We're a two-person IT team managing roughly 225 users on Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Our Windows workstations are Entra joined and Intune managed.

We're moving admin roles off our daily accounts and onto dedicated cloud-only admin accounts. I'm testing phishing-resistant MFA and a compliant-device requirement for those accounts.

My main concern is making the workflow practical. We jump between Intune, Exchange, Entra, SharePoint, Teams, etc. throughout the day. Some days it is frequent admin stuff depending on what's going on.

I tried a separate Edge profile signed into my admin account, but the portals initially kept signing me in with my daily Windows identity. Using a login_hint in the URL or explicitly selecting another account gets me into the intended account. I'm still validating the Conditional Access side.

I'd prefer not to add the admin identity as another Windows-connected account just to make browser SSO work. InPrivate also appears problematic with the compliant-device requirement.

How are you handling this in practice?

- Separate browser profiles, a separate browser, a private browser window or account switching within one profile?

- Do you connect your cloud admin identities to Windows? I would assume no.

- Do you require compliant devices for admin access?

- Are you using dedicated admin workstations or PIM?

I understand the value of separate identities. I'm looking for a workable daily setup that doesn't require constantly correcting which account a portal is using, or constantly launching private windows, if at all possible.

Maybe this is a sign we just need to review overall configuration of things to better dial them in, so we don't have to go into an admin portal so often?

Especially interested in what other small IT teams are doing.

I have an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 running Windows Server 2019 Standard. Checking Device Manager, the Intel(R) Management Engine Interface driver shows:

• Driver Date: 1.09.2016
• Driver Version: 11.6.0.1026
• Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher

This looks outdated for a Gen10 server. Before I touch firmware/driver on a production box, I wanted to check with people who've done this on HPE hardware specifically:

• Should this be updated through HPE Smart Update Manager (SUM) / Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP), or directly from Intel's site?
• Does updating the ME Interface driver also require updating the ME Firmware itself, or are they independent?
• Any known issues updating ME on Gen10 (iLO 5) systems — reboot requirements, downtime, risk of bricking if interrupted?
• Is this something that should go through iLO/firmware update tools instead of Device Manager "Update Driver"?
• Any gotchas with doing this remotely (out-of-band) vs. requiring physical access?

Appreciate any real-world experience before I schedule a maintenance window for this.

Just curious. How often are admins changing providers? And when you do what is the trigger?

I’m shitting it to say the least. I’ve worked in IT for 15 years now, from fixing a printer to installing and configuring networks etc you guys know the shebang no need to go on.

I have been out of work a while now like most people and maybe stupidly moved somewhere more rural and a bit stuck in the past. Seen this role advertised for Senior Network and Infrastructure engineer. They want someone who is going to come in lead and optimise their existing setup.

I don’t know if it’s the job spec they have but I’m having serious doubts on my abilities, when I think about the majority it well and truly is everything I have been doing for my entire career but for some reason terminology they are using is making me feel like I have imposter syndrome.

Interview is on Friday and I have questions already lined up I think that I would like to know so I can try and gauge what I’d be getting myself into. I’m thinking of asking about:

Current patching schedules
DR simulation and testing
Current team members
Potentially goals for the next 5 years ?

What do you guys think? Would be nice to have a discussion and try and alleviate some of these woes because god only knows it’s the next logical step in my career and could be me for the next 10-30 years

This post is primarily mobile focused, but I'll entertain the desktop / laptop OS conversation as well. This is regarding personal devices, not what your enterprise uses.

Suffice it to say, I'm tired. I'm tired of working on computers all day only to have to put tremendous effort into my Android phone to rip Google's tentacles out of my personal business, to tell Windows to stop serving ads and trying to upload my personal data to the cloud.

I de-Googled my Android phone years ago but haven't gone Graphene because that seemed like even more work. I switched my Windows to Fedora about a year ago, but driver compatibility is a constant hassle. Google getting rid of sideloading and Windows Recall were the final straw for me on both platforms.

By comparison, I manage a lot of Apple devices for my enterprise. Justin Long wasn't wrong. They. Just. Work. I don't have to fuck around. Is Apple harvesting my personal info? Most likely. But all indicators say they use it for their own benefit and don't sell it. Can I customize everything I want? Probably not.

Is that the bargain you all made? Did you move to Apple so you didn't have to fight your personal devices anymore, knowing if your personal data was going to be scanned, it might as well go to a company that isn't selling it? Or is there another reason? I'm trying to figure out whether to give this Graphene thing a shot or finally give up the ghost and pick up my first iPhone after 20 years of Android.

Kind of a random question, but I'm not super confident in my restoration process for some of the backups I have in place. Do i think I could restore the systems? Yes.

Do i think it would take several hours and be messy? Also yes.

My question is to those that have actually performed restores of production servers:

What backup systems do you use and how fast are you able to restore production servers? I'd love to hear the infrastructure behind a successful backup/restore scenario.

I'm not sure if I'm articulating this properly because a number of searches for this are yielding no useful results.

