CommPulse

TL;DR: Overwhelmed new sys admin, 2 conflicting bosses, fellow admins leaving. Your experiences? Whoever said two heads are better than one never had two bosses. I am a recent hire at a 200-employee company in France. I originally applied for a help desk role, but was unexpected offered a sys admin role. I was hesitant from the get-go. During the interview, the manager made long spiel about launching projects after projects... as a sys admin sat quietly next to him. When he mentioned that all 2 sys admins were leaving soon, my red flag was higher than Mount Everest. In the end I accepted though. The job market in France is brutal, especially for me as a non-native. At first, it was fine. There's no help desk, but I gladly tackled L1-3 support. There was no ticket system neither, just Teams chats and calls, handled using a spotty remote access app for PCs without any monitoring whatsoever. It was fine, I told myself. I was writing up docs, bettering my French. Administering M365? All good. VoIP system? Sure thing. Router QoS issue? I'll try. As a newbie, it took time, but I did it and made sure I documented everything. Within a few weeks the manager demanded I explain our network topology. He had no idea how everything was connected. Soon he demanded I build a ticket system, ready for production within a few months. I created a rough planning but explained I couldn't promise that timeline as I wasn't even fully onboarded before the departure of the other admins. He wasn't happy. Then I found out I had another manager, the CIO. A living nightmare. He was quietly there the whole time, over a decade with the company. I thought he was a senior dev, as he spent most of his days with the dev team. But no, he's my direct manager.. and I cannot understand him at all. That ticketing system with the planning I made? He re-did with Claude and told me to follow the "handbook". Escalations like declined invoice payments on our licenses or L3 tickets? Can't be bothered with trivial stuff. Discussions about migrating VPN? A long speech about what needs to be done, without an explanation of what I actionably should do. It wasn't until a consultant finally reached out to me after his emails were being ignored that I did "something". At some point, the CIO told me infra bores him. I told myself, that's all right, I have no mentor in him, so I'll try to maintain and improve things the best I personally can.. and count the months when I have enough experience to leave. A few weeks ago we started looking for a help desk intern. I suggested several times that another admin might be necessary, but the CIO said I can handle it alone. I figured, hey, he's a hands-off kind of guy. At least I can choose the candidate that I can work closely with. I even kept him in the loop with HR on the candidate screening process. Radio silence. Today he told me he will be deeply involved indeed. Several levels of interviews planned for each candidate. Technical questions to be developed by him. Yet he still does not talk to HR. He made a weird statement to me once. "For twenty years I had imposter syndrome. I don't anymore." What the hell does that even mean? The thing is, these two heads contradict each other. I will be working on one thing, the other tells me stop focusing on it as it's low priority. The manager will discretely ask me to re-explain concepts explained by the CIO. The CIO will say the manager's decisions are never final. Both declined to validate my vacation, saying I need coverage, then the manager approves after I made him happy with an urgent fix deployment, then the other says we need to hire an intern before approval. It's been three months and I'm exhausted. My heart is racing at work. I scheduled a doctor's appointment. The last admin is leaving soon, the only one who taught me actual stuff. I don't know how I will survive after him. I'm sorry for this long post. I don't have any questions, I just kind of unloaded here. But if anyone experienced something like this, I am curious how it ended up for them. submitted by /u/lemongarble [link] [comments]

Anybody got any laptop sticker removal routines they care to share? submitted by /u/Grouchy-Western-5757 [link] [comments]

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

This is my first blog post, developed from a collection of notes in my Obsidian vault. It explores serverless webhook ingestion on AWS, and I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on both the technical content and the article itself. I know the article is long and may combine too many topics in one post, from payload limits and architecture choices to costs, reliability, and operations, but I am sick and tired of superficial takes, SEO-driven content, marketing copy, or AI slop. https://growingbits.dev/serverless/webhook-serverless-ingestion Please tell me where the architecture, assumptions, or explanations could be improved. submitted by /u/MexicanYoda45 [link] [comments]

