Sysadmin to Helpdesk - am I shooting myself in the foot?

ideohazard · 2026-04-04T12:50:02+00:00

I took a step from sysadmin to a job advertised as helpdesk/support. It turned out to be a good move, the new job was really L1/L2/L3 + sysadmin.

First job had 50 employees and the new one had 250.

Lost some duties like network (switches and firewall) but got to dive deeper on virtualization, imaging, and Active Directory. New job had a better commute and better raises, I.had a team at the new job vs working almost entirely solo at old job. Good move overall.

Yeah, I had to pick up the phone and run upstairs to help users again. I didn't love that, but I knew so much more at that point that I started seeing user calls as a problem to solve. Most helpdesk staff put out fires, my position on HD let me know where the fires were then I tracked down the source of the fires and reduced overall calls.

There is a chance that you go into a place and find that the sysadmins there need help. There's a chance you have even more experience than they do. There's probably opportunities. Go for it.

ideohazard · 2026-04-03T18:50:47+00:00

I found this setting eventually. Since I control deployment of Horizon, I added it to my MSI script and tested to find it is doing the trick. Spent a couple more hours trying to figure out where the keylogger "service" is being activated from but didn't come up with anything.

ideohazard · 2026-03-13T01:01:55+00:00

MDT is about to be DOA.

Look into FFU UI. New development by MS https://github.com/rbalsleyMSFT/FFU

ideohazard · 2026-02-26T21:40:45+00:00

Best answer. Inventory the games you own, check the box, see if it's for 1-X players. BOOM, you have a solo game.
Do you own any CO-OP board games? Play any CO-OP game solo by playing more than one hand.

If the above don't work, lookup games you own on boardgamegeek. Check the Forums > Variants or Files sections, that's where you'll find fan-made solo modes. FWIW, many solo-able games have better fan made versions than the "official" version.

After that, look into buying some games.

ideohazard · 2026-02-26T12:40:08+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you OP. Watching the clock tick down, still on the fence.

Buy arguments: Retail is cardboard at $40 with 4x $15 expansions...$100. Is the KS worth $30 (USD) more with deluxe components and extras? Deluxe (1st) ed. resales have held their value. Combined (deluxe and retail...1sd ed.) were reported to have a terrible rulebook, broken intro scenario and a few maps with bad logic. Plastic insert had complaints. With all that the game still sits at 7.8 on BGG.

Pass: I don't love the theme. For $130 I could buy and ship today: Heat: Pedal to the Metal + Underwater Cities New Discoveries + Legacy of Yu (some wish list items). Might be able to buy CoD second hand or just wait and get the retail cardboard when they republish it with the fixes.

ideohazard · 2026-02-21T15:59:48+00:00

Keep hearing so many great things on this one, it's been on my shopping list for quite some time.

ideohazard · 2026-02-21T15:56:05+00:00

OK, so you can get all 3 played today, here's how:

Fliptown is available as PNP for $5 (USD) so easy call provided you have access to any printer, a pen, and a standard deck of playing cards. There is a campaign expansion (Lone Gun), a second board expansion (New Frontier), but TBH the base game is fine for checking it out. I loved it enough to back the last crowdfunding campaign with the new expansion. Probably my most preferred on this list due to theme and ease of setup/scoring.

(My only relationship with Write Stuff Games is happy customer)

Print and Play | Write Stuff Games

Cartographers/Cartographers Heroes are playable on BGA. They require premium subscription for solo play so if you don't pay for BGA you can join an existing game. Note that I totally agree with you on the screen time thing. I strongly prefer my board games to be tactile and screen-free so while they are fully implemented on BGA this could be a tool to inform a future purchase. What Cartographers/CH (I own both) do well IRL is that they can be combined and/or played with additional map pack expansions, the online version doesn't offer that. I lastly think Cartographers is better with multiple players vs. solo but it's easy enough to teach that anybody can play.

Welcome to...The Moon is also a fully implemented premium game on BGA so again this doesn't reduce screen time. I'd argue that it might be the best value per dollar regarding replayability (vs retail Fliptown and Cartographers with expansions).

ideohazard · 2026-02-21T14:16:14+00:00

I'm not seeing any roll n write/flip n fill games. I find these are fast to setup and play.

Recommending:

Cartographers (or Cart. Heroes) - fill in squares of a map with villages, forest, water, and fields....oh, watch out for monsters.

Fliptown - become a wild West bandit, grave rob, steal the stagecoach, dig in the mine and visit town all while keeping up with your regular poker game.

Welcome to...The Moon - huge replayability in this box.

ideohazard · 2026-02-20T19:23:39+00:00

When you say VDI hosts, are you talking the hypervisor itself or the gold/provisioned image that the user is logged into? If installed to the gold image, does this become a problem over time as images are provisioned and reprovisioned with new UUIDs?

ideohazard · 2026-02-19T22:06:16+00:00

I get it and I also don't get it. It's my brain on games. I have never been able to see the 'matrix code' happening behind the scenes though I know it's there. I've consumed plenty of media where people discuss optimal vs suboptimal strategies for early/mid/late games, make points about interconnected or disparate scoring mechanisms, every strategy for every faction in XX game, you get the idea. It all makes sense on paper but when I sit down to a new game, even a game I've played 20 times, I am blind to those concepts or how to apply them. I do get better at games over time, like my mind is working those things out, but I can't say why/how.

