Today, the director of IT at your company says to you “We’re going to remove all that centralized IPA+2fa authentication from all of our servers, and go back to using Ssh keys, because it takes too long for me (yes the director) to login to a server.” The same auth that you and your team added, for all the reasons. What do you do?

Brightspeed has created a nice graph to help you decide if your business needs 8 Gbps internet speeds. 😂

Here's the original article.

I mean, I get it. I work in IT, so I probably know a thing or two about computers. And I really don't mind helping out.

My problem is that these people usually have absolutely zero understanding of technology or how any of it works. It's usually frustration with their 10-year-old laptop that hasn't had a proper update in just as long, and pretty much everything on it is completely screwed. Now they're finally ready to spend a decent amount of money on a new device that they expect to guarantee stability and speed.

The truth is, almost any reasonably modern device will give you exactly that, and it's actually pretty hard to go wrong. It's also true that every device will eventually become a pain in the ass if it's maintained the same way as the previous one. And while there are some differences that make one manufacturer better than another, It's sort of irrelevant for the your average casual office user.

You don't have to be a genius to recommend some ridiculously expensive, overpowered machine that guarantees great performance, but what's the point of having someone spend a fortune on an advanced laptop if all they're going to do is use Word and read the news?

What I usually do when colleagues or acquaintances ask me is keeping it as simple as it gets: Lenovo ThinkPad, Core i5, SSD. No overthinking, no reinventing the wheel.

Still be prepared to become the scapegoat the moment their new laptop decides to misbehave. And sooner or later, it will, because some people simply aren't meant to own a computer.

We make rack cabinets, so we spend a lot of time thinking about the physical side of IT.

But that physical side has changed enormously over the last fifteen years, and a lot of it happened quietly.

Nobody talks about the last time they burned a driver CD. Or the era when a new server meant a physical trip, not a console session. Setting IRQs. Terminating your own cables because that was just part of the job. Keeping a stack of blank media by the desk. Actually walking to a machine to see why it wasn't responding. None of it disappeared with an announcement. One day you just realise you haven't done it in years.

What’s something you used to do constantly that’s completely disappeared from your work now? And is there anything you actually miss?

So I just got a UPS delivery that required an adult signature, and I'm thinking while singing for it, "I didn't order anything the past few days." But the package has my name on it. So be it.

I open the package and find a consolation note about the loss of my dog "Gracie" along with a cedar box containing what I assume is Gracie's cremains.

Wut? The package had my name on it. I have, nor have ever had a dog named "Gracie". Time to work backward. Stick with me.

I check my Gmail for the business' name on/in the package because UPS sends alerts on packages headed my way, and sure enough two days ago the SENDER and UPS sent an email to me stating the cremains were on the way.

So, to the point of why the r/sysadmin subreddit. How the hell did I receive cremains for a dead dog, complete with email notification from the sender (two separate but related pieces of ID)?

It seems unlikely that a pet cremation service is buying data and then, WHOOPS, "Sorry I sent Gracie to some guy you don't know. Good luck getting those cremains back!", but I've been in IT for nearly 30 years and there is just one simple truth:

You can't fix stupid.

We have a MICR printer that is having static IP issues. I reached out to the manufacturer, because their manuals do not provide any information about static IP setup, and they informed me that because we do not have a support agreement for that serial number on the device, they can't provide any information or do any troubleshooting. The office space scene is real!

Like most other VMware shops we dumped it and moved on due to the appalling way Broadcom has treated both customers and resellers since the acquisition. So imagine my surprise when we got this email recently:

I wanted to follow up regarding your previous VMware environment.

Broadcom has recently authorized a dedicated win-back initiative with aggressive, rock-bottom pricing and terms designed specifically to bring organizations like yours back. I have the direct sign-off to offer you rates significantly lower than anything you saw previously.

Do you have 10 minutes this week to look at these updated incentives and see how much we can shave off your current operational costs?

Rob Williams
Account Director | GovEd
VMware Cloud Foundation, Broadcom

They must think we are complete idiots. Who in their right mind would ever trust VMware again after the last 2½ years of price hikes, legal notices, and generally unmitigated BS they have heaped upon us?

Today when signing into the Microsoft Admin Center, I got a peculiar message saying I did not sign in with MFA and to make sure I add MFA as a secondary layer of security to prevent "sign-in disruptions" beginning in February when mandatory MFA enforcement begins.

Exact popup notification:

MFA will be required starting in February—set it up now

You’re signed in without multi-factor authentication (MFA). Enable MFA today to add a second layer of protection and avoid sign-in disruption when enforcement begins in February.

Now you may think, "Wow this guy must the shittiest of shittysysadmins for not having MFA".

But just before I got this popup, I signed in using my FIDO2 Security key which is the only authentication method setup on our privileged admin accounts and technically across my entire org. Additionally, we have recently completely moved away from traditional MFA methods due to phishing concerns.

So now I am questioning, why did I get the pop-up in the first place. Does this mean that every account in our Microsoft Tenant is going to get locked out come February due to only having passkeys??

