connected with a buddy of mine from the trenches after a looong time the other day, got hit hard with a wave of nostalgia from the early 2000s. i was working tech in higher ed back then. we had this crazy overhyped $8 million setup. vbrick encoders, crestron touch panels running shitty windows ce overlays, all packed into these heavy wooden rolling carts. the whole system blew up practically every other day. whenever a faculty started panicking mid lecture our actual high tech fix was sending a 19 year old workstudy kid to crawl behind the cart and yank the main power strip out of the wall. lol! remember begging the dean to let us build a simple linux stack in house but they fell for the slick vendor presentation instead. honestly though the broken hardware wasnt even the point. it was the culture. At 5:00 pm on the dot, front door to the office got locked so faculty couldn't barge in askign for help with personal laptops. my guys would fire up doom on the office pcs while we waited for nt 4.0 service packs to to finish patching. terry the workstudy kid held down the helpdesk phone till 11 pm. we'd order pizza, test out new projectors on the office wall, unwrap new blades and just mess around and tinker. the human connection was real back then. senior admin assistants would drop off fresh homemade muffins or cookies just because you spent twenty minutes fixing an access shortcut or some broken ODBC driver for them so they didnt have to suffer through banner. you weren't a tier-1 support asset tag. you were their guy! I've been in executive roles for years now and looking at modern IT kinds breaks me a bit. everything today is servicenow tickets, outsourced helpdesks, AWS pipelines, zero trust, and liability policies. no personal favors, no late night lan games in the back room, no tinkering. sure the corporate dashboards look great and uptime is 99.9% but we sucked out and traded all the soul, warmth, and actual human connection for green SLAs. maybe it still exists somewhere, i don't know.

Reading about the EDK2 PXE bug (CVE-2026-97631). If something can send a crafted ICMP error to a machine while it's network booting, it can run code before Secure Boot does anything.

What I keep coming back to is the inventory side. Not which servers use PXE, which have it enabled. I'd guess a lot of that is just factory default. And provisioning networks aren't alwys as isolated as the diagram says. Is there a sane way to audit this, or is it just checking BIOS settings machine by machine?

Please don't settle for a salary that barely lets you get by.

I know you're just starting out. Maybe you're resetting passwords, fixing user issues, installing software, or doing basic troubleshooting all day. You might feel like your responsibilities aren't that big yet, so you don't deserve to ask for more money.

But here's the thing about this career. The job you're doing today is only a small part of what you need to learn if you actually want to get somewhere in IT.

You have to learn networking, operating systems, servers, virtualization, cloud, scripting, security, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And a lot of it? You're gonna have to learn on your own time, because your company isn't gonna teach you everything you need to know.

You'll be spending your evenings learning, building labs, troubleshooting things that don't work, and trying to figure out what you should learn next. Sometimes you'll spend months learning something that has absolutely nothing to do with your current job, just because you know you'll need it to move forward.

Now imagine doing all that while worrying about money every single month.

That's what bothers me.

You're already investing your time and energy into building your career. Your salary shouldn't make that harder than it needs to be.

My advice? Ask for better pay. Don't just calculate how much money you need to survive until the end of the month. Think about how much you need to support your family, save money, pay for learning resources, handle emergencies, and still have something left over.

If possible, aim for a salary that lets you save at least twice your essential monthly expenses. It might take time to get there, but at least have that goal.

And don't keep accepting the same salary year after year while you're learning more, gaining experience, and becoming better at what you do.

If your company doesn't value your growth or pay you fairly, start looking at other companies. Prepare for interviews, improve your skills, and move when you find a better opportunity. Just make sure you have a sensible plan before leaving your current job.

One more thing: don't convince yourself that you deserve less just because you're a junior or because your current work seems easy.

You might not be managing production servers today. You might not be designing networks or working with cloud infrastructure yet. That's fine. Everybody starts somewhere.

But you need time and money to get beyond that stage.

IT changes fast. If you can't afford to keep learning, or you're so stressed about your finances that you never have the energy to study, you're making your own career progression harder.

And a few years down the road, you don't want to find yourself doing the same work, earning almost the same money, and wondering why you haven't moved forward.

I'm not saying you should demand an unrealistic salary or quit every job that pays less than you want. Sometimes you have to start small.

Just don't make the mistake of thinking a low salary is perfectly fine simply because you're doing entry-level work.

Think about where you want to be three or five years from now, and make sure your current job is helping you get there financially as well as technically.

