rschroeder · NAM SME · ✭✭✭✭✭

It appears the link to the video is no longer valid. It goes to a Solarwinds Thwack front page instead of to the video. What's the new link to the video, please? Rick Schroeder

2018 is almost upon us. Do you have your new bacon-strip-a-day desk calendar yet?

Regarding retina scans, we've been pushing back against biometrics for years. Yes, they might be convenient. But they're a poor idea because you can't change your retina or fingerprints, and once your biometrics are digitized for use in a computer security system, they're vulnerable to theft. You can change a password, get…

Me, too! Spell check doesn't do well with homophones, and I'm guilty of the "their-they're-there", "its-it's", "through-threw-thru", "your-you're" issues far too often, and I'm particularly embarrassed when I can't go back into Thwack conversations and correct my errors when I discover them. I'm heavily into music, and…

Bump. And extra points for making FEX's in ACI work with UDT.

I'm a little more pessimistic than that. Through their own ignorance, I'd worry that 25 out of every 25 people were potential insider threats.

May you all enjoy your favorite pizza and be trained to your hearts' content!

Agreed--as I taught myself web page building from CLI in the late 1990's, and then compared the very simple pages I'd published to those that could be created via (semi)-freeware programs and full blown MS Publisher / Front Page options, the html in the background certainly did suffer from bloat with the bigger commercial…

Bill Gates came up with that "fill the skies with Internet Satellites" philosophy twenty-five years ago. Teledesic - Wikipedia

Kudo's to Bloomberg for working to enable college educations for students. He's got half of the equation down when he says “No qualified high school student should ever be barred entrance to a college based on his or her family’s bank account.” Will there be some other person or group that addresses the other side of the…

Other companies should take note. This is yet another way to be the "good-customer-company", encouraging people to beat a path to your door.

OH, you hit one of my least-favorite admonitions about "Perfect Practice." I'd as lief have someone tell me my French Horn DevOps was off. Train a person in the way they should go, and they'll have few valid excuses for failure. As you work in your sandbox of IT, keep the kitties out of it, and protect yourself from…

Oh no! Murphy in high action! Assumptions will be the end of I.T. . .

I remain skeptical of Cloud physical & logical security. When I can't point at a building, room, row, rack, and server and say "These are my systems, I see the physical security protecting them. These are the virtual solutions and their physical locations, and here are the logical security solutions protecting them), then…

This sounds like a nice time-saver.

I was that way with car mechanics back in the '60's and '70's. Once I was out on my own, I felt like I was being preyed upon by unscrupulous / unethical car mechanics, and I determined never to be in that position again. I signed up with the local college for a car mechanic basic class and learned how to set timing, adjust…

Tried the options listed, ended up with the UPS vendor's mgmt app anyway.

My wife was a software developer / coder and Quality Assurance Manager for Control Data back in the '80's and '90's. She laughed when she read about "DevOps" using the definitions above. "That's just good writing of code--it's nothing special. It's competent people writing software properly so the applications work well.…

It's what comes when IT has no oversight into purchasing decisions. I'm not sure what the absolute answer is, other than great communications among all departments, and Leadership actually leading. One solution I'm a fan of happens to increase red tape, but it has the right end result. All purchases must be approved by…

If your senior engineers couldn't see the benefit of Splunk, they must have a preferred product already in-house, right? They DO have some kind of SIEM in place, right? If you can share it without breaking rules, what's their favorite product instead of Splunk?

As we discuss "belling the cat" or lament unsecure implementations, shall we also discuss the root causes? * Ignorance. * People would (probably) do the job securely if they understood how to do it that way. * They'd CERTAINLY do it if there were immediate consequences for NOT creating a secure product and environment. *…

The ridiculous / literal side of my mind flashed an image of a spider about three-feet in diameter, flattened on a marble countertop, ready for grilling. Eeeww! "Alternate-mind-image, GO AWAY!"

As mentioned previously, copy the link to the survey, paste it into a browser, and remove the %20 at the end of the link. Then press Enter and you'll make it to the survey.

We've had outside white hats, hired to evaluate our environment, ding us for using free tools likeTeraTerm Secure Shell and Putty and other open source tools, because you can't rely on any company contracted support for immediate resolution of newly discovered vulnerabilities and problems on the free tools. It seems to me…

Oh, I think we need the new Solarwinds "BAM" (Brain / Application Monitor) to be purchased and applied (via that subcutaneous wireless link between our bodies & the network). It'll alert our team and our Managers that our brain is either missing, or not engaged. Plus we can leverage its monitoring abilities 7x24 to see…

Jeopardy theme song [10 hours] - YouTube (skip the advertisement)

I'm for it. I use GreenShot to capture images--it has an "Obfuscate" button that enables a person to drag across a section of names or addresses, a column or row. But it's manual. A built-in option in NPM to capture images and obscure private data would be mighty convenient.

That sounds like there's a story waiting to be shared . . . ?

And remember to allow your network management devices access to everything else. Recently we installed a new NPM solution that is hosted on different subnets that our our original solution. And quickly realized the switches, routers, firewalls--all had ACLs on them allowing the IP addresses of the old NPM solution. Easy to…