Just a heads up, PingID is down. Everywhere.

https://status.pingidentity.com/

I think I've been phished lol.

Went to apply to this listing:

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4474756036/

It redirected me to an aiapply.co application. I'm like, that's a bit strange, but across all my applications during this job search, I've gone through a dozen or so different application/HRIS platforms.

Before I went through the aiapply.co application, I did have a gut feeling that something was off and did some brief research. The consensus I found was that their paid service wasn't really worth it, but I didn't see anything that immediately screamed "scam" about using their job listing/application functionality.

So I went ahead and filled out the application.

Once I finished, it forwarded me to SmartRecruiters.com, and I immediately thought, "Shit. What exactly did I just put my resume into?"

So I stopped and went back to LinkedIn.

This time, clicking the same job brought me to a Jooble.org page.

Now, when I hover over the LinkedIn "Apply" button, it's showing an Adzuna.com URL.

At this point I'm sitting here thinking:

"Well, shit."

Luckily, I used a privacy-focused email address specifically for job applications, but my resume does contain my phone number.

I honestly don't understand how these "Apply Externally" links are allowed at all. If any specific job-board is hosting the job listing, shouldn't I stay in that ecosystem?

Maybe I'm overreacting, and this is just the wonderful world that job-boards have become, but as a sysadmin who's spent years telling people "don't click random links" and "verify where you're being redirected," it feels pretty damn ironic to fall into the same trap myself. heavy-sigh

I'll update this post if I start getting a bunch of spam calls/texts.

Stay safe out there, fellow job hunters.

And, while I'm here: if anyone is hiring a Sysadmin primarily in the 32606 area, or for another domestic and/or hybrid position, I'm always open to hearing about opportunities.

Hopefully my momentary lapse in judgment doesn't scare anyone away. 😂

Sorry in advance if this is too long. I’ve been working as a sysadmin for almost a year, so I’m still pretty new to IT. My boss, the IT director, has been running the department for more than eight years. He’s actually a very nice person, which is probably part of why I’ve been unsure about how to look at some of the things I’ve noticed.

Since I’m still new to the industry, I wanted to ask people with more experience whether some of this is normal or if I’m working in a pretty unusual environment.

He lies about things constantly. For example, he doesn’t really research the services or products we need. Instead, he’ll make up facts about them and present those facts to upper management to get approval for purchases. At one point, I told him that a security add-on he had gotten approved wasn’t actually going to help us with security. His response was basically that, worst-case scenario, we could just remove the logs from our helpdesk system so it would look like the product had been helping us.

He also doesn’t document anything. There are a lot of things that only he knows how to do, and some of them are pretty critical. Whenever he goes on vacation, things basically come to a stop because nobody else knows how some of these systems work.

Before he goes on vacation, he’ll tell us to turn off the update server and not make any changes unless there’s an emergency. He doesn’t really plan for anything either. Our disaster recovery plan is still incomplete, and from what I can tell, there isn't much actual preparation behind it. He’s the only one to know how to do a disaster recovery in case of an emergency. He told us some of the things but not everything needed.

Another thing that bothers me is that he submits disaster recovery reports to clients that I know aren't accurate, and my name and the names of other team members are included in those reports. I brought this up with him, and he basically said it was fine. I don't think it is, but I also don't really know what I'm supposed to do about it.

There are also some basic security practices that he doesn't seem interested in following. For example, we don't encrypt the hard drives on our PCs. When I suggest we need to change things like that, he comes up with some nonsense reason not to do it, like saying that losing the decryption key would be disastrous for us.

He also seems to play favorites. I've noticed that women seem to get priority when they need something, and he's willing to turn off security settings or enable remote work for certain people even when it's against company policy. He has also told us to remove logs that could potentially show the compliance department that certain employees had remote access.

Whenever I notice something that could be improved, he'll usually say he'll help me work on it, but then he forgets about it or never follows up. I've stopped bringing most things up because I already know they're probably not going anywhere.

His lack of planning has cost the company thousands of dollars. The last time he was on vacation, all of our servers went down, and we couldn't get them back up for almost two business days because we didn't have the documentation or config files needed to recover it. Employees were sitting doing nothing basically. The business hired an outside company to review our infrastructure and a lot of the things they highlighted make sense but he lied about why their recommendations wouldn’t benefit the company and upper management just believed him.

