u/ITRabbit

Yo this is one of my biggest hear me outs 😭😭

I’m a 19yo female but this man has me in a chokehold. Ive never seen his face but his voice is so hot. I’m a college student who has issues with my computer like every 2 weeks and it’s always the same IT guy helping me remotely.

The last time it broke, (last week) he said “we have to stop meeting like this” and I actually felt butterflies and got a second heartbeat. The way he takes control of my computer screen is so attractive

I love u to all the IT guys out there

Edit: HE ALSO COMMUNICATES WITH MY VIA SCREEN AND HE WILL TYPE “I’m all done now :)” WITH A SMILEY FACE AWHHWHSNZIS

Also guys I’m not an old man pls stop saying that🫩🫩🫩 god forbid I yearn

Prime video down? Looks so on down detector too

Just kidding. MSP here and it turns out it was actually the fact that the two main switches are under the secretary's desk, because duh, where else would you put them? And she runs a space heater if it's below 85F in there. Turns out snagless CAT6 housing is also known as heat shrink tubing and it will squeeze the plug and eject the Ethernet cable on its own, if hot enough for long enough.

Yes, we have told her it's not ideal to do that. No, she doesn't care.

I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

Six months ago our VP of Engineering presented a slide at the board meeting titled AI-First Quality Assurance, The slide had a graph showing QA headcount dropping from 14 to 3 with a projected savings of $1.7M annually, The board loved it, The stock price went up 4% that week.

What actually happened, We bought a license for an AI testing platform, We pointed it at our staging environment, It generated 200 test cases in an afternoon, Everyone clapped, The VP showed a demo to the CEO, The CEO told investors we had fully automated quality engineering.

Then we tried running those 200 tests against a real release.

34 passed, 88 failed because the test generator hallucinated UI elements that don't exist in our app, 41 were duplicates of each other with slightly different wording, 19 tested features we deprecated in January, 18 couldn't get past our login flow because the AI kept clicking the social login button instead of the email/password form.

We spent two weeks manually fixing the generated tests, Got the pass rate up to about 140 out of 200, Then we shipped the next release, 23 of those 140 broke because the UI changed, The AI didn't adapt, We fixed them manually.

This is my life now, I am a full-time test babysitter for an AI system that was supposed to eliminate my department, The 11 QA engineers who got laid off were maintaining about 400 test cases across 6 platforms with a total maintenance burden of about 2 engineer-weeks per sprint, I am now maintaining 200 test cases on 1 platform with a maintenance burden of about 1.5 engineer-weeks per sprint, By myself.

The math didn't math, We went from 14 people maintaining 400 tests across 6 platforms to 3 people maintaining 200 tests on 1 platform, We lost 78% of the humans and 70% of the coverage, But the investor deck says AI-powered QA and the savings line shows $1.7M.

The 11 QA engineers who left took institutional knowledge about our product that no AI has, They knew that the checkout flow behaves differently when the user's cart has more than 50 items, They knew that the search filter breaks when you combine a date range with a category filter on mobile Safari, They knew that the payment flow fails silently when the user switches networks mid-transaction, None of that is documented anywhere, None of it is in the test suite, It lived in their heads and it walked out the door with them.

We've had four production incidents since the layoffs that the old QA team would have caught in their sleep, Total customer impact: about $340K in refunds and credits, Total savings from the layoff: roughly $850K so far, Net savings: $510K, Real net savings after you factor in my time, the CI costs, the platform license, and the incident response hours: probably $120K, For losing 78% of your quality coverage.

But the slide looks great.

Our Primary DNS Zone was deleted. We have the Recycle bin enabled and I didn't see the Zone inside the immediate bin. After doing some digging with powershell I found it in another container and attempted an ADObject Restore which said it completed without errors. I can then run powershell on the zombie zone and its no longer found in the deleted items. The zone now shows with the list of remaining zones listed only in powershell however DNS Manager still does not show the zone. The zone when i do query for it in powershell is listed as ...deleted-my-zone-.org I suspect the zone is neither dead nor re-animated now so I'm thinking the next option is to use Veeam to recover it however there seems to be different approaches to this.

Option 1: Mount a recent backup offline(not on the network) and login in DSRM and then export the zone. Login to one of the domain controllers and re-import (Assuming it doesnt conflict with the deleted one in its current state...) And deal with any fall out of missing objects.

Option 2: Attempt to recreate the Zone then use Veeam to restore individual objects into the zone (Again assuming it can do this and not conflict with the "Zombie" deleted zone).

Option 3: Full Authoritative Restore of one of the domain controllers and force Replication then deal with the fall out of any new objects created since the backup.

Am I missing anyting? Is there a special process to delete the now "Zombie Zone" before attempting restoration?

