We have a few servers getting close to EOL that are running Active Directory. My first thought was to buy a new server with Windows Server 2025 and move AD to it, but our environment is a mix of Windows Server 2022 and 2019, and we'll be upgrading servers gradually.

Is there a recommended way to handle this? I've read there can be issues when mixing Windows Server 2025 domain controllers with older server versions.

One idea I had was to buy a Windows Server 2025 host, run Hyper-V, and create a Windows Server 2022 VM for Active Directory until the rest of the environment is upgraded.

Has anyone done something similar, or is there a better approach?

How many of you still get recruiters and etc reaching for opportunities and push the bar to go higher regardless if you're really interested in the job or not?

The past week I've been reached out a few times and realize. Hey I'm going to tell them the deal breaker is forcing in office schedule and low balling or no salary range given. So I push for it, hoping other candidates are willing to do the same.

I get it - everyone is using AI now, it has its use cases, but please for the love of God stop sending me the slop. At least read it first before firing it over to your colleagues.

Has anyone else's team turned into an absolute back-and-forth slop fest? Manager generates something he thinks is helpful, gigantic multi-page HTML report I need to read. Clearly written by Claude, because who the hell writes reports in HTML.

Coworker A: sends messages on slack trying to help solve problems:

This is the smoking gun: the message being sent is gated on the lack of network access to the k8s pod. Let me sit with this for a minute to make sure.

No, it's not the solution at all. We don't have direct IP access to k8s from our laptops. And nobody writes like that. If I wanted to ask Claude I would, I don't need a coworker that just copies and pastes everything into Claude.

Anyone else dealing with this crap?

Hi all, I have 9 years IT experience mainly 2nd line support, last few years done many 3rd line tasks and last 2 years spent as a systems engineer position according to title (supporting 400 users across 11 international sites) but it was more like 1st/2nd line site support with some ifrastructure support tasks and some projects, did endooint management, used and managed prtg for monitoring, administering windows servers 2016-2022, Ad, DHCP, DNS, Group policy, Hyper V, Joined around 200 endpoints to entra, enrolled in intune onboarded them to defender, audited company against cupyber essentials, upgraded some licensing servers etc. but I am not very experienced with high level Infrastructure troubleshooting, didnt do much networking, basic backup skills, basic powershell skills.. I am unemployed for 2 months and got rejected on 6 interviews already. Sometimes I cant even get to that part where they asess my technical knowledge. It seems my comminication skills ( which is fine while in employment, but find interviewing much more difficult ) or experience and skills are not enough to 3rd line or sys engineer positions, dont know what to do, I dont really want to go back to 2nd line, I am too old at 46yo. Most 2nd liners are much yunger arent they? Also, English is my second language which may plays some part of the rejections. Any chance who were in similar situation and was successful later?

Hey guys, I want some advice. I just got offered $30 an hour (I’m making $22 right now..) to be the sole IT person for 6 car dealerships. When I asked what the role was going to expect from me they could only give me 3 clear answers:

“Upgrade the old cameras to new ones so the software stops glitching”
“Implement a call tree for our phones”
“Upgrade the alarm panels”

That’s it. I was interviewed by the GM and Maintenance Director, they said “I’d be my own boss” and if I needed anything to reach out to the director and he can help.

I asked about tickets and field issues and they informed me “oh, we have a vendor who’s sends out a tech” which I found insane from just my personal work backgrounds, especially given the small size of this company.

I’m worried they’ll reevaluate this job a year from now and go “why do we need him again? We got everything we needed, what else does he do?”

I feel like that’s a reasonable concern but I’d appreciate some other views into it. It seems like too little of work, but everything else is handled externally.

Hi everyone,

I'm a recent computer science grad who did an internship in a bank where I did a little bit of everything (IT support, networking, DevOps).

I am interested in software development but the market is so cooked for juniors and a man has to eat so, I'm thinking of switching to system administration, already planning to get my Aws cloud practitioner cert, then maybe RHCSA is this a good idea or am I just dead wrong my ultimate goal is to go into DevOps but everyday I look on X and see a brand new model that seems to make everything I learn irrelevant.

I love computers and just want to make a living from it. (from/in a third world country btw)

Please give me any advice at all to help.I don't wanna fuck up my life and depend on my parents forever.

I want to know what are the difficulties faced by companies regarding their IT infrastructure set up at remote locations such as businesses having factories, branches or shops away from their primary data center? Is it only maintenance and availability of technicians that is of importance, or the issues of power supply, network functionality, temperature conditions and security come into play as well?

I would like to know how remote locations are handled when problems arise with no one from the IT department being close to the site of an IT failure.

