r/ITSupport

Three years ago I was doing shift work. Nights, weekends, the whole lot. Then my first kid was born and I thought — I can't do this for the next twenty years.

So I took a pay cut, walked into a help desk job, and honestly? I had no idea what I was doing.

But here's what I know now that I didn't know then.

Help desk gets a bad reputation. People treat it like a waiting room — something you endure until a real IT job comes along. That framing is completely wrong, and it cost me time before I figured it out.

The troubleshooting instinct you build in six months of real tickets? You can't get that from a course. The ability to talk to a stressed-out manager whose laptop won't open five minutes before a presentation — and actually calm them down — that's worth more than most certs. You learn how the whole stack connects because everything is your problem, at least long enough to triage it.

If you're starting out: A+ is worth doing, Professor Messer on YouTube is free and gets you through it (I personally watched his stuff every month and he does a podcast if you prefer audio). Build something at home, even small. An old laptop with VirtualBox and Windows Server. Break it. Fix it. That's the interview. My preference is Proxmox running on a Dell server :)

I'm a sysadmin now. Monday to Friday. I have my kid's school drop-off every morning.

Anyway — I've been documenting all of this on my YouTube channel (shameless plug, link in the comments). Just made a video on exactly this topic if any of it resonates. Would genuinely love to hear from anyone who's in the middle of this right now.

Hello folks,

I am an IT professional and work in a small company. Maintaining internal as well as public facing docs have always been a pain point for me.

Internally we use Confluence which I hate because it just feels too complicated. For public facing docs I tried looking out for different softwares like Mintlify, Gitbook etc but they all seem too catered to Enterprise clients. We have a small team and do not think paying 300 bucks a seat is worth it for us.

Plus most of them made us create a new repo and maintain it. We are just migrating to git so our systems were not built for it.

That made me think what if I make something for teams like us? I took it as a side project and after months of building it on weekends I am proud to share Dokly with you.

I designed it keeping myself in mind so I am sure it might be missing some features or might not be polished as my competitors but it gets the job done.

I am just looking for honest feedback. I do not care if anyone uses it or not. I am just proud that I was able to build it on my own.

I have a degree on networks and systems with 6 months internship i'm from Morocco i've been looking for a year i find it soo hard to land in a job am I doing anything wrong

Some back story.

I have worked in IT for around 10 years and are pretty skilled at most stuff and what i dont know i learn super quickly. I'm educated IT Supporter abseloutly smashed every exam etc

And now i work as a IT Consultant with Infrastructure management

Before i came to that role i worked as a IT Supporter (or whatever it was, i did repairs on ATM,Cash registars, screens and stores + more) i did help quite a lot of people yet i learnt it at the same time as they did. Did that make some strange situations? Yep oh yep.

Yet i'm still the abseloute worst user of software.

Like i know i can setup storage,servers etc in production big enivorments and stuff but i dont do it myself at all, and even sometimes i cant even manage to work in Word or Excel.

I know why we use VLAN, Good passwords etc etc, yet i still dont use it even if it's something of my own personal shit and business shit. Heck even today i managed to do a ametour fuck up, i had a VM with a public IP. Used VNC to get it installed etc, but didn't think to set a password on, then someone just randomly took over the mouse and i knew instantly what had gone wrong. This is something i say to my customers every single day yet i dont even do it.

I feel like it's hard to give support when i even dont know myself what the hells going on sometimes specially with Windows 11 shit.

Thoughts over

Thanks if u read any of it 😛

New conditional access policy. any unmanaged device gets blocked from accessing corporate apps. straightforward zero trust principle, security signed off, leadership approved it.

applied it on a friday. by monday morning we had 14 tickets from the sales team. turns out about a third of our field sales reps were using personal iPads to demo products to clients on site. nobody in IT knew. nobody in security knew. sales operations knew but wasn't in the room when the policy was discussed.

the demos couldn't happen without access to the product environment. the product environment was now blocked on personal devices. sales escalated to their VP who called our CTO before i'd finished my second coffee.

policy got exceptions carved out by end of day. temporary, supposed to be reviewed in 30 days. that was seven months ago.

we now have a formal policy that says unmanaged devices are blocked and an informal reality where a meaningful chunk of our field team is operating on exceptions that nobody is actively managing.

security wants to close the exceptions. the business won't move. i'm trying to find a technical solution to what is not really a technical problem.

how others actually resolved this kind of conflict cleanly or is the exception list just the permanent state once business pushes back hard enough.

