CommPulse

Are there any companies offering freebies for SysAdmin Day? submitted by /u/jamesgamble [link] [comments]

Solo dev here, building a multi-tenant B2B SaaS on Azure (.NET + Postgres, Container Apps). One thing about my setup: I keep tenancy and authorization in my own Postgres — the identity provider is just a thin token issuer, my DB stays the source of truth for tenants/orgs/roles. Every External ID vs WorkOS/Zitadel/etc comparison I find is all about enterprise SSO, SAML, SCIM. But I don't need any of that yet (definitely later, just not now). So my real question, SSO aside: for the basic B2B stuff — orgs, memberships, roles, invites, tenant onboarding — does External ID already do the job, or is that exactly where the dedicated vendors (WorkOS, Zitadel, Clerk, etc.) hand you ready-made "organization" primitives that External ID doesn't have? And here's my doubt: if I already own the org/membership model in my own DB, doesn't a vendor's built-in "organization" just become a second source of truth I have to keep in sync? So unless I'm actually using SSO/SCIM, does the vendor advantage mostly disappear? Last thing: I'm planning to build a few SaaS products on the same auth layer — does that change the answer? For context, so far External ID has felt a bit mechanical/clunky to me rather than smooth — just a first impression, curious if others who've actually shipped with it feel the same. Basically trying to figure out if there's a real reason to go WorkOS/Zitadel/etc over External ID when you're not doing SSO and you keep authz in your own DB. Thanks! submitted by /u/Electronic-Map-6959 [link] [comments]

I'm trying to confirm I'm calculating the hourly commitment correctly for an AWS RDS Savings Plan. I have a single db.r8i.2xlarge RDS instance (Windows + SQL Server) that runs 24/7. On-Demand pricing: Instance: $1.20/hr Windows license: $0.184/hr SQL Server license: $0.48/hr Total: $1.864/hr With the Savings Plan, only the instance price is discounted: Instance: $0.96/hr Windows license: $0.184/hr SQL Server license: $0.48/hr Total discounted spend: $1.624/hr Based on that, I assumed my hourly Savings Plan commitment should be $1.624/hour. However, when I ran the AWS Purchase Analyzer, it recommended an hourly commitment of $0.96/hour, with estimated savings of $175.02/month (20%). I understand that the Savings Plan discount only applies to the compute (instance) portion and not the Windows or SQL Server licensing. What I'm unsure about is how that translates into the hourly commitment. Should the commitment be based only on the discounted compute cost ($0.96/hr), or the total hourly spend after the discount ($1.624/hr)? Has anyone purchased an RDS Savings Plan for SQL Server instances and can confirm which is correct? submitted by /u/ivanavich [link] [comments]

Hi all, I've been researching a golden image and seems that Autopilot is best way forward for a company with many global locations. I don't quite understand the costs though. I can see that if you have certain Microsoft 365 licences then it's basically free. But only a small number of our users have these licences. Most of the time we would be setting up a new laptop and the end user would not be using 365. I was hoping we would have something like $X per month for autopilot licences and we could do as many computers as we wanted or $Y per device. Any input appreciated. Thank you submitted by /u/CheeseFace83 [link] [comments]

Hello, I’m recently observing a trend in my organization. Some of the devices (supposedly after updates) are unable to boot and being stuck in Windows Recovery Environment. Clicking continue just make devices to boot to the same screen. Following options were tested and didn’t help: Troubleshoot -> Advanced options: - Startup repair - Uninstall quality/feature updates - Starting in safe mode - DISM and sfc scan Is there any way to fix it remotely without OS reinstallation? How to check which updates were recently pushed to the device using Intune? submitted by /u/Ok_Mycologist_696 [link] [comments]

