SysAdmin Weekly - 055 - How Do You Run IT With No Budget?

[asyrewicze]

Hey everyone!

This week Eric Siron and I dig into something a lot of us have lived: keeping a business running when the answer to every purchase request is no. Not the enterprise version where you fight for a line item, the version where getting the credit card out means you did something wrong. We swap war stories, get into what open source can and cannot rescue, and then get to the part that actually changes things, which is learning to price the risk you are carrying.

What we cover:

• The level set on a zero budget shop, including a PC DOS 4 machine still running in a manufacturing quality lab because that lab had budget and IT did not.
• Replacing an end of life Cisco ASA with a known vulnerability with an open source firewall built on scavenged identical workstations, and the planning that made that defensible instead of reckless.
• The "it has to be Cisco" reflex, and why it usually does not have to be Cisco.
• Where open source wins hardest with no money: monitoring, logging, Samba, and Nmap replacing a paid network scanning license outright.
• Budget storage as a stopgap: NAS units on the shelf for SAN emergencies, and the iSCSI argument that never quite dies.
• Where the first dollar goes when budget finally shows up, and the one place we both say do not go free.
• Turning aging gear into a dollar figure per hour of downtime, why that changes the conversation from fear to risk management, and getting the decision in writing when leadership decides not to act.
• Plus a News React on the open weight models letter and OpenAI's spending, community comments on cable pulls and fat WIM files, and a Nerd Hour on a Baldur's Gate randomizer web app and why I told the AI no on a dependency it wanted to add.

Relevant Links Below!

Podcast Episode - YouTube
Podcast Episode - Spotify

Here is the one I want to hear from you on: what is the single best piece of gear or software you ever pressed into service because there was no money to do it properly, and did it end up as a two week stopgap or is it still running five years later?