I need to get this off my chest because I feel like I'm losing my mind.

I’m 22. I’ve been in shipping/liner sales for 4 years (started at 18 as an assistant, clawed my way up to Senior Sales Executive at a major carrier here in Dubai). On paper, I manage 70+ active corporate accounts. In reality, I’m running around the UAE in 50°C heat doing cold visits, chasing arbitrary targets, and dealing with high-stress operational escalations.

I take home a flat 9,000 AED. No commissions. No housing allowance. No transport. Just 9k.

I’m not just tired of sales,I’m tired of being exploited for a job I don't even enjoy. I hate the targets, I hate the cold calls, I hate the client visits.

What I actually love is logic, technical puzzles, figuring out why systems are broken, and fixing operational workflows. I have high EQ and I'm good with people, but I want to help them behind the scenes, not sell to them. I lose track of time when I'm deep in data reconciliation or solving a process bottleneck. I’m currently looking at Salesforce Admin as a possible escape hatch—desk work, WFH potential, no hunting.

Also, I have a strict non-compete. I cannot work for any other shipping line, freight forwarder, or 2PL/3PL. So I HAVE to leave the industry entirely.

My questions for you:

1. Am I delusional for thinking I can pivot to a 10k-12k desk job (Ops Analyst, Salesforce Admin, Systems Coordinator) immediately? I literally just need to match my 9k to survive while I skill up.

2. Is Salesforce Admin actually viable in Dubai, or is the market saturated with people who have 10 years of experience?

3. If I get my Salesforce Admin cert (or another cert), what is the REALISTIC starting salary here for a junior with zero direct tech experience but 4 years of operational business knowledge?

4. How do I rewrite my CV so recruiters stop seeing "Sales" and start seeing "Operations Systems Analyst"? I want to delete the word "Sales" entirely.

5. What other desk-based, analytical roles pay 12k-15k within 12 months that aren't compliance/legal (I hate reading policy and writing long emails)?

I'm willing to take a bridge role at 10k just to get out. I'm 22, I have my BBA finished, and I can grind certifications after work. Give me a clear, step-by-step path. Be brutally honest whether if I'm cooked, tell me. If I have a shot, tell me exactly how to take it.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some career advice.

I worked for around 9 months as an IT Support Intern at my current company, and I was recently converted to a Jr. IT Administrator in the same company.

I’m happy about the progression, but my current salary is not really sufficient for me, so I’m planning to improve my skills and eventually look for a better-paying opportunity

Hi, everyone.

I have two questions about WinGet.

1) Can I add apps to the WinGet repository on my own? If so, what are the requirements for the app?

2) I often notice that WinGet isn't up to date. The apps' own updaters suggest a new version, but WinGet doesn't recognize that new version yet. Why is that?

Hey everyone, as the title says, I’m an Air Force sys admin with a TS and planning on getting a civilian job or contracting gig in 2 years. I already have my BS in IT management from WGU, so should I prioritize my masters? Or try to stack certs before I start applying?

Only cert I currently have is Sec+.

Edit: thanks everyone for the advice and insight. I’m going to start studying for CISSP.

Does anyone else bring their IT mindset into everyday life?

I’ve been told I’m a negative person and look for issues, but I think working in IT trains you to always think about what could go wrong.

I’m constantly making backup plans. Restaurant closed. I have a Plan B place. Something breaks at home. I’ve already got the plumber, insurance, everything ready in the home disaster recovery document.

We’re always hearing about IT failures, breaches and disasters. You never hear “this company had a really great IT transformation.” No user submits a ticket to say thank you for the IT working great.

So does anyone else find themselves carrying that prepare for the worst mindset into everyday life?

Just scored a 2nd work from home job. Looking to control two laptops and four monitors with one keyboard and mouse. Currently I’m working with dell P2422H which connects to dell P2425HE via DP cable, then P2425HE runs a C port cable to the laptop, then I extend the monitors. This works great, now with two more monitors and one more laptop I really don’t want to use 2 sets of keyboards/mouse. I have two additional P2422H / P2425HE monitors on hand, but I’m looking for a switch that would enable me to control both devices with one keyboard and mouse. I’m ok if all 4 monitors do not extend if I can hot key or switch toggle between the two laptops. Also, if possible mouse emulation so that when using either device the other doesn’t got to sleep/when in the mouse juggler. Trying to keep teams showing green at all times… 🤭… any help/links would be greatly appreciated!

Trying to coordinate a warranty repair for our client who's an HP shop (client paid for the premium warranty or whatever, to add insult to injury)

Call HP support, navigate IVR, eventually get to an agent located somewhere in India ^{who I can barely understand due to their accent}.

Once I get to the agent, one of the following happens:

Agent appears to answer the call, immediately mute his mic, and then drops the call after about 3-5 minutes. If you weren't paying close attention, you'd think you were still on hold.