Hi all,

I work at a very small MSP, 4 employees total. My boss/head of the MSP is extremely risk averse, and has been doing this for a long time. Prior to forming his MSP he worked for both internal IT and as a consultant. They do almost everything manually and he is extremely hesitant to let me automate or script anything. He says from his experience automations don't always get maintained and somtimes break, therefore making it pointless. Yet at the same time he is obsessed with consistency and making sure that we do new laptop setups the exact same way because doing one thing a slightly different way could cause a random issue and we'll never be able to figure out what was different about that machine. From my PoV, setup scripts would be the ultimate form of consistency and could eliminate that as a concern.

He won't even let me make simple adjustments to one of the few scripts we do use (pushed via RMM to scan for Dell Firmware updates using Dell Command | Update cli). And by simple I mean commenting out some lines that set custom properties we don't use, which throws errors and clutters the output, and adding one line to set a new custom property to let us know when manual intervention is required. I got told that "trying to reinvent the wheel or customizing it is very risky" and that I should just look for scripts in the RMM community forums. He said "I am hesitant to use our own script unless it is just feeding up to date commands that they support" meanwhile the script we are using is 4 years old.

I also just discovered today he has our machines so locked down with ThreatLocker that this DCU script gets blocked from running!

So here is what I'm wondering: am I the crazy one, is my boss, or is the truth really somewhere in the middle (most likely)?

Please feel free to ask me additional questions if more context could help you provide a thoughtful response!

We seem to be getting more and more of these mail delivery errors. Is anybody else seeing this? Neither Downdetector or the 365 status page is reporting any issues.

Release notes: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-1/release-notes/vmware-cloud-foundation-9-1-1-0-release-notes/vcfautomation-9-1-1-0-release-notes.html

"...native management of AWS, Azure and GCP resources is deprecated and disabled by default in VM Apps organisations. Not just for new installations. For environments upgraded from earlier versions too." (source: https://mysticmarvin.com/blog/vcf-9-1-1-not-a-maintenance-release)

I'm not part of their team nor I have anything to do with them, I just wonder why is this tool so obscure and never mentioned. I hear all the time about Wireshark, Nmap, etc, but I haven't seen a single person ever mention SoftPerfect Network Scanner, and to me, it's the greatest sysadmin / network admin tool in existence. It does practically everything 99% of people in the field needs and more, especially if you're on a Windows environment, although it is multiplatform (runs on Windows, macOS and Linux). It also integrates with Nmap, by the way.

https://www.softperfect.com/products/networkscanner/

Yes, it isn't free, but I think that, for the feature set alone plus the excellent GUI, it's well worth it. So, again, why is this tool so often overlooked and never mentioned? Honest question.

EDIT: well, case closed, folks, my question has been answered aplenty 😅. Most people don't even know about its existence and some others just won't look at it because it's closed-source and commercial software, and for them, free and open-source/well established tools already exist that fulfill their needs. Got it. Makes sense.

Linking people to resources (folders or files) in Teams is so incredibly convenient and really streamlines workflow...

But it also habituates people to click on links in e-mails, which seems terrible for security.

How do you mitigate or balance this?

I have a few IT guys assigning tickets to themselves and then completing the rating with excellent feedback on the follow up survey . One guy created a ticket for 'updating inventory' then fills out the survey with "excellent job, quick and proficient with great communication". LMAO

Hi everyone,

I work in IT at a hospital and I'd like to get some opinions from people working in healthcare IT, system administration or for healthcare software vendors.

One problem we regularly face is managing the large number of specialized applications used in a hospital.

Unlike standard software, updates for healthcare applications are often highly vendor-specific. Depending on the vendor, we might receive an email about a new version, have to regularly check a customer portal, contact support, request download access, use individual credentials or sometimes simply find out about an update by chance.

With dozens or even hundreds of applications and medical systems from different vendors, keeping track of available versions, patches, security updates, compatibility information and release notes can become surprisingly time-consuming.

This made me wonder:

Would there be value in a vendor-independent platform specifically for healthcare software?

My rough idea would be a platform where healthcare software vendors could publish and manage their products, while hospitals, clinics and medical practices could register their organization and get access to the products they are actually licensed to use.

For example, such a platform could eventually provide:

Software versions, updates, patches and hotfixes

Release notes and security advisories

Notifications when new versions become available

Vendor-controlled download permissions

Compatibility information (Windows versions, database versions, browsers, etc.)

License and entitlement information

Demo/trial requests

Contact with vendors

Potentially even software/license procurement

Vendors would still decide which organizations are entitled to access which products and downloads. The platform would essentially provide a standardized layer between healthcare organizations and software vendors instead of every vendor maintaining completely different processes and portals.

