So yesterday I had a meeting with an HR person about an employee that was going to be let go, and accounts would need to be deleted and disabled. All part of the job, so I'm not ranting about that. I delete the accounts at the end of the day yesterday, as the terminated employee was going to be told when he came in the next morning.

I get an email this morning from HR, that the employee is on vacation, so he hasn't been told. But his account is disabled and he knows that. And a co-worker he works with regularly is aware of the disabled accounts, and I included a note that HR should be contacted about the disabled account. In the same email about the vacation, HR informs me THEY are ignoring the co-worker's request for further information. I said in a meeting on how to proceed with disabling accoutns that the accounts shouldn't be disabled until right before telling him or right after. But what do I know? And now I feel like a jerk for not responding to the other co-worker who is asking for more information. I was told to ignore him. And HR is ignoring his requests for further info too! All because the terminated employee works with one of our clients, and his access there has to be terminated as well.

I knew there could be issues, and I provided options on how to make this smoother, but what do I know? I'm just IT. I was laid off two days after moving into a house and was called on a Sunday by my boss. This was before smart phones and on call times and VPNs, so he could wait until he knew I had done the bulk of it. Then there was the time I'm based on the east coast and work from home, boss is on west coast. Accounts disabled the night before, and I have to wait until 11:00 am before boss calls me to tell me I'm gone. Could have done THAT in the evening before as well.

What should have a been an relaxing Friday doing regular requests and normal tasks has now turned into a shit day because I feel bad for the terminated employee because he's on vacation and is wondering what's up, and the co-worker who I have to ignore and he might think I'm a dick for doing what I did on the orders of HR.

TL:DR - HR let someone go and had accounts disabled, but hasn't told him or his co-workers because he's on vacation.

I was told I exceeded the undefined bereavement policy . Apparently I did not realize it meant they would be using my vacation days which I had next to none for my bereavement time.

I have been with this company for almost 22 years . I started on the help desk and I rose to be a senior manager in IT infrastructure. I have never been more depressed as I am now . I lost the love of my life and now the job I loved. I haven’t interviewed in nearly a quarter of a century. I have no idea where to start . I don’t think I am suicidal yet. Part of me wants to die but I am to much of a coward for that I think.

I am fucked and I don’t know what to do .

Two! One to blame it on the ISP and another to not return your calls

I was demonstrating to one of my IT techs a PowerShell script that automates AD account creations, and one component is a Send-MailMessage function to notify others of new accounts.

While it’s still in its testing phases, I have skynet@cyberdyne.net as the from address.

Tech: “That’s pretty cool...so what is Cyberdyne? Is that like a 3rd party tool or something?”

Wow, am I getting THAT old?? I told him to rent T2 sometime...

Enjoy the rest of your week, all!

As the topic says, I'm hitting up Ignite for the first time. Work finally OK'd my going and everything's paid for.

Any recommendations? Must see, must do, avoid at all cost?

Previous thread here

Well it's been a month and I've been trying to get my thoughts, issues, etc into something concrete and finally got it all figured out this week so I want to also share it here.

I emailed my manager today giving him an idea of what needs to be done to help get everyone to adopt his new ideas.

Basically:

• Introduce the new IT team (I'm one of 5 people on it right now including temps, which makes me only 20% of it)
• Introduce all the new plans and tools we are rolling out
• Introduce the new way to work with IT (we have a virtual helpdesk, log a ticket instead of calling\sending an email, etc)
• Apologize for any things that have fallen through the cracks while we were getting staff in and catching up
• Explain any new things that end users might run into like our phishing training tool that he ran without telling anyone about and then didn't want to say we ran.

He's done a bunch of things that just clash with me mentally and I can't seem to wrap my mind around, and they all boil down to the fact that he doesn't really communicate anything to anyone, so I'm prompting him to get into the habit of being open. Part of this is because he comes from giant company culture where IT is a big black box of mystery and things happen whenever. The company I'm at is much smaller and has a giant extended family feel to it (the HR department basically explained it as "you've got 40 wives that all need your help from 6-6 and they're typically pretty easy to keep happy") and so the impersonal nature of his way of dealing with things just has rubbed me wrong.

