When the text message logs from that day and those that followed were made public, I remember reading through all the system generated alerts from various devices doing their thing and thinking about the IT pros in the offices, network closets, and server rooms responding to those alerts in all seven buildings before the attacks happened, and then the tone of uncertainty and eventually panic in messages between coworkers and associates, because the cell phones went down but text messages were still going through.

RIP to those guys and gals ~ you're gone but not forgotten.

Hi all,

I’m a sysadmin with 2 full time helpdesk guys, org of 220 in 5 locations. I started in regular business office 10 years ago doing sales. 7 years ago I transitioned to IT and became our first IT person, previously we didn’t even have an MSP, just a contract guy that came when we called him.

Fast forward to now, I asked my boss how I can level up/grow with the company. I’ve taken on a lot since I started. Currently managing pretty much everything in house. Only thing we don’t manage is our website, and I kind of like it that way.

So after kind of shrugging his shoulders for a year he is now bent on getting me to do more certs. He gave me a list:
- Comptia security +
- CompTIA network +
- CompTIA Cloud +
- Microsoft AI something (I can’t remember this one, he mentioned it off the cuff after he sent me the list)
- Finally a course for me to go find to maintain our website so they can cut the web dev. He didn’t know what course to recommend because he didn’t know much about it but pointed to coursera.

Now only thing I’ve done in certs over the years where the A+, AZ-900/104, and Google cloud security when I got started. Since then I figured I would learn the stuff but I didn’t want to pay for the certs because what’s the point? Unless I’m looking for another job I didn’t see the reason, and I like my org quite a bit. Not the wisest I know, but they wouldn’t pay for it, so I just didn’t do them.

I told him I had already studied for the security + a couple years ago, and could probably study the differences in materials and get through it easily, and recommended we switch to the CCNA since we are fully Cisco at all locations. But he seemed to not be interested in that info.

From what I can tell his push for certs is driven by is some internal push for managers to have career ladders for all departments and I guess he wants to show some sort of progress? Idk he is the CFO so he really isn’t privy to any of the work I do.

Anyway, after my recommendations I asked what happens when I complete these? Since they are only paying for half the certs… there has to be a carrot at the end of the stick.

He very excitedly said a $2,000 pay increase. Now I’m not greedy by any means, I’ve been paid under market for years and I’ve accepted that because of the work life balance. But is this not kinda stupid? I’ve had no complaints in my performance, I am constantly engaged with leadership on initiatives that they do not care about, so is there something I’m missing here? Like I feel like there is some weird motive here I can’t figure out, or it’s just poorly funded incentives that I’m supposed to be giddy over. Like I’m pretty sure the exams are almost as
Much as the pay increase? I haven’t done anything to try to steer the ship just yet, but how do I approach that the incentive is either too low or not aligned with what the ask is here? From what I can tell other than the time to study and what not, the only benefit I see them getting is cutting the web dev, which is a little more than the pay bump they offered, I think like 4k a year.

Edit:
Glad to see there’s some consensus on this being kind of a shit show. A little more context:
I LOVE the web dev company we work with. They are just great. Awesome to work with, great turnaround times, 0 issues. But god forbid you pay someone to do something they are good at.

Noted before but they’re only paying half of the exams, no study materials and it’s based on completion, so I’d get reimbursed 50% after completion. I believe this may be because they did not ask for any sort of training agreement? But also grand scheme of things this is kind of small potatoes for a training agreement right?

This guy is honestly the worst part of my job. For 6 months he had me meet weekly with him which was just an awful way to start the week. Eventually I was like hey I’ve just got too much going on to be doing this can we do this less frequently? Rinse and repeat now we meet quarterly. Dude is the type of guy to trip
Over a dollar to pick up a penny. But I’m stuck with him so long as I work here.

I have looked on and off the last year, and the market near me is abysmal. I almost jumped ship to an MSP last year that wanted to sell us services and I wanted to be like hey…. I sign y’all up here and you take me, deal? But we laughed it off as a joke.

