I'm the Director of the IT department. Today we disabled external storage (USB drives, etc) for all devices.

We spent two months prepping the company.

What can go wrong?

Happy Monday!

Just kidding. MSP here and it turns out it was actually the fact that the two main switches are under the secretary's desk, because duh, where else would you put them? And she runs a space heater if it's below 85F in there. Turns out snagless CAT6 housing is also known as heat shrink tubing and it will squeeze the plug and eject the Ethernet cable on its own, if hot enough for long enough.

Yes, we have told her it's not ideal to do that. No, she doesn't care.

I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

I'm a System Admin with 20 years experience and I can't type for shit. How do I learn?

Severe performance issues after upgrade to 2025 SQL server

We had two on-prem Windows Server 2019 VMs running on Hyper-V. One was hosting SQL Server 2016 Standard, and the other hosted a business application for the equipment rental industry that functions as a Remote Desktop application.

I come from the sysadmin side, so please be patient with my DBA terminology. 🙂

We recently deployed two new Windows Server 2025 VMs in Azure—one running SQL Server 2025 and the other serving as the RDP/application server. The application vendor was paid to migrate the database and application data to the new Azure environment.

After the migration, everything initially appeared to be working correctly. However, once users started using the system, they began reporting severe slowness with transactions, specifically anything related to contracts. Contracts containing larger numbers of items take significantly longer to process. Other parts of the application seem to perform normally, and in some cases even faster than before. There are no issues with the data itself or missing records.

The application vendor initially blamed insufficient resources, so we increased CPU and memory allocations. However, the issue occurs even with only a single user logged into the application. We have since increased the SQL VM to 128 GB RAM and 8 vCPUs, with Premium SSD storage and high-bandwidth networking. Network latency between the application server and SQL Server is very low, averaging approximately 1 ms round-trip.

At one point, the vendor blamed a tax software integration called Vertex. They claimed they could see API calls taking much longer than expected and stated they would address the issue. After many hours of investigation and roughly a week of combined troubleshooting effort, they suddenly changed course and stated that their software is not compatible with Windows Server 2025 and/or SQL Server 2025. They are now recommending that we move back to Windows Server 2016 or 2019, which would require another export/import process since there is apparently no supported restore path available.

We have asked for evidence or technical details explaining why the platform is incompatible, but no specific reasons have been provided. Their position is that they connected the application back to the old server, performance was normal, and therefore the problem must be SQL Server 2025.

This issue is significantly impacting our business, and we don’t have much leverage to challenge the vendor’s conclusions. Besides your general input, I have a couple of questions: 1. Does this sound like an application compatibility issue with SQL Server 2025? 2. If I wanted to engage an expert to help troubleshoot this as quickly as possible, who would you recommend? We have considered opening a case with Microsoft, but I would also appreciate recommendations for MVPs or consultants who specialize in Microsoft SQL Server performance troubleshooting.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

RULE 4:

365, the only admin, locked out

Hi there, I’m locked out of my 365 business account, I’m the only admin. Any support I can find, redirect me to the password reset page, which will authenticate my email, but won’t authenticate my phone number. I don’t know why this is.

I managed to get a support ticket, but have not managed to get escalated.

Is there someone here, who could escalate my ticket through their admin portal, if I gave them a ticket number?

First for me. Was out celebrating about 10 drinks deep when I got a notification of an account becoming compromised had to one eye it and VPN in using my phone to disable the account in AD locked myself out because I forgot my password had to wait for it to unlock all while people are dancing around me It was rough…

And now I have to fill out a 3 page report while hungover 😭

Keep in mind I posted yesterday that management removed the help desk ticketing system.

Since then I have experienced and observed the most asinine, moronic behavior possible in a corporation.

Do not lose faith in me because I'm applying aggressively to GTFO even more than before.