Startup IT Troubleshooting

Runbooks for startups and small teams where engineers double as the IT department.

When to Use

You are the "accidental IT person." Nobody has IT in their title, but laptops freeze, Wi-Fi drops during investor demos, someone gets locked out of Google Workspace at midnight, and a new hire starts Monday with zero accounts. Commands are platform/version-specific examples. Start read-only, preserve current configuration and apply only authorized, reviewed changes to the exact account/device.

Priority triage: (1) Company-wide outages, (2) Executive/customer-facing blockers, (3) Team-wide degradations, (4) Individual workstation issues. Always ask: "How many people are affected?" and "Is revenue impacted?"

SSO / Identity Lockouts

Google Workspace via GAM

# Obtain GAM from its official project, pin/verify the release and inspect installation instructions before installing.
gam oauth create                                                     # authorize