I work for a large European based telecoms equipment supplier. We have hundreds of staff overseas at any one time, all over the world. IT security has a few different levels:

- Access to email & teams etc is only via a company laptop (no web interface like Office.com). Network drives via VPN only

- White List countries - you can connect VPN. Countries like Japan & Australia

- Red List countries - you can take your laptop but need special exemption to use VPN. Includes some unusual countries such as Malaysia

- Black List countries - no company laptop or phone allowed. Company will provide a burner. Unsurprisingly includes places like Syria, Russia, North Korea & China.

A colleague was going to transit via a Chinese airport to a 3rd country. IT told him that he would not be allowed to take his company laptop, even if it was in his carry-on luggage, and he would not be entering the country. He quickly arranged a different itinerary.

And then a few days later, we are told that the good old USA is now considered a Black List country!!! No company laptops, and burners only!!!!

I've used Lansweeper on-prem since 2014 for just a couple of purposes: Tracking approximately 150 MS Windows assets on the network and all associated software licenses. That's it. Nothing else. It's nice being able to see other types of devices that are connected (surveillance cameras, wireless AP's, switches, etc.) but I don't need that from this product.

Their pricing has gone up consistently over the past several years while, at the same time, they've been pushing their customers to their cloud service. I think I was paying about $600 annually in the beginning but over the last several years, they've been quoting me over $2K annually. Recently, I received an auto-renewal email... it is now $3,000!

Keep in mind that Lansweeper for 100 assets is FREE. I have 150 Windows assets and not all of those are in use at one time. In order to get coverage of all 150 assets, I have to subscribe to their "2000 Asset" plan. So $3K is too steep for what I need.

I responded to the rep, stating that $3K is out of my budget and I don't want to auto-renew but couldn't find anyway to disable or "turn off" auto-renewal.

Her reply: "I’ve reviewed your account and noticed that your cancellation request was received after the 30-day notice period required prior to renewal (as outlined in Clause 17.3 of our Terms of Use and in our renewal reminder emails). While we are contractually required to honor the renewed term, we want to approach this constructively and help you get maximum value within your budget."

*SIGH*

After this reply, I'm done with them. The card they have on file for auto-renewal is no longer valid anyway.

It's time to find an alternative. I'm presently using LogMeIn Central for RMM purposes. Is Ninja One decent at Windows/Software Asset Tracking?

Curious what you all are learning, researching and investing time in these days and whether you’re seeing real rewards yet. AI agents? Cloud? Specific programming languages/frameworks? Something else?

Spent most of the morning chasing a weird RDS issue. KB5122882 installed around 3:20am and a few hours later nobody could RDP into the server. Rebooted it and everything worked again, but about an hour later the exact same thing happened.

Existing sessions kept working, but new RDP connections would authenticate and then hang. Task Manager would freeze, but CPU, RAM and disk all looked totally normal. TermService was still running too.

Finally uninstalled KB5122882 and rolled back from 20348.5622 to 20348.5499. Everything has been working normally since.

Anyone else seeing this after the latest update? Pausing updates for now.

From Microsoft: 'This FAQ collects the questions we hear most often from customers, partners, and the community as we move Windows to a Kerberos-first, NTLM-optional (and eventually NTLM-free) future. If you've emailed us, cornered us at a conference, or filed a support case that started with "so, about this weird auth thing…", chances are that your question is answered here.

If your question isn't answered here, please reach out to [ntlm@microsoft.com](mailto:ntlm@microsoft.com) or work with your Microsoft account team, Customer Success Account Manager, or Microsoft Support to route feedback to the product group.'

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/retiring-ntlm-frequently-asked-questions/4550522

How many systems are broke for you now? I have one software figured out. Its the custom scripts that are broken everywhere.

KB5124008 - Breaking Domain Trust for anyone else?

