I even built a tool for users to minimize the potential for error in this process.
But if a user can’t type their own personal name correctly I am at the bottom of my toolbox.

#Sysadminnery #InfoSec

There is no lesser joy than the process of resetting a password for someone who chronically mistypes their own name.

#Sysadminnery #InfoSec

Someday I will get through the first quarter of a year without having to direct a client to https://kb.isc.org/docs/aa-01640

2026 is not that year. 18 in a row. Had to explain it to marketoons for my prior employer as well, for both major brands.

I don’t *like* making their other vendors look […]

It seems to me based on mailing list traffic like a lot of people are seeing the free side of MS email (outlook.com, hotmail.com, etc. not paying customers on ms365) doing what it so often does today: mystery rejections and dropping mail on the floor.
I assure you: if you're getting bounces […]

An image of doubly-quoted email header text showing a telltale Sendmail “auto-conversion” done by whatever idiots run carrierzone.com > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by > mail54c40.carrierzone.com id [REDACTED]

I never ceases to amaze me that mail systems do this shit. I know it was a thing with Sendmail but most of us have moved on or at least fixed the stupid mailer flags.

#Sysadminnery #Email #Sendmail

#TIL: XenCenter makes no objection when one tells it to delete an apparently unused “backend" vdisk which has a (sparse) descendant busy with a running VM. Also, doing that to a Windows VM does not cause it to fail immediately.
Unclear how this mistake has not been previously made in this […]

CONFESSION:
My ongoing hatred of git is almost entirely grounded in my inability to switch FreeBSD branches without wiping and recloning.

#Sysadminnery

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116001279782592904

I have yet to see anyone even *claim* the capacity to do my job with a bot. I have never understood how I might "prompt" one for anything I do where it could do better than my own ad hoc automation.

#Sysadminnery

Typo of the day: Maimnan3 for Mailman3

I like it…

#email #Sysadminnery

Using MS365 for email is accepting the combined unknown unknowns of both MS operating policy choices and their other customers’ security.
And the KNOWN risk that it makes phishing much easier to execute in ways which are harder to catch.

#Sysadminnery @dannyjpalmer […]

I greatly appreciate when a developer confirms that my tentative bug report (e.g. "maybe I’m running it wrong…" ) is legitimate. I’m NOT a total idiot!

#Sysadminnery

I’m almost at the point of just installing the relevant software on the bare metal host (already doing email…) like it’s 1999 and I only have one box.

#Sysadminnery #Bastille #FreeBSD #jails

Why doesn’t logrotate work on Ubuntu?

#Sysadminnery

(half-serious... I support 1 Ubuntu 20 LTS machine with a high-abuse web server and periodically need to run logrotate -F /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 by hand because it really doesn't work… I’m likely to figurer it out... )

Beni HB9HNT (@beni@wirebug.ch) TIL on Linux it's possible to disable #IPv6 via sysctl, but not IPv4.... This ist depressing.

I would bet a beer on that being not entirely true.

I have no doubt that I could disable IPv4 with a small number of sysctl commands. (which are not obviously designed for that end…) https://wirebug.ch/beni/p/1754635541.104285

5 synack retries is too many.
I will die on this hill.

#Sysadminnery

Loading a Zabbix 3.2/MySQL 5.5 DB dump into a MariaDB 10.11 server for Zabbix6 as if nothing will go wrong…
Hubris is a critical professional virtue...

#Sysadminnery

Depressing that I had to write this sentence in 2025:

"You cannot administer a mail system without actually understanding what you are doing."

I can understand why I had to assert that fact in the ‘90s when any intentional ignoramus could administer Exchange & it seemed like most of them did […]

That was AFTER I had to spend a few hours replicating the (virtual) disk into a new larger one, largely because /boot was too small. It was, of course, the first partition with the root immediately after it, so a new disk was the only option. In doing so, I re-learned a whole lot of stuff about […]

I blew up a big chunk of tech debt on Friday.
This went about as well as that Oregon whale ....

My next step rebuilding this plane in the air is a 'leapp' upgrade of a CentOS 7 VM, ultimately to Alma9. I got blocked on an "Unsupported Network Configurations" inhibitor. This has never bit me in […]

Wall of text, black on muted pink, explaining a phish attempt to a non-technical user.

What it's like to be one of my users... You get this sort of crap in your tickets when all you wanted was a way to open a locked PDF .

It's not clear to me if the user noticed the simple password in the terse mail that sent this to her, because the sender said […]

[Original post on toad.social]

LOL. Boss just accepted my "I dunno, maybe $this, but I wouldn't bet on it, I've made sure it can't happen again, if it really did..." RCA as gospel and thanked me.

I really wish people would stop putting such trust in me. It will not end well for them.

#Sysadminnery

Please pass this along to all Hotmail users that you know:

STOP REPORTING YOUR KIDS' SCHOOL MAIL AS SPAM!!!

MS will relay an anonymized(mostly) report back to whoever runs the mail system the school uses, who will read the supposed spam about your little darling failing her Health class for […]

I support too many different mail platforms.

I will make all my users switch to MailMate on macOS[-1] and migrate all their MS365, CGP, and [REDACTED] mail to a pure simple Postfix+Dovecot system.

I CAN DREAM!!! LET ME DREAM!!!

#Sysadminnery

I am always surprised by the stuff that doesn’t really exist for FreeBSD. Not complaining, its just weird that e.g. ipfw has no standard tools to persist rules or address tables across boot so I've written multiple variants of shell scripts to handle that (plus a set to use pf which I turned out […]

I am having an extremely hard time motivating myself to pick up any of my vast pile of tech debt today. It is a perennial problem.

#Sysadminnery

My team at $job[-2] gave me a shirt with that on it for my 40th birthday. That was after I effectively replaced 3 virtual sysadmins (who we'd never been able to actually find and hire) by writing a multiplatform (Solaris and Tru64 of multiple versions) config management tool in shell […]

You know what they say about Stupid Games...

#Sysadminnery https://infosec.exchange/@atax1a/115385546828585134

Yes, that DOES mean that I routinely lost security battles at my past employers, to the point that I learned not to have 'battles' at all. I just noted my dissent on a few bad ideas. Even that was not great for my "career."
At an #InfoSec-centered MSP I am expected to build and support systems […]

Although I must admit, I much prefer crystal-clear problems (URL NO CONNECT) with clean fixes over the sort I spend most of my time on, where I can only see the problem through the lens of other people's perception of slow vs. fast across something like a 10k-mile connection. With all the […]