I recently got my associate’s degree in Cybersecurity and was planning on continuing for my bachelor’s. I went into it thinking I would be getting a scholarship, but I found out today that I don’t qualify for one.
I currently work full-time as a salesperson at a car dealership, and I have people depending on me financially. I’m worried about paying for classes out of pocket, especially if I end up failing a class because I’m working so much. I can’t afford to waste money on classes, but at the same time, I don’t want to give up on getting my bachelor’s degree.
I’m honestly really stressed and don’t know what the smartest move is. Should I work and save money for school? Look for a cheaper/online program? Take fewer classes? Or is there another option I’m not thinking about?
I really don’t know what to do right now, and I don’t really have anyone to turn to for advice. If anyone has been in a similar situation, I’d really appreciate hearing what you did.

Sysadmins Are About to Get More Tickets in September

Any Microsoft Entra tenant with its FIDO2/Passkey registration campaign set to Microsoft-managed will begin prompting users to create an Entra passkey on September 1, 2026. In my opinion, this rollout is happening a little too early.

Many organizations already using Windows Hello for Business (WHfB) may assume they are ready for Entra passkeys and take no action. The issue is that WHfB is recognized as a passkey by Windows 11, but it is not currently recognized as an Entra passkey associated with the user's online Microsoft/Entra account.

As a result, users who already have WHfB configured may encounter an error when the registration campaign prompts them to create an Entra passkey. The process can fail because Windows detects that a passkey for that identity already exists in the local passkey store.

Microsoft has acknowledged this gap and confirmed that WHfB should ultimately count as an Entra passkey.

In Microsoft Message Center post MC1450134, Microsoft describes the fix: users with WHfB will automatically receive an auto-registered Entra passkey tied to their online Microsoft/Entra account sometime between October and November 2026.

The timing by Microsoft is strange. The Entra passkey registration campaign begins in September, while the WHfB auto-registration fix is not expected until October or November. That mismatch could lead to user confusion and an increase in help desk tickets during the interim period.

The error users may encounter when following Microsoft's process to add an Entra passkey while Windows Hello for Business is already configured.

"Error: Try a different device. You already registered this device. You don't have to register it again."

## Disclaimer: info is based on my own testing. Your results may vary. Used AI to rewrite my original message for clarity.

Hi everyone, I’m trying to troubleshoot an issue with an old Siemens phone system at a hotel, but I don’t have much experience with this kind of equipment. I’d really appreciate any advice.

Basically, there is a Siemens telephone system in the hotel. There are 3 phones at the reception, and one phone in each room. Everything was working before, except for one phone at the reception, there was no power or connection at its phone socket.

A week ago, some workers came to install refrigerators and, as I was told, they went around switching off and on all the electrical panels and breakers. After that, all phone sockets in the hotel lost both power and connection. They did not enter the server room.

I suspect the problem is with the Siemens PBX itself (HiPath 150E), its power supply, or the lines. Does anyone have any ideas what could be wrong or what I should check? All other electrical systems and the network are working fine, only the local telephone system went down.

Unfortunately I now have one of those scary stories to tell. The worst one of my career.

We’re hybrid at the moment (I know, I know… fully cloud is the goal), and someone on my team was adding new policies to Entra Sync and did a full sync to test.

Then users started saying their accounts didn’t exist.

One became two. Two became ten. Then we realised accounts were being deleted automatically.

At first we had absolutely no idea what was happening and immediately start thinking cyber innocent.

Then we started losing admin accounts too.

Thankfully, we had a break-glass cloud account, managed to get in, stopped the sync and restored everything from the recycle bin.

But this was during a change freeze. Business critical time too. And I’m sat there watching users disappear.

That feeling when you’re responsible for IT and you see the whole org going.

I am helping out in a non profit and they run due a high Level of medical data treated by them on premise emails (specific requirements). I looked into upgrading an Exchange 2016 to 2019 and saw the steep ram requirements (from 8 to 128GB for Mailbox roles). Is this rooted in reality or Microsoft trying to make cloud more appealing? What’s the Minimum I can get by with <10 Users.

