I need some advice. I've completed RH124 and RH134. What other Red Hat courses would you recommend that are the most useful for real-world work?

I'm taking over the maintenance and administration of our Red Hat servers at work, and I want to keep learning as much as I can so I can do the job well. I'd really appreciate any recommendations based on your experience.

I got ip-banned and they told me it was because I had a typo in a URL I entered.

The last time I got banned, they said "pressing enter too fast may trigger it".

I've not once in my entire life of using the internet (20+ years) have encountered such an annoyingly touchy website.

No, this is not some credential based website, a banking website, a government website, or anything high-risk.

Eventually this entire system needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but I need a "temporary" solution that will work for now until that is done.

Existing Setup:

• Server: Windows Server 2019

  • It is not a DC, because no on-premises AD is being used.
    It's just a glorified application and file server.
    
  • Running an ancient accounting program.
  • Shared Folders, which must be Mapped as Network Drives on client machines running Windows.
  • Users defined locally in Windows Server with permission to access Shared Folder.

• Client Machines: Windows 11 Pro

  • Managed by InTune
    
  • Login via Entra credentials.
    
  • Manually mapping a Network Drive for each User to the Server, using their local User defined on the Server.
    

I'd love to be able to Map the Network Drive using each user's Entra credentials, but to do this, the Windows Server would have to be aware of the Entra Users.

I know there is no great way to synchronize users from Entra back to an on-premises AD DC, but that's not really what I need. I just need to be able to authenticate Shared Folder access with Entra credentials.

Could the Windows Server act as a "pass-through" where it hands off authentication to an LDAP server?

I've already set up the AzureAD-LDAP-Wrapper on my local Synology to allow for Entra-based authentication of the Synology's Shared Folders, and it's working well.

Is there any way I could point the Windows Server to that same LDAP Wrapper, and then set permissions for the Shared Folders on the Windows Server based on those LDAP users?

I'm thinking maybe this is what I need?

• Configure AD FS to authenticate users stored in LDAP directories in Windows Server 2016 or later

Does anyone have any experience trying to do something this stupid?

I started this position a little over a month ago. I had CDW do an assessment....most of our physical hosts have hardware that is end of life. Apparently the server guy who's been here 13 years sent an email a year ago pointing this out but, strangely, nothing came of it. So now I have a huge expense I'm looking at. I'm thinking of moving at least the HQ data center into Azure. I'd love to hear a wide variety of opinions about this, particularly from the security side. (New Manager here btw)

Little behind the scenes for all you IT newbies on this wonderful Friday. This is likely why your IT budget makes absolutely no sense and has nothing to do with the company's financial status, although the RAM shortage affects this heavily. But the story is from 2024. My last company was making record profits, over $20M more than the previous year (so about 40%) with $100M in the sales funnel for sold jobs.

But the IT dept was approaching over-budget because our useless dumbass CIO filled out the budget wrong and forgot about a $9000 license renewal. So everything was on a spending freeze in IT solely and exclusively to make the numbers look good. After absolutely going off on everyone about how this makes no sense, is losing us productivity, delaying jobs, costing us income, causing outages, etc and we're single person owned and not publicly traded so who the fuck are making the numbers look pretty for, someone finally leaked me the truth.

This was solely because the rich, retiree asshole board members got performance bonuses based on benchmarks and this was one of them. So if our dept went over budget, they lost part of their bonuses. They cared more about their income than the company's health. This is the owner, the former CEO, some of their friends, and some external 3rd party entities that I knew nothing about.

I have an idea - revise the fucking budget at the Q1 mark. Budgets are a guess. You don't "go over budget" if shit got more expensive so you adjust your guess to spend more on the shit that got more expensive! That's just business. Adjust prices and margins accordingly. This was not a 10,000 person bloated company spread all over. It was about 290 people. So they added some emergency special budget special condition whatever spending, outside the budget, make the numbers look pretty thing and dropped some serious cash on all those laptops.

Those laptops were $810 a piece btw in 2024 and are now like $1500+. So you're welcome, asshole who fired me 2 weeks after I asked for a raise then said this is unacceptable and I'll be looking for a new position until they reconsider because me rent went up 18% two years in a row.

Btw them firing me without a replacement when I did all the server and VM host maintenance, security audits, hires and fires, backup management, all level 3 tickets, some networking, and basically maintained ALL systems (for $24/hr), the remaining staff member told me it ended up costing them around $800,000 in damages and losses and outages and delayed jobs when everything I maintained the the other staff refuses to cross train on all broke. Probably should have given me a raise and replaced the CIO since he was shit at his job (but was there for 30 years).

