Is there something tech you never touched?

[-]

thaneliness@reddit

I’m genuinely trying to think of something but my 5/6 years at an MSP with every client imaginable gave me a crash course on so many old school techs. I got sent out to random customers sites to fix issues I had no experience with, but I made it work.

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stillpiercer_@reddit

Sounds similar to me. I’m a few years into MSP work out of college (for one that does not suck, thankfully!) and one day I posted a picture of a Parallel cable in teams asking what the hell it was.

About half the team was pretty upset that I had aged them a few decades with a simple question before being horrified that I had just found a real company using a parallel cable in the modern era.

[-]

canyonero7@reddit

You come across any Twinax yet? Those are funky.

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Berg013@reddit

This is exactly what I was thinking reading through this. Got into IT later than most but MSPs will open up the fire hose for exposure.

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GullibleDetective@reddit

Bgp

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canyonero7@reddit

All I know about BGP is that when a big company screws up their BGP, it takes down large chunks of the Internet. Seems ... suboptimal

[-]

technikaffin@reddit

Actually i would be thrilled to get into more enterprise networking but as solo admin no chance :D

[-]

redcat242@reddit

Certificates

[-]

automounter@reddit

COMING SOON.

[-]

BoltActionRifleman@reddit

Consider yourself blessed. They’re the bane of my existence.

[-]

arav@reddit

I used to think that as well. We gave allocated time just to automate everything, and now it works without any manual intervention 99% of the time.

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Tom_Skeptik@reddit

Can you elaborate at all on how you accomplished this?

[-]

arav@reddit

Our automation was highly specific to our environment. But I would say starting point would be https://certbot.eff.org/ . We use this for some of our public certs which uses let’s encrypt. It’s extremely easy to automate using certbot

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Tom_Skeptik@reddit

Thank you!

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SweetsMurphy@reddit

Especially now that they expire, like, every 90 days now?

[-]

Novel_Fault9705@reddit

The only way to learn certificates is through beating your head against it while up against the clock before they expire (or after they’ve expired).

[-]

BradtotheBones@reddit

Reading some of these make me feel elite! 😂

[-]

t3chguy1@reddit

Elite? You were need doing job od sysadmin, network admin, database admin, jamf admin... Sounds less of an elite position and more like your were exploited. Just because it has "something to do with computers" doesn't mean it is your job. I did everything from painting server room walls and brooming to developing custom server software, but I am honest with myself that it is not elite anything

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automounter@reddit

Buddy you're replying to an 8 word comment with quite a wild assumption that somehow this person was/is being exploited.

Some of us don't want to work in a niche area. That doesn't mean we're being exploited it means we took the time to develop our skills.

[-]

Olkrago@reddit

You should be proud of yourself having made it through it. Whatever you wanna call it.

[-]

ImCaffeinated_Chris@reddit

Yeah. Over 30 years of doing this, I've touched so damn much. I'm still trying to figure out if there is something I haven't worked on.

[-]

Matt_NZ@reddit

17 years in and I've had very little to do with MacOS.

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bionic80@reddit

As someone who used to work in the education space, you lucky fucking dog.

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Binky390@reddit

Mac management is actually easier than Windows as long as you work somewhere willing to buy an MDM.

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Arudinne@reddit

IBM published a report some years ago that showed they spent less money supporting their mac users than their Windows users.

[-]

Binky390@reddit

Yeah in my experience I would say that’s definitely the case. The initial implementation is very expensive but it balances out over time.

[-]

rared1rt@reddit

It is now but it wasn't always that way. I first started supporting Macs in the late 90's in a moxed Windows/Novell environment. I give them credit, they built a box and pretty much force you to play in it, so with the right tools it is definitely easy to manage.

[-]

Binky390@reddit

Ugh Novell. Did you ever use that awful ZCM software? Nightmare.

[-]

dm117@reddit

Agreed

[-]

SpectralCoding@reddit

In 2019 I cold turkey switched from Windows to MacOS on a whim. I'd been using computers since 1993 and never did anything more on a Mac than lean over someones shoulder to open a YouTube video. Best choice ever as someone very cloud/devops focused at the time. I used to think "ah, no problem on Windows, just run VirtualBox with Ubuntu". It matters to have native unix/linux toolsets.

[-]

Arudinne@reddit

I did something similar for work at the end of 2024. Convinced my Boss to let me switch to an M4 Max.

I'm very happy with it.

Still use Windows on my personal machine because I mostly game on that.

[-]

Greerio@reddit

Oh man, I feel this. We have two Mac’s in the company. Lucky for me, my boss is one of them, so he just helps the other guy.

[-]

This_Dependent_7084@reddit

Me sitting over here entirely content to be managing a full Mac OS/Chrome OS environment. One of the most alluring things about the job was the limited windows management required and no AD. I’ve been sick of MS bullshit for years.

[-]

DeifniteProfessional@reddit

I too am sick of MS bullshit. What I'm not sick of is the ability to buy a laptop that's ALREADY linked to my Intune network, and have it locked down to the point a user can work without hiccup, but can't run a virus or copy data to a USB, using just very simple policies and software sets.

I hate that I need to use Microsoft products to do that though

[-]

prbsparx@reddit

You can do all that with MacOS… Purchase from a supplier. Supplier adds Mac to ABM. Automated Device Enrollment kicks off during first boot. Configuration locks it down.

