My sys admin sucks

I'm not gonna claim to know a lot since I just entered the field as a helpdesk. My sysadmin is an idiot and I have no idea how this guy has been able to fool an organization for years. This is a rant so ill just list off some of the things he's said and done in the past couple months.

Oh also more than half of our employee laptops, this number is in the hundreds, are still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.

We do not have Active Directory, he has been setting it up for years, allegedly.

I am required to install ccleaner and 2 different antiviruses ontop of our endpoint protection software we pay for. One of the antivirus software he has me install is from 2000 and has been known to bundle malware

Oh I'm also forced to make sure these softwares are on a specific part of the desktop so "IT can find their tools."

I offered a solution that a friend of mine came up to execute remote code using our endpoint protection software to do all the win10-11 updates en masse but I was told "we do things the right way here"

He claimed he was unable to use his computer for a whole day because it is literally impossible to convert MBR to GPT.

I was required to ask for every employees password so I could "log into their account" since it's "easier than resetting their password on the laptop" and how "we need to confirm their password meets our security requirements"

Runs campaigns against other IT staff who know more than he does (not very hard) talks shit about them for months and they eventually get fired.

Laughs/talks shit about employees who fall for phishing emails (we also have paid for a phishing simulator software but he wont use it).

That's all I can really say without giving away too much.

https://redd.it/1oti0g9
@r_systemadmin

Should I quit?

IT director at a small business, about ~100 people. I’m six months in and I’m about ready to quit—the place is a cybersecurity disaster, HR controls laptop procurement and technical onboarding, and any changes I make are met with torches and pitchforks. Leadership SAYS they support me, but can’t have a difficult conversation to save their lives.

I think I answered my own question, right?

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

Can you restart IIS websites during working hours?

Some context:

I work as an infra/devops engineer at a software company. The applications are still fairly old-school, all monoliths hosted as IIS websites. When we need to apply quick fixes, we sometimes modify configuration files like appsettings.json instead of doing a whole new build.

However, for these changes to take effect, we need to restart the specific IIS website. The issue is that we're not allowed to do this during working hours because “we can’t undertake actions that might interrupt live services during core hours, especially without client notice,” as management always says.

From my understanding, restarting an IIS website only causes a very brief blip, just a few seconds of downtime, so it doesn’t seem like a major disruption, especially when the change has already been tested in lower environments.

Am I wrong to think this shouldn’t require an out of hours window, or is this policy fairly standard in other companies?

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

How did you learn when first starting your sysadmin career?

I started at this company on the help desk. We support about 300 different remote offices. 6 months later, I started as an IT technician doing site visits and transitions (multifamily residential industry). A year after that (about 3mo ago), I assumed a sysadmin position after a couple members of that team left.

They are still working on backfilling my role, so most of my workload is still for my old position. As a result I’m not involved in many projects for my new role. I’m in a strange limbo state right now. I don’t have most of the foundational knowledge to support most of our systems. Good understanding of networking/troubleshooting/field tech work, but not so much when it comes to enterprise applications, noscripting, server management, that sort of thing.

I was thinking of supplementing with learning on my own time so I can hit the ground running once they backfill my old role. Are there any resources that you leveraged when you first started your sysadmin role that you found valuable?

https://redd.it/1otk0yc
@r_systemadmin

Anyone got WiFi auth working with Entra ID (no on-prem AD, all FortiAPs)?

Hey folks,

Curious if anyone here actually got WiFi authentication working directly against Entra ID.

We’re 100% Entra-based(no on-prem AD, no hybrid setup). Everything lives in the cloud.
We’re also a Forti shop, so all our APs are FortiAPs managed through FortiGate.

What I’m trying to do is have users connect to our office WiFi and authenticate using their Entra ID creds.

Most of what I’ve found so far points to needing a RADIUS server (either on-prem or hosted) or spinning up a local AD just to handle 802.1X, both of which I’d rather avoid completely.

Ideally looking for a clean, cloud-only solution. Something that doesn’t involve setting up or maintaining any RADIUS/AD infra.

Has anyone pulled this off, or is it just not doable yet without a RADIUS middleman?

