pro-mpt

It’s terrible and recently I’ve felt like it’s getting worse. I despise the culture around it where MVPs are “hired” to essentially tow the company line and at extremes, develop solutions or convoluted explanations for missing features. I was waiting for a platform script result for over 12 hours this week. It is a huge roadblock in productivity.

I have an colleague I have to review PRs for and every time they use Claude (every time), it’s logically correct but littered with problems due to Claude not actually understanding our environment or much of the context. Each time I respond with the issues with the code, why they’re there and documentation to read to fix it. I come very close each time to screaming STOP USING CLAUDE IF YOU DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT ITS SAYING

It’s a life saver for admin portals with poor view options like Intune and Meraki.

Installed new Meraki Switches at our head office and it asked me if I wanted to update the firmware immediately in the console. Said yes without realising when Meraki does firmware upgrades, it does it for all switches on the site. So I rebooted the entire network of the head office. Luckily, the current switches were already up-to-date so everything came back up in about 4-5 minutes and the leadership jokingly called it a resilience test.

This was me 4 years ago. The company didn't care, my boss didn't really care, and I ended up leaving. The company will never learn and they haven't successfully filled that position since,

Don't be afraid to be wrong. Your early years are for submerging yourself in every problem you can get handed on the helpdesk and figuring out what causes it. Eventually, you'll realise what makes you tick (or that you completely hate IT), whether it's networking, hardware, applications etc. and you can make an informed decision about where you may want to take your career. I see people in the helpdesk spin their tyres for years because they refuse to jump in to a problem if they see a keyword or technology they don't like in the ticket. This curbs your growth and trust me on this, makes your life harder. That initial discomfort or embarrassment at tackling an issue you're not sure about will make your work life harder in the long run. This is a lesson you will continually have to re-learn. In the first few years, your role is to provide a service to your colleagues. Yes, you will get assholes who make you not want to go near them or help them but for the most part, people just want someone who can help them fix an issue. Be polite, be bathed, and be honest when you're not sure. You will be surprised at how much people are just happy you are trying to help. and take notes on everything.

Daily driver is a M3 Air which is excellent. When I have to do testing or Windows specific tasks, I use a 15” Precision. Can’t remember the model but it’s a bit of a beast.

Culture is critical as to how the IT department is treated. I’ve finally been somewhere in the last 3 years that ensures IT is treated as a mutually respected colleague rather than some sort of robot server you can talk to however you like and blame all your problems on.

History > Context > Problem > Solution > Choice Try to compact these points anytime you share a decision with someone else or a group who’s not as familiar as you are. Assume zero context. This is also a good exercise to check yourself that you definitely know why you’re doing something.

We use Okta. Is there a way for Azure to recognise we’re using Okta as MFA. Entra has always registered our logins as Single Factor because it presumably can’t recognise us going off to Okta for authentication.

Am I understanding the table at the bottom correctly? This week’s Patch Tuesday patches the CVE?

Thank you. No idea how this corny pretence got so many upvotes. Every day the number of genuine sysadmins in this subreddit halves, I feel.

Thing is, this wasn’t even a proper system update. We run a QA group of Crowdstrike on the latest version and the rest of the company at like n-2/3. They all got hit. The real issue is that Crowdstrike were able to send a definitions file update out without approval or staging from the customer. It didn’t matter what your update strategy was.

Relevant thread to ask - why can Intune remote lock everything except a Windows device?