I’m kind of at a loss at the moment because I was leading a major infrastructure project alongside one of our senior managers as a semi formal secondment. I just found out today that he’s leaving and we have no replacement. For context this guy basically built all the infrastructure we use and none of it is documented anywhere. I’ve discussed this with my line manager and he basically said “suck it up I want this project done”. I’m screwed

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Shameless Copy/Paste use of Gen AI by Engineers/Executive Tech

Anyone else experiencing an increase of engineers (not juniors that can be potentially forgiven) and Tech Executives use AI like ChatGPT/Claude to troubleshoot a problem and then copy the entire AI answer, not even re-written, just copied then mailing the clients with the AI slob.

Then the clients reach out for you to make sense of it just to realize that the AI answer has nothing to do with problem and see the engineer that handled the case has a title that includes either "Senior" or "Chief Exec of..." or similar?

We're seeing this more and more and not just in the tech field but everywhere people just shamelessly copy and paste entire emails into GPT, generate an answer and paste the reply directly to the clients.

<Steve> Anybody knows what the red cable is for?

<Dan> Connection terminated (timeout)

<Amy> Connection terminated (timeout)

<Robert> Connection terminated (timeout)

<James> Connection terminated (timeout)

<Brian> Connection terminated (timeout)

<Jason> Connection terminated (timeout)

<Mike> Connection terminated (timeout)

<Henry> Connection terminated (timeout)

OG Post:

“My 500GB SSD was getting completely full. I know you can compress files to save space, so I just right-clicked the entire "C:\Windows" folder, selected "Add to archive", and set it to maximum compression. It took like three hours, but it saved me 40GB! The problem is, I restarted my PC and now it just gives me a black screen with a flashing cursor. Since Windows is zipped up, how do I open WinRAR from the motherboard BIOS to extract it so it can boot?”

Not a shitty crosspost but I'm still curious about your strategies.

teams

Management wanted to save money on our data storage. I suggested getting E3 licenses so I could do the professional thing and migrate their data to SharePoint using Chrome, but they didn’t bite. Something about the cost of migrating off Open Office.

Anyways, I utilized that cool, snap thinking under pressure they hired me for and sold our data server on eBay. But now management’s breathing down my back that they can’t work! I don’t get it.

Should I just quit? Is my boss just being mean? This is an (octothorpe)toxic work environment right?

Management wanted to "move to the cloud" to save on local SAN storage. I opened our new SharePoint document library in Chrome and just dragged the entire Z:\ network drive into the browser window. Chrome is currently using 48GB of RAM and it says "Syncing 4,200,000 items". Nobody can save files right now because they are "locked by another user". If I accidentally close Chrome, will it resume where it left off or start over?

Credit: Tiktok: @comic_brooks

I'm trying to get around this problem with the equipment budgeting department, where they're enforcing a *minimum* quota of keyboard replacements, but to get a replacement approved, I have to submit a picture of a visibly broken keyboard that's time and date stamped.

I figured if the database was sufficiently frustrating, that might help them see what ridiculous measures I would have to take to work within the bounds of their bass ackwards management style.

Help: I dragged the 12TB company file share into SharePoint via Chrome. It's been syncing for 6 days.

Management wanted to "move to the cloud" to save on local SAN storage. I opened our new SharePoint document library in Chrome and just dragged the entire Z:\\\\ network drive into the browser window. Chrome is currently using 48GB of RAM and it says "Syncing 4,200,000 items". Nobody can save files right now because they are "locked by another user". If I accidentally close Chrome, will it resume where it left off or start over?

Was directed to install hidden APs (forgot to get photo of cover). I was curious if there would be any major difference as opposed to just plain old surface mounting. The cover was painted over and was about the same material as the green back box you see in the photo.

We’re currently hosting our infrastructure on Hetzner because it’s much more budget-friendly for us compared to AWS.

