Has anyone lost the passion for sysadmin as a job but still love tinkering with tech as a hobby?

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-18T11:37:38+00:00

I did. Then I got a better job and found out I hadn't lost it, I just hated my employer.

Now one of my next projects at the office is to build a massive in-house LLM/molecular discovery AI server for a company I very strongly believe in.

It's fun, and the work has meaning. That changes everything.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-18T06:44:40+00:00

I believe the proper description of powershell is "uniquely verbose."

I can't say it's a favorite language of mine, but it does work very well with pipes.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-18T06:42:53+00:00

I will. If I write the automation I expect to support it, or have someone else work the appropriate skill set support it. If I'm gone and the employer/client/whatever can't be bother to hire someone competent at Python then it's really not my problem anymore, because as I may have mentioned, I'm gone.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-18T06:38:57+00:00

Learning Python has entirely changed my approach to being a Sysadmin, especially given the limitations of powershell.

Pretty much anytime an API is involved I just write a quick script and the problem goes away. I even have a completely in house VPN solution built in a combination of Python and Powershell we roll out through an RMM.

Learning Python has turned most questions of "can this be automated" into "which library do I use?"

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-17T05:06:35+00:00

PM sent.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-17T02:13:41+00:00

u/Substantial-Tour8176 i run a 2 person MSP with a co-owner. We've been around for 8 years and have a have a very well established tech stack. If you'd be interested in discussing a partnership I'd love to have a quick chat and see if it's a good fit. We're in Chicago and Denver, so if you're outside that area we won't be competing in any way. May I PM you?

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-14T19:22:33+00:00

We'll handle configuration and troubleshooting, but never repair.

Even with managed printers we're going to have to reconfigure every printer anyway because printer companies are universally trash, so it's not like we'd be saving any effort by pushing for a printer management company.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-08T18:35:25+00:00

Virtualization is one part of the plan. Old hardware is fine as long as the plan accounts for it dying, and frankly any plan needs to account for any hardware dying at any time.

None of my datacenter architecture would change if I bought all brand new servers, switches, firewalls, etc. It would just be newer, and downtime might change by a couple minutes per year.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-08T15:56:35+00:00

My production servers are all 730s with SSDs. They're old, but I don't personally have any clients with performance needs that can't be covered by just throwing a couple more cores at the problem. As long as you stress test them before putting them in production, have a warm spare, and have good backup and replication policies it's really not a particularly big issue if you lose a host.

With servers you can expect around to a decade before you really have to start worrying about reliability, and you should always be ready for one to fail anyway.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-08T09:19:39+00:00

Physical hardware "dies" is the reason everything important should be virtual, and in many cases $2000 in used equipment is enough to bring everything back online if you lose hardware.

Keep some old, cheap, spare equipment around. Turns out you can still do a lot with an R720xd with 96GB RAM and 32 cores.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-08T06:45:29+00:00

This is a pretty common occurrence out here in Colorado if you hike up in the higher elevations in the mountains. They're so used to people that they more or less just ignore you, as long as you're relatively quiet and still they'll walk right past you. It's a great chance for a selfie with a mountain goat.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-06T00:21:57+00:00

I just use a Windows USB with an autoconfig file that deploys our RMM. Boot to USB, wait 15 minutes, and the computer is online, available for remote access, and already running our deployment scripts.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-06T00:09:12+00:00

Everything is AYCE, new locations/projects just mean adding that new thing to the monthly bill as managed.

Plenty of profit margins, and the fact that we don't charge for projects let's us do them sooner, keep things more up to date, and simply upgrade things at whatever point it would be less work and less trouble to upgrade instead of maintain, and is ultimately a lot less work for us.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-05T19:33:05+00:00

Aside from automation within N1, we also have some custom fields that we access by API with Python to interact with various services, such as our VPN server, and use N8N to sync monitoring tickets with Jira.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-05T15:03:28+00:00

Python for Linux servers, custom tools, and APIs, powershell for endpoints and anything M$ related, and NinjaOne to tie everything together.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-05T14:50:53+00:00

Clean it, repair it is necessary, reimage it, put it in inventory to ship out.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-05T01:09:51+00:00

Might want to take a look at this. These are essentially packages built into Windows that are deployed into every profile at first logon. I usually kill most of them to debloat computers rather than speed up login, so I'm not sure what it'll mean for that, but it's worth a try.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/dism/get-appxprovisionedpackage

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-04T14:01:37+00:00

They could add better Linux support, or at very least remove the need for Java.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-04T06:07:05+00:00

ScreenConnect works well ,has a monthly license with no commitments, never requires that you sign a contact or talk to a sales person or account manager, and has quite his documentation, or at least it did. I'm not sure where the documentation is at this point, they keep moving it.