UPDATE: We have 3 Domain Controllers (1 Primary with the FSMO Roles) if that matters Not additional forests or domains so pretty basic for the most part.

UPDATE2: I was able to get this resolved. My goal during these kinds of potentially catastrophic events is to always try to preserve the existing state as much as possible and minimize change in the environment so I only like using Backups as an absolute last resort (not to discount the dangerousness of using powershell to recover the environment). In these scenarios I generally find admins in a state of: Everyone wants to do something immediately and the best course of action is slowdown and understand the problem.

The Solution: We have 3 domain Controllers with Server 2016 and 2019. We have the recycle bin enabled. What i discovered is that an AD Integrated zone will not show up in the normal Recyle Bin via the Server Administrative center where you normally recover deleted objects like user accounts from. I used powershell to locate the deleted Zone using filters in my search specifically for looking at deletedobjects and filtering based upon domainDNS zones.. In my case this was NOT a ForestZone which i had to make certain of before attempting recovery. Here is the command that found my deleted Zone.

Get-ADObject -IncludeDeletedObjects -SearchBase "DC=DomainDnsZones,DC=mydomain,DC=org" -Filter 'isDeleted -eq $true -and Name -like "*mydeletedsomain.org*"' -Properties Name,ObjectClass,LastKnownParent | Format-List Name,ObjectClass,ObjectGUID,LastKknownParent

I located the zone that was deleted in a long list outputed by the above command and it was prefixed with a ...Deleted-mydomain.org

I then ran one of these two commands to restore the Zone:

Get-ADObject -IncludeDeletedObjects -SearchBase "DC=DomainDnsZones,DC=mydeleteddomain,DC=org" -Filter 'isDeleted -eq "dnsZone" -and Name -like "*.mydeleteddomain.org*"' | Restore-ADObject

When successful the command just outputs System32 prompt

Get-ADObject -SearchBase "CN=Deleted Objects,DC=DomainDNSZones,DC=mydeleteddomain,DC=org" -Filter 'Name -like "*myDeletedDomain.org*" -and isDeleted -eq $true' -IncludeDeletedObjects | Restore-ADObject

After that my domain comtainer was restored however it was empty. i had to restart DNS to see the domain in DNS manager with an error.

The Restored domain had a name of ...Deleted-mydeleteddomain.org From here I ran a command to rename the domain back to its original name.

rename-adobject "DC=..Deleted-mydomain.org,CN=MicrosoftDNS,DC=DomainDnsZones,DC=mydomain,DC=org" -newname "mydomain.org"

I then ran a powershell command to list out all of the dnsNodes that had the original domain as parent. From here:

Get-ADObject -IncludeDeletedObjects -SearchBase "DC=DomainDnsZones,DC=mydomain,DC=org" -Filter 'isDeleted -eq $true -and ObjectClass -eq "dnsNode"' -properties LastKnownParent | Where-Object {$_.LastknownParent -like "*DC=mydomain.org,CN=MicrosoftDNS*"} | Restore-ADObject

From here I restarted DNS Services and all of my objects with the exception of a handful came back. I then ran some replication tests in AD and bounced the netlogon services and reregistered each domain controller with dns.

Of Note I used several sites including this one: Using AD Recycle Bin to restore deleted DNS zones and their contents in Windows Server 2008 R2 | Microsoft Community Hub To troubleshoot.

Also various powershell commands to verify the objects and names with help from different sites including ChatGPT. ChatGPT works well but its work must always be double checked and I often limit it to "investigation" duties so its meant to observe and help confirm hypothesis and theories.

Paid a red team good money. They found a path into our environment in 4 hours through a legacy admin panel someone built during an internal hackathon two years ago. Still running. Still exposed. Default credentials. Nobody remembered it existed until the report landed on the CTO's desk.

We spent 30k on a pen test and the biggest finding was something we built ourselves and forgot about. Not a zero day. Not a sophisticated attack chain. Just inventory failure.

Anyone else done a pen test and found your own ghosts? What was the dumbest entry point you've seen?

I know some laptops come with mobile network capability, in this case do you provide them with Sims to cater this? Or do you recommend them to their mobile hotspot?

PS: mistake with the title, not gsm but 4g/5g dongles

For the record, we support 100,000 users. Thoughts? Anyone else dealing with lunacy around AI potential from executives?

"Tell me you've never worked a day of help desk, without telling me you've never worked a day of help desk."

edit:

thank you all for the sanity check and hilarious replies. glad I'm not alone. my final question... what do these billionaires and rich elites think idle hands with highly technical skills and understanding of user behaviour are going to do with all their free time and desperation? they're gonna start phishing and bringing down powerplants and data centers is my theory.