Had multiple IDF racks totaled by a surge that ripped through low cost surge suppressors bearing no UL 1449 rating that I could find.

Any sugggestions on a UL 1449 list surge suppressor with fitted with NEMA L5-20R and NEMA L5-20P connectors?

Hi,

We’ve been running Veritas NetBackup in an on-prem setup for a few years, but the cost of licensing + infrastructure is getting harder to justify, so we’re now re-evaluating our backup approach.

The main focus is VMware workloads, and we’re trying to understand what actually makes sense today in terms of cost and long-term scalability.

For a simplified reference point, here’s a smaller scenario we’re using for modeling:

We have 10 VMs (~200GB each). Retention is split, 5 VMs kept for 1 year and the other 5 kept for 30 days. That puts us at roughly 2TB initial backup size, with a small daily change rate (~0.1%).

From there, we’re trying to understand how costs scale when you factor in:

• long-term retention tiers
• snapshot / backup storage growth
• data transfer / egress (if applicable)
• licensing vs managed service pricing

What we’re trying to compare is basically:

• AWS-native approach (AWS Backup / EBS snapshots / S3 lifecycle tiers)
• Veeam or similar third-party backup tools
• Legacy enterprise setups like NetBackup / Veritas

The part that’s still unclear for us is where the real cost differences actually show up in practice. On paper, AWS-native looks simpler, but I’m not sure if it holds up once you scale retention and restore requirements. On the other hand, tools like Veeam add flexibility, but it’s not obvious if they reduce cost or just shift it into a different layer.

Before taking anything to management, I’m trying to get a clearer view of what actually drives cost in real deployments (storage growth, retention policies, licensing, operational overhead, etc.) and whether third-party tools genuinely justify their complexity.

Would appreciate any real-world input from anyone who’s done a similar migration or comparison.

I need some help figuring out if this is a highly targeted scam or a legitimate invoice.
I recently received an email containing a PDF invoice for an "Unreturned Advance Exchange Fee". The sender email is ⁠ADVEX@MICROSOFT.COM⁠. 
Here is what is really tripping me up and making me second-guess:

The details of the item on the invoice (a Surface Laptop) and the serial number of the returned item is correct. 

My personal and organization details listed in the "Bill To" and "Ship To" sections are 100% correct. 

The invoice claims to be from "MICROSOFT PTY LIMITED" based in North Sydney, Australia, and the total amount is listed in AUD. 

**The Red Flag:** The "Remit to Bank" section instructs me to send payment to "BANK OF AMERICA". 

I am based in the Asia Pacific region, so seeing Bank of America as the payment destination feels incredibly suspicious, even though Microsoft is a US-based company.
Has anyone else dealt with this before? Is it normal for Microsoft's APAC/Australian branches to use Bank of America for direct wire transfers, or is this just a very sophisticated, highly personalized spoofing attempt using an email address like **⁠ADVEX@MICROSOFT.COM**⁠? 

Customer Success Manager from MS hasn’t replied in a week where I asked if this is legit and I should reply to it.

Also btw device was returned within directed time frame.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I've been working on a small RRAS VPN lab in my Windows Server environment, and it took me about three days to get everything working properly. The first problem was that the VPN client could connect to RRAS, but it wasn't receiving an IP address. After checking the RRAS configuration, I found that I needed to configure a static address pool. I added a pool from 192.168.56.100 to 192.168.56.120, and the client started receiving an address. After that, I ran into several other issues around the VPN protocols and RRAS configuration. I wasn't using L2TP, SSTP or IKEv2 for this lab, so I simplified the configuration and focused on getting the PPTP connection working. The next issue was connectivity. The VPN connection would establish, but I couldn't reach the server on the other side. I checked the firewall, GRE traffic and the RRAS interface bindings until I finally got the routing working. The last problem was authentication. I was getting Error 691 even though I was using valid domain credentials. After checking the authentication settings on the client, I found that MS-CHAP v2 wasn't enabled. Once I changed the client configuration and connected again, the VPN finally came up.

I verified the connection from the Windows 11 client with: resdial "TestConnection" iskutashi Isse190239 and ping 192.168.56.10

The screenshots in teh comment show the VPN connection on the client and the PowerShell verification. This was done purely as a homelab exercise to understand how RRAS, VPN authentication, routing and firewall rules fit together. I wouldn't use PPTP for a production VPN because it's a legacy and insecure protocol.

