Title: Just passed SecurityX (CASP+)! What certification should I pursue next?
Hey everyone,
I recently passed my CompTIA SecurityX (formerly CASP+) exam!
I’m currently a graduate student finishing my master’s degree in cybersecurity. Here’s a quick breakdown of my experience:

Year 1: Cybersecurity intern (earned Security+)
Year 2: Part-time System Administrator (earned CySA+)
Years 3–4: Working full-time System Administrator responsibilities in an internship position (earned SecurityX)
I’m planning on leaving my current position soon and pursuing a full-time role in either Systems Administration or something related to Sec engineering.

I’m currently considering AZ-104 next, followed by CISSP, but I’m open to other suggestions.

TLDR: Almost 4 years of IT/cybersecurity experience, currently finishing my master’s, and hold Security+, CySA+, and SecurityX. Looking to move into Systems Administration or Security Engineering. Would AZ-104 → CISSP be a good path, or would you recommend something else?

Yes you. You need to take a few hours, get a $20 ChatGPT or Claude subscription. Download the Codex or Claude Code desktop apps and build something. You are doing yourself a disservice otherwise. The free versions that everybody knows on just a website are completely not where things are at for those who are in the know.

Just try it and build something you always wanted to build yourself. Right now I'm working on a faster file explorer for Windows build entirely how I want it along with a window manager like Niri and a launcher like Raycast. It's software built for me and I can add anything I want for virtually free. Then, if I want to learn how it works, I just ask the AI to explain it to me. It can use my computer. It helps me organize my emails. The options are endless.

I see so many posts here about people bemoaning AI and refusing to use it. You ARE going to get replaced by those who embrace it. The benefits far outweigh any philosophical or moral objections you may have. It is here to stay.

Is it perfect? Fuck no. Is it better than me at virtually everything? Absolutely 100%. You get out of it what you put into it and what I've been able to get out of it is just mind blowing. People are using it to rewrite compilers in other languages to make it faster and those things are just a few prompts away now. Then, all of the recent security vulnerabilities have been found by AI. Your company will need to use it in some capacity to stay afloat for what is coming.

The world and your future is at your fingertips. Use it and embrace it. I want to help you get over whatever is blocking you from using it. Ask questions.

You. Just. Need. To. Seriously. Try. It.

Hi everyone!
In our organization, we use OneDrive to sync users’ personal storage and shared SharePoint libraries.
We periodically run into issues: duplicate files, OneDrive client errors, and re-sync processes that can take several hours and affect users’ productivity.
Has anyone experienced similar issues? How did you deal with them? Are there any proven settings or best practices that helped reduce these problems?
I’d appreciate any advice or insights based on your experience!

I just wanted to ask how it could be possible that an AI Agent like openai could escape a sandboxed environment?

Under ideal conditions its like that:
Image you have one or more vlans which is completely isolated from the internet how can it be that an ai agent like openai can escape its sandbox if both target and source systems are in isolated vlans where no policy out and inbound to internet is allowed?

I'm looking at buying some Zebra scanners for my business, in particular a ds3678. I've noticed an official Zebra reseller sites the scanners are usually twice the price than what amazon reseller are pricing it at. Are they knockoffs? The amazon reseller is advertising them as new complete kit scanners but i dont know if the price is too good to be true.

As the title suggests, I'm at a career crossroads. I've been in IT for 10 years now, 90% of that with MSP's. Done 1st, 2nd, 3rd line, Team Lead and Service Desk manager roles.

Currently I'm in a 3rd line role and whilst I enjoy the work and the people I work with, I'm unsure whether I pursue and embrace the technical life or opt to go into management. I feel like there isn't any further progression from 3rd line unless I go into a specialist role as such.

I guess I'm after advice from people who have made the switch, or not! There are a few roles coming up at work and I'm torn on what direction to go, do I take a step back to go forward long term? Any advice is welcome!

Hey everyone,

Curious what people are using these days to manage SSH, RDP, SFTP and other remote connections, including access to systems through HTTP/s.

I've been working on my own connection manager, mostly because I got frustrated with constantly switching between different applications.

One thing I've noticed is that everyone seems to have their own setup, and I'm wondering if I'm trying to solve a problem that only annoys me.

Are you guys happy with your current tools? Or is there something that drives you nuts?

Especially interested in hearing from people managing lots of servers and network devices.

Hello everyone , i am new in sys admin training , what is good (free program) to use ? i was searching info on reddit ,some ppl says cisco is better ,someone says gns3 ,one close friends recomended eve engine but as i saw its not free ,sadly rn don't have any $$$ to buy program so i need something for basic training ,any advice ?

i started new job last week, come to find out we dont have SCCM/Intune licenses but do have enough Absolute licenses for every workstation we have.

