BoltActionRifleman

Were you trying to see just how poorly you could remedy something, or was this a genuine effort?

We went from Intune trying to run scripts and like OP mentions, it was half-assed at best. Running successfully on a small percentage of machines, and the others it would either fail or just not run at all with no logging. Switched to A1 and the first scripts I ran on a batch of test PCs, we were able to watch live logging on each one. My first thought was why did I waste so much time on Intune, second thought was what a contrast. Any failures (very rare) are displayed in real time with actual error codes and descriptions. Beyond scripts, the update management, app deployment and overall visibility of devices is just incredible, especially when compared to the extremely low bar set by Intune.

I was watching that night. Fight the real enemy!

Came here to say the exact same thing. VMWare support felt like they cared and were helpful. Broadcom is just a bunch of back and forth log collection for 4 days until you get escalated to the one person working there who actually knows something.

Seconding this. Install ABR, then send out instructions to the users on how to check for updates. Once the ABR request shows up, they can type in the reason why they need the admin rights and whoever the assigned approver is can approve it. If you see this OP, ABR still has a number of free installations (I think 25) before you have to pay anything.

I’d always heard the statement “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” bandied around as a joke, never thought I’d see the day it was actually used sincerely.

I learned on an old Ford 9N. I found it easy to drive but had a bit of a time learning a manual car.

My team has two cargo/utility vans, and SUV and we frequently borrow pickup trucks from other departments to haul fiber reels, large racks, big equipment deployments etc. There’s plenty of us sysadmins and associated teams who need to haul stuff on a semi regular basis.

\#3 - Yes. We had been messing around with Bitlocker using GPO and then Intune with sporadic success. Found a script to implement it via Action1, report the key to A1 reports and haven’t looked back.

Came here to say the same song. There were many songs they played, but for some reason that one was somehow more prominent, and memorable.

Same here, with one exception, no travel during snowstorms or blizzards. That rule was totally understandable.

On the Hallmark Christmas movie scale of 1-10, my hometown was probably a 7 when I was growing up. Almost everyone knew each other, little to no crime, town celebrations throughout the year, neat small businesses everywhere. In the late 1990’s, the school merged with a school in a nearby, larger town. They kept both open for a few years, but eventually shut ours down. Once the school left, it was like a light got turned off. Businesses started steadily closing, people were no longer downtown just hanging out as frequently. When your kids and grandkids are doing everything in the next town over, you’re there every night instead of in your hometown. Another twist of the knife is when the town has no school, and fewer and fewer places of employment, people all but stop wanting to live there. The bigger towns 1000-5000 people started to actually grow a little, but the small towns of under 1000 people started looking like a ghost town. In 30 years, we went from 2 gas stations, 1 grocery store, 1 furniture store, 1 livestock market, 1 veterinarian’s office, 1 lumber yard, 2 bars, 1 dime store, 3 restaurants (and various other businesses), to just having 1 gas station. That gas station is now very busy because it’s the only place in town to get *anything*. This is a little bit long and kind of a rant, but I miss my small town and still wish they had never merged schools. I know there were likely other factors at play, but once that school was gone, so was the “small town” feel.

My parents had a good upbringing, but neither of them had strict parents and I think they just passed that along to us growing up. I had to call if I was going to spend the night somewhere. Not going out during blizzards was the only driving restriction. I passed this down to my kids as well and they all turned out fine. In my opinion, it’s better to let kids grow up not feeling like they’re constantly on probation when they’ve done nothing wrong.

Ask your manager: 

How to a ticket with actual that me the problem just subject line error message. When they ask about the intent of the meeting, explain to them this is how IT feels every single day about tickets.

Same region, same size team and been in this for over 20 years. Been doing some level of help desk the entire time. It’s just the way it is at a small org sometimes.

We had a VCR, Apple IIe (eventually a IIgs), landline with two phones and antenna TV. For many years we had 4 channels, CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS. It was a big deal when Fox came about.

I don’t really have any big moments I’ve attended, but I once went to go see NIN and Marilyn Manson (before he was famous) was the opening act. He ran out on stage wearing a giant strap on dildo and sang a couple songs with it on, bouncing all around. It was kind of bizarre.

Copilot MDM Copilot MAM Copilot Intune Copilot Copilot New

Users abandoned critical thinking long before the introduction of “AI”.

Especially when they claim Intune works well. We have it (not my choice) and every single time we have to change or configure something, it’s a struggle that should take minutes, but instead takes days to weeks to complete.

