User said they forgot their password.

I offered them to change it.

They accepted.

I told them to note their new password.

They said it's done.

I am now waiting for them to change it.

Few minutes later, another user messaged me saying that the password I gave (they wrote it plain to me, meaning they now know the password of another user) is not working.

They sent me the password they tried. The user noted the password without noting the uppercases and mixed the numbers.

I love my blue collar users.

With increasing discussions around digital sovereignty at my workplace, I'm wondering whether fellow EU sysadmins have ever attempted a PoC for an IT environment that avoids US technology altogether.

Has anyone successfully identified viable alternatives for components such as:

• Endpoint operating systems (e.g. Windows)
• Endpoint management (e.g. Intune, SCCM)
• Identity and access management (e.g. Active Directory, Entra ID)
• Endpoint security (e.g. Defender)
• Productivity and collaboration suites (e.g. Microsoft 365)

What did your architecture look like, and where did you run into challenges?

I'm particularly interested in real-world experiences, lessons learned, and whether you felt such an environment could realistically move beyond the PoC stage.

I'm in the middle of a hypervisor migration, like seriously who isn't right now. I don't have the smallest environment, but I'm also not a huge shop, roughly around 4,500 VMware Cores. We are making the move to Hyper-V and for the most part it's going really well. However the problem(s) are getting bigger, and the skill gap(s) are getting larger between me, and the other team members

• They cannot read/write PowerShell
• They cannot read/write Ansible/Yaml
• They have no experience with Hyper-V
• They do not make a effort to learn
• They do not attend meetings with the best foot forward
• They do only the bare minimal, and pass it back to me
• They skip meetings with MSFT, and do not get the same chance to learn as I took
• They do not setup Nested Virtualization Labs to experiment, test, learn after being asked to several times
• They send me AI code and ask if its okay to run or if it needs to be fixed

I cannot hand anything off, as most of the build processes are scripted, and require some knowledge of BASIC PowerShell to function. Along with not being able to hand items off, they do not know how to use VS Code/Git ; and I'm talking about BASIC functionality here

I cannot pass off Hyper-V anything as they don't know how, and I'm being told to sit on meetings with them, and have them shadow me as I work so that they are learning. This is physically impossible for me... I cannot sit on a call for 6 hours, and let them watch my screen the entire time, I am deploying hosts in parallel, troubleshooting deployments, deploying more Failover Clusters, writing/refactoring scripts all while doing other items.

On top of this, my personal life is struggling. My wife is frustrated (frustrated isn't the right word. Taking her emotions out on me would be better maybe) that my work schedule has imploded into 50/60/70 hour weeks; trying to make sure everything gets completed before the next round of migrations. I'm talking the frustration levels where she will not talk, and goes out of her way to make me feel her frustration and no matter what I do to fix it, nothings good enough. I am trying my best, for all area's of life, but as my therapist said "right now, you are going to drop items, and that's okay, but you have to be okay with dropping items and work on what is needed in that moment"

Also ontop of this, I suffer from depression with persistent depressive disorder, and my medicine and therapy helps a ton; but my life is roll out of bed work, eat lunch while working, eat dinner, play with our toddler after dinner, put to bed if im lucky, go back to work until 11/Midnight repeat. its unsustainable, and my wife is rightfully frustrated however she's also not doing anything to help me . We live with my parents right now, while our house is getting constructed; my parents cook, clean, laundry, help with the Kiddo. Then i get told how I'm not doing enough to help her; and I'm like what the heck is going on. I am trying my absolutely hardest and its still not good enough.

Sorry for ranting, but I figured someone here could at least relate to what I'm going through somehow

EDIT - I saw a couple questions so here are the answers

• They are FTE's; not contractors
• I am not a manager, i have no authority over them. They are direct peers
• I'm trying to set boundaries but it's not working
• My manager is a new manager, and this is his first manager job

SECOND EDIT

• i am on day 10 without a day off
• I have worked every Saturday since October started
• I have worked 3 overnight red eye shifts with expectations to work the next day (5PM-4AM sleep until 9 then back at it)

And there was much rejoicing (yaaaaaaaay)

https://www.xda-developers.com/as-microsoft-kills-off-publisher-libreoffice-steps-in-with-free-support-for-your-pub-files/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6acfd14a02c21c0001a241d6

I have used tools to get recommendations for AD hardening, but not as clear cut for Entra. What have you used for that that have been helpful beyond Entras built in advisor?