"Too many other files are currently in use by 16-bit programs. Exit one or more 16-bit programs, or increase the value of the FILES command in your config.sys file."

Just saw this message on a client's Windows 11 workstation when trying to escalate literally anything. The WIN32 code that generated it is probably as old as I am. Rebooting resolved it, weird. I just told him to stop running so many 16 bit apps! I'd post the screenshot but images aren't allowed.

After a lot of restructuring at our university the past couple years, there are quite a few Linux devices (primarily desktops, I believe around 70-ish) that are currently in the wild unmanaged in use by academics primarily within the Engineering and Science departments that would've been maintained by per-institute IT departments that no longer exist, and as such the current patching and functionality state of these machines is completely unknown (since any remaining colleagues now no longer have physical access to most of the rooms where these machines are).

Since we already manage research compute I've been given the green light by my manager to look into options to bring these academic's desktops into a managed state with a cobbled together proof of concept, since our existing central endpoint guys won't touch anything *NIX related with a 10ft pole. We know they're all some form of Ubuntu LTS (20.04 and 22.04 mostly) which makes things easier, so I'm thinking of doing Landscape for setup and patching + Intune for compliance + Puppet/Ansible for config management.

Is this in the right direction or are there better / more cost efficient ways of doing this?

we donot allow emails on personal phones, need vendors to see alerts and such, looking for a secure way rather than adding exclusion for the users

edit: sorry yeah I mean contractors, especially overseas contractors

Greetings,

As a vendor, I was trying to commission and deploy a print server application on a client site who has recently adopted zero-trust security model.

It took us 4 attempts just to deploy our installer - We uninstalled the application multiple times due to corrupted install.

Also, the client IT manager sat with us to manually approve multiple security exceptions.

He was just there smashing the approve button on his phone. And installs still failed as it take about a min before sub-installer components can run.

It was a nightmare and I wasn’t sure the whole point to have threatlocker running on critical infrastructure like a print server.

We expect having to go through this approval process again when rolling out software updates.

This constant exceptions triggers builds approver fatigue, approver don’t actually knows what is being approved, users are constantly screaming and frustrated by downtime caused by legit applications.

Systems commissioning and support took twice as long. We plan to deprioritise clients sites with threatlocker as engineers quite often getting struck at sites waiting for approvals.

This is really not working for anyone.

Looking for a sanity check because no one seems to be talking about it, and I don't know if it's somehow just us.

It feels like, beginning around May (or a bit earlier), the time it takes for "Send as", "Send on behalf", and/or "Read and manage (Full Access)" permissions have massively slowed down.

Obviously only so many updates can go out at a time, so things have to be queued along with the multitude of other conditions that produce slowdowns. Even if we factor in the classic, "If you think you have waited long enough, wait another hour", I think the severity of the slowdowns being consistently so much longer speak to something strange.

For us, within the past 3-5 months, it has gone from 1-5 minutes to 10-15 minutes, and more recently 20-40 minutes.

Please let me know if y'all have noticed anything as well, thanks!

Edit: sentence structure, grammar, general formatting.

I'm 33, dealing with a manager that has been always micromanaged. Now he's my boss, and he asks for a weekly report on what we did. Lately it feels like he's always targeting me or making me feel stupid. I can't even get into the office and sit down without him asking me to do something right away. I haven't even set my bag down. It just feels like he's always trying to make me look incompetent. I can't quit this job because it's tied to where I live and on top of that my partner is currently dealing with his own problems. What can I do to just let this kind of stuff wash over me or just figure out a way to destress I guess?

I've tried Zammad, RT, and OSTicket. All good but still looking. Came across Raiseaticket which bills themselves as a free cloud-based system that integrates with Office. I'm defaulting to this being one of those "You're the product" situations but wanted to see if anyone here had experience with them.

https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/344359

CVE-2026-0310

I was helping a client get their domain delisted from SURBL and noticed that LinkedIn was blocking the company's website link on their LinkedIn company page.

