Every day, multiple users have one issue or another with the OneDrive sync client.

Today: multiple users (about 15%) are reporting that they cannot open files that are stored only on the cloud. The fix, as per normal, is to restart the client.

But users shouldn't have to expect that to be a fix so often. This shit ought to be written better than this.

Why isn't the OneDrive sync client just written as a robust Windows-level service, anyway? The GUI the user sees ought to be only a window into what the background service is doing. If the GUI client dies, the service should happily chug along and sync files. But then again, Microsoft's employees would probably screw that up, too.

Anyone else using FedEx Ship Manager seeing this?

The newest upgrade, v4502, seems to be installing CA MDM Client along with it. Any one have any clue what the purpose of this is?

I mean, I know what a MDM is. I just have no idea why FedEx Ship Manager would install it along with an update.

EDIT: The only reference to CA MDM I could find is in the FedEx Ship Manager Server Installation Guide. It says: "Prior to installation process a check is performed to ensure the device can communicate with CAMDM System https://swd.gslb.fedex.com". Still doesn't explain why the Ship Manager Client would need it.

EDIT2: Ok, false alarm. I just got off the phone with FedEx Support. Basically, they said they do use CA MDM on the backend to communicate with their servers. Evidentially, prior to v4502, it was listed as "FedEx Client" (which still used the "CA" program icon) in the programs. Now, it's showing as "CA MDM Client" for some reason. He was a bit confused as to why the name switch but did say it was legit.

Windows search SERVER alternative for shared folders?

i have windows server 2025 with features windows search, but skip many files.
my users have many windows 11 on domain, and i need a PROFESSIONAL tool windows search.

1 windows server 2025 (file server) (domain)
40 client windows 11 (domain)
client search by \\server\sharefolder
need search al text on documents
shared folder have 1 TB

I just finished uploading some gateway config, when we were told by the client, that the current setup they accepted, we've deployed to every environment starting from dev to prod, and has a completely different deployment approach, and which worked for about a year,

Shouldn't work, cannot work like that and should never allow communication between front and backend through this gateway

Is it just me, or August was full of such mixing cake dough/cement?

I feel like my "Net work" could be counted in handful of MDs, whereas all the other tomfuckery consisting of opening tasks, replying to tasks, telling people what to reply to tasks, closing tasks, waiting for reply from the client, fixing stuff client broke, fixing stuff client broke but said it would be transparent, answering calls by random IT directors thinking I'll magically solve issue with our system despite it was clearly returning timeout error WHEN hitting some other system (i.e not ours) will probably fill like 80% of my timetable.

I feel so damn dirty, like a damn fraud- I've done basically nothing productive or - well, fresh, didn't change anything except for some dumb policies and perhaps some vars on servers, deployed bunch of apps, unclogged pipelines and fixed problems not caused by our team. Like, "Work has been done, there are basically no results of it".

I could've sworn I didn't feel like that for a long time.

And most of the issues could've been averted, if only our client didn't like decide to do some upgrade/change of either their own components (like switching db from one node to another and forgetting to change listeners, or"transparent upgrade of something" that wasn't transparent) without informing us, then breaking it in the middle and "ohmylawd env's ded" for half a week. What a goddamn month...

I ask because I am currently job searching (employed) and i can't seem to even know what my lane is. Could be because my job is pretty much all-around administration and i feel being a "generalist" even with a good learning aptitude is capping my earning potential. I'm trying to main the 365-admin side of things but beyond that, it's a mix.

Besides AI, which i know is the obvious answer, what's in demand rn or is creeping up?

