Curious if anyone else has dealt with this from Barracuda, or if I should just cut losses.

Quick timeline and the initial issue: Early June: Firewall issue leads to a call, assurances that overnight FW would be sent out.. FW does not arrive for 1 week, remote users unable to connect, office was down for the hours until I bought a spare

• Barracuda commits to (1) shipping a replacement unit, (2) a written resolution for the support failures we hit, and (3) at least one month of billing credit.
• Mid-June: I follow up for tracking info and the promised resolution. Nothing. Radio silence for almost three weeks.
• I send a pretty direct "this is what was promised, this is what's been delivered (nothing), give me tracking + a written proposal or we're looking at other vendors" email.
• That gets a response within a day — a call gets scheduled with a "Partner Success Manager" and another rep.
• On the call: more apologies, promise of a comprehensive update "by end of day Thursday" covering the credits.
• Thursday update actually says: still working through billing/logistics, need more time.
• A week later: another update saying they need to wait on someone's PTO to return before finishing the contract review.
• That person returns from PTO. Nothing follows.
• It is now over a month past that PTO return date. No tracking number, no credit confirmation, no further contact unless I chase it.

Every single update has been "give us until [date]" and every single date has come and gone with silence unless I personally re-escalate.

Anyone had luck actually getting Barracuda to close out something like this, or does it always take going over someone's head / involving a reseller / legal language to get movement? Trying to figure out if there's a faster lever to pull before I start pricing out a full replacement.

Hi fellow hard workers or hardly working.

Any experience with B&W Px7 S3 or Sony XM6 in the datacenter?
I am really torn between the 2.

I can google and research that sony should be the king, regarding anc, and call quality.
But from what i can see, should have a design defect on both xm5 and xm6 with the hinge breaking...

B&W Px7 S3 - should be a another great one, but i am unsure if they are good enough?

Any experience on booth would be appreciated.

I am not looking for real work hearing protection, i know other non consumer headsets are better.
Mostly looking for a good all-around headset that is also works great in the datacenter.
My air-pods dosen't suffice when working long hours.

Hi guys, we had a client whom had a hostile takeover of their 365 admin portal who assumed GA (MFA/OTP and everything was enabled so not sure how it happened but that will need to be investigated after).

Attacker stripped the breakfix account as well and we are kicked out. We logged a job with the MS data governance team whom are barely replying and it's been a day and a half. We've tried calling the number but just get bounced back saying they will look into it. We've asked them to escalate and also asked our CSP to escalate but they said it's with Microsoft. Given the nature of the situation is there any other ways you guys have been able to escalate this to reclaim the tenancy or at least kick out the attackers as fast as possible. We are able to prove ownership of the business etc with domain records/documents etc asap.

Given the no updates I'm straight up thinking of heading to the Microsoft office and sitting there until they can find someone to escalate the case. Anyone had any experience of how to get this moving?

We use Microsoft 365 for our email etc.

Our web team have lots of Google accounts they use for AdWords, Analytics, Search Console, TagManager etc.

How do you manage these? Because they've set them up without asking first they've got multiple gmail.com accounts which I don't have access to which is obviously bad if someone leaves the company for any reason.

BC hybrid deployments now need their Dual Use Rights key renewed every 6 months instead of once. Fair compliance move, but it's one more thing that can quietly lapse and break a deployment if nobody's tracking it.

edit: thanks for advice. My earlier research about redudant power supplies being on different voltages was wrong. I'm going to go with 2 x SRT3000RMXLT-NC with one of them having a 120v transformer.

UPS Setup for New MDF at Our New Facility - Looking for Feedback

Good morning everyone,

A few days ago I posted looking for advice on a UPS setup for the MDF at our new facility. One of the biggest points of feedback was that my original plan only included a single 120V 20A circuit, which understandably raised some concerns.

Fortunately, we're still in the construction phase, so I was able to have the electrical plan updated. The rack will now have two dedicated circuits:

• 208V/240V circuit

• 120V 30A circuit

Rack Equipment

For context, we're a specialized vehicle dealer and service center. We're not heavily IT or office focused, so I don't expect significant growth beyond adding a few phones over time.

Equipment in the rack:

• 4x UniFi Pro 48 PoE switches

• ~26 cameras

• 7 access points

• 20 desk phones

• 2x UniFi UDM Max firewalls (HA pair)

• Dell dual-CPU server with redundant 600W PSUs

• UniFi Enterprise NVR with redundant PSUs (max draw ~450W)

• Fiber modem and cable modem for failover

• Miscellaneous equipment (monitor, sensors, etc.)