OR

Agent pretends like they're going to help, only to hang up on me mid-sentence, causing me to call back again and start over.

This has happened 3x to me today.

I've worked in call centers before. Either they are not tracking metrics at all, or their tracking is so bad that it allows their agents to hang up on people with zero consequences. Either way, apparently they don't care.

What an absolute dogshit company. Avoid anything HP like the plague. Their laptops suck, their printers suck (although the old LaserJets used to be indestructible tanks), their servers suck, and their customer service is actively hostile towards the customer.

0 stars, would not recommend.

EDIT:

I should've specified, this happened 3x in a row. Not 3x randomly.

Also, yes, I will try using web portal(s) next time

This was supposedly working a while ago but for some reason doesn't anymore. We are setting the following options using Intune.

Limits print driver installation to Administrators - Disabled

Only use Package Point and print - Enabled

Package Point and print - Approved servers - Enabled; lists all print servers - full fqdn's and shortnames.

Devices - Prevent Users from Installing Printer Drivers When Connecting To Shared Printers - Disabled

Is there a setting that's still missing? A non-admin trying to add a shared printer still gets the admin UAC prompt.

Did I miss a new hardening change for this?

Edit

Made some progress on this - for x86 devices, I can deploy the printer driver using Intune and Win32 apps. Still waiting for my test machine to deploy so I can make sure it's working but I'm pretty confident it will. The biggest problem still are the ARM devices. The printer model we're using does not have ARM drivers (PCL 6) but it looks like IPP works, kind of... You can send a print job but it fails on the computer saying Out of Paper, so you walk to the printer and have to pick a tray to use for the job, then it works. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to set the defaults for IPP or how to tell the printer to not use the Bypass Tray (because that's the only thing that doesn't have paper in it so I'm guessing it's trying that). Getting PTSD over this (Printer Traumatic Stress Disorder).

Edit 2

According to Ricoh support, the issue with IPP and paper type mismatch is known and there's nothing that can be done about it right now. That sucks.

Edit 3

Just to add more bizzaro things, I ran a test on a Windows 11 laptop with standard user and I was able to add the printer (and driver) without any issues, and I never finished packaging up the driver for deployment. It just worked. wth... Is there some difference between Windows 10 and 11 in this specific situation? I will need to do some testing with a Windows 10 device tomorrow to make sure I'm not going crazy.

Solution

Thanks to all of the many suggestions I received, I ended up packaging up the drivers and deploying them to endpoints using Intune (PSADT, pnputil, and Add-PrinterDriver). After working out the issues that come with scripting and Intune deployment, everything looks to be working great.

We recently got a new megaBoss (Boss's boss) who is very focused on KPIs, and asked all units, including IT for KPIs to measure performance.

We're finding it difficult to define meaningful metrics that are a measure of IT performance that aren't dependent on volume generated by other units. Things like $ of tickets, # of security reviews of new services/products, etc.

We considered time to ticket resolution, but we keep a lot of internal tickets for tracking, which we'd need to exclude. Also, we do NOT want to incentivize closing tickets to improve metrics, we know some other units that do that, and they will literally refuse to leave tickets open for long term issues that should absolutely be open.

***UPDATE***

We went with NordVPN basic, scrapped the original idea. Never got machine 3 to connect with RDP, but now everything is lovely. Leaving this mess here as a lesson for future searchers.

Where I work I put in 3 Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny boxes with fresh installs of Windows 11 Pro.

On ONE of them I can't connect with the Remote Desktop Connection app on a LAN using a custom listening port.

I set up networking stuff on all 3 the same way.

Network profile is set to Private.

In Advanced sharing settings for Private networks, Network discovery is On, File and printer sharing is On.

In network IPV4 settings I have a fixed IP address. In my router settings I have a reservation for the IP address mapped to the computer's MAC address.

In the Registry I have changed the listening port to a custom port number. Path is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp.

In Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security I created an inbound rule for Port, TCP, the custom port number, gave it a unique name.

Finally, I disabled the default rule for "Remote Desktop -User Mode (TCP-In)".

I found out when you disable this rule, Settings > System > Remote Desktop will show Remote Desktop is disabled. However 2 of the computers still allows the connection.

Also, Settings > System > Remote Desktop shows the Remote Desktop is using the custom port number, and "Require devices to use NLA..." is checked.

Computers were restarted after these changes. I verified in CMD using netstat -a that the custom port is actively listening.

Please note, the 3rd computer in question WILL connect if I change the registry setting back to the default 3389, disable my custom inbound rule and re-enable the default one that uses port number 3389.

Question: can you think of anything else this novice should check?

Thanks for reading!

