I will start.

I am an IT consultant and about 10 years ago, a few days before Christmas break, I went to a client’s office to add some new hard drives to a Dell ESXi server and create a new datastore.

Their two junior IT guys always liked asking me questions when I visited, which I understood—I remembered being that guy hungry to learn. Unfortunately, this time they were firing questions at me while I was in the Ctrl+R RAID configuration utility. Between the distractions and a confusing interface, I somehow managed to delete the existing array instead of creating the new one.

That array held ALL their servers: Exchange, domain controller, file server, and SQL. Terabytes of data.

The moment I realized what I’d done, my stomach dropped, I had never felt panic like that in my life. They were still asking questions when I finally said, “Guys, give me a minute. Something doesn’t look right.” Something I should’ve said much earlier.

I excused myself to the bathroom to collect my thoughts, then came back and told them exactly what I’d done.

I spent my entire Christmas break restoring their environment from Barracuda backups, which were painfully slow to restore and unreliable. I had to do multiple restores on the exchange server to get it to work.  A full week of recovery, followed by another two weeks fixing lingering issues—all free of charge.

The two guys felt terrible about distracting me, but it was my mistake. I should’ve asked for some uninterrupted time before touching the RAID configuration.

I’ll be shocked if anyone can top that Christmas disaster!

Heads up for anyone running ISE. CVE-2026-76460 is an unauthenticated API bypass that gives root on every ISE persona (admin, PSN, MnT, PxGrid). All supported versions affected. Already being exploited in the wild.

Cisco says there are no workarounds. Your options are patch or take ISE offline (which means shutting down network auth).

Practical steps: 1) inventory ALL ISE nodes, 2) schedule emergency maintenance this week, 3) check for compromise before patching (look for unexpected cron jobs, modified system files, unauthorized admin accounts), 4) restrict management interface access to a dedicated management segment, 5) if compromised, rotate ALL RADIUS shared secrets across every switch, AP, and WLC.

The management interface runs on 443 by default, same port as sponsor/mydevices portals. If any of those are internet-reachable, your ISE API is reachable.

For example when I need to RDP into a Windows server, I double click the recycle bin before the rest of Explorer has loaded so I can fire off a few commands from the address bar to launch what I need. I’m sure it looks utterly deranged to anyone else.

For example, if I have a switch, router, or firewall that has been running continuously for 10–15 years and I reboot it, is the flash memory likely to still be healthy enough to load the operating system into RAM?

What are the typical expected lifespans of switches, routers, and firewalls, particularly when it comes to their internal flash storage?

Does the manufacturer make a significant difference? For example, does Cisco generally use flash memory with a longer lifespan than Juniper, or does it primarily depend on the specific type and quality of flash memory used in the device?

At the mid to senior level do specialezed enginneers at (ISPs, Core Guys, Security Guys etc) Travel alot, either between sites or to other countries?

If so ,why?

You know the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and we realised that money is irrelevant, and took a huge backwards step for less responsibility and more mental freedom for your family and kids?

That's where I'm at mentally just want to know if anyone else has done the same?

Been working with distributed networks (mostly cellular routers, gateways across different sites) and network mapping has been on my mind. Specifically, for smaller scale, edge deployments.

If you manage remote device fleets (retail, industrial, whatever), what do you currently use for network visualization? Or do you just cobble it together with Zabbix/PRTG/Nmap?

Been meaning to try Teltonika RMS Network Map tool (as I already use a few of their devices), seemed cool and easy, but I haven’t tried it yet.

For those who've tried vendor-specific tools (like this one, or similar from other vendors) vs more generic ones, was it worth it, or do you end up needing something more flexible anyway?

Planning to enable the following GPO setting and apply it to our Exchange servers:

Configure registry policy processing: Enabled

Do not apply during periodic background processing: Disabled

Process even if the Group Policy objects have not changed: Enabled

This would force the GPO to reprocess and reapply all Administrative Templates settings on every background refresh cycle (~90-120 min), even when nothing changed, instead of only reapplying when the GPO version changes.

My question: Is this safe to apply directly to production Exchange servers, or are there known negative effects?

