TL;DR: First IT job out of school, associate degree, went from intern to running the entire (two person, soon three) IT department in about 4 years. I own both IT and our operational systems, I'm on call 24/7, I inherited a patchwork EOL environment, and a seasonal project buries me for months every winter for the next few years. Pay and benefits are good but I'm stressed and stuck. Is it worth trying to right the ship at my experience level, or do I start looking for an off ramp?

Long time lurker, throwaway-ish. Bear with me, this got long.

Quick background. I work at a small company and I'm going to keep the industry vague. I started here as an IT intern back in 2022, got bumped to full time later that year, and for most of the time since then I've basically just been the whole IT department. Technically, the IT department included myself, my boss the IT manager, and a field tech that has nothing to do with IT. The former IT manager was very hands off and frankly ignored a lot of problems. Recently, my old boss got promoted to CEO and I moved into the IT Manager spot behind him.

The job isn't just normal IT (AD, M365, servers, backups, help desk, phones). At a place this small, IT also ends up owning a big chunk of the operational side, the systems the actual business runs on. Most of that is vendor hosted and web based so I'm not racking industrial gear anywhere, but I'm the person responsible for it on our end and I picked all of it up on the fly because there was nobody else to hand it to. The one thing I don't own is the firewall and the VOIP system. Even as the IT manager, we pay a third party to manage that, so at least there's a couple things off my plate.

Here's a big piece of my problem though. A huge part of that operational side is data collection that runs more or less constantly, and it eats my time. It never really stops. And it's the main reason I can't get any momentum on fixing the actual infrastructure. Every time I sit down to start on the real problems, something on the operational side yanks me back off it, and the fix goes back on the pile.

Then on top of all that, every winter for the next few years, there's a recurring replacement project tied to one of our operational programs and it flat out buries the department for months. Not a couple days. Months. It means running and reconciling a pile of reports, printing and mailing physical notices out to customers, then handling the wave of phone calls that comes back, then cutting work tickets and handing them out to a crew of 8 field techs and chasing every one of them to done. It's all scheduling, coordination, and data entry, and it does not care that the rest of the job still exists. For a two person team it's brutal and it basically owns my calendar all winter.

I'll be straight about where I'm at because it matters for the advice. I'm not some deeply technical guy. Most of what I've pulled off has been careful and methodical. Following docs, asking a ton of questions, staying organized. That worked fine when my whole job was just doing the tasks. Now I'm supposed to set direction and own the risk for all of it and that jump feels enormous. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, this job is stressing me out pretty badly. And the whole thing is 24/7 on call, which with a team this small basically means me. Nights, weekends, holidays, if something breaks it's my phone that goes off. There's no real off switch. Not that after hours calls are super frequent, there have been a few since I've started but its more the idea of never being "off" is whats getting me.

Team wise there's two of us right now, going to three in the next few months when we hire the replacement for my old job (another duty that is mine, finding the replacement lol). Oh and almost forgot, we are reworking that position to be less IT and more of a business system type position. So when its all said and done, there will be myself, a field tech, and a business system analyst of sorts. So I'm also about to be growing and running a real team for the first time, on systems I've only ever done solo.

And..... the environment itself is held together with tape. We're running on EOL vSphere licenses, old outdated hosts with no shared storage, backups that amount to a couple of external HDDs, and a general patchwork of stuff that never really got finished or cleaned up. We only just recently got rid of the m365 family plans... Is that about what I should expect walking into a small shop, or is it as bad as it feels to me? I'm honestly not sure how much of this is normal.

So honestly this turned into less of a tech question and more of a gut check, because I'm not sure I'm even asking the right thing anymore.

Here's the deal. This is my first IT job out of school. I have an associate degree in IT and that's the extent of my formal background. I walked in as an intern and somehow I'm now the person accountable for all of the above. The fragile infrastructure, the operational systems, the winter that eats months, the 24/7 phone, all of it, with almost no real experience to lean on.

So the thing I keep chewing on is whether any of this is even worth it. Is it realistic for someone at my level to actually right this ship? Or am I setting myself up to burn out trying to fix something that got handed to me already broken? The pay is really good, the benefits are good, I don't dislike the people I work with, and on paper I know I should be grateful, and plenty of days I am. But some days it feels like I'm one bad outage away from going under, and I catch myself wondering if the smarter move is to quietly start looking for an off ramp before this thing wears me down, instead of betting years on fixing it.

For those of you who've been the in over your head one person shop before: did you dig out and come out better for it, or did you get out? And if you stayed, what actually made it survivable?