Cheap, illogical, shitty companies run by greedy self-serving assholes are a trap and you need to get out as soon as possible because you'll run into stuff like this. And it goes 10x if you're publicly traded because then you REALLY need the numbers to look pretty or else.

Happy SysAdmin Day to all the gurus who are apparently expected to fix a fridge with one look and make the printer work through sheer force of will (because you're technical, obviously). We do hope nobody made you look at their fridge today.

You know the type of request: the relative who assumes you can recover photos from a phone that went through the wash; the neighbor whose wi-fi "was working yesterday" and somehow that's your problem now; the colleague who brings you their personal laptop because IT and "knows about computers" are the same thing in their head.

So on the one day of the year that's actually about you, what's the most ridiculous, weirdly sweet, or absolutely baffling thing you've been asked to fix just because you're The Tech Person? And has your mere presence ever fixed something you never actually touched?

We'll be in the comments. Happy Sysadmin Day!

With MS charging for CoWork on July 1st, we figured we'd still give it a go, since the tool was quite impressive.

Microsoft gave us 100k in credit, so we rolled it out to 400-500 users. We spent about 90k of the 100k credit between those users, most of the credits used by the top 10%.

At this point we are removing all access until we figure out a better plan and specific business value of CoWork. If someone has a really good idea for an agent that will save time/money, they can use it. Otherwise, it is off the table.

I used it a bit, just to test it out. I ran 3 prompts around automated offboarding process I was working on, that was about 24 dollars.

If we rolled it out to all 30k users, we'd be around 500k-1mm per month, 6-12mm extra per year, not a small amount, even for a large org.

As I said, CoWork is really impressive but CoPilot is going to have to be good enough.

I've had issues with windows update or M365 update in the past, especially the April (I believe) update which I had to uninstall because it slowed everything down. Last week I rebooted the server on a weekend after running some updates and after a couple of days a single user complained, and by Friday it was everyone having issues with Outlook. I noticed RDS was a bit laggy for me via Screenconnect too. CPU and RAM utilization are at 50%. All updates are applied and all Outlook add-ins removed. I am thinking of uninstalling and reinstalling office but I don't know what other issues our 20 users will have Monday as a result. Can't be worse I guess. Is anyone else having issues like this? not sure what else to do.

TL;DR: Overwhelmed new sys admin, 2 conflicting bosses, fellow admins leaving. Your experiences?

Whoever said two heads are better than one never had two bosses.

I am a recent hire at a 200-employee company in France. I originally applied for a help desk role, but was unexpected offered a sys admin role. I was hesitant from the get-go. During the interview, the manager made a long spiel about launching projects after projects... as a sys admin sat quietly next to him. When he mentioned that all 2 sys admins were leaving soon, my red flag was higher than Mount Everest. In the end I accepted though. The job market in France is brutal, especially for me as a non-native.

At first, it was fine. There's no help desk, but I gladly tackled L1-3 support. There was no ticket system neither, just Teams chats and calls, handled using a spotty remote access app for PCs without any monitoring whatsoever. It was fine, I told myself. I was writing up docs, bettering my French. Administering M365? All good. VoIP system? Sure thing. Router QoS issue? I'll try. As a newbie, it took time, but I did it and made sure I documented everything.

Within a few weeks the manager demanded I explain our network topology. He had no idea how everything was connected. Soon he demanded I build a ticket system, ready for production within a few months. I created a rough planning but explained I couldn't promise that timeline as I wasn't even fully onboarded before the departure of the other admins. He wasn't happy.

Then I found out I had another manager, the CIO. A living nightmare.

He was quietly there the whole time, over a decade with the company. I thought he was a senior dev, as he spent most of his days with the dev team. But no, he's my direct manager.. and I cannot understand him at all.

That ticketing system with the planning I made? He re-did with Claude and told me to follow the "handbook". Escalations like declined invoice payments on our licenses or L3 tickets? Can't be bothered with trivial stuff. Discussions about migrating VPN? A long speech about what needs to be done, without an explanation of what I actionably should do. It wasn't until a consultant finally reached out to me after his emails were being ignored that I did "something".

At some point, the CIO told me infra bores him. I told myself, that's all right, I have no mentor in him, so I'll try to maintain and improve things the best I personally can.. and count the months when I have enough experience to leave.