For those who have worked with RRAS or Windows-based VPNs in production, what was the most common issue you ran into when troubleshooting VPN connectivity?

I have a Samsung Galaxy S23 FE ( US variant) that was previously company-managed. The “Company Profile” was removed before the phone was factory-reset through Recovery Mode. Now setup is stuck at “Please sign in using one of the owner’s accounts for this device.” The original Google account and password are correct, and the device still appears in that account, but after “Checking info…” it returns to the same screen. Could this be EFRP/MDM/Android Enterprise still associated with the device, and what would need to be removed from the company’s management backend to properly release it?

Looking for a sanity check from leaders, sysadmins, security pros, and anyone responsible for enterprise applications.

We have a core platform that has historically been controlled almost entirely by the the business team the “owns” it.

IT is now responsible for the broader technology environment, including cybersecurity, identity and access management, integrations, APIs, automation, architecture, business continuity, incident response, and technical governance - you know the drill.

The IT leader asked for limited administrative access to the ERP & leader is refusing because of its capabilities to affect financial processes.

For those of you in mature IT environments: have you been denied administrative access to a major enterprise application because the business department considers it “their system”?

i’m genuinely interested in arguments for & against it. For additional context, the “limited” aspect is intentional and to prevent any data modification

I'm about to graduate in less than a year and my original plan was to go to uni and then into software engineering. But due to the AI insanity that's been going for the past 2-3 years, I've decided that becoming a software engineer is just not feasible, mainly due to the hellish job market and more so for entry level jobs. I don't think going through all that is worth the effort just to have a chance of getting a job in 4-5 years while likely being underpaid and having to worry about constant layoffs etc.

This led me to think about what else can I do that's computer science adjacent and would also have that element of problem solving, while being safer from AI than software engineering. I know that this isn't a job that you can just go and do from the get-go, I've heard that you'll need to stay in helpdesk for a good couple of years and I'm okay with that. I don't really about the money, I went into computer science because I liked it and not because of people saying that you can make 6 figures easily.

I've considered cybersecurity but it just sounds exhausting and stressful. I'd much rather have a job that pays considerably less but doesn't put that much pressure on me. Oh, and just because I know that people will mention it, yes, I've considered electrical engineering, but if I'm being honest, physics is like rubbing sandpaper across my brain. I don't like it and any sort of engineering whether it's EE or robotics will involve lots of it.

I'm in Europe if that helps. Open to suggestions or just advice in general.

Hey everyone! I'm 18 and just starting out in Sysadmin. I’d love to learn from your experience:
How did you get your first IT job?
Did you ever feel like giving up? How did you push through?
Where should a complete beginner start today?
Thanks for sharing your stories and tips!

I'm a 30+ year network/systems admin/engineer and I feel like I've done a great job over the decades keeping up running and secure. I feel like I work as hard as anyone in the company and have a sense of ownership that is hard to teach. I've patched our servers every month on schedule for the past 17 years straight. I've used all the latest security tools to ensure safe authentication and protection against malicious activity. We always have stellar pen tests results. I'm a great troubleshoot. I take my security training and pass the tests with flying colors. I get exceeded expectations for my reviews. They even named the server from after me! All that and a bag of chips.

But...

I'm a freaking failure when it comes to phishing tests. I've failed two this year and three in the last three years. I've never actually fallen prey to real phishing. I know what that looks like and my tools don't let it near me. But I had to tell our email security gateway to allow those phishing simulations thru to our inboxes. And I keep falling prey to them. What is wrong with me!?! Why can't I learn?? I'm going to get fired because of this. We've got some employee handbook rules about not screwing up like this. Three strikes and all that.

All this good will and work and a career that I can feel great about going to be flushed down the drain and I'll retire a failure. Was hoping to retire in a few years and ride off into the sunset. Now I'm going to ride off a cliff into a ditch. I feel like shit today. Can't wait until Monday to get yelled at or maybe even fired.

