I have my bachelors in IT as well as a completed internship at my local ISP that has a MSP department. Unfortunately my internship could not lead to full time, even though my manager needed the help, the budget was not there.

I really enjoyed the experience and learned a ton in the 14 weeks. They mainly had me doing layers 1-3 stuff and shadowing everything else, since I was an intern, but still.

Anyways, an MSP a couple towns over posted a computer technician role asking for an associates, about 1 year of experience, or combination of education and experience. The pay is really good at 45k a year, has great benefits including education funding, and it seems to be right on par with all the stuff the techs were doing in my previous role.

Although it is not an official title of IT Technician 1, Help Desk Analyst 1, or JR Sysadmin, all the job duties seem to entail more stuff than just a tier 1 role. It includes everything from running and terminating cables, Active Directory / Entra ID Management, Imagining devices, scripting, hardware deployments, and everything else. It is all a combination of office, on client site, and remote work with on calls strictly reserved for software based issues.

Seems like a no brainer. However, I am not sure if doing this or trying to get a tier 1 role that has a more structured team consisting of Network Engineers, SRE / Devops team, official sysadmins, etc that you can learn from and promote to.

So would it be wise to go for this role, chill in it for a two or three years (if I get it), while learning everything I can and upskilling, then then move on? I know you aren't 'supposed' to stay in help desk for a long time, but if the work ends up advancing even closer to being a sysadmin, it seems very beneficial.

Public Sector US - not federal

Background: I was able to land position on the helpdesk after a lay off ended my circuit working at MSPs. After a while due to upper management, previous security guy left and I ended up taking over most of the responsibilities as a stop gap until the position was filled in addition to my other responsibilities.

Eventually was approached and offered the the position full time, so would get the title and big pay bump. I've been doing a decent chunk of the job already and the pay would've been big for me (low 60k to high 70k) so I said yes.

Fast forward I get the promotion offer and the rough responsibilities seem pretty broad for one person. CyberSec Analyst/Lead, Tier 1/2 Access Control Tech, AI advisor(?) plus some governance stuff.

I've already been doing and learning the first half somewhat ok I think, with plans to do more already but AI hasn't been full swing here yet as no one wants to pay for it minus what's included in our GCC licenses and nothing really with governance yet either.

There's also a big "numbers first" initiative happening with the big wigs.

Anyone that's been in a team of one position like this before have any advice on how to approach things? CYA, etc?

Hi,

Currently implementing PAM system, wondering what privileged account should be managed by PAM for password rotation.

For my planning, all administrative accounts in Windows like local administrators and domain user (as local administrator) will add for management.

But below account should be added ?

• Domain administrator - Password always rotate is best practice for this TOP admin account ?
• Network admin - Since the connection method is added a middle layer (RDS) for connection, can't connect directly even direct connect with laptop pc

Thanks

So, how’s everyone’s security department handing this so far? Mine has been completely worthless like always. Give me some good stories to cheer me up.

Apologies if this has been asked before:

Does anyone have any practical solutions for application whitelisting for RHEL Linux?

Thank you!

My role is pretty much putting out fires and support. I dont feel my title matches my job description. In fact I think I barely make the sysadmin qualifications.

Looking to go back to school (50 yo) and go for cybersecurity degree.

Would this be a step forward or behind in my career at this stage?

The sysadmin role is burning me out fast.

Uptime: 4,512 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down.

I’m looking for some advice on my next career move.
I have almost 5 years of IT experience and currently work in a VIP Desktop Support role as a contractor for a large healthcare organization. I’ve been in this position for 1.5 years, as a contractor but there’s no clear path to becoming a direct employee yet.
I recently received an offer for an IT Systems Analyst position at manufacturing company. The role involves maintaining the IT infrastructure, servers, networking, Active Directory, and Microsoft cloud services of the company.
I’m trying to figure out which opportunity would be better for my long-term career.
My current role has given me valuable experience supporting executives and working in a large enterprise environment. However, the new position could help me develop more technical skills outside of desktop support.
My long-term goal is to increase my earning potential and eventually move into sysadmin, network/cloud engineering or cybersecurity roles.
For those with experience in IT, would you stay in a contractor role at a large organization with a recognizable name, or move to a Systems Analyst position to gain broader technical experience?
The new job offers me 30% pay increase with benefits . which path would you choose, and why?
I’d appreciate any advice, especially from people who have made a similar transition.

I wish i could just nuke it all but I can’t.

What other options do I have? I have 1 week to clear out 50000 emails.