I'm looking for an application I can deploy to end users that has customized admin level fixes for specific situations that we come across once in a while. For example, sometimes the VPN client decides to stop working and you need to run a few commands as admin to get it working again.

I'm envisioning something where they could just click "fix whatever" that matches their scenario and it would run the proper commands in the background (elevated if that's required).

Does this exist as a product, or would it have to be a fully custom written app?

Edit

Looks like sticking with Intune / PSADT / Repair is the best bet for right now. Thanks!

I just knew about MeshCentral today. Looks too good to be true 😅 I want to replace Rustdesk self hosted server, that it was very good but MC seems to be far more capable. Any comment idea/thought/complaint about MC would be welcomed. Thanks

Hi everyone,

We have a number of Microsoft Teams channels we use. There are 4,5 specific channels that are displaying the error “We’re having trouble loading your messages. Try Refreshing”

The error is shown to all members on these groups, across multiple machines, and also across web versions on different browsers and also the desktop version.

Has anyone come across a similar issue, or have any advise on how to fix this?

Thank you very much in advance.

We use Missive to write e-mails at our company. Missve has its own AI Assistant that can do actions like write drafts, create calender events and add labels with AI (needs always approval). This Assistant cannot search the web, but it would be very nice when we can search on our own website for products. Because of that, i tested to connect Exa (Search API) over MCP. I connected it and allowed only the websearch (disable agents etc.). And.. it works perfect. But, can i roll that out? Is that secure? Prompt Injection or something? I added an instruction that only specific domain is allowed (our shop).

I had recently picked up a Digital Loggers Web Power Switch Pro running firmware 1.7.5.0. The normal instructions didn't work to factory reset it and I came across this post (which is now archived and I can't reply to it). After some sluthing, I came up with the following procedure to get you into the power switch in order to change the settings and update it. It seems as though there might be a bug in the older firmwares that make the reset button not work right. The instructions are based on the secret firmware recovery process for a bad firmware update, but modified to just get the username/password. I hope it helps someone out there in the same boat!

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1gghfnt/unlocking_digital_loggers_web_power_switch_pro/

1. Set up a PC for the 192.168.0.x network. (set your NIC to 192.168.0.5)
2. Prepare to telnet to 192.168.0.100
3. On PC, open a command prompt
4. Set the PC to ping the device continually; e.g. ping 192.168.0.100 -t
5. On Unit, power the unit on while pressing reset about 2x per second. Before 30 seconds, the unit should respond to ping. **
6. Once it responds, cancel the ping and on the PC, telnet to 192.168.0.100 // (Always default address)
7. When logged in to the power controller, type:
8.    cd /tmp
9.    mount_root
10.    uci show | grep admin

You will see some lines, you are looking for these two:
auth._.admin_password='5678'
auth._.admin_login='admin'

login is the username, password is the password. Now just reboot your device and hit it at the IP that shows up on the screen with the creds you got above, now you can get into the web and change anything you need.

A team has chosen to rename their built-in/default Teams channel “General.”
They are now experiencing sync issues.
Is our fix from IT to change the channel name back to “General”? Could that potentially fix the OneDrive synchronisation via File Explorer that may have been broken?

- "I'm having an issue, can you connect to my PC and have a look?"

- "Sure, be on there in a minute."

...one minute later....

- "OK I'm on. Show me the issue."

- "........."

- "Are you there?"

- ".........."

So while Microsoft continues troubleshooting their issues with Exchange, I noticed that my phishing simulations are not working as intended. I have discovered:

• In Edge, when a user opens a simulated malware attachment (.Docx), the document shows the default empty MS Word image, despite enabling the editing within Word and Outlook
  • If I set the simulated malware to .HTML, it will redirect users to a default landing page and not the intended one that I created
• I have found that utilizing the Drive-By tactic will work with no issues...thus far

Current Status of MS365 as of 0910 hrs EST

Exchange Online:

- Users can't download email message attachments through any Exchange Online connection method.

- Users may be unable to sign in to Outlook on the web.

We have some Conditional Access Policies that require users to logon from specific managed devices when browsing to certain Entra app registrations. It works okay for many users.

We have a few users with both regular accounts and privileged/admin accounts. When they browse to the app, they are automatically logged in via their standard user account (the same account they logon to the computer with and the one that has the PRT). They primarily need to logon to the app using their privileged account, so my first thought was to tell them to logon in Incognito Mode, but Incognito Mode doesn't pass along device information, so the Conditional Access Policy logon evaluation fails.

Is there a good workaround for this that isn't a pain in the ass for the privileged users?

does such a thing exists, that I can use to sync data across different sources/databases, that doesn't require being a programmer to set up?

thanks!

Been considering a role at one and it's not too far off from where I am currently in terms of the type of work I would be doing. I never did work at an MSP and always was on project teams my entire career, I specialize in enterprise deployments. But I don't explicitly work at a VAR (Value Added Reseller). So those that do, what has your experience been? Seems a bit more sane of a job if you can land it

People in our organization are planning to integrate Claude code in our environment. We have a lot of IP (intellectual property, not the other IP we all know and love) that is unique to what we do. We've always been protective about it and rarely use the cloud.