I'm looking for a dedicated server within a budget of $100–120/month. Requirements: 32GB RAM or more Good CPU (Ryzen, EPYC, Xeon or similar) 120–256GB SSD for Ubuntu 24.04 2TB NVMe 12TB+ HDD 1 Gbps port Unlimited bandwidth (Desicated) Abuse Policy: I'm looking for a provider that forwards DMCA/abuse reports to me instead of suspending the server immediately. I don't receive many abuse reports, and whenever I receive a valid report, I normally take action within 1–6 hours by reviewing and removing the reported content if necessary. Payment: Crypto preferred (BTC, LTC, USDT, etc.) If you have a server that matches these requirements, please let me know the location, monthly price, and setup time.

Hi, I’m a community college IT student in Ontario Canada wondering about if it’s possible to start my career by freelancing for local MSPs? The markets reeeaally bad here for new grads so I’m thinking they’d be more willing to hire a freelancer than take a risk on an employee. I’m also very ADHD and benefit from having my own hours and independence. In terms of skills, I’m good with M365 (Entra, Intune, SharePoint, exchange, graph API), Python, RESTful APIs, powershell, Active Directory, AWS, networking (VLANs, subnetting, TCP/IP model, etc), Linux scripting and commands. I’m also trying to start learning LLM stuff like RAG and vector database cause I think that might be good for MSP automation. I also want to learn servicenow and its API before I graduate. I’m thinking of starting to send out cold emails to MSPs and message people I know from prior years who got jobs at MSPs at the end of this year when I graduate. Is this possible? Or am I just screwed lol. submitted by /u/RelationshipSad4168 [link] [comments]

With MS charging for CoWork on July 1st, we figured we'd still give it a go, since the tool was quite impressive. Microsoft gave us 100k in credit, so we rolled it out to 400-500 users. We spent about 90k of the 100k credit between those users, most of the credits used by the top 10%. At this point we are removing all access until we figure out a better plan and specific business value of CoWork. If someone has a really good idea for an agent that will save time/money, they can use it. Otherwise, it is off the table. I used it a bit, just to test it out. I ran 3 prompts around automated offboarding process I was working on, that was about 24 dollars. If we rolled it out to all 30k users, we'd be around 500k-1mm per month, 6-12mm extra per year, not a small amount, even for a large org. As I said, CoWork is really impressive but CoPilot is going to have to be good enough. submitted by /u/DramaticErraticism [link] [comments]