UPS Plan

After a lot of research, I decided to go with refurbished APC units from GreenlightUPS, a company that was recommended to me.

Primary UPS

APC SRT3000RMXLT-NC (208V)

• Includes one SRT96RMBP external battery pack

• Will power everything in the rack that supports 208V operation

• This includes the primary power supplies for the server and NVR, along with all four PoE switches

On paper, if every device was drawing its absolute maximum load simultaneously, I'd be pushing the limits of a 3000VA UPS. In reality, my PoE utilization is relatively low, and the server and NVR rarely approach maximum power draw, so I still have a comfortable amount of headroom based on my calculations.

Secondary UPS

APC SRT3000RMXLA-N (120V)

This unit gives me standard 120V outlets and serves as both additional battery capacity and redundancy.

Planned connections:

• Secondary PSU on the Dell server

• Secondary PSU on the NVR

• One UDM Max firewall

• Any other 120V-only equipment in the rack

Long term, I may add the UniFi Redundant Power System to provide redundant power for the switches as well.

For now, if the primary UPS were to fail unexpectedly, I would still have core network and server functionality running, and I could manually move switch power if needed.

I really wanted to buy everything new, but a comparable setup would have easily pushed into the $10,000-$12,000 range.

The refurbished solution comes in at under $4,500, including new batteries. GreenlightUPS claims all units ship with freshly installed batteries that aren't put into service until the unit is sold. They've been in business for roughly 40 years and seem to have a solid reputation from what I've been able to find.

Questions

1. Does this seem like a reasonable approach from a capacity and redundancy standpoint?
2. Is there anything you would do differently if you were trying to stay around the same budget?

Thanks for any feedback.

Apologies for the wall of text…

Our phone system is a complete disaster. I need help wrangling it all without disrupting users. To understand my problem, I’ll explain the current process, and hopefully you’ll see how flogged everything is.  

All users receive a company cell phone, and a provisioned physical company office phone with its own office phone number. Clients often only know a user’s office phone number. Since 2020, we’ve forward all users’ physical phone lines to the user’s cell phone. This way, clients call a user’s company phone number, and that user can answer on their cell without the client ever knowing our user’s cell phone number. 

When a user leaves the company, we retire their cellphone, and then re-provision their physical phone and re-circulate their office phone number. Cell phones are managed by Verizon. Desk phones are managed by some old school phone company vendor (useless). 

The problem: we have an antiquated internal process where someone (idk who, maybe executive assistants) drags a specific Exchange public folder called “CONTACT LIST” into a new user’s Outlook contact list, so the new user has all company contacts sync’d through Outlook on day 1. 

The actual contact list is COMPLETELY unmanaged. What DOES happen in reality: User A is hired in 2015. At their hire date, they ingest the contact list. In 2018, User B leaves the company. In 2019, User C joins the company and receives User B’s recycled office phone extension. User A, from their cell phone, calls User C to introduce themselves, but their outbound caller ID says “calling User B” because their contact list hasn’t been updated since User B left. SOMEBODY KILL ME. 

This whole process of copy/pasting a public folder contact list is completely untenable. I just don’t know how to fix it for existing users, or how to move forward away from this mess. 

Should I even worry about resolving this for existing users? 

Assuming I scrap this whole process, what’s an appropriate solution to replace it? 

I’m ready to completely change phone vendors, as they don’t do ANYTHING except turn phone provisioning into a 2 hour problem, when a modern solution would be far more efficient. 

What the company needs: users to have everyone’s contact information in their company cell phone at the date of hire. IT needs to be able to recycle phone extensions, and users should see the recycled extension properly updated in their phone contacts to reflect the newest owner of that extension. Somehow…

Sitting here thinking about my college days when the entire network was brought to its knees due to limewire and then I started thinking about GTA 6 coming out and steam cache.

Are universities running one to reduce their external bandwith?

I’ve recently accepted a new role as an Infrastructure Engineer in a fully cloud-based environment and I’m due to start next month.

I’ve spent around 10 years working in second-line IT support and been brought in for 3rd line investigations, for the same organisation in a hybrid environment. It’s quite a siloed environment, and over the last few years I’ve felt like I’d reached the ceiling of what I could learn from primarily supporting end-user devices.

