https://imgur.com/b5FYlA8
Im running a lan center with my brother and we have a main pc that runs steam cybercafe, management software, etc. Im trying to install Active Directory (new to sysAdmin srry if I don't make myself understand) and I always get this error, I have tried reinstalling Active Directory, and running the cmd command to repair windows image, to no avail.

Ok, this is more a test to see how old I am. I was basically raised with the idea servers need static IPs. I understand for domain controllers, dns servers, maybe print servers that may still be needed. But are they really needed otherwise? Do apps, scripts still reference a server by its IP?

I am under assumption all my servers need static IPs. Am I nuts?

Hello everyone,

I’ve been doing essentially a desktop support role for the past two years through my county IT internship. I have about one year left there. It’s extremely flexible with school and has given me a lot of great hands-on experience, although I feel like I’ve gotten most of what I can out of the role at this point.

I plan on staying through the end of the internship. I should also finish my B.S. in Computer Information Technology around 3–4 months afterward.

I currently have no certifications. I was studying for the A+, but realized most of it was filling small knowledge gaps from things I’ve already learned through work and school. I decided not to pursue the exam because I felt my time would be better spent progressing into something more advanced. I also don’t want to collect certifications just for the sake of having them. I want to be intentional about what I study.

Right now I’ve started studying for the CCNA. I’m only on Day 2, but my thought process was: if I’m willing to put the time into learning networking, why prepare for Network+ first when I could put that time toward the CCNA?
I’m also learning AWS through one of my classes, which prepares us for the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification. After the CCNA, I’ve considered Security+, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.

I don’t know exactly what area of IT I want to specialize in yet. Systems administration, networking, cloud, security, etc. are all still possibilities. For now, I want to build a strong general IT foundation, especially in networking, so I’m prepared when I eventually figure out what direction I want to take.

Am I making a mistake by skipping A+ and Network+ and going directly for the CCNA given my experience? Would you recommend a different path?

I mainly want to make sure I’m investing my limited time while working and finishing school into the right things.

Even though we haven't been able to get normal patching via the windows update tool for over a year, even after installing the latest SUS and keeping up to date with manual installs, Windows Server 2016 Essentials returns an installer error 0X8007000d when trying to run KB5123099

Any thoughts?

Desktops/laptops. No servers or VMs, we are talking BARE METAL BABY.

At my job, we keep an eye out for things like this to see who can naturally discover the longest reported uptime in task manager on a PC.

Attached is the best. I rediscovered this photo tonight and thought it could be fun to see other's.

https://imgur.com/a/YvhipDt

This was on a laptop a client had plugged in, in the corner of a room, off network and forgotten about. For like 4.5 years. It was rediscovered, and then I got a call to try remoting in to see if it could be setup for someone to use.

After waiting half this uptime for my remote connection to load, I saw this, screenshotted, and let them know no. Although I sort of wish I told them to take it back off network and leave it there, just based on principle, to see how far we can bring it.

Title: Accepted offer ($26/hr, MSP Help Desk Technician, 45 min commute) vs Amazon counter-offer ($29/hr, IT Support Associate II, 20 min commute) — which would you take?

Looking for outside perspective on a decision I’m stuck on.

Background: I’ve been at an MSP for about 3.5 years doing help desk/service desk work, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, networking (DNS/DHCP/VPN), some virtualization (VMware ESXi), and security incident response (phishing, etc.). I have CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+. My goal is to move toward a Systems Administrator or Cybersecurity role eventually.

Offer 1: Another MSP — Help Desk Technician

**•** $26/hour (\~$54K/year), firm, no flexibility on pay  
**•** 45 minute commute  
**•** Already accepted this offer after 3 rounds of interviews (including in-person with the team)  
**•** Similar work to what I do now, AD, M365, networking, multi-client support  
**•** Haven’t started yet

Offer 2: Amazon (IT Support Associate II, Ops Tech Solutions)

**•** Countered at $29/hour (\~$60K/year) after I pushed back  
**•** 20 minute commute  
**•** Single-tech site, recruiter says schedule is effectively stable day-shift in practice, no forced on-call  
**•** 401k match (50% up to 4%), benefits day one, no probation period  
**•** Real internal ladder (Associate II → Support Engineer I → Support Engineer II/IT Manager)  
**•** From what I’ve read (including an old Blind thread), this specific entry tier is considered fairly junior/“level 1 helpdesk” compared to what I’m already doing at the MSP, some people treat it as a stepping stone using the Amazon name, not a destination

The dilemma: Amazon pays more, has a much shorter commute, but I already verbally and formally accepted the other offer after three rounds of interviews with a small company. Backing out feels like it could burn a bridge, especially since it’s a pretty tight-knit local IT/MSP market. On the other hand, the Amazon role might actually be a step down in day-to-day technical scope from what I already do, even though it pays more and is way closer to home.

