previous post (got removed by mods, but its the same post)

So basically, i joined today and after the onboarding, i met with the current IT guy (who is on his notice period)

The situation is precarious to say the least.

IT budget is severely limited, a bunch of systems are on Active Directory (controlled by an older IBM Intel Xeon machine running Windows Server 2008) , a bunch of systems are not on Active directory

There are 3 headless Windows Machines around the offices acting as fileservers, disk management is messy all around, the entire network is flat with no segmentation or separation of any kind, no NVRs, just 2 DVRs

All Windows installs are not genuine/cracked versions (not by massgrave but the sketchy iso you get from shady websites)

The primary database of the Dealership lives on a 1TB SATA HDD on a headless windows PC , which holds data of a tally server , file server and an apache based website that is used for storing purchase information

This disk has NO BACKUPS OR REDUNDANCY! and this disk is accessed constantly everyday for 9hrs

There is a FortiGate 50G Firewall standing between this network and the wide open web

After work hours, they shut down all systems including the servers.

Now, im not an expert, but this felt like it was one disk failure away from complete catastrophe.

The existing sysadmin shares the same sentiment, he proposed a proper system, however management does not feel very enthusiastic about it, citing costs, they see IT as a simple tool

I don't blame the current sysadmin, but i feel like i should unfuck this clusterfuck before it blows up in my face.

Now, the total number of clients in the network is about 60 systems, running anywhere between Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 and about 5 printers

Now, a lot of the data was stored on premise, however in 2018, the OEM mandated a lot of the data stored on cloud via their proprietary website, due to which they retired a server, which is sitting in the closet collecting dust.

Now, kindly tell me if what im thinking is stupid, but

I was thinking to recommission it, setup Proxmox to fire up a Windows Server VM to handle AD and migrate the Win Server 2008 to something newer, and a Debian based VM to unify all these scattered fileservers (and hopefully setup something like snapraid+mergerfs so that disk failures=me getting fired)

Microsoft is rolling out a Change organizer option that lets meeting organizers transfer meeting ownership directly from Outlook.

It’s not entirely unexpected. When Microsoft introduced admin-initiated meeting transfers a few months ago, many users were also asking for a way to transfer meetings themselves. It looks like Microsoft is now addressing that gap by bringing the capability directly into Outlook.

The feature is currently rolling out.

I look at some of the other sysadmins who flow through the terminal at such ease and then know these random facts about the internals of the linux OS. Not to mention the random keyboard shortcuts and a hundred of them.

If you are what i just described, how did you get to that point? What contributed to that skill the most other than “experience”. A homelab maybe? Tinkering around? Reading?

I was asked this question during an interview and I said "it depends on what exactly you're updating, but I update as often as it's needed."

I don't think this was the answer they were looking for, but how would you answer this question?

Patch 3 available: URGENT Security Advisory: PaperCut NG/MF Security Bulletin (27 Aug 2026) | PaperCut

Also a blog post from one of their executives explaining why they decided to release updates as they had them, instead of waiting for one big perfect patch. Behind the scenes - What happened after 9:42 a.m. on the 27th August 2026 | PaperCut

Mine is faxing and this isn't finance or medical it is strictly because a person/group on either side of the process won't do anything about updating the process. We have some fax machines on POTs lines and some are running through a PRI. This is simply location based and not just because.

On that note, there has to be a fax setup out there where each side is using some type of fax to email service, meaning both ends are not using a POTs line, but users refuse to scan/email and/or devs refuse to update code to allow PDF so faxing is still used but w/o actual phone lines.

Heads up, 1.1.1.3 seems to be down as of around 7AM EDT today. If you use that as a free filtered dns forwarder, change until the issue is resolved.

I'll be upfront: I run a small nonprofit and I am very much not a tech person. Our IT guy left earlier this year and since then I've been the one fielding all the Microsoft-related issues for our organization. We use a bunch of Microsoft products, Teams, SharePoint, some Azure stuff I barely understand, and when things break I genuinely don't know where to turn.