We’re slowly doing the same, with each VDI issue that arises having no permanent solution, and certainly no good support, it’s one more reason to go back to thick clients. We can spend hours or sometimes days troubleshooting thin client issues with no resolution, or just give them a computer and the problem goes away.

When my first kid turned school age I went out looking for a trapper keeper for him and was disappointed they were no longer in stores.

This sounds like us with VMWare bullshit. Don’t have time to find the root causes, and likely wouldn’t find it anyway, so we just get it running again and stay a few versions behind on VMWare Tools.

Iowa is similar up to a certain age. I don’t remember the exact details anymore, but the laws are set up to discourage being with friends and also to waste fuel since you can’t ride together, and the best part…instead of 4 or 5 friends taking one car, they take 2 or 3. So what’s meant to make things safer actually puts more teens on the road driving. These policies are just idiotic.

Yes those showers drive me bonkers! Not to mention many of them no longer have any kind of labels like H C On Off etc.

When there are problems in our VDI environment, it’s usually widespread and hard to diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve. We’re slowly moving away from it and going back to desktops and laptops, which rarely have issues, and if they do it’s usually isolated to one PC. It also used to save a lot of money being on VDI, but I’m not seeing that so much anymore, if at all.

How did someone plug in a personal router and then have it start doling out addresses on your network? Or am I interpreting this incorrectly and they had it between their machine and your network and it was only affecting their PC?

I’m not a mechanic, but I’ve owned a lot of cars and trucks. If money is seriously tight, you don’t really need to do any of that immediately, or anytime soon…in most cases. They’re not trying to scam her, and what they’re suggesting and charging all seems reasonable, but there’s a good chance she can get by without doing any of it for a long time. Maybe suggest she stows away so much per paycheck and do them one at a time.

We found this out when we were enrolling our iPhones in Intune a while back, it was a godsend.

It’s a less formal way of saying Final Boss.

We’re a fairly small org and I don’t do a lot of hiring, but when I do I don’t give two shits about someone’s specific skills or telling me how to do XYZ off the top of their head. All I care about is if they seem like someone who can troubleshoot *in general*. There are so many people in this world who are simply incapable of thinking “Well, this program is doing these three things, but not this other thing, ever since ____ happened. Let’s see what happens if we change these 5 settings, one at a time, with testing in between”. Most people just think to themselves “Thing broken, someone fix”. I don’t have a point to my story other than telling you to hang in there and keep looking. There are those of us out here who look at the person and their methods vs. their accreditations.

> like how to restart or shut down their computer My favorite is after telling people to restart, and telling them the exact steps on how to do it, they instead click on shut down. A minute later I’ll ask them “Did you get logged back in?” “No, the screen is still black” “Did you click on restart or shut down?” “I don’t remember, I think it was shut down though”. I can’t even begin to comprehend why these people get hired.

GenX as well and never heard this before.

Yes! This happens to me all the time.

The last place I lived had an old closet door handle for the front door, it wasn’t even capable of locking. Current place has a lock but we don’t use it and would have to look around to see if we still have the keys. If someone wants in, they’re going to get in regardless of the door being locked. And if they’re able to just open the door, at least I won’t have to repair or replace the door and door frame.

Outlook

You should write documentation, this is some most excellent step by step!

 42 minutes

I recently had this exact scenario, just a different country.

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

Sail - Awolnation

I took 4 years and remember the structure sentences need to be in and a decent amount of vocabulary, but I can barely speak it. Too many years of not using it at all.

I haven’t been paying any attention, I just have a drivers license with the yellow star thing so I could fly. Will I not be able to vote in November?

Final Destination - IT Infrastructure

Agreed, we dabbled with Intune updating/patching and going from that unresponsive turd to A1 was quite the eureka moment. Everything in A1 is quick, you don’t have to wait hours or even days to see if something worked, you know right away. Also, the Remote Desktop feature is worth a lot as well, not needing another vendor or software for that justifies a lot of the cost alone.

I didn’t actually see the billing, that’s above my pay grade. But in the initial talks I think it came out to something like $5k/year for 300 devices. I could be way off on the final number though so you’d want to get a quote from them.

I’m not the person you asked, but Action1 has first 200 endpoints free. We recently went over and are paying now but it’s working out very well for us.

Agreed, if they walked in and took the equivalent amount out of the cash drawer they’d likely be fired on the spot. It’s in no way excessive to tell employees they’ll be suspended without pay for stealing. If anything, it’s a bit lax.

Have a quick meeting with the supervisors of the affected employees and let them know the tone has changed, and you’re open to listening. Don’t give them the green light on everything, because they’ll quickly overwhelm you with the backlog, just let them know you’re here and are approachable.