Sysadmins Wrestling with Infrastructure Complexity

“Desktop agents seem to be the new VIP ask. CLaude cowork, gpt dots, the agent browsers and all. The issue that makes it hard to have one single answer is that the vendors dont agree on anything Copilot coworks browser use and chromes auto browse both stay off til an admin turns them on and claude cowork is on by default for both team and enterprises and on team you cant scope it to a group, its either everyone or none Also visibility is uneven cause copilots browser runs in local edge under your”

“That's been our SoP for the last decade - install and run the minimum amount of extra crap for users to do their job. It's one of the reasons we switched from Chrome to Edge - one less thing to install.”

“Can't go cloud since our network is air gapped. Is it harder to set up on prem?”

“Hi fellow sysadmins, I’m currently the solo IT Support for an SMB. Our office is a converted 2-story residential house. We have about 70-80 employees in the building, which translates to around 90-100 concurrent wireless devices (laptops, phones, printers) during peak hours. I inherited a network that relies heavily on consumer-grade mesh gear, and I think it has finally hit its hardware limit. I’d love to get a sanity check on my troubleshooting, see if there are any survival hacks I missed, or”

“While old, 6.7 does have a WebUI - https://<ipaddress>/ui, however as others have noted, Broadcom have priced themselves out of the market for a lot of organisations, so you may wish to look at Proxmox/Nutanix instead. For the controller issue, pickup a PERC H730/H740p, you might need longer/different cables to interface with your SAS drive. Some 2nd hand controllers will include cabling.”

“One thing to know before you commit, the IPAM side is IPv4 only right now. If youve got v6 anywhere in that rack you are back to a spreadsheet for that part. Thank you for mentioning this, but it's disappointing for an IP management tool to not be able to manage IPs. Most of our nodes have at least two permanent IPv6 addresses in different prefixes, and quite a few of them have no IPv4.”

“Equivalent to what? I mean, yes... May need to retrain staff and spend a shitload more money to get less dynamic capability, but sure. My home network has a single Windows laptop for my SO. Else, 1 Mac and a lot of Ubuntu. Microsoft has some really nice technology. I hate Windows, but the rest of it is cost effective and has broad adoption. Even Windows is often the path of least resistance... Compatibility has mass value. If anyone hasn't tried Linux in the last few years, it's accelera”

“we used to use vdi for contractors and then we started using island enterprise browser for this scenario - we switched over and never looked back.”

“Oh that is a decent, though had not looked at W365. Probably fine for the browser only crowd, our finance thick client would scream about the latency”

“Use them all over for our VDI setups. Get them configured for PIV with yubikeys and smart cards as a way for users to get to VMs easily. Horizon view was another alternative but still couldn't handle our piv”

“How has the experience been with peripherals like printers? Anything that you haven't been pleased with? How has support been? I'm in the initial stages of evaluating zero client / thin client vendors for our AVD. Got calls set up to talk with 10ZiG and some competitors, but any additional info you feel like sharing would be great!”

“Lol, but think you'll agree one beautiful thing is that only a set amount things could go wrong on a thin client compared to a laptop.”

“We have about 300 users and 200 of them on TCs connected to MS RDP/RDS farm. Half of people often needs some kind of real-time video calls (zoom and so on) and audio/video devices passthrough is unstable, no matter what we do. So we slowly migrating to NUC-like PCs and laptops. We still leave alone about 50 of TCs at warehouses, where they're perfect - easily replaceable, cheap, reliable and nobody needs zoom. Ofcourse migration to full-format PCs with Windows is more expensive in terms of l”

“I am sole IT for a mid sized manufacturing company and have had constant issues with windows ( even on new machines). It’s getting so frustrating that systems are slow and the act of debloating the systems as they come in only to find bloat ware back on those same devices a few weeks later. I’ve been kicking the idea of a total swap to a Linux distribution and am trying to think of all the issues I would run into in doing so. I was hoping someone who has either gone through this process or convi”

“but that's hardly "base config" PC as that may be blocked by a policy. My work started battoning down the hatches, stopping local Admin even from us Admins from our machines. So I got them to enabled Hyper-V for me, so I could run VM's, and now just live in a VM instead...”

“I'm just your bog-standard Windows Jockey, but are there really places that run Sun One or OpenLDAP?”

“There is a powershell command to get the hash. I'm not sure why the laptops are going to the user's hands first if you aren't using a vendor who automatically populates the hash for you. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/autopilot/add-devices”

“I partially agree with you, as said before. But let's think about some basic needs in Windows which are ubiquitous and have a well established user workflow, for example: - VPN: I currently struggling to find a way to use Fortigate VPN with MFA on OpenSuse, since there isn't an official app and NetworkManager cannot handle the MFA flow. A basic user how can be trained to use it? Ok you will say "the pc must be provided with all necessary tools already installed", but sometimes”

“For the UK at least the Lenovo ban is only for sensitive departments, MI5/6, GCHQ, MoD. Non classified or local governments can use them and often do due to the lower costs. For example, quite common to see in the NHS.”

I miss SCCM from the previous company I was at

“So I have done a fair share of googling on this and haven't found any good resources so I wanted to ask the greater sysadmin community here. Are there any resources for comparing the settings between various security baselines? For example showing all of the settings in the Microsoft Baseline from their security tool and then showing the matching and or missing settings that are in the CIS Benchmarks? I know there is definitely overlap between them but havent found a good resource to see the”

“There are a variety of options out there but WSUS / SCCM is still the only real first party tool. Of course, most of the time if I'm airgapping Windows it's because it's no longer supported, so that's no worry...”

“About 10 years ago we were replacing our SAN and talked to HP and Dell primarily, the Dell consultants were constantly bagging HP, where as HP were actively trying to promote their product without really mentioning Dell at all. We went with HP”

“As a PKI guy, it's a really good idea and one of many I wish people would think of PKI for. Its unfortunate so much of the industry thinks the only thing is web/browser publicly trusted TLS. You can do alot of very powerful things when you start making your own trust decisions and stop relying on the CA and browser community.”

“I recently took over an environment where they're in the middle of rolling out NGFW-based DPI for staff workstations and Im considering completely axing that project. I understand the idea of wanting to be able to watch for incoming threats and lateral movement, but I don't see why that can't be accomplished with good EDR and dns filtering without having to manage certificates and troubleshooting sites/services that break when you MiTM them. I can understand maybe if your environment”

“I'm at an absolute stuck on this one because quite frankly I can't make any heads or tails of what the actual issue is. I have a total of 4 DC's, lets name them A,B,C, and D. D was recently forcefully demoted as DCdiag showed that it was not connecting to the PDC at all(was troubleshooting it but realized I may have screwed it up more) After doing so ping to A.localdomain was failing, however its ip was not. On D it failed pings to b.localdomain and c.localdomain. Their ip addresses”

“Aight I have this old sever that ran windows 7 pro and has the local admin account enabled but I don’t know the password and the people who used to know are gone, not documented anywhere, I’m just trying to get it pull some quick data off the raid, and decommissioning it. There used to be a tool on usb stick that you could boot off and remove password started with an H but it’s been like 10 years since I used it. Anyone remember? It’s also 4pm on Friday and I will probably not do this till Tuesd”

“This have been going on for 2 years. I don't feel like typing everything out right now, but Eaton don't use drivers from 2012 for the Server backup software!! It didn't write a dmp file everytime. After doing a dmp analysis and narrowing it down to libusb0.sys with the help of Claude. I had seen mc2.exe in parts of the memory dumps before and still couldn't pin it down to that. I even called Eaton and asked if they had seen this issue before and of course said no. So basically if”