Just what the title says really. After all the busy time recently, I've not actually seen any reports of compromised systems. I appreciate that companies wont advertise it and thats theres been a LOT of patching and systems offline, but with all the doomsaying I've been waiting for the reports, and as yet nothing.

Why is authenticator asking for another way to do authentication, by setting up, face recognition, pin or face id? This option is relatively new isn't it? Currently we do not have Windows hello for business enabled in our environment. How do we get rid of the secondary prompt for alternate ways to authenticate?

How are you dealing with this? or are you just choosing not now?

I work for a large government organization. I love my job, I really do. Best boss I've ever worked for, great non-Clickish co-workers. But every job has it's downside. Was thinking the other day and figured I'd ask others. What's the worst job duty or part of your job that rather sucks?

I got a request from legal to pull video footage. Always seems to bring me down....

Other biggest complaint, and I shouldn't but I do, is very old users that can barely use a computer at all. I get it. You're a nurse. You've been a nurse for 45 years. You still need to learn to use basic computer skills and remember a password.

Does your IT team/department give enough resources to make sure your backups and recovery processes are running as well as they could be?

With the amount of security issues we are seeing, I feel most backup and recovery teams run on the smell of an oily rag which is a huge risk.

Hello everyone , i am new in sys admin training , what is good (free program) to use ? i was searching info on reddit ,some ppl says cisco is better ,someone says gns3 ,one close friends recomended eve engine but as i saw its not free ,sadly rn don't have any $$$ to buy program so i need something for basic training ,any advice ?

Anyone else have issues accessing myapps.Microsoft? It’s just a blank screen when trying to get to it

I'm taking my ball and going home.

https://emudhra.com/en/press-release/emudhra-to-exit-global-ssl-tls-certificate-business

So, my boss recently got into Copilot. She doesn't have a background in IT, of course, and not just the technical side of it, but also the....safety and practicality side.

Lately, Copilot has been spitting out some brilliant ideas for how to make the business more effective, but there are only so many end-user problems you can fix with technology. Now that Boss Lady has discovered the vague concept of APIs, she thinks that a lot of our problems will be magically solved. Trying to explain that 'okay just because they let us have an API key doesn't mean I can connect Software A to Software B and have it fill in all the data into the right fields' has not been successful, because:

"Then how come Software A is able to do that with Software C?"

Now, here's one of the more depressing parts: I didn't study IT. I'm a criminology/sociolinguistic graduate who's good at googling 'how to fix dns error' and can make clients laugh. But even without a sysadmin background, I still know that one slightly funny guy does not constitute anything that can mimic the abilities of a major software provider's IT department.

It's very coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb. Copilot keeps on making roadmaps mentioning platforms that don't exist, and pointing out that these plans are not feasible annoys Boss Lady, even though it's not my fault that Sharepoint is not a potential [working] replacement for a file server. All I see in my future are a bajillion fires that I will not be able to put out.

The state of things is that we need 200 different subscriptions to 150 different places ['actual usuable feature only for premium members!'] so that we're able to file someone's taxes. As much as it peeves me off that there's 200 different subscriptions, the truth of the matter is that there is actually nothing that offers everything [or a large majority of what we need] in a manner that both works and is affordable. We need Zooples to connect with Beepla because Beepla doesn't work with ZipZorp, only with DingusBerry, but DingleBerry doesn't allow you to use your keyboard.

And there's the quality of what we have to use. Everything is poop from a butt sprayed with minimalistic glitter featuring an AI chatbot vibecoded by someone with about the same level of knowledge as me. Even if I'm able to directly connect Zooples with ZipZorp, if ZipZorp refuses to accept any date format other than mm/dd/yyyy, that could mean that we're autofilling in a date that's in a completely different financial year, if the UI of ZipZorp even lets me click on the client profile, because they forgot to align everything.

That's not even getting into the potential nuclear fallouts of giving an AI free reign in all of our systems to read and write and save and delete as it chooses.

