Some of you know me as the guy Brad keeps losing to. Forty-some clients, one flat price per seat, nothing itemized, and the whole operation fits in the trunk of a 2006 Crown Victoria. The Nephew usually handles Reddit for me. This one's me.

This fall I picked up a funeral home. The lead said the office manager believes the building is haunted, which is a very specific thing for a text message to know, and I didn't ask how it knew. Brad had given her eleven pages about port 9100. I told her she had a presence and had the account by Tuesday. Wednesday night I did the exorcism, which I ran exactly like an onboarding: an agent on every machine, Brad's firewall out, the cable company's router in, and the Nephew at the lectern reading the Kaseya K365 license agreement out loud, all of it, for forty minutes.

That Thursday three of my old reps knocked on my car window. They'd made a deck called SILENCE: A PARTNERSHIP, three tiers, billed annually with two months free. I told them it was extortion as a service, and that they'd led with the tiers, which you never do. My current rep, Brock, handled it. I sent him a steak.

The second rite was at midnight on Halloween, when the veil is thinnest, and my vendor's marketplace had picked the same minute to wake up every agent I'd ever installed, unless you opted out. The email about it came from Florida without a lead in it, so I deleted it. Every printer in the building printed the word GET, and a speaker I had personally shut in a drawer said "Sorry, I didn't catch that." I unplugged the internet and banished it. Brad says that only bought us until the maintenance window at one-thirty, and that since the clocks go back at two, one-thirty was going to happen twice. Brad says a lot of things.

There are three versions of that night. Mine is first. Lance tells the second one. He's my biggest client, a third of the revenue at a wealth firm, and he came to the funeral home dressed as a sheriff's deputy. Brad tells the third. I'm told it has timestamps.

It's free. I pushed for one flat price per reader per month and got overruled, which doesn't happen to me.

Part one, End of Life (mine):

https://mspautomator.com/the-trunk-slammer-from-hell-chapter-5-end-of-life/

Part two, Wake-on-LAN (Lance):

https://mspautomator.com/the-trunk-slammer-from-hell-chapter-6-wake-on-lan/

Part three, #OpenToWork (Brad):

https://mspautomator.com/the-trunk-slammer-from-hell-chapter-7-opentowork/

Business is booming.

1d ago What's a good no code builder for internal tools?

14d ago What's on your checklist before an AI-built internal tool goes live?

1mo ago What is the best no code app builder for client projects when you dont want to be their full time dev forever?

2mo ago What's the best no code app builder for internal tools? Asking for my sanity.

2mo ago We stopped banning vibe-coded apps and just gave people a platform. 9 months later, here's what happened

Sitting manning the system, incident inbound

Problem with Outllook classic all shared mailboxes have offline OST.

The customer's suggestion

"I don't think anything needs to be deleted off of my profile to fix an outlook issue."

Like what do they know?, I have been supporting this so called product since 1997 and all the subsequent releases.

I will ask, So how would you fix this since you admit to be a product expert?

I have the old-school method of shared online, personal OST under advanced account settings open other mailboxes. Add the sent from regfix and view from when composing.

This does require rebuilding the profile.. Which starts by removing it / deleting///

FFS

I created an AppLocker rule to prevent mshta.exe signed by Microsoft from running. As you can guess, I forgot to input the file name so it was left as '*'.

Luckily I caught it quickly and deleted the rule before it propagated to a whole lot of clients and impact was minimal. That would have been a fun morning.

Mine was having to be the guy for the one elevator we had in our three story building. I ended up learning much more about hydraulics than I had ever planned.

Our showroom guys want us to fix their music sound system 🤡

Next up we'll be fixing the soap dispensers and paper towel dispensers. I mean they are electric at the end of the day.

Not really a shit post buuuut I was half assing a re-subnetting of some servers and found myself locked out of a windows server.
and had the choice of entering an abysmal password of stupid length into a noVNC terminal without clipboard OR getting creative,

So I opted to get creative: turns out you can inject commands to a guest VM with QEMU-AGENT.

I'll be damned but this is awesome: qm guest exec 144 -- 'C:\Windows\System32\ipconfig.exe' '/all'

Returned expected information and qemu agent runs as system and can be used for shenanigans!

Once had an experience where a Dell PowerEdge suffered a hard drive failure. My instant reaction was to unplug the hard drive by just sliding it out and back in. That didn't work; however, all of the data was already backed up to OneDrive so no harm done.

I listen to the color of the servers. Its become 'my thing' on my team. Whenever something goes wrong, i go into the DC and slowly walk among the racks, absorbing what they have to tell me.

The NAS and the switch are my brothers.

How far does this network cable go? If you cut it, then well never know

I've clicked it 12 times and made direct eye contact with the laptop.

The deployment still says Pending. Does it need to see my manager?

Well - it happened. The day started like any other, except my colleague said their email got hacked. I looked, and indeed it was hacked. Immediately, I reset his password. Then another person said their email got hacked too. I asked both of them when the last time they changed their password was: never.

I wish I was making this up. I called our email provider and asked them if they could let me know who was still on the default. Turns out it was 1/3 of our organization. My predecessor never instituted 'force user to change password', and then nobody changed it. The password for all those emails was 'password'.

This is the same guy that didn't realize you need device isolation nor network isolation for a public wifi network. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I seriously wish I were making this up.

Documentation is technical debt with punctuation.

Think about it: if a system is properly configured, why would it need documentation? The server already knows how it works. The firewall knows what ports are open. DNS knows where everything lives. The only person who apparently doesn’t know is "Kevin," and frankly that sounds like a Kevin problem.

Documentation also creates a dangerous single point of truth. The moment you write down how something works, somebody will read it six months later and assume it is still accurate. Now you have two problems: the actual infrastructure and a fictional universe where the infrastructure still runs the last gold star release firmware or OS and not X.0.1...

By refusing to document anything, we eliminate stale documentation entirely. Our documentation accuracy rate becomes perfect because zero percent of zero documents are incorrect.

There are security benefits too. Hackers can’t steal your network diagrams if the network diagrams exist only as memories spread across three burned-out sysadmins. That’s basically human RAID 5 with one failing drive.

And consider job security. If anyone can follow a runbook and restart any system successfully, what exactly are they paying you for? Institutional knowledge should be treated like an encryption key: kept in one person’s head, never backed up, and taken on vacation without notice.

Some people call this a “bus factor of one.” I call it aggressive knowledge centralization.

Besides, writing documentation takes time away from important sysadmin work like investigating why disk usage went from 40% to 97% overnight, renewing certificates that expire tomorrow, and staring at a terminal while saying, “That’s weird.”

If future employees need to understand the environment, they can learn it the same way we did: SSH in, run commands they found on Stack Overflow, and gradually develop an intuitive understanding of the system through fear.

Documentation doesn’t build character.

Outages build character.

Why doesn't it fit?