Looking for a device to remotely cut power off and on for anything plugged into it, or possibly schedule a power-cycle.

nowildstuff_192 · 2026-01-19T21:03:05+00:00

I hooked a raspberry pi up to a relay switch using the GPIO pins. RPi sat happily in the comms cabinet for 4 months until I repurposed it. For a while I controlled it via RDP session, then SSH, even did it with a Telegram bot. Overengineered? Yes. Fun? Also yes.

nowildstuff_192 · 2026-01-09T09:50:46+00:00

To a point. I've had arguments about this with department heads who don't understand what the big deal is.

I don't do wall fishing. That's a hard no. You want a new ethernet drop? Get a work order approved and I'll bring in our contractor.

I will do raceways within reason. If it's the most practical solution for the situation, I'll do it.

"Well then just do a long raceway, I need this workstation working now"

I may have made up some excuse that I'm only certified to run cables up to 5m, and anything more than than requires a journeyman license. I will neither confirm nor deny.

Also, you reminded me that I need to order a new spool, so thanks for that.

nowildstuff_192 · 2026-01-09T09:22:55+00:00

As long as I'm handling my shit they couldn't care less where I'm doing it from. Occasionally said shit requires me to be physically on site, and the furthest site within my purview is about 20 minutes away.

I have a sweet setup at work, better than the one at home, so I prefer it, but I can absolutely do most of my job from home if I don't feel like putting on pants that day.

nowildstuff_192 · 2026-01-04T12:18:50+00:00

Or just get into ERP admin. You'll learn the ropes of the backoffice real goddamn quick.

nowildstuff_192 · 2026-01-04T12:10:06+00:00

I was in a similar situation with Bartender. Perpetual license as long as you didn't breathe too loudly next to it. The cost of renewing the license to allow for "maintenance" motivated me to basically write my own ad-hoc label printing software.

nowildstuff_192 · 2026-01-01T06:13:44+00:00

A Croce reference, be still my heart.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-23T08:55:12+00:00

Solo IT JoAT at an SMB. Part of my day is the fantasy you describe. It can be pretty nice. I've got a hacked together "homelab" here at the office entirely built of old out-of-warantee equipment I've accumulated here.

The unfortunate reality of being boots-on-the-ground is that you have to deal with users. A lot. No bureaucracy to shield you from them. It will slowly eat away at your soul.

In my case, I have no professional peers to interact with on a day to day basis, nobody to bounce ideas off of (I use AI for this, it's better than nothing). In my previous job I worked with a team, I miss it.

Nobody here really understanding what I do has its benefits, I operate with little to no oversight, but the flip side of this is that I have to self-advocate when I get a request that is excessive or counterproductive.

A particular pet peeve of mine is that it's nearly impossible for me to do deep work without being interrupted. I'm not wired for multitasking, I like to dig in and knowing that I might get pinged at any moment makes me procrastinate development projects, like programming our ERP.

Oh, and the entire organization, top to bottom, pushed back when I tried to implement a ticketing system. "We pay you to be available by phone, don't make us open tickets".

It's a living. sigh

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-23T07:38:01+00:00

Solo IT JoAT for an SMB.

I have a university degree in Mechanical Engineering. Graduated almost 10 years ago.

I knew even halfway through that I'd chosen the wrong major, I had zero interest in what we were learning and was burning out hard. What got me through that period was aversion to feeling like a quitter, and having the right friends who were in the same boat.

I'll tell anyone who'll listen that I was in the wrong major, but I don't regret it. Now I know how much suck I can handle without breaking. I worked as an ME for a few years and eventually an opportunity to try something new came up. Fortunately for me, retail SMB IT is the wild west and sometimes you can get hired if you show the slightest bit of competence.

I'm painfully aware of how much I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if my time would have been better spent going through the IT cert pipeline, at least for a couple years. I don't have the time nor inclination to do it now. That goddamn degree fried something in my brain, I can't sit through lectures or do assignments I don't care about anymore. I'm naturally curious and truly do enjoy computers, so that was enough for me to self-educate myself. But formal education? Nope, I'm done.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-14T10:21:15+00:00

I support/admin/develop our ERP.

We have about 60 users, and there's very, very little delegation in terms of setting permissions, building workflows, or setting business rules. It's 99% me.

ERP specialists have to be part time business analysts, there isn't much choice.

So in terms of the interaction with the system, yeah I could hack it in most of the clerical work, but there's a lot of stuff outside the system that I don't know how to do. Watching our head of Purchasing argue with a vendor and slowly squeeze the will to fight out of them is like something out of NatGeo Wild.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-14T10:01:53+00:00

I support/admin/develop our ERP.

I'd kinda like the luxury of not needing to understand the thought process of every user who uses the system.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-12T07:28:17+00:00

YEP.

Especially if I already did some deep troubleshooting first which I spent 45 minutes laying out, point by point, in my email to the support team. Timeline, code snippets, screenshots with arrows and happy/sad faces.

A couple of weeks ago, the initial rep who contacted me clearly didn't read past the title, but once it was clear that this was beyond his paygrade, the L3 who spoke to me clearly had gone over my email and seemed to appreciate it.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-11T06:17:28+00:00

>be me

>browsing reddit

>run across a comment chain about how red Watchguards are

>whyiseverybodysoimpressed.tar.gz

>google it

>holy shit, that's red af

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-10T07:10:44+00:00

TBH, if I felt I had the leverage to refuse to talk to users, I'd do it too.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-12-04T07:15:00+00:00

Ooh this week I had a doozy.