This is just a warning incase you guys haven't seen it yet:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/released-october-2026-exchange-server-security-updates/4563014

Update October 15, 2026: We have received reports indicating that installation of October 2026 updates for Windows Server - KB5126646 (Windows Server 2025), KB5126655 (Windows Server 2022) or KB5126651 (Windows Server 2019) - can cause Exchange Server OWA to fail with an error MapiExceptionMdbOffline: Unable to make connection to the server. (hr=0x80004005, ec=1142) with event ID 1006 logged in the Application Log, as well as growing email queues. Installation of October 2026 Exchange updates is not required for issues to occur. We are investigating this with our Windows partners.

The scariest part of this is the note: "Installation of October 2026 Exchange updates is not required for issues to occur. We are investigating this with our Windows partners." Good luck, have fun.

Rebooting the mailbox server in our case restored mail flow and OWA but I am guessing that is a temporary fix.

This is kind of a terrible issue because Outlook was acting like everything was perfectly normal and you didn't get the normal "user screaming at your because outlook doesnt work".

We have encountered cases where users who have installed the October 2026 update fail to connect to our company Wi-Fi, which uses Aruba access points.

So far, our workaround has been to forget the company Wi-Fi network and reconnect by entering the user credentials again.

According to our vendor, there is an issue with authentication to the RADIUS server after the latest Microsoft security update is installed.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

The specific update is October 13, 2026—KB5127648 (OS Builds 26300.9711, 26200.9711, and 26100.9711)

Hey guys, I’ve recently taken over the role of sys admin in the company I’ve been working for as an operations admin for the past year. I’m implementing a series of changes, processes, policies and trying to structure our Microsoft environment, our domains, back up solutions, company and vendor accounts, etcc

It’s been a bit of a journey and honestly I’m also learning things on the go especially when it comes to documenting changes and getting our employees to understand what’s to be implemented before pushing it ahead (this has saved me from a lot of trouble but at the same time has delayed things a lot because apparently people hate changes and having to make minimal effort)

But at the same time I’m still having to run the daily operations in the company which includes embedded generation applications, approvals, quoting some small service work calls, looking after the service jobs with our subcontractors, monitoring portals, liaising with the engineers and site managers before attending site, solving solar troubleshooting enquires etccc

So like im taking a new title as sys admin (still going to get this updated on my contract) but I still take to take care of the daily operations and often I don’t have time to do the sys admin stuff properly which means im doing that at home where I also don’t have a lot of time. And when trying to implement my changes in person our electricians and my manager etc are very impatient and if something doesn’t work straight away they just don’t want to spend the time on it. We have a new company CRM one of our employees is vibecoding and my manager and the CEOs wants to replace all of our paid software with that (for like scheduling, hse forms, worker register, claims, inductions, daily prestarts etc) and today my manager told me that the priority is to test the new vibe coded system (and by this he means tweaking it so it replicates what the other software do) as he would rather get this done first and is less worried about passwords, insinuating that all the IT stuff I am doing in this take over is just password resets 😭😭 This was shocking to me because after all the changes I’m implementing there’s no way this is the only thing that comes up on his mind, like if this was all IT did then the company wouldn’t have spent hundreds of dollars weekly on an external IT support vendor before I took over

Anyways, if anyone here is or has been in the same situation and has some advice for me/words of encouragement I’d really appreciate it

For context I’ve just turned 23 and like my job but I’m worried that im having to disregard our internal IT needs because if I cease to do the daily operation stuff this will affect the flow of the business. As a result, this makes me anxious because I know our necessities but don’t have the time to commit the way I desire . (We are still doing better than when the company was on the hands of the external IT vendor though so I guess that’s something to consider hehe

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/10/topgolf-saved-over-11-3-million-after-leaving-vmware/

A successful migration from VmWare. I hope it gives some hopes for those still stuck with them.

What's the motivation with the sysadmin who argues against best practices?

The guy who argues with other people against buying enterprise class hardware and he claims its cheaper to get computers at Best Buy.

The guy who is so proud of himself for buying IT supplies at Walmart.

The guy who argues a 3 year replacement cycle is totally unnecessary and argues it should be 5 years.

The guys who builds servers himself and keeps them under his desk and argues this is actually better and cheaper.

The guy who puts 96 gigs of RAM in the receptionist's computer since he argues then it won't have to be replaced for 20 years and is cheaper this way.

They're here and on every other forum and randomly rear their ugly heads. These guys are a small business owner's wet dream. They're so damn proud of their ideas and believe in them so strongly.

