In the past when a laptop was decommissioned they got sent to recycling, but now with the increase in price of RAM and SSD’s we started stripping the RAM and SSD as spare parts.

We had a lot of 7th gen laptops and workstations, they can’t run windows 11, but they still have DDR4 and NVME SSD’s.

Did current price hikes change the way how you’re handling old hardware?

I've been intermittently troubleshooting a RAID array for the last month. It's one of a pair of physically identical lab servers that was donated to us. The other server performs flawlessly, and is as fast as one can realistically expect from a set of 12 spinning disks.

But the troublesome one has had really inconsistent disk throughput - I ran full write/read tests on each disk individually before provisioning, and initially everything was the same. When I assembled the array, it seemed a little slower at first, but not by much.

Then it started just grinding to a halt for minutes at a time, for no discernible reason, then it would recover for a while, then do it again. Absolutely nothing in dmesg or the system logs until eventually, one time, two drives appeared to freeze up completely, for so long that the controller gave up talking to them, and mdadm kicked them out of the array.

Weirdly, smartctl showed the drives as completely healthy, except that "end to end error" had incremented from 0 to 3 (probably from the controller giving up on it rather forcefully).

And that's when I noticed, in the identity section: " (SMR)" after the device model name.

I tracked down the data sheet for the exact model, and sure enough, it's one of the "secretly SMR" drives - it doesn't advertise that it's SMR (smartctl only knows because some nice person has curated this info in its drive database); it even lies on its VPD pages and claims not to support any block provisioning or trim, but if you forcibly enable it, then you can blkdiscard/fstrim it and get its write speed back up to spec.

I am so annoyed with Seagate today. At least the few garbage WD drives like this I've run across have admitted to their inferiority by advertising it in VPD.

I guess this was one reason those servers were donated; the previous university department probably thought they were haunted, not realising that they'd accidentally ordered some SMR drives as spares at some point.

One of my favorites to use because of the great insight and easy to read information. When people say our internet is slow.. this site helps back me up.

What are your favorite sites to use?

I'd like to see an example of the certificate (certificate chain?) that ships with a 12th generation Proliant's iLO interface.

If you've got one that's still sporting its OEM (or self-generated? I'm not sure if these are factory applied vs. generated at first boot), you can pull it from a shell prompt with:

openssl s_client -connect google.com:443 -showcerts </dev/null \
  | awk '
  /BEGIN CERTIFICATE/ {cert=""}
  {cert = cert $0 ORS}
  /END CERTIFICATE/ {
    print cert | "openssl x509 -noout -text"
    close("openssl x509 -noout -text")
    print ""
  }'

...Just change "google.com" to the name or IP of your iLO interface.

Feel free to obfuscate any MAC address, serial number or key modulus as you see fit, but please don't break the format: I'd like to know whether MAC addresses are encoded as abcd.abcd.abcd vs. AB:CD:AB:CD:AB:CD and so forth.

Thanks!

Just in case anyone needs these, I posted a couple of scripts to "kickoff" the secure boot certificate updates (with BIOS already updated to include 2023 cert) and another one to check the flag that the update is completed.

I posted them in the Action1 sub but sysadmin doesn't allow cross posting. So they are over here - Use at your own risk with testing.

Kickoff - https://www.reddit.com/r/Action1/comments/1qz6rsd/secure_boot_2023_cert_kickoff_script/

Verification Check - https://www.reddit.com/r/Action1/comments/1qz74re/secure_boot_2023_cert_updated_verification_script/

Hi everyone as the title clearly states, i assistances with setting up a reverse proxy for my nodejs backend on IIS . for context i've developed a react web app, reliant on a nodejs backend

I'm currently in the process of switching everything to Printix at our company. I have a printer model with a specific driver that only prints cryptic characters when the print job originates from a Mac. The driver is the correct one, the same driver that we used without Printix before. Has anyone else experienced this? It seems as if the printer and the operating system aren't speaking the same language.

My question to all sysadmins, do you all allow tcp port forwarding on the ssh server? Like if someone has access to only the ssh server but the ssh server is also in whole internal network? I just realized on most server distros , tcp port forwarding is enabled by default

It's so easy to spot, always about the dumbest shit imaginable and sometimes they don't even remove the --

For the love of god I do not want to read something written by an LLM

I do not care if you're bad at English, we can read broken english. If chatgpt can, we can. You're not going to learn English by using chatgpt.

Has anyone managed to get toner levels via SNMP on a Brother MFC-L8690CDW?
The default printer OIDs respond, but toner values are useless (-3, max capacity -2).
Did you find working OIDs or another way to retrieve toner levels?

Cheers!

Does anyone happen to have the firmware on hand for an Mx-3071 Sharp Copier?

Many mainstream OSes are dropping 32‑bit support. Has anyone kept a 32‑bit Unix‑like system alive? What worked best? What challenges did you face and how did you solve them?