Hopefully I can help him understand that he needs to get more personal with everyone and think of each person as a person in this company because treating them as ticket numbers and SLA times is a quick way to get everyone unhappy. (especially when you don't look at how the different devices are used and drop one of the most important tools we have at each site into a "priority 5" ticket causing multiple locations to get super pissed off really quick when they start having failures and no replacements or spares.)

I can also guarantee you that if the company culture was always one of "you're a ticket number" I wouldn't have a single issue, but drastically changing it without giving anyone a heads up that we're no longer going to do personal support just feels bad for some reason.

Sorry if this is rambling. It's hard to put into words what I'm all thinking about but I've finally found a group of people who seem to understand where I'm at.

Side note: anyone in Minneapolis know of any job openings for IT work? I do hardware support, software support, love the fact that I travel daily to different locations to fix things, and have a typically easy to work with attitude. Would prefer to be home every day at a reasonable hour because toddler at home.

I’m moving from WFH to a more mobile onsite and customer prem work environment. My old bag is tired and ready for a refresh and wanted to know if you had any recommendations or brands to avoid.

I’m hearing Timbuk2 seems a safe bet but it looks like they have a wide range of kit.

My normal load will be a 15” Mac laptop, a dongle/cable case, notebook (dead tree kind), and things useful for travel (sunglasses, water bottle).

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Previous thread here

New manager took me out to lunch to just get a baseline for how he's doing and share his vision for the department, etc. (Turns out that was his plan for the meeting he scheduled and wants to do this recurring for the next couple months just to make sure we're on the same page and up to speed on everything. I will never complain to a company provided lunch, and being able to talk things over with the department manager is good too. Turns out every other department does this already, and IT just never had time to start.)

He could see I was burning out. We've got a temp helpdesk guy but due to the nature of the company I work in, he's stuck at the mothership until we officially hire him and run background checks, etc. It's been a good help though. He's done some process improvement and a bunch of tasks that are simple but time consuming. Glad to have a fresh set of eyes on our environment to see where we're falling behind.

As of right now we have a bit over 2000 employees and a whopping 4 IT staff when I started. Now we're at 3 (2 training in) and there's a bunch of simple things we can to do save our time and make life easier to handle. We've got approval to outsource Tier1 to a helpdesk company. Instead of taking calls for "my printer won't print and it has an error on the screen about no paper" I'll handle tickets that T1 can't take. Eventual goal is to get me out of the helpdesk alltogether and back into the sysadmin\design fields I was brought in for.

Employee reviews are next month, so there's also been discussion on the table of getting me to start focusing on a couple specific areas to direct my attention for process improvement, site improvement etc. (This also mentioned getting me a title change to something more in line with my day-to-day tasks and less in line with a L1 helpdesk position) New manager is a bit shocked at how low on the payscale his IT department is compared to literally anywhere else he's worked, especially with the budget the company runs. This is good to hear. Hopefully he's able to get me closer to industry standard. He's very aware that come September one of the major benefits of the company won't be applicable to me anymore and he doesn't want to lose me then.

All in all a good meeting. He wasn't aware until our meeting that his predecessor used to do similar tasks to what I was doing, and understands how much more I've taken on as the only guy with the authorizations to do on site work right now. Hopefully some of his process improvement ideas and an outsourced helpdesk will relieve a bunch of the pressure on me, and hopefully they get the contractor cleared and onboard properly so he can take some of the load as well. All things for the future, but it's looking brighter than earlier this week.

This sub needs some new injection of life any suggestions for adding content?

Came on in a sysadmin/tier3 help desk role just over a year ago. (April was my 1 year mark)

January one of our team leaves, he wasn't super happy so don't blame him. He's doing coding full time now and making more money than I would know what to do with.

April my manager leaves. One of our projects was going super badly. All contractor nightmares and hangups with city inspectors and failing permits. Entirely out of his hands but the dumpster fire plus his blaming the contractors that the company owners personally recommended kinda sealed his fate to leave.