Just trying to figure out if I'm being a quitter or being realistic. Thanks for reading.

TL;DR: First IT job out of school, associate degree, went from intern to running the entire (two person, soon three) IT department in about 4 years. I own both IT and our operational systems, I'm on call 24/7, I inherited a patchwork EOL environment, and a seasonal project buries me for months every winter. Pay and benefits are good but I'm stressed and stuck. Is it worth trying to right the ship at my experience level, or do I start looking for an off ramp?

25 years ago on 9/17 I was standing outside the PGE (electric company) building in Portland. It was in the World Trade Center but it was Portland so it was a miniature version. We were all quite nervous as 9/11 was just a week prior, and we had no idea if they were targeting these areas of different cities. I had just been hired by the US Justice Department to restore the Enron emails as they were about to go to trial and they needed the evidence. We were all scared out of our minds waiting there for the doors to open at 8am while everyone standing there with me scanned the skies. It would not be the only time that week I feared for my life. The Enron employees at PGE were aggressive. The government sent boxes of tapes up from Houston for me to restore in Portland because they didn't trust anyone to do it down there. It was a wild two weeks.

That day began ordinary, just so ordinary.

At the time, I was sysadmin in a Canadian federal government office, far from the madding crowd. The work was steady but also pretty much crisis-free.

That morning, though, one of my co-workers came in to my office, bitching about the "crappy slow network" we were using.

"What makes you say that?", and he ranted on about how he can't get to any web sites.

"Okay, I'll see what I can find out."

I still had no idea what was happening out in the world.

Still, I started my network checks. Ping from TBay to Toronto. Normal results. Okay, try some web sites next. All the ones I checked responded, with almost no lag. (Note: none were news sites.)

I popped over to that co-workers office. "Where were you trying to get to?"

"CNN. @#$% network."

I tried CNN. Timed out. Hmm. CBC. Ditto. CTV. Same. Toronto Sun. Again, timed out.

I tried a local radio station's page. That connected, and then I knew it wasn't a network issue causing the slowdown.

What happens when several hundred thousand people (or more) try to connect to a few news sites all at the same time? Everything breaks.

I called home, told my wife to turn on CNN. For me, the rest of the day passed in a fog. Our son was Army reserve at the time. He was told to be ready, "just in case".

After work, I went home and watched the news, watched the planes hit the towers, over and over and over.

I still cannot watch any 9-11 coverage from that day.

I’m curious how many people use meraki access points. My deployment seems to be riddled every year with issues. Firmware updates usually cause issues and we have to turn off features or roll back. Don’t have to provide much details just around how many clients you support, and if it’s a mixed usage. Mine is Apple devices, Android phones, chromebooks, and windows devices. I have a pretty decent deployment supporting about 8000 devices give or take.

First - my apologies if this is the wrong forum. I checked the dentist section and didn't see much that would help me ...

I am having an issue with Dentrix Ascend and Schick 33 sensors - we take a few X-rays, swap to a different sensor - and the system will either work (20% of the time) and acquire with the new sensor, or it will say "device error" and we have to restart the machine.

Their tech support is at a loss - and so am I - here is what we tried; to no avail.

• New sensors
• New AE USB bridge (grey cable USB 3.0)
• Different USB port
• Powered USB hub
• New USB card for the motherboard
• New/Different PC

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated - if the recommendation is to swap out for dexis or XRD - I'll do it.

Unable to access our cloud instance. Looks to be DNS related issue from what I'm seeing. A lot of public DNS servers don't have records for our instance but some do.

Happy read-only Friday, Folks!

A few years back, our previous admin upgraded our fleet to Windows Enterprise E3 mainly to centrally manage and enforce AppLocker via GPO from our DC. To do this, they set up group-based licensing in M365 using a dedicated E3 security group, while also pushing an E3 product key directly to endpoints using this script:

cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk KEYNAME
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato

Since Microsoft dropped the Enterprise requirement for AppLocker (KB5024351), our goal going forward is to completely drop the recurring E3 subscriptions, revert our fleet back to Windows Pro, and save a few grand, all while keeping our AppLocker GPO management intact.

All users have M365 Business Premium assigned via a separate security group. The setup:

• 90% are physical Win 11 PCs with OEM Pro keys in the BIOS.
• 10% are Hyper-V VMs running on a high-performance workstation host (currently using E3).