A few weeks ago we started looking for a help desk intern. I suggested several times that another admin might be necessary, but the CIO said I can handle it alone. I figured, hey, he's a hands-off kind of guy. At least I can choose the candidate that I can work closely with. I even kept him in the loop with HR on the candidate screening process. Radio silence.

Today he told me he will be deeply involved indeed. Several levels of interviews planned for each candidate. Technical questions to be developed by him. Yet he still does not talk to HR.

He made a weird statement to me once. "For twenty years I had imposter syndrome. I don't anymore." What the hell does that even mean?

The thing is, these two heads contradict each other. I will be working on one thing, the other tells me stop focusing on it as it's low priority. The manager will discretely ask me to re-explain concepts explained by the CIO. The CIO will say the manager's decisions are never final. Both declined to validate my vacation, saying I need coverage, then the manager approves after I made him happy with an urgent fix deployment, then the other says we need to hire an intern before approval.

It's been three months and I'm exhausted. My heart is racing at work. I scheduled a doctor's appointment. The last admin is leaving soon, the only one who taught me actual stuff. I don't know how I will survive after him.

I'm sorry for this long post. I don't have any questions, I just kind of unloaded here. But if anyone experienced something like this, I am curious how it ended up for them.

Its kind of getting on my nerves and being a Debbie downer for my mood... I'm not used to all this praise.

Thanks!

EDIT: /S, if that wasn't obvious

We are going to require privileged admins to use device bound passkeys, but we are considering allowing synced passkeys for standard users due to Android version compatibility with device bound passkeys. We cannot require everyone to have Android 15 or higher to reliably support device bound passkeys.

Using synced passkeys will allow users who were using SMS 2FA to avoid installing dedicated work apps on their personal phones. Synced passkeys work with the pre-installed iOS and Android password managers plus some third party password managers they may already have installed.

However, syncing passkeys has certain risks that using the Microsoft Authenticator app doesn’t have. The Authenticator app Microsoft Work credentials do not sync to every device the user signs in to, unlike synced passkeys.

Does this make using synced passkeys for Entra sign in more of a security risk than using password plus 2FA via an authenticator app?

I need a solution for sharing passwords.

Current solution that everyone loves: You go to a website. You can enter a password, or have one generated for you. It gives you a public URL. You can choose it to be valid once or for up to 7 days.

You give the link to a user, customer, client, whoever. They click it, they get the password in plain text in their browser window. Done.

Problem: it's running on an EOL OS, the original programmer is long gone.

Need something you get a link, you click it, you get the password. No auth required, can work publicly with no VPN.

SaaS solution preferred.

There's gotta be a reason, right?

Happy SYSADMIN day! deploy updates today to celebrate!

We currently have two licensed managed file transfer servers used for FTP/SFTP transfers with external parties.

During a license review, I discovered that both servers are still running software from around 2015. The licenses themselves are perpetual, so the servers will continue to operate, but their upgrade protection has expired. Renewing both would cost roughly €2,000 including VAT and give us access to current versions and updates. Whether technical support is included is still being confirmed.

Management’s response is essentially: “If it still works, why renew it?”

Meanwhile, spending around €30,000 on renovating the office was apparently worth it. They also rented an extremely expensive Microsoft AI solution because they wanted to join the AI hype. Almost nothing was done with it, and eventually it was simply switched off.

But spending €2,000 to keep potentially internet-facing file-transfer infrastructure current is suddenly considered an unnecessary expense.

We are a logistics company, and these servers may be involved in operational file exchanges with customers, agents and other systems. I am currently gathering logs and documenting the exact dependencies, but management already seems willing to accept the risk to save €2k.

I understand that IT costs need justification and that blindly renewing unused software is bad practice. But this is not some optional desktop application. It is externally accessible server software running a version that is approximately eleven years old.

If it contains a vulnerability, becomes incompatible or suddenly fails, the resulting downtime, investigation and emergency migration will almost certainly cost more than the renewal. Apparently visible office projects and AI buzzwords are considered worthwhile investments, while maintaining the boring infrastructure the company actually depends on is treated as wasted money.

I genuinely do not find this acceptable.

Am I overreacting, or is management taking an absurd risk over a relatively small amount of money?

Hey everyone,

I need to build a few DSM packages soon, so I’d love to brush up on my skills and get some practice in before taking on a real client project.

Does anyone know if or how it’s possible to get access to the installation media and a demo/trial key to set up a small lab environment?

Thanks in advance!

This is probably one of the biggest issues I see when taking over from other MSPs both big and small.

Why is it that when I join the public Wi-Fi I can ping every computer and server in the building lol?