[-]

Arudinne@reddit

You don't even have to go through a 3rd party. You can order them directly from Apple via their business ecommerce site and they'll get put into ABM.

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Lazy-Function-4709@reddit

Dream job tbh.

[-]

StructuralConfetti@reddit

Do you work for a school?

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NeverDocument@reddit

Outside of using them in grade school- I've never used them or iPhones. Never work on them either.

Now due to the amount of AI toolage I use, I've been considering it. I've become the very thing I sought to destroy!!

[-]

Zantoo@reddit

I just tell users that we'd have to build an entirely separate but integrated infrastructure to properly secure it costing well over 100k and they usually clam up right then. Am I lying? Maybe a little but we're a 200 endpoint shop and me and my Sys Admin already have our hands full.

[-]

_wbmr_@reddit

Had to use a mac once for qork and my whole time with it, I thoug:

"This is all done better in Linux" and "why the fuck am I not allowed to change this setting/config"

[-]

SweetsMurphy@reddit

Like driving a sports car but the hood is welded shut

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Sweet-Sale-7303@reddit

I work in a library and we have some. I hate touching them. Everybody hates microsoft but their documentation is amazing. Apple is like figure it out yourself. They just gave business manager and upgrade and included some paid features for free. Do they have documentation to tell you what that is? No.

If you want to now add a mac to the new upgraded business manager you have to erase the whole thing. For Intune I can just add a pc to it without erasing it.

[-]

DeifniteProfessional@reddit

I keep thinking about buying an old Macbook just so I have some experience and undersanding of it, and then I remember just how much I DETEST the UI. It's so illogical to me, why can't the menus be inside the application? Why is there a centralised menu bar that shows settings for whichever app is in the foreground? What the fuck is a Finder?

[-]

UnexpectedAnomaly@reddit

Same I've always been on the periphery of Mac. Tried to use it more in the environment once to be flexible but it didn't really work. The particular workloads we were doing weren't suited for it.

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Necessary_Emotion565@reddit

And trying to keep it that way

Had a personal Mac laptop for years and it was painful

[-]

dm117@reddit

Opposite for me. Very little Windows, mostly Mac. I couldn’t be happier. So over Windows. Mac is super easy with an MDM

[-]

Andozinoz@reddit

The Jedi felt that one.

Real talk though, thankfully same here :D

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Skrunky@reddit

Thankfully, its quite easy, as long as you've got an MDM. Without an MDM is hell

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upperplayfield@reddit

Somehow I'm the opposite. I manage all of the macOS and Linux devices . We only have one windows user.

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Same-Letter6378@reddit

Lucky

[-]

xsam_nzx@reddit

Desktop/corp enviro windows is always going to be king but mac laptops are untouchable for day to day non work use.

[-]

skotman01@reddit

I’ll second the mainframe comment. I touched a AS400 once, but only to lift it up to get the paper with a list of passwords out from under it.

Somehow I became the go to guy for DNS, Certificates, Email, but I do it all, including some dev/sec ops. Jack of all, master of a few, everything else is figure outable.

For the OP, please learn DNS, it’s very simple at its core and you’ll find that most often the problem is DNS.

[-]

thewaytonever@reddit

I'm paying for it now, but coding, I avoided coding and scripting forever. Now I'm writing a damn script almost everyday. Thank you humans that created python you are life savers, humans who made powershell, who hurt you?

[-]

gafftapes20@reddit

I don't work with any on prem equipment. We are a fully remote company, so that alone has it's challenges, but internal network equipment is something I never do. I don't run networking cables, work with corporate networking appliances, or on prem servers. I avoid anything to do with Windows like the plague, I'm much happier if I can live in my unix/linux world of MacOS and Debian.

[-]

sqnch@reddit

Ive never had to actually manage networking. Always had a networking team that had that responsibility. I’ve been helpdesk, 2nd line, 3rd line, helpdesk manager, ops manager and a delegate VP for multi billion pound companies and never had to do anything on the command line of a Cisco switch.

[-]

frankztn@reddit

I thought I was gonna get through without ever needing to touch a sql database.. I started a new role last month and the erp is on server 2008. 💀

[-]

timsstuff@reddit

SQL is actually super good at backwards compatibility. If you have time, spin up a new 2022/2025 SQL server and restore a backup to it, install the app on a VM and connect it up, you'd be surprised that it probably works with very little to no changes. Just keep the database compatibility level to the latest that the vendor supports.

[-]

Arudinne@reddit

Unless you use reporting services. The whole way to install it is completely changed in like 2017 or something like that.

We ended up contracting someone to migrate our MSSQL server to MSSQL 2022.

[-]

Greed_Sucks@reddit

I loved SQL. I maintained a 2008 server for our CRM for years. It was pretty easy.

[-]

AcornAnomaly@reddit

A couple hints:

When doing admin work, don't try to run SQL directly against the database.
When you wind up needing to do exactly that, learn and use BEGIN TRAN and ROLLBACK.

Surround every bit of code you're going to run against the database with those. Start it with BEGIN TRAN, end it with ROLLBACK.

This makes every command you run in between the two part of a transaction, and the ROLLBACK discards the result of the transaction.

You can check the results of any changes you make within the transaction, to make sure they're the changes you actually intended to make.