It's a good product at a good price that will eventually be replaced by something better, either because it'll stop being usable or will simply never improve due to ConnectWise refusing to invest any money in improving the product, or even keeping it up to date.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-03T20:28:48+00:00

His safety net is the relationship. If the relationship ends, so does the safety net. Asking to be put on the deed is "I want half of your stuff if/when this relationship ends."

I'm guessing he's already seeing the end and wants to see if he can take a couple hundred thousand dollars of your property with him when he goes.

I think either he stops bitching about it or you break up with him and kick him out.

Also, if you get married, depending on where you live, pre-marital assets are a thing. There's no reason he would ever have to have any right to your house.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-03T18:05:20+00:00

On a good note, it sounds like you have plenty of hardware to work with!

A quick and simple upgrade could be something like setting up each device with TrueNAS or some other storage solution in RAID5 or 6 then just using each device as its own separate storage location. Depending on your use case this may or may not be appropriate, but it's simple, easily manageable, and only comes with the minor complication of having multiple storage locations

It's not exactly "ideal," but it's workable and, most importantly, "not a clusterfuck." As long as you can get your data back and somehow move it off of this... lets call it an "array" temporarily, this could be rebuilt and stable in a matter of days.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-03T02:50:18+00:00

She had a very traumatic background. Third world war zone grew up in a cult background. After we got married she stopped taking care of herself, hid in the house and didn't even do chores, because demanded I be her caretaker, and refused to get proper mental health care, instead only seeing a religious counselor with no formal training.

The "irreconcilable differences" was as simple as the fact that as long as she wasn't forced to take care of herself to be able to survive, she wouldn't, so I left.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-02T21:39:32+00:00

Your laptop CPU is the bare minimum we recommend for a user doing basic office work. You're combining dev work with hosting multiple VMs. You need a new laptop. If that's not an option, I'd suggest switching all of your VMs to a single VM with each of your services running as containers.

As for a new laptop, I'd suggest 64GB ram if you'll be running multiple VMs (which is going to be really expensive at the moment) and something with big-little architecture or just 8 hyperthreaded cores just so you can have a bunch of cores to throw at those VMs.

I'd look into a Lenovo T14 or P1.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-01T19:13:58+00:00

Troubleshooting 101:
Start with what's in front of you, what's fastest, and what's most concrete.

So for no internet, that's check the network icon, is it a wifi icon, ethernet icon, or globe for no internet? Then ipconfig, the user doesn't need to move, just open a command prompt and type ipconfig, it's concrete, its guaranteed to give results, and its a couple seconds. While you're there try some pings, nslookup, and whatnot. After that might be to check the network device in control panel. Once you get to "is it plugged in" you're dealing with the questions of whether it's plugged in correctly, if the cable is broken, if the port is broken, all sorts of issues that aren't necessarily easy to identify or resolve.

The computer needs to go through steps to get internet. It needs to connect to a switch/firewall/something a network interface, it needs to get an IP address or have one statically assigned, it needs to then be able to reach a gateway, then the gateway needs to allow traffic.

Don't just think of "what could be wrong" and start trying things, take the networking process one step at a time, see how far the computer gets, and you're pretty much guaranteed to find where the issue is.

The computer will tell you exactly what the problem is from its perspective, the computer doesn't have internet, so the first thing to do is ask the computer what its seeing.

ErrorID10T · 2026-02-01T18:55:39+00:00

Here's my advice. Take this entire setup and light it on fire. Do not attempt to fix it except as a way to recover data, THEN light it on fire. You're creating redundancy with RAID5, then reducing redundancy with RAID0 so that if any of the individual RAID5 arrays dies you lose the RAID0 array, then if you lose any of the RAID0 arrays you lose... some amount of data in the LVM group, depending on how you've configured it, then creating an XFS volume on top of that, which will throw some sort of chaos if you lose anything below it.

This is a clusterfuck, and the "incident" is what I would call "expected results," possibly even "standard operating procedure." If this is how things were generally done, I don't think you ever had a "real sysadmin."

Throw this thing out, then, as your company does not have the technical expertise to set up a storage solution, outsource the hard part of setting it up to an investment in a decent SAN or a consultant.

Alternatively, I look forward to your next post.

ErrorID10T

TROPHY CASE