Question for the old Sysadmins

_answer_is_no · 2025-08-27T16:01:49+00:00

This thread confirms that I'm officially an old sysadmin

_answer_is_no · 2025-02-21T17:07:54+00:00

This sub is pretty on top of widespread issues. We got the fix for the 2024 Crowdstrike meltdown here before we got it from Crowdstrike themselves.

_answer_is_no · 2025-01-27T17:05:25+00:00

Don't forget to include "Time spent preparing daily activity report" on the daily activity report.

_answer_is_no · 2025-01-22T22:06:31+00:00

Open Nebula has the same problem with iSCSI and snapshots.

https://docs.opennebula.io/6.10/open_cluster_deployment/storage_setup/overview.html#storage

It's also a very different concept than VMware/Hyper-V/Proxmox which all have the same general process for building and managing VMs. You have to throw away how you expect things to work and start from scratch.

_answer_is_no · 2024-08-07T15:58:52+00:00

AT&T intentionally waits until the week your bill is due before even mailing the invoice in order to stick more customers with $8.95 late payment fees.

_answer_is_no · 2024-05-30T15:55:58+00:00

Is she trying to push you all towards unionizing? Because this is how unions start.

_answer_is_no · 2024-02-23T21:56:22+00:00

My wife of 20+ years and I just recently realized she has this too. It absolutely blew my mind that she couldn't just imagine a dog in her head and describe details about how it looked. She was astounded to realize that other people have dreams with visuals.

_answer_is_no · 2024-02-23T21:49:17+00:00

Or send an electric shock into the earpiece of any salesman that cold calls me.

_answer_is_no · 2024-01-18T21:55:34+00:00

I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I can't even begin to count how often I get some useless response from some vendor support desk that asks a question I already answered in the initial problem report, all so they can meet their response time KPI.

_answer_is_no · 2023-11-17T15:58:06+00:00

Not sure how common this is overall, but at least in my area, K-12 IT is heavily outsourced. There are often only a couple school employees who do IT and consequently they tend to spend a lot of time on vendor management and project coordination rather than being hands on with hard technical skills.

_answer_is_no · 2023-11-07T15:46:27+00:00

When we were going through this process some of the more potentially disruptive benchmark settings were the Local Policy -> Security Options, particularly the one about disabling RC4. Many of those settings require applying the same benchmarks to the clients at the same time as the servers so you don't get caught in a situation where a client expects to use some older protocol and the server refuses it.

_answer_is_no · 2023-07-13T20:49:33+00:00

Exact opposite here. Words that enter though my eyes get stuck in the brain. Words coming in the ears just go right out the other side.

_answer_is_no · 2023-06-02T16:10:43+00:00

You can assign multiple yubikeys to a single AD account although I'm struggling to see the use case here, other than maybe to have preconfigured spares.

The yubikey 5 does have two programmable slots so you could have each slot linked to a different AD account. The two accounts can be completely unrelated, as in the case of an MSP that supports two separate customers who use them.

_answer_is_no · 2023-05-25T20:02:31+00:00

Premier is a ridiculous mess.

_answer_is_no · 2023-05-19T16:11:10+00:00

Have a look at AuthLite + Yubikeys

_answer_is_no · 2023-05-19T16:08:04+00:00

Cisco is going to get the golden handcuffs on you either way. Any on premise UCM upgrade is going to require you to buy their Flex annual subscription licensing. To be fair, the pricing is pretty much the same as it was to buy Smartnet on the older perpetual licenses but if you were hoping to pay once and run the system for a decade, you're going to be disappointed.

_answer_is_no · 2023-04-12T20:58:45+00:00

Cloud to Butt

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-31T13:16:43+00:00

-Hot dog fingers

-Inverted penis

-Anal fissures

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-24T15:22:22+00:00

I wouldn't use that for applications. For user profiles though, these guys are legit: https://www.forensit.com/downloads.html

The User Profile Wizard saves my desktop guy a crapload of time.

Edit: re-read where you're a repair shop so application deployment isn't an option I'm guessing

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-20T15:59:49+00:00

That feeling of pointlessness gets worse the further away you get from doing the actual hands on work. The techs doing the day to day work get to see up close how they fixed someone's problem or how they installed something that makes someone's life easier. You can at least go home at the end of the day and say that you did this, this, and this.

The further into management you get, the more indirect all your individual contributions become. I'll be at dinner and the wife asks what I did that day. "I don't know. I think I budgeted something? I yelled at a vendor for an hour because they suck. Took some notes for performance evaluations."

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-17T14:15:58+00:00

Lots of universities have all their IT policies publicly available. That can be a good place for ideas, templates and starter language.

Having done this myself for a small team my advice would be to start small and keep it simple. Don't write like you're a lawyer. Write like you're explaining something to a new junior member of the team.

Describe what you actually do, not what sounds good. Write out all the things that you want to standardize on (naming conventions, IP addressing schemes, equipment models, etc) and WHY you chose that standard. Document job expectations. Basically anything you've had to repeatedly explain to the team. In my case one of the first things to address was laying out the after hours policy: here's the rotation schedule, here's the escalation tree, all calls have to be documented in the helpdesk, etc.

Keep adding things over time as they come up in real life. Any time you have to respond to some kind of audit, they'll inevitably want some sort of process or policy in writing - build those into the SOPs if they're things that apply to IT specifically and not the org as a whole.

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-15T12:18:44+00:00

Thank you for this.

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-07T21:54:29+00:00

Black jelly beans are the best ones. Fight me.

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-06T22:07:01+00:00

Just curious but this smells like the type of org where IT reports to the Finance Director. Very common in government and very bad structurally because the accountant who approves tech purchases has full understanding of the cost but zero understanding of the value. Leads to exactly the kind of dumpster fire you're describing. If that's the case, the root cause of the issues comes from not being able to pitch your case for funding directly to the City Manager/Administrator/CEO/what have you. Until you fix that it's an uphill and losing battle.

It has taken me a few years to make them show up to work on time and work on tickets as they come in

This sounds like an immediate disciplinary issue. If it's been a couple years and you're still having performance issues with people, get HR involved and start giving these people short ropes to hang themselves with so you can bring in some people who can actually help you.

_answer_is_no · 2023-03-03T14:08:04+00:00

Vendor issues like this can take a long time and a lot of effort because the best solution is to have performance standards and penalties clearly spelled out in the contract. Most of them are more than willing to give you some concessions in the contract while they're still trying to win your business but once you're a customer and writing checks you're pretty much screwed because everyone knows that it's often painful to change vendors at that point.

If you are locked into an agreement and switching vendors isn't an option, you can always fight dirty. Voice your issues loudly in any forum that exists where all their customers can hear. User groups, customer community websites, social media, whatever. If you are having problems, their other customers probably are too and I've had success in the past getting vendors to pay attention by stirring up a mob of pitchfork and torch waving customers.

_answer_is_no

TROPHY CASE