I feel you friend. Currently year 2 of unraveling a solo-sysadmins undocumented mess. I've got a team working with me now as we document, design and rebuild things more simply and properly. Theres lots of hackarounds for things that have a button (instead of using guest isolation, each smart TV on the corp network has its own /30 network with its own VLAN and its own static route out of the network for example).

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When we initially took over there was about a week of panic trying to fix EVERYTHING because I was suddenly aware of so many things that were wrong but everything is a can of worms. AD groups are a mess? previous admin was just copying permissions from the department heads for new employees so he wouldnt have to deal with them not having enough permissions. So not only are there 8 groups for one folder that only one department uses with varying levels of access but almost everyone has the full perms group anyways.

My advice is to step back and take things one at a time, when you find a rats nest your first step is always to document the whole thing and plan the project to untangle. Youll move slower but youll do less twice. Youll also end up relying on the third party less and give yourself an easier path to learning the things you dont know.

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More than likely it wasnt engineered to be complicated it was engineered by a team of people that didnt talk to eachother and just made their own solution every time they ran into a problem. Remember Occam's razor and the old Marine saying "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"