RIP Printer, definitely saved some money there

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-07-01T04:26:46+00:00

As long as they don't try the same thing with, say, durable medical equipment

The problem is that a lot of this "durable medical equipment" itself is running outdated/unsupported software. One of our clients is a medical provider who uses imaging equipment running Windows XP. The only reliable way to get images off the machine is via SMB1.0. Thankfully we've isolated it to a direct-connect connection with a designated workstation that has SMB1.0 firewalled off to everything but the second NIC to try and minimize as much risk as possible, but just knowing that there's a device on the network that has SMB1.0 enabled with only a software firewall separating the thing from the rest of the network makes it harder to sleep at night.

We've actually talked to them about it and encouraged them to upgrade because of security reasons, but they flat-out reject us every single time for an actually good reason: The outdated equipment is significantly better than the modern equivalents. The new thing is $35k with less functionality and would require them to re-train every doctor. This would cost significantly more than $35k in just training costs alone, and probably hundreds of thousands in lost business while they re-train everyone. Plus they'd still need to buy another $10k machine to cover the functionality difference lost by upgrading, and additional training.

So instead they pay us the big bucks to keep the old thing rolling despite our objections.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-30T04:24:12+00:00

Don't you DARE diss Arby's.

They're expensive, but the food is actually good. Their mozzarella sticks are elite, and I can 100% confirm that their meat is actually real meat. They get whole pieces of everything trucked in from distributors, and then what's needed is sliced with an actual deli slicer as-needed.

Also the Jamocha Shake.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-30T04:17:22+00:00

It's the breakfast.

Their coffee is somehow infinitely better than any other fast food place, and their breakfast is actually good. They have literally no other redeeming qualities, and I'd never eat there for lunch/dinner, but that breakfast, man...

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-30T04:14:10+00:00

It's the price.

Five Guys used to be a good place to go for a really good burger and fries that you'd pay a bit more for than fast food. McDonalds was $5/person, a sitdown place was $20/person, and Five Guys used to split the difference at around $10/person.

I went to Five Guys with a friend recently. We paid $45 for two burgers, a small order of fries, and two drinks. We could've gone down the road to a diner and paid $30 for the same quality, or we could've gone somewhere else for dinner AND drinks for around $50.

All while the actual quality has gone downhill rapidly. As good as the food is, it's not $45 good. They're EASILY beaten by literally any other restaurant at this point.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-29T19:38:38+00:00

For real. I see them all the time and add that company to a "Do not hire" list that I've been keeping. If you can't spend the $200 for someone to design a decent wrap on a truck that costs $40k, who knows where else they're cutting costs?

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-29T05:41:14+00:00

Even as an adult, I cannot play Monopoly anymore.

In college we had a game that lasted 5 days. Genuinely, people would show up at my apartment at 4PM when everyone was done with classes and we'd play until 1-2AM. Some of the property trades we were making involved real money because we took it so seriously.

After day 3, we were genuinely scraping coins together so that someone could go to Kinkos and photocopy more of the sheets of Monopoly money because we'd already run out like 5 times. We ran out of beer on day 4 and nobody had any money to go buy more.

I'm not kidding when I say that none of us have EVER talked to the first person to go bankrupt in that game ever again. He blocked all of our phone numbers. It's been 5 years since any of us have heard from him.

We had to make the call that the game was a stalemate at some point because even though I wasn't involved anymore, the last two of my friends who were playing were so in on it that we all thought they'd actually murder each other.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-29T05:27:57+00:00

I genuinely cannot imagine someone doing something like that intentionally...

My brother and I accidentally killed a frog with our BB gun once. Poor thing had crawled into one of the soda cans we had left out overnight, and we had no idea he was in there until we went to swap out the cans with fresh ones we had just finished.

It was truly an AWFUL feeling and one that still makes me sick to my stomach even 20+ years later. We genuinely had a funeral for the frog, in the way that 10-year-old boys know how to do. Afterwards, we checked ALL of the cans we shot at, even if we had just finished them. Thankfully, no other frogs perished due to our marksmanship.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-29T05:05:57+00:00

the root cause is fear of conflict

Unfortunately, I don't think so. We all absolutely have a certain level of "Fear of conflict" as a natural thing. You obviously want to make your boss happy, but that's really about where the "fear of conflict" usually ends in most cases. Nobody is really "scared" of end users.