Someone on our board mentioned we should look into Microsoft Unified Support as a way to get professional help when things go wrong. I looked at the Microsoft site and honestly it reads like it was written for someone with a computer science degree. I have no idea what a 'severity level' means in practice or whether we even qualify for certain tiers.

What I'm really trying to figure out is: is Microsoft Unified Support the only real option for getting serious help with Microsoft products, or are there alternatives that might make more sense for an organization like ours? I don't have a huge budget and I'm a little worried about locking into something expensive that's designed for Fortune 500 companies.

Any plain-English guidance from people who've actually navigated this would be genuinely helpful.

God help us....

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/remote-help/deploy

I have 2 specific 2025 Server VMs that apparently have the same SID. I know what you are thinking.... they were imaged and I forgot to change them. That is not the case. They are both completely fresh installs and I have no idea how this happened. I have never cloned a machine as long as I have worked for this company.

Long story short, I need to get one of them changed.

If I run the following without the /oobe will anything on the system be effected such as any existing applications, software, settings, etc. My understanding is that it will have to be re-added to the domain. Anyone have any experience with this?

cd %WINDIR%\System32\Sysprep 
sysprep.exe /generalize /shutdown

Personally, I don't (just yet).

Jokes aside, I can't think of a solution that isn't overworked and/or (very, very) manual.

ELT just asked me to send an all company email that email is down and the marketing people can't send their corporate drivel that they send every Monday.

Hi it's normal in IT that you enforce a policy that user accounts may not be shared or transferred /given to new users right?

Situation is that a partner company that uses our infrastructure used 1 user account for interns for a long time. If the next intern started they give the account To the next...and so on and on. They did not even change the password.

As IT responsible I said they cannot do this any longer that way. And I do not want to support this any longer. Every user also interns need to have an individual/ personal account. Reasons are obvious for me... Accountability, managing the accounts in general, gdpr,...

Example of 1 risk: access to the mailbox or onedrive of the account can have personal data stored from the previous user. So I say sharing accounts is not ok period. But they still keep fighting me for this. They do not want to understand. I'm tired of the discussion. The arguments that they use are : we used it before like this without any issues .

In the new it policy for them it's included. I have no mandate to enforce but I warned my boss about this and I hope my boss will support me..
I was right... With the call on this with the partner... Am I right to try enforcing this?

The only thing is if directors can formally accept the risk to me. But then why bother with security in general? I'm tired and frustrated by this bullshit. I'm doing it the correct way or on the long run I'm changing jobs ...

Any advice?

I have a few HP Mini's deployed to remote locations that are headless and a real pain in the ass to access physically. They are running Windows 10 pro (I know!). Anyway I added a smart plug so I can remotely reboot them, but even so I regularly find they don't come back online (at least not so I can go on with Teamviewer or Tailscale).

Whenever I go out after one of these outages I find that usually its on a pre-login screen asking if I want Windows Backup or something like that.

To get around this I am seriously thinking of installing Proxmox and running Tailscale on the host or is there a better way?

I assume Proxmox would come backup cleanly after any reboot.

Hi all,

I have an opportunity to transition to a new Site IT Specialist role at a mine site (Perth AU) it's a full time 6 month fixed term role [possible for extension]

I have been with the company for around 3 years now [full time and contracted], and I have good IT support experience [service desk / desktop support], most recently in project-based windows 11 rollouts at mine sites [fifo] covering Corporate and OT environments.

My main worry is that I don't have a lot of knowledge and experience around:

- Network configs/servers/netwroking lingo and terminolgies

- Setting up comms racks, configuring, troubleshooting Cisco switches, Wi-Fi APs setup and troubleshooting

I do have an open to learn attitude and i know alot of these things ill learn hands on when im up there and asking alot of questions etc.

Are there any readings/courses anyone can recommend i can look into?