Posting this in case anyone's hit the same wall, or has insight into what's happening server-side. The goal I've got a Nest wired camera pointed at a small parking lot behind my office. I wanted to build something simple: check the lot every so often, count open spots using an AI vision model, and show a live "spots available" number on a little status page. Nothing fancy — just needed a way to reliably grab a still image from the camera on a schedule. What I've built so far Full Device Access / SDM API project setup, OAuth flow, refresh token, the works A Google Apps Script front end (status page + storage) that's fully working and just waiting on real image data Tried Cloud Functions first for the image-capture piece — turns out Cloud Run/Cloud Functions don't support raw UDP at all, so WebRTC media can never actually flow through them (signaling works fine over HTTPS, but the actual RTP video never arrives). Confirmed this is a real platform limitation, not a config issue. Moved the capture piece to a Compute Engine VM instead, which does support normal UDP networking Attempt 1: Pub/Sub camera events Set up the Pub/Sub topic + subscription per the docs, enabled events on the Device Access project, confirmed the publisher permission and subscription are all correctly wired. Validation pings come through fine. Real camera motion/person events never do — not once, across two separate days of testing, with real motion happening right in front of the camera each time. Pulling directly from the subscription (bypassing my own code entirely) confirms it: nothing but the occasional stale permission-check message ever lands in the topic. Attempt 2: WebRTC via aiortc (Python) Got the full offer/answer/ICE/DTLS/SRTP handshake working end-to-end — genuinely happy with how far this got. Audio decodes perfectly, every single time. Video RTP packets are confirmed arriving from Google's server (verified via RTCP sender reports, packet counts climbing normally). But the video frames never make it through aiortc 's jitter buffer / H.264 depacketization — the decoder thread never receives a single video task, despite audio on the same connection working flawlessly. Feels like a real interop gap between aiortc 's RTP handling and whatever Nest's media relay does on the video track specifically. Attempt 3: WebRTC via GStreamer (webrtcbin) Rebuilt the whole capture piece using GStreamer instead, since it's a much more mature, production-grade WebRTC stack. Fixed a string of real issues along the way (missing codec caps causing ICE gathering to never even start, missing data channel per Nest's "must have audio+video+application m-lines" requirement, a couple of SDP formatting quirks). Eventually got ICE gathering to fully complete and produced an offer that structurally matches Google's own published reference example (checked directly against the example in their docs) — same media line order, working negotiation, proper BUNDLE grouping. Sending that offer to GenerateWebRtcStream now returns: { "error": { "code": 500, "message": "Internal error encountered.", "status": "INTERNAL" } } No further detail. I've tried adjusting rtcp-mux vs rtcp-mux-only , port/bundle-only conventions to match Chrome's exact output, Opus channel params, H.264 fmtp params (packetization-mode, profile-level-id) — no change, same generic 500 every time. What's interesting This exact error string ("500: INTERNAL: Internal error encountered.") turns up in multiple long-running GitHub issues against the Home Assistant Nest integration too, going back to 2021 and still being reported this year, with a completely unrelated client stack. So this doesn't seem to be specific to my code — feels like something that trips up the SDM API backend under certain conditions across multiple independent implementations. Where I'm at OAuth, SDM API, and Pub/Sub setup are all confirmed correctly configured ICE/DTLS negotiation completes successfully on the client side Offer SDP structurally matches Google's own documented example The only failure is a completely opaque 500 from Google's own server, with zero actionable detail returned Has anyone gotten a real WebRTC video frame out of a Nest camera via the SDM API recently? Curious whether this is a known current issue, an account/camera-specific quirk, or if there's some other SDP detail that isn't in the docs. Happy to share the full offer SDP / code if it's useful for comparison. submitted by /u/TotallyHorsePancake [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/badaz06 [link] [comments]

So I came across aws:GetBatchImage - I was using claude to clean my older images apparently when I pulled I saw some image which are 300 days old and it was in good amount but next day when I decided to pull again the lastpulltime got updated and apparently it was because i was pulling manifest and not the image and there is apparently a different way to disable it by adding exclusion. Updating these detail on last pull actually lets them get you to keep fairly older images and keep on paying for the storage https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/2390 https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/pull-time-update-exclusions-manage.html PS: heading is little incorrect just updating the manifest - its just pulling the manifest submitted by /u/hello-world012 [link] [comments]