Work hard, keep learning, and ask for the money that gives you a real chance to grow. Don't spend your entire career just trying to survive while preparing yourself for a better one.

Hello, everyone!

Sysadmin with 9 months experience here(basically nothing). My question is kinda more theoretical/philosophical rather than technical one. So I do tasks and tickets, but at the same time I read books about Linux and recently I was learning on a deep level about TTY, PTY, history of terminals, what is line discipline and etc. And when I asked my senior colleague clarifying question about it, he said that he does not know, indeed he thinks that its pointless to learn this things because its highly unlikely that I am ever going to implement this knowledge at all. He stated that it is better to learn new stuff as you get new tasks instead of building up this knowledge because you will forget it anyway. He added these things like low level components and C and all this stuff that Unix systems are running on is already a legacy and we have to shift to a next abstraction layers like developers do not need to know how assembly runs code. So my question is do I really need to know all these things and even more so on a this profound level to become highly skilled sysadmin and infrastructure specialist or I need to form a more pragmatic thinking? For example, I know what is bios, uefi, lvm, disk partition, daemons and etc, but it's more on superficial/practical level even though I can answer interview questions about it.

I think that this philosophy (understanding Linux/Unix and its components on a profound deep level even though I probably will not use this knowledge on a day to day basis ) is going to make me a strong professional by building a whole picture but at the same time since I am new to this industry and do not know it is going to work in a long run.

Thank You everyone in advance!

Can anyone offer me some advice? I quoted for the hours I thought this would take and it has been at least 4x times that already.

I'm using the Office 365 Admin Centre migration tools.

Issue 1: Migrating Files/Shares - CONSTANTLY FAILING - I get a report on what is failed, exclude those folders, and try and run it again. Gets a bit more data then fails again! In the end - I have a "complete" user migration but 20 excluded folders and I have no way of knowing what the issue is and what hasn't moved across. Right now I'm trying to download a full user's data locally so I can just copy it across but I don't know if it will work and also might not work for their "big" 150GB share folder.

I only have ONE user and ONE large share that's an issue, everything was small enough to sync through. But once it is hitting these sync issues it's almost impossible to actually move all their data.

Issue 2: Email migration - they have at least 100k emails, at least 50k being sent auto-replies. I know the issue about file limits rather than sizes and have asked them to look at and clear this data, otherwise it will take weeks of restarting the sync over and over for one mailbox.

Ahhhh

Any other options I can try outside of this damned MS migration tool, that won't break things that have already half migrated?

Hey guys, the company I’m working for has no form of back up active right now and id like to set that up. I’ve looked into the Microsoft back up but it doesn’t feel reliable because why would I keep the back up for the environment within the environment

I’ve looked at Rubrik but it’s expensivee, and I’ve looked at Veeam web which also looks expensive

So how is everyone backing up the data for your organisations? It’s mainly for our Microsoft environment in the event of a ransom attack etc. I’m looking for cheap options as management does not want to spend a lot of money

Plss help : (

There is a shipping and receiving warehouse that prints a lot of labels from software like UPS Worldship as well as pdf output from a few web portals. This has been working well for years aside from the occasional reset the zebra printer stock size settings once in a blue moon.

The company is looking to change things up with a Warehouse Management System that should help us be more efficient and reduce errors.

One of the options requires all label printing to have an IPsec VPN tunnel to the vendors VPS systems which will send ZPL print jobs directly to the Zebra printers.

I am curious if you happen to work with shipping and receiving warehouses and have run into this type of network requirement for label printing?

This is a really strange setup from my experience but I am not claiming to be a warehousing IT expert, happy to learn and our segmented POC does the job just fine but it seems like a lot of extra pieces for something that traditionally has been a super simple setup

Hello. I am trying to hire two positions and while I think these are good jobs on a good team, I am getting very few applications and I am hoping for some advice on how to retool the positions to get more hits.

I know I'll catch hell for this, but I cannot provide a salary range, but management said they are willing to pay high for quality talent. These positions are in Huntsville, AL and require a Secret clearance. Huntsville has a lot of cleared talent, so I was hoping for more applications.

One is a 50% network position and 50% storage position:
https://careers.trinzic.com/us/en/job/R3000564/Senior-Infrastructure-Engineer

The other is a pure Linux sysadmin:
https://careers.trinzic.com/us/en/job/R3000823/Senior-Linux-Systems-Administrator

Not necessarily trying to advertise here, I'm just looking for advice on how to retool the postings, but obviously if any of you want to apply please go ahead.

