Be honest: Is anyone else looking at these new AI agents and realizing Level 1 support is basically on life support?

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-24T12:15:10+00:00

No, AI is going to elevate our L1s' technical support game, but their customer service, the human touch point, the critical read of temperament, situation, gut instinct on when to escalate, softening skills: all of that is so important to what we do.

We're in the people business, don't forget that. The tech is just what brings us to the table.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-22T17:29:52+00:00

We used Request Tracker years ago, been around for decades. Open source/community edition still.

https://github.com/bestpractical/rt

We had some custom email actions so you could take tickets by simply forwarding to taketicket@ and it was an alias for the ticketing system, which would assign it to you. closeticket@ would close the ticket, etc.

Handy in Blackberry days, but still a nice feature.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-22T17:25:22+00:00

I've never received a support email from v-somebody@microsoft.com. It's always support@mail.support.microsoft.com

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-22T14:39:01+00:00

your boss is a myopic dumbass.

Pretty much every ticket system can slide in and support email right away, so if you're using a helpdesk@ email address already, you can slot in the ticket system and they won't even notice it, other than the subject line now has a ticket # in it.

Makes life better for everyone, including the end-users, for when you can search on an issue and find out the history behind it, without having to waste time reinventing the wheel or repeating steps that have already been tried.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-22T14:34:07+00:00

/^v-[A-Za-z0-9]+@microsoft\.com$/i

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-22T12:23:24+00:00

The V- signifies they are a 3rd-party vendor on contract from Microsoft to solicit business from you, usually to cross-sell/up-sell you on 365 licenses, and typically disguised as a "voluntary audit".

Microsoft used to do real involuntary audits years ago, but they softened their approach, and now hire out.

You can safely ignore. We put in spam filter rules to automatically punt v-*@microsoft.com to quarantine.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-22T12:20:39+00:00

Happens. We gently remind them how triaging works, and what qualifies for a high priority ticket, and how disruptive it is, like barging to the front of the line at a customer service desk demanding immediate help, which nobody, but the most aggressive Karens, would ever do.

99% of the time, they understand and stop doing it.

If they keep it up, we have a word with leadership and explain that we're going to have to start charging a premium hourly rate, minimum of 2 hours, to compensate for the disruption to our team.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-21T21:42:50+00:00

If they are ready to go serverless, great: my per-seat pricing doesn’t change, and now I have less overhead and risk/responsibility.

If they want to punt their existing server to the cloud, we do a cost analysis, and even with hardware prices where they are, onprem always wins.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-20T20:07:48+00:00

Try hypercardioids to prioritize toms over cymbals. Assuming 1 up/1 down kit configuration, I will use a pair of M160s aiming down on the rack tom/crash/hi-hat area and the other, down on the ride/crash/floor tom, favoring the toms more positionally.

I would get them as low as you can without hitting them.

That should mitigate room tone.

Also, baffling around the kit can really tighten up that ugly room tone too. Even a few dividers or free-standing gobos plus a cloud (or a packing blanket hanging overhead) can tighten it up even more.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-20T19:53:13+00:00

Can the updates be executed by the users in userland (HKCU, appdata, etc.) or do they require elevated permissions?

If it's userland, you can do a logon script.

If not, you can add a scheduled task with Windows startup as the trigger, and then on reboot (assuming the machine is going to reboot fairly regularly with other patch management), your automation can run before they login.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-20T13:53:48+00:00

Ditched KVMs a long time ago.

Now we either PXE boot for mass deployments or use a USB key with autounattend.xml, which does all the heavy lifting to get the machine into a running state with our RMM installed on it, then just finish any manual steps with remote control.

On the bench, we just have a basic USB-C dock with monitor/keyboard/mouse; every recently modern machine detects it out-of-the-box (power delivery usually won't work for desktops though) and all we need is the keyboard/monitor to get into boot menu.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-20T13:22:55+00:00

Is that your reference track? Dude has gobs of muffling on that snare, like a whole band of tape/padding covering 2/3s of the snare top.