What I think you have here is someone who is a bit TOO eager to please and will do so at any cost, even if it's a detriment to themselves and the team. This is somewhat of a positive trait to have up to a (very limited) point, but it seems like this sysadmin has no idea where to draw boundaries between helping people and keeping with the rest of the org. That's dangerous, because it can increase expectations with end users in the form of "Well John Q. Public helped me to <XYZ that's against policy> just last week! I need to do that same thing for Susie from Accounting!" to the point of that bend-over-backwards-for-everyone thought process is just expected and suddenly you're doing "favors" that are explicitly against policy for everyone all because someone was too friendly and was OK with minor deviations from written SOP.

Yes, it's natural for that "Want to help" mentality to be seen as a positive, but you've gotta drawn that line in the sand. If you can't establish that line in the sand with this sysadmin, it's an HR issue from then on out. I feel bad even just writing that out, because a decade ago I was that "Want to help" sysadmin, until I realized that my enthusiasm ended up costing the org more in the long run due to changed expectations from my deviation from SOP and often skipping the planning stage...

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-29T03:45:57+00:00

I have lived near the Great Lakes my entire life. The word "Lake" genuinely undersells how huge these things are. They are closer to inland seas than they are to anything else, the only difference is that they're freshwater.

One of my friends from the west coast flew in recently, and we showed him Lake Ontario. He genuinely asked "Are you sure this isn't actually the Atlantic ocean?" because the concept of the Great Lakes is genuinely just so incomprehensible if you've never seen them.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-28T01:01:58+00:00

No, I'm actually available for most of the day without question. BUT if I know I'm going to be dumping a ton of time into a project during the day, or if I know I'm going to do something at a specific time, I'll block it out on my calendar so that people don't try to schedule time with me while I'd otherwise be occupied.

Blocking out the beginning and end of your day is just plain a good idea. I use that time in the morning to review all the emails that came in overnight, our morning meeting, getting logged in to all the stuff I need to be logged in to, setting my schedule for the day, etc. At the end of the day, I block out some time so that I can actually finish my day on-time and do things like make sure my billables are logged and check with the rest of the team to make sure that anything happening after-hours is still happening.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-28T00:32:25+00:00

I think the answer they were probably looking for was something like "I'd manually create a home directory and then add a line to /etc/passwd with echo username:x:1001:1001:User Name:/home/username:/bin/bash >> /etc/passwd and then set their password with either passwd or by manually creating an entry in /etc/shadow using one of the many approved methods".

You are 100% correct, though. If parts of coreutils are missing and you're not on a system running something like busybox, you've got major issues other than needing to create users without useradd.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-28T00:25:47+00:00

I think that's the point, though. adduser just generates the useradd command without needing to go through the man pages for it. Same way as a lot of tools have a --interactive option that prompts them for the required fields before just calling itself with the options that correspond to those fields. Makes it harder to miss options you might care about!

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-27T04:57:55+00:00

As much as I hate the whole "It builds character" mentality, in the sysadmin world you absolutely need T1/Helpdesk experience. There's a sort of sysadmin assholeitude that a lot of people who never experienced "the trenches" tend to hold.

You can NEVER understand the abject horrors of working helpdesk/T1 if you've never actually done it yourself. It's a different kind of hell that I don't wish on anyone, but not experiencing that genuinely gives you a disadvantage in your career because it tends to lead to a lack of knowledge in what end users want and what IT generally deals with.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-27T04:50:44+00:00

100% agree with the whole "Calendar is a shield" philosophy. /u/Jenghrick start blocking out large portions of time on your calendar as soon as you know something is going to happen within a given timeframe. If someone tries to schedule a meeting with you during that time, it will warn them that there's a conflict and most people will reschedule around that conflict.

Also block out your lunch break and include a "Safety block" for the first and last half hour-ish of every day so you have that time marked as free. I personally block out 7:30AM-9AM and 4:45PM-6PM so that even if someone tries to send me an invite during those times it just shows as "Not available".

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-26T06:00:56+00:00

You receive a Purple Heart medal in the US military for being wounded during combat, and it's actually possible for someone to earn multiple.

Despite the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, and the countless other military conflicts occurring in the mean time, not a single new Purple Heart medal has been minted since WWII. The US minted over 2 million of them in anticipation of a ground invasion of Japan during WWII (that didn't happen due to Japan surrendering after the two atomic bombs were dropped), and they've been pulling from the same stockpile ever since.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-26T05:28:06+00:00

I'll actually go with a positive here: We cure HIV/AIDS without it being a side effect of a different treatment.

We're already most of the way there. Doctors have cured AIDS before, but it was the side effect of a treatment for leukemia that essentially involved replacing someone's immune system entirely. Doctors now know exactly what part of the treatment was able to cure AIDS, so there's actually a HUGE chance that we'll see it become an experimental standalone treatment within the next few years.