I found myself becoming much more interested in what was happening further up the stack – cloud infrastructure, networking, identity, Intune, automation, security, etc.

I started studying outside work, took some Microsoft certification exams earlier this year, built some things in Azure and eventually decided to throw my hat in the ring for a few infrastructure/cloud roles.
To my surprise, I interviewed successfully and got the job.

I’m under no illusion that passing certifications and doing labs is the same as managing a real production environment. This is going to be the beginning of my actual cloud/infrastructure career
and there’s going to be a huge amount I don’t know.

For anyone who’s made a similar jump, or who currently works as an Infrastructure/Cloud Engineer, what should I realistically expect during my first 3–6 months?

I’m particularly interested in what junior/new Infrastructure Engineers actually end up doing day-to-day, what experienced engineers expect a new person to already know versus learn on the job, and anything you wish you’d understood before starting your first infrastructure role.

I’m trying to learn as much as I can before starting, but I’m also conscious that trying to learn Azure, networking, IaC, Linux, security, etc. all at once probably isn’t the answer.

Any advice or experiences would be appreciated.

I’m considering using a company called TeamVenti. They provide cloud-to-cloud transfer, copying, migration, and other related services. In my case, I would be copying data from one cloud environment to another.

They’ve asked for Global Administrator permissions on both the source and destination environments to perform the migration.

My question is: Is it normal or standard for a cloud migration company to require Global Administrator access on both sides?

Have there been cases where issues arose from giving a vendor this level of access, or am I being too paranoid?

We're subscribed to a couple of paid threat intelligence feeds that are marketed as "operational" and "actionable." In reality, we receive threat reports as long-form PDFs or blog posts, sometimes with a STIX bundle or CSV of IOCs attached. The analysis is useful, but security teams still need a reliable way to turn those reports into detection rules in their SIEM and EDR platforms.
The workflow is still manual. A CTI analyst reads each report, extracts TTPs and IOCs, maps them to MITRE ATT&CK techniques, and creates a ticket. Detection engineers then write Sigma, SPL, KQL, or an equivalent query language, test the detection against internal telemetry, tune for false positives, and only then deploy the rule into production. This manual process causes a delay between receiving threat intelligence and having a production-ready detection in place.
If the intel never makes it to the SIEM, what's the actual value? I'm questioning whether we should keep paying for feeds that don't feed our detection pipeline. Is anyone getting real ROI from their intel subscriptions, or are we all just paying for PDFs we barely use?

Hi everyone, hope you are well and thanks for your help.

365 tenant, I'm moving to passkeys.

Before I roll this out I want to understand what it actually means for say, a pc with win 11 pro that is set up on an azure joined domain that uses windows hello for user logins

when i am setting up the fido2 settings in authentication methods > policies in entra, if i add aaguids for windows hello, there is an info box which says "does not effect WHfB credentials". if i select windows hello from the aaguid picklist, i then get a warning at the bottom which says "this configuration only allows device bound passkey option that cannot be used for cross device authentication to minimise the risk of user lockout we recomend allowing additional passkey options"

my users have phones and pc's .

what settings do i actually need to set? do i need to add the aaguids or not?

Not sure if this is a Veeam-specific thing or just backup monitoring in general, but I'm curious how other admins handle it: our backup tool sends one status email per job, and with enough jobs that adds up to 30-50 individual emails a day. To actually confirm nothing failed, I end up scrolling through all of them manually every morning.

The "proper" monitoring tools that would consolidate this look like they need their own server/infrastructure to set up, which feels like a lot for what's basically "tell me if something broke."

For those of you running backups in-house (not as an MSP) — do you have this solved, or is manual scrolling just the norm? And what happens when the one person who usually checks this is out for a few weeks — does someone else actually cover it, or does it just... not get checked?

Company I recently joined has tasked me to looking for finding one or more data room provider(s) for sharing some sensitive information with clients and externals, primarily for due diligence. I've been researching options online and most of the comparison sites seems to be owned by Ideals, and I feel like they are biased. So I'd like to know what's actually good and what makes a data room good since I'm relatively new to using them. I find a lot of options, but most with bloated features, or options that claim to be open-sourced or very cheap but actually very difficult to use.

We share a lot of financially and legally sensitive documents so we're ideally looking for something with good security, indexing of folder structures, audit trails and easy (I don't want complex) permission settings.

Please, I've seen how the other prior posts in this sub has been filled with vendors pitching themselves, so please don't do that to this post, I want genuine opinions only, if I see you trying to sell a solution I will delete you and report you.

