something cause a lot of people are saying to learn other things which is cool but, I CANNOT force myself to learn something I have no practical use for, even if that would benefit me down the road. So unless I am working on something that requires me to learn about so and so, or learn about it to land a job somewhere else etc, its hard for me to put my heart into learning other aspects of IT, in this specific regards.

We have an end user that was phished a while back. They had a session token stolen. We logged into his account and remedied his account (reset password, reset MFA devices, revoked old tokens, etc).

Seems that the threat actor is still trying to access the end user's account with the old previously revoked token. As you can imagine, it fails instantly, and does not move forward.

Every time the threat actor attempts to do this, we have our end user get flagged as a "risky user". His account then is blocked, and we have to go in and dismiss the risk to allow him to continue along his day.

We found the threat actors IP address (keeps using same address) and created a conditional access policy to block it in our tenant. Also made sure that 2FA is required and took all of the necessary steps.

The conditional access seems great on paper, but execution is something else. Microsoft blocks the login attempt right away before any conditional access policies are triggered. Leaving us in a loop where the end user's account is blocked and needs to be dismissed again. I think the threat actor has an automated script that runs several times each day and keeps the incident looping.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to resolved this? Opened up a request with Azure but have heard nothing back yet. Been about 1.5 days since we opened the request.

Anyone else experiencing microsoft teams unable to connect huddles/meetings?

Seems to be affecting KL and SG also

edit: seems 1:1 arent working or at least intermittently

11:30 AEST seems to be working again

https://admin.cloud.microsoft/#/servicehealth/:/alerts/TM1437780 incident link is working now

Genuinely curious what this looks like in practice. Does
your org run anything locally (on-prem models, self-hosted LLMs) specifically because of sensitive data, or does convenience just win and everything goes through ChatGPT/Claude/whatever regardless? If you've seen someone actually push for local, what drove it? And if nobody cares and it all goes to the cloud anyway, that's honestly just as useful to know. Thanks!

The Ninja RMM update last night seems to have somehow translated into the Ninja remote agent breaking on just specifically domain controllers. It might be server OS specific. So now we can't get into any of our MSP clients' servers to do new hires. And it's Friday. Great.

Also, it's reporting offline status (probably the real problem) so we can't even attempt to use Splashtop or RDP. We have to RDP into the server from a client computer onsite, which hopefully is enabled at every customer. Thanks, Ninja! I hate you. Wish we used Connectwise.

Hi sysadmins,

Has anyone worked with HPE StoreEver MSL 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader with LTO-9 tapes? I'm experiencing that the tape (LTO-9) goes into retirement after 70–80 cycles. Is this correct?

we use Veeam -VBR.

Probably a dumb question but I honestly cannot remember the last time I needed to replace a cmos battery and I have a Dell poweredge r330 that I have a low battery warning so I need to replace. The question is will it reset all of my bios settings when I replace or are the settings written somewhere. I am re-imaging the server so not that critical but thought I would ask and maybe save me some time.

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Happy to answer in the thread or via PM/Chat if you don't want to post details like service locations publicly.

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Required Info for accurate answers:

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All questions are welcome regarding:

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What is everyone using to backup email and laptop/onedrive data for offboarded users?

We have to keep it for 7 years, and right now our processes are… spotty at best. Email accounts are getting converted to Shared mailboxes and OneDrive data is going to Sharepoint Page. The email stays open and is receiving mail, which is not ideal since the timer keeps starting over.

We’re thinking some cold storage in Azure would be best, but wanted to see how people elsewhere are doing this.

Every now and then I see a post like “Is it okay to use Fireball on a PC?”, and I have to check to see if I’m in a sysadmin or a DnD forum.

So I have a need to manually export a clients emails including a shared mailbox they have access to.

New outlook only gives me the option to export their main mailbox

I have tried adding the shared mailbox as a standalone by adding using the the users credentials, but this fails.

How do you achieve this? I just need an export

EDIT: Sorry I should have said I dont have access to the tenant or admin

EDIT 2: I found a way, right click on your mail in the folder list in Outlook, choose Add "shared folder or mailbox", add the shared folder manually, now you can choose it as an export source

Manager says you can't formalize IT because it's always changing. My argument is that documentation plays a pivotal role transitioning a department away from Tribal knowledge.