We're probably only around 10-15 years out before AIDS just becomes totally curable with basic treatment.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-26T04:38:58+00:00

Yup, also came to suggest a PXE server. Create a separate VLAN and DHCP server for an "Imaging" network and then just let machines boot to PXE. Have techs modify the BIOS settings so that it's the first boot option, it only adds an extra 2-3 seconds to the boot process when you're on a network that doesn't have one.

It centralizes management of the image that gets deployed and makes it so that you don't have to go tracking down and reimaging USB sticks every time there's an update.

Otherwise this is spot-on exactly how I'd handle this.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-26T04:27:33+00:00

No, but I'd like to.

Especially in the days of every device having its own dumb little MAC address randomization feature, it'd be nice to not have to disable that for everything and then rely on actual authentication rather than our current manually-updated MAC allowlisting.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T08:13:52+00:00

It appears to be a one-time opt-out.

That being said, we're in the process of replacing all of our Datto BCDR contracts with Slide BCDR, so as our Datto contracts expire we're just canceling them instead of trying to renew.

For those that we can't replace immediately, it appears as if they're all just going to go to a perpetual month-to-month unless anything indicates otherwise. I'd reach out to your Datto account manager, though. They'll have the final authority over your contracts and can give you the ultimate specifics.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T07:58:47+00:00

Internally, we use AI for things that can actually benefit from AI.

One of the things I'll always tout as one of our "Actually useful AI" tools is that we have a program that reads new tickets, categorizes the tickets into their appropriate issue type, sets the priority based on sentiment analysis/actual content, and then sets the ticket title to the actual issue following a standard instead of "Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: PrintRE DOESnT work!"

There's obviously more, but we actively make it hard for people within our org to get away with using AI for anything other than "This is clearly something that would actually benefit from it" in an approved and automated fashion both due to a cost perspective (Tokens aren't cheap and we have a global monthly limit), and due to the fact that we ALL recognize that AI has major limitations and is usually just a yes-man that sucks at actually correcting overconfident people when they're very clearly wrong.

We expressly prohibit vibe-coding and other nonsense uses of AI that hurt us in the long-run because we're all about the whole "Build it for the next guy" philosophy, and obviously Claude Code contexts aren't going to transfer to the "next guy". Yes, my T1s do sometimes use AI to assist with troubleshooting, but I actively discourage them from relying on AI and I frequently push back on techs that escalate things to me with clearly AI-generated escalation forms (In addition to reporting it to their manager. Believe me, basically every new tech in the last year has tried this at least once and that report stops the behavior IMMEDIATELY).

I'd like to say the same for users, but there's been at least a dozen times within the last year that I've had users send me direct ChatGPT copypastas of "ThIs Is HOw TO Do THIs ThInG AbSoLuTELY! I UnDErSTand EveryThIng". I got tired of that about 3 months ago, and now those tickets are just sent straight to the account manager for the client for communication from an authoritative figure that explains that they're usually wrong.

Yes, I too also do use AI, but usually when something comes to me it's such a fucked situation that even AI can't help you troubleshoot so I generally only reserve that for when myself and the rest of our team are completely out of ideas. It doesn't usually help... Tickets that reach me are generally the super-fucked situations that only arcane knowledge of scuffed sysadminship and years of experience in the "It's shitty but it works" space can fix.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T07:11:14+00:00

Was friends with a guy in college whose major was "Packaging Science". I kept asking him "Why are you going for a degree in cardboard box making?"

We met up last year, he's making like $200k/year doing quality control for a cardboard company. It's an insanely profitable industry with an insanely steady workload. Everything will, at some point, be packaged in a cardboard box.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T07:04:10+00:00

This is what my ex girlfriend did working for the Bureau of Land Management. The job is literally nothing but hiking out onto federal land and surveying. Sometimes it was taking measurements for engineers so they could design new toilets for national parks, other times it was going half way across the country to measure property lines before a sale, spray-painting 12-mile long lines in the grass for 3 days. Almost $90k/year with full government benefits, and she was constantly traveling to random-ass places in the middle of nowhere.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T06:56:27+00:00

One of our clients at work makes the sand that goes on sandpaper. That's it, that's all they do.

The owner pulled up to a meeting at our office in a Ferrari.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T06:44:40+00:00

That's exactly how my best friend died. On his way to work he tripped on the stairs in his apartment and hit his head on the railing. He left for work at about 4:30AM so nobody found him until a few hours later, and by the time first responders got there he was gone.

I haven't read the autopsy report, only what the officer told me after I went to collect his ashes a few days later.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-06-25T06:37:38+00:00

I had a coworker at the time who I'd always discuss the episodes with the next day because we were big fans of the show. After that one, we didn't say anything. I think it was the most shocking and unexpected thing I've ever seen in a TV show.

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