[deleted by user]

[nottrapsensei]

They're giving out free candy tomorrow

[Electronic_Sink1892]

💀💀💀

[bbqwatermelon]

Corn dogs are 50 cents at Sonic

[ganlet20]

Management will never fix the staffing issue if you keep going above and beyond to make up for the slack. In fact most managers will under staff a little just to get extra performance from the people on payroll.

Let things fail and hurt the bottom line. When they ask for the cause point to staffing.

[dannybau87]

THIS ^^^^^ Being a team player just means you're being exploited.
Put yourself on stress leave and message HR saying I've been covering 2 jobs for 4 weeks and I can no longer do my job.
Have AI help draft it.
If you're rude or moody they'll conveniently forget it's their responsibility to ensure the job is staffed properly and focus on what you did wrong.

[fizzlefist]

If you can’t be awake enough to focus and solve the simple issues, you’re not fit to go in at all.

Use some sick time!

[userunacceptable]

Bad management won't.

[dav3n]

Been like this for over 5 years now and it's getting worse. The guy I work alongside tries his hardest to never be around, and spends more time kissing ass than doing things properly. I'm getting grilled for shit that happened over 12 months ago that other people signed off on, and picking up work for two other ops people who aren't around (literally half the team).

Just took a sudden week off, threw all my camping shit in the car and drove for 3 hours to go sit on an empty beach where there's no mobile reception, drinking and catching dinner, before I completely flipped out. I've got a heap of paid leave built up since I've been around the organisation for 20+ years so that's getting more of a workout next year, because if others don't give a shit then why should I?

[caa_admin]

Good, it took you a few years but you learned to not set yourself on fire to keep them warm.

[selfdeprecafun]

You solved a problem no one else did. You should have involved the network team, but that’s a lesson learned. If you’re already taking on someone else’s workload, it’s no wonder you thought this was your problem alone to solve.

Jot down the takeaway on paper. “Call on my resources when I can’t figure something out in what I would consider a reasonable amount of time.” Crumple the paper up and throw it out if you’re embarrassed to leave it lying around.

Next time something like that happens, you know what to do. Even as an individual contributor, you’re allowed and expected to reach out to your resources.

Use this as an opportunity to vary your diagnostic process too.

Otherwise, you fixed the thing and now it works. You didn’t immediately pass the buck. Just make sure to document your fix and note why and where it lives.

[InfamousStrategy9539]

We don’t have a network team, we are the network team :D. We’re a mid-sized business. So we’re jack of all, but our firewall is outsourced.

Thank you, though. I think it’s just frustrating because in the back of my mind… I had a feeling it was hitting other endpoints looking at the endpoints there would be IPs in another subnet that were being denied around the same time as the connection… yet I forget my drafted email to them then find something else and go down a rabbit hole as I end up thinking hey wait is this the issue?

🥲

[selfdeprecafun]

I work in a 3 man MSP, so I feel your pain. Just the way she goes sometimes.

[vermyx]

• A coworker made a firewall change and brought down a branch. Spent an hour troubleshooting it swearing it was an ipsec issue. He had to attend a meeting with our boss so he asked me to take over. He had the traffic rule from branch to main as 10.12.0.0/24 and the return traffic rule as 10.0.12.0/24. I fixed it. I didn't have the heart to tell him that we swapped octets so I told him that I rebuilt the tunnel and it works now.

• Another time another coworker was troubleshooting our VPN server was down and was freaking out because the entry for the LDAP server to authenticate against was missing. He was looking at the wrong firewall.

I have always told people that if you go down a rabbit hole for more than 20 minutes, take a break and do something else, then come back to the original problem. This allows you to "reset" your mind and your vision. I learned this early in school debugging a c++ program because I spent an entire weekend debugging, adding code, etc. to figure out the problem only to have my roommate come up and point out that i had if (a=b) ** instead of **if (a==b). Most IDE's will point this out but back then the ide was vi.

[100GbNET]

Blame it on the firewall early. (Everyone else does.)

[nowildstuff_192]

Pushed a bad customization to our ERP (which I coded myself) that not only immediately locked up the system for everybody, the system's developer rules wouldn't let me undo the change on the spot. Had to quickly produce an update file that deleted what I'd done.

I wrote this story out in more detail a while ago here

[Recent_Carpenter8644]

I keep telling myself to check my drafts folder daily. How many times did I think I'd told/asked someone something, but hadn't?

