Lenovo account manager is driving me nuts - how can I get reassigned?

We have a Lenovo account manager straight out of hell. He is very friendly and positive when talking to him but his actions are the exact opposite.

I made the mistake of asking him to create a bunch of orders for us instead of me placing them myself in the online portal. He made so many mistakes, I lost count.

He has been promising to fix them or get us refunds since November. There has been zero progress so far. I have been in calls with him at least weekly since then but all of his promises turn out to be empty. He will not share his manager's contact details or anyone else's for that matter.

I am really not sure what to do now. I would love to be reassigned to a different account manager who actually works but I am unsure how I can trigger that. When I call the hotline, I am told there is nothing they can do. All paths point back to the same account manager.

Does anyone have some advice for me?



https://redd.it/1qxka8h
@r_systemadmin

easily annoyed

I was just asked if "the One Drive" was down. That's like asking about "the Batman".
But seriously, if MS would stop moving things arround and re-naming things perhaps people could just use the software. In this case the problem was that "Files is now called Shared" in Teams.

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

Who else's recruiting staff has been decimated by AI?

I keep hearing "AI will never take real jobs", yet the recruiting team at my corporation has literally been cut down to a 10th of its original size and producing better hiring numbers. Quality of candidates TBD. This is for ALL positions, mind you, not just IT.

As someone that had faced the soulless job market in 2023-24, and a once desireable candidate, I had no choice but to take a position at the corp again, since it was my only lead after a year and a half of job hunting.

Im seeing Service Desk being supplemented by AI using our KBs, so I anticipate a few jobs being freed up as well.

Ofc, deep systems and tribal knowledge will never be replaced, Im seeing the affects firsthand on staffing numbers.

Where are we going from here? I have no clue, but it seems the proverbial wall has been hit on dependable results from these systems. I really hope we can get more humanity back into the hiring process.

https://redd.it/1qxwl2a
@r_systemadmin

digicert increasing price again 15%

digicert are increaseing their prices again by 15%.

Their justifications are very slim for such a large price increase, specially considering i have been waiting over a year for bug fixes on their platform which is making me lose customers and also their VERY LARGE security issue with their login system.

https://redd.it/1qxr2h4
@r_systemadmin

Anyone else having issues with KB5074109

My org is starting to see a few computers having issues installing this update. The only solution we have found is reimagining the computer. Pulling the update from the catalog and installing it that way doesn’t fix it either. I’ve tried countless other things as well. Even using disk restore health from the corrupted file in the cbs logs doesn’t fix it either. My tier 1s are refusing to reimagine the machines as well and management pushed it up to me as a tier 3 which seems a little ridiculous but oh well. Let me know if anyone needs more information and thank you for any help in advance.

https://redd.it/1qxzo5y
@r_systemadmin

So it's Saturday, and I just discovered that the January Windows update I just rolled out is killing support for the 30+ printers I've deployed that are otherwise functional

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-finally-pulls-the-plug-on-legacy-printer-drivers-starting-january-2026

This one snuck up on me annoyingly. I don't remember seeing this mentioned after all these years. We're a company of 40 and have a combined total of about 30 OKI C843 and B432s deployed. Now I have to urgently replace them.

How's your weekend going? 😂

https://redd.it/1qy653j
@r_systemadmin

Can we ban posts/commenters using LLMs?

It's so easy to spot, always about the dumbest shit imaginable and sometimes they don't even remove the --

For the love of god I do not want to read something written by an LLM

I do not care if you're bad at English, we can read broken english. If chatgpt can, we can. You're not going to learn English by using chatgpt.

https://redd.it/1qy9ppi
@r_systemadmin

How is this a thing: "Power outage affecting Microsoft Store app installs and Windows update delivery"

I manage a bunch of server rooms and have battery backups. The more important ones have gas powered generators as well. I've worked with enough datacenters to know power delivery has many more layers of redundancy. Yet, Microsoft will tell us that it was a power outage, and not an oopsie doopsie? I feel Copilot sent the shutdown /f /s command.

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

Speed.cloudflare.com is one of the coolest

One of my favorites to use because of the great insight and easy to read information. When people say our internet is slow.. this site helps back me up.

What are your favorite sites to use?

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

Legacy infrastructure doesn’t fail because it’s old

It fails because planning assumes upgrades are optional instead of inevitable.

Most outages I’ve seen weren’t caused by “bad tech”, but by deferred decisions finally coming due.

The hard part isn’t replacing legacy systems - it’s convincing the business that waiting is also a choice, just with interest.

Curious how others are framing this conversation internally.

https://redd.it/1qz23pt
@r_systemadmin

We started stripping old PC’s

In the past when a laptop was decommissioned they got sent to recycling, but now with the increase in price of RAM and SSD’s we started stripping the RAM and SSD as spare parts.

We had a lot of 7th gen laptops and workstations, they can’t run windows 11, but they still have DDR4 and NVME SSD’s.

Did current price hikes change the way how you’re handling old hardware?

https://redd.it/1qz2mzp
@r_systemadmin

Secure Boot Certificate Update: 2011 vs 2023 Certificate Priority

Hello,

I have a question about the Secure Boot certificate update. When I run (Get-UEFISecureBootCerts db).Signature, I can see both the 2011 and 2023 certificates present.

Will the 2023 certificate automatically become the active one after June, or are both the old and new certificates considered active at the same time with no priority between them? Thank you!

1 upvote

https://redd.it/1qyhh30
@r_systemadmin

Any way to encrypt HPE Proliant DL360 Gen 11 without the Smart Array?

