Did everybody lose an unknown number of emails from M365 issues?

I sent some test emails during the M365 outage yesterday. The only ones that showed up in my inbox after the problem was resolved were the ones that I sent after the problem was resolved. The ones from earlier in the day never showed up in my M365 inbox and my GMail account never received any rejection.

I may never know exactly how many emails went to the bitbucket yesterday, but I suspect a lot.

Same thing all over?

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

I did not abide.... Read Only Friday

Don't do it, no matter how many times you've done it before, no matter how trivial it typically is.... DON'T DO IT!!

Thought I could sneak a ticketing system upgrade in on a Friday before a few days off. I do not yet know how much of my time I've donated for "this one small thing".....

EDIT:

It was the classic, update blew up the config game. PTO rescued, happy Friday peeps!

https://redd.it/1qkrwp0
@r_systemadmin

Microsoft needs a wake up call

MORE issues with exchange today. "A recent code regression is causing crashes on a portion of mailbox infrastructure that handles access requests from Outlook on the web, New Outlook, Outlook for Mac, and mobile apps".

Get it the fuck together, Microsoft. Jesus christ.

Edit: grammar mistake

https://redd.it/1qkz2te
@r_systemadmin

Alerting Staff

So yesterday sh*t show with MS it was apparent that we need a way to mass communicate with staff that there is an outage in these types of situations in the event Teams or Mail (or both) go down. We currently don't have a company portal for these types of notifications. I'm wondering if anyone has gone down this path, and if so what they did?

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

It’s the dream on social media vs. reality

Everyone on social media says, "Oh, IT is great, I make $100k+." But unless you live in a high COL area, the reality is usually starting in Help Desk for $30k–$60k. That is often not far off from the regular job postings you might see for retail or delivery/warehouse in the area, just with the advantage that you're working at a desk or remote.


​I want to hear the real journey, not the highlight reel:

​The Start: What level did you start at (MSP, local shop, corporate, family biz, etc.)? What state were you in, what was the pay, and was it actually livable at the time?

​Location: Did you have to move to get better pay, or were you able to advance locally?

​The Work: Was your first job simple, or were you thrown into the fire? How long until you actually felt like you knew what you were doing?

​Education: Did college or certs actually help you in the real world, or were they just a specific checkbox to get hired?

​The Grind: What's the longest you've spent grinding on a single project?

​The Money: How long did you spend in the field before you actually hit $100k?

https://redd.it/1ql62va
@r_systemadmin

Anyone ever sit in a Colo during a severe weather event?

With all the crazy temps and likelihood of widespread power outages across the US, anyone ever look to weather the outage/recharge devices and such at your Colo? Do places usually have policies on this?

I’m north enough where I’ll be fine in this storm but the thought occurred to me!

Edit:

People seem confused by my question, I was referring to the context of charging devices and caching some Netflix on your phone stopping by for a few hours vs living there for 3 days

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

Do you delay Windows updates?

Over the years windows patching has been of highly varying quality, and every conversation I can find around this has a lot of people on two very different sides. I've been trying to puzzle out an answer between "Always patch immediately" and "let someone else be the beta tester".

I don't see any good recent conversations on this topic in this sub in recent years that have swayed me one way or the other, so I'm hoping to get some more opinions here.

https://redd.it/1qlgcc5
@r_systemadmin

Ricoh MFP automation hell: CAP users + Address Book + PCL6 auth — is there REALLY no supported way?

I manage \~60 Ricoh MFPs and I’m stuck on CAP.

Address Book automation works (SOAP, PowerShell, RicohAddressBook).
Printer deployment and PCL6 drivers are fully automated.


But CAP users:

\- local to device
\- no API
\- no supported way to create users, assign badges, or link scan destinations


CSV import exists but isn’t automation-friendly. Has anyone solved this?

Is CAP-ES the only real option, or is CAP basically a dead end unless you buy Ricoh’s server stack?

I’m open to unsupported hacks if that’s the reality.



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

Documentation - what do you use?