Any Avimark experts here? I'm trying to install it for a practice so they can view legacy records. I found a zip file with the installers, copied it to the C: drive of a laptop, ran Avimark.exe and chose the option to open a database (instead of installing the client/server), then ran AvimarkGuardian as a service. The program opened and looked fine, but was missing data. Found the database/v2$ files on another drive and dropped them in to replace the empty v2$ files created by the installation. The program still opens, but is now asking for a password. The login page also has a field for "new password" and a dropdown where I can select the practice. However, it has no username field! I'm not sure who I am signing in as and all of the user passwords we've tried are incorrect. I'm thinking now that it might be asking for a practice password, but we don't have one on file. Any advice is appreciated!

For anyone with cPanel, Plesk, CloudLinux or DirectAdmin boxes: those usually have several PHP builds side by side (ea-php74, ea-php81, alt-php and so on), each one needs its own fix, and 8.1 and older have no PHP release at all, only source backports. The other thing that'll bite people tonight is updating the packages and never restarting PHP-FPM, so the old binary keeps serving requests.

I wrote a small read-only bash script that lists every PHP install on a server, marks which branch has a fix, and flags FPM processes still running a binary that was replaced after they started. Exit code 0/1/2 so you can run it across a fleet:

https://github.com/KyleClouthier/php2shell-check

MIT, about 150 lines, read it before you run it. Happy to add paths for panels I missed.

I enabled forwarding + to keep a copy of emails. Also modified the defender setting to allow forwarding. Later I unchecked forwarding and returned the defender settings to where they were, to block forwarding and saved the settings.

A few hours later someone mentioned no emails had been received. I looked at the forwarding setting and it was still set to forward but with no destination email address and was set to NOT keep a copy of the email. I eventually had to reset it with PowerShell.

No emails in purview or sent or deleted items. Is there anything I can do to recover?

There were a few questions in r/vmware in the last while about perpetual licenses and subscriptions. 

I thought I'd make it clear what the licensing limitations on them are, what is allowed/ compliant and thought this might be useful for this community too.

Any customer that had perpetual licenses that had SnS after October 2022 possibly still has a perpetual license for VMware 8 products, unless they converted through the Subscription Upgrade Program without amending the terms to retain perpetual licenses. If anyone wants more detail/ backing info for this DM me. I'm not a lawyer, so not legal advice.

Any customer using a perpetual license must:

• use a perpetual license key from the contract/ transaction/ site that held the perpetual licenses.
• must be compliant with the terms of the original license (geography, entity, deployed quantity etc)
• Can use any version released and downloaded prior to perpetual SnS end date or released as a critical build (ESXi 8.0 U2d, U3d, U2e, U3f and vCenter U2d, U3d). This is based on a Broadcom policy at https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/314603/zero-day-ie-critical-security-patches-fo.html/I recommend reviewing the policy for changes before applying a build to check it has not changed.
• If you are on a later build, its not very easy to downgrade. The most effective way is to rebuild each host/ vCenter one by one. If on VxRail, you need to "de-VxRail" and rebuild as if they were just the Poweredge servers that are underneath. If on build later than SnS entitled, but earlier than a critical build, upgrade to a critical build.
• In the EEA/UK/Switzerland it is also possible to buy 2nd hand perpetual licenses. Make sure you do that carefully with a reputable company!
• In a hybrid situation, where some licenses have active support and some don't, all licenses in a functional environment must have the same support level; so all VMware components must be seperated, and automated vMotion etc between those environments switched off.
• Using a trial is not compliant. Continuing use of the crippled software after subscription expiry is not compliant.
• Use of the various 3rd party support organisations on perpetual licenses can be compliant if they pay attention to licensing and respect IP laws. Disclaimer: I work for one of them. Not spamming here, so DM if more info needed.
• Use of perpetuals is most likely governed by either the original contract or old VMware EULA rather than Broadcom EULA, but you need to read your contracts and transaction documents to confirm.
• Broadcom still has rights to carry out a license audit on the Licensee. I have never seen a VMware contract without an audit clause.

Like everyone, we have people in the org that send out reoccurring invites. People also join and leave the firm. Leavers are not so much of an issue, they are just stale invitees. New joiners however aren’t on the meeting invites so typically miss the first few occurrences of the meeting until someone realises and forwards them the invite (or the meeting organiser add them and sends update to meeting).

Curious how others are managing this?

We use exchange online and outlook.

anyone else getting errors on the dashboard?

After upgrading Dell R840 running ESXi 8 to latest BIOS available Dell Support website the ESXi host losses connectivity with vCenter after 15 seconds or so. From the ESXi host DCUI it can no longer ping gateway or vcenter. The ESXi host does respond to ping and webui from remote host.

Confirmed NIC has no network issue by moving from the vDS to the Standard Switch. Using the Standard Switch from the ESXi host DCUI it is able to ping remote hosts and it does not disconnect from vCenter.

Confirmed setting of the vDS have not changed on the ESXi host.

