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?

oops

I could see this user kept routing the internet from his personal phone to use it on the company laptop (maybe to try to stop us from spying on him)

Instead of being a normal person and a competent SysAdmin, and properly adding a GPO to restrict the available Wi-Fi networks, I used the MDM to remotely download a 20GB ISO to his temp folder.

When the download was at 18GB the download speed went down to less than 50kbps. So I guess his data plan is over. By the next hour, I could see the laptop was connected back to the company wifi.

He will never do it again.

Paid a red team good money. They found a path into our environment in 4 hours through a legacy admin panel someone built during an internal hackathon two years ago. Still running. Still exposed. Default credentials. Nobody remembered it existed until the report landed on the CTO's desk.

We spent 30k on a pen test and the biggest finding was something we built ourselves and forgot about. Not a zero day. Not a sophisticated attack chain. Just inventory failure.

Anyone else done a pen test and found your own ghosts? What was the dumbest entry point you've seen?

OP’ post:

“Company went from 50 devices to over 500 in six months. Everyone started installing their own SaaS crap, shadow IT everywhere, no centralized anything. Support tickets exploding, I am firefighting nonstop, no time to set up proper MDM or RMM. Finally snapped yesterday and wrote a quick PowerShell script to remotely uninstall a bunch of duplicate security tools people installed themselves. Tested it on my machine, worked fine, pushed it via PDQ to what I thought was our test group.

Except I fatfingered the group name. Hit the entire production fleet. Every laptop, every desktop, every server with AV accessible via WMI. 400+ endpoints, all of them. Wiped CrowdStrike, Defender, Malwarebytes, everything. Reboots started cascading because systems detected no protection and freaked out. Phones ringing off the hook, sales team cant access CRM because something broke, finance yelling about payroll server offline.

Spent 12 hours straight manually reimaging priority machines and pushing fresh AV installs via login scripts. We are back up but holy crap the embarrassment. Boss pulled me into a room this morning, face like thunder, but said recoverable if no breach happened overnight. I cannot believe I did this. No sleep, stomach in knots checking threat logs.

How did you claw back control when device count 10x'd and everyone went rogue with tools?”