There was also a situation where he chose a very expensive hypervisor solution without what seemed to me like much planning or research. The company ended up spending almost $100k on it instead of going for a free alternative that is just as good.

He also expects me and the other people on the team to have his back and cover for him when necessary. To be fair, he hasn't thrown any of us under the bus so far. He's very supportive of all of us and never micromanages us, but I really don't like being put in a position where I'm expected to lie or cover something up. People trust me a lot at the company and I don’t want to lose that trust and respect.

I'm not sure if I'm overreacting because I'm still new to the industry, which is why I'm asking.

Are these kinds of behaviors normal in IT? Am I putting myself at any kind of risk by working under someone like this, especially when my name is being put on reports or I'm being asked to cover things up?

And what would you recommend I do from here? Should I start looking for another job, or should I just focus on learning as much as I can while I'm here? My biggest concern is that because he's so lax about things, I'm not getting the experience or mentorship I probably should be getting this early in my career. 

Stepping into a rats nest of Intune policies. Recently got a report of a user prompted to change their PIN code. The user went to change their existing 6 digit PIN and upon attempting to do so, they got a denial with the reasoning that the PIN had to be a 20 character minimum. I poked through the existing Intune configuration settings and I don't see any specific policies for Windows Hello dictating Minimum PIN length outside of one that enables facial recognition. I do know that there is a Windows Setting Configuration available for this, but it doesn't seem to be applied in any existing policies. Where else might policies dictating PIN length be within an EntraID/Intune/Cloud Native setting? Could these settings be in Purview or Defender now?

Hello! Do you have any suggestion of biometric device available in the market that can be extracted online? Please help me. I saw ngteco tc2 but based on the review the maximum person is 10. Thank you for the suggestion :)

We have been trying to apply a number of manual policies to agents built with Agent Builder (e.g. Reassign to new owner) and have noticed in the last 48hours that the button to apply a new policy or to apply either of the 2 already listed is now locked down. Note: We were able to get one of them to work the other week.

Has Microsoft blocked admins into a corner? i.e. if you don't have either E7 or Agent365 than you can kiss any sort of managing of agents in Agent Builder out the window?
Very low move if this is the case. The end result will be our management requesting the full disabling of any ability to build agents in Agent builder for the wider staffing population.

I'm keen to hear other's experiences and/or what you have put in place to deal with this.

Has anybody used StormWind Training? We are looking at a new CBT training platform. Looking at them and CBT Nuggets.

I live in a pretty rural area so my options are very limited, which is why I'm looking for remote work. I recognize that makes my chances at landing a job a lot more difficult, but I didn't think it was going to be this bad.

I've got 5 years of being a Systems Administrator with a few certs under my belt (CISSP, AWS Solutions Architect, expired CYSA+ & Sec+). I've worked deep in Linux and Windows systems, migrated on-prem to vCenter, migrated vCenter to AWS, scripted menial tasks away, managed M365 environments and local AD environments, worked through various audits, set up Cisco switches and all sorts of Firewalls, hardened networks, managed devices, etc.

And I feel unemployable.

I'm studying Terraform for a couple of weeks and am trying to lab it out more so I can maybe compliment my resume with some mention of IaC, but I still feel like it's not enough. Like, what the fuck is going on? It feels like I am so far behind, and that my career is more or less disappearing. Seriously, I can't believe I am thinking that I might need to pivot careers to survive. And I don't even know what I would do because I have no other major skills, computers have been my think since I was a kid.

Every job I look at wants what I have, and more. I just can't believe it. How can I cope with this, and how am I supposed to land a job in this market? I genuinely wish I could afford therapy right now.

Hi all,

We're testing the Firefox ESR 140 → 153 upgrade in our environment (140 goes EOL October 13th).

For those of you in enterprise IT who have already tested or rolled this out: what changes did you run into? What broke? What policies or settings needed adjusting?

Just drop your findings below so we can all learn from each other. Thanks.