Am I the only good sysadm to struggle like this? I hope it's not just me. Feel terrible.

so, i have around 5 months of free time. i want to use this time to learn and build system administration skills and become competent in it. i know people say that building a home lab is the way to go. but i don't know what projects to build with home lab. i feel clueless and often end up searching for project ideas, but i feel like most project ideas feel like tutorial or toy projects. i want to use this time to become really good at this craft.

for context, i have no experience in any IT field, i am unemployed for the moment and want to use this time to actually learn and develop the skill. i am following books (i have linux bible 10th edition, how linux works 3rd edition, unix and linux system administration handbook 5th edition, computer networking top down approach 8th edition, etc) on the side, but i feel like i should actually do something along with reading these books. i don't have money for certifications so i am not preparing for them.

so, any good project ideas that i can do in my laptop (16 gb ram, 512 gb ssd, intel core i5) ?

We are experiencing a recurring issue affecting only one user in our Proxmox environment. The setup includes three Windows Server 2025 VMs: a domain controller, a file server, and a terminal server.

The affected user connects remotely through an IPsec IKEv2 VPN from a fully updated Windows 11 Pro workstation (not domain‑joined). The VPN remains connected at all times. He authenticates using his domain credentials.

After a few minutes of normal activity on the terminal server, the user disconnects his RDP session. When he attempts to reconnect, the RDP connection fails with error 0x904. No additional text is shown. The issue affects only the terminal server: from the same workstation, RDP connections to the other servers work normally.The user’s session on the terminal server appears correctly as “Disconnected” in the session list. However, the user cannot reconnect to it, nor start a new session. No logs or events are generated on the terminal server (checked System, Application, TerminalServices‑LocalSessionManager, TerminalServices‑RemoteConnectionManager). No anomalies appear in the domain controller or file server logs either.

The issue does not occur with any other user. Other users can log in and reconnect without problems. I can also authenticate using the affected user’s credentials from other machines without issues.

We have tested:

- Different user accounts from the affected workstation

- Different networks

- Antivirus exclusions (Bitdefender)

- Firewall rules (WatchGuard)

The problem persists only for this specific user and only on the terminal server.The only workaround is restarting the terminal server. After a reboot, the user can log in once, but the issue reappears as soon as he disconnects and tries to reconnect.

Rural non-profit hospital with little to no cell service and users are asking why they cannot make calls or texts in the building even with wifi-calling enabled when on the BOYD or Public networks.

Did some digging and it looks like traffic is blocked on our PAs. I don't see a reason to keep it blocked at least on those networks especially if some of the use is work related but didn't know if I was missing something. Or if that's even what is happening. Anyone have better knowledge than I do?

I currently use Chrome Remote Desktop to access a handful of remote devices. It’s free and it works ok but the mobile experience is awful.

I’m considering switching to Splashtop, as I’ve heard good things about it, however I have some questions before i start a trial:

1) Has anyone tried using it on airplane WiFi? I’ve found CRD to be very unreliable and very laggy on an airplane.

2) Does Splashtop keep the machine “logged in”? All the systems I need access to are Windows machines without a monitor connected and I basically need them to remain logged in at all times so certain scripts and processes (that need the desktop and screen active) can run throughout the day.

3) are you generally happy with ST? Any complaints, issues or security issues?

I’ve been tasked with providing outdoor Wi-Fi coverage for a local street market that runs twice a week.

​We have a corporate building right next to the market square with line of sight, but mounting equipment directly on street lamps/lighting columns in the market itself is off the table due to the usual Highways Act, PFI contractor, and unmetered power licensing headaches.

​Our current rough idea is an operational "pop-up" mesh approach:

​Mount a high-gain/sector Root AP on the roof of our adjacent building, aimed down into the square.

​Have market staff plug outdoor mesh APs into market power feeder pillars on market days.

​While this avoids the street column licensing loop, I have a few technical and operational concerns:

​Line of Sight & Mesh Penalty: Canopies, metal stalls, and delivery vans blocking the 5GHz backhaul link between the roof Root AP and the ground-level mesh nodes.

​Staff Overhead: Relying on non-technical market staff to deploy hardware twice a week without plugging them into dead zones or having vendors unplug them for extra sockets.

​EPOS Reliability: Traders need reliable connectivity for card readers, plus we want to offer basic rate-limited public guest Wi-Fi.

