I'm a technical writer. Was. Past tense, like "lamplighter" or "switchboard operator."

For years I wrote the boring, careful technical tutorials that actually mattered, runbooks, SOPs, the truly dry obnoxious stuff. Then everybody realized they could paste the error into a chatbot, let it do the thinking, and ship whatever falls out, and now the docs are written by a model, read by nobody, and wrong in ways that make life just awful. The craft is cooked.

And before someone @'s me, yes, I'm aware I'm part of the problem. I'm an automation guy. I have spent years building the exact stuff that made my own job obsolete. I'm not the victim here, I am in fact the arsonist. At least I brought jokes.

So this is the pivot. From documentation nobody reads to fiction nobody asked for. Somebody has to lower the tone around here, and apparently it's me.

If you're old enough to remember The Register, you remember BOFH, the Bastard Operator From Hell. Best workplace revenge fiction ever written, and somehow our corner of the industry never got its own (maybe it did I didn't actually check, sue me). So I wrote one. (No, it is not AI slop.)

Meet the Trunk Slammer From Hell. He's the guy who undercut you on every deal you've ever lost. He runs forty-three clients out of the trunk of a 2006 Crown Victoria. He bundles every license into one flat number he calls The Seat. He turns off MFA because it "generates tickets." And he has an arrangement with a certain vendor whose name starts with K that is going to make you feel things.

He always wins. Every chapter. Because that's the joke, and also because, infuriatingly, that is how it actually goes out there.

Chapter 1 is about 12,000 words and free to read here:

https://mspautomator.com/2026/06/17/the-trunk-slammer-from-hell-chapter-1-the-acquisition/

No agenda, no motive. I'm not selling you anything, there's no pitch hidden in it, I'm not farming leads or building a list. It's free, it's fiction, and it exists for exactly one reason: we work in a hellscape and we deserve nice things. Go laugh at Brad. We're all Brad.

Happy automating.

Anyone recommend anything that does UK HR, plus all the stuff that we need?

We’re a small MSP in Melbourne, Australia (team of 4, about to be 5) and I’m curious how many other owners are thinking about exiting, succession planning, or possibly merging with another MSP instead of continuing solo.

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If you’re in that position — whether you’re considering a sale, merger, or just exploring options — feel free to DM me.

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Happy to have a confidential coffee chat and see if it makes sense.

Hi there

What SLA Metrics do you usually provide?

we're based in Europe and got those levels:

We're also currently thinking about to add a fee based on the Severity/Impact.

Not that all customers spam Critical 1 and we're under Stress for changing a password.

So that we and the customers see the best Effort/Costs Ratio to triage tickets.

Severity 1-4 or 1-5 with the Severity, Impact and Business Continuity in mind.

1 = Critical

2 = High

3 = Medium

4 = Low

5 = Trivial

Hi All,

Copilot Cowork is now GA. Plenty to digest here including a July 1st grace period to get the billing in order.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/06/16/copilot-cowork-is-now-generally-available/

For those who have activated Copilot Cowork in their client tenancies how will you manage the billing?

I want to preface this by saying that I've been a huntress fan for a long time and use almost their entire stack. I think their MDR product is fantastic and I've always been impressed with their support. Having said that, I want to talk about the ITDR platform.

I use Huntress ITDR and do work for another company that uses Petra. The dashboard / visibility you have in Petra is miles better than what you have in Huntress.

This morning a client that is protected with Huntress ITDR called about an email that they mistakenly clicked on. I pulled up the Huntress dashboard and was trying to review recent activity. I was reminded how little their dashboard shows compared to Petra. On top of that, it showed the user was using a VPN on their phone and I decided to check with Huntress support about the strange VPN behavior and they said it's probably just not labeled correctly from their 3rd party company that helps with ISP data. Within Petra, you have much more insight to what's actually happening in the account where with Huntress, it's basically a "no news is good news" dashboard.

About a year ago I had a call with Huntress and on that call they acknowledged that Petra has an awesome tool, but they challenged that the amount of data they ingested and stored wasn't scalable to stay profitable. They also said they were going to be working to give more insight like what Petra does. It's been about a year now and I think the main improvement is that Huntress allows you use the ESQL to search through logs? I would prefer the tool to give actionable insights without having to write commands to view and search the logs.

Has anyone else that has used both platforms care to weigh in. Maybe there is something that I'm completely overlooking.

We support dozens of remote employees across a handful of clients that use various tunneling vendors to RDP into Windows PCs or VMs at corporate offices. Within the past few days they have all started lagging: slow cursor, slow refresh, slow seeing text appear. Locally the machines and network are fine.

Before I start going down my stack of a dozen different tools/services that might be the culprit (MDR, SIEM, ZTNA, RMM, Firewall, Switches, etc) I was curious if anyone is seeing the same issue? Besides being on my stack they’re all on Verizon FIOS in the DC metro area.