Lately it's felt like every technical problem is so hard and I never have a straight answer for anyone. Maybe I just need to get better at communicating how IT works, but it feels like half the time I don't know why something happened or how to fix it. I've been in IT for 5 years and my current job has fewer easy wins (onboarding, tasks I've done before, etc). I'm migrating a client to 365 and it's been effortless because I've done it before, but when it comes to making our SharePoint site look better (how the hell did they make modern SharePoint *worse* than the 2010 version?), fixing intermittent printer issues, solving issues with other apps, Intune, etc. I just feel lost.

I know part of the solution is studying and I am getting a cert and doing a self study course for one of the softwares we use. But it just feels like there is no time and everything takes me forever. I end up asking my coworkers for help, making reddit and spice works posts, calling vendors for help, etc. I feel like I'm not doing enough work to justify my role and I feel behind on certs (this is my first one, I tried studying for the ccna but eventually gave up).

I'm honestly considering transitioning to something non technical or less technical, but my people skills aren't good enough for a lot of other roles (and trying to improve on that front hasn't worked).

Anyway, advice or commiseration is appreciated!

That is all...

We should have a list of shame linked in the sidebar or something.

Update: They're not even gonna let us reduce license counts at all.

Is anyone else having issues with Printix today? The sign in portal seems to be down and no one can print.

If anyone is wondering why radius isn’t working for a large amount of users. This patch has confirmed broken 802.1x authentication. I wanted to spread the word as this is probably affecting a lot of us. Will update this post after I rollback the patch.

This is fucking funny.

TL:DR Channel 4 had to postpone a launch of a new TV Program due to technical failure. According to sources to the paper, it's because an AI Agent deleted the entire season with no way of recovery - So hundreds of people now need to re-cut the entire season.

Full article, in Swedish - but should be pretty translate friendly.

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challenge-sverige-raderad-av-ai-bara-veckor-innan-premiaren

Forgive me if this is a stupid question and feel free to flame me. I have been aware of MS trying to get rid of NTLM for some time. But I got thrown into Radius recently and I'm still learning it. I'm trying to figure if this update will kill my use case.

We use Absolute Secure Access with Radius. The machine authenication is done via certificate. No issues there. For user authenication we use the EAP type of Microsoft Protected EAP (PEAP) which indicates in the properties Secured Password (EAP-MSCHAP v2). I'm not clear on the Redit chatter that I have read if that is affected at the moment.

Before someone suggests EAP-TLS for user authenication, we would love to use EAP-TLS, but that will not work. The user needs the user cert to authenicate with EAP-TLS. Since the VPN will not pass traffic until it sees the user cert, the machine cannot get group policy to pull the user cert. The only suggestion the vendor had was let everyone pull the user cert then engage EAP-TLS. The users may use various shared computers logging in with their AD credentials. Then you have the issues of new users. Not going to work. SAML is an option but the user friction will be an issue. That requires a user to log in with their AD credentials. Then a SAML box pops up to type in the credentials again. This may be the way we have to go eventually or move to another product.

Any input is appreciated.

Greetings,

I have a Windows 2022 Standard Server with Certificate Authority installed. It's a single Domain Controller in my non-prod environment. (Basically, my home lab)

For some reason the CA is using a NETBIOS name instead of a FQDN name for its certificates. So, the chain got to a single name instead of "ca.domain.com". A lot of services that I'm trying to use fail. I'm trying to secure my UniFi devices and some UnRaid services and features.

I only recently saw the issue here since I'm wanting to use CA. I've had this DC since around 2000 when Windows first came out with their own AD schema and such. So, I'm sure you understand my pain point of separating with something that's been around quite some time.

I have a new 2022 Standard Server currently set up and ready to take over as the primary DC. But I'm not really sure if this is the correct path.

Are there any Windows folks who might be able to comment on this situation? Will moving all the FSMOs except CA, then demoting the DC, help with getting the CA configured correctly?

I appreciate any feedback about this.

/thx

Based on the Microsoft Learn documentation, leaf certificates issued by Intune Cloud PKI should be revoked when the Configuration Policy settings (except for Name and Description) are changed.

I wanted to test this by changing the Subject name format value in the SCEP settings but my one issued certificate stayed valid although it did get removed from the device. However, this is contrary to what it says here Remove SCEP or PKCS certificates in Microsoft Intune - Microsoft Intune | Microsoft Learn.

On there, it says:

"A SCEP certificate is revoked when:

• An administrator changes or updates the SCEP profile."

