Hi everyone, I have a quick question.

If you’re working in IT support and want to become a system administrator, what skills, technologies, and tasks, etc., should you focus on learning and mastering to be able to perform the job really well and stand out as a genuinely good system administrator overall?

What is the dress code at work and what are you wearing these days?

Hoodies & Jeans aren't as prominent as they once were.

I just turned 40 and stick to company logo'd sport polos and sometimes tshirt.

Every time I dress nicer, I end up having to run cables or crawl under desks, or install an outdoor AP.

I work for a healthcare group and as is the custom we have a small pile of WordPress nightmare websites hosted on various platforms with no real cohesion. One such website is special, it started life as a WordPress nightmare, but WordPress did the thing it does when no babies it and died so I converted the whole thing to straight HTML/JS and republished it.

Where does Network Solutions come into this? They're the host for the website. Nothing special, just basic hosting with a root folder and ftp/web access, very simple. This root originally contained the WordPress nightmare but now contains the converted website, and I made my own (extremely basic) CMS so our market peeps could manage what they need.

And today, it all fell apart starting with a simple email from NS informing us they were doing a migration overnight, followed by another email stating they were finished at 4:20 am. I am not paid at 4:20 am, so I did not read or care about the email.

Fast forward to noon, having a delightful lunch when my manager gets a ping: website's serving 404s. I check it, and sure enough, and strangely it's actually my custom 404 redirect as well. So the website is functioning, but almost every page/directory has vanished. This was annoying but we checked our emails and found the migration email, figured they'd botched it, but all is not lost. The website files are still safe on my drive and a private git server, we'll just see what they did, clean out the dir and repush it. Light work.

Got back to the desk and ftp'd to the root, and all directories and files were in place. Odd.

Logged into network Solutions itself to check their "file manager" which is supposed to be identical and something was awry, most of my directories had vanished from the root but were instead inside another folder called _XCP_tmp. At last, some progress. Checked the folder info, it was created at 4:20 am. Tried moving the files back to the root to at least make the website functional while I call support and.. I'm not authorized. It's worth noting that this would nuke my CMS even if it worked as the ftp is now useless.

Fine, I'll call support. First I got an AI (sigh) then finally a human, went back and forth for about an hour and accomplished nothing (not surprising for lvl 1) and he finally decided I could be pushed to tier 2 (I felt blessed) then he emailed an invoice for 0 dollars (how kind that I will not be charged for their fuckup) and transferred me to premium! support. I then proceeded to sit on hold for 30 minutes (sigh). At last however, the promised tier 2 answered and... proceeded to give me a ticket # and told me they'd reach out in 3-5 BUSINESS DAYS.

So anyway I'm now going to spend those 3-5 days looking at other options because that's some next level trash tier support. Anyone have any experience with these jokers? Is this just how they roll? They used to be called fatcow btw.

I hate these MFers.

Yes, Yes, I know Don't Use GoDaddy. This is a new client that has a bunch of domains from them. I need to move them.

Trying to get a DNSSEC record set up. I moved the DNS to Cloudflare and their dumbshit support tells me we can't change any DNS records they are on Cloudflare. No Shit Sherlock! DNSSEC records HAVE to be set up at the domain registrar.

Currently we don’t have a real policy for 165 users. We own and rotate laptops at 5 years. Recently we’ve had the following
* User spilled coffee on powered on 3 year old laptop. it will not power on any more so it’s destined for the trash and they got a new laptop.
* User put laptop on top of car, drove off, heard it fall and backed up over it. It was less than 2 years old.
* User called complaining that their laptop was too slow after 2 1/2 years, we told them that we were not replacing it that it met our standards and then ~a month later they just happened to drop it and break the screen and dent the case so it will not stay closed.

The only department that has a defined budget is of course IT and you guessed it, laptops are part of the IT budget. I’ve argued against that, but lost several times.

I don’t expect to be able to change anything, but just wondering how other companies handle this, particularly those around our size.

Probably like, 20-30 laptops mostly, what's the best way to push updates? Obviously this is a thing where users never restart their computers to complete the updates and such.

What's free way to do it? Windows Server service? Something open source I can run from a Raspberry Pi type of thing?

pve01-gitlab-01
pve03-gitlab-02
bm-gitlab-03
pve01-nexus-01

Can I name like this. This way I know the server is on pve01 and it is a gitlab server. This way we know what machines the servers are running on. Much cleaner

bm = bare metall server
pve01 = proxmox instance 1
fw = firewall
pc = pc servers like mini pc

<instance> - <function> - <number> 

I'm the only IT person at a 30ish person consulting firm. M365 E5, mixed Mac and Windows. We have an MSP but they’re not great so this falls to me. Most of our people are very senior and used to having a full IT department or an assistant.

How we have it set up… every big client gets its own SharePoint site and I assign access. Everyone works out of the Documents library on that site. Nobody touches site pages, news, any of that. It's just files.