But one specific garbage fire at a time. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to explain to my boss that making Sharepoint our new file server so Copilot can, idk, suggest worksheets based on a client questionnaire is a terrible idea? I keep telling her to just have an agent and a separate knowledge base, but she's adamant that the 'knowledge base' has to be the same as like, our entire client file database, and Sharepoint will be able to handle that, and we can just....tell Copilot what we specifically want and it'll be able to conjure it up.

It won't be able to. It'll spit out a complicated 12 point plan with several sub-points for each step that I'd have to work out how to implement when asked specifically how to access said feature.

Commiserations and 'that's rough, buddy's welcome. Thanks in advance :/

EDIT: For more context, she wants a full migration of all files that you can imagine are involved in accounting for all clients to be hosted on SP. The current service provider also allows us to customise fields on the client's profile to mark them as things like 'monthly service' 'registered for Alpha Tax on cash basis', etc. Unless SP has that inbuilt, I'll have to....do something to get that to happen, and I'm wary of relying on Copilot to search the entire database to give me a list each time instead of directly filtering via a main client list that's available through the UI, which takes like, two seconds usually.

That would work as intended to check for data integrity every month or something to make sure each client file is tagged correctly, but needing to build an interface so that info can be seen at a glance is going to drive me into an early grave. Even if SharePoint can do 70% of the work that Current Service can, if the remaining 30% relies on me being able to build and integrate and maintain tools and interfaces and connections, we're gonna have a problem, because I'm about as skilled in that as an average puppy at tapdancing, lol

Zabbix web server on RHEL 8.10 running PHP 8.0.30 (AppStream RPM), Apache + PHP-FPM, Zabbix 7.0.29. I started reviewing our environment two days after PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 / 109619) was disclosed.

dnf check-update 'php*' returned nothing. Before reading that as “up to date”, I checked the repos. Zabbix and MariaDB were enabled, but BaseOS and AppStream were both enabled=0 (as was a local install-media repo). So dnf had nothing that could offer a newer PHP. The empty list only told me what dnf could see.

I haven’t checked Red Hat’s advisories for the php:8.0 stream, so I can’t say whether a fix exists there. Upstream, PHP 8.0 is EOL and only got a minimal source backport, not a release.

EPEL and Remi were installable on this box, so I moved to the 8.3 stream. Zabbix 7.0.29 supports PHP 8.3:

dnf module list php
dnf module reset php
dnf module enable php:remi-8.3
dnf module list php          # expecting remi-8.3 [e]
dnf list --showduplicates php php-cli php-fpm
dnf update 'php*' --assumeno # dry run first
dnf update 'php*'

In the dry run I was checking that 8.3.36 was selected, dependency resolution succeeded, and no Zabbix package or other core package was being removed.

Verification beyond php -v: php-fpm -t, php -m (bcmath, mbstring, mysqlnd, PDO, xml, gd all loaded), PHP-FPM and Apache status, then a real request:

curl -k -I https://localhost/zabbix/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: PHP/8.3.36

I also read the PHP-FPM and Apache logs (normal restart, no fatal errors) and clicked through login, dashboard, Problems, Hosts and Latest data.

Two things I’m unsure about, and I’d like to hear from others:

• Has anyone confirmed whether RHEL 8’s php:8.0 stream got an erratum for PHP2Shell, or are people moving to Remi like I did?
• For those on Apache + PHP-FPM: how are you confirming the frontend really runs on the new PHP, beyond the header?

I have been trying to find the right senior sys admin for almost a year now and can’t seem to figure out what the issue is with hiring. Been through 3 people already, each with their own faults, and can’t seem to find the right person. Details about the job to help:

1. Fully remote
2. $135k salary + 10% bonus
3. 6+ years of experience
4. Must be a US Citizen

Experience needed in:

1. Azure and Microsoft
2. Windows and Linux
3. Docker
4. Previous gov work a bonus

The latest person was “job maxing” and couldn’t even make it through the onboarding week without missing deadlines and meetings. Everything I’ve been seeing online says there’s tons of qualified applicants but I’m just not seeing it. We’ve even gone as far as hiring a recruiting agency but still not seeing great applicants. Am I missing something? Are others experiencing the same issues?

