r/sysadmin

I'm a 30+ year network/systems admin/engineer and I feel like I've done a great job over the decades keeping up running and secure. I feel like I work as hard as anyone in the company and have a sense of ownership that is hard to teach. I've patched our servers every month on schedule for the past 17 years straight. I've used all the latest security tools to ensure safe authentication and protection against malicious activity. We always have stellar pen tests results. I'm a great troubleshoot. I take my security training and pass the tests with flying colors. I get exceeded expectations for my reviews. They even named the server from after me! All that and a bag of chips.

But...

I'm a freaking failure when it comes to phishing tests. I've failed two this year and three in the last three years. I've never actually fallen prey to real phishing. I know what that looks like and my tools don't let it near me. But I had to tell our email security gateway to allow those phishing simulations thru to our inboxes. And I keep falling prey to them. What is wrong with me!?! Why can't I learn?? I'm going to get fired because of this. We've got some employee handbook rules about not screwing up like this. Three strikes and all that.

All this good will and work and a career that I can feel great about going to be flushed down the drain and I'll retire a failure. Was hoping to retire in a few years and ride off into the sunset. Now I'm going to ride off a cliff into a ditch. I feel like shit today. Can't wait until Monday to get yelled at or maybe even fired.

Am I the only good sysadm to struggle like this? I hope it's not just me. Feel terrible.

Logged into AWS Billing today and nearly achieved enlightenment.

Month-to-date cost: $978,081,319,814.31

Forecast for the month: $1,640,183,462,987.13

Last month: $14.54

That’s a perfectly reasonable 10,758,281,500,456% increase.

I did not launch 40 million EC2 instances, train Skynet, or store the entire internet in S3. The cost breakdown appears to blame Amazon S3.

The funniest part is the calm little recommendation on the right:

Expired payment method.

Yes, AWS. Unfortunately, my card may not have a $1.6 trillion limit.

Has anyone else seen this billing-dashboard glitch today, or have I accidentally become a systemically important financial institution?

PS: No, I do not have $978 billion. Please stop asking me for loans.

I've been in systems administration for almost 30 years. We had a new Sr. Director start a couple months ago. He brought in a lot of changes to fit his style which I understand. Part of my job function is patch management for the company. He saw that our vulnerability score is high, so he assumed it was a patching issue. He was told that by our IT Security team. I provided proof that the patches go out and that the score is attributed to the amount of field techs who don't turn on their pcs.

He said stop autopatching and start a schedule with groups. I did. We use a third party patching system that is replacing a previous one. The older one is still active with only two apps it updates. One of those apps updated the other day and broke some developers apps. I rolled it back and all was good.

Yesterday I asked to talk to my boss about it. I told him that it was my fault that I should've stopped updating that app. He proceeds to berate me saying "you have an office so you're seen as a leader. You're not a leader". I was stunned. He then started being condescending and said he told me specifically what to do. I told him I sometimes have difficulty with his thick accent when he speaks and he said that was insulting. We then finished the meeting. Never had anything like this ever happen to me before.

I really had to bite my tongue on this one.