Finally made the jump to Sysadmin.

After being burnt out at my last job (Desktop Support) I made the jump over to a 6 month contract doing IT support during a transition from GCP, with the possibility of extension or conversion after it ended. Now that the contract is finally coming to an end, and I just got the good news from my boss that they want to not only keep me, but convert me as well. I was initially hired on as support for their transition from one cloud platform to another, but now I’m being converted over to the infrastructure team, and my new noscript will be Jr SysAdmin for a bit while I get my bearings and learn the systems/tools. Then after 6 months or so I’ll get the full Sysadmin noscript (and a pay bump)! So, just wanted to hop on here to say thanks for all the good advice that you guys give in this sub (and r/ITCareerQuestions) and thanks for the encouragement to keep pushing up the career ladder for bigger and better positions. If it could happen for me, someone with no related college degree and no certs, it can happen for you. Cheers! 🍻

https://redd.it/1oecxn7
@r_systemadmin

I barely have any work to do, should I be worried about getting fired?

I honestly only have about three hours of actual work per week. During daily standup meetings, I usually have to come up with things to say, like “I’m doing this or that,” which is technically true , but those tasks are very manual and only take a few minutes to complete.

This is a remote job, so it basically feels like being on paid vacation. For some people, that might sound great, but for me it’s stressful because I constantly feel like I could be fired at any moment.

I’m also not learning anything new, since I don’t have much access within the company. There are just two of us working as sysadmins, and the other guy barely does anything, he actually has another job. Sometimes after the daily standup he messages me asking if there’s anything to do, and my answer is always “no.” Then that’s it for the day.

Nobody seems to care about what we’re doing, or maybe they’ve just forgotten about us. For example, the last time I did any real work was almost two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve just been going to the gym and watching stuff online.

What would you do in my situation? I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I get fired , it doesn’t make sense for a company to keep an employee who’s doing nothing. Has anyone else been through something similar?

https://redd.it/1oeegur
@r_systemadmin

Solo IT guy - What now?

Well, I have been at a place for 2 years now and everything is running like a toyota hilux. No breaches, no spam emails, no phishing, not internet outages. Intune has been implemented; iOS devices are no longer activation locked to personal accounts. No laptops lying around with less than 8 GB of RAM and Windows 10 has been removed from the office environment, we have an offsite failover.

It was what I would call a low complexity environment, where you have your standard ADsync domain server, 1 app server, firewalls, a VPN tunnel between sites and a whole bunch of random web applications.

My question is. What now? There are some things that can be done, but I no longer know what.

https://redd.it/1oefwnm
@r_systemadmin

I’m curious how other admins weigh buying criteria between Dell PowerEdge and HPE ProLiant.

My take:


The main decision factor isn’t CPU, RAM, or bay count.

It’s remote management. I generally prefer iDRAC over iLO for day-to-day work (UX feels quicker, fewer clicks), and I also find Dell boxes arrive fully assembled and are easier to rack, which speeds up deployment.

Questions for the room:

Do you also view OOB management as the #1 differentiator? If not, what is?
Which vendor has treated you better on firmware hygiene and RMA in the last 12–24 months?

https://redd.it/1oed8my
@r_systemadmin

Looking for a Postman alternative that works fully offline

I’ve been relying on Postman for API testing and documentation for a while, but lately the heavy cloud sync and account requirements have been driving me nuts especially when working in restricted or air-gapped environments.

I’m curious what others here are using as an offline or self-hosted alternative to Postman?
Ideally something that:

Runs fully locally (no cloud dependencies)

Can import Postman collections

Supports environment variables and OpenAPI specs

Works cross-platform (Windows/Linux/macOS)


I recently came across a few options like Bruno, Hoppscotch (self-hosted mode), and Apicat curious if anyone here has tried them in a production or secure network environment.

Would love to hear what’s worked best for your workflow.

https://redd.it/1odz605
@r_systemadmin

Alaska Airlines IT staff...

Y'all have my sympathies. Hopefully it's not DNS....

Alaska Airlines issues temporary ground stop for IT outage
https://mynorthwest.com/chokepoints/alaska-airlines-3/4146461

https://redd.it/1oel8bs
@r_systemadmin

What's your go-to PC deployment method in 2025?

Curious what everyone’s go-to method for PC deployment is these days! I used to be a PXE boot guy myself - boot, image, throw at user. Now I’ve joined the Autopilot + Intune club and I must say, It’s great! That is if you survive the initial setup. 😂

https://redd.it/1oendam
@r_systemadmin

I swear SaaS renewals are slowly turning into a full-time job

Just finished chasing down 3 auto-renewals from tools nobody remembers buying.
One’s on the company card, one’s on someone’s personal card (who left 6 months ago), and one was “just a free trial.”

I’ve got a shared spreadsheet to track this junk but it’s always out of date.