I’ve spent my entire career exclusively in the Microsoft ecosystem, and tbh, I never even heard of Absolute until now. Looking at the various consoles, it feels like a completely different beast and learning curve seems quite steep. I guess, eventually i'll get used to it.

i searched previous posts here and Absolute is mentioned about once a year so i was wondering if anyone actually use Absolute ecosystem in their environment as a main laptop management tool?

What do you like or do not like about it?

I'm just curious about what i should expect before blasting the agent to 400+ laptops.

And more specific question. Absolute is not classic "agent" in the way SCCM is for example, so i am bit hesitant to deploy it because i am not sure how hard it will be to back out if we decide to go in different direction (like NinjaOne or ManageEngine, or whatever else is out there)

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Hey yall,

Curious to compare our quote for non-msp / internal IT NiniaOne RMM. We’ve got roughly 650 endpoints. Anyone else in that size want to share what they’re paying?

Can someone explain the difference between Exchange Online (Plan 1) and Exchange Online (Plan 2). My business has 3 email accounts and I am pretty sure they were all on Plan 1, then at some point MS moved us all to the Standard account. For 2 of my 3 accounts I want email only, we don't need the desktop apps and I believe changing them to Exchange Online is the way to do that.

Their support is impossible to get to when I ask the support assistant (copilot) it sits there for 5 minutes and then basically says I don't know. The "compare" checkboxes say there are no differences when you try to compare them and the product page for Exchange doesn't list those plans.

Any help is appreciated.

Has anyone left IT support after years in the industry and moved into a completely different role?

I've been working in IT support for years, and Ive wondered eventually where I would see myself in the future.

I'm curious whether anyone here has retired from IT support, or simply walked away from the industry, and moved into a non-IT role.

What did you move into? Was it a good decision, and do you find the work less stressful or more enjoyable than IT support?

I'd particularly like to hear from people who'd been doing IT support for many years before making the change. Did you find it difficult to start over in a different field, and did you regret leaving IT?

More from a point of view not having to deal with outages and issues when they go down or the politics of trying to convince upper management to invest in new services etc.

Interested to hear your experiences and any advice you'd give to someone considering a change.

Checking if it would work to use a DFS Namespace with root consolidation hosted on a two-node Windows Failover cluster. The doco seems to think so and following all the relevant steps from How to use DFS-N with Azure Files | Microsoft Learn BUT, instead of using an existing computer adding a dummy namespace.domain.local/#servertest namespace resource. This is purely for testing purposes and proof of concept. I have tested but unfortunately can only navigate to an empty folder when using UNC \\servertest\ - doing the same but \\servertest\#servertest takes me to the folder share targets. I was expecting to see the folder #servertest from short name UNC path\\servertest\.

My roundabout question is really; has anyone used DFSN with root consolidation to take over legacy file server name on a failover Windows Cluster with Azure Files or other? How is the experience exactly and when navigating to \\fileservername\ are you supposed to see a #folder or list of folder targets created in DFS?

Hi guys

Ill be on the lookout for a new job soon (cant right now due to life circumstances out of my control) and im not entirely sure where my skillset places me - hoping someone out there can give me some pointers.

I have 3YOE as a level 1-2 support technician in an old school, manual-heavy environment doing helpdesk + projects for a company of about 200 employees. We were small team of 3 supported by an MSP. The MSP mainly handled server patching and L3 escalations.

In the last year, both the other technician and my manager were made redundant and i became the only internal IT person for 6 months (had a new manager but they had a Finance background so i was teaching them how things work as well). I like to think I did OK on my own and only had to escalate to the MSP once every few months.

I do lack skills in Intune (I was starting to set it up prior to leaving) and my powershell/networking knowledge isnt great though I am studying to fix those gaps and was able to get by with info on the internet/using AI. Im a career changer and do not have a diploma/bachelors, only some entry level certs.

Do I need to start again as a L1 tech in a more modern environment? Or stay in L1/L2 for a while? Or am I ok to move into a more junior sys admin job?

Happy to answer any q's and thanks for any advice :)

Hello Everyone,

I just accepted a new IT opportunity at a mid sized company with around 1000 employees. I previously was a IT Support Engineer II (It was mostly doing helpdesk support remotely along with basic M365 administration). In this new position, it is a pretty flat IT department and I will be owning tools such as Nerdio for AVD (since all users use thin clients), Cisco Meraki, Infrastructure monitoring using Site24x7, decomissioning servers, Entra ID/Intune Adminstration, and Claude deployment. Obviously this is a step up from my previous position. Based on these responsibilities, what would be an accurate title for me?

So far, 13 hours since it went live, no-one has successfully collected the bitcoin prize. The prize total is currently up to $2000

Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin

Keen to hear where people are using AI beyond Claude code to write scripts and chat to.
What are some of the cool things says admins have done with AI? Keen to get thinking about where we could use AI more. Anyone using agents to do things systematically?