We manage ticketing for 30+ clients. Their systems are pristine. Auto routing, SLA alerts, escalations, the works. Our own internal IT requests is however a complete disaster. Someone needs software access and it's a chain of Slack DMs and emails. Took an incredibly long time last week to get a new tech provisioned because the request bounced between four people and nobody knew who was supposed to do what. We literally sell this service to other companies and can't figure it out for ourselves.

Many companies still try to block websites on Android devices using basic browser restrictions.

But if work and personal data aren’t properly separated, users can easily bypass those controls via personal apps or unmanaged browsers.
To prevent this, IT teams usually enforce web restrictions only within the work environment while keeping personal data private on BYOD devices.

I really need some help!

I volunteer for a Community Group as Secretary. I have sent ALOT of emails in the last 4 days or so asking local business to support us at an upcoming event. Since yesterday, every email I sent is being returned. It just says 'message rejected' that's it, click this link - which isn't relevant to my blocked message!

Can anyone help me? Please!

Hi everyone! Over the past few days, my internet connection has been dropping out for a few seconds and then coming back on.
-There’s no problem with the cable; it works fine on my laptop with the same cable.
-It’s been doing this since the last Windows update.
-I’ve already tried commands like flush DNS and similar ones.
-I’ve already tried resetting the internet connection. (That seemed to fix it), but as soon as I restart the computer, it’s bad again.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Windows 11

I need to migrate my nonprofit's email (11 users) from a webmail service ("aplusnet by HostPapa") to GMail or something compatible with Outlook. I'm out of my depth. What is the simplest way to do this without breaking the bank?

We had this recurring issue where a simple internal access request should be a straightforward flow but it never is in practice. it starts with IT needing to provision accounts, HR handling employee records, and Finance approving system and tool access. on paper it looks like a straight path, but in reality each team works out of their own queue, their own tools, and their own timing.

so what ends up happening is this constant back and forth where nobody actually owns the full lifecycle of the request. what it looks like in practice:

- IT waits for HR confirmation before they can proceed, but HR doesn’t treat it as urgent yet
- HR is waiting on Finance approval for system access, which sits in a separate queue checked once or twice a day
-Finance asks for extra context or manager confirmation, which has to be chased back through IT or HR again
-meanwhile the employee is stuck waiting days for something that should take hours
-everyone is technically doing their part, but the request keeps losing momentum between handoffs

we also tried tracking it manually, but the problem was not visibility, it was coordination. everyone could see their part, but nobody had a full view of the entire lifecycle of the request, so things kept slipping even when nothing was actually broken. over time it became clear that the real issue was not the individual steps, but the lack of a system that can understand the full context of a request and keep it moving across teams without losing ownership.

how are teams handling internal support workflows like this at scale without it turning into constant manual coordination work?

If you know please share your golden words.

Small issue… My partners iPhone 11 has bricked, I think it’s a motherboard failure, it won’t respond to anything, plugged into a laptop, charger, attempted to hard restart it and still no luck.

I’ve taken it to an Apple shop and they can’t get it working either both Apple and a repairs shop have agreed saying the motherboard is the problem and to repair it would require a new motherboard… This brings me to the second part of the issue.

My partner has some sentimental photos and videos stored on this device and they’ve set all their passwords, including the iCloud account and email to a random password stored in Apple’s password manager which means we can’t get into the email account that’s linked either.

Now the email is locked, the phone unresponsive and if we were to fix the phone there’s a high probability that all the data we want from the phone will be lost in the process of replacing the motherboard.