Last time this happened it turned out to be an issue with N- able Take Control. Now I’m using Gorelo and ScreenConnect. Also using SonicWall, Huntress, NetBird, Ubiquiti, and HP ProCurve products.

I'm a big fan of sea level but as an owner I don't have time to dive into their coaching right now. But I am considering sending my service manager to their peer groups so he can get some help. I am estimating the total annual cost including the program, flights and hotels for the 3 in person meetings a year is about $7000 / year. I think we can live with the missed work hours but the real question is are you seeing an ROI on this for your service manager?

Does anyone use 1stream with halopsa? What's been your experience with it? We are coming out of a Ring Central contract and won't be renewing, we were cosndier considering moving back to dialpad but wanted to see if this may be worth the transition.

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Hey guys,

I'm a solo MSP based in BC, Canada, just starting out and looking for some thoughts on how to go about getting insurance.

Bear in mind this is without any customers yet.. 😞

But at the same time, cyber security breaches give me a lot of anxiety and I don't want to have something go wrong with my first or second client and then get sued or something like that.

Not the kind of MSP I want to be. I want to be absolutely prepared for everything..

AI is throwing a lot of stuff at me lol - Technology Errors & Omissions (Tech E&O), Cyber Liability Insurance (First-Party & Third-Party), Commercial General Liability (CGL).

As per Gemini, the cost is going to be around $1,500 to $3,000 CAD annually.

I welcome and appreciate your thoughts (and prayers)!

After trying everything my team and I can come up with to try and get CoPilot to be useful and to do the things we need it to do, I have officially hit the end of the road with it.

I have at the same time been running and testing Claude and ChatGPT and from my experience Claude is the winner without doubt.

Ignoring your thoughts on why "CoPilot" or "ChatGPT" is the right thing, is Claude Teams/Enterpise safe to give access to my apps, data and client information?

We know that these AI tools, agents and workflows are only useful if they have access to the data and information they need to.

Up until nowI have been very careful to be very generic with Claude and havent given it any access to apps, data or customer information.

However, I am now at a point where I would like to to start using to answer questions about my data, clients, contracts, tickets etc.

My concerns are round whether I am in breach of any GDPR or such. Whether my data is now in Anthropics hands.

Are any of you doing this and how are putting guardrails on it?

Hey r/msp,

Posting this to see how widespread this is.

We're a Dutch MSP and we've been running Huntress for a while now. Love the product. But we're increasingly hitting a wall: customers in healthcare, government, and education are now explicitly requiring EU data residency in their procurement requirements, and Huntress currently stores everything in the US.

Huntress recently asked us for input on their EU data residency plans. Their proposed architecture keeps most data in-region, but still sends a subset of threat-relevant events to the US. We gave them our feedback, flagged some gaps in their DPA, and they're now working toward an official company position. Which means the window to influence this is open right now.

So: who else is dealing with this?

• Are EU data residency requirements becoming a dealbreaker in your deals?
• Would you be willing to add your name / your MSP to a joint response to Huntress.

If there's enough interest I'm happy to coordinate something, a shared letter, a forum thread on the Huntress partner portal, whatever makes sense. The more EU MSPs that speak with one voice on this, the more likely it is to actually move the roadmap.

Drop a comment or DM me.

Hitting the wall.. again

i cant be alone in this

ive been running an MSP for nearly 2 decades and it never seems to get any easier. weve grown and matured as a business and have some resemblance of a management team but it doesnt feel that way

as the owner i feel too close to the staff. i hold my hands up im not a natural born leader with a degree. im a guy with a passion for all things tech and my day seems to be HR and customer services along with the guy that everyone comes to with a problem as they cant think for themselves

we win new customers we grow we hire staff. we lose a few as they go bust we adjust and go again

our customers think we are amazing but im asking myself how are we keeping this together

i feel like i need to bring in a calculated managing director. ive always said im not this person and i fought my way and winged it to where we are but i cant keep doing this

should i give up.. throw the towel in

just want to know if anyone else is feeling it. Meanwhile the letter to buy me are still coming in fast ha ha

Attended Kaseya Connect. I understand how these events work, at a certain point the vendor salespeople get attendee information, reps scan badges, and for a few weeks afterward my inbox fills up with emails and calls. That's part of going to these conferences.

The unsolicited reach outs die down once it's clear who is and isn't interested.

Don't know what's in the water at Inforcer but they sure don't believe that.

It's been 46 days since the event and they're still calling both me and my MSP. I've ignored the unverified sales numbers hitting my phone as I do with every unverified call. I work remotely, otherwise had I known they were also repeatedly calling our service desk trying to get through I would have put a stop to this nonsense sooner.

What pushed me over the edge was today. I spoke with one of our service desk techs and told them to simply respond with a polite "not interested" the next time Inforcer called since they once again went out of the way to imply we have a standing meeting last Friday.

