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I am one that has a two car garage with one car in it. As a former Boy Scout, I'd rather have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, because if I am considering keeping it I usually end up needing it. That obviously comes with a price, both monetarily and operationally. My current mechanism, which I have found…

Pay scale is a whole issue in and of itself. Budgeting for FTEs is hard and for whatever reason many organizations see the IT staff is easily replaceable and fail to retain them even when it is a simple budget adjustment.

It is absolutely an art form. It's nuanced, full of grey areas and edge cases and that can really be off putting to very technical people, especially those that need structure. It doesn't fit a simple model. Thankfully my undergraduate education was art school. =)

Yes, and it's always a bit surprising to me how adverse to change so many IT folks can be. Embracing change makes for a far more well rounded and adaptable (not to mention employable) IT professional.

I do completely agree that this is an issue. I was in a different boat when I got started - IT was not a utility, I was a poor art student trying to pay for my art school and just happened to have an aptitude toward networking and UNIX. Today, the IT field is flush with ways to pay for training and education.…

This is spot on, Terry. Keeping email threads and change / request management requests is key here. For all of its faults and draconian implementations, there is real value to some of the ITIL practices in this respect. Even if it is secondary or tertiary to the problem, having an accounting trail to point back at when…

Exactly. This kind of work is really meant for humans to do once to twice and then to automate their actions. Fortunately that kind of thing is very easily accomplished with threshold alarming. Cross referring it, from my experience, is typically accomplished by custom code that is unique to an environment. There are…

I am mostly asking from an enterprise security perspective and am trying to feel out the ethics behind it. Since there is implied security with ssl, is it ethical for an enterprise to decrypt that traffic even when those resources being utilized are owned by them? Is it more appropriate to block the services and disallow…

Bit rot is another oft overlooked issue in this same vein. The tapes with no drive? Borderline useless unless you can find a used replacement. Flash media failing over time, optical media being scratched or losing their burn? Also a big problem, much like the usefulness of offsite backups. Cloud solves some of these…

My experience has been that a combination of full packet captures, IDS systems, flow data and syslog data in combination with reference graphs for CPU and interface statistics ends up being the necessary toolset for rooting out offenders. Correlation is the hard part in every environment I've worked in. There is so much…

Absolutely. Do the work up front. Make the investment - it pays back huge dividends long term. Another absolutely critical factor is good, collaborative, positive communication lines. I'll trade a technical savant who doesn't communicate for an average tech that has great communication skills all day long. Tech can be…

"Everything" is a loaded term. My opinion is that repetitive tasks that you have to do more than 3-4 times in a month can be automated - or at least pieces of them can be. I do not subscribe at all to the sensationalist notion that "the network / system engineer will be replaced by code" or programmers. That's a nonsense…

I can't speak to that, but I do agree that much of this can be automated in most netflow collector platforms. I have done fairly extensive soft failure detection and alerting work over the years - it is very doable to automate and alert on known soft failure scenarios based on predefined criteria and existing baselines.

All three have their place. Without change for the sake of change we'd never see progress or innovation. Without those that resist, we'd have mayhem. Getting that balance in a positive, collaborative way is the cornerstone of success.

Good read. This scales well past one It discipline (and well into real life). It is our duty to question any and all status quo. interroga omnia