News & field notes.
Migration post-mortems, security guidance, and company updates, written by the engineers who do the work. No vendor fluff, no gated forms.
Windows Server 2016 Ends January 12. The Hard Part Is Not the Server.
Microsoft stops supporting Windows Server 2016 on January 12, 2027, which is about fifteen weeks away, two of them holidays. And if you are running Server 2016, you are probably running SQL Server 2016 on it, which quietly went out of support back in July.
Twenty Years In, Why Does RMM Still Work This Way?
The logos changed and the dashboards got flatter, but sit a 2005 admin in front of a 2026 RMM console and they would be productive in an hour. Six questions about why remote monitoring still puts the hard part on you.
Mike FarmerVMwareSeptember 8, 2026 · 6 min readExit Cost Is Part of the Purchase Price
When you chose your current platforms, you evaluated two numbers: what it costs to buy and what it costs to run. Almost nobody evaluates the third one, which is what it costs to leave. Broadcom just gave the entire VMware market a reminder of why that number matters.
Mike FarmerMaintenanceAugust 31, 2026 · 4 min readThe Most Expensive Way to Save Money
Nobody decides to neglect their infrastructure. What actually happens is a series of small, reasonable decisions made by people trying to be responsible with money. The trouble is that a twelve year old switch gives you the same green lights on its last day that it gave you on its first.
Mike FarmerSecurityAugust 30, 2026 · 5 min readThe Patch Was Already Available
In August, CISA gave federal agencies three days to fix two vulnerabilities. Both already had patches. One had been available for seven months. Almost none of this summer's damage required a secret flaw. It required a fix that existed and had not been installed yet.
Mike FarmerVeeamAugust 13, 2026 · 3 min readVeeam 13.1's Vault Archive: A Simpler, Safer Alternative to Rolling Your Own S3 Glacier Tier
Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1 shipped a new managed archive tier called Vault Archive. Here's how it stacks up against wiring your own AWS S3 Glacier bucket into your backup strategy, and why the native option is usually the better call.
Mike FarmercybersecurityAugust 6, 2026 · 3 min readWhen Your MSP's Own Tools Get Targeted: The N-central Vulnerability, Explained
N-able's N-central, the RMM platform we use to manage client endpoints, was hit by an actively exploited authentication bypass this week. Here's what happened, why RMM platforms are high-value targets, and how we responded within 24 hours of the fix shipping.
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