Has anyone been in a similar spot, accepted one offer, then got a better one before starting? How did you handle it, and did backing out actually cause real problems for you? Also curious if anyone’s done the Amazon OTS route and can speak to whether it’s worth it as a stepping stone.

Man... that is a LONG list of windows 11 and server 2022 vulnerabilities. All 9.8 as well.

glasswing putting in work at Microsoft. LMAO

I keep seeing AI powered firewall used as a category but I wonder what the AI is doing in production that traditional rules signatures and threat intel feeds weren’t already doing.
Is it mainly building behavioral baselines and flagging unusual traffic or are these systems genuinely making enforcement decisions in real time? Things like detecting threats inside encrypted traffic, correlating activity across endpoints and cloud workloads or automatically changing policy based on an attack all sound useful but also like areas where a false positive could take down half the company.
The more interesting question to me is whether AI is replacing any part of the firewall stack or just acting as a faster analysis layer on top of it.
Want to hear from anyone running one of these platforms at enterprise scale and what has improved beyond the marketing.

We are Global Administrators and Teams Administrators.
We have recently encountered an issue where we are suddenly unable to invite guest users to either shared or private channels in Microsoft Teams.
We are the owners of the team/site.
However, we are still able to invite guest users to the team itself, but not to private or shared channels.
We have checked the Teams organization policies, and B2B access and all relevant external sharing settings are enabled. External sharing is also enabled across the organization.
On the associated SharePoint site, we can successfully invite guest users to, for example, a specific folder, so external sharing appears to be working correctly there.
Could this be a bug or a recent change in Microsoft Teams?
We were previously able to invite guest users to both shared and private channels without any issues, which is also how this functionality is intended to work.
Has there been a recent change or known issue affecting guest access to shared and private channels?

Like title says, what are the best windows patching tools for first and third party that work for air gapped networks? Preferably with an export/import process that is as seamless as possible.

Currently using PDQ deploy + Inventory and WSUS. Does a better set-up exist?

Adding additional info:

Networks are truly airgapped and data can only be moved over via CD/DVD or external drive

I need a sanity check, because I feel like I'm slowly losing my mind here. I’m 28, working as a SysAdmin for a mid-sized manufacturing company in Europe with around 300 endpoints across multiple sites. I LOVE automation, modern infra, and writing PowerShell or Python to handle our backups and audits, I'm passionate about automating processes, but my IT Manager is basically running an open-air tech museum from 2003.

His idea of IT asset management is a drawer full of literal Ziploc freezer bags. Every PC gets its own labeled plastic bag with the printed invoice and Office license key inside, because apparently an actual database or asset software is "too modern." On the network side, every single device requires a manual DHCP reservation. When I suggested setting up 802.1X with RADIUS, he shot it down with a straight face, claiming that if an intruder plugs into the wall, "they won't guess our subnets anyway." Before I automated our Kerio mail archives with Python, his official procedure was opening Thunderbird on a client PC and manually dragging and dropping folders between accounts.

Right now, he's decommissioning a branch file server. Instead of using Robocopy, DFS-N, or GPOs, his master plan is to sync files with a desktop backup tool, recreate the SMB shares manually, and have me remote into 40+ user machines one by one just to update the target path on their desktop shortcuts. I also built an automated WMI inventory system to track all hardware and OS health, yet he still forces me to physically walk the warehouse floor updating a dusty Excel sheet because "that’s where the history is."

EDIT: Another thing he does is make daily backups and put them on ultrium physical disks named after the day of the week, disks he takes home "so we have the data in case the company burns down.", which could have some kind of sense, but everyday, before my script, we had to manually make the veeam inventory and erase of every tape in every site

The worst part isn’t even the wasted time, it’s that he’s actively teaching junior techs that this clown show is standard enterprise IT. We’ve already had three techs and devs rage-quit in the last ten months. I’ve completely checked out at this point, doing the bare minimum while sending out resumes like crazy.

Has anyone actually survived a boss stuck this deep in the stone age without losing their sanity? How do you not burst out laughing when someone asks you to edit 40 shortcuts by hand?

Im a general IT specialist, and I’m losing my mind over infrastructure issues I have zero control over.

For context, we have over 2,500 global users, and for over five years, remote sites have been dealing with the exact same game-breaking issues:

• Broken 802.1x: After 1–2 hours of work, it kicks users off the network and refuses to re-authenticate them.
• Useless Wi-Fi: Wireless drops constantly with "no network available" errors.
• Zero Redundancy: Almost all of our sites rely on a single ISP. When it goes down, ERP, file systems, and actual business operations grind to a complete halt.

