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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • This is actually the worst type of end-user.

    Doesn’t make a ticket or notify anyone that there is a problem and then proceeds to try and fix it themselves incorrectly. When it does become a ticket, they won’t remember exactly what steps they took to troubleshoot and will waste 5x as much time from support staff trying to fix it than if they just didn’t touch it in the first place.

    Guaranteed didn’t wipe the machine from the built in reset/recovery screen and instead used a windows installer that was created on a different computer and doesn’t have the correct network drivers in the image.





  • This is specifically an issue with corporate M365 accounts when a user tries to migrate to a new phone without access to the old phone where the authenticator was setup.

    Personal MS accounts can backup their auth secret keys to cloud storage, and when signing in on a new device, it authenticates you with your cloud storage (Google/Apple) and properly restores your MS Authenticator app.

    The issue is that while MS says you can backup your corporate M365 accounts in MS Authenticator, it doesnt actually store the secret key, so it’s useless.

    Have your administrator enable TAP (Temporary Access Passwords) on the tenant. Then an M365 admin can create a TAP for your account that lets you login without a password/2FA. You can use the TAP to login and rejoin MS Authenticator app. The TAP expires in 1 hour by default.


  • ^ Your M365 admin needs to know where to manage the specific authentication methods and be sure to disable MS auth rollouts. By default right now, authentication rollouts are enabled on all tenants with P1 licensing or above, and it only supports the MS Authenticator app.

    Once that rollout is disabled, the authentication methods your admin has made available to you will actually work properly.


  • Edge/IE run some underlying services for built-in windows features, so uninstalling them can cause issues with completely different parts of the OS.

    Ran into an issue with a client still running Office 2016 where uninstalling IE11 prevented them from opening any links within those apps. Office was harcoded to look at IE for link handling and didn’t respect the setting for your default browser.



  • For Lenovo, install Win10 from a USB, install Lenovo Vantage, hit update. For Dell, install Win10 from a USB, install Dell Command Update, hit update.

    Manuallyneeding to find and install drivers stopped being a thing after Win10 1709, which was 6 years ago at this point. Win10 will almost always get you fully updated drivers if you just keep hitting Windows Update on a fresh install.


  • M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.

    If a BIOS update fails on them, they don’t have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.

    The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.

    I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.

    It’s at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can’t run the recovery from any other OS.

    Absolute baloney from Apple.




  • Somehow you hit an unpopular opinion landmine with the greybeard devs.

    For the greybeard devs: Try asking ChatGPT to write you some Arduino code to do a specific task. Even if you don’t know how to write code for an Arduino, ChatGPT will get you 95% of the way there with the proper libraries and syntax.

    No way in hell I’m digging through forums and code repos for hours to blink an led and send out a notification through a web hook when a sensor gets triggered if AI can do it for me in 30 seconds. AI obviously can’t do everything for you if you’ve never coded anything before, but it can do a damn good job of translating your knowledge of one programming language into every other programming language available.




  • Using a Pi3b to run AdGuard Home and a TailScale subnet router.

    I’ve got another Pi3b running Octoprint/Klipper for a 3d printer, but I’m currently migrating that to Mainsail running on an old SFF PC so I can run multiple printers with Klipper off the same PC.

    The rest of my stack is on an actual server running UnRaid with like 50tb raw storage.

    I will say that TailScale has been annoying asf with their subnet router setup not actually forcing the correct DNS for AdGuard Home so I can have ad-blocking while away from home. I had to move back to a pure Wireguard setup directly on my router for DNS to work properly.





  • I’m surprised more people in the selfhosting community aren’t recommending Mikrotik.

    Their cheapest routers have all the same software features as their enterprise gear. They’re also one of the only companies who makes most of their routers and switches capable of being powered with POE in and redundant DC power.

    All of their newer ARM based routers support running docker containers natively on the routers extra features. You can run PiHole/AdGuard, nginx, tailscale, etc. directly on your routers hardware.

    I’ve been running a hexS for 3 years without any issues. I run multiple VLANs and wireguard directly on it, and it has an SFP port that I can use for an ONT module to get a fiber connection directly to my router from my ISP. I think it cost me $60 when I bought it.