Sysadmin

Kind of finally. SuSE https://www.suse.com/news/SUSE-Preserves-Choice-in-Enterprise-Linux/

So... I think this is kind of the worst case scenario re SuSE - an actual fork. But Oracle kind of hints at that, and Amazon already dropped a RHEL compatible AWS Linux for sort of a Fedora Server?

Obviously none of this is great, but would anyone really want Oracle leading a RHEL "close as possible" rebuild? I don't know anyone is going to downstream them.

SuSE is even weirder, as I understand it, SLE/OpenSuSE is a fork from decades ago, or at least also uses RPM? I can't imagine they get any value from trying to make a RHEL fork really... Why not push SLE? All very confusing, that's for sure.

Hello c/sysadmin, and welcome to the Patch Megathread! I'm editing this post and leaving it up as a single catch-all sticky post for patch days for the time being, since we're not seeing enough activity to warrant new threads IMO. If someone wants to help moderate / curate content and actively create new patch day posts, please let me know and I'll add you to the mod team.

This is the place to talk about the latest patches, updates, and releases. We put this thread into place to help gather all the information about this month's updates: What is fixed, what broke, what got released and should have been caught in QA, etc. We do this both to keep clutter out of the community, and provide a singular resource to read.

While this thread is timed to coincide with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, feel free to discuss any patches, updates, and releases, regardless of the company or product.

Remember the rules of safe patching:

• Deploy to a test/dev environment before prod.
• Deploy to a pilot/test group before the whole org.
• Have a plan to roll back if something doesn't work.
• Test, test, and test!

Hey all, in my company we've been having a lot of trouble with our first-line support team and I wanted to get some ideas how it works in other companies.

To give some context, I work in a Customer Team (L2-L3 Support) for a MSP, previously I belonged to the Internal Operations Team and they had a very negative view on the first-line team, with opinions like:

• we don't need them
• they lack knowledge
• management can't create a good first-line team because they don't want to invest

But I didn't interact a lot with them before, but now, I have to interact with them on a daily basis, and I see some things that have started to make me worried about the team:

• They ignore KB's
• They say that they don't have access to certain servers, or that they don't find the correct credentials and just pass the ticket for us to solve
• They have people that lack knowledge in some basic support, I have had tickets passed on with notes like "I don't know how to use Linux"

From my point of view and the team I belong now, we all think that management didn't really verify the required knowledge for some members of that team, but they really have a few that are trying really hard to improve their skills.

We have started to try to help them, so that our job can also become easier:

• Improve the language in legacy KB's
• Simplify the process in the monitoring platform with more directions
• Automating some processes so that the first-line can execute fixes without having the required knowledge on the backend
• Picking the best members of their team and promoting them to our team

That team also has some problems that I fully recognize:

• Shit pay
• Bad leadership, that team has had 6 different Team Leaders in a short time (I have been here for only 2 years)
• Lacking interview and requirements for the position

Sorry for the long text, would love to have some feedback from your sides, or is this normal in a lot of companies?

Suncor is replacing employee computers after a cybersecurity incident last week shut down debit and credit processing at Petro-Canada gas stations across the country, among a series of other security measures at the Calgary-based company.

"Normally you wouldn't expect hardware to be compromised so fully that you need to replace everything,"

What are you favourite/useful rsync tricks these days?

Mine is rsync -r --chown=AUSER:AGROUP SRC DST to copy the files and change the ownership on the fly.

I got my new PC for about 3 or 4 months. Today, I was using my PC as usual and suddenly everything stopped reacting. Rebooting just boots be into the UEFI interface. Which is very concerning.

Then I got a liveusb to look into what's happening. Upon using smartctl. It shows that my SSD have 0% spare capacity despite only writing 15TB to it.

So far, I knew that Samsung's EVO 980 and 990 SSDs have a firmware bug that can cause this. But this is the 1st time I know of 970 Pros having this issue.

I know there's a lot of servers using consumer drives for their system. Be careful and check if you are using a 970. If so, check the spare capacity RIGHT NOW and decided if to upgrade the firmware or RMA the product.

Monitoring and observability tools commit the cardinal sin of tricking people into thinking monitoring is an easy problem. It is very simple to monitor a small application or service. Almost none of those approaches scale.

VMSA-2023-0014 - VMware vCenter Server updates address multiple memory corruption vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-20892, CVE-2023-20893, CVE-2023-20894, CVE-2023-20895, CVE-2023-20896) Please see the advisory here: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0014.html Impacted Products: • VMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server) • VMware Cloud Foundation (Cloud Foundation)

Hi guys, I recently started working at a company with about 50 people that has grown to large for their current IT setup. They have no documentation or any SOPs. Has anyone been in a similar situation and how did you go about creating documentation, especially when you are new and don't fully understand all of the services they have in place?

Thankfully it's mostly a Microsoft shop and pretty low tech but there are dozens of exchange rules in place that no one knows why they exist or what they do, dozens of SharePoint sites with critical information strewn about them and so on. It's hard to think where to even start and decide what the best way to organize this information will be, and keep in a place a system where we will update it regularly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I started a new job as a systems engineer not too long ago and am looking for a way to get comfortable with FOS as I've never had to manage FC switches before. Anyone know of a way to emulate it, or should I just resign myself to buying an old switch on ebay and throwing it in the rack?

Hi, all!

For those of you who work in organizations that do decent documentation, what are you using?

We currently just have a bunch of word docs in a SharePoint document library. I've previously used dedicated solutions for this such as Bookstack and Confluence. The company is very anti-Atlassian, so Confluence is out.

Just want to see what y'all are using as I search for a better solution.

Thanks!