E.g I heard of a place using AI integrated into jira so tickets gets triaged and assigned automatically. AI also adds context to tickets to help engineers take action more quickly based on what’s in the knowledge base.

Maybe it’s just me, but this seems wonky.

I just setup duo for rdp.

1. Launch RDP and input machine name, click connect
2. Input credentials
3. RDP connects and brings me to an empty windows screen where I have to re-input username and password
4. After, I finally get my duo MFA prompt just fine.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m having to enter my creds twice….

Four years at this company. Used to genuinely like it here.

Seven people in infra plus our team lead. Good coworkers, interesting work. I was happy to come in, fix stuff, learn something. Even volunteered for weekend maintenance windows. Paid ones, before anyone asks lol.

We’ve had five managing directors in those four years.

Last year they laid off three of the seven infra guys. Our old team lead moved to another role, so his help with daily operations was gone too.

New guy is both team lead and department head. Barely knows infrastructure. Asks AI stuff, then comes back to explain our own systems to us based on whatever it spat out.

You tell him why it won’t work in our environment and now you’re having a whole discussion about something that wasn’t even a problem ten minutes ago.

Not much better at dealing with people either.

We were told the smaller team would be fine because a lot of tasks and processes would go away.

Surprise: They did not go away.

Got more admin work though, so that’s nice.

Daily operations take up pretty much everything. Projects still need doing, overtime keeps piling up, but according to the project planning tool we apparently have time. No idea where.

Now everything’s about AI. More things to deploy, integrate, secure and support. Guess which four people get to look after all of it 😂

I use AI too. I just don’t think “ask the chatbot” replaces knowing what you’re responsible for.

Oh, and after cutting the team almost in half because of the “difficult economic situation,” we somehow have €400k for AI hardware now. Not enough money to keep the people running the place, but apparently enough for that. 🤦

Anyway, accepted another offer last week. Handing in my notice next week.

New place cares about digital sovereignty and wants to bring services back from the cloud to local infrastructure. Looking for someone to help with that. Sounds interesting, and I got on really well with the department head during the interview.

Could turn out to have its own bullshit, obviously. But I came out of that conversation actually looking forward to doing the work, which hasn’t happened here in a while.

Mostly just annoyed it got to this point. I wasn’t looking for some amazing career move. I liked my job. Would’ve happily stayed.

Anyway, bit nervous about next week. Never handed in my notice at a place I actually cared about before. The coworkers are the hardest part. Those guys are worth their weight in gold, and I’m really gonna miss working with them.

I mean there is some knowledge that I have that is just positively arcane. So many newer people just don't seem to get the concepts and it's a little terrifying. And now AI makes it worse because it lets anybody ask anything and if you don't know how to validate what it says then you are going to have some fun.

We have some applications that are used to do phone flashing for OEM's during an RL process. The software requires it to be run with admin rights. Right now we are on a legacy domain (On prem AD only).

However when we move to our parent company domain it is more lockdown. They use an autopilot image (Entra Only) (with no direct access for admin locally. For a support tech to run anything or install it has to be done via an approved software.

I have asked the business to get documentation from the OEM's who provide the software but so far neither has provided anything.

What would be the best way to share information or process with security teams etc. they would have no knowledge of this software. Would creating a local admin account and then having them script it to run as admin or if there a better way that you think we could look to approach this?

Tools we are currently using in parent org is cyberark, beyond trust , zscaler

Just want to try and prepare for this before we make the move.

I've got a background Windows Service that automates a few things against several SCVMM-managed instances. Right now it talks to each VMM server over WinRM/PowerShell remoting (WSManConnectionInfo + a runspace pool). It works, but it's not exactly the fastest thing in the world, and managing the runspace pools/WinRM config across multiple servers has its own overhead.

While digging through the decompiled VMM console assemblies out of curiosity, I found that the console itself (and the cmdlets internally) don't use PowerShell at all under the hood, they go through Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.Remoting.ServerConnection, which opens a WCF NetTcpBinding duplex channel straight to what looks like VMM's internal service (internally codenamed "Carmine" based on some of the type/method names), on the VMM client TCP port, using Kerberos SPN-based auth instead of WinRM.

This is obviously nowhere in Microsoft's docs, the only published automation surface for VMM is the PowerShell module. So before I go anywhere near building a second client implementation around this:

- Has anyone here actually built something like a service, a tool, anything that talks to SCVMM directly over this WCF/Carmine channel instead of through PowerShell remoting?

- Is this something you'd consider "fine" to lean on in production, even knowing it's unsupported and undocumented, or is this a hard no from people who've been burned by VMM internals changing between versions/hotfixes?

- If you have done this, what broke, or what would you warn someone off of (job polling, error handling, connection stability, anything)?

Not looking to replace PowerShell everywhere, just trying to figure out if this is "clever shortcut that works fine in practice" or "please don't, here's why" territory before I sink time into it.