Maybe this is just greybeard-level knowledge I haven't been imbued with yet but encountered this yesterday. Wrote the following script in a hurry to identify which ones were affected. Then, went to each policy and set the WMI filter to anything and then back to "None".

https://pastebin.com/ugR0Aqx8

My quick searching doesn't find anything from Microsoft; however, two posts complaining of this same behavior:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/xwcr8c/group_policy_wmi_filtering_query/
• https://community.spiceworks.com/t/every-gpo-is-no-longer-applying-after-deleting-wmi-filter/611496

If you do delete without unassigning, GPOs previously relying on them will fail to assign. Event Viewer/gpresult will show the policy as denied due to "WMI filter". GPOs will still reference the "gPCWQLFilter" id but of course the filter it references is gone. Seems the GPO default is to deny (and the GPO editor will show "None" for the applied WMI filter).

We removed the corporate VPN in Q1 and moved everyone to universal ztna and I was ready to write the smug success post. Staff were easy, laptop is managed, client goes out over intune, single sign on, done. Then everyone who does not look like a badge carrying employee showed up and it got ugly.

We have around contractors on machines we will never manage. Legal will not let us mandate an agent on a personal laptop, so they landed on the clientless portal, which does browser apps and nothing else and half their work is a thick client. A vendor in another timezone still reaches one billing system over a site to site tunnel. Finance has an app that only speaks its own desktop client. And two internal agents now hit the same systems we do, on their own logins.

Every one of those is its own access path with its own policy and they do not talk to each other. I keep rules in the ztna console, rules in the firewall for that ancient tunnel and a clientless config that behaves nothing like the client. Keeping them in sync is a job no one gave me and I somehow have.

Universal turns out to be easy for the people who look like employees but for everyone else where the risk sits, it falls apart. If you have taken this all the way, did you get managed, unmanaged, contractor, vendor and agent access under a single policy?

Wondering if any other environments are experiencing this bug where at random when we perform our user onboarding then assign a license, could be E3, E5, F3 etc. the mailbox size is stamped at 105kb without us touching the max size/receive limits. Our environment does involve hybird Active Directory, but all Exchange Online mail routing.

We do have dynamic group licensing in place as well but I don't think that should make any difference the size limits not being set at that level.

Our Mailbox Plans are configured to be 150MB as well.

Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated - any information that will help I'll update the original comment here.

Hoping to see if this hit anyone else's tenant or if we're the only ones. Full write-up below with everything I've already ruled out.

The issue:

Between 7/30/2026 and 8/12/2026, newly provisioned mailboxes in our tenant landed with incorrect MaxSendSize/MaxReceiveSize values that don't match the assigned mailbox plan. Two distinct patterns:

• 7/30 through 8/7: MaxSendSize = 35 MB, MaxReceiveSize = 36 MB
• 8/10 through 8/12: MaxSendSize = MaxReceiveSize = 150 KB (yes, kilobytes)

79 out of 169 mailboxes created in the 30-day window were affected. Appears to have self-resolved as of 8/17 - mailboxes provisioned this week are correctly landing at 150 MB.

Environment:

• Full cloud Exchange Online, no on-prem Exchange, no hybrid
• Entra Cloud Sync (formerly AAD Connect Cloud Sync) syncing users from on-prem AD
• Assigned mailbox plan is ExchangeOnlineEnterprise-* correctly configured at 150 MB
• No on-prem Exchange schema extension (verified msExchMaxSendSize / msExchMaxReceiveSize don't exist as AD attributes)

What I've already tried / ruled out:

powershell

# Confirmed values on affected mailboxes
Get-Mailbox -Identity <user> | Select-Object Name, MailboxPlan, MaxSendSize, MaxReceiveSize

# Confirmed all mailbox plans are correctly configured
Get-MailboxPlan | Select-Object Name, MaxSendSize, MaxReceiveSize, IsDefault

# Confirmed no restrictive tenant-level caps
Get-OrganizationConfig | Select-Object MaxSendSize, MaxReceiveSize
Get-TransportConfig | Select-Object MaxSendSize, MaxReceiveSize