Then, once you're sure it's doing what you want, change the ROLLBACK to a COMMIT to let the transaction save.

[-]

q120@reddit

Take the advice of not running queries against the database very seriously.

I once ran: UPDATE customer_database SET address='123 Fake Street';

If anybody knows SQL, you know what I just did.

I DID have a backup but everyone in the company lost at least an hour worth of data.

Lesson learned.

No need to call me stupid... Trust me, I know

[-]

braytag@reddit

By this, he means insert, delete... not "select"...

And you should always run a select to test your where/having clause.

Cause putting it in the transaction log is nice and all, but you can still bring down production if you fill said transaction log/mess-up.

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NeverDocument@reddit

Also if you can afford it, get SQL prompt from red-gate or something like it (idk if that even exists) as it'll bark at you if you forget a where clause, you can bypass it for sure, but it's saved my ass a few times when i've somehow mis-selected

[-]

poizone68@reddit

Thanks for the tip!

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RevLoveJoy@reddit

^ this advice will save your sanity and your job in that order.

[-]

MrYiff@reddit

Another great set of tools are the DBATools.io PS cmdlets, so much stuff that is a pain to do manually or via SQL you can now do via powershell - they took a migration I needed to do years ago down from a full weekend to being done by saturday lunchtime.

https://dbatools.io

[-]

Witte-666@reddit

I hated database management and sql module when I was getting my degree.

My first job in IT was a half-time jack-of-all-trades role at a school. They were short an IT teacher and asked if I could teach "IT" to 2 smaller classes for the rest of the semester. I accepted before I learned that I had to teach them database management and sql.

In the end, it wasn't so bad, but I never had to touch a sql database again.

[-]

StratoLens@reddit

Exchange. Sharepoint. And teams / Skype for business

And I’m very thankful for this.

[-]

Old-Flight8617@reddit

I've heard horror stories about Exchange.

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Loupreme@reddit

Exchange online is chill, on prem exchange very much not chill

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Dan_706@reddit

Dealing with one right at this moment, you didn’t hear incorrectly.

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bbbbbthatsfivebees@reddit

I just finished decomming our last onprem Exchange server about a week ago.

Yeah, doing admin for an on-prem Exchange server is a fate worse than hell. I genuinely wouldn't wish it on anyone. Even just the thought of dealing with the old filtering/spam prevention system alone gives me nightmares.

[-]

DeifniteProfessional@reddit

I am so thankful everything I've ever had to touch is generic IMAP from whatever cPanel or Plesk has installed, or Exchange Online (and even EXO is painful when you want to do niche stuff). Exchange On Prem sounds like a complete nightmare

[-]

rared1rt@reddit

Oh the good Ole days of running eseutil.

I am dating myself here but my first experience with Microsoft Email was MS Mail for DOS.

Ran Exchange 2003 on VmWare back in the day that was interesting and not supported by Microsoft.

Remember upgrading to Exchange 2007 and hosting email for a bunch of companies. Back then no DB cleanup. We just built a new mailstore migrated the mailboxes then deleted the old store it was a continuous rinse and repeat.

[-]

M4niac81@reddit

I don't miss it one bit. Those late nights restoring corrupted database stores after a failed patch. Chasing performance issues. I think it took up a fair chunk of my time in days gone past.

[-]

CraigAT@reddit

I am so jealous of you having never touched/looked after SharePoint.

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skiing123@reddit

I'm currently learning about broken permission trees and how parent-child relationships work in SharePoint after someone couldn't move a file...

Also, extremely jealous of that guy

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whatsforsupa@reddit

There were some really nice parts to Exchange on-prem. Hitting it with Powershell for automation was a lot easier than 365. If you were having an issue, you could figure it out directly instead of just crossing your fingers that Microsoft taking care of it (which is a double edged sword)

I don't miss updating them, even CU updates could be butthole puckering. I don't miss building new ones and switching over.

[-]

thevoiceofalan@reddit

OCS/lync .......shudder

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Daphoid@reddit

Exchange online is actually pretty decent. I did our global skype to teams migration 5 years ago so I've touched a lot of that. SharePoint is at best tolerable I am glad we have folks on staff who are wizards in it.

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laincold@reddit

I feel like anyone shitting on admining Exchange and SharePoint online never touched the onprem stuff. I'm so glad it's not in the same building as me anymore.

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DeifniteProfessional@reddit

I used to shit on SharePoint, but now I know how to use it, honestly SharePoint and Teams are great. It took me 7 years to feel that way, but it is what it is

[-]

Skrunky@reddit

Do you mean local versions? Because the cloud versions are largely the same under the hood, obvious with architectural and feature improvements. Hell, some of the admin menus for SharePoint online are straight out of SharePoint Server 2013

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DeifniteProfessional@reddit

Almost all of the admin menus I use in SharePoint is under "classic". Trouble is, it does its absolute best to stop you being in those menus sometimes

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Vesalii@reddit

Never touching any of these you must be in a 1% group hahaha.

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jkarovskaya@reddit

On prem (on bare metal) exchange 5.5 was the bane of my existence in one position, because no one else had a clue about how to restore mailboxes, test backups, read the logs, or anything else

Had a corrupted raid on that box, and it turned into a nightmare, never so glad to later on have cloud services

[-]

bennasaurus@reddit

I'm not even a sysadmin really and at one point during my support days I supported an on-site exchange server that also had some ancient telephony software installed on the same server.

