You guys ever think of changing career?


Feels like it is just downhill and this is no longer fun. ”Only” been working in IT for 10 years and honestly it feels very meh.

Me? I’m just an IT Lead who’s role is to not manage employees anymore but consultants / ”bought services”. This ain’t no fun.

Ever dream of changing career? Got any fun ideas or career switch where you can apply previous job experience to?

Would love to hear what you think.

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

Anyone know how much crowdstrike pricing is for government or non profits?

I'm helping a small local government office look at endpoint security options and crowdstrike keeps coming up. We've heard it's good but we've checked online and the pricing is totally unclear for public sector or non profit type of budgets.

Their website just says "contact sales" but we're trying to get a rough idea before we even reach out. We don't need a huge enterprise setup, just something solid for about 50 endpoints for now.

Does anyone have any insight into how much crowdstrike might charge for a public sector or education/non-profit org? Even an estimated range would be super helpful.

Lastly, are there any good alternatives that work well for government but might be more budget friendly?

https://redd.it/1pyk135
@r_systemadmin

Anyone else stuck between a hostile local IT team and corporate IT?

I joined my current company last year. Small sysadmin team (5–6 people), reporting to a senior sysadmin and a director who’ve both been there 25+ years. Very strong “this is our environment” energy.

I came in with a more modern / DevOps-leaning background (Docker, Ansible, NetBox, etc.). The existing culture is very legacy Linux: heavy shell noscripting, extreme rigidity, and strong opinions about how things must be done.

At this point, I mostly just say “yes sir” and go with the flow. I’m trying hard not to take things personally, but it’s difficult when I get constant pushback on very small stuff:

• Strong resistance to Docker

• Complaints about one tool per VM because it “wastes” a CrowdStrike license

• Hyper-strict naming rules (dashes only, even in Python code) This goes deep though.

• Requests for features that feel unrealistic or fundamentally misunderstand what tools like NetBox are for (e.g., clicking a device and forcing native SSH sessions)

Individually, none of this is catastrophic. Collectively, it’s kinda exhausting. The hardest part is that I share an office with the senior admin. He’s extremely knowledgeable, but he’s also very loud, curses constantly, gets visibly upset, and communicates in a very intense, commanding way. He aggressively picks apart work and points out what’s “wrong” with it. I honestly can’t tell how much of it is intentional versus just how he’s wired — but sitting in the same room with that energy for 8–9 hours a day is brutal, especially since I’m fairly introverted.

On top of that, he hates our corporate IT team with a passion and talks about them like they’re the devil incarnate. We were acquired by a parent company, and corporate IT handles change control and many if not all network changes we need. That arrangement drives him (and my manager) crazy. I’ve felt caught in the middle and sometimes unsure whether I’m supposed to fully cooperate with corporate IT or “play defense” for the local team. It’s super confusing.

What makes it weirder: my director’s boss is the same executive corporate IT ultimately reports to. Same umbrella, same leadership chain — but no regular step-ups, no alignment meetings, and I’ve never interacted with that level. So I’m left guessing who I’m actually supposed to prioritize. My director and the senior sys admin regularly instruct me to not help or support this corporate team, we keep denoscriptions off interfaces to keep them in the dark, we revoke their privileges to our tools— anything to piss them off. They’ve become “need to know”.

I don’t feel disrespected enough to go to HR, and I’m not trying to rock the boat. I just find myself holding my tongue constantly and reminding myself not to take the daily criticism personally. I just want to do my job.

The pay is very good, which is why I’m still here. But coming from a long, relaxed, collaborative job, this place feels rigid, tense, and high-pressure by comparison.

I guess I’m looking for perspective:

• Is this just how long-tenured sysadmin teams are sometimes?

• How do you mentally detach from constant criticism without burning out?

• Has anyone navigated being stuck between corporate IT and a hostile local team?

• At what point is “good money, bad culture” not worth it?

Mostly venting, but curious how others have handled similar situations.

https://redd.it/1pyldq1
@r_systemadmin

Anyone here reselling VoIP/UCaaS? What platforms are reliable?

My team manages IT for a handful of small and mid-size clients, and we’re thinking about rolling out our own VoIP/UCaaS offering next year instead of constantly playing middleman with third-party vendors. I’m curious what platforms members of this community have had good or bad experiences with.

And also, what matters most for you when recommending a VoIP solution to a business (is it call quality, ease of provisioning, white-labeling, recurring revenue, or something else?) I’d love to hear your experiences.


https://redd.it/1pyl0rb
@r_systemadmin

Dell iDrac Write Endurance Warnings

I have 3 Dell R740xd servers.

Two of the servers iDracs are sending daily alerts about the write endurance of a SSD. In one server it is disk 24 and in the other server it is disk 25.

In each server disks 24 and 25 are a RAID 1 and run ESXi for each host. The data stores live on another RAID array.

But when I check disk 24 in server 1 it has a write endurance of 0% and then disk 25 has a write endurance of nothing it is just a dash. When I look at the other raid array on server 1 the write endurances are the same just a dash.

Same thing on the other server as well.

The disks are all Micron disks and have been in there for a few years now. The iDracs are all on the latest firmware and I also tried rebooting the iDracs to see of that would reset anything. All the disks are also reporting healthy by the iDrac.

But nothing seems to work, and we are getting multiple emails a day about these write endurance warnings. I have seen other posts from years past where people just said create an email rule and call it a day. But I wanted to see if there are any better solutions then that.

https://redd.it/1pym1b4
@r_systemadmin

MS Teams Channels missing tabs ex. Planner, OneNote etc..