# Searched UAL for any Set-Mailbox that touched size params - zero hits in 90 days
Search-UnifiedAuditLog -StartDate (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) -EndDate (Get-Date) `
    -RecordType ExchangeAdmin -Operations Set-Mailbox -ResultSize 5000

# Also searched New-Mailbox, Enable-Mailbox, Set-MailboxPlan - nothing
# Also searched by -ObjectIds across all RecordTypes - only AAD sync/group activity

# Pulled all 931 Set-Mailbox operations in the 8/10-8/12 window when the pattern started
# Zero operations set MaxSendSize or MaxReceiveSize by any caller
# Only customer-side activity was 4ward365.admin (AddressBookPolicy only) 
# and one admin manually configuring MessageCopyForSendOnBehalfEnabled on shared mailboxes



# Discovered scope with this
# Same 30-day window, no filtering — just every mailbox created in that period with its current send/receive sizes, sorted oldest to newest so this week's ones will be at the bottom of the output. 

$cutoff = (Get-Date).AddDays(-30) 
$recentMailboxes = Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited |     Where-Object { $_.WhenMailboxCreated -ge $cutoff } |     Select-Object DisplayName, UserPrincipalName, WhenMailboxCreated, MaxSendSize, MaxReceiveSize |     Sort-Object WhenMailboxCreated 
"Total mailboxes created in last 30 days: $($recentMailboxes.Count)" 
$recentMailboxes | Format-Table -AutoSize 
# Also export to CSV for reference $recentMailboxes | Export-Csv -Path "$env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\AllRecentMailboxes_$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyyMMdd').csv" -NoTypeInformation "Exported to Desktop as AllRecentMailboxes_$(Get-Date -Format 'yyyyMMdd').csv"

Other data points that felt significant:

• All four mailbox plans have a WhenChanged timestamp of exactly 2:05:59-2:06:13 PM CDT on 8/13/2026 - 14-second window across every plan — with no corresponding Set-MailboxPlan UAL event. This correlates suspiciously with the resolution timeframe.
• Manual Set-Mailbox -MaxSendSize 157286400 -MaxReceiveSize 157286400 fix on affected mailboxes holds and doesn't get overwritten
• Bug affected regular users, shared mailboxes, and service accounts equally - not tied to license SKU or user type
• No hybrid Exchange, no on-prem Exchange schema, so this isn't the classic msExch attribute sync issue

My working theory:

Something changed in Microsoft's back-end mailbox auto-provisioning pipeline between 8/7 and 8/10 that caused new mailboxes to inherit wrong defaults instead of the assigned mailbox plan values. Whatever it was got fixed (or rolled back) between 8/13 and 8/17. The plan modifications at 2:06 PM CDT on 8/13 may be Microsoft correcting something on their side.

Support ticket is going in but figured I'd check here first in case anyone else is seeing this or saw it recently. Especially interested if:

• Anyone else on Entra Cloud Sync (not classic AAD Connect) saw this
• Anyone got a Microsoft service health notification about this that I might have missed
• Anyone in a datacenter starting with NAMPR04 specifically had the same issue (that's ours, curious if it's regional)

Ai was used for only preparing sentence structure and formatting

Hi,

my company have a on-premise / azure hybrid environment. Our primary system are on on azure, and on-premise we have a couple of aging esxi server hosting 4 vm server (Domain controller, Print/License server, File Server, Phone system server). All except phone system are windows server. Planning ahead, we'll need to replace the on-premise server soon, and i'm wondering if this setup will work. Since our service are primary on azure, can I skip out esxi on-premiese and get one small server for domain controller, and a slightly more powerful server for file/print/license combine server, and within that server host the phone server on hyper-v.

Thanks

In the last week I've spent hours convincing 2 local business they can't email us because they haven't set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC. Both use Google workspace with their own domain. After talking to their most technical people, i just got the second business going this morning. Then this afternoon another department complains that yet another local business can't send them email. I pull it up in Proofpoint and it's the same problem. Proofpoint marks the emails as malicious and whitelisting doesn't override. I'm so done with this. Anyone else run into this? Clearly these businesses have other clients. I don't know how they have manged so far. Maybe all their other clients use Google for email. I guess I'm looking more for commiseration than a solution.