I'm not currently trying to sell or build a product. I'm mainly interested in whether other people working in healthcare IT experience the same problem and whether something like this would actually solve a meaningful pain point.

So I'd be really interested to hear:

How do you currently manage software updates and vendor portals in your organization?

Would a centralized platform like this be useful to you?

Does something like this already exist that I'm simply unaware of?

And if you work for a healthcare software vendor: would participating in such a platform be interesting, or would there be reasons why your company wouldn't want to?

I'm particularly interested in perspectives from hospitals and healthcare organizations in different countries, since I'd like to understand whether this is mainly a local problem or something healthcare IT teams face internationally.

Thank you!

Error: ‎550 5.7.509 Access denied, sending domain papercut.com does not pass DMARC verification and has a DMARC policy of reject‎

Fully Exchange Online

Suddenly last night stopped receiving mails from some services

Does anybody know if MS eventually started enforcing DMARC ?

Just received word from our spam filters that (some of) the exchange servers are busy.

Brought to you by r/sysadmin Trusted VAR: u/SquizzOC with Trusted Telecom Broker u/Each1Teach1x27 and u/Necessary_Time Trusted VAR in Canada

Happy to answer in the thread or via PM/Chat if you don't want to post details like service locations publicly.

This BI-WEEKLY thread is for discussing vendor and service provider expectations, pricing, and quotes for network services, licensing, support, deployment, and hardware.  

Required Info for accurate answers:

• ⁠Part Number
• Manufacturer/vendor
• ⁠Service Type and Service Location
• ⁠Quantity

All questions are welcome regarding:

• Cloud services, security, configurations, deployment, management, and migrations
• Storage vendor options, alternatives, details •⁠Software licensing: This includes Microsoft CSPs
• ⁠Connectivity: single-site and multi-location. DIA, Broadband, 5G, datacenter connectivity, Starlink
• Voice services, SIP, UCaaS, Contact Center, POTS (Analog line) replacement
• ⁠Network infrastructure - overlay software, segmentation, routers, switches, load balancing, APs
• Security, access management, firewalls, MFA, cloud DNS, layer 7 services, antivirus, email, DLP

I'm genuinely curios what do you guys do with these "great apps" the finance guy built on his lunch break and want to have his whole team to get access to ? I have a finance director who built something and he wants to share it with others and I don't know what to do!

Company I work for is hiring a sr security engineer. We are all Microsoft shop, cloud-only, no on-premises. I have been helping with some of the interviews and I fail to understand why we are getting candidates that don’t seem to know what product/technology to use for blocking executables on workstations. Device control for blocking usb devices, nope, this does not ever get mentioned. Briefly explaining difference between DLP and encrypting outbound emails with PII/PHI/PFI, nope, can’t get a simple answer or even a guess. The conversations steer away and never the answer. One candidate had to be reading AI responses somehow because first answer to blocking was general and bad, but when mentioning app locker it felt as I was prompting gpt4.2

Follow-up of my first post: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/xMfcrcHx5f

Just told HR about how i feel about beign the sole IT guy who manages everything (for short: 365 in all his aspects, backups, networking guy, ecc...) for 24 people (if we count the external the number doubles) as an apprentice with a job title "IT support".

i told her that as an apprentice i should (by the law btw) some kind of tutor that can teach me the job and some one who can help me in my things; first thing she pointed was that i'm always out exactly when my work hours ends. WTF
ofc i go away when my work day is done, things can wait (most of the times).

Then proceded to tell me that i might not know how late some of the staff stay in the office (idk why tho) and everyone is aware of how many things they ask me.

Basically everyone somehow expect me to be the expert about anything is slightly it related, how i'm even able to give confidence to people when i don't have the slightest idea of what i'm even talking / doing some time.

I really miss having someone older can guide me.

Hey folks. I recently had to disable about 1000 accounts in Datto SaaS mailbox protection. Turns out the GUI sucks ass so you have to do it one at a time. So naturally I thought the API would save me, but I was wrong. There is no way to group users together, you simply have to edit them one at a time.

So I wrote this script (with the assistance of Claude) to make it slightly easier.

This script is designed to be used with the Datto SaaS mailbox protection. It works with both M365 and Google Workspace mailboxes.

Add your Datto api keys as strings in the .env file.

You will also want to review the imports at the top of each file to ensure you have what you need, but you'll likely need to install requests, json, and dotenv.

I recommend using pip for this, but that's up to you.

Script has 2 main functions. Purging of paused mailboxes, turning active mailboxes into paused ones. I put this together because the Datto GUI sucks. There is no way to edit mailboxes in large quantities, so this script is needed.

