055 - How Do You Run IT With No Budget?

"No budget" is almost never no budget. It is no budget yet, and the thing that closes the gap is your ability to put a real dollar figure on the risk you are carrying.

Andy Syrewicze and Eric Siron have both run IT for organizations where getting the credit card out meant you had done something wrong. They walk through what that actually looks like: a PC DOS 4 machine still passing parts in a quality lab, an end of life Cisco ASA swapped for an open source firewall on scavenged workstations, NetGear ReadyNAS units kept on a shelf for SAN emergencies, and the iSCSI arguments that never die. Then the harder part: where the first dollar goes when budget finally shows up, and how to translate aging gear into risk language that a business owner will actually fund.

Chapters: 00:00:00 - Cold Open: Keeping the Lights On With No Budget 00:01:00 - Welcome and Show Plugs 00:03:32 - News React: 25 Companies Sign On for Open Weight Models 00:07:51 - News React: OpenAI, Profitability, and the Missing CFO 00:12:56 - Nerd Hour: A Baldur's Gate Randomizer on GitHub Pages 00:16:02 - Nerd Hour: Unicode, MiniForge, and Why the Human Said No 00:20:51 - Community Comments: Cable Pulls and Fat WIM Files 00:24:34 - The Reality of the Zero Budget Shop 00:29:56 - End of Life Cisco ASA to an Open Source Firewall 00:34:04 - You Do Not Have to Buy Cisco 00:40:00 - Where Open Source Wins: Monitoring, Logging, Nmap 00:43:35 - Budget Storage: NAS Stopgaps and the iSCSI Argument 00:51:31 - Spending the First Dollar on Maximum Risk Reduction 00:52:44 - Backups: The One Place Not to Go Free 00:57:02 - No Budget Usually Means No Budget Yet 01:01:40 - Document the Risk, Get the Decision in Writing 01:03:40 - Wrap Up and Outro

Resources / Show Notes:

- Microsoft - Open Weights and American AI Leadership, the letter itself: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/

- TechCrunch - Industry urges against broad open-weight restrictions: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/as-us-weighs-response-to-chinese-ai-industry-urges-against-broad-open-weight-restrictions/

- Fortune - OpenAI CFO reportedly at odds with Altman over spending: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/openai-cfo-sam-altman-missed-revenue-target/

- Andy's Infinity Engine party randomizer, the Nerd Hour web app: https://asyrewicze.github.io/infinity-engine-randomizers/

- PomoCLI, Andy's terminal Pomodoro timer: https://github.com/asyrewicze/pomocli

- Miniforge, the package manager Andy declined to add as a dependency: https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge

- OPNsense, open source firewall: https://opnsense.org/

- pfSense, open source firewall: https://www.pfsense.org/

- Nagios, open source monitoring: https://www.nagios.org/

- Nmap, free network scanner: https://nmap.org/

- Restic, fast secure backup program: https://restic.net/

- SysAdmin Weekly, all show links: https://www.sysadminweekly.com

- SysAdmin Weekly Newsletter: https://newsletter.sysadminweekly.com

- AndyOnTech: https://www.andyontech.com

- Project Runspace: https://www.projectrunspace.org

- GitHub Discussions, share your no budget stories: https://github.com/ProjectRunspace/sysadmin-weekly/discussions

Sources and clarifications (News React):

- The open weights letter had 25 signatories on July 24, 2026. OpenAI and Google were absent that day and signed by July 26; the list has since passed 270. Anthropic has not signed.

- Eric flagged the Sam Altman "no path to profitability" clip as possibly a deep fake, and we could not verify that specific video. The underlying reporting on OpenAI's CFO and spending tension is real; see the Fortune link above.