Heads-up for the Prepaid-Host customers here. I'm posting this myself rather than letting it get "discovered" — you'll see the emails anyway, so here's the full thing, numbers and reasoning included. What's changing We're adjusting the price of some of our older promo root server plans — mainly the RAM-heavy ones (26 GB and up), plus a few older 20–24 GB promos. Renewals only, nothing changes for a period you've already paid for, and nothing goes up by more than ~35 %. The smaller 16 GB promos we adjusted recently stay untouched. Plan (KVM, 1 IPv4 incl.) old new 26 GB / 6 vCores €8.99 / €9.99 €11.99 / €13.49 20–24 GB / 6 vCores €9.49 €12.49 36 GB / 8 vCores €14.99 €18.49 48 GB / 10–12 vCores €19.99 €23.49 Effective 1 August 2026, renewals only . You can still renew at your current price before 1 August — that locks the old rate for that prepaid period, and yes, you can prepay a year or two upfront if you'd rather. Renewals after that move to the new price. The why — and I'll pre-empt the obvious objection The fair pushback is "you already own the RAM, NVMe and IPs in those nodes, so why do spot prices matter?" For the parts already installed: they don't. It's the resupply that bites — and right now nearly everything we need is scarce or up sharply at once: Replacements are at today's prices. A 15 TB enterprise NVMe we sourced for ~€1.4–1.8k in 2025 is €6–7k now. Every failed drive is a 3–4x hit versus what those nodes were priced around. Utilisation keeps climbing while machines expire. We're running well below our last peak in machine count, yet RAM/storage commit keeps rising — so we need to ADD capacity, into a market where there's no cheap capacity to add. Availability, not just price. The DDR4 these nodes run is being wound down toward EOL to free fab capacity for AI memory, so our exact RAM type is getting scarce, not just pricey. High-capacity enterprise NVMe is short and up 3–4x. And IPv4 is exhausted — no free RIR blocks, secondary-market only. We still bundle the IPv4 free, but all three being scarce at once is the actual squeeze. No new-deal bridge. Normally we'd float fresh promos on cheaper hardware and let the old ones age out — but with nothing cheap or even readily available to build on right now, that valve is gone too. So it's replacement + utilisation + cash flow, not "the DIMMs in your VM appreciated." Nudging the oldest, most RAM-dense promos up is what frees the resources to keep serving everyone who stays — at the same specs. No new hidden fees. IPv4 stays bundled at no charge. And prepaid stays prepaid — no contract, no notice period, nothing auto-charging you that you can't stop. If the new price doesn't fit, just let it expire; if it's an idler, honestly that's the capacity we most want back right now. "Vote with your wallet" is a completely legit move here and it costs you nothing. Will you drop prices again when RAM/NAND normalises? Straight answer: we won't retroactively cut an existing plan. When hardware gets cheaper again we do what we've always done — post fresh deals, open to existing customers too, you just migrate your own data. Promising a rollback would be the dishonest answer, so I won't. That's the whole picture. Ask away — I'll answer straight. — Christopher, Prepaid-Host

We had a major production incident a few weeks ago that really exposed how manual our root cause analysis process still is. Incident was pretty standard on paper: error rate spike across a couple of microservices, latency blowup on one critical api, customers hitting timeouts. We have the usual observability stack, distributed tracing, logs, metrics, dashboards, plus tickets and slack channels but getting to "what broke first, and why" was mostly humans correlating tabs manually. The incident response workflow looked like this: jump into the oncall war room, pull up dashboards, zoom in on the time window and pivot between error logs, traces, deploy history, feature flag changes and infra events. someone manually builds an incident timeline, a deploy goes out, error rate spikes shortly after, latency climbs, autoscaling kicks in, db connections start flapping. then another person tries to connect that narrative back to the specific service, function, or config change that caused it, which is the actual root cause analysis part nobody's automated yet. We do have some ai-powered anomaly detection and basic rca signals turned on but in practice they mostly narrow the blast radius instead of giving a confident, explainable root cause. it still feels like humans doing the hard work, with the tooling just providing hints rather than a real diagnosis. Looking for automated root cause analysis tools that can take telemetry, logs, metrics, traces, infra events, together with deploy and feature flag changes and output a credible "this change in this service is most likely the cause, here's why." also interested in platforms where the rca output is good enough to drop straight into a postmortem instead of needing another hour of digging and anything beyond the usual big observability platforms, especially newer ai-native rca tools that sit on top of existing observability instead of trying to replace it, that's noticeably reduced incident triage time or mttr without just adding another noisy dashboard. if you're running any of these in production, what do you still consider "top" for automated root cause analysis today? submitted by /u/Potential_Force_4136 [link] [comments]

Fiber went down, uplink to core.. No activity on link light both sides pull SC connectors, laser, so i know it's not the cable fail over to other uplink is working so I SSH and do a no shut, still off "try replacing the sfps" That was it, an SFP malfunctioned. Thank god it's friday submitted by /u/Anonymous1Ninja [link] [comments]

