Following your requests, we’re expanding some of the topics we’ve covered in the well-received ‘Sysadmin compendium of cheat sheets’ posts, and including SCCM and System Manager.

If you are a sysadmin, or even another role within IT, by and large, you love your job the same way we all love ours. There’s no other job I would rather have, or any other thing I would rather do, but sometimes it is fun to wonder what would be different if I had just made one decision differently.

We got a lot of great responses on r/SysAdmin – Reddit to our Compendium of cheat sheets, quick reference cards and one-pages – and a few requests for more cheat sheets. And since we love to give our readers more of what they really want, here’s a follow up to our original post. These are […]

There is so much information out there that it is impossible to remember everything you have read or came across. That’s why bookmarking is so important; hundreds of them in the form of cheat sheets, quick reference cards, one-pagers, pensieves, or anything you want to call them. There are some really smart people out there […]

Don’t you just hate it when you are ready to install that new program you found, or the new software application that the department is dying to use, and you go to install it only to be slapped down with a FATAL ERROR? Or more accurately, an Error: -1603 fatal error during installation. That’s really […]

Windows servers, remote management and scripting: What ties all of these things together? Powershell. You can use PowerShell to manage a local machine and a remote machine as well. Using WinRM (Windows Remote Management), you can configure all of your servers and workstations to accept remote PowerShell connections from authorized users so that they can […]

The other day I was working with a customer who had discovered several ‘unauthorized’ installs of a particular software package. Apparently the install files, and the serial number needed to activate the software, were stored together on a network share to which everyone had READ permissions, and once word got out, lots of users decided […]

“May the 4th be with you” always makes me see Sylvester the Cat dressed up in Jedi robes. And since today is Star Wars Day, we wanted to provide a fun post to combine two of our favorite things: sys admins and Star Wars. To the ‘normals’ that are out there, some of the things […]

Wikipedia defines a face-palm as the physical gesture of placing one’s hand flat across one’s face or lowering one’s face into one’s hand or hands. The gesture is seen in many cultures as a display of frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, shock, surprise, or sarcasm. In no culture is the face-palm more significant than in IT. Back […]

You’ve probably heard the phrase “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. I want to introduce another in the same vein as that – “The Dumb, the Stupid, and the Unbelievable”. I’ve been an IT consultant for many years, and I’ve seen my customers do a variety of strange things. Some were shocking, some were […]