Long story short i've inherited a project from a departing team and I'm configuring our Proliant DL360 Gen 11s. We have several of them with only 1 being a Dl360 Gen 10. I noticed while configuring them that only the Gen 10 has the smart array option which allows me to do the RAID and encryption. The Gen 11s don't have that option so and while I'm able to set up the RAID in system configuration I can't find any way to encrypt it without the smart array. I then learn that while the smart array was included by default on the Gen 10s that is not the case with the Gen 11s. I check with the previous team that ordered these and was informed that they selected the default options when ordering everything. Which means no smart array for the Gen 11s we have. Per our Orgs policies we have to encrypt these things before they can get approved for use. I haven't configured one of these in 5 years so I'm doing a lot of catching up so my main question is, can i encrypt the gen 11s without the smart arrays or are we going to have to order those and install them to proceed?

https://redd.it/1qyo0zl
@r_systemadmin

Brother MFC-L8690CDW toner level via SNMP?

Has anyone managed to get toner levels via SNMP on a Brother MFC-L8690CDW?
The default printer OIDs respond, but toner values are useless (-3, max capacity -2).
Did you find working OIDs or another way to retrieve toner levels?

Cheers!

https://redd.it/1qz7je7
@r_systemadmin

Unlabelled SMR hard drives are a cancer

I've been intermittently troubleshooting a RAID array for the last month. It's one of a pair of physically identical lab servers that was donated to us. The other server performs flawlessly, and is as fast as one can realistically expect from a set of 12 spinning disks.

But the troublesome one has had really inconsistent disk throughput - I ran full write/read tests on each disk individually before provisioning, and initially everything was the same. When I assembled the array, it seemed a little slower at first, but not by much.

Then it started just grinding to a halt for minutes at a time, for no discernible reason, then it would recover for a while, then do it again. Absolutely nothing in dmesg or the system logs until eventually, one time, two drives appeared to freeze up completely, for so long that the controller gave up talking to them, and mdadm kicked them out of the array.

Weirdly, smartctl showed the drives as completely healthy, except that "end to end error" had incremented from 0 to 3 (probably from the controller giving up on it rather forcefully).

And that's when I noticed, in the identity section: " (SMR)" after the device model name.

I tracked down the data sheet for the exact model, and sure enough, it's one of the "secretly SMR" drives - it doesn't advertise that it's SMR (smartctl only knows because some nice person has curated this info in its drive database); it even lies on its VPD pages and claims not to support any block provisioning or trim, but if you forcibly enable it, then you can blkdiscard/fstrim it and get its write speed back up to spec.

I am so annoyed with Seagate today. At least the few garbage WD drives like this I've run across have admitted to their inferiority by advertising it in VPD.

I guess this was one reason those servers were donated; the previous university department probably thought they were haunted, not realising that they'd accidentally ordered some SMR drives as spares at some point.

https://redd.it/1qz7tl7
@r_systemadmin

Printix garbled output

I'm currently in the process of switching everything to Printix at our company. I have a printer model with a specific driver that only prints cryptic characters when the print job originates from a Mac. The driver is the correct one, the same driver that we used without Printix before. Has anyone else experienced this? It seems as if the printer and the operating system aren't speaking the same language.

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

Do you have a 12th gen Proliant? Willing to show me the factory iLO certificate?

I'd like to see an example of the certificate (certificate chain?) that ships with a 12th generation Proliant's iLO interface.

If you've got one that's still sporting its OEM (or self-generated? I'm not sure if these are factory applied vs. generated at first boot), you can pull it from a shell prompt with:

openssl s_client -connect google.com:443 -showcerts </dev/null \
| awk '
/BEGIN CERTIFICATE/ {cert=""}
{cert = cert $0 ORS}
/END CERTIFICATE/ {
print cert | "openssl x509 -noout -text"
close("openssl x509 -noout -text")
print ""
}'

...Just change "google.com" to the name or IP of your iLO interface.

Feel free to obfuscate any MAC address, serial number or key modulus as you see fit, but please don't break the format: I'd like to know whether MAC addresses are encoded as abcd.abcd.abcd vs. AB:CD:AB:CD:AB:CD and so forth.

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1qze8pu
@r_systemadmin

Need help setting up a reverse proxy for my nodejs backend on IIS

Hi everyone as the noscript clearly states, i assistances with setting up a reverse proxy for my nodejs backend on IIS . for context i've developed a react web app, reliant on a nodejs backend





https://redd.it/1qzf9z5
@r_systemadmin

Changed email address for resource calendar, can't see free/busy now

I changed the email address for a resource/room calendar and now I can't see free/busy if I add the shared calendar to my calendar list in Outlook. It will still accept/deny meeting invites.

I waited 24 hours and no change. I've changed the email address back and it still doesn't work. Next step is to delete and add, but I might upset lots of users.

Any ideas?

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

SSH Port forwarding

My question to all sysadmins, do you all allow tcp port forwarding on the ssh server? Like if someone has access to only the ssh server but the ssh server is also in whole internal network? I just realized on most server distros , tcp port forwarding is enabled by default

https://redd.it/1qzj9dt
@r_systemadmin

Action1/Powershell Scripts for Secure Boot kickoff and check

Just in case anyone needs these, I posted a couple of noscripts to "kickoff" the secure boot certificate updates (with BIOS already updated to include 2023 cert) and another one to check the flag that the update is completed.

I posted them in the Action1 sub but sysadmin doesn't allow cross posting. So they are over here - Use at your own risk with testing.


Kickoff - https://www.reddit.com/r/Action1/comments/1qz6rsd/secure\_boot\_2023\_cert\_kickoff\_noscript/

Verification Check - https://www.reddit.com/r/Action1/comments/1qz74re/secure\_boot\_2023\_cert\_updated\_verification\_noscript/

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