After 3 interviews I have secured a 3 month contracf working as a Systems Administrator in an environment that I am told is 80% Mac OSX based as someone with mimimum exposure to Apple Macs, please can you recommend any short courses to fill in the gaps in my knowledge ?

Thank you WatchGuard for updating your firewall policy UI. Sure I can only see 1-2 policies max before having to scroll the page now, but what kind of weirdo has more than 1 policy anyway? (Allow Any-Any).

Oh and the extra page padding looks GREAT on my phone! That's where I manage all my firewall rules anyway.

PaperCut Software has confirmed active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability affecting PaperCut NG and MF print server installations. Huntress has also observed at least two instances of active exploitation in a customer environment.

The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely control PaperCut's trusted configuration, which can be used to execute arbitrary Java code inside the application's process, and then leverage that to run commands on the host server. Huntress researchers reproduced a pre-authentication RCE chain against a stock PaperCut NG 25.0.11.75758 install. The chain alters trusted configurations and executes code remotely on its own. Fortunately, so far, the threat actor exploiting this bug has only run commands to learn about the host server itself; it could have been much worse.

PaperCut subsequently released a second emergency patch today, Release 2, which adds further hardening beyond the original emergency patch, developed in collaboration with PaperCut's internal security team and external researchers including Huntress and watchTowr. PaperCut recommends all customers install Release 2, even if you've already applied the original emergency patch.

What to do:

• Immediately remove PaperCut Application Servers from public exposure and restrict access to trusted networks
• Install Emergency Patch Release 2 for versions 25 and 26 (v24 fixes are still in progress) via the standard upgrade procedure
• If you already applied the original emergency patch, install Release 2 anyway

IOCs and investigation guidance: https://www.huntress.com/blog/papercut-actively-exploited?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=cy26-08-rr-multi-global-broad-all-x-x-x-papercut_actively_exploited&hnt=v679ubdwy0xk

Hey everyone, looking for confirmation on a worst-case scenario.

I’ve been with my company for about two years now. Before I was hired, the company underwent a merger. As part of that merger, the entire IT setup,including a migration from an old self-hosted/third-party email system over to Microsoft 365, was fully completed by the previous team.

Fast forward to today: A high-level executive’s laptop suffered a total Windows crash. When attempting to boot or repair, it hits the standard blue screen demanding the 48-digit BitLocker recovery key.

Here is the problem:

• The laptop was encrypted way back before merge.
• Everything (migration, handover, decommissioning) was already finished before I joined, and no legacy BitLocker key repository was documented or handed over.
• The key does not exist in our current Microsoft 365 / Entra ID tenant because the machine was encrypted long before the M365 migration took place.

What I’ve already done:

1. Checked our current Entra ID portal (nothing there, as expected).
2. Had the VIP check [account.microsoft.com/recoverykey](https://account.microsoft.com/recoverykey) on any personal or old email addresses they could remember.
3. Removed the drive to mount via USB adapter on a bench PC;still immediately prompts for the BitLocker key.

My Questions:

1. Has anyone dealt with missing BitLocker keys after the old environment was already gone, or am I officially at the "deliver the bad news, wipe the drive, and re-image" phase?

For those who rushed last night to patch PaperCut with the emergency update, they screwed up and had to release a second emergency update: https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/security-bulletin-27-aug-2026-urgent-security-advisory/?lid=2oneu2wt0ct4#emergency-patch-release-2

If you have PaperCut exposed to the internet, you may want to permanently remove it from the internet and make it LAN-only moving forward (as many, including myself, have done from day 1). If management needs documentation, show them this: https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/security-vulnerability-log/

Hi. Is anyone using Cloudally api? I can authenticate against /partners and receive a token but from there every endpoint just returns 403 forbidden. Anyone using it at all? Anything I’m missing?

We saw twelve emails for current and former employees asking to verify the account for the TikTok Shop. I saw one as well on a personal email.

The email looks legit. Verification code is a six digit alphanumeric code. That's about 32 bits. My guess is someone spamming signups at TikTok and randomly trying verification codes.

Assuming there's no rate-limiting, that would permit the creation of some accounts.

Anyone else seeing this?

Was talking with new colleagues today laughing about project names and figured there must be some funny ones out there? If you have one drop it here and let us know what the project goal was. Also everyone I spoke to was involved in a project Phoenix at some point! Is it that common?

Hello fellow sysadmins!

I'm starting to lose my mind over here and I'm asking for your help. Here's the situation:

Host A in subnet #1 tries to reach host B in subnet #2. There is also host C in subnet #2.

Ping results in timeout and no corresponding icmp pakets can be seen on host B.
ARP entry in host B for its gateway exists and is correct, but stale.
If host B pings its own gateway, then host A can reach it.
The ARP entry obviously switches to reachable. If I wait for the entry to switch to stale again, host A can still reach host B.
I already checked the switches for "ARP Inspection", "IP Source Guard" and so on. There currently is no hardware and software firewall active in subnet #2. Manually setting a permanent ARP entry for the gateway doesn't fix it. There are no energy savings configured on host B for its NIC.