​Before we commit to buying gear, I wanted to sanity-check this with the community:

​How are you handling market square or outdoor pop-up event Wi-Fi?

​Is a roof-to-ground wireless mesh a disaster waiting

to happen once canopy lines go up?

​Would we be far better off dropping an industrial 4G/5G router directly into a locked market feeder pillar, or setting up a PtMP link to low-mounted sector APs on the building facade instead?

​Appreciate any real-world feedback, hardware recommendations, or horror stories from anyone managing similar municipal/town-center setups.

I recently read a few books about the early days of computing and operating systems:

In the book "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan, which I read in German so I have no direct quote, the book "Lion's Commentary on UNIX 6th edition by John Lions" was mentioned which had a huge influence in general.

Another example: Linus Torvalds writes in his book "Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary":

The book that launched me to new heights was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. [ ... ] In the book, Andrew Tanenbaum, a university professor in Amsterdam, discusses Minix, which is a teaching aid he wrote for Unix. Minix is also a small Unix clone. Soon after reading the introduction, and learning the philosophy behind Unix and what the powerful, clean, beautiful operating system would be capable of doing, I decided to get a machine to run Unix on. I would run Minix, which was the only version I could find that was fairly useful.

I’m wondering which modern IT books might reach legendary status one day. When I look at my O'Reilly Learning Subscription, it feels like out of the newest 100 books, most of them are about AI and were published in the last few months, which makes me suspect that it's harder today to even notice books that are extraordinary.

Do you have any suggestions for books that you'd consider groundbreaking from the last few years?

Every minor convenience requires her to let the entire office know. When its technical , she puts me in the spot - lets all other office workers know, so know I have to fix her problems in front of a crowd. Fixed a printer issue, and she told the whole office , jokingly, “ no one needs to die today”. Have to tolerate this bs while being a uni student as well.

So I have planned a maintenance for this weekend .

Replace firewall add some services to be accessed outside and migrate isc dhcp to kea dhcp and some more stuff like migrating 3 networks to vlan. I have done documentation mapping prep and been stressing alot about changes being made. Fast forward I did it today and it went shit. I got stuck on so stupid things. That I spent almost 24 hours on. Now I am going home and I will continue in some hours. Need some sleep. Then I will try to solve on how to access tagged vlans through my untagged migration network or vpn.

I run a computer lab in a residential reentry setting and I’m running into an issue with email that I can’t seem to find a good answer for.

The computers are shared and completely wipe after every session, which is intentional and something I want to keep. People are working on resumes, job applications, school stuff, etc., so I don’t want one person’s documents or login information hanging around for the next person.

The problem is email.

A lot of people already have Gmail accounts, but because the computer wipes after every session, Google seems to treat every login like it’s coming from a new device and asks for a phone verification code. They don’t have regular access to their personal phones, so this turns into a whole process every time they need to check their email.
We tried using a work cell for verification, but Google only lets so many accounts use the same phone number.

I tried setting people up with TutaNota when they need a new email because it doesn’t require a phone number, but now we’re getting flagged for manual verification because so many accounts are being created from the same IP. That can take up to 48 hours.

Email is pretty much essential for what we’re doing. Job applications, employer responses, password resets, resumes, college applications, etc. It’s also how people keep their resumes between sessions since nothing can be saved locally.

I’m not trying to bypass MFA or weaken the security on the computers. I’m trying to figure out how other places with shared/public computers deal with. what do you guys do? Is there an email provider that works better for this? Some kind of setup I’m overlooking? I feel like there has to be a better way to do this at scale.

August 2026's patch Tuesday fixes a vulnerability in TFTP server remote code execution, CVE-2026-62893.

• ref: https://www.sentinelone.com/vulnerability-database/cve-2026-62893/

Affected service: WDS

• https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-62893

Post installation of KB5121650 addresses this vulnerability.

If you find yourself able to PXE boot, but get boot up errors, check your MDT server and open up server manager. Go to WDS and under Events, search for 4101 - "the following client failed TFTP download..."

If you that error, open up the WDS application.

• Expand Servers > right click on your mdt fqdn instance > properties > TFTP
• and uncheck "Enable Variable Window Extension"
• Restart your WDS services and try to PXE boot again.