Hi everyone,

We're currently migrating approximately 3,000 Windows endpoints from traditional Active Directory to Microsoft Entra Join, with Intune and Microsoft Global Secure Access (GSA / Entra Private Access).

One challenge we're facing is how to preserve effective remote troubleshooting capabilities for our L2/L3 support technicians and IT analysts.

Our current environment

With AD-joined devices, we use WinRM / PowerShell Remoting extensively for interactive troubleshooting, diagnostics, inventory queries, and remediation.

For example, a technician can:

• Connect to a remote workstation using PowerShell.
• Query services, processes, registry settings, WMI/CIM, event logs, and Windows configuration.
• Investigate an issue interactively.
• Execute a corrective action.
• Immediately verify the results.
• Continue troubleshooting based on what was discovered.

This is particularly valuable because troubleshooting is rarely a predefined sequence of actions.

The challenge with Entra Join and GSA

We understand that WinRM can work with Entra-joined devices under certain conditions.

However, using WinRM through GSA, especially for remote endpoints without direct network connectivity, appears to be considerably more complicated.

Our architects are understandably cautious about maintaining traditional remote administration capabilities in a modern Zero Trust environment.

But here's my concern: What about the technicians and analysts who actually troubleshoot workstations every day?

Why Intune Remediations may not be enough

Intune Remediations are useful for proactive management, automated corrections, and recurring issues.

However, they don't necessarily replace interactive troubleshooting.

Consider a technician investigating a Windows service issue.

With WinRM, they can query the service, inspect dependencies, examine logs, test a hypothesis, apply a correction, and immediately verify the outcome.

With Intune, the process may involve creating or selecting a remediation script, deploying it, waiting for execution, retrieving results, and repeating the process if additional investigation is required.

Furthermore, our L2/L3 technicians and analysts won't necessarily have access to Intune administrative functions, nor should they require broad Intune permissions simply to diagnose a workstation.

We don't want every troubleshooting operation to depend on an Intune administrator or someone developing a new remediation script.

My questions to the community

1. How are you handling interactive remote troubleshooting for L2/L3 technicians in an Entra-joined environment?
2. Have you successfully retained WinRM / PowerShell Remoting, including for remote endpoints using GSA?
3. If you've moved away from WinRM, what solution replaced its interactive diagnostic capabilities?
4. How do your technicians retrieve diagnostic information and execute corrective actions without having to create and deploy new scripts for every investigation?
5. Has your organization implemented a solution that provides immediate, interactive PowerShell diagnostics while respecting Zero Trust and least-privilege principles?

I'm not opposed to modernization or replacing WinRM.

If a modern solution provides equivalent or better functionality with appropriate security controls, I'm all for it.

But I believe we need to distinguish endpoint management from interactive technical support.

Replacing a technology should not mean losing operational capabilities that support teams rely on daily.

I'd be particularly interested in hearing from organizations managing thousands of Windows endpoints that have already completed this transition.

What does your L2/L3 troubleshooting workflow actually look like today?

Hello all,

We moves tenants and update everyone's iPhone or Android. But one iPhone lost it's names in Messages. I tried just about everything I could find on the net. No help. Any thoughts?

Has anyone else experienced Quickbooks Online being very slow loading reports when in a Zoom meeting doing a screenshare? We have an accounting client that is fully remote and just about all of them report this issue. QBO is fast and responsive until the Zoom meeting starts, then it takes 10+ seconds to go from page to page. We're trying everything we can for them, but wondering if anyone else has come across this and found a solution? TIA!

Hi there! Not sure which subreddit to ask this in, so here I am! I work at a non profit arts organization that houses lots of artists short-term throughout the year. We have about 50 rooms scattered around our campus, and managing every rooms schedule in Excel is torture.

Does anyone have a room booking system (preferably free or low cost for non-profits) that they have used to create and manage booking like you might use at a hotel or something similar? We wouldn’t need the ability to have people make reservations themselves, as my team assigns everyone a space. Just looking for a way to create reservations myself, see who is in which room when and have our housekeeping team update rooms when they’re clean. Any advice is appreciated!

Just like the title says, I needed to record a simple step-by-step for a client today and found that the old tool I used to use (PSR.exe) has been deprecated. Another casualty of modern Microsoft. Does anyone know of a free and simple alternative that works decently enough?

Over the weekend, we got charged over $48k across 2 bank payments by Autodesk (aa 3rd of another 40k got blocked), the issue is that we have never had an Autodesk account nor used their systems before, we already contacted the bank and their support directly and Autodesk says they don't see such payment, with the specific transaction number/code being received. Any suggestions?