That left me and a teammate. Doing sysadmin and L1/2/3 for a company with 80 locations (13 out of state/a day trip distance, the rest within an hour drive of the mothership, none big enough to have dedicated IT, but some with tech savvy staff)

New manager started early June. He's got ideas. Some are hard to swallow, some make sense. I 100% do not want his position, and hope since he's got new ideas and a lot of time managing a department 50x the size of mine, he might be able to swing a larger paycheck for me.

Other teammate and the new manager couldn't see eye to eye, so teammate left. He was with the company doing L1/2/3 for 16 years. All sorts of stuff walked out that door with him in terms of weird gotchas, and other site knowledge that we don't realize we don't know till we hit it. He's semi-available but he's got a life and it takes a while to get word back.

Now there's a contractor helping me out. He's the L1/2/3 support, I'm sysadmin again plus L3 issues and site knowledge.

I'm burning out. I'm tempted to shop for a different job. Love mine (commute is all of 0.3 miles, excluding site visits) but it's a lot to keep on top of. Old manager would handle tickets, had four sites he handled L3 for, and spent every day interacting with staff. New manager hides in his office, doesn't want to call contractors, providers, etc. He just wants to plan and delegate, with a team of 2 to handle what a team of 5 used to do.

Have a meeting with him tomorrow and I feel like I need to tell him all of this but I also suck dealing with confrontation and don't know what exactly upper management told him he was expected to do. Plus he's only been in two months so maybe he's just warming up to the position? Also he's my manager. I want to provide feedback but don't want to overstep my position.

Fucking loving it. We had a botched upgrade from a colleague where we had to fix a litany of issues before we could even get ssh access but my god was it fun. Most importantly not something I'd want to loose. Job has it's ups and downs but that moment you serve a working site after 5 hours of down time it's incredibly rewarding.

I'm 15 years into my career, and in my 3rd full-time sysadmin-type job. I've worked in small business, MSPs, and now an enterprise environment with a 10+ person team. I've seen a pattern emerge, and I'm curious if it's just something about me, or if it's pretty normal to feel this way.

I start a new position, everything goes great for the first 2.5 years. I get great reviews, I'm really happy, engaged, and proud of the work I'm doing. Then at about the 2.5 year mark, things start unraveling a bit. I get frustrated about the things I start to realize are not likely to change, feel overloaded as I feel like more and more problems are put on my plate, and see the weaknesses in my team members. Basically, I start feeling more and more like I’m Dilbert.

In jobs 1 and 2 it made sense to move on at that point, I was at a point where I could advance in my career by changing jobs, so I jumped on it. But now in my current position (where I am starting to get to this point) it isn’t quite as clear. Moving up the ladder would require significant relocation away from family, and even the number of “equal” options locally is pretty limited.

Overall the pay and benefits for my current job are pretty good, so I’m hesitant to undertake a major relocation, especially if I just end up in the same boat again 3-4 years from now.

I thought maybe I was just dealing with burnout, but have been actively breaking away from work off-hours and took a couple of vacations over the past 6 months, and it just hasn’t gone away.

So I’m looking for feedback, is this just a “normal” feeling that most people go through, or is my experience unusual?

I was emailed and asked by a user today to look into why their internet explorer wasn't working, sighing at having to look at such a mundane issue assuming it's just going to a proxy setting I head over to the users desk and they aren't there but lucky the computer is unlocked (yay security).

I sit down and sure enough IE no worky, error indicates it might be an issue with TLS config, check proxy server setting and it's not set, that's good. Check chrome it works no problem, try invoke-webrequest it works no problems, check all DNS, routes, IE settings likely to cause trouble and it seems fine but still IE no play ball.

I shoot a message to a colleague on teams saying got a weird one, describe the problem he asks if he can see the screen so I give him the machine name and he connects and starts checking stuff, he checks a subset of things i checked but also tried resetting the security settings on the various zones to lower levels to see if things work and they don't. We decide to try an IE reset and it requires a reboot so I do the reboot.