Cloud platforms have made it much easier for teams to build and deploy applications quickly, but I feel the security review process has become more challenging as release cycles get faster. Azure provides a lot of tools for infrastructure security, monitoring, identity management, and compliance, but application-level issues can still be difficult to catch before they reach production. For teams running applications on Azure, what security checks are part of your deployment process before going live? Do you focus more on code reviews, automated testing, manual assessments, vulnerability scanning, or a combination of different approaches? I'm interested in hearing how different teams balance shipping quickly while still maintaining confidence in the security of their applications. submitted by /u/Minute-Vegetable-773 [link] [comments]

We are hardening our security policies and want to implement some password rotations. One account that came up with our security guy was our AD account that we have in the Microsoft Entra Connect Sync app. I understand that this account is for the app and the account syncing to the cloud is different. If we change the password in AD to the Entra sync account, is it as simple as just updating it in Entra Connect sync tool and then running a delta sync to see if it works? I have a small environment I plan on testing this with before we change the password to Azure connect for the larger wide org. submitted by /u/Available_Pack_2499 [link] [comments]

I am looking for netcup vps 1000 512 GB SSD (instead of 256 GB), 6.81euro/mo. Anyone who wants to transfer pls DM to me.

Hello fellow Admins, As budget season approaches, we are reconsidering Udemy as a company platform for additional learning. Personally, I find Udemy quite adequate, but wanting to hear what other people like for their help desks, admins, and others within your department. submitted by /u/Ironfox2151 [link] [comments]

So I'm having a battle with Gemini here and trying to work something out. I decided, since SMS MFA is soon to be done, I tried the new Windows passkey feature until I realized this has to target a phishing-resistant policy to work ideally. This worked great for our regular users that don't have our apps on personal device nor corporate phones (no MS Authenticator). Until the desk phone kicked out in my test. Now I can't sign in, of course. It looks like the Teams admin provision option uses device code flow, which is blocked as a recommended practice. Is there a way to slightly loosen that? Ideally, I would like the best of both worlds but I'm not figuring out the best path here. submitted by /u/scratchduffer [link] [comments]

This is probably one of the biggest issues I see when taking over from other MSPs both big and small. Why is it that when I join the public Wi-Fi I can ping every computer and server in the building lol? See normally I encounter businesses with one Wi-Fi and I understand how that doesn't translate to guests or customers being separate from the main network. Still not configured properly and still an issue, but I get it. But today for example. Did a network assessment for a healthcare office. They literally had 2 separate ssids. One labeled private one labeled public. They both connect you to the same subnet. And I can ping every computer and server in the building from the public. Like you went out of your way to make a separate public Wi-Fi but didn't actually make it separate. My guess is they either had issues with the VLAN so they said screw it and put it on the main. But even then, this is a unifi system, you could literally just check the box for isolation of devices and leave them on the LAN but at least they wouldn't be able to talk to other LAN devices. It's really sad that I see this so often. It's one of the first things I check when I walk in the door, I join the public or guest posted wifi and start pinging. What's even worse is I looked up this MSP. They are up and down the entire East coast USA. They also were billing them for advanced antivirus and security on all the machines but sentinel one was only installed on two of them. Smh. submitted by /u/Sea_Information6125 [link] [comments]

EIXO was created to address a common operational challenge: critical business areas working in isolation, with fragmented data and limited visibility across the organization. Built around the real operational needs of Jardim Espaço de Educação, the platform connects multiple domains within a single operating ecosystem: • School administration • People management • Finance • Supplies and inventory • Nutrition and kitchen operations • Operational intelligence and performance indicators EIXO is not designed as just another traditional ERP. Its architecture follows a distributed operating model in which each module preserves its specialization while sharing data and operational context across the organization. The goal is to reduce manual work, improve traceability, strengthen coordination, and turn operational data into faster and more consistent decisions. The project is being developed and documented publicly on GitHub: github.com/maykonlincolnusa/Eixo-jardim-ERP #SoftwareEngineering #SystemArchitecture #ERP #DigitalTransformation #DataEngineering #OperationalIntelligence #EducationTechnology #OpenSource submitted by /u/MaykonLincoln [link] [comments]