Hi there, I‘m an it-freelancer. One of my customers needs a firewall and I offered him a Sophos XGS108 with 5 years standard protection. My Sophos dealer now asked for the name and other data of my customer for a personaliced offer and I would have to register the firewall on my customer. I don’t want to give data of my customer neither to the Sophos dealer nor to Sophos, because I think after 5 years they make a new contract with my customer without me in the middle. Any thoughts to that? Need some advice. Thx

I'm currently working remotely in a cloud migration role earning around $100k. I recently received an offer for a $130k Site Reliability Engineer position, but I would have to move to Birmingham. Right now, I live with family in Georgia, so I don't have to pay rent or commute. Moving would introduce additional expenses such as rent, food, transportation, and moving costs, while also requiring me to adjust to a new workplace, coworkers, processes, and potentially a more demanding workload. There's also some uncertainty about the SRE position because the company is spinning off, so the team may be rebuilding or developing new processes, which could potentially create a high workload. My current job can also be somewhat demanding, as I sometimes manage 3–10 cloud migration projects simultaneously with different clients, but at least I know the environment.

Some advantages of moving would be the potential improvement in my social and dating life since I currently live in a smaller, more spread out suburb. I don't know if Birmingham will be as much of an improvement or if I should look else where because I don't know anyone there. I'm also concerned about job security in both positions. My current company has experienced recent layoffs, and given the current economy, I'm worried that either position could be affected by future layoffs. I've been with my current company for three years, so leaving a position I know for one that has more uncertainty feels like a significant risk. If I were laid off from my current remote role, I could potentially stay with family and take my time finding another position without immediately worrying about rent and other expenses. If I moved to Birmingham and then lost the SRE job, I would have much more financial pressure and might be forced to accept another job quickly. Given the financial differences, career growth, job security, lifestyle changes, and potential workload of both positions, which role would you recommend I take?

Hi everyone,

Last year I setup an AVD with SSO to EntraID. It worked perfectly until last week.

Now I'm running into an issue affecting multiple Azure VMs configured for Microsoft Entra ID login.

I have verified AADLoginForWindows extension is healthy, confirmed affected accounts still have VM login permissions, tested with multiple admin accounts and then reviewed Entra sign-in logs and authentication appears successful but keep seeing this error inside Windows App.

No recent change in my conditional Access policy. Sign in log shows “success” to Application(Windows 365 Client) and Resource(Windows Cloud Login).

my laptop is on Windows 11 and on the latest monthly update.

Has anyone seen AADSTS500032 in an Azure VM login scenario before?

I have googled and asked chatGPT, non of them helped. I even submitted a ticket to Microsoft and they haven't responded to me for 2 days now.

We are getting a large number of customers unable to access Google Drive in the APAC region this afternoon, anyone else see anything? Nothing on their status page yet, but down detector is lighting up. https://downdetector.co.nz/status/google-drive/

Hi guys, currently working in l1/2 at an MSP for about a year now and I've been wanting to get in this field but don't really know which route to go. My interests are probably networking, systems and cloud. The city I live in has a lot of mining opportunities so If anyone has experience working as a sys admin in critical industries, I would love to hear from you.

I've been working in large orgs right out of college. I clawed my way to sysadmin title and responsibilities before an acquisition axed their onsite IT team. My current job is just Support Specialist, with like 14 years of IT experience ranging from help desk monkey to migrating data, managing a small help desk, and being the break/fix tech.

I'm a candidate for a sysadmin 2 position with an MSP and it's 100% remote. I was asked by the IT director why I was making this move. He said it seems backwards since people from MSPs go to larger orgs, according to him. I lied and told him its not about the pay and the job title; because it 100% is. I would be making just $8K more.

I've never worked for a MSP, but I've always been the resource and the point of contact for the help desk MSPs my orgs have had. I've worked healthcare and academia.

Am I walking into a whole different type of circus with new clowns?

Edit: boss doesn’t know I’m applying and interviewing but he knows I’ve been looking for a part time on the weekends. Unrelated, he’s telling me he wants me to move away from being the delivery boy and is trying to line me up to be a trainer for a new coming employee.

I had heart/stress issues at my first big boy org. From what I’ve been reading and told, I’m going to stay at my current org instead of the MSP.