The other whole thing was held together with hopes and dreams. Many times I would be the last person in the office and many times the night shift support guy would come in and see me talking an on-site engineer through some bodge to get it running. Absolutely awful and I spent 7 years supporting printers before that job.

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MiggieSmalls24@reddit

Wow! Have you been g suite or something your whole career?

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gabacus_39@reddit

UNIX/Linux

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emmawatson5ever@reddit

Same here, I didn’t touch Linux for a long time. It just sits in that “I’ll get to it someday” pile. Hard to find time with everything going on.

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the_cainmp@reddit

Old “big iron” PBX units

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QPC414@reddit

Started my career on those. Kids (coworkers) these days can't handle complex problems like big iron.

Now I just blame the cliud voip vendor after I prove it ain't the Lan.

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illicITparameters@reddit

AS/400's, thank fuck.

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bridge1999@reddit

Never had to admin a mainframe

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stillpiercer_@reddit

There’s something pretty neat about them. I was involved as a third party for a customer who ran on a very poorly maintained and neglected AS/400 and the little bit that we worked on it was pretty cool. Seemed like its own thing entirely and I didn’t get to learn a ton about it, unfortunately.

With that said, not at all something I’d want to spend my time working on all the time.

[-]

poizone68@reddit

AS/400 (IBM i) is something I did work on, and it was so much friendlier to work with than mainframes in my opinion. One of my favourite things was that if you could think of what you wanted to do in English you would pretty much guess the commands. E.g to work with user profiles the command is WRKUSRPRF

[-]

gangaskan@reddit

Yeah the wrk commands were a blessing.

Worst part? Mapping field exit. We used uhhh, right control I think.

You don't realize how much you miss it when the app devs move on to .net

The 409 was good Damm rock solid unless someone fucked up a query that consumed every resource available

[-]

Fit_Indication_2529@reddit

heard

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gangaskan@reddit

Know how to recover one that only has qpgmr enabled? 😄. Asking for a friend.

Our system has literally all accounts disabled because we moved on from it. It's not even powered on

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poizone68@reddit

There is a correct way to get entry, and a cheeky way to do it.

The correct way: If you boot the system to Dedicated Service Tools, you can reset the OS QSECOFR account to the default pwd, if you know the DST qsecofr pwd. If you know neither, then I believe you have to reinstall the kernel (Licensed Internal Coce or LIC).

The cheeky way relies on having a valid user on the system, and the sysadmin not having locked down FTP correctly. Non-restricted users might be able to pass OS commands from an FTP session using the QUOTE function. This could mean being able to submit a job under an account that has the authority to reset admin accounts.

[-]

Blehninja@reddit

All I had to do was to reset passwords on AS400 as it was already retired, but we needed it for lookup.

Never forget that the first time I had to actually do it after being showed once. Alone in the office and it needed to be right now. Found a perfect youtube guide that saved my butt.

Luckily we got to shut it down completely last year.

[-]

Duck_Diddler@reddit

My sister team runs ours. It's an absolute nightmare. I won't say exactly what they are....AS...cough cough

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Sweet-Sale-7303@reddit

My father was a computer operator before he left and became an engineers aide. I got to go to work with him sometimes and help. He would tell me what commands to type in and also what reel tapes to put in. I also worked in two places as a Junior Network Admin that had mainframes. One was a Wang system that I helped Virtualize . The other was a company called Proginet.

[-]

Best-Conclusion5554@reddit

Surprised no-one has mentioned those 3 scary letters 'SNA'...

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awkwardnetadmin@reddit

Worked in a few orgs now that had one, one large county government and a large financial institution, but never really was involved in admin of them. Managed network security policies been them and other devices, but about as close as I got.

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BrokenPickle7@reddit

I've always wanted an SGI machine with IRIX UNIX. Since the 90s I've wanted one to play with.. don't think it'll ever happen :(

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jaymansi@reddit

As someone who did Irix system administration for a few years. You are not missing much. I was doing administration on them prior to Google. With a very small user base, if you ran into an issue, it wasn’t easy to find solutions. Also never patch with a the other release flavor; feature release vs standard? It will allow you to do so but then your system is fubared.

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BrokenPickle7@reddit

I'd still like to use it. I'm a huge UNIX nerd and it's the only one I haven't used

[-]

rootsquasher@reddit

I have a dozen SGI machines (“Irises”, I guess) in my basement. IRIX really was ahead of its time usability-wise and graphically, with Xsgi, 4Dwm, and IID being the best GUI on any Unix-like system until Mac OS X.

A good analogy for IRIX is that it was like an Italian sports car: expensive and beautiful with amazing performance, but if it ever breaks down… time consuming and even more expensive to fix.

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BrokenPickle7@reddit

Lol yeah that's a good analogy.

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jaymansi@reddit

I have worked on some obscure *NIX. AT&T 3B2, SCO, HP Apollo, Tru64, BSDi.

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BrokenPickle7@reddit

I've used those with the exception of att 3b2 I'll have to check it out thanks

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viral-architect@reddit

I have a degree in Networking and have not once logged into a network device at work

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broken_computers@reddit

DNS is pretty easy, you’re not missing much.