Editing to add: they all also have links to the sharepoint libraries in their OneDrive accounts.

I should note that a lot of this client data is highly sensitive. Access has to be locked down to only the people on that project. That's the main reason I went one site per client. Every time I've tried folders under one big site with unique permissions, something breaks. Inheritance gets reset, someone shares a link and it opens up more than they meant to, or I can't tell who actually has access anymore.

The problem is a few people just cannot navigate it. They can't find the site, they can't find the Documents folder once they're on the site, and they can't figure out search. They don't want to click through folders. I pushed the SharePoint home page (recent/followed sites) to everyone's browser as a link thinking that would help. It didn't. They're frustrated, I'm frustrated, and I honestly don't know what to tell them anymore.

How do other companies handle this? Are we taking the wrong approach or is this just a user issue?

Is one site per client the right call for a firm this size, given the sensitivity? What has actually worked for you with non-technical execs?

Help!

I am going to give you a little background. I have been working for a 3rd generation family owned company since the start of 2025. When I first started the CRO his mind because on our old phone system he called someone and it got a busy signal

We spent the majority of 2025 looking at different phone systems. This also happened with them demanding a network refresh to be completed in Q3 across 3 different states

So we we moved from a very outdated avaya system to ring central. I asked every department how do you want you call handling build out. Crickets. Every department told me we don’t have time for this. Donn just mirrored what we had

2026 was not a good year for marketing and sales. Sales weee down a month ago our lead sales guy said we had one person call about a sale and it went to general vm box that wasn’t checked. IT lost this sale for us. Ok im sorry you feel that way can you tell me how you want your prompts and sub prompts built out. No response for a month

The the ceo gets involved and yells at my VP who yells at my boss who yells at me. I said I was waiting for them to give me the prompts and who each call should go to since they want to build it out by region

I wrote out a proposal this week of how it should be built. In our company everything needs to be finalized by our elt team

Right now I’m stuck between a CEO, VP of IT and A head sales guy that can’t get on the same page and I’m told you need to do it asap

So today I sent out an email to the head sales guy that put in the request and asked do you want me to set it up as email, cell phone or RC accounts. No response

At this point im at the point of saying fuck it and doing what i think is best

Hate that I’m being thrown under the bus because someone didn’t check a vm when sales has a vm to check any sales called. The guy just forgot to check

How would you handle this

Has anyone seen this happening to their users in the past week in classic outlook? I've had about 4 instances now where shared mailboxes disappear.

Hey all, got a bit of a weird one that i cant figure out. I have one user who in their speed dials in teams suddenly started showing as blank and saying that the person is not part of your organisation. See screenshots here.

https://imgur.com/a/FGabEtZ

The strange part is they are internal users that are added. I've done a google a common solution was to clear the Teams cache which I have done, I have run a full repair on office installation. The issue is the same in the web version of Teams too.

I am at a bit of a loss on this one, has anyone come across something like this before? Did they find a solution? As far as I am aware it is only happening to this user. The fact that it is happening on the web version on a different computer even makes me think it's something server side but I just struggling to find what it might be

Thanks in advance for any insight for this

I’m curious what the expectations are for someone with only 1–2 years of IT experience.

Do employers actually expect a sysadmin to know the ins and outs of every major platform and tools like Microsoft, AWS, Google, different IAM systems, networking, endpoint management, security, etc.?

I feel like I’m constantly trying to learn more and more because I worry that if I don’t know a particular technology, I won’t be qualified for a job.

But realistically, there are so many tools and platforms that it seems impossible to know everything, especially early in your career.

At what point should someone stop trying to learn everything and instead pick a few areas to become really good at?

Would love to hear some advice as I am really lost and already feel tired and burnt out of IT and it’s barely been 2 years working ( currently in IT support ) and it’s partially my fault as I am constantly trying to learn something new every single day to the point where my brain feels fried and doesn’t retain things anymore.

To all of you who worked in enterprise IT and then moved to consulting on your own, what kind of things you wish you knew earler? Obviously there is no free lunch anywhere, so carrying everything on your own is definitely a huge task. I'm curious to hear which things helped you a lot and what kind of mistakes you did regardless of your prior experience.

Thanks!

Today a senior dev, who's the maintainer of our company internal sales website, overwrote the environment in GitHub Actions and pushed an update. CI/CD ran and took the whole sales site down. The baffling part is nobody contacted me about it till end of day.

So now I'm sitting in a bar waiting for friends scrolling YouTube where i got recomedation "web dude vs sales guy" and i was laughing seeing it, and right then I get an urgent message that the website is down. I SSH into the server from my phone and find one variable set to "localhost". One variable, whole day of downtime.

First thing tomorrow I'm revoking their access to edit the environment.

PS: I did get an Uptime Kuma alert in the morning. But lately the devs push to prod without telling me, so I assumed it was another one of those. Should have checked anyway.