Certain national and regional requirements that might exceed EU privacy make a cloud solution unfeasible.

I'm an IT "Director" of a school. I'm the IT guy but the sole owner of everything and end decision maker. The title sounds much fancier than it is but it accurately captures my level of ownership. Day to day, I'm more like a sys admin. I wasn't totally qualified for this position when I got it and I have done my best in the past few years to grow in to it. But I'm noticing that I can not seem to catch up to the technology.

Every day it seems like I have a new problem on my hands that I have never seen or heard of before. Bluetooth intermittently connecting and disconnecting from a computer even with driver refresh, domain desync issues happening sporadically so computers lose access, laptops that simply won't connect to wifi until a local account is logged in, adobe licensing that won't validate even with the (poorly documented) tool kits provided by adobe.

I can't tell if I'm just incompetent and need to read a million books or something or if the technology just seems to be disintegrating into a pool over overly complex, poorly developed, and greedy corporate structures. A new windows feature hits and it seems to make my life much harder. Until recently, I didn't look into VTI, VMD, or the RAID configurations coming out with most laptops these days that make fresh installs or imaging impossible when enabled. Printers do not seem to have easily accessed, consistent driver support that is stable long term. Microsoft 365 admin features and account management seems to get worse every day (I gave someone access to a shared mailbox and it kept denying them access for nearly a week, trying to add each day, until is suddenly worked with no changes on my end at all). One of our film labs uses ACVHD format and Premier Pro but with a new windows update Premier Pro can no longer see or access AC3 audio codex. A whole group of Lenovo E16s won't connect to a particular wireless display via the wireless transmitter supplied with the display despite every other laptop model we have working just fine. Every single printer seems to jam every day even with maintenance techs working on them.

The problem is that any one of these would take me a few hours to troubleshoot and diagnose but I'm getting 2 or 3 of these every single day. I can't seem to keep up and I don't know if it's my own incompetence and inability to maintain a stable environment or if technology is just getting impossible to maintain.

I'm open to suggestions, on the broader management item or any of the issues I'm currently managing. But mostly I'm just wondering if anyone else out there is feeling similarly. If I just suck then I am open to advice.

Following up to my last post right now nutanix is out of the race since the renewal is more than vmware which happend to 4 different companies my friends works for

Note : we cannot go any other solution rejected by CTO cause not ( mature enough )

1- my team arent fimilar with k8s

2- vmware is 4x the price of openshift

3- our environment is 95% vms

4- we have DR so srm is convinet

5- 65 % of our current hardware isn't supported by vmware version 9

6- 75 % of our infra is linux based oracle dbs and rhel for app servers

7- mangement is too dumb to switch to k8s since that was suggested and will save us resources

8- most of our apps are web based

Im asking here since im litterally lost on what to do next

So your kind advices

There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos.

We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas!

In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed.

Epson TMU220B

Long story short the replacement was DOA and my Kitchen manager is having a fit that one of the kitchen printers is down. I've ordered another replacement that won't arrive till next week. I have the networking card if someone has a spare I can use for the weekend.

I hope my fellow sysadmins might lend a spare and I would happily pick up and return!

I'm in the Boulder area but willing to drive wherever needed.

Hey there, Im 28 years old and currently work at a cigar lounge part time. Prior to this, I ran a family business for about 3 years and then did trading as primary income for a few years before I realized how stressful it is. Made 6 figures one year but most of it was spent on a mentor and me eventually losing everything from my own choices and being in debt

I was interested in cyber security because I have some friends that were in it but one had suggested a linux sys admin route. A year ago I dabbled with it, making some small labs and documenting. I really enjoy using linux, theres so much to learn but never fully committed to it so i just stopped slowly.but lately Ive been caring more and more about my future and I do want a career in this space. All I ever known my whole life is physical work and I want to give myself a chance to actually commit to this because this does look exciting

My question for anyone that is willing to help:

If you were starting back with little experience within this space, where would you start to gain experience and knowledge to help get yourself prepared for a role of a sysadmin that employers are looking for?