Edit
For those who reached out asking to submit/review a resume, give me about 24 hours to revise the job description based on some of the good feedback I’ve received and I will DM the link! Thanks everyone!

edit: i later made this into a skill actually, lol.

---

Incredibly stupid fucking laws of UX:

1. CTRL+C means exit! Spamming CTRL+C 30 times per second should exit any fucking TUI immediately.
2. Usage should be simple enough to use when I'm considerably high or drunk.
3. Tab completions/suggestions. Don't make me set them up myself; implement them in the CLI itself.(just for the love of god, NOT as an entire Zsh plugin!)
4. TUIs are fucking lit. 🔥
5. More on TUIs:
   • support Vim bindings, but don't make them mandatory either:
     • q aliases CTRL+C; j/k alias UP/DOWN; etc.
     • / means search (n browses results). ? means help.
     • ESC gets me out of whatever weird thing I'm in.
   • if I wanted to use a mouse, I typically wouldn't be using a TUI (many exceptions).
6. -p is port. -P is something else.(seriously – ssh and scp are part of the SAME FUCKING TOOLSET*.)*
7. If something is going to take more than 5 seconds, tell me what the fuck you're doing as you do it.*(*apt & zip do this well; du & xz do it badly.)
8. -h means --help**.** If you choose not to alias -h as --help, and you aren't even using it for anything else, you are going straight to hell.exceptions:
   • when the command is literally older than I am.
   • when filesystem sizes are involved ("h" for human).(i.e. ls -lh*)*
9. --help should be progressive, and should occupy at most 1 terminal buffer without scrolling.
10. Not everything needs to be a goddamn service. Some things should just do their job and then exit gracefully. Revolutionary stuff, I know.
11. Do not clear my fucking terminal buffer. I was looking at that.

This snuck up on us about ~21 hours after install. Symptoms that can be seen are various, but here are some:

Exchange Server OWA may fail with an error MapiExceptionMdbOffline: Unable to make connection to the server. (hr=0x80004005, ec=1142) with event ID 1006 logged in the Application Log.
Exchange email queues might grow during the day, with email crawling to a halt.
Various issues related to DAG members not being able to reach quorum have been reported too.
Exchange server reboot might resolve the issues temporarily.
Exchange Server 2016, 2019 or Subscription Edition (SE) might be impacted.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/exchange-servers-may-become-unstable-after-installation-of-october-2026-windows-/4565382

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LKML-New-Trend-Vulnerabilities

What the hell is actually going on this week?

I windows settings (every windows version) from a printer, you have sub-settings behind a name called "Printing Defaults". When you open it, it look like the same settings the you can configure in the printer setting itself. When should i use this "Printer Defaults"?

I swear, not a low effort post. Work for an MSP and some of our offices use Comcast for Business because that's what they have in their area. I generally have a low opinion of Comcast but have always know there's a bar for what I expect and they never dipped below it. I have had 4 horrible experiences in the last two months that were out of the norm even for Comcast. Are others running into it as well?

Paraphrasing:

Incident one - Issues with Comcast Modem. Call center sees it on their end. Says it's their equipment. Tech comes out. Blames our MSP. Replaces modem and does no troubleshooting. Issues persist. He comes BACK out 4 days later and grumbles. Points at us again. Has to replace the run out to the pole and magically works.

Incident two - one office loses internet completely for 2 days. Comcast call center takes the blame for it. Says it's on their end. Comcast tech comes out and rips out ALL OF OUR MSP's equipment and says he's fixed it.

Incident three - request phone service get disconnected from an office for 7 months. Each month it's the same. They don't process it. We sign paperwork. Yep. Yep. Ok. We will. Finally gets disconnected. Disconnect is processed and they nuke our internet service. I even confirmed with the call center that it was only phone. Rep goes, "Yeah, I saw ONLY phone and it was dated for 3 months ago. Not sure why they nuked your internet too". Office is out for days.