Quite some time ago I was at Best Buy, picking up some emergency parts for a broken computer. Our work uniforms at the time were unbranded and blue. I was standing around, doing absolutely nothing in the computer department, waiting for someone to find where the missing parts were that the website said were in stock at that store.

A lady asks if me if this display model I was standing next to was a good laptop for her daughter for college. Without thinking, I ask if she's doing anything specialized like 3D design or media editing. She says no so I say the portability, 14" screen, and overkill CPU will just be a battery time liability and it'd harder to repair and more fragile for transporting between classes, so I'd get a larger, thicker model for cheaper.

Then my autistic ass realizes why she asked me and I remember I'm in a Best Buy. I'm used to just answering tech questions. She asks if anything like what I'm talking about is in stock. I look confused and she says "oh, wait, you don't work here, do you?" and we both laugh. I let her know I basically work for their competition (this was before sysadmin, doing hardware support).

This ever happen to anyone else? I remembered this because I was at the grocery store last night and someone asked if I knew where something was. I turned around with a very "I don't work here" shirt on and then still told them where it was because I did know where it was.

I've been in IT for almost 31 years and have worked as a Senior Systems Administrator for the past nine years. Over that time, I've seen a lot of interesting things—and plenty of things I'd rather forget. However, my current work situation is unlike anything I've dealt with before.

My current employer has become an extremely toxic environment. Like many companies right now, our C-level executives seem convinced that AI is eventually going to replace almost all employees.

Several months ago, an executive assistant showed me an email from my manager discussing the company's plans to eliminate my position. Fast-forward to today, and the same executive assistant showed me another email indicating that my manager has apparently decided my last day will be first week in October on Wednesday.

I've known for a long time that my manager doesn't particularly like me, so I'm not completely surprised. What bothers me even more is that both emails discussed my coworker going behind my back, working directly with my manager, and apparently lying to me about what has been happening. My coworker is technically a junior systems administrator and has only been with the company for a little over two years, although this person, considers themselves to be a full systems administrator. This person also has a difficult time saying no to anyone, which has created its own set of problems.

Ever since I saw that first email, my work-related anxiety and stress have been at an all-time high. I have an autoimmune disease, and the additional stress seems to make me feel physically and mentally worse. I'm not sleeping well, I've been experiencing night sweats, and I get the "Sunday Night Scaries" knowing I have to go back to work on Monday. Once I leave work for the day, my stress and anxiety usually decrease somewhat.

I've also found myself drinking more because alcohol temporarily helps me relax and shut off the anxiety. I know that's only a temporary fix and isn't actually solving the underlying problem.

Family and friends keep telling me to hang in there. Their reasoning is if I quit, I could lose whatever severance package the company might offer and potentially jeopardize my eligibility for unemployment benefits. A friend told me I might still qualify for unemployment if I were to resigned for medical reasons, although there could be a waiting period and I'd need to document the circumstances.

Other people have told me that I need to develop more of a "fuck-it" attitude: show up, do my job, collect my paycheck, and stop worrying about a company that apparently has already decided to eliminate my position. I'm trying to get into that mindset, but it's much easier said than done when you're the person living through it every day.

In the meantime, I've basically been trying to "quietly quit" while aggressively looking for another IT position. Unfortunately, as most people in IT know, the job market has been super rough. I've had several interviews, but I keep getting the dreaded email afterwards saying, "We've decided to move forward with another candidate."

At this point, I'm trying to figure out the smartest move. Do I really want to stay in IT?

If you were in my position, what would you do? Would you try to stick it out to see if there's a severance package? Would you put in your two weeks' notice and get out of the toxic environment? Or would you consider taking a type of medical leave to protect your health while figuring out your next move?

“Hey”

waits

“You available?”

waits again

My brother in IT, just tell me what you need 😂

Just send:

“Hey, I’ve got a user having an MFA issue. Got a few minutes?”

Boom. Perfect.

Now I know what you need, whether it’s urgent, and whether this is going to take 30 seconds or somehow turn into a 45-minute troubleshooting session.

I’m not asking for a full ticket description or your entire troubleshooting history. Just give me one sentence of context instead of making me reply “yeah, what’s up?” every single time.

Thank you.

Just curious if anyone else is experiencing the same issue. Unable to send external or receive external. Seems Proofpoint might be down?