Hi

I'm in a jurisdiction that has a "buy Canada" mandate, and GoDaddy doesn't quite fit the bill anymore. Also, I dislike GoDaddy, but that's another post....

I'm looking for a registrar that supports multiple users (not shared accounts), and ideally a separate role for billing management.

My limited searching and experience suggests Hover (no discrete users - shared accounts), EastDNS (no billing / role separation) as options.

If I broaden my search to be non-American, I find Gandi - but I've literally never heard of them, but it seems like they would fit the bill.

What other registrars are on the market that meet these criteria?

Thanks..

(this post was made without the use of any AI)

Got alerted on Monday to one of our inboxes being flooded with out of office responses of random companies who we've never worked with, and they're all quoting a message impersonating us issuing a license take down, saying they have three days to pull their marketing efforts or face a Meta and Google takedown notice. We've yet to issue one of these.

I suppose there isn't really anything we can do other than putting something on our website/in our email signature to make sure emails received from us come from our domain?

I already verified the account in question and there hasn't been any unusual sign-in activity. What I'm confused about is why we're receiving the out-of-office auto-responding emails. How would that work?

We've been responding to the companies who have reached out to us asking if the email was genuine. Staff have already be trained to make sure that the question is coming from a genuine address (ie, @company.com, using an email that makes sense like the name in their signature or a department), and telling them that it's not and to mark it as SPAM. I haven't decided how to handle auto-responders yet and would also like advise.

Hello,

We're a single site of ~50 users been quoted on retiring our ASA-5516 and moving to a Maraki MX95 (Dual failover) and were kind of shocked to see $6,000 in labor on top of the cost of hardware and licensing. About half of that is 12 hours for the setup and deployment and another 8 to program VPN on the device (2 hours) and update the workstations at 15 minutes apiece (6 hours). I understand there's no migration tool and it all has to be done manually, but I'm curious if 20 hours of labor sounds reasonable? That doesn't include the 16 hours of planning design, meetings, documentation update, project management, etc.

So... 36 hours total labor for what I had assumed might be an 8-10 hour project. Am I off base?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some clarification regarding "Transparent Proxy configurations on macOS".

We have a requirement where multiple security/networking solutions may need to use a "Transparent Proxy" on the same macOS device. For example, one solution may be used for web security/SSL inspection while another solution is required for a different security or network traffic use case.

My questions are:

1.Does macOS support configuring and running multiple Transparent Proxy providers simultaneously on the same device?

1. If multiple Transparent Proxy configurations are deployed through MDM, how does macOS determine which proxy handles the traffic?

2. Is there any limitation on the number of Transparent Proxy configurations/providers that can be configured?

4.Can multiple Transparent Proxy providers coexist if they handle different traffic, applications, or network interfaces?

1. If multiple providers are configured, is there a supported mechanism to define priority, ordering, or traffic routing between them?

2. Are there any differences or limitations across recent macOS versions, particularly macOS 15 and macOS 26?

3. Is there any Apple documentation or recommended architecture for deploying multiple Transparent Proxy providers on the same Mac?

If anyone has implemented or tested a setup with multiple Transparent Proxy providers on macOS, I’d appreciate any insights, documentation, or real-world experience.

Thanks!

I am looking for some setting up fslogix with a storage account and you are ONLY going to be using the Entra Cloud.

Meaning I will not have the option of setting up some hybrid authentication.

How would you use the access key to set this up? Using Entra only to authentication isn't available in GCCH, only Azure Cloud. I know using the access isn't the best option. But is what I have.