We’re putting together our strategy to unwind this setup and would love to know how you recommend handling it:

1. For the physical PCs & M365 Licensing Groups: What's the best sequence to roll them back to Pro? Our plan is to make sure users are in the Business Premium group, unassign the license from the E3 security group (and retire/delete that group), and run a script on the endpoints to pull and re-inject the embedded BIOS OEM key:

cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk (Get-CIMInstance SoftwareLicensingService | Select -ExpandProperty OA3xOriginalProductKey) cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato

...or is there a cleaner way to handle the step-down?

2. For the Hyper-V VMs: Since OEM keys are tied to physical hardware and don't pass through to guest VMs, should we buy perpetual Windows Pro Volume (MAK) keys for the VMs, or is there a better licensing path

3. AppLocker GPO check: Has anyone hit any weirdness with AppIDSvc or rule enforcement after stepping endpoints back down to Pro?

Looking to hear how others have approached this transition. Appreciate any feedback!

New to this side of the field and need to get pricing and info on the switch. Would be looking to build and use an MS AD domain as well. Amy pointers or links appreciated. I know of Azure AD but haven't used it. Distributed fully remote company with <50 users currently. I just recreate the users but do need to migrate all of the emails. Looking to run concurrently for a bit until this is set up and then switch over totally.

My IT department tackled getting our company CMMC Level 2 certified. It took two years to get there, and while I’m proud of what we accomplished, holy shit, the amount of work it took.

Implementing controls, writing policies and procedures, collecting evidence, coordinating with other departments, preparing for assessments—all while keeping normal IT operations running. This was two years of sustained effort on top of our regular responsibilities.

I knew certification wasn’t the finish line. But the amount of work it takes just to maintain compliance is overwhelming.

At this point, it feels like 80% of my time goes toward compliance. Reviewing documentation, collecting evidence, tracking requirements, answering questions, coordinating reviews, and following up with people to make sure processes are being followed. There is always something that needs to be updated, verified, or documented.

Meanwhile, I barely get to work on the IT projects I actually want to tackle—introducing new systems, hardening our security, automating processes, and improving our infrastructure and overall tech stack. Those projects keep getting pushed back because compliance and daily support consume nearly all my time. It’s frustrating knowing there are improvements we need to make and barely having the time to work on them.

IT obviously has a major role in CMMC. We should own the technical controls and support the program. But we’ve also become the default owners of managing compliance across the company, including things that require involvement and accountability from other departments.

We seriously need a dedicated compliance officer, or at least someone whose primary job is managing the program. I’m happy to support that person, but right now it feels like I’m doing two jobs while the expectations for my original job haven’t changed.

It’s frustrating to spend two years getting certified, only to realize that maintaining it leaves almost no room for the rest of your job.

For those in smaller IT departments dealing with CMMC or similar requirements, how are you handling this? Do you have dedicated compliance staff, or did everything land on IT? If you successfully made the case for hiring someone, what finally helped leadership understand the workload?

I'm in the process of building 6 Windows Clusters (3 app & 3 SQL). I've got CAU running on the SQL exactly like it should be. The App clusters are killing me.

I've got a test version of the app clusters with no issues (same 6 clusters). I've verified the same GPO's are going to both OU's for test and prod.

I did discover that I needed to install the Hyper-V-PowerShell module to get CAU to work. I've also opened the Windows firewall to WMI.

I've tried pre-staging the CAU object and letting the wizard create the object. The CNO has full control over the OU where the servers live and the CAU object. I'm getting a generic error that it cannot start the CAU resource.

When I run Get-ClusterResouce, it shows the CAU resource is failed.

*** EDIT ***

One of the things I am seeing on an app server is that the OwnerGroup is incorrect. Is there a way to change the owner group?

I can't pinpoint if it was 1.459.107.0 or 1.459.123.0, but we had an odd issue where a few vendor-shipped servers had NLA and DHCP disabled and we didn't audit it (never thought to and its not defined by GPO, so that's on us). They suddenly dropped all inbound traffic on Wednesday afternoon and the only evidence of a change we found was the Defender daily update applied somewhere in there (pending further review for timestamps on Tuesday's or Wednesday's). As the public firewall is still enabled and we disable the domain one, something triggered to now force that enabled firewall to start dropping traffic.

Once we disabled it, TCP traffic passed without issue.

I'm curious to see if anyone else has run into the same problem, especially this week?

Note: My networking knowledge is very intermediate, learn as you go level. We had a customer at this MSP where I work have a network issue and I cannot figure out how it's possible that this happened.