Would love to hear what others have tried.

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

UPS for every Network Switch?

We are planning a new building with a large production hall and severals racks for sub-distribution with switches. One of our team is worrying that on a power outage, the switches get damaged. (by voltage spikes, etc.)
So what is your opinion on this?
Are the switches resistant enough?
Should there be some kind of surge protection enough?
Or do you go to ups them all?

Location Germany.

https://redd.it/1otigp2
@r_systemadmin

Is it safe to reset the KRBTGT password if the account has been disabled for 12 years?


Hi,
I’m planning to rotate the KRBTGT password in our Active Directory domain. I noticed something unusual — the KRBTGT account has been disabled for about 12 years, but everything in the environment is still working perfectly (Kerberos auth, logons, services, etc.).

Before I run the Microsoft noscript, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything.

My questions:
1. Do I need to enable the KRBTGT account before resetting its password, or can the noscript reset it while it’s disabled?

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

Getting to the right level of tech support

Years ago Spectrum/Brighthouse/Time Warner - whoever they were at the time - had a guy in tech support that I could call and no matter what the issue was he could fix it. It wasn't even a special secret number - he was typically the first person to answer. It was unreal.

These days it's near impossible to get to someone like that.

If anyone has a secret tip on how to get to a higher level of tech support with Spectrum or ATT (Firstnet) please do share. I need someone that understands what I mean when i say "there seems to be a subnet routing issue between two ISPs".

https://xkcd.com/806/

https://redd.it/1otr67y
@r_systemadmin

Anyone else see a rise in critical failures straight out of the box with Dell servers?

I'm currently on a project that is using Dell servers ( a couple of different models ) as Active Logic (formerly Sandvine) servers. we are currently working at a 30% failure rate straight out of the box. 1 was Dimms, 1 is a Logic Board, 1 is either a PCI issue or a power supply problem Just trying to get some context here.

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

How often do you do demos and projects just to throw it in the trash?

Hi folks,

Headache of the week comes from the director of operations reaching out saying hey, we have too many sales folks that are getting texts to their personal phone because they don’t have another option for clients to reach out to. This is a problem when a sales person leaves as well.

Me: okay well they do have a business line that supports SMS and MMS but yeah I get it when people are off those still sit in their inbox until they get to it. I’ll look into a few options and will get back to you, but you basically want them to be able to use it like a shared mailbox sort of thing?

Dir: yes exactly! Just so we can get quick response times and maybe send out a quick reminder of a relevant promo here or there.

2 weeks later after going back and forth getting 10DLC approval for low volume use case because they wanted to see a “live example texting real people” aka text them from the system, not from a demo number to me.

Me: hey let’s meet today, I found a pretty good option that also integrates with slack that works really nicely.

Dir: awesome!!!!!

Demos account, team really likes it

Me: so it comes down to $20 a month for 10 sales people, $230ish a month after tax per month, no contract so we can adjust up and down as needed. Do y’all want to start with maybe just a sales manager or something? See what their thoughts are?

Dir: that’s a lot of money… what if we all just shared one account?

Me: well… 2FA would be kind of a nightmare. They’d likely get booted each time too many people login at once.

Dir: we’ll just set it up in each employees Authenticator app

Me: how would you know who is texting a client if it’s all under the same account? That’s just not good practice. Like what if the account was compromised? So we just lose 100% access to a texting platform with all of our clients?

Dir:…… never mind let’s scrap this idea. It’s just too expensive just to text clients like they already do from their cell phone.

Ughhhhhhh

Edit:
Valid point I left out, I brought up that things in IT are generally not free, and there would be a cost to this service and was told “yeah yeah I know, we’ll deal with the budget when we find something we like, just look for something good is reliable.”

I don’t know what they thought it would cost, and I still don’t think this is a crazy cost for a company that does 90m in revenue, but whatever. The only part that really rubbed me the wrong way is when one of the team leads said hey, thanks for trying to put this together, didn’t mean to waste your time on this and the director goes it’s not a waste of time, this is what he’s here for. Not technically wrong, but just seemed really douchey like hey don’t worry about the time he spends it isn’t valuable anyway.