Thanks in advance :)

Today's Exchange/O365 (EX1464935/MO1465074) outage seems to be a result of the instability we've been seeing the last 3 or 4 months due to the rapid change occurring regularly in the Microsoft ecosystem. This one is more visible to end users than other problems we've faced this summer. I'm curious if the stability of government tenants has been better. Are commercial tenants the beta testers for government tenant changes?

Hello. I've used the DRM successfully dozens of times in the past. I recently have seen errors when I attempt to run the ISOs I create from DRM. This is happening on both DRM 3.5.0 and 3.5.1 running on a Win11 client and being applied to all my R640 servers and they are running the latest BIOS: 2.28.1. All of the catalogs and plugins are up to date.

Using the DRM software I simply choose the "Platform Bootable ISO" option, I select the system: R640, chose the location to save the ISO file, and then I click on CREATE. The job runs successfully.

When I go to apply the ISO to the system, either using iDRAC to virtually present the ISO file on boot or using any type of application to send the ISO to a USB drive I can get the system to successfully boot into the loaders after starting Suse Linux. That's when I get the errors.

Every package in the bootable ISO attempt to install the updates. Then I get:
Trying to Upgrade DSU
Failed to create Support Directory
<Package Name>.BIN Error: Package execution requires 'root' user privileges.

I see this for multiple packages and then it eventually just hangs. With this being an automated process in the DRM to create the ISO I'm not able to intervene and elevate privileges. But I shouldn't need to with this process. Has anyone else seen these issues before and successfully resolved them?

We're working through a CIS Benchmark remediation and one of the findings is:

>

We're planning to set this to **"Authenticated"** (not "Authenticated without exceptions" — we're aware that level is much riskier and more likely to break things) on our **Exchange Server SE** environment.

Before we push this via GPO, I'd like to hear from anyone who has actually applied this in a production Exchange SE (or 2019) environment:

* Did it break **Outlook Anywhere / RPC over HTTP** for any legacy clients?
* Any issues with **MAPI/RPC** connections from older Outlook versions?
* Any impact on **DAG replication** or **Active Manager**?
* Did it cause problems with **Exchange Management Shell / EAC** functionality?
* Any unexpected issues with **AD communication** (since Exchange talks to DCs heavily over RPC)?
* Did you apply it to Domain Controllers as well, or keep DCs and Exchange servers on separate rollout schedules?
* Since Exchange SE is fairly new, has anyone tested this specifically against SE's RPC dependencies, or is it safe to assume behavior is the same as 2019?

Our environment: Exchange Server SE, mostly modern Outlook clients on MAPI/HTTP, not fully certain if any legacy RPC/TCP clients remain in the environment.

Any war stories, gotchas, or "wish I'd known this before enabling it" experiences would be really helpful before we roll this out.

Thanks in advance.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hi SysAdmin family,

Is anyone here using GLPI or Zammad as a helpdesk/ticketing system?

I’d love to hear about your experience with either platform, especially:

• Pros and cons
• Number of users
• Number of agents
• Average tickets per day
• Overall environment/setup
• Performance and reliability
• Any issues or limitations you’ve encountered

If you’ve used both, I’d especially appreciate a comparison between GLPI and Zammad.

I love optimizing and automating things. I have seen many labs (EDU sector) doing updates and deployments manually or wasting a lot of times doing things that can be automated in an weekend. I have previously worked in a lab and loved automating some of their processes. Have you seen "consultants" being hired to automate / optimize IT labs workflow? Maybe this is more of a career question as to if this is possible / hourly rate

I'm leaving my company. I was asked regarding the potential to do contract work following my departure. I really like my boss on a personal level and don't want to screw him over, but at the same time this company has had over a decade to build some redundancy into this role and they haven't.

I'm burnt out. I want to get out and be done. I really don't want the contract work, but I don't want to totally screw my coworkers either. Is $200 a good rate to set, not too insultingly high, if they need it they can pay it, but hopefully I won't be contacted all the time?

anyone else having issues sending emails?