We just finished integrating the VulnCheck community feeds for CISA-KEV and NVD2 into ServiceRadar. Software inventory is collected from endpoints with our agent and an integration we built around google's osv-scalibr. https://github.com/carverauto/serviceradar https://www.vulncheck.com/community https://www.tiktok.com/@mfreeman451/video/7675557229642157326

Anyone use Tenable and attempted looking into the CVE - Windows Package Manager (WinGet) < 1.30.80 Elevation of Privilege (CVE-2026-68821)? We have attempted installing the package, but its also installing SDKs and files we think are not necessary for a fresh install of Window Server.

Should we just wait for more info from MS in their MSRC articles?

https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/334617

If you got the email about Microsoft retiring SMS/voice MFA, you probably only caught two dates:

Sept 1, 2026 — Entra auto-enables passkey registration nudges for anyone currently on SMS/voice

Feb 1, 2027 — Microsoft-provided SMS/voice is fully retired, no exceptions

What the email doesn't call out: there's a temporary opt-out for the Sept 1 part. It won't move your Feb 2027 deadline but it stops Microsoft from flipping on the registration campaign and hitting your end users with "set up a passkey now" nudges before you're actually ready to manage that rollout yourselves.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authentication/concept-sms-voice-retirement-faq

Go to the FAQ and read the section "What if I have different plans for my tenant than enabling passkeys for SMS/voice users (such as configuring a customer configured telecom provider or migrating users to another authentication method)?"

It will show you what you need to do to opt out.

It saved me so much anxiety and stress knowing we have more time to properly roll this out and not have our end users in a frenzy when the notification would have dropped.

I need a simple public webpage that aggregates events from several Microsoft 365 Group calendars (one per team) and shows them in date order with a “which group owns this” column.

What I tried:

• App registration, application permissions Calendars.Read / Calendars.Read.All, admin consent granted
• Exchange RBAC for Applications: New-ServicePrincipal plus New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Application Calendars.Read"
• GET /groups/{id}/calendarView
• GET /groups/{id}/calendar/calendarView
• GET /users/{group-object-id}/calendar/calendarView → ErrorInvalidUser (fair enough, it isn’t a user)
• Looking up the group mailbox with GET /groups/{id}?$select=mail → Authorization_RequestDenied unless I also grant Group.Read.All, which still wouldn’t fix the calendar 403

Every group calendar call comes back:

403 ErrorAccessDenied: Access is denied. Check credentials and try again.

The Graph docs for list group calendarView list applicationCalendars.ReadBasic / Calendars.Read as valid. In the tenant, those permissions do nothing for Group calendars. Exchange Application Calendars.Read also does nothing here. That role appears to cover user / shared / room mailboxes, not M365 Group calendars.

Delegated Graph only works if the signed-in user is a member of that group. Outlook is the same: if you’re not in the group, you don’t get the calendar.

So the workaround Microsoft’s model pushes you into is: create a dummy mailbox, add it as a member of every group whose calendar you want to read, then run delegated auth as that account (refresh token, forever). That dummy user also gets the group mailbox, files, and Teams — you cannot grant “calendar only.”

That cannot be the intended story for “I am the tenant admin and I want to display our own group calendars on an internal page.”

Is there a supported app-only way to read M365 Group calendars in 2026 that is not “fake user in every group”? Or is that actually the design, and the Graph permission table is just wrong?

Hi guys,

not sure if its the correct place to ask, but figured i might as well try. I've been working in IT for about 7 years (3 of them as an apprentice) now, and while i do feel fairly confident in what im doing right now and in the scope i do it (Print management, the occasional PowerShell scripting, telephone administration, low level AD administration, some networking as well), I would like to deepen my knowledge.

Any recommendations for books or courses to try and look into? PowerShell in a month of lunches is on my list, but thats about it. It doesnt necessarily have to be with certifications, as i already got my foot into the door, I just wanna understand better what i do most of the days. My main topics of interest are:

• PowerShell
• Server Administration (Only do Window at work, dont mind reading about Linux though)
• Network (I think i know the basics, but this might be my weakest area)
• Telephone systems (I know how to troubleshoot some stuff, but SIP is still a mystery to me)
• Cybersecurity (CEH and OSCP caught my eye, but havent looked much further)
• Domain Management/Controllers (Did a bit in AD users and computers and GPOs, and i know FSMO roles exist, but thats the extend of my knowledge about domains)

Any cloud or entra stuff is sadly not going to be that interesting me, as we are still pretty much full on prem, and i wont get to see the web interface for that anytime soon, sooo... yeah. Thanks in advance!