petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

Lawmakers identified as criminals. No surprise there. In the UK quite a few of our lawmakers (Members of Parliament) have been caught fiddling expenses, falsely claiming allowances for second homes and other dodgy things. If I did that I'd be locked up but not them. When they get caught they just lie about it and seem to…

Some are and some aren't. I learned to drive in a snatch landrover, 4 tonner, Chieftan tank and a Scorpion. None of these are very complex but all need fixed in the field. Combat vehicles need to be simple as they just need to work in tough environments. Most don't need complex electonics but a load of sensors monitoring…

Something that would listen empathetically to the user when they call the helpdesk then tell them to turn it off and back on again.

Hmmmm. More virtual currency being stolen. Kinda confirms my suspicions that they aren't secure enough. Glad I don't have any.

That's annoying. I thought it was Thursday already. Now I have an extra day to go before the three day weekend we will have in the UK (Monday is a Bank Holiday).

Strong opinions. I'm quite happy to let the loudest one say whatever they like. I then do the job correctly. When they then tell everyone that they were correct all along I take great pleasure in telling everyone that they weren't and that it works because I did it my way. It's nice that the proof is already there to back…

At least there's nothing ambiguous about today's (9th) question.

Maybe that's the answer. In our place it would be. 404 Brain not found.

Unfortunately, given the number of problems with questions over the last few months, we are now in the position of not knowing if it is another problem or if it is deliberate. Ordinarily I would have answered the question using the wording in the hint but was cautious because of the recent issues. At least now I know that…

Crypto mining. Well I guess they shouldn't run out of power. What gave it away. The reactors spinning up to 105% (Hunt for Red October).

Details are really important. I was at a client (and hadn't been there long) when the decided to do a DR failover to the backup site. I waited for a few days whilst they planned, waiting for someone to point out what I thought was obvious. Eventually, the day before the planned failover I had to point out that they were…

Only if you have paid for a second poller

Ransomware. It is far too easy for this to happen. We are really strict on IT use but we still get users doing really stupid things. We stop them from doing something that will cause harm so they spend their time trying to circumvent our protections instead of talking to IT and seeing what we can do for them. Then we have…

Most people I see working as DevOps are really just scripting the starters and leavers processes. To be fair, that does save us a lot of time and effort and allow us to get on with the slightly less mundane stuff. That's a real Peregrine Falcon (Hyabusa in Japanese)

Yep, none of the answers are correct for the question.

Skynet's already here. It's just a matter of time. Skynet (satellite) - Wikipedia Being British it will be a it more polite before taking over.

Have used WPM but found it couldn't handle certain authentication pop up boxes. That ment we couldn't use it to run automated login checks against some of our websites to ensure that they were running. Solarwinds couldn't seem to get to the bottom of the problem. That was just over a year ago so it may have been resolved…

HCI was the big buzz-phrase at my last place. So much so that they spent £3M on a VxRail HCI setup. Turned out it was just a bunch of servers running VMWare with an attached SAN. Sound familiar. That's what we already had and for a much cheaper price. Ho Hum.

I just wish some of the other people in the IT department would actually try collaboration. Too busy keeping stuff to themselves to try to make themselves invaluable.

We have ISO27001. It's still very difficult to get users to think. We have just had someone ask if we can receive credit cards details by fax. Yes I know there are secure fax to e-mail systems but that's not what they wanted. They wanted us to provide a fax machine at this end too.

I think I could manage that chunk of beef by myself. It looks really good and now I'm hungry.

My final year dissertation for my degree was in Critical Path Analysis. That brings back memories. It does fit here. You need to identify all the items / services on the critical path and make sure these happen on time and in sequence. Quick hint, Work backwards from the end to the start when identifying the critical path. 

I really don't understand trolls. Maybe we can find the troll gene and sort the problem out at birth (OK, I got THAT from a movie).

This isn't about points. It's about telling people about your product. I think you are missing the point. The documentation is wrong. Busy people will look at the summary, see your product doesn't provide something they need (because it isn't mentioned in the summary) and decide NOT to look at your product. No one will…

You had to go there didn't you Buggers keep doing it at work

We use LastPass in the IT department as somewhere that isn't an Excel spreadsheet to store the multitude of passwords for the thousands of systems and devices we look after. It's OK for that and is accessible externally with 2FA authentication which is useful if we are off site and need to retrieve a password. It also…

I did one UX session not long after last year's London SWUG. Pity it was for the new customer portal that I can't access as we use Orion through a third party as SaaS which means that I'm not actually a Solarwinds customer and don't have access to the customer portal.

Couldn't select all that apply. Most of the options for us.

The best way to stop Alexa or Siri from doing something stupid is to not have them in the first place. 

Some confusion I think. I was agreeing that none of the answers are correct (even when you expand the list). 3 could be correct if you assume a one character typo but that is a standard Solarwinds gotcha for these questions so I stopped and waited for confirmation from da management.