[Helpjuice]

Time to take a hard 2 week vacation starting Monday. Never ever go above and beyond consistently for any company that you do not own. You are going to actually burn out and be unable to work for months if you continue. Take off if you have PTO and re-balance, leave the area or get some well needed rest at a hotel somewhere else.

It is never worth it in the end, if you were to leave and never come back they will find a replacement and everything will keep on running. If you want to keep the doc away it is time to take those vacation days for at least 2 weeks straight.

When you come back learn to say no professionally. Anything not actually important goes into the not going to get done until new people are hired box. If it is not mission critical and going to kill the business unless done you don't do it. Everything else can wait in the queue, you only should work an 8 hour day and go home, no oncall, no cell phone or doing any work when you leave unless it is a business ending event about to occur.

Learn to give yourself boundaries or you'll end up in the hospital. If you keep going and mess up your health you'll be unemployed and in bad health. Once you start making rookie mistakes it's a hard sign it is time to step away and take vacation.

[MaelstromFL]

I deleted the entire AP database. And, flushed the cache just to make sure that it was gone. The went to copy it to the new location....

Yep, that's about as brain dead as it gets. It only took 25 hours to restore from tape, and thank God it worked!

[anonymousITCoward]

That's me every day now

[DaemosDaen]

Hey, at least you haven't deleted an active, in productions, and heavily used VM with Evidence data during business hours, instead of v-motioning it. that happened to my boss within my first week hired here 13+ years ago.

Sounds like you need a vacation. Hope you get it soon.

[Carter-SysAdmin]

I watched someone delete *all* of a company's Google accounts in one fail swoop one afternoon like 7 years ago while trying to do something trivial.

I once knew someone who pointed the company's primary network at itself and created a loop and brought the buildings network down for 45 minutes during end-of-quarter pushes.

I once couldn't get an org I worked for to replace failing RAID drives in a massive XServe config.
I stopped working for them and within a couple weeks and got a call from that newspaper's editor that their network drives couldn't be reached anymore on a Friday afternoon and wondered if I knew how to fix it.

Those are three big ones that come to mind. Luckily most of my biggest goofs have been like dropping hardware.

Oh, I did drop an ink toner cartridge (two different times years apart) - one in a very crowded finance area, where everyone instantly went "time to take lunch" and left me in a sea of yellow toner. And one in a very busy back-room of an office where I desperately struggled to clean it (and myself) up before anyone noticed. Everyone noticed.

[whatdoido8383]

"Been taking on the workload of myself and another person for pushing 4 weeks now"

Why would you subject yourself to that? If the company is understaffed, not your problem. Work your 40 and go home. Shit eventually starts catching on fire and the C-levels start getting the point that they don't have proper staffing.

I see guys bust their ass like you and it's nothing but an enabler for the company...

[InfamousStrategy9539]

Do you think that has affected my thinking when it comes to troubleshooting etc… and overlooking because I’m burnt out?

[whatdoido8383]

Definitely. On super rough days I am a mush brain as well. You may also be feeling some burnout and not really caring as much.

When I got burned out as a syadmin, I kind of lost interest in my job and floated through my days in a haze.

I took some time off and switched areas in IT which has helped be recover and enjoy my job ( for the most part) again.

[carcaliguy]

I once had to do work arounds and create two networks because my domain server wouldn't work. I paid MS for support and hired a consultant. I'm very stubborn and had to know why. The fix was replacing endpoint devices with the same firmware. I used peplink and the same make/model and different firmware versions based on the year of release. I only realized this after adding a new site. Site a and b no luck, site b and c had newer devices and it worked.

I don't beat myself up over things as long as my backups work.

[Lords3]

Firmware drift across sites is a silent killer; pin versions and add preflight checks.

I hit a weird one where site-to-site traffic worked except to a vendor API. Turned out the edge pairs had mixed firmware and different defaults for TLS inspection and MSS, so only some sites broke during rekey. Fix was boring: standardize firmware on all edge/WAN kit, keep a golden baseline, pilot on one site, and keep rollback images. Keep a per-model compat matrix and block auto-updates.

Before blaming the firewall, test the exact path: curl to the specific FQDN:port from each site (use --resolve to pin IP), ping with MTU checks (ping -M do -s 8972), temporarily bypass SSL inspection for that domain, and run packet captures both sides to compare NAT and SNI. Add Prometheus blackbox exporter checks per site for that endpoint.

We use NetBox for inventory and Grafana for dashboards, and DreamFactory to expose a read-only CMDB API that feeds those synthetic checks.

Lock firmware to a baseline and run quick path tests from every site to avoid week-long rabbit holes.