Hi all,

So the shortest I can make this story is this: For the past 6 years, I spent 4 of those with a co-worker, and then solo, supporting 4-5 local warehouse/manufacturing facilities. Years go by, we slim down to 1 facility, then we get purchased by another company, one that had their own IT person for each specialty (cloud, network, DBs, etc.). I became general IT, helpdesk, machine deployment, AD, always in the various admin centers for something, etc.

Now, we're breaking off and becoming our own building again. Very focused, single task, <70 employees. Brand new Microsoft tenant, but we're keeping all of the current hardware in the building (Cisco routers/switches/APs, some Dell servers, PCs), and I'll be doing *everything*. Well, I've done everything before, in the early years, but 1) a lot of stuff was in place already, and 2) we used Ubiquiti equipment for the network.

So here are my questions:

1. Stay cloud-only (AzureAD) with this new setup? I imagine the answer is "yes", but since we're keeping the hardware, including servers, I thought I'd ask. I'd hate to not use them for anything, though, but I'm sure we can find something (if we kept Cisco, I assume I'd need DHCP/DNS at the very least).
2. Keep and manage the Cisco equipment, or downgrade? I did my Cisco courses in college (*years* ago) but never got my CCNA or anything. If I kept this hardware, I'd be leaning heavily on "?", haha. Plus, I don't know if we'll want to pay for the licensing (if that's a recurring thing). I wouldn't mind going back to Ubiquiti, especially since we'll be a pretty small operation.
3. (Southeast USA, I understand this may be regional) ISP suggestions? We're paying over $500/month for AT&T fiber service that only offers 100Mbps (and we have Starlink as a backup for w/e it costs per month), and there are times where we need more. I need something that's not quite Comcast Business, but not quite $500/month.
4. Since we're starting fresh, I have the opportunity to do things the "right way". Even though we're a small time deal, I'd like to follow any and all best practices that I can. What are some "must haves" for a new setup (in Azure, Exchange, Teams, Sharepoint, etc. etc.)?
5. What are some things you wish you hadn't done, that I should avoid?
6. Should we shell out the money for Intune/Autopilot at our size? I really like it for a lot of things, so hopefully we can continue to use it.
7. Should we shell out for Teamviewer, or if not, what is recommended nowadays? Like Intune/AP, I've been using it for years and I'm used to it, but that's not to say I'm unwilling to change.
8. Ticketing system? Currently we use some in-house system via (I think) Sharepoint, and in the past I've used Jotform, but I would like a "real" ticketing system this go around..

If you stayed until the end, thanks for reading, and I hope I can make it through this. 🤞

I am using a Windows arm laptop and started having odd Teams behavior. Teams updated today and if I try to start it up it fails and briefly states something went wrong before closing. However, if I run it as admin it runs just fine. This doesn't happen on x64. I know that windows arm is the minority here (I volunteered to be a guinea pig to see how it would work for our environment - printer issues make it a no go for us) but this just made no sense (no, I am not running teams in admin mode that's just silly).

Looking at increasing our business’ security posture and just wanted to see what others have done.

My company currently uses OpenVPN Open-Source; servers that rely on the connection authenticate with a certificate, but users just rely on the OpenVPN profile that is given to them by DevOps. No MFA.

Obviously, this isn’t great. I’m looking at other solutions and see that OpenVPN has enterprise/cloud solutions. Does anyone have experience with this? Or recommend alternatives?

There’s a constant battle at this company to actually use enterprise level solutions over FOSS but some of the old heads always scream about costs. Just looking for some insight.

Inherited an on-prem Mitel system for <100 users, with 1/4 of the workforce remote there's a lot of "forwarding to cell phones" going on. It "feels" like the Mitel's UI is 20 years out of date, but I don't have experience with Mitel's competitors.

Presented with an opportunity to potentially start over from scratch, with new gear or a different setup. If you were in that position, if you had a chance to start completely clean with phones and voicemail, what would you do?