Has anyone else seen this?

Surely this is just another Microsoft screw up and my sign in was falsely flagged as not using MFA since technically MFA and Passkeys are considered different auth methods.

We're working off of a 35 day window between server restarts (and patching). Sometimes we run short like this month and have servers alert that their uptime is greater than 35 days.

What is your server restart window/patching window? How many days between restarts do you allow before you force a restart?

I've seen some posts discussing in place upgrades and domain controllers. MS recommends against it for Server 2025.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/upgrade-in-place?tabs=media

Don't use in-place upgrade for servers that run Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). Although an in-place upgrade is technically possible, it doesn't deliver the AD performance and feature improvements included in Windows Server 2025 and later. Instead, use a clean OS install to promote new domain controllers and demote the older ones. For more information, see Upgrade domain controllers to a newer version of Windows Server.

Hey all,

I have been in IT about 4 1/2 years now starting from helpdesk to systems administration. I have been doing the sysadmin part for about 2 years now and have slowly but surely accumulated services over time to the point where I have over 30 different systems I regularly have to maintain. From endpoint management to life safety to VDI to Entra my scope has slowly gotten larger over time. Here lately I keep feeling more and more burned out due to all these services that are supposed to be a temporary re-assignment for a hire that will never come on board.

I have also been looking at other jobs especially in the endpoint management space where I would be making almost double my salary on the high end and a 50% increase in salary on the low end. I do like where I work and I do like what I do its just becoming all too much being a Swiss army knife sysadmin.

To some of you guys who have been in the career field longer or have made moves to other places what signaled to you that it was time to find something else? I realize that I am still early in my career so this may just be part of the job that I am going to have to get used to.

TL;DR: What made you decide to leave a job for another in sysadmin work?

We noticed this morning that ca.archive.ubuntu.com is not resolving to an IP. Confirmed using OpenDNS CacheCheck:

ca.archive.ubuntu.com CNAME us.archive.ubuntu.com

us.archive.ubuntu.com NO_RECORD

Anyone know what's up?

Edit: I see https://status.canonical.com/ says security.ubuntu.com is down as well.

For me they work like 20% of the time 💢

It's so bad I actually use smartphone passkeys now to login to a website on Windows.

Here's the situation. We've had 120v forever and that is what our rack is set up for (UPSs, PDUs, etc). We got a Dell PowerStore that requires 208v (or 240v? I'm not well versed). So now we need 2 more UPSs to have redundant power for that one device.

The dilemma is do I just do a couple small UPS units for the PowerStore or do I get two large ones, new PDUs and go full 208v with all our servers? We have 6 hosts hosting VDI, 2 that host our servers, a backup server, and a couple switches for the iSCSI network. This is all in a single rack so space gets to be quite a premium which is why I'm not fond of 4 UPSs.

Interested to hear your thoughts on if you think it would be worthwhile to rip the bandaid off and convert or is the juice not worth the squeeze?

I am beyond furious right now. I created 2 OVH accounts a while back. I literally NEVER used them. No resources added, no projects created, nothing. Zero usage.

I decided to just close them to keep things clean, but guess what? You CANNOT close your account on OVH.

Apparently, OVH automatically assigned random services/projects to my unused accounts (like vRacks and Public Cloud projects) without notifying me, and now their broken system blocks account deletion because of "active services."

I’ve been stuck in support ticket hell for OVER TWO WEEKS trying to get these accounts wiped under GDPR.

Here is the circus I've been dealing with:

• Canceling a basic service takes 7 DAYS?? Support told me a vRack service had to be canceled first and that it takes a full week just to delete. What year is this?!
• Their UI is completely broken. The GDPR deletion page threw errors, and the system kept telling me to manual-delete things that I couldn't even delete through their manager interface.
• Their support agents give conflicting advice. One tells me to click links to delete Public Cloud projects, another says they'll delete it manually, another tells me to wait a couple of weeks for a "specialized team" to step in.
• THE ULTIMATE JOKE: Today I finally get an automated message saying: "Unfortunately, despite our efforts, we are unable to delete your account at this time. It looks like some actions are still in progress and blocking its deletion..."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The actual owners and developers of the platform cannot delete an unused account from their OWN system due to "technical issues"?! They literally built the system and claim they are powerless to delete user data!

They clearly don't give a damn about GDPR or basic customer support. I have deleted every possible service, settled $0 invoices, answered every ticket, and I am still stuck in a loop of copy-pasted support templates and automated rejection emails.

Has anyone actually managed to force OVH to close an account, or do I need to go straight to a Data Protection Authority (DPA) complaint at this point?

```

What is changing

Passkeys become the default authentication experience for users currently enabled for SMS or voice.

Microsoft-provided telecom delivery for SMS and voice will be retired. Customer-managed telecom providers configured through the Microsoft Security Store are not affected.

```

So SMS and voice are going to be sunseted. I'm happy with that. Any of y'all got a C-Level who refuses to use anything besides SMS?