Hey everyone, I'm having a persistent issue with a specific Windows client connecting to our WSUS environment. The machine appears in the WSUS console with a yellow warning triangle and the status "No report generated yet" , even though it is able to query the WSUS server for updates. System Info: OS: Windows 11 Pro Domain: Internal Active Directory environment The Problem When running an update scan via PowerShell ( $Searcher.Search("IsInstalled=0") ), the client actually contacts the WSUS server successfully and receives update objects ( ResultCode = 3 ). However, the client fails to send its telemetry / status report back to the WSUS server. The yellow triangle in the WSUS console won't go away, and the "Last Report" timestamp never updates. Looking into WindowsUpdate.log (generated via Get-WindowsUpdateLog ), I found the following errors: Plaintext ComApi *FAILED* [80244010] wuapicore.dll ProtocolTalker *FAILED* [80072F76] ECP: DownloadCabFile: failed to get CDN Country for error reporting Error 0x80244010 ( WU_E_PT_EXCEEDED_MAX_SERVER_TRIPS ) indicates that the client is exceeding the maximum allowable server round trips during the scan/reporting phase. Steps Already Taken (Troubleshooting Done): WSUS Reset & Local Cache Clearing: Stopped wuauserv and bits . Deleted SusClientId and SusClientIdValidation registry keys. Purged C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution . Re-registered via wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow and usoclient StartScan . GPO / Registry Check: Confirmed UseWUServer = 1 . Verified both WUServer and WUStatusServer point to the correct internal WSUS URL. WSUS Server / IIS Checks: Verified IIS AppPool ( WusPool ): Private Memory Limit is already set to 0 (unlimited). Forced Scan & Reporting via COM API: Executed $AutoUpdate.DetectNow() via PowerShell. The search succeeds, but the reporting step hangs/fails silently. Next Planned Action / Question: It seems the WSUS database is sending too many superseded/declined update metadata entries to the client, causing the client to hit the 200-request limit ( 80244010 ). I am planning to run Get-WsusServer | Invoke-WsusServerCleanup -DeclineSupersededUpdates -DeclineExpiredUpdates -CleanupObsoleteUpdates on the WSUS server to purge superseded updates. Has anyone encountered this specific behavior where Search() succeeds but reporting completely halts due to trip limits? Are there any other client-side registry adjustments or IIS tweaks I should consider before running the cleanup? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/After_Emergency_4788 [link] [comments]

Hi everyone! I’m looking for a log collector/management setup for a few of my Linux servers. I’ve spent some time searching Google, but I haven't found anything that feels particularly "user-friendly" yet. Most solutions either require editing huge, complex config files or feel way too over-engineered for my needs. I need a good way to handle long-term log retention. Maybe you could suggest a solution? submitted by /u/jkvint [link] [comments]

There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos. We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas! In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed. submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

I've spent the last few weeks asking people who run AI automations what they won't let an agent do. One answer keeps coming back in a form I can't stop thinking about. Someone running automations for clients described their process like this: start with a manual audit of 100% of what the AI handles. Once you feel confident, drop to a 20% random audit. After a few weeks with no errors, only audit when something breaks. That's a completely reasonable process. It's also the process where, if a quiet failure started on week four, you would probably never know. The thing that struck me across every conversation is that the line people draw isn't risky vs. safe. It's verifiable vs. not. People happily automate high-stakes work when the result is checkable, and refuse low-stakes work when it isn't. One person put it as "anything of importance that cannot be easily verified." And almost nobody trusts the agent's own report of what it did. Everyone had independently built some version of the same workaround: log at the tool layer instead of the agent layer, compare the result against approved source data, keep everything read-only by default, record what was requested separately from what actually executed. So the questions I'm stuck on: If you've scaled back checking on an automation, did you ever go back and verify a sample? What did you find? Has an automation ever reported success while doing the wrong thing, and how long before anyone noticed? What would you need to see to trust a check more than you trust your own spot audit? For context: this started as a university research project and has pushed me toward building something in this area, so I'd rather be upfront about that. No link, nothing to sign up for; I'm trying to find out whether "silently wrong, discovered late" is a real recurring problem or something people have already solved well enough. Concrete stories are far more useful to me than agreement. submitted by /u/Recent-Ball543 [link] [comments]

I just stumbled onto a problem I can't wrap my head around. I work for a company that dabbles in ITSec and manages firewalls for several customers. One of this customers just called me because some remote users can't connect to their main site. I looked at one of those systems and found a weird situation. The PC is fully online and can access the web but can't even ping the customers firewall even though it should. I did a PCAP filtering for her IP I find nothing. There is no connection at all. But when I do a tracert to the same IP everything looks fine and I see incoming ICMP traffic from their IP on the firewall. What's going on here? From my site (same ISP as the customer and the remote user) I can connect to their firewall and the remote worker can reach my firewall. Any idea? submitted by /u/boris-becks [link] [comments]

A few weeks ago we created a new aws account and moved it under an organisation with our existing - 5 year old - aws account. Both accounts (including the 5 year old one) have now been marked as unverified, so not only can we not use the new account, but we're effectively locked out out of our production account! We have support tickets open on both accounts that have sat unassigned for over a week in order to try and get the accounts verified. Has anybody run into similar issues? What is going on at aws!? submitted by /u/Electric_Pistachio [link] [comments]

All emails in organization have been logged out. When they log in with their credentials, there's an 'Invalid Login' prompt. On the CPanel, the accounts have been restricted and resetting passwords doesn't solve the issue. What could be the problem? submitted by /u/Objective-Object828 [link] [comments]