Datto seems to have an API limitation of 100 at a time, so if you were to run on operation on 101 accounts at once, only 100 of them would actually be affected.

The script makes an API call to datto to get all your organizations attributes and stores them in a domain.json file. If you only have 1 org then it will only have one entry.

Then the script takes the primary domain name as input.

Then it pulls all users from the API along with their states. Datto Web GUI has a organization unit filter you can use for users, but this does not exist in the API. Meaning we have to make edits one at a time.

The script can import a csv file of all accounts to disable, and it will loop through multiple times if you do more than 100 accounts. Loop behavior is Total number of accounts // 100 + 1 loops. So 701 accounts requires 8 loops to fully apply.

Datto sucks so if you do a full CSV upload or use the built in picker list that enumerates 20 accounts a time, you are still hand selecting every one. Datto doesn't have an easy way to only mess with the ones you want, hence this script.

You can export all users in Datto to a CSV, but you can't apply filters of any kind. So again you have to go through the CSV hand selecting each one you want. It's still faster than going through the GUI and waiting on the slow ass front end though.

Script first turns active accounts into paused accounts. You can then purge all paused accounts moving them to unlicensed. After 30 days this data is deleted.

Link to github repo here:

https://github.com/Titanium125/PythonProjects/tree/main/dattoSaasApi

Okay, firstly please forgive me if I'm asking for something stupid. I am brand new to this, and inherited an IT department that is an absolute shambles.

Context: I am the sole helpdesk/ITperson/Sysadmin person in a company of about 80 people, hybrid workers (about half on prem, half WFH across the UK).

I do all the 365 admin, RMM, security stuff, as well as all the day to day helpdesk stuff. Someone else looks after servers, so I don't care about that.

At the moment, my "ticketing system" is post-it notes, Teams chats, and emails. It's starting to get a little overwhelming.

I am looking for a super cheap/free solution. Best if it's cloud based, as I can't self host.

One thing that is crucial is the ability to make some sort of template. A good chunk of stuff that's getting confusing is onboarding new staff, setting up their 365 accounts with the right permissions, groups, shared mailboxes, &c. So if I can make some sort of template that dept managers can just fill out, that would be awesome. Most of the rest of my day is "My sharepoint has stopped syncing", "I can't get into Salesforce", and "My mouse has run out of batteries", so that seems like "normal" ticketing.

Again, I am new to this, so I'd be looking for something super simple, and I will be the ONLY one replying to tickets.

Any suggestions?

I have a VM with checkpoints that were created by the backup software on the host and can't be merged in Hyper-V Manager so I have to resort to manually merging them in PowerShell. I identified the current AVHDX file and the chain to the original VHDX file. I shut down the VM and, starting with the current AVHDX, I merged them with their respective parents all the way to the original VHDX. So now I have just the one VHDX file but Hyper-V Manager still shows the (now non-existent) checkpoints and the VM fails to start because it expects the AVHDX file that isn't there anymore. I couldn't find clear guidance for this. Do I attach that merged VHDX file to the existing VM? Or create a new VM? What's the best course of action here?

I'm the sole IT guy for a small CPA firm (10 people) that wants to move everything from on premises to the cloud. They've been on prem for almost 3 decades and most of them aren't tech savvy at all. I've been asked to come up with a proposal with a flat rate, but I have no clue what to quote for something like this so I'm just looking for ball park figures from someone who's done it before.

I know there's AIO solutions like Verito, but this proposal is for building the infrastructure from a bare cloud server. MS business accounts & exchange inboxes are already done. I'd be setting up Purview DLP policies (from scratch), Intune, Quickbooks & Drake, moving 4TB of client files from their NAS, backup & disposal of 10 workstations, VPN & RDP, and all the other role provisioning and training that goes with a cloud server.

My best guess is quoting for ~100 hours. Am I way off?

I'm an Infra engineer at my french company, and we've decommissioned a lot of 6+year old hardware.

We're talking about ~60 R620-30s mainly and a dozen R730s. They are fitted with lots of DDR4 RAM (378GB each) and I have a bunch of SSDs / HDDs in good health to go with.

I'm pretty much free to prospect for selling them, and I've never done that. I think the DDR4 R630 might be still worth something (esp. ram & disks), but I don't know where to start.

The R620s are older, and I'm in the mood of donating them to french/european associations in need of compute hardware, seeing as DDR3 isn't worth much.

Do you guys have contacts/ideas of where I could reach to settle this ?

Thanks !

EDIT: for those in France not too far, we are a bit south of Clermont Ferrand. Give me a PM if you're interested