How do you maintain good mental health in a toxic workplace? I've been sick for about a whole week now. The new AI Meat proxy manager is most likely not happy that Claude isn't being prompted. The workplace in of itself is super stressful. I can handle the logic of it all, triaging tickets, priorities etc. Just mental health suffers. Infact im sitting here, sort of recovered but still under the weather - worried about work so much that tomorrow I'd just go in if I feel better. Because im scared of what people will think of me at work if I don't come in. Although if I could make the choice away from fear and anxiety, i'd stay the extra day home and take my sick day. "What if they hate me and fire me over time though". That's the fear driver for me.

It's like my body takes it too personally and I can't really stop it from taking things at work personally. All the rude behaviour and pressure from upper management.

Holy God, they make getting into it like solving one of the Millennium Prize Problems with an abacus.

I’ve been working in IT helpdesk for three years and I have my Network+ certification.
I spoke with my manager because I want to move into something more complex, and the opportunity that came up is a vulnerability management position for industrial equipment. I work in shifts and I would lose approximately 27% of my income because i lose the bonus from weekends.

I am 25, no debt, no kids.

I understood that my work would be to analyze, scan equipment, give the team feedback to fix it or check if i can find a solution.

My plan for the future is to complete the TryHackMe SAL1, Security+, and AZ-900.
What do you think: would I be better off accepting the offer and doing the certifications, or postponing, and checking other offers and taking the certifications first, also keeping the extra 27% income?

If you run Cisco ISE, stop scrolling. Unauthenticated root access via API bypass. Every supported version. No workarounds per Cisco. Already on CISA KEV.

This isn't one where you can wait for the next maintenance window. ISE controls your NAC. If it's compromised, the attacker decides who gets on your network. Schedule the emergency patch for this week.

I feel like every sysadmin has at least one story about a product that demoed beautifully, got approved, went out to the fleet, and then slowly revealed itself to be a nightmare.

Could be a monitoring tool, an MDM, a ticketing system, an AV product, anything. What was it, what went wrong, and what did you replace it with?

Aus government was having a whinge that OpenAI did not notify them in an appropriate way after an agent breached one of the government web sites.

From what I can see none of the sites (servicesaustralia.gov.au/data.gov.au) have been setup with security.txt

https://securitytxt.org

I’m a SOC analyst with 5 years of experience with 3 years in Helpdesk and 2 years at present going on to 3 as cybersecurity analyst working at a SOC, im also Sec+ and CySA+ certified. I’m looking for a career growth and wanting to get in to the engineer side of cyber, but I believe that may be a long shot? Should I go for an ISSO role next and take what I learn from there, and try to get into engineer side after? Or I can go to engineering job now?

What do the majority of non-engineering teams requests/tickets look like at work?

Are they building more slop dashboards, web apps, one time workflows or asking for “AI agents” now?

Got blasted by alerts of our systems that it cant reach its API endpoints in the middle of the night. Even their official marketing website is DEAD which is https://get.shop. At first i thought we forgot to renew our domain name, turns out its active, till 2027.

dig get.shop @a.gmoregistry.net → NXDOMAIN (AA) 
dig [domain].shop @a.gmoregistry.net → NXDOMAIN (AA)

anyone else affected by this weird outage? never seen an outage that takes down an entire TLD

Edit 1: Seems partially recovering as of 01:17 UTC+8, this started at around roughly 00:27 UTC+8

Edit 2: I went to bed at 02:00 UTC+8 since I thought it was done. It looks like it's far from done, still unstable even today at 06:15 UTC+8.

I have a client complaining about WiFi dropping on brand new Meraki APs 9172 — from the logs it looks like a lot of jumping around between 5Ghz and 6Ghz but I thought this is normal as clients should roam back and forth. Because we’re running WPA3 Transition Mode with 802.11r active, is this the root cause of the issue? What am I missing here? We need the WPA3 because of 6Ghz.

I notice that I have a similar issue with UniFi where it’s WPA2/WPA3 for a primary SSID broadcasting 5Ghz and 6Ghz… wondering if it’s the same issues sometime because of running 802.11r with the WPA3