I work in operations at a large regional bank. My title is entry-level ops — same title as coworkers who open mail and process bill payments. The official job posting for my role says it exists to serve "as a back-up, or on rotation with, our technical support/operations analyst." I *am* that analyst. Nobody backs me up. My desk has absorbed: - Identity/access administration across four platforms including a mainframe (I direct the IAM team on what access to grant) - Application and systems administration for our core platform stack - Automation development — one process went from ~3 weeks manual to ~30 minutes - Designing the reporting cycles leadership presents quarterly - Production incident response — last week I started at 6:45am (shift starts at 8), pulled in the vendor and two internal IT teams, ran the bridge call, restored service by 9:40 - Writing the helpdesk's troubleshooting procedures — and their escalations route to me *through the IT ticketing queue*, on a team I'm not classified under **The money:** My employer's posted range for my title tops out ~$0.75/hr above what I make, and that range explicitly covers "all levels of the role" nationwide. Government labor stats for my metro put the occupational categories my work falls under at roughly 40–55% above what I earn. I make below the average of *every* job category in my metro. **What's happened when I raise it:** - Told to be "more specific" — then told that role doesn't exist here - My manager said last fall we'd both move to the technical org. I did prep work. It got shelved. He moved in March. I didn't. - I documented everything against the company's own job architecture, showing the work lands a full band higher. Result: "we value you enormously, but this job doesn't exist in our section." They admitted they *could* adjust pay and create a title. No owner, no date, no commitment. - In that meeting my manager claimed he gave me a role document in week one. I'd never seen it. He sent it after — a six-week onboarding training schedule that surfaced only after I submitted my documentation. **Where I'm at:** This has taken a real toll. I have a diagnosed condition that's gotten worse under the stress, and my doctor is ready to certify me for FMLA. I'm planning to take it, then some already-approved PTO. I'm also actively job hunting. I'll be honest that my feelings about the leave are mixed. It's genuinely medically needed — I'm running on empty. But part of me is also aware that a lot of critical work sits only with me, and things will get uncomfortable while I'm out. I don't love that I feel some satisfaction about that, and I don't want to make a decision about my health for the wrong reasons. **Asking:** Any internal play I'm missing, or is "they'd have fixed it by now" the right read after two years? Anyone actually win a misclassification fight? What made the difference? Has anyone taken medical leave in the middle of something like this? How did it land, and did it change anything? Advice on translating hybrid ops/IT experience onto a resume for analyst or developer roles? Honest takes welcome, including "you already know the answer." submitted by /u/Delicious-Spell1356 [link] [comments]

We manage the devices with Intune, but work with Google Apps. We have SSO to Google with Entra ID provisioning. I inherited this setup. This leads to problems in various scenarios. One of the problems is iOS BYOD devices. If you're fully immersed in the Microsoft ecosystem, MAM/Protection Policies are unavailable. Is there any way to use iOS BYOD in this scenario? What other options are there? On android we are using the work profile. submitted by /u/Sad_Mastodon_1815 [link] [comments]

Hey r/azure , I wanted to share an interesting scenario we ran into during a live production deployment window this week involving Azure Data Factory and ARM templates. It served as a great refresher on Control vs. Data plane mechanics and hard Azure limits. (Anonymizing specific client/resource details) Blocker 1: The Control Plane Trap We were manually publishing our DEV Data Factory to generate the ARM templates in our adf_publish branch. The publish instantly failed with a LinkedAuthorizationFailed error regarding an Event Grid Subscription. The "Why": A developer had merged an Event-Based Trigger. While our ADF Managed Identity (Data Plane) had the permissions to run pipelines, a manual "Publish" action uses the engineer's physical Entra ID credentials (Control Plane). Because I lacked the EventGrid EventSubscription Contributor role on the target storage account, Azure Resource Manager blocked the entire publish. We simply reverted the trigger code to unblock the template generation. Blocker 2: The 256 Parameter Limit Once we reached the Azure DevOps Release pipeline, we noticed a Key Vault secret name for a Linked Service hadn't been parameterized (it was hardcoding a DEV/QA name). We jumped into arm-template-parameters-definition.json and applied a global wildcard to force parameterization of secretName for all Linked Services. The publish succeeded, but our DevOps pipeline crashed. The ARM template was completely invalid. Why? The 256 parameter limit. By applying the wildcard, ADF traversed our massive factory and generated over 300 parameters, instantly breaching the hard ARM architectural limit. The Strategic Workaround Fixing the 256 limit properly requires explicitly ignoring ("-") static variables across the whole factory to free up space. Doing that during a live deployment window was too high-risk. Instead, we reverted the parameterization fix. We took the hardcoded DEV/QA secret name the template was demanding, went into the PROD Key Vault, and created a secret with that exact non-production name - but populated it with the PROD credentials. The pipeline deployed, the Linked Service authenticated, and the deployment succeeded without breaching the parameter limit or requiring massive refactoring. Takeaways for me Just because your Managed Identity has access doesn't mean your manual deployment commands will. Know your execution planes. Be incredibly careful using wildcard parameterization in large ADF environments. Has anyone else hit the 256 ARM limit in ADF? How do you guys manage your arm-template-parameters-definition.json to keep the parameter footprint down? Would love to hear how others tackle parameter bloat or other similar issues in CI/CD! Generated using notebookllm submitted by /u/non_chalant_32 [link] [comments]