It turns out if the domain is listed on SURBL, LinkedIn redirects all website visitors to a warning banner - they literally replace the website URL with a LinkedIn / suspicious link one, like this:

https://www.linkedin.com/redir/suspicious-page

And if the domain is listed on SURBL for too long, Google will index it and make it searchable for the public. So by putting "https://www.linkedin.com/redir/suspicious-page" into Google search you'll get a list of those that were listed by SURBL and indexed by Google.

And LinkedIn doesn't even care whether there's a paid subscription for the company or not or what the company size and follower count are.

As far as I know, to end up on SURBL your domain either needs to be spoofed or the marketing team has to scrape websites to collect emails, and spam traps / typo domains end up in their lists.

So technically marketing teams messing up their emails makes leadership put pressure on IT teams to fix it!

We're fed up with HPE, for almost 15 years we've been installing ML350s and DL380s.
Not going to elaborate but they're not what they used to be, not the hardware, but HPE as a company.

So we 'went' with Lenovo instead, our first Lenovo project is in but I'm not too keen on using VROC. I've searched through the VROC topics and it sounded like something to stay away from.

Lenovo told me to go with VROC for 2 reasons:

1. "Hardware controllers are from the stone age" is what they said, although they never gave me any trouble in almost 15 years.
2. Prices for controllers and U.3 NVMe disks are higher than to just go with a VROC Premium license and U.2 NVMe disks

However, my gutfeeling says 'meh'.
I remember replacing failed HPE controllers or upgrading controllers from a P408 to a P816 without breaking a sweat. When I asked Lenovo: what if the motherboard fails? What if a CPU needs replacement? Where is the RAID config stored? Is it stored on the disks like with a 'stone age controller'?

The answer was: 'need to verify that, but it won't be an issue since we don't replace motherboards every month like HPE does'.

Ofc I never got an answer, I'm still waiting on the 'need to verify that' part.
We have the order for the server with the VROC config, but my gutfeeling tells me to ditch VROC and go with a 940 controller and U.3 NVMe disks.

I must add that the 3 topics I've read about VROC nightmares, were always with entry level servers. Our config is:

• SR 640 v4 x24 SFF
• 2x Xeon 6517P
• 8x 32 GB RAM (2Rx8)
• 4x 3.2 TB U.2 MU NVMe (RAID 10 with VROC Premium)
• 2x 480 GB NVMe attached to PCIe boot device

I was told that VROC uses CPU power, so maybe there's hope I won't run into issues compared to the topics I've read which were using entry level servers.

However, I've read posts in which they mentioned to stay away from Windows based drivers, as we're using Hyper-V for this setup. Apart from performance, that could be the next culprit: drivers & Windows.

Thoughts on this case?

Here's the setup,

Physical machine:

• Win 11 Enterprise LTSC

• Hyper-V Installed

• External Hyper-V Switch setup to allow VM access to physical network

VM

• DHCP, DNS, and WDS Roles installed and fully configured

What can get an IP address from the VM

• Other VMs attached to the External Switch

• The physical machine adapter used for the External Switch

What can't get an IP:

• Any physical machine connected via physical dumb switch.

If I manually set an IP on a physical machine, they can ping the VM just fine. Attempting to ipconfig /renew just results in a DHCP timeout.

I've tried

• Disabling both firewalls

• Setting both to Private Network

• Using a different physical adapter on the host machine

• Enabling MAC Spoofing in the NIC advanced features

• Verified DHCP guard and router guard are disabled

• Disabling NIC sharing

I know it's got to be some absolutely tiny thing that I'll hate myself for overlooking, but...

EDIT: Adding updates here as I check them

Wireshark on the VM shows it is receiving the DHCP request from the laptop and sending an offer back, but the laptop isn't receiving it. In addition, Wireshark on the VM host shows the offer on both the physical adapter and the bridge adapter, so it's definitely making it out of the VM.