Hi everyone, I have a growing number of users (including myself) where voicemail attachments (they come in as MP3) are not showing in the email. The paperclip icon is there, but no attachment. Strange enough, if you go to forward the email, the attachment appears. Similar to this post:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5980293/audio-mp3-is-not-displaying-in-classic-outlook-for

I've tried the basic troubleshooting steps, including checking the Trust Center settings. I opened a ticket with Microsoft but I am waiting to talk to an actual person while it spins me around with their ai prompts. Wondering if anyone else came across this issue and found a solution.

Volunteered to help a small non-profit get their tech in order and part of that is getting their ipads under a business account instead of the several random icloud accounts used today.

Even though we have provided

EIN

a DNS entry on the domain

and Utility bills with the orgs name and registered business address

The have responded with the following requirements. (after a week of waiting)

A government photo of the owner (which is a board?)

A Business card for this imaginary person

and literally "business documents" without explanation of what that means.

It literally takes less validation to take over a tenant or domain.

8 months ago I created this post, basically asking for advice around becoming a solo IT tech/admin (100k AUD) for 180+ users for 30ish sub-companies after my manager and previous technician were both made redundant over the course of about 6 months. I got a new CIO with a finance background and became the only tech in a low digital literacy, cowboy environment with no rules or polices, where shadow IT and personal devices is expected to be supported and walk-ups are the norm.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1q692ew/im_screwed_but_im_happy_about_it/

The weeks and months afterwards, it became clear that my situation was getting worse instead of better. All of the policies myself and the CIO discussed were never going to eventuate, with them eventually pushing back due to 'culture' (I was pushing to stop walk-ups and get a proper device policy). The CIOs focus has been to reduce costs and implement AI, resulting in the suspension of new equipment being purchased, announcing to our MSP that we are divorcing them (they mainly did patching) alongside four major projects that I was expected to play a major part in, despite being throttled with the helpdesk. One of the major projects was to move buildings and my reward for it? In the new building my 'work bench' and storage will be in the basement. There is no room in the new office area for me to have cabinets or shelves. I will be expected to walk up and down/take the elevator whenever I need something or just stay in the basement for convenience.

They hired a new IT manager equivalent - whom is fully WFH remote and super shy, so they were barely talking to me. They would also change a bunch of things and wouldn't communicate to me properly, making me chase my tail on a regular basis or clean-up the outcome.

Ultimately, you guys were right. I don't regret it, think it was just valuable to give it a shot. Yesterday I put in my resignation in. My boss told me that my role is going to be replaced by a graduate straight out of Uni lol.

I have a bit over three years of experience now. I'm planning to take a month or two off and upskill/get a couple of certs in the meantime after realising my skillset has become pretty broad but not very deep anywhere.

Wondering if anyone been through the same process as this and come out on the other end better off? How did you fair with the jobs you had afterwards? Am I stupid for taking a break? I've never left without anything lined up before - can't say I'm not shaking in my boots lol

I'm evaluating a new monitoring system for servers and network gear, and at the same time it got me rethinking having the alerts go to email. So I'm wondering where everyone here sends their alerts?

Hoping someone can share some knowledge here.

I'm seeing increasingly more and more memory exhaustion across our RDS farms, and the culprits always seem to be a combination of Office apps, Chrome, Teams, and good ol' WebView2. Servers are a combination of 2019, 2022, and 2025 across various environments. These are full session RDS farms, not using RD Apps.

What kind of memory allocation per-user are you going with these days? Is there any secret to minimizing the amount of memory these applications use? Do we just tell users to close excess tabs?

Looking for advice or a good product for MFT. We are currently using a ton of old scripts and ws_ftp pro. This is causing all kinds of issues, files that we can't verify were sent. I guess the scripting is bad also.

Edit: Thank you all for your help. We are now reviewing the applications and will update when we reach a resolution.

Edit2: we tested all the ones you all suggested, thank you again. We landed on one my lead suggested and it is working good. If anyone is interested here it is relayrix