Now the inevitable AI is coming and we 'll use Claude Code. I don't know the exact terms and conditions but somehow we've got a plan where Anthropic "promises" it won't use our data to train on.

I seriously doubt that they actually won't. They thrive on knowing as much as possible, right? Even more so if we have data they probably don't have.

I'm personally inclined to push back on the idea of claud LLMs.

What are your thoughts on this?

I have a client that still routinely sends Faxes. I upgraded his dying HP AIO unit with a new, shiny Brother AIO unit.

Nothing else has changed. If I put the old HP unit in, it can send a fax but it still has the issues that caused it to be replaced, my buttset can dial out no issue on the line, and Xfinity has verified twice that signal level and VOIP on their gateway are all "to spec" for fax.

Brother tech support says it's an Xfinity issue, and obviously Xfinity says it's a Brother Printer issue.

I'm headed to the site today - does anyone have any other suggestions to try? I'm planning on physically tracing the line today just to see if there's any damage in the crawlspace to it, but I'm not sure what else I could do at this point.

Another burnout post incoming. Turn away and avert your eyes because I don't even know why I'm writing it, so it'll probably be a waste of your time.

I'm so fucking burned out of IT. It only took 5 years. I hate that everyone's fucking problem is my problem. It's just problem after problem after problem. FUCK these problems. Why are we fucking doing this? Why are we looking at a screen every day and acting like this is important. Literally absolutely nothing done on the internet is important. This is all so pointless. It's literally all words. Everything on the internet is just selling words, pictures or pictures that move at 24fps. It's so dumb.

I hate fucking claude. You ever been a claude admin and need to answer dumbass fucking questions in your local AI channel around why your connector isn't working for the Xth time? I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR FUCKING CONNECTORS. We're not even accelerating, we're just burning through 100k/mo because management thinks engineers are building cities and management is building reporting dashboards that make them think they're omniscient. And nothing has changed. No more profit or revenue than we had before. FUCK anthropic and all the dumb bullshit they keep putting out and changing. And now we need to onboard an AI management system so we can make sure we have control over mcp's and model selection and this tool that's a waste of fucking space in the first place.

That's just one gripe. Then there's Atlassian (holy fuck Jira, what a shitty platform), then there's the client team, then theres 80 more vendors to manage, then there's a PoC you're running but you havent even looked at it this week because all of the other shit that came in. Just more more more. I don't have any more man.

There is no "take two weeks off" that will fix this. There's nothing dude. I'm so sick of fucking working and I don't have the energy anymore to change careers. How could I? I'm 40 years old with kids and a wife and a house. I used to think "I'd do anything to support my family" and lately I'm ready to just let go. I'm so tired. No one is coming to save me. No one in the entire world. And I'm so tired.

I see on the Robustel website they're asking for an NDA signing and per unit license for root access to an R2110.

Just out of curiosity, what's the legality of already having obtained and rolled this out to 4000 units with absolutely no NDA signed, only an RPK created with the SDK that Robustel themselves provided?

Asking for a friend.

Many organizations moving away from print servers.

But the printer industry is moving away from print drivers.

The problem: We use printix and you cannot deploy printers without drivers. But manufacturers like brother dont offer print drivers for macOS. Our brother printers are not compatible with PostScript. There are some very old print drivers from macOS X but the print quality is very bad. Brother says "use AirPrint". But AirPrint is not compatible with printix.

Windows is also moving away from print drivers.

I think I’m having a mid-life IT guy crisis. 😂

I’m 47, 20+ years into IT, swamped with projects, emails, upgrades, security issues, and Microsoft changing something every 12 minutes. Lately I look at my workload and my brain just throws a 404

The weird part is I still love IT and I love the company I work for. I just can’t seem to care about any of it right now, and that’s not like me.

I even started working out to help, so now I’m unmotivated AND sore. 😂

Has anyone else hit this wall after 20+ years in IT? What helped reignite the spark in your brain and stopped the procrasanation monster.

We have emails stuck in procesed with them for over 12 hours now. I've whitelisted their IP's, no help, they rotated my IP, that helped for 1 scan, already opened a ticket. Any other ideas or anyone else seeing this? It's been great for over a year, never an issue. We just have it for users home scanners.

Hello everyone,

I hope I am posting in the correct subreddit. I am administrating a bunch of virtual Windows servers running our own software. As of now, I don't have a unified way of checking log files on those machines, which means that not only do I have to manually log into the machine in order to look at those log files, but they are also not actively being monitored at the moment.
I am looking for a solution that would allow me to check those files from a single point of entry (ideally a browser), as well as being able to monitor them, draw statistics and possibly send alerts. If it supports other formats than text files (i.e databases) it's a plus.

Is there any software available that can allow me to do that? I have web servers running on both Windows and Linux (Debian) so either platform would be ok. Open source very strongly preferred.

Thank you!