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

Laptop Budgets

Sounds like we will be needing to cut our equipment costs down for the end of the year and into 2026... That's probably not all that uncommon right now, but I don't know how much cheaper we can go before we sacrifice quality and usability. I just wanted to see what you guys are spending on your devices so I can get an idea of what's "normal".

For context, we used to be a Dell house but swapped over to Lenovo a few years back. We initially ordered some X1 Carbons but had to find a more cost-effective device to deploy to our standard workers and landed on the T14 and P14s models which have worked really well for us so far.

All devices need to have Intel vPro/AMD Pro and 32GB of ram at a minimum because of our company's standard software. We're spending roughly $1200 on average for these devices that are fully loaded with touchscreens and the works. Getting quotes through our vendors/Lenovo for stripped-down versions or cheaper models (E14/L14) don't seem to be any less expensive than our current devices. Sometimes it's even more expensive to remove the fancy stuff lol.

Are we doing good on price? I just cannot imagine paying that much less for what we're currently getting.

https://redd.it/1otu2zb
@r_systemadmin

My thoughts on my first few months as a new SysAd

I just completed my 4th month as a Linux SysAd. I previously was a Security Engineer but really wanted to move over to something more technical. I work on a small program where I’m the only SysAd. I had a fair amount of Linux Admin experience before beginning, but when I first started, it was a bit overwhelming, but being thrown into the deep-end is usually where I’ve done best.

When I first started, the previous SysAd had implemented almost no automation and my non-technical team members were constantly dealing with small issues that the previous SysAd just spot fixed with “band-aid fixes” and not fixing underlying issues. My first month I worked my butt off trying to get everything automated that were part of daily/weekly processes along with working to eliminate all the “papercuts” team members had. I had a massive list of things I had to do, but they all got completed pretty quickly! I’m kinda happy I walked into this situation because I learned EVERYTHING about the systems super quickly. It was also very enjoyable walking in after about a month and a half and I didn’t have anything pressing I needed to attend to, and no new issues.

After 4 months, the most suprising things is how much the OS can actually do. We use RHEL, and I’ve been continually suprised about what it can do out of the box. Looking back when I was a security engineer, I just feel like the OS was massively underutilized and basically just acted as a wrapper around security tool applications. There’s so many security tools natively available! SELinux is, while annoying sometimes, is legitimately amazing and I can’t believe it’s free.

Along with just the Linux knowledge, I feel like my general IT understanding has massively increased. Due to my program being small, we don’t have a lot of money to throw around, so to get things like SoL, we may not have the money to buy iLO or iDRAC, but we can utilize IPMI which those platforms are built on to still reap massive benefits! Understanding what products are actually built on and being able to use those underlying technologies has been massively beneficial!

Overall I’m extremely happy being a SysAd. The work I’ve done has been extremely intellectually stimulating. I just wish I knew what I know now when I was a Security Engineer. I really feel like a lot of Security Engineers don’t understand what their server OSs are capable of, because I certainly didn’t!

Is there anything you guys found was legitimately interesting when first becoming a SysAd?



https://redd.it/1otys08
@r_systemadmin

Microsoft 365 Admin Center "hacked" / No More Admin Access

Hi,

I am in BC, Canada, time zone -8 PST. Long story short:

1/ Thurs, Oct-30-2025: I discovered my client's Microsoft 365 Tenant was hacked. All 3 accounts that have Global Admin assigned had their rights removed, and new admin accounts were created. Therefore, it rendered Microsoft 365 Admin Center inaccessible.

2/ Oct-30-2025: Called Microsoft to create a case #

3/ Nightmare begins. When case # was created last Thursday, I was promised Microsoft 365 Data Protection team would call or email me in the next couple (2) days. I replied to all their emails indicating my time zone, best time to call (8AM to 5PM PST), and my cell#.

4/ Oct-31-2025: Nothing

5/ Monday, Nov-03-2025 until Today (Nov-07): I was calling Microsoft since 7:30AM this morning again, again and again. All I keep getting are "Microsoft Technical Advisors" who keep promising that their data protection team engineer would call me in the next couple of hours, at the latest 11AM Today, and Microsoft failed to call me back, so I called again, and after 3 or 4 weird disconnections while talking (and no call back from the so called "advisor"), I was promised call back in 15 minutes by another rep. Nothing of course.

