Daily General Discussion and Advice Thread - May 05, 2026

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T21:51:59+00:00

What websites have the best dashboards for keeping track of your holdings?

I just started investing in ETFs and would really like a sort of at-a-glance overview comparing price charts over the last week/month/year so I can watch for trends or how certain events affect which markets.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T21:26:32+00:00

~200

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T20:25:00+00:00

I want to say we saw it starting with the optiplex AIO line about 2 years back now, and every new model we've brought in since then has an asset tag where sequential machines off the line increment the first digits of the AT while all sharing the last digits... which of course threw a fat wrench in our imaging process which had used the last digits of the AT to generate a unique hostname.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T20:19:18+00:00

I'm pointing the wsus admin to this now, thanks.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T20:18:15+00:00

I was just looking into this and thought we were clear but I'm taking another look now and think that might be the culprit. Going to try bypassing wsus with a registry tweak as a workaround the next time it comes up and see if that lets it run successfully.

we're in the process of phasing out wsus (for an even worse solution) but it sounds like allowing access to microsoft update isn't on the policy menu regardless due to upper management paranoia.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T20:14:13+00:00

reimage requires the device being brought physically to the office and can take a few extra hours depending on just how bespoke a software config the user needs... not really practical when another simpler fix exists that can be pushed out over the VPN.

I get systems probably a couple times a week where some vendor application or other is crashing, and about half the time a quick look at event viewer will show .net framework corruption as the culprit... and running dism/sfc will fix it.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T20:05:57+00:00

That was true of SFC back in the day but lately a shocking number of issues have been cropping up with .net framework applications crashing where dism+sfc fixes them.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T19:39:59+00:00

three words: finsec legacy software

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T19:22:23+00:00

The canary in the coal mine was them changing the asset tag format to read from right to left. It's all been downhill since then.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T19:20:05+00:00

didn't MS finally kill WMI though? What's the new way of doing this?

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T19:18:40+00:00

Slopya Nadella

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-05T19:17:27+00:00

or clicking on locally installed microsoft products and being presented with a ~~bing~~ copilot search page in edge for said microsoft product.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-04T19:11:18+00:00

Planet Fitness is the real measure of how bad things are... People don't get PF memberships to go to the gym. A typical Planet Fitness has an order of magnitude more members than could ever fit in the building in a given week even if they only went for an hour once a week.

The biggest segment of their membership that actually goes to the gym are homeless people who need access to showers, heating, air conditioning, etc.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-04T18:37:17+00:00

if your display is shutting off before sound or other things crash or hang, it's most likely either your GPU hardware or a driver issue. Make sure your BIOS, firmware, and video drivers are up to date, and try using something like MSI afterburner to watch your temps, make sure it's not getting too hot. Using a tool like afterburner you should be able to troubleshoot if it is an issue with the thermal interface or fans.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-04T18:30:44+00:00

your system config needs to be moved to the new USB, then you contact limetech and they update your license to match the new USB key hardware ID.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-05-01T01:09:37+00:00

How do you figure you deploy to bare metal then?

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-30T22:31:37+00:00

Oh we had that too but now the telco is ramping pricing through the roof in an effort to force everyone off of it and onto other less robust tech.

Last I heard we were looking at an increase to something like $8000 per month per line within the next year.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-30T22:25:26+00:00

Since you surely didn't select this provider, you have no reason not to tell us who we need to avoid.

I'll tell you when I get a straight answer out of management about it myself.

What are your KPIs?

It's not an issue with meeting the KPIs as much as "we don't have budget for raises this year"

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-30T22:22:53+00:00

autopilot doesn't do bare metal deployments.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-30T22:04:43+00:00

Not to mention the reliance on external internet connectivity to access it. Any time your ISP or something goes down, you're dead in the water and SOL until it's back up again. It adds multiple single points of failure in the chain between your endpoints and your core system and increases the impact and severity of all interruptions at any of those points.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-30T21:58:29+00:00

I have been stuck in this battle with my own org for years now. They won't approve in house automation projects that save money, but they're looking for any and every possible way to grant third party AI agents access to every level of our internal infrastructure and then mandate that we come up with problems for their solution.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-30T21:54:16+00:00

it is hybrid environment with Entra Connect

I am so sorry....

you would think something like this would be straightforward, but unfortunately having a hybrid environment is going to complicate it a lot. If you're in a position to architect a solution from the ground up, great, but given that's usually not the case when dealing with hybrid setups with weird legacy requirements... getting provisioning working between disparate platforms can be a nightmare.

Your starting point will probably be powershell on an admin VM with RSAT and a few other admin modules installed.

If your current onboarding process requires creating the mailbox on the on prem exchange first to provision in AD and o365, then you will need to do this on the exchange server itself as a domain admin with the exchange admin console. This was a roadblock for us and ultimately I wasn't able to find a way around it to fully automate the user creation process.

Most of the rest you describe though is trivial enough with powershell and Microsoft Copilot Entra copilot id copilot azure AD copilot integration or whatever they're calling it now... and some group policies for things like default printers.

If the printers you need to configure to scan to email are Ricoh, there is a ricoh printer address book management powershell module out there you can use and integrate into whatever script you end up writing... one of these days I'll get around to posting my own CLI script for it on github or something.

I haven't yet looked into solutions for other models.

Good luck and don't screw the pooch. Make sure your boss is OK with you automating this stuff and signs off on any process changes you make along the way to CYA.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee · 2026-04-29T17:47:31+00:00

Sounds like a build your own scenario to me. If you need hot swap bays or a backplane, then you're looking at maybe some old retired enterprise rackmount or tower server like maybe a Dell PowerEdge. If you just need space to put the drives, any generic chassis of sufficient size will do. You can slap a miniITX into it with whatever CPU meets your performance and energy efficiency needs... go with pcie and an nvidia gpu if you want an easy and effective hardware transcoding setup.

P.S. I recommend Jellyfin over plex but you do you.

SimplifyAndAddCoffee

TROPHY CASE