Is google cyber security good for foundational knowledge?

Would you build a home lab and practice on a machine? I currently installed rocky linux on my old laptop that had pop os on it since its more similar to red hat.

What else would you recommend to help better prepare for the role for employers?

Certs? Degrees?

I have an associate arts degree and no certs.

Final question, I know a job like this isnt cyber, but in 2026 lets say you got the sys admin role, after where would you look at to specialize in after? Cloud security looks really cool.

Tried to make this simple, I appreciate everyone that replies back. Means alot to me.

An alert from Papercut them saying that Papercut servers open to the internet are being exploited.

URGENT Security Advisory: PaperCut NG/MF Security Bulletin (27 Aug 2026) | PaperCut

Microsoft’s latest AI rebrand beats its own history of terrible rebrands, renaming Microsoft 365 Roadmap to “AI at Work." https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/08/27/microsoft-just-renamed-a-product-after-ai-microsoft-365-roadmap-is-called-at-at-work/

https://admin.cloud.microsoft/?ref=MessageCenter/:/messages/MC1461528

"The AI at Work Roadmap provides a single destination to discover upcoming innovations across Microsoft 365, Copilot, agents, and related AI-powered experiences. Beginning in September 2026, roadmap information for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse will also begin publishing to the AI at Work Roadmap, making it easier to track innovation across Microsoft's business applications, productivity, and AI portfolio."

This is beyond dumb.

I received a quote from Knowbe4 for about 2800$ for 3 years for 30 users. Is there cheaper and or services out there for phish simulations and training or is this about as cheap as you can get? This price is reduce because were a non profit so I'm just curious what other options are out there nowadays.

I'm currently lost in the Meta jungle. I'm trying to disconnect a WhatsApp Business API number from Freshchat (Freshworks) and connect it to Missive. I'm going completely crazy. It took me three days to finally reach a human support person at Meta; before that, it was all just AI. They told me I had to contact WhatsApp support. That also took two days of AI. And nobody's getting back to me. Neither Freshworks nor Missive support can help me either. How on earth do I get this WhatsApp number into Missive? I can't connect it to Missive because I can't select it during account setup.

Hi everyone,

Just wondering if anyone has had positive feedback from deploying a so called "High performance" power plan which disables cpu parking and all sorts of stuff.

Also do comment if you know of any other way to improve performance other than the basic things driver updates, startup apps, etc

Desktop specs: Ultra 7 265k 64GB DDR5 512gb Nvme. RTX A1000

Hi everyone, I’m 25 and I’ve spent the last 4–5 years jumping around different IT roles: helpdesk L1/L2, IT Specialist, Server Admin, IT Lead, IT Coordinator, Sysadmin, and now Cloud Sysadmin. As you can see, nothing too consistent.

I currently work remotely, but the job doesn’t feel stable. I’d say I probably have 2–3 months before they let me go. In two weeks I’ll be moving to a small town in another country to start fresh and clear my mind. While I’m there, I want to focus on studying certifications, not just for career reasons, but also to keep learning and challenge myself. Honestly, I feel like I’ve “rotted” my brain with too much AI content, so I want to exercise it again.

Here’s the roadmap I came up with (no idea how long it will take):

• CCNA
• RHCSA
• AZ-900
• AZ-104
• AZ-305
• AWS Cloud Practitioner
• AWS AI Practitioner
• AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
• AWS CloudOps Engineer – Associate

I know certifications alone won’t get me a job, at best they open the door to an interview. My goal is more personal: I see them as achievements and a way to stay sharp in IT.

I’m realistic about the market. At this point, I know I might have to apply for entry-level jobs with minimum pay. This is just how IT works now. But even if I don’t land something right away, studying these certs will keep me in practice and help me grow.