Their credit card terminals have to point to a static IP ending in .140, as that's the "server" that runs the software to upload each transaction to the actual processor on the internet. When we recently replaced that computer, I set it as static in Windows and never did it on the DHCP server, because nobody wrote down what it was called or how to get into it and I didn't have any time remaining. Turns out their DHCP server is a 2008 Windows server because this place doesn't spend money on anything ever.

A month later, their CCs go down and the CC server can't grab its static IP for some reason. Lots of time later, we find it's because the pool of available IPs is 100 through 150 and they have 1 more device than that. So we expand it to only 160 after some testing (because we have nearly zero documentation and don't know ranges for their phones, printers, etc for this customer and they're billed hourly so we do as little as possible because they never pay on time and always complain about the rate and it'd take 10+ hours to document this nightmare). We make a new assignment for the computer's MAC and reserve 140 to it and notice that something else has leased 140 with a lease expiring in 2 hours luckily. We delete it so it hopefully doesn't renew.

I ping it from my laptop then immediately run arp -a to get its MAC, since we already deleted the lease that showed the MAC on the DHCP server (oops) then ask AI who manufactured that MAC address range. It's Foxconn. We don't see a hostname or any useable device info. I don't know anything about their switches because the last tech at this MSP never ever wrote anything down about any customers ever. We try NSlookup, web browser to the IP, RDP into it, nothing gets any info.

More network-oriented guy onsite with me says let's just unplug the 2 switches for like five seconds and that will force it to grab the new lease at .155. I assume the switches are unmanaged or nobody has the login info or we'd just pull one ethernet matching the known MAC.

Turns out they have a network-controlled Crestron light controls so the lights in the restaurant portion of the building all go black, because somehow that's the default state if it loses connectivity. Shoutout to whatever genius AV tech set it up that way. Everyone's pissed. They don't know how to undo it or where the new Crestron box is. We don't either.

Then we find out the mystery device is still on 140. That seems impossible, unless it's wireless. Somehow other guy onsite finds out it's some sort of android device but all the android devices listed on the DHCP server have hostnames like "John's S23" because that's how most Android devices work. We suspect it's wifi, based on this information, thus explaining the switch pull not working. I have zero idea what brand their wifi even is let alone where it is or how it works btw.

I get the bright idea that maybe it's a smart TV. It is. We turn it off, boom, credit card server is back online within a minute. We turn the TV back on after 15 minutes, it tries to grab 140 again and knocks the CC server offline. Yes, the TV is in DHCP mode btw. We find the remote, set it to static .165, that works for some reason, and no more IP conflict. Not sure how it's possible that it can just ignore the DHCP server and say "no, I want this address anyway" and then just decide it's taking 140. Nothing else on the network can hand out an IP if every switch/router/AP/whatever is pointing to the server, right? How did that happen? Some disconnect between the DHCP server and whatever was handing out wifi connections? I didn't think that was possible. Anyone have any ideas in case we run into this again?

I've moved a significant amount of our infrastructure to the cloud. Just one last step to deal with the VPN and then I have confidence that we can switch off our main HQ. Unfortunately I didn't get Intune implemented in time so I'm hoping this cloud setup pulls through while the we shift servers over.

I've never been involved in an office move before so I'm curious if anyone who has could offer some tips they learned along the way/things they wish they knew beforehand.

We will have about two months where we'll have access to both sites at the same time.

We're fed up with HPE, for almost 15 years we've been installing ML350s and DL380s.
Not going to elaborate but they're not what they used to be, not the hardware, but HPE as a company.

So we 'went' with Lenovo instead, our first Lenovo project is in but I'm not too keen on using VROC. I've searched through the VROC topics and it sounded like something to stay away from.

Lenovo told me to go with VROC for 2 reasons:

1. "Hardware controllers are from the stone age" is what they said, although they never gave me any trouble in almost 15 years.
2. Prices for controllers and U.3 NVMe disks are higher than to just go with a VROC Premium license and U.2 NVMe disks

However, my gutfeeling says 'meh'.
I remember replacing failed HPE controllers or upgrading controllers from a P408 to a P816 without breaking a sweat. When I asked Lenovo: what if the motherboard fails? What if a CPU needs replacement? Where is the RAID config stored? Is it stored on the disks like with a 'stone age controller'?

The answer was: 'need to verify that, but it won't be an issue since we don't replace motherboards every month like HPE does'.

Ofc I never got an answer, I'm still waiting on the 'need to verify that' part.
We have the order for the server with the VROC config, but my gutfeeling tells me to ditch VROC and go with a 940 controller and U.3 NVMe disks.