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GloomySwitch6297@reddit

Apple products :)

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dederplicator@reddit

Citrix.

[-]

Gunny2862@reddit

I take pride that I refused to set up the TVs in the office.

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

Sendmail. I noped right out of that.

[-]

Xattle@reddit

Can I pretend I live the good life and say printers?

[-]

SweetsMurphy@reddit

Still waiting for that paperless office Bill Gates promised us. Sure we’ve cut down on printing but….

[-]

sdvid@reddit

I’ve never touched the space shuttle computer

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pemungkah@reddit

Going WAY back: I was an IBM assembler programmer for 15 years and never did channel programming I/O.

[-]

slippery@reddit

Ibm ALC was awesome. Flat memory model unlike chaotic x86 assembler. I think there were only 72 instructions in my yellow handbook. Remember the return code goes back in register 15.

[-]

pemungkah@reddit

Parameters in R1, base reg R12, save area R13, return address R14.

I may end up not remembering my name, but I will never forget STM 14,12,12(13).

It was actually my preferred programming language up until it was no longer an option. Oh yeah, some Rexx, some CLISTs, some SPITBOL, sure...but I loved working in assembler.

[-]

slippery@reddit

Mainframe assembler was the best for fast utilities. It was impractical to write complex business logic, so I wrote a lot of COBOL in those days, too. I was also on call a lot then, and assembler never crashed in the middle of the night with a S0C7 or S0C4.

[-]

MitochondrianHouse@reddit

iPhone. Until this week.

That's the only device my company will buy anymore. I feel like an idiot because I'm still adjusting to the difference in interface.

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1RedOne@reddit

I used everything in system center back in the day except for Service Center which was a terrible to use service management / help desk product

It was just a nightmare, I had to build an environment for a bake off for a huge health care customer (our company vs two other companies) and compared to ServiceNow and… some other product maybe it was Shalik? Any way compared to those two, our proof of concept was a nightmare and just complete shit

[-]

Barrerayy@reddit

printers, paper free office

thank fuck

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techretort@reddit

DNS took down my prod environment across multiple DCs yesterday.

Fucking DNS....

[-]

t3hnp@reddit

I work at a FI so literally everything I'm not accountable for 🤣

[-]

slippery@reddit

One of my guiding principles throughout my 38 year career was never to touch Exchange Server. Never, no exceptions.

[-]

Novel_Fault9705@reddit

That was me until I got placed in a hybrid exchange environment. Ugh, the PTSD of simultaneously learning on-prem and EXO and the quirks of how they interact.

[-]

Nanocephalic@reddit

I would have filthy unprotected back-alley sex with two exchange 5.5 servers at the same time before I would even take the same bus as a Lotus Notes server.

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Abject_Serve_1269@reddit (OP)

Ah never worked with fed govt .

[-]

Merdrak@reddit

Ironically, despite my background... call managers. Been around CUCM my entire career but it was always a different group to manage it.

I've toyed with an Avaya one before, but that was because it was literally a place where anything vaguely computer-like = IT. Sometimes anything with an electric current... like setting up a PA.

[-]

Novel_Fault9705@reddit

I encountered the inverse of this. Never thought as a senior engineer I’d be touching phone lines and fax systems, until starting a job where they still were using it and no one dared touch it.

[-]

WorldsWorstSysadmin@reddit

Hey OP, how much of this have you touched:

Core/Edge router configurations
Managed switch configurations
k8s / k3s
Storage arrays / LUNs
NFS / CIFs arrays or even mounts
AWS / GCP / Azure
VPCs / VPC networking components
Load balancers
Firewalls (physical, not windows firewall)
Webservers
Databases
git / code repos
CI/CD pipelines
AD / IdM / IPA
SIEMs
Newrelic / Datadog / ScoutAPM / OS APM stacks
GPOs

There's a LOT of stuff in tech, and most people have only touched their own little portion of it.

[-]

Daphoid@reddit

You really should learn the basics of DNS. One of my first managers had me read the first 4 chapters of the DNS&BIND book. I actually went back and read it a second time a few years later.

Knowing how DNS works is important.

I'm trying to think of things I've never ever touched in IT. Lots of things I've only touched a little... oh.. Terraform or Ansible. I know what they do but I've never automated cloud deployments myself.

[-]

Sweet-Sale-7303@reddit

I can see not touching DNS in a huge organization but can't see never touching it in small and medium sized ones. Just setting up a new windows domain requires setting up a dns server.

[-]

DeifniteProfessional@reddit

Terraform and Ansible are two of my big projects for this year actually!

Also yeah DNS, super important to know. But unless I'm clueless and blissfully unaware, it's honestly quite simple. And I've ran my own BIND servers before I moved to Cloudflare

[-]

meandyourmom@reddit

Words to numbers or numbers to words.

Now you know 90% of DNS. You can google the rest.

[-]

TheCaptain53@reddit

Queue, "my hands look like this so her hands can look like that" meme. I'd much rather take it on so someone else can't fuck it up - in terms of things that really can't afford to be fucked up, DNS is up there. It's not even safe from other people that could be considered technical. I had some request to make an MX record change, not appreciating that this would kill all of our emails and had to clarify this was for a subdomain and not our root.

