petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

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…

Worked fine for me in Chrome.

Not sure Q9 can be answered today given the details in the hint. Something appears to have changed. Couldn't do it last week as I was on holiday.

It's obviously the 51st of Feb 2020. Didn't you hear that, due to the Corona Virus, life has been postponed. March is delayed.

Google. Just to throw them off a bit I randomly access websites that I have no interest in and wait for someone to e-mail me trying to sell me whatever curd they sell. I then reply telling them they are mistaken and whoever sold them my details were just taking them for a ride. I know it won't make any difference until…

I know a good strip joint in Honolulu.

Except he says two of the possible answers.

Good article. I've been badgering clients for years that perimeter defence isn't good enough. Most don't seem to get it. USB port lockdown, CD / DVD drive lockdown and a good end-point protection suite of software, centrally managed. Log file monitoring and AD monitoring for repeated failed login attempts etc. I might as…

The first thing I did when I started here was to go through every server I could find and create a spreadsheet detailing each server, what it did and who 'owned' it. It was just so that I could get up to speed with a new client's systems. The first bit took about a week gathering data from many sources. The 'what it did…

Once solar panels become cheap, user installable, efficient and discrete people will start looking at using them. This is a small but significant step.

It does sound like a great idea. If you can develop the "muscle memory" in a controlled environment it will make the soldiers reactions that much faster in a real situation. It's not all about looking at a computer screen and pressing a button. Now if we could only develop Holosuites (as in Star Trek). 

About to put in a suite of Solarwinds products at the current client. Looking forward to not having to use VMWare's vTop to looks for this stuff.

The PC of the secretary to the boss of a major client kept going haywire. Field engineers had been out several times but couldn't find anything wrong. I was called in as I was support for the engineers. I drove from London to Dundee (475 miles) and decided to sit with the secretary until the PC went wrong again. It didn't…

GM gathering data. Again, someone has thought about different ways to make money. Gather data and sell it on. Money for old rope.

A good set of questions. Pity I get looked at funny when I ask similar ones. I'm just seen as a 'stick in the mud'. Funny how when the "new" things go wrong it's never the muppet, who's brainchild it was, to blame.

Building something to win at poker isn't about teaching an AI. It's about teaching the people who build AIs. They have to start somewhere so why not start with something they can understand then move on to the more difficult stuff when they understand how how to progress.

I'm kinda hamstrung here because we only have SAM. The network support was outsourced so it is a constant battle between us and them about where the problem lies. I would also like to monitor the applications but am restricted to AppInsight for AD and SQL. Still helps though.

It's ALWAYS the network.

We are having problems with some of our nursing students sending e-mails to NHS trusts to apply for placements and jobs. It is almost impossible to contact anyone in any of the trusts IT departments to get them to look at the problem which seems to be at their end. No one seems to have any idea. I know an awful lot of…

Someone in Microsoft stealing stuff. Poetic given how long Microsoft have been stealing from the public (sorry fleecing the public).

The Zoom one did raise a few eyebrows here a while ago as we are currently rolling it out worldwide.