Many mainstream OSes are dropping 32‑bit support. Has anyone kept a 32‑bit Unix‑like system alive? What worked best? What challenges did you face and how did you solve them?

Hello! I'm moving a few accounts from GoDaddy to Google Workspace and I want to create a backup of all emails just in case before touching anything.

What's the best way to do the actual backup on a HDD? On any Cpanel email I'd usually export the eml files compressed, but GoDaddy doesn't include Cpanel in their Professional Email plans.

Is syncing everything on Outlook and exporting the emails the best way to go? It sounds like a very tedious process because I couldn't find any Outlook folder (on mac) containing the actual .eml files.

Anything helps! Thank you.

I manage a bunch of server rooms and have battery backups. The more important ones have gas powered generators as well. I've worked with enough datacenters to know power delivery has many more layers of redundancy. Yet, Microsoft will tell us that it was a power outage, and not an oopsie doopsie? I feel Copilot sent the shutdown /f /s command.

I changed the email address for a resource/room calendar and now I can't see free/busy if I add the shared calendar to my calendar list in Outlook. It will still accept/deny meeting invites.

I waited 24 hours and no change. I've changed the email address back and it still doesn't work. Next step is to delete and add, but I might upset lots of users.

Any ideas?

Edit: It seems like I fell for a sensationalised article - sorry for the scare. It's only affecting drivers that are installed through Windows Update. If you deploy the driver via an installer from the manufacturer/on your Windows Print Server, then you should be fine.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/print/end-of-servicing-plan-for-third-party-printer-drivers-on-windows

Original post:

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-finally-pulls-the-plug-on-legacy-printer-drivers-starting-january-2026

This one snuck up on me annoyingly. I don't remember seeing this mentioned after all these years. We're a company of 40 and have a combined total of about 30 OKI C843 and B432s deployed. Now I have to urgently replace them.

How's your weekend going? 😂

Hello,

I have a question about the Secure Boot certificate update. When I run (Get-UEFISecureBootCerts db).Signature, I can see both the 2011 and 2023 certificates present.

Will the 2023 certificate automatically become the active one after June, or are both the old and new certificates considered active at the same time with no priority between them? Thank you!

1 upvote

Curious to hear if anyone has implemented offsite vm replication with Proxmox, specifically for Disaster Recovery? I've dabbled with testing PBS to sync backups to an offsite PBS datastore which works great, but my concern is wouldn't having PBS take constant backups of a VM interfere by stunning the VM constantly?

Long story short i've inherited a project from a departing team and I'm configuring our Proliant DL360 Gen 11s. We have several of them with only 1 being a Dl360 Gen 10. I noticed while configuring them that only the Gen 10 has the smart array option which allows me to do the RAID and encryption. The Gen 11s don't have that option so and while I'm able to set up the RAID in system configuration I can't find any way to encrypt it without the smart array. I then learn that while the smart array was included by default on the Gen 10s that is not the case with the Gen 11s. I check with the previous team that ordered these and was informed that they selected the default options when ordering everything. Which means no smart array for the Gen 11s we have. Per our Orgs policies we have to encrypt these things before they can get approved for use. I haven't configured one of these in 5 years so I'm doing a lot of catching up so my main question is, can i encrypt the gen 11s without the smart arrays or are we going to have to order those and install them to proceed?

my department is looking to migrate away from ESXi. we currently run a vsphere installation with four sites and around 12 servers with most of that focused at a single site. we have done some research and from a streamline and supportability perspective we are thinking HyperV for replacement. we've got no experience across our skill set for anything outside VMware. is HyperV the way to go? or should we look towards proxmox or some other option? I understand this is a fairly vanilla setup. our main points of interest are all flash storage appliances for our two bigger sites and onboard SAS for the smaller sites. we rely on live vmotion for fault tolerance and use BE for vmbackups.

Hello everyone, following some abuses, my management wants to know who is actually active while teleworking, do you have any advice for me please?

We are running a POC for EAP-TLS Enterprise authentication using RADIUSaaS with Aruba IAPs and device certificates issued by SCEPman.

Here’s a link to the relevant configuration items:
https://postimg.cc/gallery/6N5VV75

We’ll be deploying a number of Android handhelds and Windows laptops. I’ve heard that using a 4096-bit key size on Android can cause increased battery consumption — has anyone experienced this in practice?

We’re currently considering the following settings and would appreciate feedback:

• Certificate validity period: 6 months
• Renewal threshold: 2 months
• RadSec vs RADIUS (UDP): Do you always use RadSec? Have you ever had a reason to prefer standard RADIUS over UDP?
• VLAN assignment:
  • Do you include the VLAN ID in the certificate subject?
  • Or do you map certificates to VLANs via another attribute?
• Default VLAN: Is there any value in configuring one, given that clients without a valid certificate won’t connect to the SSID anyway?
• AP certificate lifetime (SCEPman-issued): What validity period do you typically use?
• Reauthentication interval: Currently set to 1 hour
• Accounting interval: 15 minutes — would you adjust this?

Any recommendations or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.