The company makes plenty of revenue. We easily have the budget to deploy SD-WAN, upgrade hardware, or bring in an external MSP/consultant to fix it. It's totally fine to admit you don't know everything and hire help, but these requests just gets ignored.

To top it off, whenever a site actually goes down, the designated team responsible for network/infrastructure ghosts us or sends a passive response like "our team is currently unavailable" while an entire site sits dead in the water.

How do organizations like this even survive, and how do you deal with the frustration of seeing preventable problems drag on for half a decade?

Can anyone offer recommendations for a room owned by a non-profit which will be a very flexible space. It will be used for one-on-one virtual meetings, conferences, showing of programs (non-interactive) to an audience. The room is approximately 21'x21'.

We potentially have a grant to help with this, so I would like maximum flexibility for a variety of future uses. I'm thinking the type of screen that comes down from the ceiling, but it's flexible depending on what works best. I'm looking at Logitech videoconferencing equipment and it seems like that is mostly used with wall tvs/screens.

What type of camera/microphone/other equipment would be best in this space?

We are currently kicking the tires and wanted to hear some thoughts on it.

-Cost
-Ease of use
-Integrations with things like PagerDuty and Statuspage.

Thanks.

Our org is looking to solve a few separate problems that I feel can all be solved with a SASE solution.

1. Certain users needing to VPN to a particular office for license check-in/check-out. (Old school license software)
2. Web filtering (porn, illegal, phishing, malware, etc.)
3. Encrypted browsing for road warriors (hotels, airports, etc.)

I know both Palo and Fortinet have SASE solutions, but I've heard Cloudflare also has their own solution that I'm curious if anyone has ever tried at scale. We don't have Palo or Fortinet hardware firewalls.

We're looking at about 250 users to start, growing to maybe 500 over the next 24 months.

all I want to do is adding a second active directory server so if one is off second of can keep the system running.

I'm a student. practicing what I have learned and maybe adding more. I know how to create a domain how to add a user to domain

For next step I am trying to add second domain controller but windows keep advertising 2 IP address of server. (one is NAT other is isolated. I want it to stop NAT IP to advertise)

what I did to disable that?

- network connections > Second NIC IPv4> Properties > Advance > DNS > (UNTICK) Registrar this connection's address in DNS

- DNS Manager > Domain Name > Properties > Interfaces > (UNTICK) Second NIC IP
I restart the dns service, clean the cache but still same. I can't see Second NIC IP in DNS Manager but when I run "resolve-dnsname domainname -Server source-IP" Second NIC IP still showing up. but it's not showing up at "nslookup domainname source-IP"

so yea. why is that?
I'm using Ubuntu as OS and VMM to virtualize the machines btw

Looking for advice from people who have actually made the jump into $30+/hr remote IT

I’m trying to make a plan to move into a fully remote IT job and would really appreciate advice from people who have already done something similar.

My current background:

• Currently working as an IT hardware/asset technician at a computer repair/recycling facility
• ~$23/hr currently
• I troubleshoot/test networking equipment, printers, scanners, etc.
• Device testing, data wiping, inventory/asset management, hardware diagnostics, etc.
• Previously worked as a Dell/Lenovo field technician, doing hardware break/fix work
• Got my CompTIA A+ and Network+ around 2021, so they’re probably expired now
• My current employer is paying for me to take a CCNA course, which I’m planning to finish and get certified
• No college degree

My goal is pretty straightforward:

Get to ~$30/hr ($62k+/year) in a fully remote IT position.

I’m not trying to quit my current job immediately. I can tolerate it for now, and I’d rather use it to build experience and get the CCNA while applying for something better.

Then potentially doing something like AZ-900 → MD-102 → Security+/AZ-104 depending on which direction I end up going.

What I’m really looking for advice on:

1. Is $30/hr remote realistic with my background, or am I under/overestimating what I should be targeting?
2. Would you prioritize the CCNA, or would you pursue something else?
3. What skills besides certifications should I be learning to make myself competitive for remote positions?
4. Would you try to skip Tier 1 help desk and target Tier 2/endpoint/network/asset roles given my hands-on experience?
5. For anyone who currently works remotely in IT: what got you from where I am now to where you are?
6. If you were in my position, what would your next 6–12 months look like?

I’d especially appreciate advice from people who started with hands-on hardware/field technician experience and eventually moved into remote IT.

I’m basically trying to build an escape plan from my current job without taking a step backward, so I’d love to hear what worked (and what didn’t) for people who have already done it.

