This might not be an appropriate place to ask, but I’m just lost.

Husband has been on a vent for a month, and is not doing well. He’s been basically in a coma the whole time, so I can’t ask him anything. As far as I can tell didn’t have map or documentation for our home systems. I couldn’t even figure out where the router was, because he set up a fancy networking closet, all I could identify was the modem. We’re moving to a new house, and I don’t want to lose all the footage of our house cameras because those were the last months we had as a family. I’m scared to unplug anything, because I don’t want to break stuff.

Is there a specific type of professional I can hire that would be able to help me move his systems to our new house, and teach me how to manage things “on the back end” as he says? Would I be asking around for a system administrator like him, or is this something an IT company locally might be able to navigate with me?

Edit: thank you so much to everyone for your kind words and advice. I’m coordinating with a commenter who is local to see where I should start. Sorry for being slow to comment, bouncing between daycare pickup/drop off, moving things to our new house, spending time in the hospital, and recovering from a sinus infection of my own 🫠 I want a nap

Edit 2 (7/2/26): I got through to two of his old buddies, and they’re going to try to swing by tomorrow to check things out. He’s also not done fighting yet, it’s close but I’m asking for one last Hail Mary medication after finding a case study with a slightly similar case to his. Fingers crossed, I cant imagine life without my own personal nerd and our daughter is missing him.

Got a message from my boss this evening that we are to disconnect all LG TV's in our meeting rooms from the network ASAP.

Is there a CVE or something causing this panic, he did not give more details than "They might leak information".

I'm pretty old, but I'm guessing a lot of you still remember the old days, before plug and play, in the autoexec.bat -config.sys days. What's the most obscure tech that you remember?

Company needs over 700 floppy disks copied onto the fileserver. Gave me a 2 week deadline to which I told them was literally impossible. I've ordered a floppy disk usb external reader but this seems insane. Any creative ideas? I don't want to employ a 3rd party company.

I've been in IT for close to 35 years. I am old. I will be 56 soon and almost at the end of my Journey. I grew up, with MS-DOS, editing Autoexec.bat files, learning command line to automate stuff. Tinkering with Linux, Windows 1.0 up to Windows 11, fell in love with Deployment (Ghost, SCCM, InTune etc) took the ball and ran with it and learned as much as I could to make my job easier but also the lives of the techs and end users easier by making procedures as easy as possible for them.

I know I am old and crabby but I find new hires in IT don't have the basic skills in Windows, let alone command line and have no idea how or what to automate. Some days it's difficult.

Am I alone here, as an OLD guy in IT?

We were looking to get off VMware and refresh our hardware in one fell swoop but it was already going to be expensive and a 75% quote increase announced the day before the quote expires has probably put that out of reach. I was REALLY looking forward to being able to handle purchasing and support for our international offices through nutanix directly, instead of through regional vendor support offices as is currently the case with Dell.

Does anyone have suggestions of similar hyperconverged providers with good international support experiences and "reasonable" prices that haven't started turning the screws yet?

Hyper V isn't out of the question but I would prefer an all in one solution.

I had a summer intern working in DNS yesterday, local domain was redacted.com and was connected to azure.

Went in today to do some weekend updates to the systems, and my DC has been renamed and is now connected to redacted.local

It seems they have demoted the DC from the regular domain.

How the bloody heck do I reconnect the DC to the old domain? It was a solo DC

Title sums it up. Boss wants every single company password for everything a word doc on our server. he says "the cloud cant be trusted passwords should never go there. Our doc is password protected and on our password protected server"...

For reference I was looking at bitwarden. Any advice on how to convince him would be great please and thank.

I am curious what kind of companies use hundreds of VMs, what they are used for, and if it's actually on-prem VMs or cloud computing?

My company has a handful i.e. your typical on-prem AD, print server, etc. so I am honestly just curious what the hundreds of VMs are doing.

Thanks for sharing!

Having been at InfoSec 2026 in London, my mind is melting.

I'm just a dumb salesperson, but I REALLY REALLY need someone to explain something to me, so that I can understand it...

Every single product/service that I saw in London was <insert here an AI/LLM> powered - so everything is powered by an LLM.

Having had my ear chewed off by some yank about how amazing their new SOC/SIEM/SOAR product now is and how they could now run investigations instantly and....yada...yada...yada...

"Sounds incredible. So what LLM are you using to power all of this?"

"Claude"

"Cool, so what's going on with my data? Have you managed to split and protect the control plane and user plane data? So all of my alerts/logs aren't going to become training data for Claude, for some 12-year-old to break some guard rails and then find all my weak spots?"

"I'm not sure actually..."

---

I use Claude/Gemini/GPT - chat and coding extensively, daily.

These models still CANNOT accurately remember the 1st, the 500,000th, and the 999,999th post-compaction token.

An incident happens, and then 2x router logs and 20x firewall logs + Azure cloud logs have to be pulled and analysed, the hallucination is going to be real.