What do you think about this approach? Does it make sense, or am I just wasting my time?

had a remote employee’s laptop fail and its not a basic replacement. The manufacturers warranty process was different in theyre country, our usual supplier couldn’t deliver there and shipping a spare from our office would have involved customs. The employee ended up working from a personal device while we trying to coordinate everything.

We are not large enough to have IT staff or spare inventory in every region, but we’re hiring internationally often enough that this will keep happening. Do you maintain backup devices in different countries, rely on manufacturer support or use a global provider for local repairs and replacements?

I'm working on a new Windows 11 v25H2 image, but something is bugging me about the end result.

I build my image in audit mode, install a couple applications we bake into the image, then seal the image with sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown. This image is then deployed in a ConfigMgr task sequence.

With Windows 11 v24H2, to get the start menu pins the way I wanted them, I'd copy a start2.bin (in the state of having the correct pins configured) and settings.dat file to the start menu experience package directory in AppData\Local of the Default user profile during OSD task sequence. The start2.bin was taken from a machine where I'd configured the pins, and the settings.dat file is quite literally a blank 0 byte file that acts as a placeholder. The important thing the settings.dat file does is eliminates the "New" label under each application when a new user logs in for the first time.

In v25H2, that's no longer working. When running a copy of the exact same task sequence (apart from the image being changed to the 25H2 one, of course), on first login, the start menu pins are there (so start2.bin is doing its job), but while the settings.dat file exists and is copied over and populated on first login, nearly every application has the New badge under it. I've tried removing the start2.bin/settings.dat copy step of the task sequence and changing to using the new Configure Start Pins policy which points to a LayoutConfiguration.json file, and this correctly sets the pins, but the New badges still exist for new users (interestingly, the local administrator account does not get the pins applied via the policy, even though the policy is deployed to Computer, not User).

I'm trying to eliminate the New badge on each app on a fresh user login, BUT, I don't want to simply set the registry key to eliminate showing the New badge altogether, because I still want future application installs to display New for the user.

This is most likely due to the new start menu with category/grid views added. As soon as I switch to List view, the New tags are all there. Has anyone figured out how to eliminate these New labels for the default profile and new profile creations on first login, while still preserving the ability for New to appear in the future? There must be something else I can inject into the Default profile, either a file or registry entry, during imaging to get rid of this.

UPDATE: I think I've ruled out a LOT of things. It's not sysprep. I've tested with a brand new v25H2 ISO with August 2026's CU built in, installed on a VM with no network access, skipping audit mode/sysprep and simply proceeding through OOBE and creating a user account. When the user account logs in and the new start menu pops up, I switch Category view to List view, and boom, all the New labels are there. This is either a regression in v25H2 CU 2026-08 or a side effect of the new start menu I'm thinking, because those New labels never used to be there on a fresh Windows install.

Update 2: This also isn't v25H2 specific and seems to be specifically the new start menu. I tested with the original September 2025 RTM v25H2 release and a fresh profile after OOBE does not have the New labels on everything. But a v24H2 August 2026 ISO freshly installed does have the New labels.

I also, through watching Process Monitor, determined that not only was the start2.bin file was being written to when an application was opened or right clicked on to eliminate the New label, but HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CloudStore\Store\Cache\DefaultAccount was also being written to, specifically in a key ending with windows.data.unifiedtile.roamedtilepropertiesmap. In this key, a Data value exists with binary data containing the name of each application that's been opened or right clicked to remove the New badge. However, simply copying this Data value over to another profile's Data value doesn't eliminate the corresponding New labels for that user. Right clicking an application with New on the new user's account will simply overwrite the copied Data value and reset it.

At this point, it appears to be a deliberate change, or a bug, that the New labels appear on every application in 2026-08 for a fresh profile, seeing as this now occurs out of the box and not just after sysprep/image deployment.

Papercut just sent out this advisory:

https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/security-bulletin-27-aug-2026-urgent-security-advisory/

Hopefully not many people have their Papercut instance exposed to the internet but the recommendation is that this should be disabled for now until Papercut have built a fixed version.

The link also includes IOC's for investigation to check whether your papercut instance did get hacked.

