petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

I think you have missed the point too. The question setter is making assumptions about people's mindset. For some that is ingrained by workplace policies. For others that is just how they think. For example, the person I sit next to would automatically ignore what anyone said to him in the kitchen as he only works on…

Good article. Reminds me of when I joined where I now work (Dec 2018). AD wasn't replicating correctly for several sites worldwide. I had no monitoring solution. Everyone said it was an AD issue. I used many different tools to narrow it down to misconfigured deep packet inspection on firewalls which was blocking RPC on…

Snoopware. It is everywhere and almost impossible to completely avoid. It is as a direct result of companies failing to properly write and test software. Most software is rushed out before it is ready in order to make money. Everything is about making money NOW.

Now we just need the backpack back in stock (fingers crossed).

Well, I thought I knew the answer but decided to wait to see if I was on the correct track. Now I'm confused. I agree that Red = BAD / DOWN. Yellow should be degraded. It is entirely possible this was supposed to be a really easy question but past tricks have really caused confusion. If this is supposed to be a "Get to…

Her. Keep up

The biggest problem is the users. They just want to get on with whatever they do and see IT as stopping them doing that. They can't grasp that we are only protecting them and the company. Of course, when a user lets data into the wild it is the IT department that gets blamed for not stopping them. 

@"captain_hook" Wrong. Take another look. Hope you are better at system monitoring.

This is what I've been saying since I got here 6 months ago but they have moved 50,000 student accounts to Office365 and are about to move 5,000 staff. The student accounts don't really matter as no one listens to them anyway but the staff raise merry hell if anything happens to e-mail. There is a culture of people going…

Don't be too harsh on legacy IT pros. I spent 20 years as a contractor looking after legacy systems. There was a great demand because most of the client's staff wanted to work on the newer stuff and that left no one to manage the stuff the business actually depended on. Each time I moved clients I gained a bit of knowledge…

Good response. Of course France should be happy. They are now officially the best National football side in the world (not just the USA and maybe Canada). The USA didn't qualify because they weren't good enough. At least 31 other countries were better than the USA (Russia don't count as they automatically qualified as…

I know my systems. I have to as no one else cares. I was contracting for 20 years and would move jobs about once a year. Every time I moved I would have to get to know the new setup and the best way to do that was to map it out. It's now second nature and has frequently really helped. I've lost count of the number of times…

I guess we could cut them some slack. They have been quite busy with something slightly more important. Congrats for getting a fix out so quickly.

LHC. Got to admire their vision. We don't know what we are looking for, don't know how to do it and probably won't recognise what we find but we will keep doing it and get paid quite well as we are 'experts'. Pity IT doesn't work that way. If it all goes wrong we could all disappear in a flash. Of course there would be no…

You may be right but I'm not willing to bet my job on that. If something were to go wrong the management are all standing around you asking "is it fixed yet" every few seconds. After that the blame culture kicks in. We also have a really slow Change process. Even emergency changes have to be fully approved. I don't do them…

How much ? I thought £40 for Nightwish supported by Beast In Black at Wembley Arena was a bit steep.

HR departments are ONLY there for the company's benefit. They are not there to help you. This case shows a company that doesn't care about its employees / contractors and should be avoided at all costs. Fortunately where I now work the HR department gave me the wrong contract. It all seemed OK to me so I signed 'in good…

This is just taking the mickey. How much revenue does the city of Barcelona take in from tourists visiting the site. Think of all the food, drink etc. tourists are buying. Think of all the hotel rooms being booked. Some people need to get a sense of perspective. Treat it as an asset and stop trying to bleed it dry for a…

Yep. The cloud looks great until you start to look under the hood. It's just servers but they are in someone else's data centre and you have no control of them.

Unfortunately it is too late. Think millenials. We have an entire generation who think they are entitled to everything and will do whatever they like to get it. 

Not sure where I sit with the police or security services accessing private data. I can see both sides of the argument and agree to a certain extent with both. I guess with the correct checks and balances in place it would be OK but I know the politicians will really mess it all up as usual.

Agreed. I'd love a perfect world. However, when population control is tried certain cultures just end up killing baby girls because boys are seen as somehow better (not an idea I subscribe to). We also have to deal with certain religions banning contraception and people who still have far too many children because there…

I spend quite a lot of time explaining to users why we shouldn't use whatever rubbish they have read about. These days everyone thinks they know IT because they have a computer at home and the people hyping their product know it. We still use tape because it works even though we do disk backups and SAN syncs. At trade…

I used to work in the public sector. At one client they had automated the provisioning and de-provisioning of user access rights to such an extent that no one there actually understood the process (and it was extremely complex). Everyone that had been involved had left. That meant they were trapped doing whatever the…

How secure are they. Would a hacker be able to access the system and prevent it alerting the homeowner when their mates turned up to rob the place.

Superstar to the rescue again. Thanks

RCA is all well and good but getting people to learn from the results is another matter. I've just had a user complaining that she was having inbound e-mails blocked and wasn't receiving messages telling her of the block. Turned out she had marked inbound e-mails from IT as junk so wasn't seeing the block messages. We…

Your average human being hasn't any idea about security. We can protect stuff as much as possible but there will always be someone who will plug in a USB drive to see what is on it even when they don't know where it came from. I've worked places where we have disabled all USB ports and management say we have to open them…

@"jnewell" Stop talking about food. I'm so hungry at the moment I'd probably eat the drone too.

Couldn't agree more. It's not DevOps. It's just Ops done the right way. I've always tried to automate simple repetitive tasks and have some sort of monitoring (starting with a simple batch file that pinged servers in sequence and e-mailed via smtp if there was a problem). None of this is rocket science. It's just marketing…