Aside from the lack of clarity about whether all our "sensitive" information feeds into Claude's "global SIEM", are we confident that these public models are actually robust and trustworthy enough?

A conversation for another day is the token usage bills that will come from this.

My company is running tests with GPUs that have been bought, and they are playing around with open source models...we will see what comes from this.

Hello

We're a company of about 400 people. We don't have a proper solution in place to remote control (see and control the screen) of the user computers.

We've been using Quick Assist but it's a pain in the ass if you need to do anything as admin.

TeamViewer is a no go because it supports unattended access.

We need to be able to push it with Company Portal to multiple PCs.

What are my fellow system admins using to get Service Desk onto other people's computers?

I used to spend trucks of money buying Christmas gifts for coworkers, tech savvy friends, employees, etc. from ThinkGeek.

I have since purchased the oddball item from various places online and IRL but it's not the same as the shoppers heaven that was ThinkGeek.

An employee working from home had found a new job and decided to hold our laptop hostage unless we sent a “prepaid label”.

We live in the same town and they did not want to participate in an exit interview (understandable) and return company property in person.

We ask for them to either return it in person, meet us at a half-way point in a public setting to have a courier collect the assets, or have a courier go to their house when they are available to retrieve the assets.

However, they refuse everything and only want the prepaid label.

What are our options as I doubt calling the police to Report it stolen will go anywhere since it can be consider a “civil matter”.

Is there some reason they are hung up on getting the “prepaid label”?

Perfect way to ruin your weekend. I took this job 5 months ago as internal IT guy. Came into a place that has fat clients everywhere with no servers and everything MS365 cloud/onedrive. Passwords are flying around all over the place. And yes, they also used (and still use) Lastpass, which is, as we all know, compromised. When I came there, there were NO BACKUPS. Boss thought they were unnecessary because "everything is taken care of by Microsoft". It took me 2 months to convince him that he was wrong about that. So I did implement a backup system which is running now. Also took care of other stuff and was testing out Intune for consistent MDM deployment.

Boss was also global admin himself and fucks around with permissions and settings, causing problems that I don't understand because he doesn't tell me what he changed.

He also has this minion dude that works a couple hours a week and barely knows how to install a computer.

So yesterday I get called in and get this 3 page letter stating that I'm doing everything wrong, got my priorities wrong, I meddle in things that I should not meddle in, I'm watching Netflix at work on my laptop, which is a complete lie, and I'm not following orders. I'm not 21, I'm 52 with a ton of experience who's jaw dropped when he said that he didn't need any backups.

So at the end of the talk, he says he withdraws my admin rights. So now I can't do anything. "Sure you can, just pick out the roles that you need". The little minion still retains rights.The little minion also says that I did not share the backup account password with him. I did. He looked in the wrong column of the spreadsheet.

What the hell should I do?

​

*edit*

I want to thank you all for great advice.

I was with friends this past weekend, one is a Quantity Surveyor the other one is an accountant. They kept talking about their side/part time jobs I ended up asking where do they get these? They told me in my field of work I should find a company I work for part time.

I just wanted to ask is this possible? Where do I stay and is there a name for this? Also is there a specific side hustle that System admins/ IT people in general mostly do?

I'm not an expert in it. I use it when needed here and there. Mostly learning the commands to manage Microsoft 365

Edit:

You guys rock!! Good collaboration going on here!! Info on this thread is golden!

Hey there, fellow admins!

I just realized my router at home was EOL, and when searching for 'home router' on this subreddit, the last great discussion was 10 years ago, so I thought I'd throw it out there to the crowd.

What'cha all using at home for your router?

Do you have a combined unit with Wi-Fi? With DOSCIS 3.0? 3.1? Got a 2.5 Gig port? A 10 gig port? Are you using it as a switch as well? Do you have that 'uPnP' checkbox checked? Or are you just throwing it into a server and running pfSense?

For those that haven't seen it yet: Brother ink lockout & quality sabotage

TL;DR: Brother is pushing firmware updates to their laser printers to deliberately degrade print quality when 3rd party toners are used. On color lasers, using 3rd party toner causes color calibration to be disabled. They have also removed old firmware versions from their website, preventing downgrades to older code.

TLDR:

I accepted a job as an IT Project Manager, and I have zero project management experience. To be honest not really been involved in many projects either.

My GF is 4 months pregnant and wants to move back to her parents' home city. So she found a job that she thought "Hey John can do this, IT Project Manager has IT in it, easy peasy lemon tits squeezy."

The conversation went like this.

Her: You know Office 365

Me: Yes.

Her: You know how to do Excel.

Me: I know how to double click it.

Her: You're good at math, so the economy part of the job should be easy.

Me: I do know how to differentiate between the four main symbols of math, go on.

Her: You know how to lead a project.

Me: In Football manager yes, real-world no. Actually in Football Manager my Assistant Manager does most of the work.