As of almost two weeks ago, it appears that tabs within Microsoft Teams channels Ex. Planner or OneNote etc..

When attempting to add these tabs back, I get prompted to request approval. No approval email is ever received, and the request is indefinitely in a grayed-out “Requested” state.

I cant tell if this is some new MS change and its standard behavior or if I changed something.

Any info is appreciated.

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

Cyber insurance query

When answering insurance questionnaires, do you ever deliberately limit scope or wording (e.g. “as of this date”, “for these systems only”, “to the best of our knowledge”)? If so, where is that wording usually captured?

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

Post-mortem sanity check: how do you handle “un-scannable” expiries (API keys, internal certs) without spreadsheets?

We just had a ~2 hour outage because a 3rd-party API key expired.

What’s annoying is that this wasn’t a surprise. We knew about it. It was written down in a “DevOps Secrets” spreadsheet, and someone even had a calendar reminder, but that person was on PTO, and honestly the spreadsheet hadn’t been opened in months.

We already use UptimeRobot for public SSL certs, so those are fine. But for the “offline” stuff , Apple Push certs, API tokens, internal signing keys, we don’t seem to have a good answer.

I’m honestly just trying to sanity-check how other teams deal with this:

Do you actually have a tool that tracks these properly?
Or is everyone using some shared spreadsheet + reminders and hoping it doesn’t get missed?

I’m tempted to hack together a cron job to nag us, but that feels like yet another fragile workaround that’ll probably rot over time.
Curious what’s actually worked for people.

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

Suggest arguments

I am working as a sysadmin intern in a university.
They have a site for professors to upload their recorded lectures and notes and for students to access them. It used aws s3 bucket to store the data.

There are many pcs that are outdated for general use with i3-7th gen and almost 50, 1tb hdd. I had setup a ubuntu microcloud's microceph, and set and integrated it with the site for proof of concept. I had configured redndancy, backup and for security i had seperated the server from all other nodes in the university network. For observability of the server i used Graphana and protheumus. We already have a power backup for the it department and the other servers, so power will not be an issue

The director argued that money is never the issue for tech. The current trend in tech is that we should pour money and since all big tech are using cloud and it is the "trend" why should we have an in-house cloud.

I had future plans of using microcloud's lxd and other features to implement most features offered by cloud providers so that students could learn the tech that goes into setting up these cloud services and allow students to use these in-house services for testing and research purposes. Obviously even for such a small scale cloud, it would require a couple good nodes with good configurations which would be a cost but the university anyways does not care about money.

I have created a document citing stanford's it department with their own cloud and other companies that have shifted to a hybrid model as well.

Please suggest good arguments and suggestion what should be done

https://redd.it/1pyu60k
@r_systemadmin

Bitlocker hardware encryption post

There was an excellent post a little while ago showing how to enable the new hardware enabled bitlocker as well as some performance comparisons and for some reason the mods nuked it? How is that not relevant to this sub?

https://redd.it/1pyx9or
@r_systemadmin

Question about building UPS bypass switches.

Hi, i do alot of UPS units (mostly up to about 5k), i have been around the larger (10k and above) and i know they have a bypass system and understand the concept, however something thats always seemed odd.

The building bypass generally has the supply and output from the UP with a switch for both, then the bypass which will basically connect the in power to the out connection there by putting the power and UPS in parallel, this means it will back feed in to the output side of the UPS, real bad idea... so how do these switches do this?


I would assume it would need to break the UPS output then make the bypass port, but this would drop the load for a fraction of a second, so how do they get around this issue?

https://redd.it/1pyvm2m
@r_systemadmin

Company Teams Backgrounds

We have a noscript that runs everyday that pushes out company-branded Teams backgrounds to all user computers. Users are also allowed to add custom backgrounds. 2025 was our 50th anniversary, and today we received a request to remove all Teams backgrounds that have our 50th logo on them. I was told by one of my colleagues that removing any backgrounds from our folder repository would also remove anyone's custom backgrounds. I would think there's a way around this and a more elegant way to implement this - GPO maybe?

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

Is it AWS in general, or just us-west-1?

I'm enjoying some bad network connection issues and latency at 200x the normal levels.

Is this going to be a very long day, or is it some one else's problem?

https://redd.it/1pz0a61
@r_systemadmin

Best alternative to Veeam Backup & Replication?

Hello everyone!


My set-up consists of 4 servers. All of them using VMware ESXi. For backups, I've been using Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition and must say it is really, really nice.


The problem is that the CE edition limits up to 10 workloads, and I definitively need more than that.


I'd love to hear alternatives cheaper than Veeam, or single-payment software, or even free :)



Thanks!!

https://redd.it/1pz2oqx
@r_systemadmin

Mail bomb defense?

I'm seeing an uptick in Mail Bomb attacks... thousands of incoming messages in a short time.

Other than Proofpoint, I'd love to hear some tools and solutions others have found that help with this in the real world, are there any good solutions?

Thanks in advance!

https://redd.it/1pyxw7o
@r_systemadmin

DFS file server configuration

Hi,

Currently a 3TB folder (One of Seven folders) is configured to replicate between 2 DFS file servers.

And I have configured 300GB to staging quota in DFS management for this 3TB folder.

* Is this value too big ?

I found "DfsrPrivate" folder is quite big (240GB) and it impact to backup window and backup storage.

For my experience, small value (\~10GB) caused replication failure (not instance replication ?)

Therefore would like to know your suggestion to for configuration to retain replication and better backup window.

Thanks and Happy New Year.

https://redd.it/1pz6gju
@r_systemadmin