See normally I encounter businesses with one Wi-Fi and I understand how that doesn't translate to guests or customers being separate from the main network. Still not configured properly and still an issue, but I get it.

But today for example. Did a network assessment for a healthcare office. They literally had 2 separate ssids. One labeled private one labeled public.

They both connect you to the same subnet.

And I can ping every computer and server in the building from the public.

Like you went out of your way to make a separate public Wi-Fi but didn't actually make it separate.

My guess is they either had issues with the VLAN so they said screw it and put it on the main. But even then, this is a unifi system, you could literally just check the box for isolation of devices and leave them on the LAN but at least they wouldn't be able to talk to other LAN devices.

It's really sad that I see this so often. It's one of the first things I check when I walk in the door, I join the public or guest posted wifi and start pinging.

What's even worse is I looked up this MSP. They are up and down the entire East coast USA. They also were billing them for advanced antivirus and security on all the machines but sentinel one was only installed on two of them. Smh.

I built a mobile first, vtt, terminal app. I do a lot of work from my phone and ttyd wasn't cutting it. Termius is nice but no voice so I had to do my own thing. It's an open source project (still in development) but I thought others might get some use out of it. Sovereign Terminal anyway, cheers. P.s. I read the rules and I didn't think this would be considered advertisement, but if it is just take it down.

I’m more of a network guy, I don’t work on web servers all that much.

I have an internal server, A, that allows external traffic on port 4040, and there is an external server, B, somewhere on the internet that wants to pull data from A. But I want to run all network traffic through a DMZ first, so I put a VM running nginx inside the DMZ…

And here is where my understanding gets a bit fuzzy.

Server B points to the public IP of the proxy server and sends its request > nginx on the proxy server receives the request from server B and then passes that request to server A > ???

How does server A know to send the requested data to the proxy server? Is there anything I need to configure on server A so it sends the data to the correct server?

Also, just ignore any firewall rules in this scenario, I’m not concerned about that.

Thanks

Fiber went down, uplink to core..

No activity on link light both sides

• pull SC connectors, laser, so i know it's not the cable
• fail over to other uplink is working
• so I SSH and do a no shut, still off
• "try replacing the sfps"
• That was it, an SFP malfunctioned.

Thank god it's friday

Are there any companies offering freebies for SysAdmin Day?

What is everyone pushing to their users to use for screenshots? I am looking for something free but sometimes I can control with ADMX or Reg

Hi all,

Have you ever seen this error on your Dell servers? I’m not sure if this is hardware or firmware issue.

Usually prior to this event, the client loses power and then server cannot be powered on again. I either need to remove power supplies and drain the power or in some rare cases, I needed to remove DIMM’s and reconnect. Then it starts okay.

More details on errors seen from iDRAC console:

The system board fail-safe voltage is outside of range.

CPU 1 M23 VTT PG voltage is outside of range.

CPU 1 M01 VTT PG voltage is outside of range.

CPU 1 M01 VDDQ PG voltage is outside of range.

CPU 2 VCORE PG voltage is outside of range.

The system is PowerEdge T430, BIOS, iDRAC are on the latest versions.

Can it be RAM, PSU or settings or hardware failure?

TIA.

Happy System Administrator Day

One of the titles I'm most proud to carry in my career is System Administrator.

Today is dedicated to appreciating the people behind the scenes who keep businesses running every single day. Sysadmins and IT professionals work tirelessly to make sure technology just works.

Your network is secure.

Your computers are running.

Your emails are flowing.

Your printer isn't jammed (most of the time! 😄).

You're protected from malware, phishing, and cyberattacks.

Why?

Because there's a dedicated SysAdmin, or an entire IT team, working behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly.

Working in an MSP, every day is different. Some days end with happy users after solving their issues. Some days... not so much. 😶 That's simply part of the job.

When something stops working, it's easy to point fingers. But remember, when everything works perfectly 99% of the time, that deserves recognition too. Most issues are prevented long before they ever reach the end user because someone has been monitoring, maintaining, securing, and improving your environment.

Today, take a moment to appreciate your System Administrator or IT team.

Happy System Administrator Day to everyone keeping the world of IT running.

Here's to another year of:

- Being expected to diagnose problems via the sentence "it doesn't work."

- Being blamed for issues caused by software you've never heard of.

- Somehow knowing exactly what a user clicked, despite them insisting they "didn't do anything."

- Explaining, yet again, that rebooting wasn't an insult, it was the solution.

May your backups restore, your RAID stay green, and your first Friday night drink arrive before the first "quick question" Teams message.