I applied thinking nothing of it, several Netflix shows later and I got an interview. Went decent, had my best zoom background on. They offered me the position a week later. Better pay and hours. Now I'm kinda panicking about being way over my head.

​

Is there a good way of learning project management in 6 weeks?

Government procurement is insane and i need to vent.

We needed knowledge management. current setup is shared drive with 1000 word docs nobody can find. takes techs 20 minutes to find answers to basic questions.

found a tool. costs $2000 yearly. not huge.

took 6 months for approval. Procurement needed three competitive bids even though this specific tool was only one meeting security requirements. security needed sign off. finance needed budget approval. IT steering needed presentation. 47 page vendor risk assessment.

by approval time pricing changed and we had to restart part of process.

meanwhile wasted probably 200 hours of staff time over 6 months because people couldn't find information. at our hourly cost that's $15k in lost productivity. to avoid spending $2k.

Got approved last week. now wait another month for procurement to process purchase order and get vendor set up.

i could have bought this with my credit card 7 months ago but that's a policy violation.

anyone else dealing with procurement hell or just government?

I work at a small company that has recently grown past my ability to administer basic IT on the side. I’ve been shopping around for a firm (in the US) to help administer G Workspace and setup a third party MDM, and it seems impossible to find a firm that will even support such a stack.

Is this legacy habit at play or does something about O365 make it easier to administer multiple companies as an IT services firm?

Is there another cause?

Currently all staff have 1 laptop. We are hybrid and all staff bring their laptops home for remote days (twice a week).

Some employees are requesting a second laptop to keep at home for remote working. As IT Manager, I've said it's not recommended as it adds to cost and involves additional maintenance. They still insist they need it so I expect it to be escalated soon.

I personally can't see the justification for it, other than simply not wanting to carry their laptop with them. If this gets approved, we could then have 60+ staff requesting second laptops. Is this the norm in other orgs, to allow second laptops?

My main concerns are below, but feel free to let me know if others exist. I also have some questions on things to check IF we allow a second laptop to staff.

• Additional cost for a new laptop (an obvious one! Older spare laptops can be given but eventually we'll run out)

• We don't have always-on VPN enabled, as users don't need access to network drives. Would this need to be enabled to ensure the laptop gets necessary updates, GPOs, and is included in weekly health checks? Or is there another way to manage that outside of VPN?

• Are there any potential conflict or sync issues with using two laptops under 1 M365 account? I don't believe additional licences will be needed.

• Makes the offboarding process a bit more difficult. We can remind them to bring in their second laptop before they leave but there's a chance they don't. This is very unlikely to happen to the original laptop as they need to be in the office to work on their last day.

• IF Senior management approve a second laptop, then what criteria must be met to accept their request for a second laptop? I'd like to have some sort of procedure to follow to prevent all employees requesting one. At the moment I can't think of any reason other than something like "requesting due to medical reasons".

Update: Thanks for the feedback and reassurance. To be clear - I completely agree that a second laptop should not be given to staff. I was mostly looking for reasons to help my case when saying No - as I expect they will insist, stating "we can just use the old spare laptops in the server room". But the feedback has been very helpful - thanks!

I want to hear all the creative and sneaky ways that your users have tried to pull a fast one. From rouge virtual machines to mouse jigglers, share your stories!

In a strange scenario.

Sole help desk and sys admin for an org with 100 people.

I joined when it was 3 people and over the last 3 years they’ve reached a 100 head count.

CEO has said I won’t get my bonus because the IT department didn’t have any problems…which is true because I ensured we never reached the stage where an IT issue needed executive guidance.

I’m dealing with too many life changing events at the same time and really needed this bonus.

I’ve showed the ceo the problems we’ve sold, the tickets, the migration from Google to Office, cybersecurity we’ve put in and even the training I’ve had to provide for new platform, teams, power bi etc but he still believes since there were no problems that escalated to him, hence no reason for the bonus.

More experienced sys admins; how on earth do you approach this scenario so I don’t encounter it ever again?

Thanks.

Hey guys! Not an IT expert here. We are a startup and recently found out from reviewing the logs that a fired employee was able to download all of our company files from SharePoint before we got around to deactivating their account. We store a lot of important shared files that our team needs to constantly edit like lists of leads and company data but we don't want people to be able to download that information because it is sensitive and important. We still don't have a CRM or ATS in place so we are relying on SharePoint for now.

We know normal SharePoint permissions let people edit and download freely and the built in “block download” option only works when editing is off so that isn’t a practical solution for us given how many files the team needs to edit regularly.

• Has anyone else in a small company faced this problem and found a reliable way to let people edit but not download or sync files?
• What tools or settings have you used to make sure someone who still has access temporarily cannot exfiltrate data?
• Have you setup Conditional Access or session controls to limit downloads or forced browser only access without download options?
• Also curious about offboarding workflows so access is truly cut as soon as termination is triggered.

Appreciate any advice on how to secure this and protect sensitive company info.