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.

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?

```

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).

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?

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.

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!

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

Here's the original article.

Hi all,

Just a general question for anyone who deals with HP (or other vendor) support.

We run HP elitebooks in our fleet with their standard 3 year warranty. We've just purchased an additional year, but a number of our newer laptops (830 x360 g9/10 and 840 g9/10) have really shoddy battery life - usually an hour or two off charge.

Running HW monitor on them, they show a wear level of 25-35%, which seems pretty high for devices that get used for standard office/teams/powerpoint work.

I've logged a few jobs with HP previously, and they've been happy to just ship out a replacement battery and have me send the dead one back. Now, it seems they've tightened up their restrictions, and state that batteries are consumables and that 2-3 hours is acceptable for a device that's 3 years old.

The bossman doesn't think this is a good response, and wants HP to replace them under warranty or state their exact requirements for determining whether a battery gets replaced or not, which I have so far been unable to squeeze from them.

Has anyone else had similar issues dealing with HP or their vendor support? Or do you agree with them that batteries are consumable and just purchase new/spare ones outright?

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?

Medium sized business in construction with a fleet of HP laptops and desktops totaling around 150 units combined. I would say 2/3rd of them are HP Probook models within the last 4 years (4 year upgrade cycle). The remaining 1/3rd are Prodesk models again within the last 4 years.

I have been less than happy with HP overall. Most of them seem to be issue free (the desktops have been really rock solid actually), but we have been seeing a handful of weird issues that a windows re-install never seems to resolve. Now I understand windows is a big player in this, however a lot of these issues we see are generally firmware related and some hardware related issues. Display issues, docking station instability, and NIC issues to name a few.

Maybe we are buying the wrong HP models for our environment, but I am also seeing in this sub that HP isn't regarded very highly either. I thought the issues we had with them were from the pandemic with QC or lack there of at the time, but here we are years later with alot of the same issues. I have the option of starting our next upgrade cycle with a different brand next year. I was thinking of switching to Lenovo, but would like some opinions on Dell as well. Those are really the only other 2 players I am interested in looking into. Apple is off the table for the immediate future due to some legacy software we use that will not run on MacOS.

TLDR: What brand of Desktop/Laptop do you recommend that is not HP.

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?

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?

Hello

I just received the 5th call in three days.

All seem unrelated (different environments, different hardware, no common software except the usual Windows 11, Microsoft Office etc.)

Users can boot, see the login screen, enter their password but afterwards they just end up in a black screen with only the cursor.

- One of the devices I physically got my hands on. After about three reboots it started to behave normal again.

- Another one I instructed the user by phone to reboot it multiple times which also seems to have fixed the issue, at least for now.

- A third one said she had the issue for about a week and she also managed to get it to run by rebooting and waiting, but then the issue would reappear the next day.

Because of the clustering of calls with this symptoms I assume connection to a recent Windows update. But when searching this sub, I could only find similar questions from one or two months ago, whereas all of "our" users said that the problem started for them either this or last week.

Anyone seeing something similar?

My CITO enabled passkey on our Entra Tenant.
In testing, the passkey works to on Microsoft 365 resources, either Outlook on the desktop, or online through the browser, on windows laptops and Apple laptops, via the QR Code scan. However on our Windows desktops, in our tests, they are presenting the option only of “insert USB key”. Desktops have Bluetooth as they are using Bluetooth mice and keyboards. So Bluetooth is on.
What causes the desktops to default to only presenting this option, unlike our windows laptops / Apple laptops?

All windows endpoints are up to date (win 25h2, all recent July sec and driver patches).

FURTHER CONTEXT: I just tried pulling a new desktop out of the box. Booting it up, running through basic setup, and then try to join it to our Entra domain. The bind prompt asks for me to login with my admin credentials, and passkey is set for my credentials. The desktop then asks for a USB KEY, or password, doesn’t give me the option for QR code. I input my password, then it hands off asking me for the USB KEY, to finish authentication.

So since it is not even enrolled, it points to something in the MFA/ FIDO2 policy. Digging further….

RESOLVED: USB Bluetooth with Antenna rectified the issue on the devices.

Good morning everyone,

I realized that my beautiful notices, frequently sent to all sectors at the organization in which I work....

...well, they are never read by anyone!!

.

.

I often write to the sector email (thinking that it was useless to send the same warning communication to ALL employees, since NOT all employees work with the different software which is often subject to scheduled maintenance).

I then discovered that that email of mine is NEVER forwarded by the Sector itself to its employees (... possibly affected by my communication).

Since there are around 400 employees here - and not all of them work with the same software - in your opinion what alternative would be more efficient to warn every sector and every user that on "a certain day" the software (with which they work) will be down for maintenance?

.

.

At the moment I have used a mailing list to notify all the sectors, but as already mentioned, each sector never disclosed the same communication to its employees.

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 leadership position that I am well qualified came up for a staffing agency. It looks like it may be a good gig, but I am curious what the experience has been for those of you who have worked for one? I've been in the same industry for over a decade so a change *feels* risky

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?

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.

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.

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're paying for about 6TBs of additional storage a month. It's costing around $2,000/month or $24,000/annually.

What is the best solution you've found to storage archived data and still be able to access it?

I'm looking at Azure storage (hot/cold). I prefer not to set up new access permissions. Would Azure storage access use the same permissions already set up in SharePoint?

Trying to decide what the best solution is. Any advice would be appreciated.

Im looking for some good recommendations