With all of this, my question, is there at all a possibility of us being able to recover this data at all? And if it is possible is the only solution to send it to a data recovery centre to pay quite a high bill to get this fixed?

I've been messing around with NAS setups for a while now, first using an old PC i had laying around and now with a Pi 5 using the Radxa Penta SATA HAT. On two occasions now, once on the old PC and once on the Pi, I've accidentally killed a hard disk drive while trying to format it. By kill I mean it no longer spins up and doesn't appear in fdisk or lsblk.

On the first occasion I was formatting with OpenMediaVault, on the second I was formatting via Pi Lite OS (SSH'd in from my regular PC) before installing OMV. On both occasions I was following step-by-step instructions from trusted online tutorials.

The first one was a USB external HDD that was not new, so I figured it was a fluke that it happened to die when I was trying to use it again. The second one was a brand new NAS HDD from a trusted retailer, so now I'm wondering if there's something I'm doing incredibly wrong that's causing me to kill drives. Is there a common cause of this issue happening? Is there something I should look out for in future to avoid doing this again?

I visit Reddit every day. I am blind and use the screen reader Voiceover to access content. Suddenly today I cannot get Voiceover to read posts. I can still read the comments but not the original posts. Clearly there has been some kind of Reddit update that has caused a bug. Can anyone help?

Hi! Some guy I didn't trust used my MacBook yesterday an I have weird .js files and stuff on my Mac now. And what is sshd-keygen-wrapper? new .bak? documents I cannot open with a question mark (for example: system-Small----164.00.h-27.88rkwXjBcg0jLGkOXgflR#vfsEQ3NEu-HIIxpQpIS#DfabA=.chrono-timeline and like ten more), lot of caches, plists.. idk. How can I see if he is still spying or did something bad on my laptop? Unfortunately I don't know a lot about computers so I would be happy if someone could help ❤️

I will have interview with this role at Supermicro after countless applications. I currently have CS bachelor’s degree with Comptia A+ and Network+, and I have no IT experience yet. So, I want to find a job that can help me having experience in IT career. But this job is more like technician. Can anyone give me some ideas about this?
This is JD:

System Repair and Test Technician

Date: May 2, 2026
Location: San Jose, California, United States
Company: Super Micro Computer
Job Req ID: 28248

About Supermicro:
Supermicro® is a Top Tier provider of advanced server, storage, and networking solutions for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/ Big Data, Hyperscale, HPC and IoT/Embedded customers worldwide. We are the #5 fastest growing company among the Silicon Valley Top 50 technology firms. Our unprecedented global expansion has provided us with the opportunity to offer a large number of new positions to the technology community. We seek talented, passionate, and committed engineers, technologists, and business leaders to join us.
Job Summary:
As a System Repair and Test Technician, you will have solid knowledge of PC systems, server operations, and troubleshooting. In this role, you will have the opportunity to complete the final testing of all Supermicro and OEM RMA products, as well as perform ECO and BIOS upgrades. We are looking for passionate and dedicated technicians who love what they do and can provide excellent testing support.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Essential Duties and Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
Test and calibration of Supermicro/OEM RMA products and final assemblies
Follow drawings, written and verbal instructions to complete work assignments
Determine job status (check shortage and close of work orders, etc.)
Determine material status of jobs
Reference all pertinent procedures, drawings, and specifications for the purposed changes
Physically locate job materials within the assembly/test calibration area
ECO upgrades
Report any defective parts to RMA Repair Database
Onsite customer support service as needed
GPU skills and knowledge are a plus
Qualifications:
Technical school certificate or college degree is preferred
Minimum 1 year of experience as a test technician preferred
Good operation software skills in Windows or Linux
Must be a team player
Capable of self-motivated hard work with a positive attitude
Demonstrated skills and experience in electronic circuit analysis and troubleshooting
Good soldering and de-soldering skills
Excellent communication skills both verbal and written
Ability to set priorities, multi-task, resolve problems and manage time