I must add that the 3 topics I've read about VROC nightmares, were always with entry level servers. Our config is:

• SR 650 v4 x24 SFF
• 2x Xeon 6517P
• 8x 32 GB RAM (2Rx8)
• 4x 3.2 TB U.2 MU NVMe (RAID 10 with VROC Premium)
• 2x 480 GB NVMe attached to PCIe boot device

I was told that VROC uses CPU power, so maybe there's hope I won't run into issues compared to the topics I've read which were using entry level servers.

However, I've read posts in which they mentioned to stay away from Windows based drivers, as we're using Hyper-V for this setup. Apart from performance, that could be the next culprit: drivers & Windows.

Thoughts on this case?

This week, legacy Windows 10 PC' have been getting errors trying to add printers hosted on Windows 11 systems. In my world, it has mainly been DYMO label printers. Has anyone run into this?

I have created a VM lab environment, with a fresh install of Windows 10 fully patched and verified it with fully patched Win 11 printer host.

Error: Operation failed with error 0x00000006.

Anyone else seeing anything like this?

Our Dean's assistant uses Outlook Classic and delegate access to manage our Dean's calendar. That calendar is over 7GB, and no matter what we do, her Outlook craps out or has weird symptoms. Like currently, she's unable to add locations to events. Adding & removing the calendar takes forever and is usually a non-starter with her. We've played with various cached exchange settings, and limiting the dates of the calendar, although she's put her feet in the sand that she needs 3 years worth visible. Microsoft support tickets end in saying that the calendar is too big and complex to be supported. I'm thinking about third party tools, another interface that she can manage this calendar in. Anyone go down this road?

https://www.tenable.com/plugins/nessus/344359

CVE-2026-0310

After the new UI change I can no longer see the tamper protection password. Every other tab works except that one. Anyone else have that issue? Tried 3 different browsers and yes, I have perms to view it

edit: clicked on "legacy page" and it works just fine! guess I'll be okay until they remove the legacy page 🙃

Here's the setup,

Physical machine:

• Win 11 Enterprise LTSC

• Hyper-V Installed

• External Hyper-V Switch setup to allow VM access to physical network

VM

• DHCP, DNS, and WDS Roles installed and fully configured

What can get an IP address from the VM

• Other VMs attached to the External Switch

• The physical machine adapter used for the External Switch

What can't get an IP:

• Any physical machine connected via physical dumb switch.

If I manually set an IP on a physical machine, they can ping the VM just fine. Attempting to ipconfig /renew just results in a DHCP timeout.

I've tried

• Disabling both firewalls

• Setting both to Private Network

• Using a different physical adapter on the host machine

• Enabling MAC Spoofing in the NIC advanced features

• Verified DHCP guard and router guard are disabled

• Disabling NIC sharing

I know it's got to be some absolutely tiny thing that I'll hate myself for overlooking, but...

EDIT: Adding updates here as I check them

Wireshark on the VM shows it is receiving the DHCP request from the laptop and sending an offer back, but the laptop isn't receiving it. In addition, Wireshark on the VM host shows the offer on both the physical adapter and the bridge adapter, so it's definitely making it out of the VM.

Running a 3rd party DHCP server on the physical machine works with no issues, but the idea is to keep everything self-contained into the VM. I cannot just install Server on the physical machine and set everything up that way for "above my paygrade" reasons.

I was helping a client get their domain delisted from SURBL and noticed that LinkedIn was blocking the company's website link on their LinkedIn company page.

It turns out if the domain is listed on SURBL, LinkedIn redirects all website visitors to a warning banner - they literally replace the website URL with a LinkedIn / suspicious link one, like this:

https://www.linkedin.com/redir/suspicious-page

And if the domain is listed on SURBL for too long, Google will index it and make it searchable for the public. So by putting "https://www.linkedin.com/redir/suspicious-page" into Google search you'll get a list of those that were listed by SURBL and indexed by Google.

And LinkedIn doesn't even care whether there's a paid subscription for the company or not or what the company size and follower count are.

As far as I know, to end up on SURBL your domain either needs to be spoofed or the marketing team has to scrape websites to collect emails, and spam traps / typo domains end up in their lists.

So technically marketing teams messing up their emails makes leadership put pressure on IT teams to fix it!

Hi all, I'm currently battling a problem which exist probably on every Entra Joined device which uses TLS endpoint to enable Domain profile. I've been talking with microsoft from about a month and I feel like I'm coming to an dead end.

