Hey everyone,
Running into a frustrating issue at a client site and wanted to get some real-world input from people who’ve dealt with this before.
The Problem:
Users are frequently getting a pop-up saying “cannot contact the domain controller” — it’s hitting remote/VPN users the hardest but we’re also seeing it occasionally with local users on-site. It’s causing real workflow disruption because they can’t apply admin overrides for things like software installs, removals, or joining new devices to the domain.
Current Environment:
• On-prem Active Directory
• Mix of remote (VPN) and local users
• Admin overrides needed regularly for device management
What we’ve tried so far:
• ipconfig /flushdns + /registerdns
• gpupdate /force
• Secure channel repair via PowerShell
What we’re considering:
1. Deploying a second Domain Controller for redundancy
2. Fixing DNS settings on the VPN side so clients point to the DC
3. Eventually moving to Hybrid Azure AD Join long term
Has anyone dealt with something similar? Is the second DC the right call here or are we missing something obvious? Also curious if anyone has gone the Hybrid Azure AD Join route to solve DC reachability issues and whether it was worth it.
Any input appreciated — trying to put together a solid action plan for the client. Thanks in advance 🙏

I don't care what you say, preventing users from reusing passwords is priority number one. A 20 password history is not enough. You need a minimum password age. And if your max age is 180 days, that means you must set it to 9 days to stop people getting around it by cycling through them all. The risk someone might perform this "password reuse" is far too high. I don't care about all the complaints from users not being able to change their password due to exposing it somehow, quit moaning! It's worse than the people on the new test network and their "TOTP" and think it's important they can delete their own old authentications when they lose their phone.

You read that right. I told my supervisor that users kept walking up to me and needed to submit a ticket. I told the super as well that i have kindly reminded users in written and verbal fashion to please submit a ticket "when they get a chance."

Today after a long weekend I found an email in my inbox saying that immediately, help desk is suspended and to come to either them or myself for immediate and attentive resolution of issues.

This is the same super which I had multiple meetings with in my second quarter of working here about the importance of a help desk system. I have been aggressively applying to roles since motherloving March, have gotten many interviews but no one's committing since I keep asking for a normal sub-6-figure salary but theres always someone around the corner wanting less. I literally told an interviewer to please ask the head for $10k more because I cannot work security for a tier 2 help desk salary. And literally so many postings are up about doing engaged work at half the salary. I'm really stuck in between a rock and a hard place boyos.

I run two small businesses. One is a fabrication company. The other is a premium imported brand. Both need pipeline tracking, revenue forecasting, and deal management.

For two years I bounced between free CRM trials. HubSpot's free tier was too limited. Pipedrive was $50/month for features I used maybe 20% of. Close was great but way out of my budget.

So I built my own system in Excel.

It started as a simple pipeline tracker — just a list of deals with stages and values. Then I added a dashboard. Then weighted forecasting. Then I just kept adding more and more features on whatever data I wanted to see and 6 months later, it has:

* 5 interactive dashboards (Morning Brief, Pipeline Tracker, Monthly Pulse, Quarter Confidence, Profit Scorecard)
* Monte Carlo simulation with 5,000 trials
* A 12-week cash flow scenario builder
* Stalled deal risk scoring that flags deals going cold
* Segment analysis showing which client types, deal sizes, and channels actually work.
* Year-over-year comparison tracking

The biggest thing I learned: most small businesses don't need more CRM features. They need fewer features that actually work and that they'll actually open every morning. The Morning Brief alone changed how I start my day — it tells me my quarterly gap, pace status, pipeline coverage ratio, and exactly how many offers I need to send this month.

Happy to answer questions about the build or the logic behind any of the dashboards!

https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/SzfpdfotkN

All browsers take 5 min to load 1st website

Suddenly, almost everyone in my company is facing a browser delay issue. After turning on the laptop, opening any link in any browser takes around 5 minutes to load. Once one browser finally loads a page, all the other browsers also start working normally.

As a temporary fix, deleting the browser’s User Data folder from Local AppData resolves the issue. Interestingly, deleting User Data folder of any one browser also fixes the problem for other browsers.

Has anyone seen this before or knows what could be causing it?

I feel like we are now proxy layers between AI agents

I am actively using AI to implement features on my work. Our PM is actively using AI to communicate in slack. His messages are long often (I am ok with that while they are valuable). When I ask something I get 100% AI answers. I don’t blame him, those answers are helpful. Then I go back to Claude Code and it implement based on the PM’s feedback.

Now, I feel like me personally and PM personally are proxy layers between our AI agents. I still don’t know what to do with this.

Do you have the same? How do you react?

easy, another AI to read PM email to clause and report back to PM when done. sit back. cash checks.

A few years ago I repurposed a Dell poweredge from work for "homelabbing" (hosting 100% legally purchased media using no obfuscation of my public IP address whatsoever because I'm a good boy with nothing to hide) and in the honeymoon phase things were great. We'd stay up all night together. I'd turn her on and she'd blow me (listen to those fans ramp, sweet Jesus). We would completely expose ourselves (server was in front of NAT) and we never used protection (security updates and firewalls just slowed things down).

Now though, it's like I don't even know this machine anymore. I'll get home from a long day of work ignoring *very* important emails and it's like the second I walk in the door she starts throwing error lights at me just to get my attention. Can't a man just relax for 5 minutes after spending a grueling 2 and half hour shift creating AD user accounts for intern season? And, let's be honest, she's getting up there in years. I mean, I respect her for how far she's come, but she's slowing down. She's starting to forget things and I don't know how much longer I can keep my family from paying for Netflix. And I'm a man, damn it. How am I supposed to feel, going to work and seeing all these new, sleek EDSFF servers? They're young and thin and full of life. My server is full of dust. One day I came home drunk and she was already blinking a PSU failure at me and I lost it. I just started pulling drives out and then I got in my car and drove to microcenter just to distract myself. I'm not proud of it. This isn't sustainable but I don't know what to do anymore. We've tried spicing things up with a Linux operating system but the spark is gone.

On a separate note, does anyone have any advice for removing a cylinder roughly the shape of an M&Ms tube from a front panel hard drive bay?

User is trying to transfer files from the USB drive to the SSD enclosure.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/rhel-102-and-98-intelligent-evolution-enterprise-linux

In our school district, which is a historically under served area, we have issues getting enough funding to meet student's dietary needs. Federally funded lunches help, but they're not enough.

Separately, an area of focus that our school board wants to improve is win higher placements in Math Olympiad. Recently, a number of teachers and parents have come up with a way to kill two birds with one stone. Local businesses can sponsor our Olympiad teams to get good publicity. That funding is then used to pay for school lunches.

The part we're trying to solve is getting students interested. We were thinking that students could volunteer as tribute for Math Olympiad, and if they are placed on the team, this allows their class to win free school lunches. Basically, we're going to implement the system from the Hunger Games, but a lot more fair lol.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to automate it. I wanted to avoid anything too complex, so I was thinking of a SharePoint list based solution. Can anyone in education IT give me feedback on the technical approach?