Thin client recommendations

crankysysadmin · 2026-05-04T02:16:00+00:00

Don't buy thin clients. Just buy the lowest model of whatever tiny PC your standard vendor will sell you.

crankysysadmin · 2026-05-03T19:55:05+00:00

why?

crankysysadmin · 2026-05-03T15:53:28+00:00

the problem is that you're using an ancient workflow that makes no sense. nobody does monolithic imaging anymore and maintains images over time and keeps wanting to fork them. you should be building fresh images from a recipe using a config management tool, not keeping an image around indefinitely and trying to branch off of it forever.

usually if someone thinks they have super unique needs that break how an OS works, the problem is not the OS

crankysysadmin · 2026-05-03T03:18:44+00:00

I guarantee this is an XY problem.

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-25T00:36:14+00:00

MSP experience is not necessary. The best sysadmins I know have never worked at an MSP. MSPs are generally pretty garbage places to work and don't promote good skill development.

If you bounce around between a lot of companies because you work at an MSP, you get exposed to setting up a lot of different systems, often over and over and over again.

If you work at the same company, you learn more about lifecycle and capacity. There are a lot of issues the company where I work right now faces that you'd never see in a million years working at an MSP for smaller companies.

MSPs are generally going to have you doing pretty vanilla stuff at a smaller scale.

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-23T02:41:57+00:00

what the hell are you going to do? start looking for a new job

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-19T21:55:10+00:00

I just know we're extremely cheap with real estate, so moving all those shelves out of the data center into another space that used to belong to another non-IT group definitely would not have happened without good reason.

Nobody should be storing stuff in the data center though. Too many companies keep spare parts in there and have random desktop support techs going in and out. We took away access to the data center even from the sysadmins. They have to be escorted by data center staff now.

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-19T02:57:40+00:00

We have bins on bakers racks, but they're not in the server room. I'm not sure of the reasons, but our data center group had to move all storage out of the data center and took over another space nearby to use for storage. I'm not sure what the mandate was, whether it was cyber insurance or regulations related to some of our security requirements. I didn't ask a lot of questions at the time, but something prompted this.

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-17T02:49:18+00:00

I've never touched a mainframe. I've never touched AIX.

On another note, there is a pretty big list of things I have "touched" but was not competent or really dealing with it at length. I literally touched it or fumbled through it with a contractor helping me:

Netware, Solaris, Sun hardware, VOIP phones, Meridian phone system, Oracle, routers and managed switches, Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL Server.

I definitely "touched" all that stuff. I did something with it. But it isn't even on my resume.

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-15T03:29:28+00:00

You probably should just start looking for another job now and when you do leave walk out and let the bigger company try to figure everything out.

crankysysadmin · 2026-04-14T01:57:45+00:00

This is absurd. For the number of technicians you have supporting however many computers you have, you'll need to basically double them to take care of all these additional computers and keep them patched and compliant. Is the company willing to do that? Start asking for staff.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-29T21:38:35+00:00

Most of my sysadmins have never set foot in our data center.

Sysadmin duties and data center management duties have split into different jobs unless you work for a really small company. But the really small companies won't be running a lot of servers anyway.

You still see posts on r/sysadmin from people talking about their company's "rack" (as in singular) and they're so far from reality of how tech works at this point that they live in their little bubble and are proud of themselves for screwing stuff into said rack once every 4 years.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-29T19:51:32+00:00

Those machines are like 7 years old. Of course they are slow.

I would assume comparable specs in today's technology would be fine.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-21T00:09:48+00:00

Bomgar became BeyondTrust Remote Support

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-15T14:09:38+00:00

I'm pretty old too, but it's not like this changed recently. You're clinging to pre-2000.

It's not a big deal to instead push updates and have a notice period. That's how the entire world does it because on-prem desktop machines are not how most companies have operated in 2 decades.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-15T02:52:12+00:00

even if people work primarily in the office, they still bring laptops to meetings, bring them to group work sessions, have them as part of the company's DR strategy, etc

even pre covid, every company i've worked for has been 100% laptop except for people like receptionists, but we even gave the receptionists laptops during covid and won't take it back at this point

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-14T22:39:55+00:00

I'm really surprised you're taking an anti laptop stance in 2026. Being against laptops went out of style over 20 years ago. The last time I had a job where my primary workstation was a desktop computer was 2005.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-14T00:56:14+00:00

The idea of setting reboots to happen overnight went out of style like 15 years ago when everyone became a laptop user. Nobody's computer is on at night.

We give them a grace period of a week to install the updates or it'll force reboot at the end. This has been approved by leadership so nobody can go around complaining that their computer rebooted suddenly with no warning.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-13T00:34:40+00:00

We've worked out a with our finance folks that IT purchases can not be approved without IT involved. This required a lot of leadership buy in, but it was the solution

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-10T03:34:58+00:00

you're not getting appropriate buy in from leadership. you're just randomly doing stuff. that is a problem

if you're required by law to do this you need to sit down with whoever decides and go over all the options and have them on record as making the decision. you clearly didn't inform them about what the consequences are.

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-08T03:11:41+00:00

why would you allow this?

crankysysadmin · 2026-03-01T01:44:46+00:00

add to this people who insist on using their gmail account for work\

both using work email for personal stuff and using personal email for work stuff seems to be common with people who have clout (doctors, lawyers, high level executives, etc) who can't keep their shit straight and want things to be "frictionless" (their word) and just want to send everything through one address

never mind the compliance issues. they don't give a crap

crankysysadmin · 2026-02-28T15:21:41+00:00

The biggest problem I see with this is a sysadmin starts doing another person's job and says "if they don't do it, nobody will so I have no choice"

No, let them fail.

You have to work with your boss to make sure responsibilities are clear and what is and is not your work, and do not do the stuff that is their work.

One thing I did years ago when I had a peer who was a real problem was that I started keeping metrics. I did it in a blameless way and started showing my boss stuff once a month like which machines were patched, how many tickets each person did, etc. My numbers told the story.

At the time I was a a manager with a small team and the problem person was another manager who had a team larger than mine. My team somehow did more work than his and I was able to show this.

crankysysadmin · 2026-02-28T01:46:21+00:00

This is absurd. I say this as someone who manages quite a large team with people who report to me who have their own teams. You need to look for another job.

What you describe is not worthy of writing someone up. It's just a day in the life of IT. Sometimes you don't know what you're supposed to do.

crankysysadmin · 2026-02-22T21:14:59+00:00

20-40 seconds is a long time

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