Hi everyone, I passed SC-900 on 27 July. I'm currently a Cybersecurity student, and I have one year left before graduating with my BS. My long-term goal is to become an Azure Cloud Security Architect. My current roadmap is: SC-900 → AZ-104 → SC-500 However, I don't have any corporate experience yet. My main question is: How can I prove my skills before getting my first job? I've heard people recommend solving real-world, business-centric cloud security scenarios, building GitHub projects, and creating a portfolio. But I'm not sure where to find these practical scenarios or how to approach them. Where can I get hands-on experience that actually reflects real-world Azure environments? Would the Azure Free Account with the $200 credit be enough to simulate enterprise-level scenarios? I understand that real corporate environments are much more complex, but I'm looking for the closest practical experience I can get as a student. Since SC-900 was mostly theoretical, my next target is AZ-104. However, my priority isn't collecting certifications,it's building real skills and having proof of work that I can show employers. I also have a question about Infrastructure as Code: I know Bicep is Azure-specific. Should I also learn Terraform? Is it worth pursuing the Terraform Associate (003/004) certification, or should I focus on developing practical Terraform skills instead of another certification? I'd really appreciate any advice from Azure professionals or cloud security engineers. If you were starting from scratch today with one year left before graduation, what would you focus on to maximize your chances of becoming an Azure Cloud Security Architect without wasting time on things that aren't valuable? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/Junaid631 [link] [comments]

I have been stuck in a 10 hour call today trying to update a horizon cert that expires in 48 hrs. Lucky I do have still have the old environment to update cert and test. (Old is horizon 7 main prod is horizon 8) In the old environment I'm getting after updating the cert I get the error "authentication cannot proceed domain name us invalid" but will work off domain auth through OKTA. I positive I followed the guides out there. I have 3 uags that point to the two connection servers that work for of prem connections. The two on prem servers have been set up the same way. Even understanding that new root and intermediate certs need to be sent out to local machines from GoDaddy was just managed from our workspace one My brain is fried and have look through so much documentation can someone here tell me I'm missing something so simple. submitted by /u/tj481138 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/itspotterhead [link] [comments]

Happy System Administrator Day One of the titles I'm most proud to carry in my career is System Administrator. Today is dedicated to appreciating the people behind the scenes who keep businesses running every single day. Sysadmins and IT professionals work tirelessly to make sure technology just works. Your network is secure. Your computers are running. Your emails are flowing. Your printer isn't jammed (most of the time! 😄). You're protected from malware, phishing, and cyberattacks. Why? Because there's a dedicated SysAdmin, or an entire IT team, working behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly. Working in an MSP, every day is different. Some days end with happy users after solving their issues. Some days... not so much. 😶 That's simply part of the job. When something stops working, it's easy to point fingers. But remember, when everything works perfectly 99% of the time, that deserves recognition too. Most issues are prevented long before they ever reach the end user because someone has been monitoring, maintaining, securing, and improving your environment. Today, take a moment to appreciate your System Administrator or IT team. Happy System Administrator Day to everyone keeping the world of IT running. submitted by /u/AppuniAkhil [link] [comments]

Went through all the hoops to have Dell survey and spec gear for my workloads, received the hardware recently and can’t even get it to support my idle CI runner workload without toppling over as the powerstore is quite literally the worst storage device ever made. They promised 86k iops and the powerstore bombs out at 10% of that due to IOSize. They really dropped the ball. Icing on the cake was the final f u today. They officially said they will not take back the appliance, comp local disk to just run those specific VMs , or even offer a discount on the local disk to work around the severe bottle neck. Had my var quote out the local disk 2 weeks ago before we proposed it as a solution and it can to 125k, they sent them a quote today for the request on this issue at double that. Do not buy a powerstore, do not buy Dell. They will refuse to support you after the fact and refuse to even attempt amends on the issues. I’d also like to add with the 3 node cluster this appliance was to support, we had a hardware issue 2 weeks after install and it took the server down for just shy of a month. I’d like to add I’m not even a tiny shop, I’ve spent around 1.8 million on Dell stuff this year alone. Jokes on them though as I had some discussions this week internally to basically refresh our entire network as things get on in age over the next 2 years. Other people make servers too. submitted by /u/Advanced-Reindeer508 [link] [comments]