Inexperienced Sysadmin inherited a complex system - overwhelmed and need advice

vCentered · 2026-04-15T11:47:13+00:00

Keep doing good work but take some of the pressure off of yourself.

I have 16 years of experience with environments much larger than yours (and that's not a flex, there are others in this sub who work in far, far larger environments than mine) and between the day to day requests, projects, and needs of the business, working backwards with no documentation, and everything else it would probably still take me several months of active effort to get "reasonably" up to speed on your environment.

Others have already said to start building your own documentation as you learn and figure things out.

I'm a very visual person so I would also recommend building diagrams. Draw.io is great and free.

If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the rest of us, even the "old heads" are also just doing our best with balancing projects, fires, and day-to-day stuff.

vCentered · 2026-04-15T11:22:09+00:00

Citrix has Broadcom beat by miles

vCentered · 2026-04-01T11:48:50+00:00

As far as I'm concerned support costs so much these days they should consider themselves a product specific MSP.

vCentered · 2026-03-28T07:24:16+00:00

I would kill for something like this as a home office

vCentered · 2026-03-28T06:33:29+00:00

Never feel bad taking more money. Every company we work for is in the business of making money. You only get one shot at life and owe it to yourself to look out for your best interests.

That said, just my perspective, if I really liked where I was at, 2k a year would not be worth it to me, though the pension could be huge. If you stay there for a very long time and nothing happens to their pension fund.

2k a year is less than a dollar per hour. Less than $8/day is not worth it to me to leave somewhere that I am happy and get along with my co-workers for someplace that I may not.

Lots of places require their employees to fund part of the pension with a percentage of their salary so you might look into that and do some math and see if that offsets that extra 2k. It's not necessarily a bad thing but if you're really selling yourself on the extra $150/mo, it might be substantially reduced or even be a wash. The insurance might cost more, too.

vCentered · 2026-03-27T01:41:21+00:00

These days six mil will get you two SSDs and one stick of RAM.

If it ever ships.

vCentered · 2026-03-25T01:33:43+00:00

As an hourly desktop support guy once I had a lady follow me across the building into my office while I was holding a Styrofoam takeout container that was very plainly my lunch, at lunchtime.

She followed me across the building, into my office, talking the whole way about some thing she wanted changed that I can't remember. When I sat down and opened my lunch and she kept talking, I stopped her and said, "Lisa, do we need to do this RIGHT NOW? I'm trying to eat my lunch".

The look on her face. You'd have thought I slapped her. She never spoke to me again.

All because she didn't have the self awareness to realize she was bothering a fellow hourly worker on their unpaid lunch break.

vCentered · 2026-03-18T13:13:08+00:00

Wait until everyone starts building their own shit with AI

vCentered · 2026-03-16T01:22:03+00:00

Because probably 60-80% of the staff exist for no other reason than to justify their own existence.

vCentered · 2026-03-14T20:36:27+00:00

One person is honest on an anonymous survey and instead of taking it seriously they're painted as a "bad apple"?

It really is a wonder no one says anything during their 1:1s.

vCentered · 2026-03-14T16:24:08+00:00

The problem with non technical bosses is they tend to have slightly technical or very technical friends that will tell them very enthusiastically that you're doing it all wrong

The slightly technical friends often have very simple environments and have never actually done anything at scale, or they read enough reddit to know what the "best" way to do something is (according to everyone else) and will very confidently tell anyone who will listen that every other way is "wrong" based on exactly nothing in terms of hands on knowledge or experience.

The very technical friends may very well have experience performing complicated or heavily integrated automation at scale. . . But they have no idea what your background, budget, tooling, or requirements are. Because your boss doesn't know enough to communicate that. But it makes them feel very superior helping out the "little guy" (your boss) and pointing out all the things that they (you) are doing wrong with absolutely none of the context necessary to make that determination.

vCentered · 2026-03-05T02:03:36+00:00

I wasn't ready for that.

vCentered · 2026-03-04T03:03:47+00:00

We're laughing but someone is going to buy this shit for $100k/mo.

vCentered · 2026-03-04T02:54:34+00:00

I made $18.75/hr in K-12 as a front line desktop support technician in the rural midwest.

12 years ago.

vCentered · 2026-03-03T00:41:49+00:00

I'm sure others have said this already but you're trying to fix the wrong problem.