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Ordinary-Freedom-611@reddit

No corporativo nunca mexi em Linux, ainda 🤓☝️

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ZAFJB@reddit

when you live check to check and do side gigs to pay bills.

If you understood DNS you could get a better paying job....

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token_curmudgeon@reddit

I've always thought of Windows as a gaming operating system. I wasn't using it for home use. So doing any server support inherently meant Linux. I don't think Windows admin salaries keep up with Linux admin salaries in most markets.

I've noticed too that network appliances tend to be UNIX-like syntax.

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MolimoTheGiant@reddit

I wish I never had to touch Quickbooks.

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selfishjean5@reddit

Never touched a PABX,

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m5online@reddit

Never had to deal with managed switches, at least in a deployed environment.

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wrtcdevrydy@reddit

They're pretty neat if you get the centralized management software for them. Being able to mess with every switch in the building in one interface is good.

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DeifniteProfessional@reddit

The modern unified cloud management like Meraki, UniFi, Omada, VigorACS, Mist - amazing. I absolutely love that shit. Got 30 offices spread out in a 500 mile radius? No problem, you can manage everything from your LazyBoy on an app on your phone. Great modern world we live in

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Daphoid@reddit

Truth! When I first did this a bit with brocade and cisco I thought it was neat. When I could do it in a web browser with Meraki it was awesome. When I could RMA a switch, drop it back in and it would get its config back without me having to do anything? Awesome.

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DeifniteProfessional@reddit

BGP. I have so little clue about what happens once my packets reach my ISP's infrastructure. I mean I understand the basics of routing, tier 1 networks, etc. but I've never had to deal with BGP, running an ASN, buying transit from other networks, etc. In fact when we were renting rackspace from a DC we had an ISP manage the entire outgoing network stack.

That said, I'd quite like to get into it. Internet communications is weirdly interesting to me, and I already have a strong general network knowledgebase and skillset

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vard2trad@reddit

VoIP phones, with the exclusion of configuring voip on switches and maybe restarting some servers.

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Low-Oil7883@reddit

it’s kinda wild how you can do full infra work and still dodge dns like it’s optional content

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According_Ad1940@reddit

Printers can fuck right off. I refuse to deal with them. They're all leased units anyway so the client can go right ahead and phone the actual printer people to fix whatever issue there is.

[-]

Bright_Arm8782@reddit

Never touched a NAS, never made a lan cable.

Loads more but those are the most common things.

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dmitryaus@reddit

20 years in, never touched MacOS and ADFS.

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talin77@reddit

I refuse to touch printers. First job i made a netlogon.bat with printers being appointed to users, it was hell

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xSchizogenie@reddit

Printers are easy, if you know what you do. I manage a fleet of 600 printers across 70 locations, Europe-wide. Rarely we have any kind of serious incident. The most what happens is, when the colour-bottles are delivered to the wrong office, which is more of a problem of data rather than the printer itself.

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Abject_Serve_1269@reddit (OP)

I feel old now. My new job landed me as a t1 and I literally taught my coworker what's a ps/2 and also how imaging a pc works. Noone taught him how it works, just the steps to do it. I told him you delete the partition that holds the os and the steps ot works. Ot answered why my work pc has a dual boot; he didnt delete the win10 and added win11 .

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tejanaqkilica@reddit

Damn, kids these days have it easy.

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eufemiapiccio77@reddit

Good question

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crazyfuck_1@reddit

Windows domain controller

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Squeezer999@reddit

Radius authentication for dial up modems

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jafo@reddit

Like your housekeeper, I don't do Windows.

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ConstructionSafe2814@reddit

Yay, same here :)

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meandyourmom@reddit

I’ve touched a lot in my career. Thing is, most of my time at the desktop and sysadmin level was supporting environments that were overwhelmingly Mac (contrary to one of the other posts). I know all about managing Mac’s at enterprise scale. But never managed an environment with enough windows to justify things like SCCM. I’ve never even seen it. At the biggest I had >3000 macOS machines, 2000 IOS, 200 Linux servers and like 20 windows laptops.

It was decided that it was cheaper to just give the windows users all software for backup and local admin access. When they fucked the shit up, we just kept a small stack of replacement windows laptops. “login and restore your own files!” We’d Wipe the old one. Rinse repeat. Granted this was more than a decade ago. But still.

I still have no idea how to manage windows at scale, and GPOs frighten and confuse me.

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TheDawiWhisperer@reddit

Network stuff. Don't know how, don't want to know.

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tech-brah@reddit

Reading this thread makes me feel like an IT god in comparison. I have to believe the people in this thread are the same “experienced professionals” crying online about not finding a job. If this is the talent pool I’m competing with, I have no worries in the world.

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crippledchameleon@reddit

Dynamic routing

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RetroactiveRecursion@reddit

Cisco, Oracle, kubernetes, AWS (not directly anyway ... I'm sure I've used stuff that's hosted on it), probably most big ticketing/inventory/deployment systems, git hub (other than as a place to try to find stuff to download ... I still don't get what exactly it's supposed to do or how it works), zfs.

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73DarkStar@reddit

Desktop support/Tier 1/Tier 2 things.

I went the enlisted military route (1997) and when I was assigned my duty station, I was tabbed to be a junior Windows sysadmin. Two days before I was supposed to show up in my office they reassigned me to a Unix/Solaris server team overseeing several thousands of users, hundreds of servers, etc. I had roughly 5 days of unix training in military tech school. I basically knew "ls", "cd", "cancel ", and a few other basic unix commands and was thrown right into the fire.