How do you all keep SaaS subnoscriptions under control without spending half your life in Excel?

https://redd.it/1oeo21h
@r_systemadmin

Tier 2 Technician - $50/hr?

I'm being hired by a Gas Station company in the East Coast to be a Tier 2 technician, mainly troubleshooting and fixing issues at their retail locations. I've done this work for about a year, at another company, for only $22/hr. This new position offers $40/hr starting, but since I have about 1.5 years of experience, they offer a range of $40-$60/hr based off of experience. Has anyone done this kind of work before that can give me some insight into what I'm stepping into? Since I have about 1.5 years of experience in this kind of IT, and 7-8 years experience in Deskside Support in general, can I feel comfortable about asking for $50/hr? Advice needed.

https://redd.it/1oen665
@r_systemadmin

Weekly 'I made a useful thing' Thread - October 24, 2025

There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from noscripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from noscripts and software to tutorials and videos.

We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas!

In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed.

https://redd.it/1oetnqf
@r_systemadmin

What visitor management system are you guys using? I need something stupid simple

Need to implement something for our office. Our front desk isn't always staffed, so we want something that can run as self-serve.

We always have mix of vendors/clients/candidates coming through, so simplicity is the main thing (while still feeling “premium”, or at least not homemade).

And we have a fair chunk of regular visitors, so I ideally want them to be able to sign-in quickly (IE not having to start from the top every time they visit).

Anything specific I should know about and ask during demos (I have calls booked with Arc⁤hie and Env⁤oy this week)?

P.S. Main ask is proper integrations for badge printers and doors access, and Slac⁤k notifications for hosts would also be nice to have!

https://redd.it/1oepsxb
@r_systemadmin

Teams is apparently going to soon start offering location tracking, not just in buildings but also to identify people working outside of the office

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-teams/microsoft-teams-is-about-to-become-your-boss-lapdog

Sitting here wondering just what kind of fallout this is going to engender, particularly with the subset of remote users who pretend to be working from one location but are actually nowhere even close to where they should be. The tracking will apparently be automatic whenever Teams is running, not just when on a call.

https://redd.it/1oewcr8
@r_systemadmin

PSA: Update your WSUS servers ASAP CVSS 9.8 RCE with OOB Updates for Server 2012 and above

MSRC Link: CVE-2025-59287 - Security Update Guide - Microsoft - Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

"A remote, unauthenticated attacker could send a crafted event that triggers unsafe object deserialization in a legacy serialization mechanism, resulting in remote code execution."

ETA: care of u/rich2778, note that this update will apply to _all_ servers since WSUS is an OS feature. Probably don't need to rush it out the door on non-WSUS servers.

https://redd.it/1oewrm6
@r_systemadmin

Most overlooked IT ticketing system for smaller teams?

We've been testing a few IT ticketing systems for a while now and keep running into the same issue: everything feels built for massive enterprises (too many upcharges and side fees)

We did demos with Freshdesk and Jira Service Management, but they both feel too heavy for our team of around 260 people.

At that scale, the pricing and setup overhead don't make a lot of sense anymore.

Curious what smaller or more "under-the-radar" ITSM tools people here have actually used and liked. Looking for something clean, efficient, and not overcomplicated.

https://redd.it/1oey65f
@r_systemadmin

File Explorer automatically disables the preview feature for files downloaded from the internet

Will this was a buzz kill all of a sudden users could not preview PDF's from the scanner....

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-disables-preview-pane-for-downloads-to-block-ntlm-theft-attacks/

https://redd.it/1oezz2b
@r_systemadmin

What do you hate about your job?

I’ll go first. I’m been in tech for over 8yrs. I’m basically a one man shop so I do everything. I can buy whatever I want, and basically almost do whatever I want. I get paid relatively okay.

The problem : the end users.

Being the one man shop means I also gotta do all the terrible stuff like change toners, explain to basic people that if they have 20years of emails on their computer their email is gonna be slow. That they need to try a reboot.

It’s so baddddd. I keep studying at work so I can stop dealing with end users .

Rant over

https://redd.it/1of15vb
@r_systemadmin

Employee forgot MacBook password

Hoping you can point me in the right direction as I am not an Apple person.

Company is completely remote. All computers are on intune with laps. Users are setup as standard.

Got a call saying new employee already forgot their login password to their computer.

Anyway to reset it remotely with local admin login? Wipe and do over as they are new?

I would love to be able to just reset or change the password but as it is Friday and already pissed off, wipe is an option.

https://redd.it/1of0rg6
@r_systemadmin

In honor of this week's AWS outage: The weirdest "It was DNS!" I've yet encountered!

This was a couple of months ago, and it took us nearly 4 days to figure it out - but once we did, we had a fix in place within half an hour.