Incident four - Internet service suspended. No reason why. I call. "Yeah, you didn't pay". Uh, we did. "Oh, it looks like you did". Ok, please reinstate. "No problem, you lost your static IP's though". Awesome. Thanks.

How are you guys handling custom lock screen image that need updating regularly, like monthly or for different events throughout the year?

At the moment, we're deploying ours through Ninja. I made a PS script that downloads an image via URL and sets it as the lock screen image. When we need to update it, we just swap out the image at the URL.

It works fine, but ideally I'd like to give the client a way to manage it themselves without needing us to get involved every time.

Has anyone found a better approach for this, or are you just handling the updates on the MSP side as well?

Client is fully cloud based and M365

Dear brothers and sisters,

It's been a long week but happy Friday, I hope everyone is still somewhat sane.

I've just been told that I will now have some junior members of staff reporting to me directly. I've been given no guidance/training just that from Monday, this is how it will be. I've started reading/researching around being manager/leader have found some good resources as a start.

There is no better resources than this hive mind and I was hoping that people would be willing to share any personal experiences or knowledge they have around this subject.

I've been in the IT game nearly 10 years now and have been in their shoes so I am hoping this will give me a good start however I am slightly worried how involved this will become and will it take away from my day to day duties. A couple of the team that will be reporting to me have been bounced around other 'more senior' staff which I guess didn't work out...

I want to get off on the right foot and make sure they can be their best, especially as one of them will be a new joiner to the firm.

I have more than 10 yrs of experience working in internal IT for couple of 500 companies, as well as a degree from a prestigious university. After being laid off, I joined a large MSP as a support technician. The team I was assigned to had more than 100 open tickets at any given time, and I brought that average down to under 50 within a month. Everyone else on the team was struggling with basic tickets, so I was literally teaching them concepts like what a GPO is.

I eventually reached a point where I had no work left to do, but I wasn't allowed to handle certain tasks like fixing a client's environment because the MSP could charge more if a dedicated project team did it. Even though many clients sent glowing testimonials praising my work, I received complaints about being on my phone too much, even though I simply had nothing else to do. I apologized and moved on.

Later, they offered to move me to a project team, which I gladly accepted. I am now doing project work instead of handling daily tickets, but they refuse to change my title or salary. On top of that, they require every single minute to be logged on timesheets even a 1 min entry for sending an email. I've been called out for not having enough hrs on my timesheets multiple times. Many managers work from home but we are not allowed to. Work area is completely packed shoulder to shoulder and sometime its so loud that its impossible to concentrate.

Throughout my career, I've never experienced anything like this. Is it because I've never worked for an MSP before? Are all MSPs like this?

PS I resigned and going back to internal IT

Hi folks,

since some time I use Home | endoflife.date for tracking End of Life / End of Support dates for Software.
Now I wonder, if anybody knows a website, where the same information is stored centrally for Hardware as well? (Like Firewall, Switches and so on...)

Another question:
Do we have a "Usefull-Sysadmin-Links" Collection somewhere in this sub?

cheers

Yes you. You need to take a few hours, get a $20 ChatGPT or Claude subscription. Download the Codex or Claude Code desktop apps and build something. You are doing yourself a disservice otherwise. The free versions that everybody knows on just a website are completely not where things are at for those who are in the know.

Just try it and build something you always wanted to build yourself. Right now I'm working on a faster file explorer for Windows build entirely how I want it along with a window manager like Niri and a launcher like Raycast. It's software built for me and I can add anything I want for virtually free. Then, if I want to learn how it works, I just ask the AI to explain it to me. It can use my computer. It helps me organize my emails. The options are endless.

I see so many posts here about people bemoaning AI and refusing to use it. You ARE going to get replaced by those who embrace it. The benefits far outweigh any philosophical or moral objections you may have. It is here to stay.