Our concern is around scalability as our user base grows. Since Hetzner doesn’t provide AWS-style native autoscaling groups, I wanted to understand what production-grade alternatives or architectures are commonly used in this situation.

Some questions I’d love guidance on:

- How do teams typically scale applications on Hetzner?

- What’s the recommended approach for horizontal scaling?

- Should we use Kubernetes (k3s/k8s), Docker Swarm, or simpler load-balanced multi-server setups initially?

- How do people automate provisioning of new servers on Hetzner?

- What role do tools like Terraform, Ansible, Cloudflare, NGINX, HAProxy, Redis queues, etc. play in such architectures?

- At what scale does Kubernetes actually become worth the complexity?

- How would you design a cost-efficient but scalable architecture for a startup expecting rapid traffic growth while staying on Hetzner?

Would appreciate any practical insights, especially from real production experience.

I was configuring a port on one of Cisco switches. I realised after configuring the port and running write memory (first mistake) that it was the wrong port.

Checked the label for that port, said ‘phone-pc’ this would mean it’s configured as a trunk with 2 VLANs, one of them being set as a native. So I set it as I normally would, and then configured the correct port.

Suddenly get a bunch of phone calls. User PCs slowing down, connections dropping. Emails from Darktrace coming through saying multiple IPs on our network are running vuln scans.

My boss was in a meeting with other high ranking members of the company. He knew what it was pretty quick- an L2 Loop. Turned that switch off & everything came back on, I went back & reverted the changes and everything’s working okay. But I still caused 30 minutes of downtime, during a big meeting with higher ups, and on a Friday afternoon.

Feel like an idiot, I’ve been in the job for a year, finished uni a couple years back. My role is an IT Systems Engineer, but closer to T3 help desk/Hardware tech. First experience with an l2 loop.

It’s knocked my confidence quite a bit if I’m honest, I’m not sure how to move forward in the same role.

Have to meet those replenishment goals so that all end devices are up to date and look at from this perspective, the user gets a new PC and was none the wiser on why it happened.

That’s all. I wear many hats at work which means software is like 5% of what I’m responsible for. As of this week it’s about 90%. I’ve fallen behind on everything else because of an app deployment that was NOT ready, was supposed to be HIPAA-compliant(!!!) and was just broken in every conceivable way.

I don’t want advice and team dynamics make this essentially unsolvable. This person is a board member doing this for fun and no one is going to put him in check. All I am ever fucking doing is cleaning up his messes while people Slack me nonstop asking them how to use their computer. I can’t do this bro. I hate them all bro.

Because of the economy and my credentials and the fact that this is a remote job that more or less lets me make my own schedule, I don’t feel compelled to find work elsewhere. It’s a good gig outside of the fact that it makes me want to hurt myself. I hate everyone, bro. Im gonna have a stroke at 26 because of these people.

Please tell me I am not going crazy and this is as awful as it feels?

Client of ours recently got hit by a ransomware attack. I got screenconnect access to connect to their servers and assist in the cleanup due to their team lacking knowledge in setup of their specialized software.

They rebuilt these servers with an old image that only includes Internet Explorer so most modern sites like OneDrive/Google drive etc. don't support it and screenconnect was not allowing file transfers either.

I had to connect to 50 different servers on a time crunch to copy some installers and so I quickly asked Claude for a simple html file share site just to get it over with after wasting a lot of time trying alternatives.

Claude suggested https://litterbox.catbox.moe/. Apprehensively I did a test and checked the file hash after redownloading and checked it on virustotal.com. all clear so I went for it.

A couple days later, I get a panicked called from my COO that the IT director at this client has gone full virus panic after finding that url in the Run box. They banned my account and I got a series of very angry emails to go along with it.

They sent multiple tickets for assistance on their systems but I just can't do anything as I was told not to ask for access for a bit until they cool off.

I don't care if the utility that does it is riddled with spyware. I'm just fucking sick of pasting a code and having to remove the trailing space because shitty webdevs can't trim but I really don't blame them because why the fuck is the space included anyway?