It started with users reporting cryptic error messages when trying to connect to our ERP system using Chrome: "ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR". Then other users started reporting the same error when trying to connect to our ticketing system. Some quick googling led us to the flag to disable QUIC protocol, but this just gave the users a different error: "ERR_ECH_FALLBACK_CERTIFICATE_INVALID". Users who had already connected weren't affected and could use either system just fine. Then just as suddenly as the errors appeared, they went away, and everyone could use the systems again.

Obviously, knowing "It's always DNS!", one of the first things we checked was DNS logs. The error code seemed to indicate a mismatched certificate, so an early theory was that somehow an incorrect A record was making it into our DNS cache - but DNS was consistently answering with the correct record, and even packet traces confirmed Chrome was connecting to the correct server. As the issue was always exclusive to Chromium-based browsers (1 person was for some reason using Edge, but everyone else was on Chrome), we began to suspect some secret Google experiment was affecting us. Firefox was never affected, but unfortunately our ERP vendor insisted only Chrome could be used for that system.

Then as I was trying to explain to the CITO that it wasn't DNS, I noticed something else in the DNS logs: Queries of type=65 for these host names. I looked up that record - HTTPS, a specialization of the relatively new SVCB records - and discovered that it can be used to provide public keys for, you guessed it, ECH.

Turns out our web filter - a cloud-based DNS service - had some glitch in their system that was occasionally answering DNS requests for HTTPS records, which it normally should be denying. And every impacted system was a split-DNS scenario: On our internal network, users connected directly to the server, but outside users would connect through a Cloudflare Tunnel. And Cloudflare sets up HTTPS records for you for all your Tunnels! So occasionally this HTTPS record would make it into our internal DNS caches, which would prevent anyone from connecting successfully due to ECH failing, until the record's TTL expired.

Once we realized this, we set up "no record" records for these hosts for HTTPS on our internal DNS servers, and just like magic the issue was solved.

TL;DR: It's not DNS. There's no way it's DNS. It was DNS.

https://redd.it/1of66eq
@r_systemadmin

Microsoft Store download fail 0x80244007 on every application (Possibly fix)

I just came here to share this piece of information that saved my weekend at least.

I recently reinstalled my main computer with Win 11 Pro, which is connected to my Azure AD. It has a Business Premium license, so nothing fancy — i.e. no rules, CAs, or anything set that might cause issues described below. I use my account with Hello, and I have been using this machine daily since the reinstallation.

Today I needed an app from Microsoft Store, and it kept loading only 390 Kb and failed — every app that I tried. Same thing. The error was:

Problem signature:
P1: Acquisition;Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe-Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe-StartProductInstallWithOptionsForUserAsync
P2: 80244007
P3: 26100
P4: 6899
P5: Windows.Desktop

Sadly, it didn't explain anything, as it pointed in the Windows Update direction — which was working perfectly well. But I went the rocky road with wsreset, Store reinstall, Store “find the problem” assist, Windows updates, cleaning update caches, and all those tiny things that the internet can suggest you should do in these cases. Even though I knew that none of those would work.

I even tried my other machine (same Entra connection, same account, same Windows, etc.), and it worked perfectly well. So the issue had to be in my machine. I tried logging in with another account, and the funny thing is that this didn’t solve the issue either...

But read on...

Then I had to log back in again with my normal account, and for some reason it threw out my Hello sign-in just for that time and requested a password. I signed in with my password and tadaa — Store started to work!

So, I double-dared myself and signed back in with the second account — again with Hello. Store didn’t work. Signed out, signed back in with that same account but this time I used the password. And Store started to work as it should.

I went back to my standard account — with Hello sign-in this time. Store was still working.

Conclusion: I have absolutely no idea what is the connection between Store (which was not signed in!) download and Hello account... So no conclusions.

But I hope that this will someday save someones day as it did today for myself.

https://redd.it/1ofa76l
@r_systemadmin

What would happen if 4.2.2.2 and 8.8.8.8 went down?

I have worked with hundreds of smaller customers using Google DNS for their devices and even mid size companies with them on servers, routers, firewalls, literally every kind of device.

https://redd.it/1ofcbxi
@r_systemadmin

Variety is the spice of life!

So this morning I migrated us from Jira to Desk365 for our ticketing solution. I hated how convoluted Jira is to configure. It took me a few days to get it where I almost wanted it. I had Desk365 completely done in two hours.

For the afternoon I got to fix a dishwasher as one of our buildings has a commercial kitchen and there’s this fancy Miele dishwasher that wasn’t happy and wanted some salt. Turns out you have to add the salt a certain way and fill it so far (like 3 lbs of salt!). Then you need to let the dishwasher sit there and think about life for a few minutes and then it’s happy and ready to go!

But you know, it definitely was a different mental box to find myself in and it’s just another day of enjoying the variety of things I find myself working on.

https://redd.it/1ofeqet
@r_systemadmin