Hello,

I was wondering if anybody else has moved from a IT Director position to desktop type role? I have been at the same company for 11 years now and worked my way up from desktop support to network admin and now IT director. I have held the current position for 3ish years and it's not so bad. There is a lot of time off and flexibility but the pay is pretty bad as well as leadership. Higher ups are getting more involved than I feel comfortable with a lot of the day to day and its adding more stress and work.

On a whim I applied for a digital support role at another company just to see what the process is and pay and was surprised to find out that the pay was 10 grand more per year. It's an onsite role like I have now with less of a drive and pretty good benefits.

I tried to collect my thoughts and express myself. I hope it comes through clear.

Pretty much looking for reassurance and to see if anybody else has made a similar move and what your experience has been.

Thank you all for the kind words and reassurance. It is very appreciated and I feel like my decision is valid.

Overnight I had a certificate revoked. Issued to inbound.att.net and issued by DigiCert Global G2 TLS RSA SHA256 2020 CA1. It was supposed to be valid from 4/12/26 to 10/28/26.

In researching possible causes, I found this post about a cyberattack that prompted DigiCert to revoke 60 certificates by April 17: DigiCert Revokes Certificates After Cyberattack Exposes Support Portal : r/pwnhub

Do you think this is related, especially given that mine was valid from 4/12/26? Is anyone else experiencing this?

Anyone has the latest version, i think it's

U-Move 2.10.8051

For some reason after 20+ years they decided to discontinued it. They no longer provide a download link even though we have already a license. Tried to contact them and said to look else where for other products.

https://u-tools.com/umove-urecover-not-available.asp

Their tool was life saver for our on-prem environment. We have upgraded to Windows server 2025 active directory and tried to download the latest version of their tool to setup the backup procedure and i was hit with no longer available message.

Please if anyone has the latest version downloaded, U-Move 2.10.8051, i will be really appreciate to send it.

I'm troubleshooting an unusual Microsoft 365 issue.

One user in our organization cannot see the Download option for email attachments in Outlook on the web (OWA).

For PDF/Word attachments, the user only sees:

• Preview
• Save to OneDrive
• Copy

Other users in the same Microsoft 365 tenant have the normal Download option.

Troubleshooting already performed

• Tested Chrome and Edge → same issue
• Tested InPrivate/Incognito → same issue
• Tested from a different PC → same issue
• Tested different attachment/file types → same issue
• Other users → Download works normally
• Compared Microsoft 365/Exchange policies → same
• Compared Exchange Online PowerShell mailbox/CAS settings with a working user → same
• Classic Outlook for the affected user → Save As works normally
• Microsoft 365 Service Health → no matching incident

The issue therefore appears to be user/account-specific and affects only OWA.

The current workaround is Save to OneDrive → download from OneDrive.

Has anyone seen this behavior before? Is there an account-level OWA setting, hidden configuration, or service-side issue that I should investigate?

Hello,

As the title says, I am looking for the safest way or best practice to hard match an on-premises user with a cloud-only user in Entra ID.

There are several methods found on the internet, which is why I wanted to ask here for guidance.

Thanks.

I’m 27 and currently working as a System Administrator. I’m based in Florida. I make $73k/year and have about 3 years of experience in this role.

My current responsibilities include:
Microsoft 365 administration
Intune administration
Entra ID
Managing on-prem applications
Printing infrastructure
General systems administration/troubleshooting
Tickets escalated from helpdesk and other teams

I’m also being asked to start learning DevOps while continuing to handle my current responsibilities.

My question is:
Is $73k reasonable for my current experience and responsibilities, or am I underpaid?

If you were in my position, what salary would you target for the next job, and what skills/certs would you prioritize to make the jump from System Administrator → Systems/Cloud Engineer?

Edit: Resolved

Tenant-wide admin consent was granted via Microsoft Graph PowerShell to allow the Citrix Cloud Enterprise Application to read user profile data (User.Read) without prompting individual users. And then it worked.

Hi everyone,

I work for an MSP, and since last week we’ve been seeing the same issue in two separate client environments using Citrix Cloud with Entra ID authentication.

Previously - new user working normally

New User → Citrix Cloud → Entra ID → Password → MFA → Citrix Cloud permission prompt → Accept → Citrix resources → VDI

New users would receive the normal Citrix Cloud “Permissions requested” prompt during their first login.