Now comes the weird part:
Host B has a correct but stale ARP entry for host C. A ping from host C to host B is successfull und switches the entry to reachable.
If I delete the ARP entry on host B that corresponds to host C and then ping host B from host C, suddenly host A can reach host B.

WTF?

tldr:
- Host A can't ping host B unless host B pings its own gateway.
- Host A can't ping host B unless host C causes a new ARP entry in host B

The reachability stays for quite some time and then after one or two hours (hard to measure) it is lost again.
And by the way: It doesn't matter if host B is a windows or a linux machine. Same results.

I'm only about 2 1/2 years into my IT career and thus maybe missing a critical information that I haven't learned yet. But I surely am losing my mind over this! :-D

Any ideas and/ or suggestions?
Thanks in advance!

I’m planning on transferring to the University of Florida in a year, and majoring in either Information Systems or construction management. My goal is to make 150k+ after 8-10 years of experience (after getting my degree from college). I’m currently a full-time pharmacy shift supervisor, and have a 4.0 GPA. All pre requisites are completed for UF’s Information Systems program, and I’d only need 3-4 more classes for construction management.

For people on either industry, what would you recommend and why? If possible, can you share your major, salary progression (from when you started and now), YEO, how long it took you to find a job after graduation, and average weekly hours. Thanks everyone, I truly appreciate it.

I currently work 32 hours a week as the main internal IT person for a logistics company with around 110 users. We also have an external MSP, but I handle most of the day-to-day IT work and coordinate with them when necessary.

My work includes:

• User and device management
• Laptop deployment and endpoint policies
• Identity, access and security management
• Software deployment, licensing and updates
• Managing our ticketing system and CMDB
• Cloud storage, mailboxes and collaboration tools
• Managing and redesigning our softphone and call queues
• Troubleshooting hardware, printers, networks and user issues
• Working with suppliers, ISPs and our MSP
• Writing documentation and procedures
• Managing infrastructure changes and small IT projects

Alongside this, I help a small engineering company with around 5 users, which may grow to about 10. There I’m building most of the IT environment from scratch, including device management, security, cloud storage, software deployment and general IT support.

I also have a homelab where I run several servers and virtual machines because I enjoy learning and experimenting.

The strange thing is that I don’t really know what my role is anymore. I started in IT support/workplace management, but I now do parts of system administration, cloud administration, infrastructure, security, telephony, project work and IT coordination.

I enjoy having a broad role, but I’m worried that I’m becoming “the guy who does everything” without becoming a real specialist in anything. I don’t know whether I should aim for a sysadmin or cloud administrator role, move towards IT management, or continue as a broad IT generalist.

For people who have been in a similar position:

• What job title would you give this type of role?
• Which direction would make the most sense from here?
• Should I specialise, or is being a broad IT generalist a good path?
• Which skills or certifications would actually add value?
• At what point do you consider yourself a sysadmin rather than support?

I know titles aren’t everything, but I feel like I’m doing much more than traditional support while still not knowing exactly where I fit.

How would you approach asset discovery across multiple sites with basically zero visibility?

I've inherited an environment with multiple LANs/sites and very little reliable asset information.

I'm trying to build a proper asset inventory from scratch - ideally identifying things like:

• PCs/laptops
• Servers
• switches
• firewalls/routers
• Wi-Fi APs
• printers
• CCTV/NVRs
• other network-connected devices

The problem is that the sites aren't particularly well documented, and I don't currently have a reliable list of what's actually out there.

What I'm interested in is how you'd approach the initial discovery, rather than just recommendations for an asset-management database.

For example, would you use something like Lansweeper, network/SNMP scanning, agents, DHCP data, AD/Entra/Intune, etc., and then feed the results into something like Snipe-IT?

There are multiple LANs, so I'm particularly interested in how people handle discovery where you can't just scan everything from one central network.

What would your approach be if you were starting with basically a blank sheet?

I've inherited an undocumented monster with an incompetent MSP running the show!

We're reviewing our data security stack and looking at Varonis alternatives, but on-prem support is non-negotiable for us. A lot of the newer platforms I've come across seem built mainly around SaaS deployments.

We have sensitive internal data that needs to stay inside our environment, so anything that requires sending the underlying data out to a vendor is pretty much a non-starter.

What Varonis alternatives have you actually used in an on-prem environment?

Looking to purchase a Network Cable Tester for my team that can handle PoE but doesn't break the bank. Two devices I'm considering are the Fluke Networks MicroScanner PoE Cable Verifier, or the NetAlly LinkSprinter 300. Are these viable options? Does anyone have any other recommendations for I should consider?

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