Hi everyone,

Earlier today we were the target of an automated Layer 7 DDoS attack against our production Cloud Run service. The attack was carried out using a Python script (Python/3.13 aiohttp/3.14.5) which was making around 50 requests per second to POST /api/login, attempting to consume container concurrency.

The traffic came through Google's own proxy infrastructure, potentially Apps Script or Colab, rotating across 200+ IPs resolving to google-proxy-*.google.com (e.g., 66.102.8.132, 66.102.8.161, 74.125.210.103).

The problem is that Google's official abuse reporting form (https://support.google.com/code/contact/cloud_platform_report) immediately closes the report with:

We're unable to do anything with this report as the IP address referenced in it isn't hosted on Google Cloud.

It appears the automated system only recognizes customer Compute Engine IP ranges, not Google's own proxy egress IPs (AS15169). As a result, the report gets rejected before anyone can review the Cloud Logging evidence, including timestamps and Cloud Trace IDs.

We've already hardened the backend with distributed Firestore rate limits, concurrency controls and request timeouts so the attack traffic is now being dropped. We've also responded to the closed ticket with the trace IDs, asking for escalation to the relevant Trust & Safety team.

I have three questions:

1. Is there a specific abuse reporting email or intake point for traffic coming in via Google's own proxy infrastructure which would effectively bypass the automated IP validation?
2. Has anyone with Basic Support actually escalated a similar proxy based DDoS to a human at Google?
3. Would Google Bug Hunters be the right place to report this as a potential proxy abuse/SSRF vector or is there a more appropriate channel to get to the relevant security engineers?

Any suggestions on how to get this routed to the appropriate team would be great. Thanks!

We're trying to get M365 setup. However whenever I try to login to the application with a test licensed user account, I get a 404 Network error. I know the creds are good, I can log into web portal no problem.

I've isolated the issue to a specific GPO that when applied causes this, but this is a like a legacy GPO that may be 20 years old and no matter what I've done I can't seem to isolate what specific policy item is causing this.

I've recreated the policy by hand, trying to match it item for item, no problems, the new test policy doesn't prevent M365 from working.

I do a backup and restore policy item, new restored policy does cause the problem.

I modified the files in Sysvol and renamed the ADM folder in the relevant GPO to adm.old, this prevented new computers from experiencing this behavior. But since I need to get M365 working, I need to find the actual policy so that I can either delete the registry key or set the inverse as simply removing the policy leaves the behavior in tact for anything that got the policy previously

I've used Regshot for a before and after, unforunately this creates a 5,000ish line txt file and there is simply too much noise to figure out what's actually happening here.

If anyone has any ideas or thought about where to look or ideas on how to isolate this further, that'd would be greatly appreciated.

This is M365 installed on Windows 11 24H2 Ent.

Can we relax a little? lol asking for a friend.

Hey Folks,

Scenario:

• User running MuseAI (not M365 integrated)
• User works on a sharepoint document OR shares a link to a sharepoint document with the bot
• ITDR screams on token theft
• Logs show user logging into sharepoint on chrome/linux, accessing the same file with the same session token they have on their workstation
• none of the other typical evidence of BEC is present (no phishing messages, nothing weird in browser history, etc)

To me, this looks like Muse is taking extreme liberties with end users active cookies and login tokens, replaying them on other machines in other geo-locations. Terrifying if true.

Wondering if anyone else has seen similar.

And yes, I know, block non-approved apps, filter DNS, etc. Not looking for solutions, just confirmation that others are seeing similar behaviour.

Im a L1/L2 support guy. Our end users use the new outlook from Microsoft. Since yesterday, ive had a handful of users call in saying they can't open documents, specifically PDF documents

When I go to their mail and open the PDF I can't. Its only a preview of it. I have to save it to the desktop or one drive and then I can open it in edge. I can't just double click and open it in edge anymore.

Same goes with word documents. I click them, select to use it in the desktop app, and it will say its opening or loading then it stops and never opens.

Ive downloaded Adobe acrobat reader and tested it as thr default app to use, nothing works.

Its driving me crazy and making me feel extremely stupid that I can't resolve this.

Any help, ideas, even a solution at best would be helpful, thank you.