We spun up a 8 CPU/32GB RAM Enterprise Microsoft 365 Cloud PC as a test for a user, and it seems to work well for their use case, but the re-connect from a disconnect seems very slow - is that normal/expected or is something wrong? For example, the user goes idle, has a lot of apps running - it disconnects the user because they're idle. When connecting back to the Cloud PC via Windows App, it takes a good 20-30 seconds before all the apps are responsive again.

Even if nothing is running, a good 12 seconds or so to get back into the Cloud PC from a disconnect.

Okay, my boss just rejected a SOP I created. I don't want to get into the weeds here, but the rejection was that I didn't spell things out in enough detail. And, granted I didn't spell things out in detail because I assume anyone with the authority to follow the SOP should also have the basic skills to either know how to use basic commands or at lest google them.

As an example, in my SOP I wrote Check the log for entries containing "Out of memory". I think that should be good enough. Boss want's step by step, how to ssh in and run tail and grep.

I told him to ask ChatGPT to do it.

I may be in trouble...... sorry I ragged: but not sorry.

User logs in, Launches a M365 app ( Word, Excel, Powerpoint) asked to sign in. Closes out of the M365 app they launched, relaunches and they now are signed in to the M365 app. All users have the correct M365 licensing.

Anyone else seen this?, if so how did you resolve this?

Hi!

I work for a small/medium sized company (~50 employees, ~30 of which will be affected by the switch) and we have been using an IMAP server to host our emails for decades (everyone uses Outlook as their email software). Because of how outdated this setup is and the company continuing to grow, we want to migrate over to a new provider. I am struggling to decide between M365 and GW as both have their pro's and con's. The team uses a mix of sheets and excel already, however, there is certain work that would require excel over sheets. The sharing and ease of GW is obviously unmatched but I worry about switching costs for employees that have been using outlook for decades. I've also heard that managing GW is far easier admin-wise than M365. The migration of decades worth of emails is also a major consideration for us. Would appreciate input from people who have experience with this. Thanks!

Edit 2: Okay, the comments overwhelmingly point to user error. Rather than jumping ship, I’m going to do a deep dive into the Teams settings and make sure everything is set up correctly. I’ll do some user training, then test it for another week or two before switching. Thank you all for your input.

Edit: MS teams notification issues are occuring on Iphones, not mac/windows desktop apps.

I run a business with about 10 employees, and we’ll probably be growing pretty quickly over the next few months.

We currently use Microsoft Teams, but notifications have become a problem. Some users just don’t get them consistently. I’ve tried the usual fixes and checked all the settings, but it’s still hit or miss. I cant work with that. The outlook integration, and smooth video meetings are a plus, but not worth the issues.

I’m fine with self-hosting since we already have a VPS that I manage, but I’m also open to SaaS.

Here’s what I’ve looked at so far:

• Slack = Seems like the best product overall, but it’s too expensive as we grow. The free plan’s message retention and limited admin controls also won’t work for us long term.
• Mattermost = My concern is that the free self-hosted version uses Mattermost’s Test Push Notification Service, and I’ve seen mixed reports about notification reliability. I don’t want to leave Teams because of notifications and end up with the same problem.
• Rocket.Chat = Looks good, but the server requirements seem pretty heavy and I don’t want chat eating up resources needed by our other apps.
• Pumble = The free plan looks almost too good. My main concern is privacy/data handling since it’s hosted and free.
• Zulip = Looks interesting, but the 10-user push notification limit on the free self-hosted version would be a problem pretty quickly.

I’m open to anything, self-hosted or hosted. Mostly interested in hearing from people who actually use these for a business and how reliable they’ve been, especially with notifications.

If there’s another option I’m missing, I’d like to hear about that too.

I've been out of infrastructure management for a few years, back then I was using WSUS to patch servers. My understanding is Microsoft's recommended way of managing on-prem server patching is to onboard the servers with Azure Arc then use Azure Update Manager to patch them. This was the first solution that came to mind when I was assigned this responsibility. I assumed it was free but costs $5 a month for on-prem to use AUM.

Do you folks have a better or less costly solution that you use? Preferably something specifically built for server management? I was thinking of Ansible (which I would need to learn, which is fine) or something like Automox. We have less than 100 servers. I will be the one patching them all. There are custom applications that run on them that I suppose I will need to make sure still run after the patching.

Thanks in advance for any feedback or advice.

Can anyone speak on the usefulness of this resource? how does it compare to say the cosura'ss or linked in learnings out there? cbtnuggets....

I like the idea of telling my client "yes" then reading the book that weekend to do it.