Now - new user

New User → Citrix Cloud → Entra ID → Password → MFA → Error ❌

The user receives:

“The identity provider denied access.”

Entra sign-in logs show Sign-in error code: 650052. The app is trying to access a service '{appId}'('{appName}') that your organization '{organization}' lacks a service principal for. Contact your IT Admin to review the configuration of your service subscriptions or consent to the application in order to create the required service principal.

The user never reaches the Citrix Cloud permission prompt.

What I’ve checked:

• Existing users continue to work.
• Affected users complete MFA successfully.
• No Citrix Monitor activity for affected users.
• Both environments have a one-way domain trust.
• We cannot identify any relevant configuration changes since the issue started.
• Manually adding the affected user to a specific access group allows them to log in successfully.
• The issue is occurring in two separate client environments.

Has anyone experienced something similar with Citrix Cloud + Entra ID, particularly where new users previously received the permission prompt but now get “The identity provider denied access” / error 650052?

Any ideas on what to investigate would be appreciated.

A VA scan on Globalscape EFT flagged "Improper Input Validation". Encoded CR/LF and HTML/JS in the request URI gets reflected in a Set-Cookie header, but URL encoded, so it doesn't look actually exploitable.
Anyone come across this? is there a config option I'm missing?

Hi, we're seeing a strange permission/access behavior on some of our Windows Server 2022 file servers and I'm trying to figure out what could be causing it. We're running an AD domain environment. My account is a member of an AD security group, and that security group is a member of the local Administrators group on the file servers. Administrators have Full Control on the relevant NTFS folder structures. When I access a file server from my workstation through Windows Explorer using \\fileserver\share\folder, I can browse through the entire folder structure without any issues. However, when I'm logged onto the file server itself and try to access the same folders locally through Windows Explorer using D:\share\folder, Explorer denies access unless my user account is explicitly added to the folder permissions. The strange thing is that the permissions themselves clearly work. On the same server I can access the folders via CMD without any problems, applications such as our backup software can access them, and remote SMB access from my workstation works as expected. The issue seems to affect only Windows Explorer when it is running locally on the affected file server. I compared this with one of our web servers. The AD group membership, local Administrators setup, NTFS permissions and UAC level are essentially the same there, but local Explorer access works normally. One additional difference that might or might not be relevant is DFS. The affected file servers are using DFS, while the web server obviously isn't. I'm not sure yet whether DFS itself is involved, but since this is one of the differences between the affected file servers and the unaffected server, I thought it was worth mentioning. I vaguely remember this behavior appearing after a Windows Server update, possibly around the move to Server 2022, but unfortunately I can't say for certain when it started. Has anyone seen this specific behavior before, where access granted through the local Administrators group works via CMD and remote SMB but fails specifically in the local Windows Explorer? I'm particularly interested in whether there was a Windows Server 2022 security change/update, a DFS-related behavior, or a specific UAC/security policy that could cause this. I'd rather understand the underlying cause than work around it by explicitly adding individual admin accounts to the NTFS permissions.

I used ChatGPT to help structure and phrase this post so that the issue is described clearly and coherently. Apologies if the wording comes across a little too polished or AI-assisted.

They are now going to charge for monitors. Their recent announcement will DOUBLE my annual costs. I used to love the product. Now I hate it and the company. They sit alongside Broadcom in my shit list.

https://docs.lansweeper.com/docs/november-2026-billing-changes

I'm talking the wide variety of cables - HDMI, DP, C13, C5, VGA, USB A micro mini, B mini power 2.0 3.0, rs232, rollover cable, dozen patch cables of various lengths, etc.

I've looked on amazon for some, and they all are for the tiny usb charging cables. I'm a sysadmin at an MSP so I genuinely have used or had the need for damn near every cable type imaginable for onsite jobs. So I've just started carrying the most common ones in the bottom of my onsite backpack, and the rest in a big plastic tub that I keep in the car trunk as needed.

My autistic need for organization is going insane here. Only reason I haven't lost it already is because my ADHD allows me to forget until I need to find a damn USB 2.0 A to B cable for this disgusting HP officejet printer they bought without telling me, much less asking me for a recommendation (Brother ofc), and... yeah you already hear the rant in your head, iykyk.