Had an employee leave on Friday and found out Monday morning their badge was still active. HR had processed everything on their side but nobody had told the person managing door access

Nothing happened but it made us realize how easy it is for something like that to get missed when different departments are handling different parts of offboarding. For anyone managing access control, does HR automatically trigger badge removal or does someone have to manually request it? Trying to figure out what people do to make sure these don't slip through

Hello everyone,

In my ESXi 6.0 environment, when I run /usr/lib/vmware/vmsyslog/bin/vmsyslogd, I get the following error message:

Cannot open kernel log device!

After checking, I discovered that the symlink /dev/klog pointing to /dev/char/mem/klog does not exist. I tried recreating the symlink manually, but was unsuccessful.

Currently, the vmsyslogd service is unable to run.

Any help or suggestions on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

What is everyone doing with this? Moving all PC's to the new Time Zones or staying with known time zones? Anyone brave enough to use the Microsoft Invoke-Calendar move commands that come out tomorrow?

Current Microsoft communications.

Update to MC1510951: Canada 2026 time zone changes — Microsoft 365 impact and required admin actions

 Summary

 On November 1, 2026, certain Canadian regions will not change clocks, affecting Microsoft 365 scheduling. Admins must update Windows, Outlook time zones, review meetings, update Teams Rooms, and keep apps current. Testing and support case submission with #Canada Time-Zone are advised.

 This post updates MC1510951 ((Updated) Windows updates are available for 2026 time zone changes in Canada, posted October 16, 2026).

 On November 1, 2026, affected locations in British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba will not move clocks back and will remain on UTC-07:00, UTC-06:00, and UTC-05:00 respectively. Affected locations in the Northwest Territories (including Yellowknife and Inuvik) align with the Alberta change, and Northwestern Ontario aligns with the Manitoba change.

 Windows and Microsoft 365 services depend on updated time zone definitions for correct scheduling and display behavior.

 How this affects your organization

 Confirmed impact

1. Outlook and Exchange Online (calendar): Users must move to the new time zone. Existing events do not migrate automatically. Recurring meetings require additional review.
2. Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows: Some devices may display time one hour behind Windows until Edge/WebView2 is updated.

Potential impact (under validation)

1. Microsoft Teams (desktop, web, mobile) and other Teams devices
2. Outlook for iOS, Android, and Mac
3. Microsoft Bookings
4. Shifts
5. SharePoint Online
6. OneDrive

What you need to do

1. Ensure Windows devices in affected regions have the latest Windows updates (including October 2026 updates).
2. Ask users in affected regions to select the new time zone in Outlook and review meetings scheduled after November 1, especially recurring series.
3. Plan to run the Exchange Online PowerShell remediation cmdlet for non-recurring meetings once released (target: October 28, 2026).
4. Update Microsoft Edge and WebView2 on Teams Rooms on Windows and confirm room time display matches Windows.
5. Keep Teams, Outlook (including iOS/Android/Mac), and other Microsoft 365 apps current.
6. Test key scenarios before November 1: recurring meetings, free/busy, Bookings appointments, Shifts schedules, and SharePoint regional settings.
7. If issues occur, open a support case in the Microsoft 365 admin center and include #Canada Time-Zone in the title.

Additional information

• Outlook Time Zone Changes for British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba (Microsoft Support)
• Interim guidance for British Columbia time zone changes 2026 (DST Blog)
• Interim guidance for Alberta time zone changes 2026 (DST Blog)
• Manitoba 2026 time zone update available now (Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone Blog)

We will continue updating this post as product teams confirm impact, publish mitigations, and release additional guidance.

I'm seeing this trend more and more. WFH users opening tickets for very simple things that they claim is preventing them from working. I remote in and the issue magically vanishes. How many people do you think are just faking technology problems from home so that they don't have to connect or work? Seems pretty simple to just throw your tech under the bus. Thoughts?

Does anyone have experience with Forensit User Profile Wizard in migrating a user profile from the old domain to a new domain?

I’m migrating 6 users to the new domain, and want the transition to be as seamless as possible.

Edit: it worked great for user #1. She had a ton of desktop documents, etc. i manually exported and imported the Chrome passwords and bookmarks. In our setup, I had to connect to VPN before running the tool and afterward as local administrator before signing the user in for the first time. I’m pleased.

https://imgur.com/a/9CBEok2

Started getting a few complaints about this one and it was news to me. I never saw anything in the M365 Admin Center about it, even went back through all the Admin Center messages and my emails.. still absolutely nothing.

Disabling the tag involves a mail flow rule. Folder behavior is controlled by bulk move options in your anti-spam policies.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/anti-spam-bulk-complaint-level-bcl-about#deliver-bulk-mail-below-the-bcl-threshold-to-the-promotions-folder