SysAdmin Weekly - 053 - How to Survive as a Solo SysAdmin: Where to Start When You're the Only One

[asyrewicze]

Hey everyone!

This week's episode came straight from the community. Bart emailed the mailbox a while back with a list of topics, and this was one of them: you're the solo SysAdmin, the only person standing between the business and the abyss. Where do you even start? We got into the real survival skills, not just the tech.

A few of the things we covered:

• Triage before projects: keep things online first, tackle improvements once the fires quiet down
• Documentation is survival, and the "hit by a bus" list as the place to start when you've inherited an undocumented environment
• Note-taking systems that actually stick: the ARC system, the Bullet Journal method, and Rocketbook, plus why pen and paper beats digital for a lot of us
• Buying time back with automation and, carefully, the right managed services partner
• Communicating risk and business value to non-technical leadership so it lands
• News React: Windows Server hot patching via Azure Arc (now free) and 1Password letting Claude log in without seeing your passwords
• Nerd Hour: Debian 13.6's Secure Boot certificate transition and connecting Nagios to Active Directory over SAML through ADFS

Relevant Links Below!

Podcast Episode - YouTube
Podcast Episode - Spotify

If you've done the solo SysAdmin thing: what was the first system or process you documented when you took over, and did it end up being the one that saved you later? Curious where people actually started.

[yllekz]

My stories aren't super exciting but I definitely had one where I asked how they imaged computers. They were using enormous "fully loaded" fat images for deployment, which every year effectively DDoS'd the network while they reimaged classrooms/etc. The first thing I did (and luckily I had done this at a previous job), was remove all apps, settings, configs from the WIM, strip it down to just a patched OS, and deploy everything else separately (oh and also build/roll out a full SCCM setup). It was a glorious triumph of mine and a very clear and quick "hey, let's not only fix this, but fix it up REAL good!"

[asyrewicze]

That's a nice win! I Never understood the "Let's put ALL THE THINGS in the WIM" crowd. With so many other ways to deploy apps independent of imaging a machine, why would I want to limit myself to doing that via updating and redeploying a whole image? Maintaining everything in the WIM gives you LESS control and more headaches..... self-inflicted DDoS lololol... oh boy lol.

Great success story! Thank you for sharing!