So there it goes again,,, I am thinking about quitting again.
I feel that I cannot be the sole sysadmin for a company whose critical IT-infrastructure lives on Life-Support, deprecated software and hardware, and the unwillingness to actually invest it in.

Been there done that. You owe them nothing, pack your shit and go somewhere your work will be valued 😅 no use trying to breathe life into a crumbling infrastructure. It'll all come crashing down no matter how much duct tape you apply.

I can slightly relate to this and I'll suggest getting the hell out of there. It's a sinking ship where you might end up being blamed for.

@Elyz

Yeah I feel like that too - I am applying alot of ductape on already existing ductape because if I redo it from scratch - it will mean downtime and that is unacceptable for my boss.
Also, I can't do it alone, because the devs needs to rebuild everything since everything is hardcoded to work in this environment. But they are never getting the time for it, since "other things are more urgent" - like building NEW shit ontop of shit

We had an issue convincing the tech. director we needed money for infrastructure backups ($500 for a network switch? peanuts, c'mon). They claimed we have legacy devices in the basement and they can be used as an emergency backup.

So we've plugged the basement dwelling 48-port hub instead of 48-port 1Gbps switch (claiming malfunction to avoid blame for intentional downtime). The company network entered a stand still. We were cleared to use the money within 1 hour.

Sometimes they just need a "worst case scenario" demonstration.

@qwwerty

Well, you had a network switch - I have everything.

Every single component is a Single Point of Failure.

Is this related to the dead Dells?

@Linux We had so many single point of failures. The usual legacy company that haven't fully understood the impact of IT on their business.
I was creating their network topology documentation as a summer intern. Some of the cables were not discovered until cleaning lady disconnected some UTP and plugged it back into wrong port, taking down portion of the network (both internal and customer facing).