rschroeder · NAM SME · ✭✭✭✭✭

Are you familiar with Larry Niven's Known Universe series of Science Fiction? The Meritocracy Solution is applied there with intriguing results. The idea is good in a vacuum, not so good in his fictional universe's implementation. But it's fascinating thinking about it and the ramifications.

One might question just exactly how intelligent, how sneaky, or how absent minded government officials and representatives might be. One could certainly suspect the "accidentally revealed" not about 5,000 troops being sent somewhere was a true accident and an embarrassment. Equally plausible is the concept that information…

May I suggest a fourth rule for your team? Restore the latest backup regularly and prove it's valid. They say "Your backups are only as good as your latest restore." I've seen restores fail from sequential backups taken from over a year, with Administration becoming more panic stricken with every failure. In this case it…

Back in '94 I was in hog heaven with dual 5 1/2" floppy drives in my PC. Let me run DB3 AND have a disk to read from and write to at the same time! Who needed hard drives back then?

Great memories! But wait--no 867-5309?

Although this month's Mission is not yet complete, it's easy for me to say it was one of the best ever! Yes, the questions were harder than usual. But that made the learning more important, the digging and researching and re-reading more critical, and it resulted in me learning more about the product than I have via any…

This remains a useful suggestion.

I love UDT--it saves me time & effort every day. But I don't love IoT, and I'm curious how the military is using it to make "ships, planes, tanks, and other weapon systems far more lethal and effective." All I've seen so far is how it provides new (unnecessary) convenience while increasing risks and vulnerabilities.I don't…

Bringing competition to ROSCOMOS sounds like a good idea. Assuming that several successful flights, and one successful flight carrying astronauts (which isn't yet 100% since they haven't safely returned to Earth) may be overly optimistic. It ignores the track record of the U.S. Space Shuttle program. It, too, had good…

You're right. There were only a very small number of possible winners if one based votes on leadership, training, accomplishments, how beneficial their actions were to the general populace, who you'd follow, who George Washington might have followed, etc. Once the bad or evil or silly captains were immediately eliminated…

I did learn that the 6807's are slated for end of sale in the near future. However, I have four in place now, and their end of life/support won't come before my corporate hardware lifecycle replacement process retires these four, so we're good. Thanks for the info!

Google "A Girl Worth Fighting For" and watch the Youtube video of it. It's great marching music, and has wry feminist observations and comments, and reveals how ridiculous men's biases can be. The title character, Mulan, is impersonating a male soldier to protect her family's honor and her father. She's marching with the…

Jeans at work was a delight. When we moved to business casual there was complaining, but understanding. The practical part of the complaints was that the I.T. staff typically never interacted with outside customers, and normally only interacted with their direct peers and Managers. Yet the C-Level determined a dress code…

Special note about the Easy Button. The current release of NAM at 2018-12-18 is not activating all modules (NCM, NTA, HA, etc.) beneath NAM when NAM is licensed and activated. One must still manually activate the licenses at the portal, copy their license keys one at a time, and paste them into the License Manager within…

It's true that you may not need to turn to the checkbook to find new security and monitoring capabilities. To paraphrase what might be seen in any newspaper any day, use the tools already in place rather than buy new ones. Few folks I've met have had the time and luxury to thoroughly understand any of their products'…

conf t snmp-server enable traps snmp-server host (destination server IP address) public end wr No--it's not a trap. It's ALL traps! (config)#snmp-server enable traps ? TestGroup1 Test Group 1 TestGroup2 Test Group 2 TestGroup3 Test Group 3 aaa_server Enable SNMP AAA Server traps auth-framework Enable SNMP…

Rickrolling the NSA. This is why we can't have nice things. What next? IPv4 and v6 have hidden holes that let anyone do anything without anyone else's knowledge?

When I read about "Negative power bills" earlier this year, I thought "Who can argue with this? Where's the down side--other than coal miners and their peers needing to learn new skills, and having to move to new states to do their work?" Yes, moving can be a hardship--especially if you have traditions and are tied-down to…

Have you run into VM sprawl? It's where folks request and receive VM's for test and POC implementations, then never clean them up, never give them back. It's a thing. It means wasted resources backing those VM's up, wasted SysAdmin time managing/monitoring/patching them, wasted/expired licenses, etc.

This would be convenient, and I want it. I generate new Reports at need, and sometimes the simplest and quickest thing is to send the info to Excel via a .CVS export. Later I can open the file and filter on columns or content, but this request would reduce my labor, thus making me more efficient.

Nicely done. Security, security, security. But after that, then the next most important item will be . . . security. As I say to the folks who forget to first check if the device is power up & plugged into the network "You can't beat Layer 1 security."

I appreciate the concept of not being able to defend against that which you cannot see. The opposite is true, also: it's possible to attack what one cannot see. Doing so is like throwing rocks into the brush, hoping to hit an unseen target. One doesn't even know if the target is within throwing range. But hackers still do…

Adapt and grow, or stagnate and become obsolete. My team's going through ISE discovery, and mapping flows and needs is an amazing education, both for learning what's out there, and also for what flows are NOT needed. We wink and say "Wireless? Oh that's a passing fad." I.o.T. may have some worth, but until folks are fully…

Towards better security, even automated proactive and preventative procedures and responses, what is the status of Solarwinds FSM? Is it keeping pace with threats and our needs for deploying consistent policies, and seeing the right information in a timely manner?

What Passive Vulnerability scanners have you used, and what's your degree of satisfaction with them?

Less is more. Right along the lines of K.I.S.S. Don't sweat that you're not contributing 7x24--your content would become weak and watered down and irrelevant. Many times I feel SW blogs could be doubled or tripled in size, seeing as how they sometimes are over views and comments about general situations. I'd take that over…