This week I’ve been reinstating IE11 support.

OMFG WHY!? I hear you ask.

Is it due to critical legacy integration dependencies? AD Intranet logins? Draconian Group Policy rules?

Nope. This ONE user just prefers it! 🤯

How much are we getting paid for this nonsense? Sweet FA!

#cognativedissonance 😢

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

group policy prevents me from installing browser plugins at work. For crying out loud, I'm a dev! Any set of permissions that enables me to do my job would include an escape hatch for this! I can just rebuild Firefox without group policy support! What the fuck is this meant to achieve besides waste company resources!?

Fucking Windows Servers, I just wanted to set a login timeout of a few minutes after several unsuccessful login attempts.

(Windows Active Directory for Domains and shit is installed - just an FYI (otherwise this would be slightly easier))

Steps:
- Go to Group Policy Management
- Navigate to your domain in a policy tree
- Right click "default policies" and select edit in the right click dropdown.
(Why not just fucking double click and edit it them in the convenient right-side window? Because fuck you!)
- Navigate another god damn policy tree
(And it's not obvious, it's under Windows Settings... Ok that makes sense, but there are so many nests.. Fuck me)
- And only now can you edit the "Account lockout duration" field

Windows Servers are a pain.. This actually isn't completely horrible, but it gets really annoying, because literally everything here is hidden in weird places behind thousands of click navigations and in between that there's some shit sandwhich UX.

Project requirements include a database. I don't have permissions to create a new database on the server, so I go to the person that spins up new servers and deals with group policy. They rustle some papers around, looking aggravated, throws up hands and says, "I guess I'm the DBA now..." Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do shithead? Ask the web team to do it? We don't have a DBA. My boss has been gone all week and, really, this isn't a hard task. You check a fucking box.

Whatever, I'll remember this when they need a favor from me.

Stupid Google fucks.

I finally discovered why I have such a low DMARC pass rate. If your DMARC policy is set to "none," and you send something to a Google Group, the stupid fucks intentionally rewrite the return path of your messages. This breaks DMARC alignment, SPF and DKIM in one go. They only do the correct thing if your policy is set to "quarantine" or "reject."

Google must get a hardon from playing bad net citizen.

Dear Docker for Windows I know you exist to make devs on Windows life easier. But DEAR GOD, with all the firewall/group policy problems..you have been the pain of my existence during this short time developing on Windows.

Literally have a countdown on the time left until I get to no longer do a rain dance for my development environment to work.

Had a Windows update the other day. Now hyperv isn't working anymore.

I fixed it but why the fuck does the update change the group policy settings? It's supposed to update the system not poke around in my settings!

At work we've been having problems with printers... Like anyone that has to deal with printers.

They kept disappearing and reappearing for users on every log on.

We got a support contact with Microsoft because it was group policy doing it.

Their final solution (after weeks of remote sessions and long phone calls) is to install pstools on every machine, and run about 7 commands as the system user to delete and then re add registry keys.

ON EVERY LOG ON AND LOG OFF. WTF...

This is an educational institution where "computer hacking" is taught... It's not gonna take long before someone realises that pstools is installed...

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

Can we just for a moment recognize how absolutely fucked Windows update is?

I have done everything, EVERYTHING, outside of booting from a live Linux OS and permanently deleting the windows update executables. All this to stop windows from force updating and rebooting my system while it's locked.

I've killed services, schedules, edited the registry, changed group policy. I even set my wireless connection as metered. Fun fact about that, if MS deems the update to be "priority" they'll download it anyway and reboot, so fuck your data-cap.

I wouldn't have a problem with it IF they would put everything back the way it was before, but those fucking cucks can't even be bothered with doing that. But you bet your fucking sassy ass they start up all the bullshit services I disabled last update are all running.

I don't even know WHY I even try.

Doesn't matter anyway, in a few months I won't even be able to use half the tools I use on Windows for work due to licensing issues 🤷‍♂️

At that point I will give a big fucking finger to Windows 🖕 and use a VM for all the fucking work related bullshit.

Fuck you Microsoft, I would say it's been fun but you're a god damned disaster. I wish that I could send a message to the entire MS board on how much they have failed, but unfortunately I rather like my freedom and it's frowned upon sending rotting roadkill in the mail.

I got a new computer. Ended up getting a Sager Laptop. I also ended up getting Windows 10 Pro. I had forgotten how shitty Windows 10 has gotten. My biggest gripe are the start button (fixed using open shell) and the creation and adding users. Microshit goes out of their way to trick you into getting a POS MS account. I knew the trick when my PC first started to stay offline so MS could not force a MS account. However, I added a user later and again they are fucking with you to force a user account. Figured out which non-descript place to click to just add a local account. This is shitty behavior of an OS. Especially one that claims to be Pro. This is not how to win customers. It just aggravates people that know what they are doing.

The bright side to this is could take out my frustration after I moved my Fallout 4 setup to the new computer. Mod Organizer 2 makes it easy to move everything at once. Configured one config file and boom I can now run it on Ultra settings. Explode a few skulls and reduce a few more to radioactive ash/goo. Frustrations are gone. lol

Also on the bright side with running Pro. I can select Update control via group policy. This doesn't seem to work on Home.

Rant and geniune question:

How can a group of 'devs' make 2 functional(enough unfortunately), many active users, phone apps, not just basic af, over a few years... but apparently not know how to make a working referral link of any kind???

Am i missing something like referral code link logic being extremely hard for typical devs to understand? Or some odd or trending reason for for forcing manual, explicit, referral code binding instead of a simple (imo) link that attributes the new user account to the referring user's? If you dont believe me u can check either/both of their actively running, decent/moderate size user base apps, claw eden (on play store) and/or claw party (possibly only via finding an apk... at least not on google play).

They have legit rewards, relatively very fair/honest policy... etc... i get 60+ items won/delivered a month (i have paranormal crane game skills #AutisticSuperpower) which i donate the vast majority of to charity (1 of 3 reasons the IRS reeeeally dislikes me).

Im just baffled by this apparent inability.

So recently I've been feeling like I fooled myself into thinking I'm any good at anything regarding development.

Today I tried to deploy a Console Application that would run nightly. The production systems are much more guarded, as it should be, but I should still be able to schedule a windows task (yeah yeah, windows servers, not the time Linux fanboys and not my choice :P) no problem.

Except I didn't expect that network users can't run jobs, because of a Group Policy about saving passwords on network accounts.

I expected a local administrator account to be available, and it wasn't.

Also a web API isn't available, even though I could telnet to the address on port 443 (HTTPS). A proxy apparently accepts all HTTP/HTTPS traffic and so on.

All this I feel like I should have known....

So am I in my own head, or am I right in thinking maybe I'm not "pro" development yet? Maybe I don't deserve to be "pro".

Thoughts?

Organisations who enforce strict group policy obviously hate their developers.

?rant: a lot of people(including me) hates microsoft for the mandatory win10 updates, but I recently found out that you can block it from group policy. Is this not enough or people just dont know about it?