6/ Called Microsoft again at 2:39PM.... after repeating the same incident over again, this time I asked to be escalated to supervisor --> After 1.5h on hold, a person took the phone call, of course I have to repeat ALL from beginning, and also give them AGAIN the case#, believe or not in middle of conversation, I was disconnect again, and of course no call back.

7/ Now it is 5PM PST.... where do I go or what do I do now? ALL I want is help with re-gaining admin access to M365 admin center, but so far all I got since last Thursday...various advisors, each promising me different story.

8/ I am pleading for help! So far from Microsoft side, I have not even received any attempts to help me resolve admin center issue, instead Microsoft gives me very good run around for nothing, because I am still speaking to the "advisors" that assign case or ticket#.

9/ Anyone out there with a more direct phone # to contact Microsoft 365 Data protection team? All I need is to re-gain access to Microsoft 365 Admin Center.




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

Got let go today, writing down a few lessons

Nothing dramatic. A director put a quick touch base on my calendar, read a tidy noscript, HR joined for the formalities, and that was that. The company that bought my old shop after a decade plus let me go in under a year. Official line was downsizing. Roughly two dozen people out of about three hundred twenty. Not fishing for sympathy. Just leaving notes for whoever needs them next.

Never feel bad about taking time off, asking for more money, or walking away. If you do not look out for yourself, no one will.

Keep a healthy level of skepticism, even with people you like. When pressure hits, most will protect their own lane first. Be grateful if someone goes to bat for you, but do not expect it.

Do not email questions you can answer in five minutes by yourself.

In interviews, ask how likely it is the company or a business unit gets sold. I ask this now and it has already helped.

If you are well paid, know that finance may circle your name first when cuts come. Perform and prepare anyway.

Save money. Pay yourself first. Also parking myself in a live Men’s Mental Health Day conversation called Inside the Male Identity Crisis, mostly to listen, because getting laid off messes with who you think you are. If you want a quiet room to sit in and maybe chime in, this one looked solid https://statesofmind.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=male_event&utm_content=sysadmin.

It is usually DNS.

Keep your mouth shut unless speaking clearly benefits you. Do what is right for the client, but do not gamble your job on heroics. You are there to pay rent and put food on your table.

Unsolicited notes from a temporarily wobbly solutions architect. Peace.

https://redd.it/1ou675v
@r_systemadmin

Where patch tuesday megathread?

Awaiting eagerly in anticipation?

https://redd.it/1ou81v7
@r_systemadmin

Burnout in IT

Hello Reddit,

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ooz097/burnout\_signals\_i\_ignored/ just popped up in my feed and I identify with a lot of problems people mentioned in the other post. This gave me the courage to write this post, provide some encouragement for others and ask for advice. To be clear, I am not looking for sympathy, I just saw how kind people were in the other post and I felt the need to post here.


I was in a job where I was leading a relatively big team that was under constant pressure to deliver. The requirements kept piling up, work kept piling up and to make things worse, there were also last minute requests that came in or priorities kept changing. I was basically keeping the things going, unblocking people, jumping on calls with them to get them on the right track, as well in some cases being involved in hands on work, for a couple of high profile projects. Suggestions to improve things or simply stating what the problem is up the chain were either dismissed or ignored, sometimes even making them seem like the problem was on my end, despite my team agreeing with me. 2-3 years ago I started getting panic attacks while walking on the street and it would get so bad I felt like I'm going to faint. For the better part of the year and a half, I started sleeping pretty bad. I started having brain fog, as well as massive headaches in some of the meetings. I was constantly fired up. This is when I think depression kicked in for me, as I was constantly unhappy with work. In the meantime, I started getting more work and stress got so bad I had to get signed off from work. I was applying for jobs in the meantime and when I found something, I quit thinking that's going to be the end of it. This lead to a number of issues that I'm not going to get into, but essentially I was diagnosed with severe anxiety and severe depression.