I’m just curious what other sysadmins are using for documentation, both for within your area, and to share with other areas of your company. In my experience, documentation needs to be as simple and easily accessible as possible, or no one will look for it or read it. Documentation will only get checked at all if it’s easier for the person to look at it rather than just ask you. In my opinion SharePoint is terrible for this, no one wants to look for word docs in a library, or try and navigate though potentially multiple sites to find it, the searching isn’t great, and overall it’s just a cluttered painful experience. I’m learning towards using markdown and a static site generator to render those into web pages. But I’m curious what other people do and how it works out for them.

https://redd.it/1qlnc1e
@r_systemadmin

M365 Direct Send

Per Microsoft recommendation of turning off direct send we have been trying to work through everything that apparently uses direct send. We used the command from here to implement.

Introducing more control over Direct Send in Exchange Online | Microsoft Community Hub https://share.google/13BkHcDO3BFYZPhdu

please note we have seen multiple messages coming in to our environment that can't be filtered properly because it was determined it was using direct send. so we have needs to disable this to protect the end users.

however we ran into a snag with paubox. even though we use their api to send out. any email that comes to one of our email addresses, from them is not going out through them but coming directly through our tenant and getting blocked because direct send is rejected mode. had anyone seen this and able to offer guidance why? all of our records are setup properly to route messages correctly.

https://redd.it/1qloc22
@r_systemadmin

How was your experience to find your first sysadmin job?

Hi there, I know this probably gets posted a lot but in googling I haven't found many recent posts. I am looking to start an associates degree for "System- and Network administrator" (might not be exact translation, I am Belgian, so it is in dutch for me) The associate degree comes with a CCNA certificate. However, I was wondering what to expect from the job market after graduating in 2 years? I know 2 years is still a ways out, but I was just wondering how the jobs are going to change wtih AI and such. Thanks for the replies!

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

Take Action: Out-of-band update to address cloud‑backed storage application issues

This hosed a couple of our cloud backups. Glad it’s resolved.

Microsoft

Take Action: Out-of-band update to address cloud‑backed storage application issues

Microsoft released today a resolution for an issue observed after installing the January 2026 Windows security update. This issue may cause applications that open or save files stored in cloud‑backed locations to become unresponsive or display errors. Some installations of Outlook may also become unresponsive and fail to open when PST files are stored in cloud‑backed storage such as OneDrive.



An out-of-band (OOB) update was released today, January 23, 2026, to address this issue. This cumulative update includes all protections and improvements from the January 2026 Windows security update released January 13, 2026, as well as from the OOB update released on January 17, 2026 (which introduced fixes for two known issues: remote desktop connections and hibernation failures).

This OOB update is available through Windows Update for Windows 11devices running the updates released this month. To install it, open Settings > Windows Update, and select Download and install. Some devices may install the update automatically. For supported versions of Windows Server and Windows 10, the OOB update is available from the Microsoft Update Catalog. Refer to the KB articles below for detailed information and installation steps.

Windows 11, versions 25H2 and 24H2: KB5078127

Windows 11 Enterprise versions 25H2 and 24H2: Hotpatch KB5078167

Windows 11, version 23H2: KB5078132

Windows 10 ESU (22H2) and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021: KB5078129

Windows Server 2025: KB5078135

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Azure Edition: Hotpatch KB5078239

Windows Server, version 23H2: KB5078133

Windows Server 2022: KB5078136

Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition: Hotpatch KB5078238

Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019: KB5078131

IT administrators using Microsoft Intune or Windows Autopatch should follow the guidance below for installing the OOB update via Windows Update.

Expedite Windows quality updates in Microsoft Intune

Deploy an expedited quality update using Windows Autopatch

View in the Microsoft 365 admin center

https://redd.it/1qm1en7
@r_systemadmin

SNMP trap handler suggestions

Does anyone have recommendations for free and/or opensource applications that handle SNMP traps and monitoring...well?

We're currently using zabbix and it's perfectly fine for all SNMP GET tasks, but it's pretty painful to configure SNMP trap processing and handling. I feel like I shouldn't have to configure basic SNMP trap items manually in zabbix, nor should I need to develop my own templates. If there aren't any other good SNMP trap managers out there, I certainly can walk down the path paved in broken glass, though.

We're mainly looking to process and alert on the most basic SNMP traps for network devices: cold boot, warm boot, link up, link down, etc.

Thanks in advance!

https://redd.it/1qlx9mo
@r_systemadmin