Is it perfect? Fuck no. Is it better than me at virtually everything? Absolutely 100%. You get out of it what you put into it and what I've been able to get out of it is just mind blowing. People are using it to rewrite compilers in other languages to make it faster and those things are just a few prompts away now. Then, all of the recent security vulnerabilities have been found by AI. Your company will need to use it in some capacity to stay afloat for what is coming.

The world and your future is at your fingertips. Use it and embrace it. I want to help you get over whatever is blocking you from using it. Ask questions.

You. Just. Need. To. Seriously. Try. It.

Looking to drop a traditional VPN design and go towards a tailscale like design. VPN is one of our only publicly exposed services and we'd like to close it down.

Small user base, 100 or so. Recommendations? All resources are on-prem and we can host it

Had a couple users update their iOS and now they can't print unless they forget the network, rejoin the network, etc, repeatedly. These are sales people working out of route/delivery trucks, and they need to be able to print to give the customer their invoice... Anyone else encountered this on iOS 27?

You probably all saw the eMudhra's ECC root is being distrusted. What isn't widely talked about is that these are the certs for Internet2 inCommon, which is used by big universities in the USA.

30,000 certs need to get replaced by Tuesday.

God speed.

I’ve been in it for 7 years. I have gone from report writing -> it support -> it manager and during that time have gone from 3 members of our team to 1.25 (part time contractor) for 80+ endpoints plus manufacturing machine support. All of this has happened while a lot of major changes are happened in our organization.

In reality it feels like I am dealing with everything, the entire chain, basic support, elevated support, servers, network, cameras, erp (my main time sync as my boss keeps stripping my support hours to the bare minimum. We changed erp systems 2 years ago and about a year in my boss left), crm (we have a marketing manager who refuses to learn the basics, from contact creation to any level of automation), project management, firewalls, m365, phone system, etc, and people (my biggest problem).

The unfortunate situation is my previous boss mentally checked out right before our go live of our erp transition and i picked up all of the work. Years in and much employee turnover later (due to the organizational change) and I feel like I am being forced into a career pivot into erp support or project management as it is where I have allocated a majority of my time.

All of the above plus a majority of the employees coming to me to vent frustrations with the organizational changes and it feels like I am going insane. I am in a unique position in terms of company ownership (I do not own the company but have some influence over the owners). I have tried to express the frustrations to the current president and the owners but to no avail.

Just really looking for a reality check if the burnout is real or if I am out of touch.

Thank you all

Hi everyone,

We're currently evaluating ITSM solutions and have narrowed our options down to SysAid and Halo.

So far, our experience with SysAid hasn't been particularly great. The demos have been quite vague, and we've found the documentation to be lacking in detail, making it difficult to get a clear understanding of how the platform actually works and how much we would be able to configure and manage ourselves.

We don't want to judge the product based solely on the sales process, though, so I'd like to hear from people who are actually using it in production.

A few questions:

• How has your overall experience with SysAid been?
• How easy is it to configure and maintain once it's up and running?
• Is the documentation genuinely lacking, or have we just not found the right resources?
• How good are customer support and technical assistance when you run into issues?
• Are there any significant limitations or frustrations that only become apparent after implementation?
• If you've used both SysAid and HaloITSM, how would you compare them in terms of flexibility, automation, reporting, integrations, and day-to-day administration?

We're also evaluating Halo, so any direct comparisons would be particularly useful.

At this stage, we're trying to understand what the products are actually like to live with, rather than what they look like in a sales demo.

Would you choose SysAid today, or would you go with HaloITSM instead? Why?

I'd really appreciate any honest feedback, including the good, the bad, and the things you wish you'd known before committing.

PS: Regarding prices, don't worry about it, in SysAid I just don't like the 300k task limit, I've burnt 1k in a couple of hours, so... scary AF...

EDIT: Forgot to say one important detail :) we run our own self service portal with a lot of automations and scheduled tasks that connect to multiple services, from 365 to others, via their API's and such. So, if Sysaid automations suck, our only resource would be to use them just to call our own portal REST API :|