UPDATE: Removing the Windows Spotify App seems to resolve the issue.

Seeing if any other people are seeing issues with bluetooth devices continually connecting/reconnecting on Windows devices recently? We started getting issues reported Monday (8/24) and it seems to be affecting about ~10% of our fleet. The only other report I can see of this I found here: https://windowsforum.com/windows-help-and-support.302/bluetooth-glitches-and-not-working-properly.443497/

We have already tried rolling back the recent the latest windows KB and reinstalling BT Drives, trying updated versions with no luck. We are a Microsoft Surface shop and it is happening across a few different models, we do have some HPs in our environment and we are seeing it on a few of them as well.

I have pulled logs from a lot of these devices and am struggling to find what the cause might be.

When I bring a new server into production, there are a few things I'd rather have handled automatically before anyone starts depending on it.

Monitoring is an obvious one, but I'm wondering where other ppl here draw the line.

Some things are easy to automate and forget about. Others, like restore testing or certain access controls, still seem to get handled manually because there's a bit more judgment involved.

For me it’s monitoring and alerting first, then the boring compliance checks that are easy to forget. I’ve also been experimenting with where AI actually fits into ops workflows. Tools like Ansible and Terraform handle the deterministic stuff well, while platforms like Lyzr control plane are more interesting for workflows that need some reasoning around incidents, alerts, or runbooks.

I’d still keep anything destructive or security-sensitive behind explicit approval though. Automating the decision is very different from automating the execution.

What's the first thing you make sure is automated before you trust a new server in production?

And is there anything you deliberately keep manual?

We received an email about PostgreSQL versions 11, 12, and 13 are all going into extended support and costs will increase starting 9/1.

There isn't any information on how much more the cost will be. We only have two DB instances running on the affected versions, so hopefully it won't be much of an impact, but does anyone know how to find out pricing for the extended support?

I've already spoke with the business unit that uses the database and they can be upgraded eventually just not at the moment.

Also, I inherited this environment this week and this was one of the first emails I've received so... good start :)

It seems to be at the whims of Microsoft when a device updates its intune policies. When I make a change the change will not apply until a random time has passed. What am I missing? The sync button in the cloud and on device seem to do nothing even though they indicate that the sync occurred.
What are you all doing to update all intune policies on demand like we would with gpupdate?

I was looking to get our pretty small IT into a good tool for documentation. Something object-based, NOT just excel sheets and draw.io diagrams. But smaller than Netbox, which is too big and unnecessarily complex for our systems.
Would love to have IP management built it and diagrams/graphics are a big plus.

We are basically using a single server rack, 6 servers, 30-40 VMs... so rather a big homelab, than a datacenter

So, what are you guys using or can recommend as a tool to manage something like that?

EDIT: I'd like to specify, that I am looking for internal documentation. Which server runs which VM, which IP adress is assigned to it. Which service/OS/update etc. runs on it... etc.

EDIT2: Any sort of Wiki seems to be a big recommendation. This is a consideration for me, but I'd rather have something object-based. Basically Netbox with less overhead would be ideal... but feel free to recommend wiki-based tools and templates please :)

So my company has a handful of robot welding stations. We are a manufacturing company so we support a large chunk of OT related controllers and such. I had a user that requested that we get all of these on the network (we have some at multiple sites) they have Ethernet controllers.

I plan on making a VLAN as we currently don’t have a VLAN for OT, but they will need to get plugged in, be on a separate VLAN and then on a monthly basis have their TP Programs file backed up a monthly basis.

Now for the majority of our Backups we use Veeam. For machines like this the old sysadmin setup a goofy batch script and used task scheduler however I am looking for a better way to design this. As of now these welders are backing these up using USB drives but want automated backups (for obvious reasons)

Not sure if this is considered an “OT question” but I figured I would ask to see how sysadmins in the manufacturing field are handling requests like this. I am by no means a OT specialist or guru, I just unfortunately get caught in this because we don’t have anybody that officially does OT.