u/floswamp

Earlier this week, I went into another department to talk to the manager about patching a server that's critical to their work. The manager was out, but I saw a senior departmental person and said "Hey <blah>, since you're the adult in the room, we're planning on patching <blah> server overnight Thursday to Friday. I'll send a follow up email confirming this."

End of conversation.

Today I get called into my directors office because another person in that department didn't like the comment. I am so over working in IT. The nobody gives a shit about you till things break and then it's your fault.

I know I probably shouldn't say anything, and yes I was technically at fault. But come on. My org is a 24/7 type of place, so I do sooo much after hours just to avoid interruptions. I'm just kind of over it today. Tomorrow I may love this place again.

This is a firstone. I appleid for a new Business Account for my business that has been incorporated form more than 15 years. It got rejected because of trademark infringement according to the automated message that I received over the weekend. I looked up my company's name and it only shows one trademark that was set up in 1986 and made inactive in 1989 in Vegas.

Has anyone else dealt with this and how can I resolve this issue with Apple.

Thanks for any insight!

Hi everyone, how’s it going?

I’d love to get your perspective on this situation:

I’m the sole guy responsible for IT operations and infrastructure for my country at the company where I work. The company was recently "sold"/migrated to another group within the same conglomerate. I used to report to a highly structured global IT team (80% cloud, very mature processes), but with this transition, an entirely new leadership team took over. The new CTO recently came here to establish the new headquarters in another city.

We are currently in a transition phase, still using a few things from the old infrastructure (Entra ID, Intune, and... our remote access tool). However, the IT team from the old group won't allow us to add any new machines to this access tool during the migration. To make things more interesting, the CTO’s first big mandate upon arriving here was: replace everyone's laptops.

Realizing that I would completely lose the ability to support these new machines, I asked the CTO which global remote access solution they use so I could migrate the machines, or if we should procure a standalone solution just for my country. His answer: "We don't need any."

I didn't understand and pressed the matter. I explained that we operate on a hybrid model, users are scattered, and now that the new HQ is active, I’m being flooded with support tickets from people in another city with these new laptops, where I have zero visibility. He insisted: "No need. You can just guide the user over a video call. It is a global decision not to use remote access tools."

Since he is the CTO and we speak in English with each other (which is not the native language for either of us) I decided not to keep bumping heads.

But the tickets keep coming. Trying to troubleshoot blindly is an absolute hell. Out of desperation, I did my homework: I gathered a few local quotes from standard market remote access tool vendors and presented the pricing to him, showing how users were reaching out to me and why we needed this. He replied again: "We are not going to use remote access."

I simply gave up. I'm not going to keep bumping heads with the CTO. It’s clearly not a budget issue, it feels more like a rigid and inflexible mindset. He never gave me the real "why" behind this rule. At first, I thought maybe it was some extreme, distorted Zero Trust policy or user data privacy thing. But then, a few days later, I asked this same CTO which corporate antivirus solution we were going to deploy, since we are going to stop using the one from the previous group. His response: "We don't need antivirus because we use MacBooks."

At that point, my friends, I decided to just "let it go" and strictly follow his orders. I brought the issues to the highest technical authority in my sector, and he refused to act. If a key user has to spend 4 hours on a video call with me trying to fix a stupid issue that I could solve in 30 seconds via terminal, so be it.

Has anyone here ever dealt with such an inflexible leadership? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this "behavior", your experiences, and what kind of workarounds you’ve used in similar situations.

Thanks!

A whole bunch of computers need the update but it crashes if an older version is installed (ver 20). It is also a dog of an install. And having to select what version after it has half installed is frustrating.

I’ve never liked QuickBooks.

Company went from 50 devices to over 500 in six months. Everyone started installing their own SaaS crap, shadow IT everywhere, no centralized anything. Support tickets exploding, I am firefighting nonstop, no time to set up proper MDM or RMM. Finally snapped yesterday and wrote a quick PowerShell script to remotely uninstall a bunch of duplicate security tools people installed themselves. Tested it on my machine, worked fine, pushed it via PDQ to what I thought was our test group.

Except I fatfingered the group name. Hit the entire production fleet. Every laptop, every desktop, every server with AV accessible via WMI. 400+ endpoints, all of them. Wiped CrowdStrike, Defender, Malwarebytes, everything. Reboots started cascading because systems detected no protection and freaked out. Phones ringing off the hook, sales team cant access CRM because something broke, finance yelling about payroll server offline.

Spent 12 hours straight manually reimaging priority machines and pushing fresh AV installs via login scripts. We are back up but holy crap the embarrassment. Boss pulled me into a room this morning, face like thunder, but said recoverable if no breach happened overnight. I cannot believe I did this. No sleep, stomach in knots checking threat logs.

How did you claw back control when device count 10x'd and everyone went rogue with tools?

Sometimes it's boring and I let Claude does it's thing, the isuue is i give Claude access to the production payment system and all production databases, it makes life easy but sometimes I wonder what could happen if I go to sleep and Claude be clauding

Specifically he reached out to our PM without IT on the email and then explicitly stated he doesn't need us when the PM pushed back.

ERP doesn't even have an API. All of the existing integrations either use a JDBC connection or run a remote command (IBM i ACS) to retrieve data/perform work.

I can't imagine what he's trying to do but I feel like it's time to jump ship. Not really looking forward to this

My 500GB SSD was getting completely full. I know you can compress files to save space, so I just right-clicked the entire "C:\Windows" folder, selected "Add to archive", and set it to maximum compression. It took like three hours, but it saved me 40GB! The problem is, I restarted my PC and now it just gives me a black screen with a flashing cursor. Since Windows is zipped up, how do I open WinRAR from the motherboard BIOS to extract it so it can boot?