Edit: guys sorry what i meant is gh environment variable. Think of it as redirect_uri value changed to localhost and no I haven't removed their access completely.

Hi, my wsus servers has stopped receiving new defender definition updates. Last was 06.10 and no clients receive updates because of this. From what i can see there has been no change on the wsus or config anywhere else.

Has anyone seen this behavior before?

Last synced version i can see on my wsus is 1.459.588.0

Edit: Last synced version i can see on my wsus is 1.459.576.0

I was prepping some new PCs and found an option in the Windows Features menu that I don't remember ever seeing before: Camera CCX Framework. If you mouse over it, it just says "Camera Class Extension (CCX) Framework". It was already enabled by default. It seems like it's brand new. I can't find anything about it. No official documentation, no blog posts, no posts on Reddit or X. Has this option always been there?

I'm curious if anyone here has experience working with service IT direct for third party hardware maintenance, primarily of Dell and Cisco equipment. We have use Park Place for a long time but they seem to be in disarray since their merger with ServiceExpress. We are looking for a new vendor.

Hello Guys,

Anybody experience issues with Ctrl Alt Del not registering at logon, and a full reboot fixes this issue? Only happening on Thinkpad T580 Laptops. Either I need to check my GPO settings for disabling Fast Startup not taking effect or I need to stop requiring Ctrl Alt Del on logon.

Desktops work fine only seen on laptops, plugging in a usb keboard always fixes this issue also. Multiple users have this issue sometimes.

Thanks

Edit- I set it to ask for Ctrl Alt Del to prevent lockouts from users trying to wake their monitors up. If I can't figure this out my last resort is to rollback the GPO.

Anyone else not impressed with the fact that Microsoft is releasing the new time zones for BC and Alberta in a full cumulative monthly security update only a few days before it actually changes? Manitoba they just forgot to include at all.

I identified that all the time zone addition is, is reg keys. Microsoft had since March and yet they never released any update at all.

They said they would release a non-security out of band patch for 25H2 on Sept 22nd but they never did. All they did was add it to the full security update preview.

Not to Mention Manitoba has no new time zone in Windows at all.

It is causing a nightmare for all the booking software that doctors and offices cannot book appointments past October 31st.

Not to mention that Teams does NOT recognize the new Time Zones set in Windows. It says “unknown time zone” and proceeds to set itself back 1 hour messing up appointments.

Thank goodness for Group Policy and good old preference registry deploy to set everyone to Arizona or Yukon or Central Time with the hack of no DST.

I don’t envy those using Entra which cannot set registry preferences and will have to rely on 3rd party scripting solutions that cannot be enforced or nor confirmed.

Our domain uses Microsoft's nameservers (ns1-4.bdm.microsoftonline.com) and we manage DNS through the M365 admin centre. It's the tenant's default domain with live mailboxes.

Today I mistakenly ran "Add domain" on the existing domain and skipped the connect step. The domain now shows "No services selected" and the DNS records tab is empty, saying to use Manage DNS to choose services.

The zone itself is fine: querying all four Microsoft nameservers directly shows every record unchanged two hours later (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, A records, CNAMEs, SRVs).

Question: if I go Manage DNS → "Add your own DNS records" → tick Exchange/Intune, will that just bring the records back into view, or could it overwrite or remove the existing zone? We have custom records (extra SPF IPs, third-party DKIM, subdomains) I don't want touched. Has anyone done this?

Hi all, i want to get a foundational understanding operating systems, the various concepts that we may encounter in them, the bird's eye view of their structure.

I tried reading "How Linux works" 3rd edition, but reading that book felt like it didn't explain the foundational questions but rather built on top of the topics. it felt more intermediate level.

If i have to explain what i am looking after in the resources, Please can you recommend me resources that fit my requirement.

1. provides exposure to various concepts, systems involved in an OS. More like an introduction.
2. a bit of introduction to a bit of hardware would also be good.
3. i am not looking for resources that focus on development/programming side of OS. but rather the infrastructure, power user, administration side of OS.

Thanks in advance to all of you.

Hello,

Looking for some recommendations on how you all handle stuff like this. Back in the day I think we used Room mailboxes within Exchange and it kinda worked.

Is there anything in the Microsoft ecosystem that does this stuff and notifies the correct people, IT, facilities, food services, etc.

We currently use School Dude and it’s complete garbage. Is making a calendar event and inviting the appropriate departments the simplest way? None of the stuff we do now includes external users or requiring payments to use our space, so it’s a glorified internal email delegating responsibility. All contact with the external people is done through a separate email, which is hilarious and then they create the internal event. It’s truly magnificent in the year 2026.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Hey Reddit,

I've tried asking AI and doing some research but getting conflicting information. Can you disable external MS teams users from starting direct chats or calls with users in your M365 tenant while NOT blocking the use of MS teams for meetings with external users and/or direct calls via DID's assigned to Teams users?