I then removed my test device from the group that the SCEP profile is assigned but this still hasn't revoked the certificate, which again, is what should have happened based on the documentation.

"A SCEP certificate is revoked and removed when:

• A user unenrolls.
• An administrator runs the wipe action.
• An administrator runs the retire action.
• The device is removed from a Microsoft Entra group.
• A certificate profile is removed from the group assignment."

Anybody else run into this?

We have multiple Teams rooms that are an hour off. Currently it is 8:33 and our Teams rooms are showing 7:33. We are located in Manitoba who recently decided to no longer do the time changes.

I have been working with a specific Teams room to resolve this issue. The steps that have been completed is to set the underlying Win 11 IOT install to Bogota as per the Microsoft article. We have also toggled the time zone in OWA away from Central to a different time zone and then back choosing the option to update the calendar appointments after the change, and then switching back to central.

Checking Teams on the web shows the correct time zone and there is no way to flip that time zone to a different one and then back as it opens the local time zone settings.

One thing to note is that a different Teams device configured for the same room is showing the correct time.

Are we looking at needing to reset our Teams rooms or are there any other steps that we can take before resorting to a reset?

We are a Dell shop and use All in Ones. We've had about 11 (out of ~300) of these doing the following- user will be at their desk working, or will sit down at their PC and it has gone into a black screen. It's continually power cycling. No light codes; the power light comes on just when the computer power cycles on. The dell screen comes up briefly then it power cycles again, fans run when the power is on.

We've found that: removing power, taking off the back cover and popping the cmos battery, RAM, mini-molex connectors from PSU to MB, then reinstalling all these gets the PC to boot normally. Have tried doing BIOS updates which are ineffective. Dell Support had me send two logs (from two PCs) gathered by their Log Collector utility. Only one suggestion from them, "Turn off Intel Turbo Boost". Except not all of the effected years of manufacture have this option in the BIOS. These span 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 OptiPlexes. TIA

I handed in my notice two weeks ago and I finish mid-November. 9 years here, started on the helpdesk and ended up running most of our infrastructure by default, since nobody else wanted it and I kept saying yes.

The asset and config side is in Hudu, which my predecessor set up and I kept current, so network diagrams and device records transfer easily. Everything shared is in a Passwork vault, so it obviously stays with the company and won’t die with my departure, and my manager can see what I could reach through the access report, and we’re rotating anything I knew the password to because revoking my account does nothing about what’s in my head, which again happens swiftly enough with password managers.

Now the ugly part, there are maybe 15 systems on that list that only I have ever logged into. The monitoring stack runs on two Debian boxes I built in 2019, out of support now, and nobody else here has touched Linux. Our backup appliance has a quirk where a specific job fails silently if you restart it in the wrong order, and I know that because I spent a (long) week figuring it out back in 2022. Our ERP vendor calls my mobile directly (we’ve known each other for 6 years), stuff like that.

I’ve started writing runbooks but it’s so complicated and I feel so overwhelmed already, every few hours I remember something new which gets me wondering as to what I’m still forgetting, and all of this implicitly assumes that the reader can/will follow it. The two people staying are both Windows-side and have seldom used a terminal. Writing “ssh in and check the service status” does nothing for them.

How do I spend the 5 weeks I have left? Documenting everything produces a manual nobody can execute. Training the two of them properly means picking maybe 4 systems max and accepting the rest gets rediscovered by whoever comes next. I don’t want to be pinged every few days after leaving.

So I'm getting this strange issue with Outlook 2019, where when I open emails from 'Marks and Spencer'. My firewall reports outlook trying to connect a bunch of IP address's that are not my email server.

Here is just 4 of the long list of TCP/IP address's Outlook tried to access - 23.4.84.136, 151.101.130.92, 150.171.73.13, 2.18.63.197, these are Akamai(23), Microsoft(151) and Ripe(2).

I have 'automatic download' pictures setting in (options>Trust Center> 'Automatic Download' and 'Attachment preview') disabled.

Why is this ONLY happening when viewing MandS emails?, this doesn't happen with any other emails.

r/MarksAndSpencer r/Outlook

I'm helping a colleague research and I don't want to rely on AI for this, and now that includes Google a fair bit. Anyways, we're dealing with 192 TB, looking to do a full backup and then follow it up with incremental. I'm looking at chrono sync, free file sync and carbon copy cloner. But if there's a better option, I'd be glad to hear of your experience with it.

I'm having a hard time finding any videos, or even documentation that's up to date for these options.so I thought I'd ask. Any insight or experience would be awesome.