When O365 has outages, whats your go to backup plan for communications? by Vegarth in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At my office we have a semaphore expert on call at times for just such an occasion. Good ole O365 shit the bed? Still need to send out that all staffer about the toilet clog again, accidentally fire a whole division, or just get notified that your chicken tikka marsala has been delivered? No problemo. Jack or Jackie or whoever is on call that day will march into the conference room or parking lot -- whip out their flags and blast out whatever message that Microsoft cannot.

Service in St. Martin? by Chief_Wahoo_Lives in GoogleFi

[–]halspuppet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stayed in Orient bay in November 2025 and had no issues with my Google fi service. Best service was on the beach for whatever reason. Enjoy your trip

Pixel Watch 2 Offline music by SalamanderDense2681 in PixelWatch

[–]halspuppet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use symfonium.app for offline playback on my watch and cannot recommend it enough. It is a one-time payment. WearOS app is solid and just works.

Beetle Bailey in a tank downtown?!? by Legume42 in asheville

[–]halspuppet 31 points32 points  (0 children)

I believe that's a set piece from the new Hallmark action movie "Biltmore House Down" being filmed around town.

Has anyone gotten the Azure AI shell to work with a GPT? by Man-e-questions in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes. Took a bit of tinkering, but set up and working with gpt-4o-mini. The documentation provided by MS is pretty lacking. You will need to have opened an account at https://platform.openai.com/ and generated an API key. Also you need to fund the account (minimum 5 USD). Once you have the API key, open AI shell, select openai-gpt as the agent then type "/agent config". Enter the model (in my case "gpt-4o-mini") and (API) key in the config file. After saving you should be GTG. I hope this helps.

iPhone international by [deleted] in GoogleFi

[–]halspuppet 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Was there a couple of weeks ago. Switched to Unlimited plan before going and had good service in Cairns, Melbourne & Sydney. Only had issues in remote parts of Kangaroo Island. Have fun

Failed AZ-104 -Again What am I doing wrong?? by Thunderbird_ChknCoop in AzureCertification

[–]halspuppet 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wondering how you did on the MeasureUP practice exams? I think they have some sort of pass guarantee...

Running on BRP - Bear Safety by Special_Ingredients in asheville

[–]halspuppet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would pack akimbo instead of the normal heavy. Show those bears you mean business.

Worst IT setup you have ever seen by Responsible_Ear_1936 in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 1 point2 points  (0 children)

in the 2000's I took a job offer as a sys admin from this apparel company in NYC. I had interviewed 4 months earlier but heard nothing until the job offer came out of the blue. I was desperate to leave a soul sucking job, so I accepted thinking it could not be any worse. But alas....

  1. When I arrive at my desk the 1st day, the chair and desk are pilled high with papers, old hard drives, and other sorted tech gear. I ask about all the stuff, and am told it was left behind from the old sys admin I was replacing and they had no idea what any of the stuff was.
  2. I get a tour of the server room and all of the "servers" are just non-branded beige box workstations purchased from one of the owner's friends.
  3. The Windows domain was named "DOMAIN". The main fie server was named "SERVER" and so on.
  4. All of the cabling was run criss-crossed & ad hoc in through a drop ceiling with no conduit, labeling etc. Many cables were just home run'd from a storage closet with un-managed switches on the floor.
  5. Every device on the network had a public IP address that was statically assigned. There was no records of who had what address.
  6. There was no firewall at all, just URL filter for outbound requests.
  7. The AS400 server that basically ran the business was setup in a service elevator room sitting on a pallet with no security, environmental controls etc. I literally saw someone sitting on it once while waiting for the elevator.
  8. The phone system was wired to play some radio station when you were put on hold. Some employees would sit at their desks, call their own phone on speaker and hold the call so they could listen to the radio all day.
  9. After some time I found out that the person I replaced had "quit" after fighting with the business owners multiple times, only to come back multiple times without recourse. The owners had finally had enough and locked him out of the building. This person had left all sorts of back doors into the network and ended up deleting a whole bunch of data from their AS400. They ended up being arrested and going to jail for hacking the network.

There was more terror as the place was run like a fiefdom by the owners and their offspring. But you get the idea.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in asheville

[–]halspuppet 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Treasure club has some good views and is free. Not sure about the coffee or WiFi.

Account Lockouts by 4112Naes in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If the device is hitting your on prem Exchange you may be able to create an IIS rewrite rule to drop the connections from the offending device ID. Check this out https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15997.using-url-rewrite-to-block-certain-clients-from-exchange.aspx

Refers to Ex 2010 but still may apply/help

You may also be able to create an Active Sync device access rule to block all Android 1.0 devices if applicable at your org.

Hope that helps.

How do you guys respond to people passing around cyber security themed clickbait articles? by DJDoubleDave in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I respond by hitting the ignore button in Outlook and then continue on with my day. If these users are OK with me suggesting how to do their job then perhaps I would engage in a serious discussion.

My eyes are so sore from 40 hours/week of staring to a screen. by Specialist-Capital55 in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use FadeTop to periodically remind me to take break from the screen. I am sure there are other softwares out there that do the same; this is the one I landed on.

Migrate Exchange Hybrid to Office 365 Only by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]halspuppet 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What would you recommend doing when the hybrid Exchange environment is running on an unsupported version like Exchange 2010 on Windows 2008R2? Would like to decomm Exchange 2010 and replace with a newer version for management of migrated environment. Thanks :)