"Hey 73Darkstar, NFS is fucked on server $X, can you fix that?". "Sure!..... {what the fuck is NFS....}". Or NIS/YP (at the time), or basically any other unix/solaris situation you can think of. I had no idea what any of it was but I was on the server team regardless. I made sweet, sweet love to so many O'Reilly books in that time.

That said, it also forced me to learn everything really quickly and I was able to skip a large number of years toiling away at the end-user level so I can't complain in the least. Learning unix and then linux (also when it was still young. Installed my first linux system in 1998'ish) ended up shaping my entire career.

[-]

gimpbully@reddit

Fujitsu big iron. I've worked HPC in the US for 20+ years, up until recently all under some form of US govt funding. Buy-American regulations have meant i've never gotten to admin a Fujitsu machine.

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alpha417@reddit

Anything ever having to do with payroll.

... ever.

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Palantir_Scraper@reddit

You're lucky

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crankysysadmin@reddit

I've never touched a mainframe. I've never touched AIX.

On another note, there is a pretty big list of things I have "touched" but was not competent or really dealing with it at length. I literally touched it or fumbled through it with a contractor helping me:

Netware, Solaris, Sun hardware, VOIP phones, Meridian phone system, Oracle, routers and managed switches, Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL Server.

I definitely "touched" all that stuff. I did something with it. But it isn't even on my resume.

[-]

nethack47@reddit

Was looking for NetWare sysadmin experience. I kept away from them since it seemed to drive people to drink…

That and HPUX…. that isn’t a flavour of UNIX that I wanted to learn.

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XL426@reddit

I've literally never touched Oracle database. Lots of SQL Server and MySQL with a bit of PostgreSQL thrown in but never installed / administered Oracle Database

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mistersd@reddit

Anything >25Gbe

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Sir-Spork@reddit

Damn, this is a hard one, I am extremely curious and nosey with a 30+ year IT career history. I think I touched / worked with just about everything lol.

If I find something new, I’m usually very quick to begin reading up on it

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dacrow76@reddit

Never made a Ethernet cable

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pspahn@reddit

There was like five or six questions on the A+ about IRQ ports. One of them was "which IRQ is the keyboard?" That was in the late 90s.

I've never had to know this. I think it was IRQ 2 but it's been almost 30 years so I might be wrong.

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HWKII@reddit

The only time I ever had to think about an IRQ was dealing with an IRQ conflict trying to play Wing Commander on my i386. It’s been a minute.

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Jxxku@reddit

8 years in, I don’t believe I’ve ever touched a host file.

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juitar@reddit

Punch cards

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pspahn@reddit

We use punch cards, but of the clock in and out variety.

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YellowOnline@reddit

Really, in 2026?

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jkarovskaya@reddit

We had punch cards when I was in high school, and remote terminals to the IBM machine they ran on. We mailed the decks to the datacenter

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yankdevil@reddit

Windows.

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Abject_Serve_1269@reddit (OP)

Love windows. Lol.

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clbw@reddit

I"m Token Ring old and Dos old so I cannot think of something I have not experience in the technology world. first computer was a Texas Instrument TI99/4A. I still posses that.

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punkwalrus@reddit

Lotus Notes or BES.

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Necessary_Emotion565@reddit

Now I feel old. Set up a BES server back in the 2000s.

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1RedOne@reddit

I never messed with OLE or ODBC somehow and very happy for it. I also never managed blackberries either

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slippery@reddit

How about DDE?

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CPAtech@reddit

Man I forgot about the old BES for blackberries.

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rimjob_steve@reddit

Jesus way to make me feel old yall. Out of everything mentioned what I’ve touched the least is an as/400.

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Practical-Alarm1763@reddit

You're actually wrong OP. You've worked plenty with DNS, even if you do not know it. You may think you haven't, but you have.

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Abject_Serve_1269@reddit (OP)

I mean not index etc. I usually do ip release and pow works. Or tell the sysadmin or network team hey dns is broke. All my experience has been siloed even from a help desk level.

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Danowolf@reddit

As a admin at a small company, Vlan was my nemesis. Oh and group policy.

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Massive-Effect-1307@reddit

The Microsoft tool stack.

You’d have to pay me pretty good money for me to become a “ClickOps” engineer dealing with Windows, Office, and the entire slew of proprietary solutions to handle the most trivial of tasks.

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Cheomesh@reddit

Yeah, loads. Not all of us have been admins for these massive, hyper-complex environments that seem to be the norm going by what this place is on about.

For example, I've never actually managed anything in the cloud beyond moving some files into an S2 bucket. Literally no one I have supported has been cloud based, nor was it reasonable to become so.

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wireditfellow@reddit

It’s a huge world when people just generalize it as IT. Don’t beat yourself up you will only learn things as they are presented to you otherwise you will get more experience in tech that you already know.

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Secret_Account07@reddit

I’ve never created a DNS record. Maybe an A record once, idk.

