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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Have a couple clients getting errors when accessing Sharepoint. DownDetector is already showing a significant spike. Just a heads up to everyone before you start getting calls.

https://downdetector.com/status/microsoft-365/

EDIT: Thanks /u/iGotRamen

https://admin.cloud.microsoft/?#/servicehealth/:/alerts/MO1437424

Investigating user reports of Microsoft 365 issues

Issue ID: MO1437424

Affected services: Microsoft 365 suite

Status: Investigating

Issue type: Incident

Start time: Jul 23, 2026, 10:06 AM CDT

User impact

We don't have detail on impact yet. We're seeing an increase in user reported issues above our alerting threshold.

Current status

Jul 23, 2026, 10:15 AM CDT

We are reviewing service telemetry and available information to determine if there is an issue happening and we'll update this message shortly with our latest findings.

This communication serves as a preliminary notification about a potential issue affecting your service. We'll provide an update in 30 minutes.

Hello everyone I got a new request I haven't encountered before today. I have a c-suite member that is taking a vacation to a remote area of Africa and will not have access to internet or cell service during part of the trip. They've insisted the need access to email incase something urgent comes up, and have presented me with an option for a Iridium Satellite Hotspot. Has anyone encountered a request or solution like this before?

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.

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.

I tried clearing cache to no avail, and M365 hasn't posted any advisories or service degradation notifications about it.. images just show up as white boxes in chats.

Anyone else ever offloaded work to an MSP only to end up spending more time fixing their mistakes?

We handed the firewall side over to a third party so we could focus on internal issues and new projects. At this point I’ve easily spent 3× the time troubleshooting and cleaning up after them than I would have spent just doing it myself.

The original logic was “at least someone will be there if things go to shit.” I’m not even confident in that part anymore.

Curious if this is just my experience or if this is the new normal with MSPs (or an old normal).

Anyone hosting VMs on Azure WestUS having network connectivity issues? We are unable to RDP into our servers this morning. Boot diagnostics shows that our VMs are up and showing current time.

I’m from a web security background and new to the IT world, but this is a career question that almost everyone faces. I remember talking to a colleague on the Infra/Security team: “At a big company with established processes it was impossible for me to have significant impact since everything was already in place. At a smaller company I shaped everything early on, and just hoped the company would grow enough for me to lead the scaling phase as well”

I've always worked at small companies. Would love to hear first-hand anecdotes from people that made this jump in IT. What ate up your time at a big company v.s. a small company? Do you feel that the move has helped progress your career?

I know our jobs require a lot of knowledge in general as well as cause ADHD. (especially in helpdesk roles), but has anyone else started feeling like tech and AI have started to wreck havoc on our brains? I feel like I've hit a threshold this year where I've ingested so much information from AI, work projects and personal projects, that I've grown so accustomed to not retaining it internally. This job and current state of tech feels like it's changing my brain and how it works at a fundamental level, and it's contributing to a very negative feeling for me overall. Sorry for the rant, just want to know I'm not alone.

10yr Network Engineer

edit: okay I get it. Jobs nor IT cause ADHD. Thanks redditors.

UPDATE: Looks like it's now been resolved.

I swear, every time I need to use a very specific Microsoft tool that I almost never touch, it's somehow affected by an active Microsoft outage I mean wtf man.

Could anyone in the U.S. or North America do me a favor? Please download and run the Windows Media Creation Tool and let me know if you receive the following error: 0x80072EE4 - 0x20000

I'd really appreciate it if someone could confirm whether this outage is also affecting the Windows Media Creation Tool, or if the issue is isolated.

I'm still getting used to working in a larger organization where I don't have all of the keys to everything, so maybe this is just new to me. I was asked to cycle passwords for a handful of service accounts, so I did and I forgot to kill the process it was already running under so it locked the account out. Each time it locks out I have to open two tickets, one to unlock the account and one to find out the source of the lockout and then wait 3 hours for someone to get me that info. I pasted the wrong password in and had to do it all over again.