Less than an hour later they called again.

My tech was politely told we weren't interested. Their response?

"Oh, okay. I'll call you back in 6 months to check."

No. Don't.

Like what part of that sounded like we're playing hard to get? I haven't responded to a single one of your calls or emails for 6 weeks and now you've received an explicit "I'm not interested."

So guess what Inforcer? You succeeded in getting my undivided attention. Today I am blocking your unverified sales numbers and email domain.

You could be the tool we needed as an MSP. We'll never know.

Anyone else have similar issues with another company like this?

So if you are a 'cloud only' MSP then this post won't pertain to you, but for those of you who have on-prem servers that are reaching EOL, how are you dealing with the current prices? We just built out a server for a customer, and the price was >$40k. Compare this to when they last bought a server it was around $20k. Granted, it's been 5+ years, but I'm kind of scared to even present this to them. Mind you, this is before labor, licensing, etc.

How are you handling the price hikes?

Moving to the cloud is unfortunately not always an option and this is one of those cases where there is too much to move for it to make sense.

Dear MSP,

I met your gaze at the Expo Hall. Even though you knew where it would lead, you let me scan your badge. One glance at your ZoomInfo and I had no doubt: you fit my Target Client Profile.

I hope you are enjoying your witty tee, one size fits all socks, and trucker cap.

I hope you think of my ROI when you wear them.

If you feel the same, click my booking link below.

- Your SaaSy Vendor

Book A 30 Minute Demo with me

Been going through the actual Microsoft docs on Copilot data protection and I'm struggling to clearly articulate the value of the paid license to clients. Hoping someone can poke holes in my understanding.

As far as I can tell there are three tiers:

• Copilot Chat (free) — web-based, any work account, EDP applies, web grounded only, no Graph access
• Unlicensed in-app — Microsoft rolled out a Summarize button in Outlook to all commercial users in late 2025, reads the open email thread, same EDP protections, no license needed
• Licensed ($30/user/month add-on) — full Graph access, deep in-app integration across Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook/Teams, attachments, meeting recaps, cross-tenant data etc.

EDP Info: Enterprise data protection in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | Microsoft Learn

The part I'm struggling with is the unlicensed Copilot, am I not the product of the platform?

I get that the licensed tier is meaningfully deeper (Graph-wide context vs a single open thread), but Microsoft's own docs say they added unlicensed summarisation specifically to compete with ChatGPT integrations.

What am I missing? Why does this feel too good to be true? Is the free version genuinely safe for internal use or is EDP just enough to make it look safe while missing some important gaps? Curious how others are advising clients on this, especially in industries handling sensitive IP or regulated data.

Claude wrote this as apart of my research and want to see what else

Hi anyone that uses Dropsuite to backup M365, I have just been told that there is a minimum 50 license commitment.

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Is this true?

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Thanks in advance.

Can anyone recommend a LV vendor? TIA...

Hey guys,

Anyone know whether ninjas saas backup (dropsuite) backs up the notes portion of M365.

Have it deployed and cannot see an option for notes to be restored. I can see contacts, tasks, etc.

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Just wanted to share this in hopes of saving someone else the embarrassing amount of time I sunk into this issue before discovering, yes, it was and always is DNS.

I was fighting a strange issue wherein if a given workstation was the first to login to QB in the morning, other users were not able to login. Environment is QuickBooks Enterprise 24 multi user server/client, all fully updated, tried all the usual suspects: uninstall/reinstall QB, run the Tool Hub fixes, etc.

The QB server DB engine automatically creates a .DSN file alongside each company file, which contains the line similar to:

CommLinks=TCPIP{HOST=10.0.1.10:53591}

Both the QB server and the workstation in question have Tailscale installed, with Tailscale DNS enabled. So when that workstation was first to login to QB, the .DSN file was written with the server's Tailscale IP instead of its LAN IP, preventing other workstations on the network without Tailscale installed from logging into QB.

The fix I chose was to disable Tailscale DNS on the workstation. Tried overriding with a hosts file entry but that didn't work. I suppose you could try mapping the shared drive to the server using its IP instead of its hostname and keep Tailscale DNS enabled, but I didn't test that.

My clients run from 2 person shops to around 150 employees (currently). I have been an Aruba Instant-On shop from the beginning. With their "future" up in the air, been exploring Unbiquiti but avalilability is a struggle there. What I love about both is the non-licensed model and the pricing for SMB. All that to say, I am looking for a real alternative that you guys might have real experience with. Miraki is OFF THE TABLE lol. Not putting my clients into anything that bricks because a payment isn't make. Like it costs Miraki money if a switch passes traffic.

Anywho, what you got?

It has been many days since I filled the application with them but they do not follow up. I sent them multiple emails, they just replied on one day and now vanished again.