I should know more but just don’t. Have a whole team for it so just…. Don’t

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Emotional_Garage_950@reddit

Never needed to log into a network switch. There’s a guy on the team that always does it

[-]

udsd007@reddit

In my 51 years in the workforce, I wrote exactly one COBOL program. I was a systems programmer on very large IBM mainframes, and a system administrator on large Unix and Linux systems. I did it all, from dragging cables under the floor through configuring and generating operating systems and writing utilities to designing datacenters. I wrote in assembler, C, CLIST, FORTRAN, SAS, Perl, shell scripts, PL/1, and anything else that came to hand. And only one COBOL program, to help find a kidnapped girl. And it did.

[-]

AcornAnomaly@reddit

VoIP and QoS.

Considering we're switching to a new phone system soon, I'm about to get a hands-on lesson.

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Revelation_Now@reddit

Never written a quantum algorithm. Maybe I'll write one on the weekend

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LargeBlackMcCafe@reddit

sql clusters and MacOS.

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timsstuff@reddit

SQL clusters are actually pretty easy to maintain, especially the AlwaysOn stuff. It just works.

[-]

BoysenberryDue3637@reddit

Just going to say it. Azure and the cloud in general for compute. Simpler my ass. Lower cost. Ya gota be joking. I could go on and on on the issues.

[-]

popohum@reddit

Those motorized fleshlights. There’s just something I don’t like about a motor that close to my junk yknow?

[-]

iSunGod@reddit

I feel you. I'd like to add a motorized fleshlight that plug into the wall. My junk emits a fluid & I'd like to keep that as far away from electricity as I possibly can.

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antiprodukt@reddit

Was about to say those motorized real dolls, but this too.

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discgman@reddit

gif

Uh

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Old-Flight8617@reddit

Don't wanna work I'm that guys environment. Lol

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spittlbm@reddit

Can relate.

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TheMarinusNL@reddit

windows or any microsoft service

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TheRedstoneScout@reddit

So far I have yet to touch a standard SAN.

got tons of vSAN experience at work. Ive been thinking of homelabbing one just because.

[-]

timsstuff@reddit

I grew up in Silicon Valley, got my first computer when I was 10 in 1980 and have worked professionally in IT since 1996. I have never once touched any sort of Oracle software (Java doesn't count).

Until this year. One of my biggest clients had their main line of business application bought by a company that is migrating them to their new system on Oracle. I'm in charge of migrations and getting the devs hooked up to the database. It's a fucking nightmare. FML.

[-]

isotycin@reddit

Any HCM or HRIS. I despise people working with that system.

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Kangie@reddit

Man, I can't think of anything that I haven't touched at some point or another at this stage. Maybe some niche software but I've supported everything.

I guess token ring because it was obsolete before I started my career...

[-]

VortechSCMarauder@reddit

Man, I would have bailed on the sysadmin career long ago if it were not for Linux. It's what's kept me sane in this business. If all I had to deal with was Windows Server I would have either eaten a bullet by now, or moved on to some other career. Honestly, I don't know how you Windows-only guys do it. You have my respect. And my sympathy.

[-]

goatsinhats@reddit

Spelling and grammar check

[-]

biffbobfred@reddit

Coax networking. Token ring. PDP-11. Windows Active Directory setups. SQL Server.

[-]

Ninja67@reddit

I went from knockoff geek squad selling personal computers to a tier one at a MSP with only a associate in computer science that was a bit out of date (technically in a bachelor's and technology management, but that was just the computer science associate with half half a business degree tacked on). Was that the MSP for just shy of 3 years

My thing is I've never configured anything, just a bunch of brake fix and hoping I get it right. But sitting down and configuring something from zero to a system running still haven't done it you and after I moved on from the MSP.

[-]

thesuperpuma@reddit

Just curious, what is your job title currently and how much do you make?

[-]

Ninja67@reddit

I don't remember in that MSP just merged or got bought out. I got promoted twice from tier one to two about a year on and then from two to three in only a couple of months. I think tier 1/2/3 was the title. By year two I was the third longest employed technician, I lost count after 15 other techs quit before me. That's when I got very antiquated with the term " tribal knowledge" and the loss of said knowledge.

I think I was making $44,000 a year. Current job I actually took a little bit of a pay cut down to $39,000 but I actually get some decent PTO and the stress isn't even close to the MSP. The client base is a little bit more relaxed. I'm also not on call.

[-]

Ninja67@reddit

Wait you asked for my current job title. Technology specialist. Smaller team, kind of like MSP work. I'm tier one two and three and system administrator except I actually have a boss who's also the system administrator.

[-]

shimoheihei2@reddit

Patch walls and mini computers are the only things I can think of.

I've touched pretty much everything else, from mainframes to networking gear all the way to Linux, Windows Server and cloud.

[-]

thesuperpuma@reddit

well I still never hacked the mainframe… hoping I never have to pull that one out

[-]

No_Desk_4921@reddit

SANs. We also had somebody else who dealt with those. Just a different beast, if you will, in comparison to just heavily loaded servers. I've got one, now, that I need to attach a few hosts up to after we had to rebuild their own RAIDs.

I'm sure it's easy to connect them but it's so rare to see one fail that you almost fear it.

Corporate handles all of our switches/firewalls/etc. so I don't mess with those but from what I hear and see as they deploy payloads for their work, it feels like a different language than the typical server stuff we manage.

[-]

zoharel@reddit

Lots of things. If you think otherwise, you're just not familiar enough with tech.