Hello, looking for a conference room / AV partner and installer for Manhattan. Ideally, they can help with Yealink, but open to other tech as well. Looking for table top touch screen device + full sound audio video bar for underneath conference room TV in small room setups (~6-7 people).

Thanks!

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?

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,

https://imgur.com/a/zB5tKDl

email hosted at m365. User received this email, from an actual address inside my org, let's call it [email protected]. There's no sign of compromise on [email protected]. the header shows spf and dkim pass, but verified by mchsi.com, not domain.com. Is this a direct connect exploit of some sort? When I use message trace in exchange admin, it shows the email as coming from [email protected].

some stuff from the header

Message-ID: [email protected]
Reply-To: USER [email protected]
Content-Language: en-US
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Anonymous
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: YT2PEPF000001CE.CANPRD01.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-Network-Message-Id: 14cb0675-1297-4422-62a9-08dee74a69cc
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: 1
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: [email protected]
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-RecordReviewCfmType: 0
x-ms-publictraffictype: Email
received-spf: Pass (protection.outlook.com: domain of mchsi.com designates 34.195.253.200 as permitted sender) receiver=protection.outlook.com; client-ip=34.195.253.200; helo=omta009.useast.a.cloudfilter.net; pr=C
authentication-results: spf=pass (sender IP is 34.195.253.200) smtp.mailfrom=mchsi.com; dkim=pass (signature was verified) header.d=mchsi.com;dmarc=fail action=none header.from=domain.com;compauth=fail reason=601
x-ms-office365-filtering-correlation-id: 14cb0675-1297-4422-62a9-08dee74a69cc
x-ms-traffictypediagnostic: YT2PEPF000001CE:EE_|YTZP288MB1239:EE_|YQBP288MB0762:EE_
dkim-signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/simple; d=mchsi.com;       s=20240430; t=1784653591;       bh=8DB0fr86BLYD8LBT2zW0NZliR6xoP6XdS6smX2LZX/o=;        h=Date:From:To:Message-ID:Subject;      b=n9SoQyLTMx0wdkt4b7mdmBYDeAbPh+zGZvZGHHNjutw97IkdM44Idfgzc6SfhV2lJ  

thanks!

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

Here's the original article.

Why does the Service Health show so many incidents (50+) but no one is complaining? Is it a problem with the Service Health portal?

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!

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.

Like the title says, I’d like to hear from people who currently use or have previously used NAKIVO for backup and disaster recovery.

How has your experience been with reliability, recovery performance, support, and security? I’m trying to decide whether NAKIVO would be a good fit for our small business environment, especially from an effectiveness and ransomware-protection standpoint.

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.

A user got an email from Sharepoint online / microsoft and it's confirmed when they log into onedrive on the web that they are out of space in onedrive. They are using about 4TB and they've had that level for months / longer.

They are on onedrive plan 2. So they should be allowed much more, right?

Anyone know if this is a mistaken email / website message today? Or specific to the user (asking here / asking users is almost ALWAYS more accurate and certainly quicker than trying to deal with Microsoft).

THANKS!

We are considering on moving our whole IPSEC infrastructure to a cloud agnostic provider. Alkira was suggested, but I never heard of them. Has anyone encountered them on the field?

https://www.alkira.com/

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?

So I know Intune has MAA now for sensitive tasks, but I'm curious about it for Entra role changes. We run a small shop, but in the event of a successful compromised account and escalation attack, I'd love to see if we can prevent at least some of that just by requiring MAA for role assignments.

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?

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.

So like everyone else here, I get lots of calls from recruiters and many of them go no where. Thing is that I've been starting to be more weary of scams. Almost without exception they are Indian with thick accents and recently they've been asking for the last 4 of my social. I haven't given it out but I've also read some legit job opportunities at larger fortune 500s do actually need the last 4. Again, never gave out my last 4 of my SSN, but I wanted to ask others in this community what they know

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 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!

Hey there, i'm at my wit's end so maybe someone would have a magic setting or something :D

Currently i have an RDS farm with 6 servers and 50 xerox printers distributed around 10 sites. Every site connects to a central print server which has all of the printers and their drivers installed. The printers were initially deployed through GPOs linked to per site OUs. The problem:

Printer deploy GPOs seem to not work anymore, tried with a fresh user he gets nothing, something somewhere is blocking it but that's a secondary problem.

Some time ago users started complaining about their default printers disappearing and not being able to print. The printer page in control panel, last time i checked a server, counted around 250 printers. Most of the printers being duplicates. When a printer "disappears" its duplicates do not work and show "driver unavailable". Adding a printer manually creates a duplicate for every user on that server.

Removing a printer adds it back almost instantly -> i've found a printer aging and pruning registry keys and when applied it greyed out almost every printer instantly and allowed me to actually delete them.

I've disabled printer redirection but it seems that this particular setting actually allowed people to print more reliably (as the printer defaulted to their redirected printer). But i suspect it's what caused phantom printers to appear in the first place.

I also suspect the deployed drivers are no good (the previous IT guy did the printer deployements) as they lack the "shared" option. But if i use universal drivers i lose some of the printer functions.

Given the headache and the number of printers we are thinking of using a third party printing solution like papercut, would that solve our problems and duplicated entries? Do we install NG or MF, the price is not the same.

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!

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?

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.

I purchased a Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription on 21 July 2026. During checkout, there was an error on the payment screen, but the payment ultimately went through successfully (I have a confirmation receipt with Order ID.

During signup, I entered my personal email (outlook.com address) and was prompted to create a new work/tenant account, since a business subscription requires one. I created this new account (in the format firstname.lastname@[tenantname].onmicrosoft.com) with a password.

I have since received two confirmation emails from Microsoft to my personal outlook.com address:

1. An order confirmation with the Order ID above
2. A "your subscription is ready" welcome email with generic setup links

However, neither email states the exact tenant domain or account username that was created. When I try to sign in to admin.microsoft.com using the account I believe I created, I get an error saying the account doesn't exist.

I don't know if I made a typo in the username during creation, or if something went wrong with the account provisioning after the payment error.

Could someone help me:

1. Recover or confirm the exact admin account/tenant name tied to this order, or
2. Advise on next steps to regain access to this newly created tenant?

I have no other admin accounts on this tenant, so I currently have zero access to manage the subscription I've paid for.
I've called several times at 0800 801 046 and the AVR keeps hanging up on me now as soon as I mention the word Business on the first automated question.

Thank you in advance for any help.

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?