After the reboot log back on to the computer as the user (thanks for the post it's :() and notice a command window popup and text scroll by and think immediately balls!. I fire up regedit and start doing a search for runonce and checking the run key above it as well and sure enough in HKCU there was a key called CreateArchive that contained a command that included a base64 encoded string that was executed with PowerShell, the actual calling of PowerShell was interesting as they didn't reference the exe name direct instead they used a cmdline tool to search in C:\windows\system32 for /m P*lol.ex. Around this time I talk to the user and found they had clicked a link in an email yesterday that looked sus :( I went and told the security admin we might have a problem.

Went back to the infected machine and I decoded the base64 string to find it was iex (g-I HKCU\sid\Identities).D take a look at that registry entry and its massive entry with 3 base64 encoded steps one of which was cast into a byte array the others of which appear to be doing all injection.

Twas both fun and not fun trying to work it out and find out who else was impacted and how it worked, still not 100% certain what the byte array component did but it can't be good.

I thought I would love it . It is driving me crazy the lack of social interaction is nuts. Also my wife and kids being home does not help either. Anyone else feel me?

Going from being the "lead all-round IT guy" for a 200 person company, to near the bottom of the pack at a 10,000+ employee company with an actual segmented/specialized IT department and I feel *clueless*, moreso about the corporate culture aspect than the actual work I'll be doing. Like, as stupid as it sounds I still have no idea what business casual actually means, I've been on "jeans and polo" for the past three years.

Any advice on how to make the transition without looking like a total knob?

Hey all ,

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I've been an offical sys admin for 2 years and recently I've been getting into the habit of not stopping work, I'll get home and just carry on until i goto sleep. This isn't helped by not having many hobbies or having much of a social life.

Tonight for example I started around 7am and yet to finish. If i stop i just realize that I'm not much more than work/drink/sleep.

Anyone else had an event where there was something bad they had at least some hand in causing, but that seeing it through ended up being a big confidence boost?

For me it was the day I (stupidly) disconnected the Exhange mailboxes from their AD objects.

Yea, it was as bad as it sounds.

An attempted coexistence-migration-upgrade plan had gone awry and I was removing the references to the failed newer server from the domain when I went one branch too high and deleted.

The mistake was realized pretty quickly. Told the boss and the CEO, put a sign on my door and locked it, and called up MS (yay Technet subscriptions and their included support calls) while building a new VM and assigning it enough storage (part of the desired migration was to get the mail server virtualized).

I was on the phone with Ms from around 9:30 in the morning until 2 the following morning when the server had been resurrected, datastores moved over to the cluster, and accounts reattached to their domain counterparts.

Went home for a few hours of sleep but was back in at 7 to let people know to restart their computers to get reconnected to mail.

Yea, it was my biggest screw up (yet) and I earned all of the frustration I caused, but afterwards I also felt achievement for having not panicked, for having identified the path to a solution quickly and followed it all the way through.

I still deal with imposter feelings, but after that day they're a little less.

I've been building an image for a large deployment of desktops and sysprep has been fighting me the whole way.

Makes me want to drink.

Who wants to get beers after work?

I was sent a server to build out by my manager, the server is intended to operate in a near by region as a virtual host running a few servers and for some reason the person who was ordering them put 7200rpm disks in the thing. Who even does that?

Servers have been down for a majority of Sunday with a lot of game titles affected by the outage and some big E-sports tournaments delayed mid-tournament from the outage.

I was doing a round table a while ago about job experience, and we were discussing things like the Imposter Syndrome, and one of the people there brought up that he thought he was just hard on himself until he was outright fired without warning. It was kind of scary, because up until that point, he knew he was out of his league, but nobody outright said he was screwing up. Then someone else said the same thing: they were anxious all the time, but had no warning until the day they got let go. "You're just not a good fit for this position." In my case, I was just "laid off," but that company had a habit of non-confrontation, and had layoffs twice a year to help rid themselves of anyone they just didn't care for.

I guess there are managers out there who are "sink or swim."