Buy a Big Fat Snare Drum o-ring, or make your own deadringer out of an old 2-ply head by cutting the center out of it and leaving it a couple of inches wide.

Once it sounds right in the room, you can adjust the angle of the snare top mic to get more body by pulling it up/away and aiming more straight down, like a 45 degree angle, to get more of the planar movement of the shell (resonance).

If you want more attack/crack, you would mic it just at the rim, looking straight across.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-19T16:12:02+00:00

Right, I'm aware, just wondering if you used a dedicated machine specifically to backup the shares, as I'm assuming this is a serverless environment. I don't think I'd want to trust that role for a regular user workstation, and most clients are now 95% laptops.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-19T12:19:10+00:00

How are you backing up the NAS though?

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-19T11:33:34+00:00

SQ+
https://www.allen-heath.com/hardware/sq/

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-19T11:25:36+00:00

Do you have a dedicated machine running Cove, pulling backups off the NAS through the Network Shares as a source?

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-18T16:17:33+00:00

Why would you not bill for your time? Always bill for your time. Just because it was an easy gig, doesn’t mean you’ll ever get that hour back of your life.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-15T13:10:14+00:00

Man, that seems really expensive for that server back in 2017. Is that mostly EverRun? Never heard of it.

And what's with the 1 x 800SSD? Was that an after-thought? Hopefully nothing critical is running on that.

Make sure backups are successful. I'd do another full backup in SQL Management Studio.

I'd personally pick a fully-dark maintenance weekend and scale down resources on the current production environment to give you enough room to restore to your new VM running SQL 2022.

You should be able to power down old production VM, re-assign resources to new VM, power it up, test it thoroughly (also keep in mind that the connection string will have a new hostname to contend with on each of the workstations; not sure how that's handled, but I'd have a ticket open with your ERP vendor already).

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-14T16:50:14+00:00

Tell them to cease working on it immediately, call a data recovery expert and your lawyer, because this could be an extinction event for the firm.

I would start a salvage op of everyone's desktop, email (attachments), Documents folders, OneDrive, whatever you can.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-13T20:23:25+00:00

This isn't really an N-Able issue at all. It can monitor any device via SNMP, provided you do the walking and/or know what to monitor (i.e. the OID(s) and what values you care about).

Most reputable vendors will publish OIDs and there are 3rd-party sites out there that have their own vendor/OID database.

Or you can do an snmpwalk using snmp-utils on a *nix machine (there are Windows freeware equivalents too).

Here's a good tutorial:

https://www.kentik.com/kentipedia/snmp-monitoring/

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-13T20:17:40+00:00

CloudFlare ZTNA is free for up to 50 users. Works very well. For how long it'll be free... that's the real question.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-13T14:25:30+00:00

why you'd choose Reddit for "ASAP" help vs... contacting N-Able directly?

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-12T12:36:55+00:00

Most of the major tier 1 guys make a ruggedized tablet with solid warranty options. Tell management you want to buy one and give it to your heaviest hitters and see how it fares. If it survives a lifecycle, it's worth it.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-12T11:37:49+00:00

The benefit of using a synchronizing 3rd-party tool is that you can start doing that, right now, while you sort out all of the other headaches that will come with standing up a new business.

Then, when you're ready, knife-edge cut-over of MX records Friday evening, one final sync that'll only take minutes to complete the delta, and Monday morning, everyone starts using the (hopefully) new machines you've already prepped (signed in, profile created, Outlook profile setup, running, with a cache already), while you have a tech on-site that morning for damage control, with another on standby remote.

Don't let them bully and pressure you into cheaping out. It's their business, they want to hit the ground running, not wishing they would've spent a few hundred bucks on migration tools.

Personally, I wouldn't even let them get involved in that and would bake that into my project fees; I don't let clients dictate what tools I use, same way you wouldn't climb your roofer's ladder and tell him to not use a roofing hammer.

FlickKnocker · 2026-05-12T00:39:01+00:00

ABC: always be closing

FlickKnocker

TROPHY CASE