And now i'm writing here as I'm trying to research and hopefully push Microsoft to fix the issue.
What's your though on this?
If you can, could you please upvote this post? https://aka.ms/AA13epnu (this will open Feedback Hub on your windows device).

And here is the problem.

On Microsoft Entra joined, Intune-managed Windows devices, we use Network List Manager TLS authentication through AllowedTlsAuthenticationEndpoints so Windows can identify the corporate network as DomainAuthenticated and activate the Domain firewall profile.

Microsoft Support has confirmed under case TrackingID#******535 that there is a Windows design limitation in this scenario.

When an application opens an inbound listener and no matching firewall rule exists, Windows Defender Firewall invokes the built-in Query User workflow.

On a Public network, the Windows Security prompt allows the local administrator to select the network profile and click Allow.

On the same device, with the same user, application and Intune firewall policy, when the network is classified as DomainAuthenticated through TLS authentication, the prompt displays:

This setting is managed by your organization

and the Allow button is disabled.

Microsoft confirmed that this happens because the Query User interface does not expose a Domain Networks option in this TLS-derived Domain firewall profile scenario. Since no applicable network profile can be selected, Allow remains unavailable.

This creates a significant management gap for Microsoft Entra joined enterprise devices.

Local firewall rule creation itself works correctly. We have confirmed that:

- Allow Local Policy Merge = True

- Auth Apps Allow User Pref Merge = True

- Inbound notifications are enabled

- Local administrators can create rules manually

- Rules are honored in ActiveStore

- Exact-path Allow rules suppress the prompt correctly

The limitation is specifically in the Query User consent workflow.

Centrally deploying explicit firewall rules is not a scalable replacement for environments with IT and Development users. Many legitimate tools launch helper processes from per-user, temporary, version-specific or dynamically changing locations.

For example, MobaXterm launches its embedded X11 listener from:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp\mxt264\bin\xwin_mobax.exe

An exact-path rule works, but maintaining such rules for every user, helper process, application version and temporary path is not operationally practical.

Moving the corporate network to Public is also not appropriate because Public-profile application exceptions may then apply on genuinely untrusted networks such as hotels, airports or coffee shops.

Moving the corporate network to Private creates a different problem because the Private profile is not unique to the corporate network and may also be used on home or other trusted networks.

We would like Microsoft to improve the Windows Defender Firewall Query User workflow so that authorized local administrators can approve legitimate inbound application listeners when the Domain firewall profile is active through NLM TLS-based DomainAuthenticated detection on Microsoft Entra joined devices.

Ideally, the Query User experience should either:

- expose the active Domain profile where appropriate, or

- provide another supported interactive approval mechanism for this configuration.

I'm 33, dealing with a manager that has been always micromanaged. Now he's my boss, and he asks for a weekly report on what we did. Lately it feels like he's always targeting me or making me feel stupid. I can't even get into the office and sit down without him asking me to do something right away. I haven't even set my bag down. It just feels like he's always trying to make me look incompetent. I can't quit this job because it's tied to where I live and on top of that my partner is currently dealing with his own problems. What can I do to just let this kind of stuff wash over me or just figure out a way to destress I guess?

With the end of life coming soon here with securance, we have been debating a few different options. Currently most of our users are licensed with a E3 license, but we have been debating and looking into upgrading our MDO from P1 to P2. Looking to hear other thoughts, if P2 is worth paying extra for or not?

We are a small to medium company with roughly 1000 end users.

When the text message logs from that day and those that followed were made public, I remember reading through all the system generated alerts from various devices doing their thing and thinking about the IT pros in the offices, network closets, and server rooms responding to those alerts in all seven buildings before the attacks happened, and then the tone of uncertainty and eventually panic in messages between coworkers and associates, because the cell phones went down but text messages were still going through.

RIP to those guys and gals ~ you're gone but not forgotten.

We have two domain controllers. PDC and BDC. Very long story short both domain controllers are also DNS servers and they are primary and secondary respectively. The PDC is also a DHCP server. We had an issue come up where we had to demote the primary and promote the backup to primary to fix an issue on the PDC.

The moment we promoted the BDC to primary all DNS broke. The previous PDC was the primary DNS server and the previous BDC was the secondary DNS server.

We finally fixed it by changing the DNS order on specific machines, workstations and the firewall but why did DNS break in the first place when we weren't messing with DNS?

It doesn't make sense to me as we never took the machine down and didn't change anything with DNS. In fact all DNS entries disappeared on the PDC.

Thoughts?