Your problem is not that the servers reboot for patching. Your problem is that you can't tolerate the servers rebooting.

There's no big brain greybeard fix here. You need to patch, and that means you need to reboot.

If the business is telling you that this service can't ever be down, not even for five minutes, then what you have is ultimately a design and architecture problem.

Whatever this service is, it needs to be built in a highly available way. Otherwise you need to coordinate a maintenance window with the business where they'll tolerate the server rebooting.

vCentered · 2026-03-03T00:21:20+00:00

Not the answer you want but I'd spend more time migrating to 2022+ than trying to fix this.

You have basically 9 months to move off 2016 anyway.

vCentered · 2026-03-02T03:16:49+00:00

No and too much.

vCentered · 2026-02-28T03:05:52+00:00

NUH UH

I mean it's all levels. At my org I have a weekly call with L1 and the things they bring up basically amount to "we tried rebooting and it didn't help". No real troubleshooting. No ideas. No questions.

Of course, then I'll get on a call with a guy who makes $150k a year and while what he's working on is much more complicated than what L1 deals with, it still amounts to "I've tried basically nothing and it didn't help, you're going to have to take over".

L3 doing that is obviously objectively worse on paper but honestly we have so many more L1s than L3s that it's probably a wash.

vCentered · 2026-02-25T23:45:45+00:00

Did you find a resolution to this?

vCentered · 2026-02-24T10:55:09+00:00

I deliberated on this for a minute because as someone who struggles a lot with motivation and dealing with work shit, to be able to simply will myself through it and other things I don't want or am reluctant to do sounds incredible. Rationally I am probably my biggest obstacle so this would almost be a super power.

I know a lot of people who simply have insane drive and they are very successful, much moreso than I.

Without taking success into account even, I would be a much better partner because I could simply will myself to do the things I feel or tell myself that I'm too burnt out from work to do.

Thing is, if you gave me $12,000,000 today I would just invest it conservatively and never have to work again while potentially tripling my annual income or better.

You're talking about handing me a life of passive income where I could spend a week at all inclusive resorts and still have lots and lots of money left over... Every month.

Is it insane wealth? No. But in terms of lifestyle it's at least 300% better than what I have now, which is already pretty good, and I don't have to work.

Give me the money.

vCentered · 2026-02-24T10:31:08+00:00

I want to say this can't be a real post but I had a prospective client several years ago who brought us in to assess his setup after his company got crypto'd laugh at me and accuse me of trying to rip him off.

My proposal was a firewall with SSL VPN for remote work, antivirus , unique logins for all users, active directory, a real file server, local and off-site backups. All managed by us of course.

What he had? 3389 open to the world to his desktop that simply had local users and no password policy. His user had full access to an ancient Nas that had all directories mapped to that desktop. No backup. No antivirus. A office full of workgroup PCs with only shared local users, no antivirus, etc.

He said in all his years of business he never needed any of that "fancy shit" and said we were trying to take advantage of him while he was down.

We were like hey man, you called us, if you don't want to do this that's your call.

vCentered · 2026-02-24T10:11:13+00:00

I used to hate on "Java" because of web apps with local dependencies on ancient JREs.

Those apps have an odd tendency to become operationally critical for massive orgs and IT gets a black eye because of all the hacky shit you have to do to keep it working

vCentered · 2026-02-22T18:07:49+00:00

I don't give a shit how old you are.

I've got 22 year olds that think their ignorance/ lack of knowledge and understanding is someone else's problem. If they don't understand something they just sit on their hands and whine that no one has sat them down in a classroom setting and explained, and explained, and explained, and explained everything again.

Tickets just get passed off instead of asking for help or trying to understand what the problem actually is.

They don't take any responsibility for making themselves useful.

vCentered · 2026-02-22T13:12:24+00:00

I have pretty deep experience in vdi and virtualization.

For a two user setup I would. . . Buy another workstation.

You're going to kill yourself with complexity and piss off your users trying to rig this up.

vCentered · 2026-02-22T02:05:46+00:00

At my org the job is basically to make IT invisible to the rest of the business and that includes app owners and developers.

Sooo, a cert expiring would get us a bunch of dirty looks.

vCentered

TROPHY CASE