IT BS thread

I just had a simular talk a couple hours ago. User scanning docs to C: drive. I had another one doing that and lost their mind when the hard drive died and they lost three years worth of work.

 

When I was the facility information system security officer, I had to have a developer's system reimaged. He had 2 years of code he'd been working on - gone. He never saved it to the network. He tried, cried, pleaded, and at one point threatened me to not reimage the system. I was like "but you're malware infected from a known infection point - this isn't optional."

His executive management got involved. They lost. HR ended up having to get involved.

The worst part was that he didn't think he'd done anything wrong, and that none of it was his fault. Like, it wasn't his fault that he had all that code on his C:\ drive and wasn't his fault that none of it had been saved to the network or code repository. It wasn't his fault that that Linux developer tool site he visited was almost all malware, and he downloaded it anyway after a McAfee alert popped up.



Now that I'm in management, every time his name comes up as a POC for something I go to one of coworkers because I don't trust his judgment.

 

My favorite is trying to explain that if your only copies are on an external drive it's not a backup drive.

 

I wouldn't trust any of his code. He obviously has no clue what he is doing. But, some of the smartest people do some of the dumbest things.

Back in my development days, I worked with a guy that likely had some form of ADD, very excitable and not really one to be able to focus for very long (he had over 200 hours of college credit but never finished an actual degree). But, he wanted to be a developer and eventually my boss let him. He needed help writing code to write a log file. On Unix, this about the simplest thing you can learn or do. We helped him, but I told him that if he was going to do that, he also needed to write the code to clean up his log files. He decided to do that later. A month passes, and his log file fills up the drive on the shared dev server (not mine, thank goodness). He freaks out and ends up wiping out the entire drive. Luckily there was a backup, but his fellow devs did lose a day or so of work and had to wait for it to be restored. He was not very popular.

 

Like with all other things, if you think professionals are expensive...







...hire an amateur.

 

^this^

At one gig I was the first professional IT person they'd ever hired. My team consisted of a former security guard, a VP's son (blood relationship was his only qualification) and Wally from the Dilbert cartoon. Just one example of how messed up things were, the Director of accounting was complaining about network problems. They didn't have one single piece of network test gear, so I did it old school by tracing the cables. The cabling sins I found were enough to send the installer to ethernet hell forever. The biggest sin was the Accounting Director had changed his office around and his ethernet drop needed to be extended. No one would own up to it, but they had extended the cable by stripping the wires, twisting them together, and insulating them with clear office tape. How it worked at all was a mystery to me.

 

Because everyone's YouTube video is sponsored by some VPN.
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

 

I just stumped the iRobot tech support with a problem that both they and now Apple are going to have to figure out. Apparently the vacuum only talks on 2.4GHz, while the phone (and iPad) only talk on 5GHz. The app requires that the robot connect to the phone AND the WiFi during setup...but can’t connect because of the 5GHz connection. So it fails.

The weird thing is that this was working for months and months...then stopped about a week ago.

I suggested that we (the customer) be able to manually define the 2.4GHz network connection in the robot setup screen instead of making it slaved to the mobile device.

They’ve promised to get back to me.

 

I've heard that if the SSIDs of the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies are different, you can choose which one you want with iOS. If the SSIDs for both frequencies are the same on the router, iOS chooses whichever is stronger.

 

Can you try turning off 5 GHz on the router while doing this?

 

My solution to this is I have a 2.4GHz IOT SSID for all the things that want to phone home and have no business being on my main network. Nothing fancy, just my wifi routers guest network.

 

Tried that. iOS never showed me the 2.4GHz network - just the 5GHz.

‘The really weird thing is that this was all working a week ago. All that changed was app and iOS updates.

 

given your large size or highly regulated industry, this is probably a naïve question, are you not able to use the onedrive for business local backup feature? O365 license dependent, but our people were pretty stoked when we switched over to onedrive for our company cloud storage, and the desktop/docs/pics default local backup was part of the onedrive (business) tool. A cool bonus is if everyone is backing up their work computers to onedrive, and billy bob has a file on his desktop someone needs, i can grab it from their onedrive account.

 

We have over 400K users. Onedrive is tied to Teams and SharePoint - nothing else.

We also deal with PII/PHI, and by policy that information is not approved to be stored on that platform.

 

figured that was the reason.

 

They migrated mail to 0365 this weekend. I can get to mail via Outlook and browser when VPN'd in, and via browser but not with Outlook on my DaaS instance. I've hear some in management can't get to email, particularly via phone.

That went well.

 

We implemented an upgraded Blackberry Services implementation just before upgrading from Blackberry devices to secure iPhones. Email, Teams, and browser in an encrypted workspace. When we migrated to O365, mobile devices worked perfectly.

I have to say that Blackberry did a fantastic job in dropping their hard devices and going to the secure workspace in iPhones model. Very stable, super secure, and easily manageable.

 

DNS .. its always DNS.

Or someone didn't configure and test AzureAD Conditional Access properly.

 

I'm hiring for two positions if anyone knows anyone in the general Austin TX area...

- DBA (MS Access) with PM experience
- Security Analyst who can use eMASS

Jobs will post to Leidos for the Austin area within the next two weeks.