petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

Arrrrrghhh. Smart plugs. Yet another invention looking for a problem. And because they are a relatively cheap product there isn't enough spent in R & D to secure them.

I look forward to the demonstrations of how to do stuff. It always gives me great ideas of how to improve what I do. Free knowledge is always gratefully received and this stuff comes from the world experts themselves. Of course there are the Thwack points too.

Food does look good. Pity we don't have taste 'o' vision.

I've been pining for the Fjords

Unfortunately management here just want to point the finger and blame someone as long as it isn't them. They fail to see that they are actually the problem. Not enough staff, too much work and unreasonable deadlines all lead to fatigue and mistakes caused by too many interruptions to critical tasks. Root Cause documents…

Thanks for the link. I was having a Monday morning and read the check boxes as radio buttons. This threw me for a bit. The link gave me what I needed and is a nice feature of the software.

I joined a large organisation in London about 2 years ago. They had already activated their DR plan and everything was running on the backup site. This wasn't because of a disaster. They wanted to refurb the primary data centre. That took a while and during this they were creating new systems. When they finished the refurb…

Yep, I've signed up for this presentation.

Using anything on the internet is a risk. It is how we evaluate that risk, and decide how much to risk, that is important. With Facebook I couldn't see how it could make money just through advertising so I assumed they would be doing something with our data. That outweighed any possible benefit I could see for me so I gave…

White elephant. What were you expecting to find. I'm happy to see any elephant.

I'd be happy surviving long enough to retire. It would be nice if people remembered me fondly but it doesn't really matter. I probably won't see any of them again (except the ones that have become friends). Systems that I have put in or managed will all be replaced after a few years or become so unrecognisable that it…

Oh god. I remember this. Have done a few mainframe moves in my time. Once we had sold a new mainframe to a client and had taken the old one in part exchange. We had then sold the old one on to another client. I was away so someone else supervised the move. Unfortunately they had only been told to remove the mainframe so…

Spot on. We have about 400 business critical applications and it is fun to watch external consultants heads explode when we tell them. We are a large modern University and every application either is used to run the business or to run the courses. Finance, payroll etc. are critical for obvious reasons but so are the…

In my last place I inherited a Solarwinds solution that no one had looked at for at least 6 months and no one had documented. It took me a while but I got there thanks to loads of people on here.

Novell did this years and years ago. Microsoft started from a basis of trust everyone. Now we are paying the price. The network guys here tried to implement some east - west restrictions. Unfortunately they blocked port 135 between all the firewalls because they didn't know what it was. It was AD replication (RPC). Took me…

Having done both I'd say they are the same except for the slower pace and extra paperwork in the government side.

Pizza. I guess you could pre-load the car with partially cooked pizzas and they finish them off whilst on the way to the delivery. It would take a load of those idiot pizza bikes off the road. You know the ones where the rider only has L plates and ignores all the traffic laws.

It's just an unknown file format. Open in Word.

I agree. Monday's question got me because I was busy and didn't read the question properly. However, even though it was my error, I now have a bad feeling about the product and don't feel inclined to even try it. I know that isn't a reasonable or sensible position but it is something that is influencing me. I'll probably…

Agree. Would be very useful to have on the big screen on the wall showing major services status.

Mmmmmnnnnn. Meat. I was in France when a vegetarian friend ordered a salad suitable for a vegetarian in a restaurant. When it arrived there was a beefburger sitting on top. The waiter's response was "Well, there's not much meat on it". Maybe he was a Monty Python fan (Spam sketch).

I've found far too many open source products with malware / adware etc. enclosed. Lots of it from the original sites too. I wonder how much of it is because the original site looked to make a few bucks.

Must have missed it. I thought Oracle was already gone. We have a few servers running it but that is for legacy purposes only and are being phased out as we migrate stuff off them.

Not really surprised Marriott had issues. I'm surprised that other massive chains haven't either been hit or discovered they have been hit. It's such an obvious source of data and there are so many access points for the data. I bet a lot of companies are looking closely at their systems now.

Very true. We are moving about 100 people into a new building and have to transfer all their data (non IT management picked the location and ignored the very small internet connection which we can't upgrade - not our building). They have 11Tb of data which they refuse to clean up as it is "All very vital". I've checked and…

A couple of things come to mind. What a poor list of Keynote speakers. Only one had any value. The rest were just big names who I wouldn't want to listen to about IT. The IT department should always be engaged with the users. We should be asking "What do you need from us to help you do your thing ?". IT then go away, find…

Facebook being sexist now. Who would have guessed. They really aren't behaving well are they.

Oops, make that three.

More likely that large companies have dedicated IT departments with some budget for security and staff. They will also have procedures in place which involve multiple people to check things. SMBs are running IT on a shoestring and are easier to hack / scam etc. Also likely to have only one or two finance people who are…

GitHub being sued. Amurika really is messed up. This should be thrown out before it gets anywhere near a court of law but I imagine it won't and GitHub will lose. The UK isn't any better. Someone was compensated for slipping on some pigeon poo at a railway station. I'd hate to see the size of the pigeon that did something…