Broadcom KB (https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/414665.) states that LLDP agent gets enabled on the NIC after doing BIOS upgrade but going into the BIOS on the ESXi host and disabling  "LLDP nearest bridge" and "LLDP nearest non-TPMR bridge" didn't resolve the issue with vDS. The vDS is configured to use CDP which is why this was investigated as possible issue.

Looking for anyone with experience with this issue and for suggestions of things to check that could have been changed on Dell server BIOS upgrade.

Current setup:

• Main site in Houston with on-prem AD and Windows file servers. Users map drives network Drives
• Azure Hybrid environment with about 100 users.
• Brazil users connect back to Houston over FortiGate VPN, and file access is slow
• About 10 TB of data total.
• ½ of Brazil staff don't work from one office. They're spread out or remote. We have about 10 users now and may be expanding soon.
• Veeam for backup

Hope you guys can give me some reocmmendations on how can users from Brazil can access the data on on-prem faster. I looked into Azure Files and Azure FIle Syncs with and without local Brazil server. What do you guys recommend? Thanks.

thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Reported 5 domains (mix of .org .com .ca) not resolving NS queries, or even not querying anything at all validated via cmd line and 3 online tools including Google dig. Look fine in the admin console. Support confirmed no holds with compliance (and I already knew that, they would look different if that were the case).

Get told to check if hosting provider made any changes - SMH. Mix of systemdns, our own NS, and an external webhost but that's irrelevant if a query can't even find the domain in the first place (.com on icann) to get the NS records first.

I only went thru about 50 domains so far and found 5 "missing" :( so 10% gone

Hey everyone,

I have this issue on two RDS Servers we manage.

When the user tries to connect to their office account, they get "A required authentication broker is missing "

I've fixed it once already with these commands on powershell:

Add-AppxPackage -Register "$env:windir\SystemApps\Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin_cw5n1h2txyewy\Appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -ForceApplicationShutdown

Add-AppxPackage -Register "$env:windir\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.CloudExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\Appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -ForceApplicationShutdown

But now it's happened again. I was hoping someone here would know how to fix it permanently.

Thanks !

This might be really niche and limited to mainly Energy sector IT but I'm a bit frustrated with this damn thing and thought I'd see if anyone else had experience with this. Some of my understanding of this might be off or limited. I've inherited this damn thing.

Petrel is a subsurface software platform developed in house by the ever irritating Schlumberger. It uses the annoyingly antiquated practice of having a physical hardware licence key that its licence server pretty much constantly challenges to make sure it's valid. I've used these things before. Even going back to ones in print media that fitted to parallel ports with pass through to things like printers.

The server that runs the app\licence server is up in azure as the company in question has no local hardware that can really run it. So right now i'm getting away with having digi usb over ip hub and mounting that on the azure server. The problem is the office internet connection is.... not the most reliable. Its fine for a user but even a blip in the connection is enough to kill the licence server and force intervention from me.

I was trying to work out if we could clone the dongle somehow, but didn't expect any real success there without getting into some.... grey territory.

The next step might be to make the client suck it up and colocate a bit of hardware just for this purpose, that would solve the issue.

So yeah, anyone else had something like this and have a manageable way to work it?

Anyone else sitting at working just spamming the update button on my Linux web hosts because the PHP repo servers are so overloaded they have basically been hit with a DDOS attack, so you just keep hitting update in the hopes it will eventually work or is that just me?

Can we get a list going?

So far I found:
Synology
Unifi OS EDIT: I may be wrong about this one.
pfsense
fortinet

Is anyone using and can recommend some sort of online Outlook training class? We have tons of users who can't manage basic email management, reminders, folders, rules, etc. The basics to keep email in check, more intermediate things.

I know Linkedin Learning used to have a bunch of good stuff, we had that for a while, but it got too pricey so they dropped that. I've done some google searching, but it's all random places I've never heard of before and it's really hard to get any sort of feel for what's out there that users will actually get some value out of.

Is there anything else out there that you've have first hand experience with that can actually improve a user's experience and usage of Outlook?

Hi Folks,

At work we use WhatsUp Gold for monitoring network devices (about 80 Groups with each between 8-50 devices. The think about WhatsUp Gold is that you can create visual maps/layouts of your groups. Although WUG is kinda slow sometimes, I like that managing your devices is very easy, and that the icons are simple. Just create a group, add your devices, position them on the layout, add lines between them, add monitors and done.

I want to use WhatsUp for my personal projects but it’s limited to 10 devices on the free license, without paying a very hefty bill every month.

Are you aware of any monitoring tool that has a very easy interface to create visual layouts of your monitored items? I am aware that Zabbix has some kind of layout feature but for me zabbix has too much features, has too much steps to add a device and the layout feature is too bloated. I like how compact you can make your layouts on WhatsUp. Ideally I would want to have something as easy as Uptime Kuma but with a mapping feature.

Preferably the alternative would be free or cheap. Open source is nice but not a must. Thanks!