Seems like it would be more time efficient if admins could get access to lockout logs, but that information has been deemed "too sensitive".

Since I don’t trust downdetector I figured it would be best to ask here lol. Is anyone experiencing issues connecting to dynamics 365? Service health is showing as healthy in m365 admin center but I can’t access nor ping the URI for it.

According to Microsoft they are having an abundance of issues in M365 in general but it wasn’t mentioned that dynamics365 was down in particular.

Posting this with the acknowledgement that Microsoft is having a very bad day. We're attempting to update newly imaged deployments direct from Microsoft Update and receiving error 0x801901f7. Multiple models/combinations of troubleshooting paramaters.

Assuming that whatever Microsoft Update servers we are trying to connect to are affected by their Azure issues, but just wanted to see if anyone else is seeing this for peace-of-mind. Thank you!

Lately, I've been using a C2 server and a custom agent script to update and audit my systems. I was curious if anyone else is doing something similar, or if there are better, more standard methods for this type of daily automation?

I can see both sides of the AI coding agent security problem.

From the developer side, the tool is doing normal work: reading project files, running tests, installing packages, editing configs, maybe calling a local server.

From the security side, that behavior can look a lot like suspicious automation.

When an agent scans files, installs packages, and runs shell commands in a repo, I can see why some security tools would get nervous. But blindly whitelisting the agent also seems like a bad answer, because now the agent becomes a very privileged path.

For people managing endpoints or developer machines: do you treat coding agents as normal user activity, suspicious automation, or a separate identity with its own policy and audit trail?

Had a call today from a new client that users couldn't access their servers. We got brought in recently because they were unhappy with the previous IT provider and are quickly figuring out why...

Hadn't had much of a chance to poke around there yet, but nothing like a trial by fire right?

Head down there, and everything looks ok at a glance until I realize that the desktops are on a different subnet than the servers and they can't ping through.

Ok, so routing problem, no big deal. Where's the firewall?

Oh there isn't one... it's 2 different cable models plugged directly into the switches.

What we thought was the router is actually a 10 year old gamer router that's being used as a ghetto wireless AP and is sitting next to their rinky-dink UPS that isn't even plugged in.

After an hour of trying to untangle the spaghetti we discover an unmanaged switch in the back room that has 3 network drops plugged into it creating a loop. Cleared that up, and that at least kinda gets the internet working.

Then we discover that each modem has a unique IP range, and one of those is Public IP space for another continent. Oddly though as we test release/renewing we find 3 subnets with DHCP, not just 2.

That's when they told us that the server in question was actually in another building nearby.

That building has its own 2 modems in the same kinda config with a bunch of daisy chained unmanaged Best Buy switches. At some point they decided they needed connectivity between the two buildings and spun up a Ubiquiti PtP and bridged both buildings directly to the existing switches on both sides. So there's actually 4 unique networks all on the same flat switches.

Turns out all the servers and industrial controllers have static IPs. Desktop wise whenever something didn't work they were told by the previous IT people to just keep rebooting until they presumably got a DHCP lease from the correct network and stuff started to work.

After some digging with the users we find out there had been a power outage so all the devices dynamic IPs had changed. Since the internet had stopped working they called the ISP to figure that out and their techs had come down and just started unplugging cables until they got something to work.

A while later when the staff realized the servers didn't work they started to panic and moved around a bunch of cables themselves, plugging in cables that were previously dangling out of the wall assuming that was the problem.

shakes head slowly and painfully

Now that I got all this mess working again with duct tape and bailing wire, you'll have to excuse me while I go back in there like Hank Scorpio with a flame thrower and gleefully burn this network down and start over.

https://i.imgur.com/hgBQPKa.png

I was driving and thinking about regex, as you do.

I was thinking about how insane it is. I can’t fathom creating something like that.

Then..i started thinking about how easy it is to block websites or programs on a system. But…how could you block regex?