Sysadmin

Hello c/sysadmin, and welcome to the Patch Megathread! I'm editing this post and leaving it up as a single catch-all sticky post for patch days for the time being, since we're not seeing enough activity to warrant new threads IMO. If someone wants to help moderate / curate content and actively create new patch day posts, please let me know and I'll add you to the mod team.

This is the place to talk about the latest patches, updates, and releases. We put this thread into place to help gather all the information about this month's updates: What is fixed, what broke, what got released and should have been caught in QA, etc. We do this both to keep clutter out of the community, and provide a singular resource to read.

While this thread is timed to coincide with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, feel free to discuss any patches, updates, and releases, regardless of the company or product.

Remember the rules of safe patching:

• Deploy to a test/dev environment before prod.
• Deploy to a pilot/test group before the whole org.
• Have a plan to roll back if something doesn't work.
• Test, test, and test!

Hey all, in my company we've been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.

To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:

• we don't need them
• they lack knowledge
• management can't create a good first-line team because they don't want to invest

But I didn't interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:

• They ignore KB's
• They say that they don't have access to certain servers, or that they don't find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
• They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like "I don't know how to use Linux"

From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn't really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.

We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:

• Improve the language in legacy KB's
• Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
• Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
• Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team

That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:

• Shit pay
• Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
• Lacking interview and requirements for the position

Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?

Suncor is replacing employee computers after a cybersecurity incident last week shut down debit and credit processing at Petro-Canada gas stations across the country, among a series of other security measures at the Calgary-based company.

"Normally you wouldn't expect hardware to be compromised so fully that you need to replace everything,"

What are you favourite/useful rsync tricks these days?

Mine is rsync -r --chown=AUSER:AGROUP SRC DST to copy the files and change the ownership on the fly.

I got my new PC for about 3 or 4 months. Today, I was using my PC as usual and suddenly everything stopped reacting. Rebooting just boots be into the UEFI interface. Which is very concerning.

Then I got a liveusb to look into what's happening. Upon using smartctl. It shows that my SSD have 0% spare capacity despite only writing 15TB to it.

So far, I knew that Samsung's EVO 980 and 990 SSDs have a firmware bug that can cause this. But this is the 1st time I know of 970 Pros having this issue.

I know there's a lot of servers using consumer drives for their system. Be careful and check if you are using a 970. If so, check the spare capacity RIGHT NOW and decided if to upgrade the firmware or RMA the product.

Monitoring and observability tools commit the cardinal sin of tricking people into thinking monitoring is an easy problem. It is very simple to monitor a small application or service. Almost none of those approaches scale.

VMSA-2023-0014 - VMware vCenter Server updates address multiple memory corruption vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-20892, CVE-2023-20893, CVE-2023-20894, CVE-2023-20895, CVE-2023-20896) Please see the advisory here: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0014.html Impacted Products: • VMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server) • VMware Cloud Foundation (Cloud Foundation)

Hi guys, I recently started working at a company with about 50 people that has grown to large for their current IT setup. They have no documentation or any SOPs. Has anyone been in a similar situation and how did you go about creating documentation, especially when you are new and don't fully understand all of the services they have in place?

Thankfully it's mostly a Microsoft shop and pretty low tech but there are dozens of exchange rules in place that no one knows why they exist or what they do, dozens of SharePoint sites with critical information strewn about them and so on. It's hard to think where to even start and decide what the best way to organize this information will be, and keep in a place a system where we will update it regularly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I started a new job as a systems engineer not too long ago and am looking for a way to get comfortable with FOS as I've never had to manage FC switches before. Anyone know of a way to emulate it, or should I just resign myself to buying an old switch on ebay and throwing it in the rack?

Duo uses push notifications, time-based, one-time passwords, physical tokens and biometrics to verify the identity of users at login. Similarly, Microsoft Authenticator uses push notifications, one-time passcodes, and biometrics for authentication and can integrate with Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory. While both 2FA options share some similarities, there are still key differences that can sway your decision to choose one over the other.

System administrators and IT operations pros might want to rethink their careers, because analyst firm IDC is predicting substantial drops in the number of people employed in such roles.

The firm this week published its first "Worldwide xOps Census and Forecast" – a study that predicts "a substantial shift in the responsibilities of IT professionals will occur over the next five years."

"IT professionals in the most purely operational roles are facing a transition to a more technical or focused role that very often may involve some level of software development work," the firm asserts.

Debian 12 remains on track for releasing next week even with around 100 known RC bugs that likely won't be resolved pre-release. The Debian release team says overall things are on-track.

No, we will not be going dark. The reasons are simple:

1. This form of protest has proven ineffective on reddit repeatedly.

2. Shutting down the sub on a Monday will have an adverse impact on our readers, including possible production issues.

3. We have avoided reddit "politics" intentionally and will continue to do so.

You are more than welcome to avoid participating on that day which will make the message far clearer to reddit through their metrics than shutting down the sub to folks in need who would be here anyways.

It's disappointing to see the r/sysadmin mods take this stance, but I guess in a way it's a good thing that they've shown their true colors.

Here's hoping that c/sysadmin thrives and replaces it in the near future as the go-to place for all sysadmin stuff.

While Microsoft has indicated these outages are a mess of its own making, hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the downtime, and said it did the deed as retaliation for the US government interfering with the internal affairs of the civil war-ravaged African nation.

The potentially-pro-Russian crew stated its claim on its Telegram channel, with messages coinciding with the timing of the first outage. Afterward, the group reportedly said it would again attack Microsoft's services because the company said the problem was technical rather than a cyberattack.

Beginning with Jenkins 2.407, May 30, 2023, Jenkins administrators running a Jenkins weekly release will be warned if they are running Jenkins on an operating system that is within 6 months of its end of life date. The same warning will be visible to Jenkins administrators running a Jenkins long term support (LTS) release with the next LTS baseline after Jenkins 2.401.x, beginning August 23, 2023.

Microsoft kicked off its Build developer conference yesterday, where it unveiled several new features for enterprise customers. The company also announced a preview of Windows 365 Boot, which lets users log directly into their Cloud PCs at startup instead of the local install of Windows 11.

Windows 365 Boot is designed for Windows devices that are shared between multiple people (such as frontline workers and temporary employees). The feature eliminates the need for IT admins to configure Windows PCs for individual users.

“When you power on your device, Windows 365 Boot will take you to your Windows 11 login experience. After login, you will be directly connected to your Windows 365 Cloud PC with no additional steps. This is a great solution for shared devices, where logging in with a unique user identity can take you to your own personal and secure Cloud PC,” Microsoft explained.

Just a recommendation to the mod(s) here, you may want to set the display name for the community to simply "Sysadmin".

While it's a funny true-ism, when searching Lemmy communities for "sysadmin" it's easy to miss "It's always dns" in the results. Make the sidebar just read "It's always dns" instead.

A backup tool.

Any opinions on an IM solution to send notifications to?

Something which can show push notifications on my phone would be ideal.

This is for my personal stuff which isn't critical or public. I would like E2EE if for no other reason then why not.

Top options:

• Matrix
• XMPP

Middle:

• Jami (No API?)
• Zulip (no EE2E)
• Google Chat (no EE2E?, dealing with Google APIs)

No:

• Briar (no iOS client)
• Signal (no API)
• Session (no API)
• Whatsapp (API cost)
• Threema (cost)
• Wire (bot API in beta, cost?)
• Telegram (sus)
• Slack