I'm still not 💯 onboard with passkeys. My favorite is still TOTP. I've enabled it for a few accounts. Tbh, some of those were on total accident. Because I was just clicking popups without reading (personal gmail account).

Seeing as the move to B2B from the old SharePoint sharing has been implemented by MS. We find that the ability for a regular user to create a guest user, gives too much access.

Particularly when a person can invite a guest, and then ANY owner of a teams site could invite that external user to a Teams or SharePoint site and give them access to who knows what. Seems mind boggling to me.

Are we missing some settings, the only thing I’ve found is locking out guests completely from Teams/sharepoint invitation by default and then allowing it when asked.

This seems like too much overhead and that Microsoft haven’t particularly thought this out very well. Or am I the only one thinking this. How are you guys managing guests?

I have been in the IT industry for 35+ years as a Systems Admin / Systems Engineer. I fully admit there are some things I do as a matter of being a bit old school… because they work. There were times way back in the dinosaur age where I tried the in-place Windows operating system upgrades and never quite had the warm and fuzzies about things running 100%. I’ve probably done more workstation upgrades and not so many server upgrades (actually had two completely blow up on me) so as a matter of practice I always do fresh new installs and reinstalled applications/roles and migrated user data. I am also one of those that do not mix roles on servers.

I have a project underway to migrate the rest of our Windows Server 2016 servers to 2022 (yes I know 2025 is out and am running it on less critical systems). I have a new guy in the DBA team pitching a fit to anyone that will listen because I won’t let him do an in-place upgrade. The other 2 DBA’s have no problem with it and have fished up their group of servers with zero issues. I am not concerned about shutting him up nor am I concerned about higher ups overriding me (My CIO flat out told the CEO that what I say goes when it comes to our systems). Rather, I am beginning to question if my old tail needs to get with the times. Has Microsoft gotten in place upgrades ironed out so well that it is a non-issue. What say you?

EDIT: One more detail I forgot to mention. While I know it is not as critical today as it was back in the Windows NT or even Windows 2000 days, the previous SA built their golden image template without sysprepping the image. out of the 400 servers we have running, 92 all have the same SID. these are mostly the 2016 servers. I am trying to clear them out.

hi everyone,

i recently graduated from college and just started my first corporate job. i’m working in software asset management (sam) specifically software license management at a automotive company.
my compensation is around 9 lpa, the work culture is genuinely good and the biggest advantage is that i’m able to work in my hometown. those factors made it an easy decision to accept the offer, even though it isn’t a dev role.

the only thing that’s making me anxious is my long term career growth. most of my college friends have joined software development roles, and i’m wondering whether staying in sam will limit my future opportunities or earning potential.

i’m not against staying in this domain if it has good growth but i also want to make sure i’m building skills that’ll keep my options open.

a few questions:

is this considered a good long-term career, especially in terms of salary growth?

if you started in sam, where are you now?
what skills or certifications would you recommend learning alongside my job?

would learning cloud (aws/azure), scripting (python/powershell), sql, itsm, finops, cybersecurity, or grc make me more valuable? there’s like too many options i dont what to chose i just want good money

is it realistically possible to transition into cloud or devops?

would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve been in sam or made a switch from it. thanks!

This is a rant but also looking for advice.

We have machines randomly experiencing massive CPU spikes. Not just like running Prime95 though, the CPU spike also renders the device almost unusable. I witnessed it on one of my devices and I could not even open TaskMgr during the event and even the screen redraw is affected.

Pretty certain this will be one of the usual suspects of management/security apps (SCCM, Tanium, Qualys, CrowdStrike), but ultimately this is Windows shitness. How can an OS allow an app to cause what is in essence a DOS. I expect this could easily be abused by a threat actor and go undetected if using signed processes.

As far as analysis is concerned, the WMI activity log is set to 1 MB by default, which equates to 3 hours of events.... What the fk is the point in that.

Is there a way to determine the cause on a device that no longer has the timeframe in event logs?

Hi guys,

Do any of you have any advice for a long time on prem enterprise infrastructure engineer with a wide support skillset covering server, network, storage, DB, VDI, observability, SRE, but now re-entering the workforce after a long time at one legacy company and looking to modernize on things like AWS/Azure cloud, Terraform, CI/CD, etc..

Are there any bootcamps, related training, or guidance that will help land a new job in this modern infrastructure landscape when you have tons of on prem legacy experience, but need to modernize your skillset now.

thank you,

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm trying to understand the practical purpose of setting the Primary Group to Domain Users vs Domain Admins.

Hi everyone,

Bit of a long shot.

We're looking for the latest Oracle NVMe firmware for the following Oracle OEM drives:

• Oracle 7335940 – ICDPC2DD2ORA6.4T → QDV1RF35
• Oracle 7361456 – ICRPC2DD2ORA6.4T → VDV1RL04

The drives are in production in our Amsterdam datacenter, and we're happy to perform the upgrade ourselves. Unfortunately, Oracle doesn't provide firmware downloads unless you're an active support customer.

Does anyone happen to have access to these firmware files through Oracle, a server vendor, or another legitimate source? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!