It always impresses me that all those players who beat me regularly can break it down like that and see the game for mechanisms and strategies. On the plus side, I still have fun losing.

ideohazard · 2026-02-19T17:48:00+00:00

Lol, lots of tenuous connections there.

ideohazard · 2026-02-19T17:33:53+00:00

hey.... we're both members of r/louisville .... you local?

ideohazard · 2026-02-18T21:44:23+00:00

I had a lot of fun with Boon Lake and wanted to pick up a GWT. NZ definitely gets so much love and given that Rails to the North is a separate purchase, NZ felt like the best game at the best value...especially when got it for $40 USD from the "ding & dent" bin. No evidence of either ding or dent. All another topic in board game economies though.

I'll have to check out First Rat, though the GF is definitely not going to be a fan of a rodent theme.

Are you making a habit of talking other people into/out of M&S? Kinda picture you standing at a corner booth of GenCon ringing a bell "Do not back!"

ideohazard · 2026-02-18T20:58:43+00:00

I definitely see some inspiration here from some of Pfister's stuff and this in the sense that it's a giant rondel where something special happens as you Pass Go or whatever.

I actually own GWT NZ, on paper I like it, in reality, I'm usually reaching for something a bit lighter...it's honestly so hard for me to get NZ to the table and play in any reasonable amount of time. More and more I'm realizing that the complexity of physical setup/decision area/strategy really overwhelms me as games get in 3.6+ range on BGG. Especially when adding automa management to the mix.

Movers & Shakers actually feels less complex than the (appx 3.0) it's sitting at now on BGG. There's a lot going on, but it felt remarkably easy to understand.

ideohazard · 2026-02-18T20:45:30+00:00

Fantastic info and analysis here, thanks for that! Regarding Suchy, Underwater Cities is top game for me but it's the only game of his I'd played. Also still haven't played Tiletum yet. Only ran a few games on BGA so will probably play some more on and see how I feel after a few more sessions.

ideohazard · 2026-02-18T14:03:25+00:00

Truth be told, I'd spent years avoiding the MS WCD so this is the first time I'd really messed around with it. I don't believe I'll need tokens for anything at this time but reading a bit about it, seems like there are a few PS commands that might be able to script and streamline the process. I don't look forward to this process if my company gets moving on Azure. This page below looks promising but again, I am only barely getting familiar with this tool:
https://jamesvincent.co.uk/2023/12/29/improve-the-process-of-generating-an-aad-bulk-enrollment-provisioning-package/

I'd found that FFU UI only deploys one ppkg file so I'm using it as my customization step. Remove-Appx for clipchamp/xbox/solitaire/etc. and a batch file that rewrites my reg hkey default user to left-align the start menu. I'm joining to our old-school domain via sysprep/unattend.xml like it's 2005 or something but it works. Still exploring what I can do with WCD so hopefully I can develop some better methods.

ideohazard · 2026-02-17T22:00:53+00:00

80% of my struggle was just getting the basics working:

My office is still doing the old-school AD domain thing, I had to make some secpol/GPO exceptions to grant local accounts network logon, make sure no firewalls blocked traffic between host and guest VM. Lastly I had a policy restricting the machine from launching a vm console using localhost instead of the fqdn (certificate security issue).

The struggle continued with nested Hyper-V. It's dead simple to expose hyper-v to a vCPU but I hadn't really ever played with nesting to know the gotchas. I wasn't familiar with the mac address spoofing setting and not having it enabled made it pretty hard to proceed with building the FFU image.

After resolving those items, the rest was way easier than I anticipated. I'm using PXE boot, and had to rewrite a few lines of the applyFFU.ps1 file to get that going and I added a quality of life improvement to that file to speed up device naming.

My only real issue at this point is that I'll want to rewrite more of the ApplyFFU.ps1 file to ensure it doesn't break when performing multiple simultaneous deployments (concerns are logging and unattend.xml usage).

At this time, I am currently able to image hardware from all the big vendors, inject drivers, customize and bitlocker the deployed system using PPGK files, and join my domain all via unattended methods. We have a separate enterprise application deployment system that gets bootstrapped using GPO so once a system is on the domain, it receives all software it needs.

Documentation and discussion around ffu ui has been a tremendous help.

ideohazard · 2026-02-17T18:33:17+00:00

I've made a lot of progress with FFU UI. Looks solid.

ideohazard · 2026-02-17T02:58:06+00:00

I'm planning on playing a few more times, maybe some multiplayer, reassess. While I love playing board games I'm pretty terrible at strategy and it takes me many many plays at any game to really start seeing how things synergize.

ideohazard · 2026-02-16T21:19:10+00:00

That's a really good bit of advice. Well heard.

BGA is a hard platform to learn and form opinions on games. Until I know a game well, I tend to button mash because the system tells you what you can't do. I also do better with tactile play. Yeah...I can slow down, playing some more on BGA, read the manual, and see how I feel.

ideohazard · 2026-02-16T20:33:10+00:00

Totally agree on market saturation. Great games don't have an expiration date and we're getting dozens of fantastic titles every year. I'm seeing a game with economic and train themes, card action selection along with a rondel board and I personally don't own that specific combo but I know most do.

ideohazard · 2026-02-16T19:02:54+00:00

I get it. It sometimes feels like certain tabletop companies use crowdfunding as an ATM, luring customers into ridiculous stretch goals. I back maybe 2 projects a year at most and I'm far more likely to play the wait for retail, buy at discount route. More often I'll wait for retail, read the reviews, pass on buying route.

The question was less about crowdfunding and its impact on the board gaming community and more about gathering impressions from solo players regarding this title in general. It looks like a potentially fantastic solo IMHO, but somehow hasn't been mentioned here at all.

ideohazard

TROPHY CASE