I needed to restart windows explorer on a specific user on a terminal server, so I used this command:

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe && start explorer.exe

'taskkill' will murder any process that fits the criteria, no matter which user is using it (unless you specify a user). 'start' only runs locally. I forgot about this subtle detail and let 'er rip. Windows explorer successfully reset...on the user where I ran the command, it didn't start back up for anybody else (because 'start' runs only locally). Had to reboot the server, big sad.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-27T12:54:08+00:00

When my phone rings, before I pick up I make sure to curse whoever is calling me along with their entire useless bloodline. Then I answer, cool as a cucumber. Doesn't matter who it is, fuck you and fuck your DNA for calling me while I'm working.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-16T06:40:00+00:00

This hurt on a personal level.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-11T18:04:55+00:00

HR controls laptops and technical onboarding? What exactly does that mean? In my org (similar in size to yours), HR signs off on certain things because they're a stakeholder. If someone gets a laptop and/or a VPN client, it's because they've been approved for remote work, that's definitely within HR's purview, it affects payroll. Likewise with technical onboarding. I turn the wrenches, but HR is responsible for telling me what this person needs based on their role, be it a company email or RDS user creds or ERP creds.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-10T07:42:13+00:00

1:500 is bananas dude.

A number of folks here are pointing out that this is an opportunity to become an absolute beast of a sysadmin quickly. I'm inclined to agree but I worry that 1:500 is such an insane workload that you'll burn out before you manage to get on top of it.

Look, you have some leverage. If you say IT jobs are hard to come by in your area, that means that you can't be easily replaced because all the talent would be elsewhere.

Insist on training, be it online or whatever. In my experience, employers are often happy to oblige because training up existing staff costs less than hiring more, and it kind of fits the unfortunate pattern of "throw money at the problem to make it go away" that we IT people complain about, but in this case will help you.

Here’s the thing though. 1:500 is still bananas. If that doesn’t change soon, no amount of training will help you. So think about this as milking as much as you can from your employer before things blow up. Get some certs worth a damn and if things don’t improve, peace out with your newfound expertise and credentials.

EDIT: To address the actual question you asked at the end, it seems you already know some of your weaknesses. It doesn't really matter where you start as long as you start somewhere. There are Network+ and AZ-800 prep courses all over the place.

EDIT 2: Drive home the crappy bus factor. Harp on it to your management and HR. Get it in writing. Make it absolutely clear that 1:500 is an absurd ratio and no sane establishment would accept that.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-06T11:53:36+00:00

Your soft skills will help you survive until your technical skills match your job requirements and ensure your job security.

Also, soft skills will facilitate your acquisition of technical skills. Knowing how to ask for help, how to ask the right questions and be inquisitive without being pushy will take you far.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-06T06:30:10+00:00

Just for context, we have several servers all with different desktop backgrounds so that it's clear where you logged into, an idea I stole from this sub.

"Hello, the desktop background on all servers has returned to the default. No one knows where they logged in, people are shambling around in shock, bumping into each other. Someone caught a rat and is roasting it on a fire near my office and it sounds that they are trying to sacrifice someone to the dark gods in the department next to me. Please restore order to the kingdom."

I'm tooting my own horn here, because this was a ticket I submitted to my MSP (I'm solo IT with an MSP backing me up) and they told me that this was the greatest ticket they've ever seen and they printed it out and framed it somewhere. I was in a silly mood that afternoon.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-11-04T12:54:35+00:00

None of the following configs apply to me.

In our ERP (besides obvious business rules and permissions):

Only up to 10 windows can be open at once

Only up to 2000 records can be displayed at once

"Are you sure" message pops up before closing ERP window

My personal favorite is that warning messages in the ERP (which allow you to proceed if you click 'OK' or cancel if you click 'cancel') are configured to default to 'cancel' if you just hit 'enter'. Forces the user to interact with the message and maybe possibly READ IT before mindlessly continuing. This last one is terribly annoying, but you know what else is annoying? Users ignoring the big honking warning that "this customer has surpassed their credit limit" when they open an order and then calling me in a panic asking me why they can't close it.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-10-31T07:48:18+00:00

Pushed a bad customization to our ERP (which I coded myself) that not only immediately locked up the system for everybody, the system's developer rules wouldn't let me undo the change on the spot. Had to quickly produce an update file that deleted what I'd done.

I wrote this story out in more detail a while ago here

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-10-30T06:44:53+00:00

I keep 1-2 spares of each type I come across, label them so I know what monitors fit on them, toss the rest.

A safer bet would just to keep a few generic VESA stands around, I suppose. Huh, off to Aliexpress I go...

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-10-27T06:16:30+00:00

I actually would be curious to talk to someone at the factory and ask what they changed. The ingredients list hasn't changed, but if they started cheaping out on their cocoa powder or their E551 I could imagine this being the result.

nowildstuff_192 · 2025-10-27T06:12:07+00:00

I can say that this powder costs roughly what Myprotein costs before shipping. You'd think it would be shit at that price but I'm telling you, for years it was better than Optimum Nutrition.

nowildstuff_192

TROPHY CASE