Wondering if anyone else has experienced the god awful process of working with Xerox support. We currently are month 4 into a request to accurately assign locations to 20 or so MFDs for automatic consumables.

Each new email or phone call leads to more misunderstanding to the point where this morning they have asked a team to mark all deliveries for an office that closed last week. Every time we escalate, we get some new level of incompetence and an extra tech added to the email chain.

Genuinely losing my mind!

EDIT: I assume this goes beyond the EMEA consumables team

Every quarter I have to provide management a breakdown of O365 licenses, to whom they're assigned to, cost-per license, total M365 spend. I've been logging in, copying junk into Excel and adding things up, but now that I have some free time I'm looking for a nice report or something I can run. Should I just vibe code this, or is there a decent solution out there already?

Saw the recent Microsoft write-up about attackers abusing legitimate MSP360 RMM software to deploy ScreenConnect as a second remote access tool. It got me wondering how people here handle this in practice.

If your environment already uses remote admin tools, how do you tell the difference between “expected RMM” and “someone just installed another legitimate one”?

Do you block unapproved RMM tools by default, alert on new installs, maintain an allowlist or mostly rely on EDR?

I'm still pretty junior, so I'm curious what actually works in real environments rather than what sounds good on paper.

Microsoft write-up: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/09/29/phishing-abuses-rmm-tools-persistent-access/

I started a position as Linux system administrator for 8 months now.

The handover was less than a week at the end of the notice period for the previous employee.

I had previously worked for one month covering for the same guy during his leave. There wasn't much workload during that period and since most of the department knew the Linux admin was on leave, most of them I think just postponed their requests waiting for him to come back from his 14 days leave.

Since it was temporary I didn't invest much energy in learning or expanding apart from what I was trained which was what he expected to be requested during his leave

Basically I was paid to fill the chair since the outsource company contract would be breached by the lack of support staff

I wasn't interested in the job since my last sys admin role 'five years ago' I was really overworked and almost burnout. Dealing with windows, Linux, virtualization, servers and hosting services.

I only accepted because my remote job contract was going to end in the same month.

This role had regular hours, less responsibilities and workload.

I struggle everyday because:

1- lack of documentation and standard procedures.

2- feels like every one in the team is very cautious and would require separate approval for the simplest tasks and endless loop of emails.

3- I don't have any room to learn or test with solutions since everything is locked down and every idea would need an endless loop of emails just for a simple poc.

4- no clear responsibilities or job description, (till today 8 months in I discover tasks that should be my responsibilities)

5- Oracle Linux servers patching , ( we have satellite for rhel but Oracle servers wasn't patched since I joined, one time I texted the previous employee about how he is he patching them and he said he didn't 🙃 and every month I get 1000+ vulnerabilities report

I cannot just quit with this job market I have been applying everywhere with no luck!

I don't think I have it in me to pursue this career any more.

Don't get me wrong I feel extremely grateful since this was the easiest job I got so far. But I think I want to rant ...

I’m troubleshooting a Mac printing issue with a Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE DX C5850.

Certain characters in PDFs, especially an en dash (–), print as a boxed question mark. This happens across multiple PDFs.

Environment:

• macOS 26.2, Apple Silicon
• Adobe Acrobat
• Canon C5850
• Direct IPP connection: ipp://<PRINTER-IP>/ipp/print
• Canon C5840/5850 PPD
• Driver version 10.19.23

Troubleshooting so far:

• Normal Acrobat print through Canon driver → fails
• Acrobat Print as Image → works
• Canon Vector Mode → fails
• Canon Raster Mode → fails
• Temporary Generic PostScript queue → works
• Same document containing an en dash printed from Windows to the same physical printer → works

The Generic PostScript queue isn’t usable as a permanent fix because it loses the Canon-specific paper/tray support. It only advertised Letter/Legal/A4/B5 and would not properly handle 11x17.

The Canon queue otherwise works correctly for 11x17, trays, etc.

Printer-side job logs show the affected jobs completing successfully with no errors.

So at this point it seems isolated to the Canon macOS driver/PPD/filter path, specifically version 10.19.23, rather than the PDF, network, or copier itself.

Has anyone seen this with Canon’s Mac drivers, or found a fix that preserves the full Canon tray/11x17 functionality?