Here when I want to give everyone going through this an advice:

If you don't look after yourself, no one will. If you don't set boundaries, the company is just going to overwork you. The reward for work is almost always more work. If you can't do something on time, explain why and let the manager deal with it - that's why they're in that job, to prioritize and ensure they have all the resources needed. If you get severely burnt out and land in depression, it's going to be hell to go through that, and hell again to get out of it. Spend time with your family and enjoy the nature, spend less of your free time on computers.


Now, I'm in this new role and still dealing with the burnout and depression and anxiety. I realized I do not like this role as it has the HUGE potential to burn me out quite rapidly. In addition to this, my motivation is at an all time low. This is a hands-on role which I thought I would enjoy, but in reality, I don't like it at all. I've started applying for other jobs already but I know the job market is TERRIBLE right now.

This is where I'm looking for some advice: have any of you gone through the same route (manager -> engineer -> manager again? How hard was it going back to it? When did you realize you do not enjoy being hands on anymore?


Sorry if this post does not belong here, but I've been a long time lurker and this community is amazing.


Please, look after yourselves.


I feel like I've made a mistake, going from the position of a manager to the position of an engineer and I am now worried

https://redd.it/1ou9p3k
@r_systemadmin

Block personal account on ChatGPT

Hi everyone,

We manage all company devices through Microsoft Intune, and our users primarily access ChatGPT either via the browser (Chrome Enterprise managed) or the desktop app.

We’d like to restrict ChatGPT access so that only accounts from our company domain (e.g., u/contonso.com) can log in, and block any other accounts.

Has anyone implemented such a restriction successfully — maybe through Intune policies, Chrome Enterprise settings, or network rules?

Any guidance or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

https://redd.it/1ou98ur
@r_systemadmin

Has anyone killed Imposter Syndrome through certs or exp?

I know this is discussed a thousand times a day, but have any of you successfully beaten it? I’ll study a new topic or get a cert for a month, realize I still dont know shit, then not learn anything for a month or two from the burnout. Im starting to think I just might not be up to it.

For context, I’m 22, have a BS in Cybersec, a couple certs, an actual homelab people use (Game servers, SIEM, Discord bots, etc), but still feel a pit in my stomach anytime someone needs unplanned help at my job. I use ChatGPT to help with 75% of my tasks at home, mostly bc I cant remember exact syntax but at work kinda freeze up. Im now grinding networking hoping that helps, but I doubt it will.

https://redd.it/1ouc6g5
@r_systemadmin

Patch Tuesday Megathread (2025-11-11)

Hello r/sysadmin, I'm u/AutoModerator, and welcome to this month's Patch Megathread!

This is the (mostly) safe location to talk about the latest patches, updates, and releases. We put this thread into place to help gather all the information about this month's updates: What is fixed, what broke, what got released and should have been caught in QA, etc. We do this both to keep clutter out of the subreddit, and provide you, the dear reader, a singular resource to read.

For those of you who wish to review prior Megathreads, you can do so here.

While this thread is timed to coincide with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, feel free to discuss any patches, updates, and releases, regardless of the company or product. NOTE: This thread is usually posted before the release of Microsoft's updates, which are scheduled to come out at 5:00PM UTC.

Remember the rules of safe patching:

Deploy to a test/dev environment before prod.
Deploy to a pilot/test group before the whole org.
Have a plan to roll back if something doesn't work.
Test, test, and test!

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

Grrr - hate the new logo - Teams coworkers are now joined at the hip

Does anybody else hate how Microsoft is constantly changing logos and icons? And the new Teams logo makes it look like coworkers are physically joined at the hip. LOL

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

Excahnge 2019 to SE upgrade - licensing without azure

Hello everyone. Company I support as system admin has exchange 2019 on premise CU15. I am unable to figure out can we update to latest SE because we are not using Microsoft azure for our tenant.

As far as understand new licensing concept is user based and needs to be mapped to azure account which we do not use.

 

Does anyone have any experience with updating to latest exchange SE for users/companies that are not using MS Azure ?

According to other posts here on this topic SU upgrade itself wont be an issue but next CU might cause licensing issues ?

https://redd.it/1oud9kx
@r_systemadmin