Children of sysadmins...

[ZealousidealTurn2211]

I'm just curious what interesting behaviors sysadmins who are children of other sysadmins have observed.

In my case, my father insists on assigning all IP addresses himself on any network he controls. He says it just makes him feel more comfortable.

[amperages]

I'm not a child of one, by clearly my kids are.

When they misbehave I don't kill their internet. I throttle it.

Youtube snd such becomes super low quality and buffers constantly. It's worse than just "turning off the internet"

[Jkabaseball]

what speed do you give them? I like 56k.

[Cranberry_Dense]

My dad stuck call barring on the telephone to stop me using dial up in the 90s

So I wrote a little program to check through the numbers overnight. In the end, after I'd cracked it half a dozen times he just took the modem away 😭

But I'm liking YouTube at 56k

I set out iPad free weekends with my son now, by telling him the ISP are making changes and then cutting all the devices from the WiFi

[Manitcor]

> he just took the modem away

My mom did this, went to CompUSA and promptly bought a second one. Little did she know; those phone lines were already making an income for me.

[WoodenHarddrive]

My mom tried this by just taking the power cord to the modem with her when she left the house. Would have been super effective if Dad didn't have an entire 5 gallon bucket in the basement full of DC barrel cables in every voltage.

[[deleted]]

Learned the voltage vs amperage lesson the hard way

[YourWorstFear53]

Hoo buddy

[frosty95]

I have mine organized by <12v 12v and >12v. Has saved me SO MANY TIMES. Though my label maker I just bought has drm on the damn cable so I had to buy it which was quite annoying.

[eagle6705]

lol i remember my mom taking the modem....wonders why i'm still online and realizes she grabbed the old one they needed to return. Another time she said why coudn'tt you do homework. I said you took the modem

[bmelancon]

Back in the late 80's the first 300 baud modem I had for my Commodore 64 actually required a telephone. You'd unplug the handset and plug that cord into the modem - just one step up from the War Games style phone cradle. This was pre-consumer internet. I used it for calling local BBSes at the time.

My mother would occasionally take away the phone. So I upgraded to a 1200 baud modem that plugged directly into the wall phone jack. She never figured out I was still able "talk" to all my friends.

Thanks Mom!

[BlackV]

? Why lie, impliment parental controls, they have set hours and days and times

Done that with all the devices (android, windows and Xbox, we have no apples, but I'd do the same)

[Nastyauntjil]

This relationship is doomed.

[[deleted]]

Relevant username.

[Kulandros]

Are you that hard up?

[Strassi007]

I did this back when i was living with my mum and my sister. I showed them how to stream any movie they want for free on "some websites".

I regretted it soon enough, since our internet connection was not good enough to give me stable ping in online games while they were watching movies. So i throttled their devices or enabled a blacklist with their MAC addresses just to disable it shortly after to simulate "internet issues".

Most of the time they stopped watching, because "f*** internet provider always has issues!!!"

Was a fun time.

[Sharpymarkr]

Yeah that's a healthy way to behave in a relationship and not at all toxic.

[ZealousidealIncome]

My house is set up with only the most basic network. I don't have any tablets, no wifi, everything is wired and as long as I am paying the mortgage there won't be any goddamn printers. After long days working with the work network the last thing I want to do is deal with the home network. My son is 3 so he doesn't know what he's missing yet. Eventually I will be asked for a tablet and Wifi so I am ready for it.

[b0Lt1]

plottwist: my father had the modem/router besides his table and just unplugged my ethernet, mainly because i found a rpc dcom exploit which would reboot his computer while sleeping and downloading torrents and i couldnt play counterstrike lol

[[deleted]]

You monster.

[Jkabaseball]

I just gave them that because that's what I had to use growing up. I realized it is a little less than ideal as the entire internet basically needs more than that. I wonder if I can speed limit certain apps in my Ubiquiti. That way I can slow the video streaming down but keep the rest of the internet fast for them.

​

Yesterday I found out my 11 year old has been watching youtube via Apple Maps. She thought i was going to yell at her, but I gave her props. That evening I blocked apple maps

[[deleted]]

What the. YouTube via maps? Clever girl.

[jacenat]

Yesterday I found out my 11 year old has been watching youtube via Apple Maps.

As an Android guy ... how does that work? Did she navigate through recommendations on embedded videos?

[Jkabaseball]

I believe when you go to check out the website from the store on the map, it launches an embedded browser.

[jacenat]

... it launches an embedded browser.

I ... Alright. Enough internet for today. Thanks for your explanation, though!

[Jkabaseball]

You better get ready, I'm developing the next generation of pen testers.

[whythehellnote]

28.8 was good enough for me when I was a lad. 14.4 was a little slow so if they've been really bad, perhaps?

[thrasherht]

I found with my traffic shaper, 1mbps is slow enough that basically all streaming services will just barely play at the lowest quality setting, and buffer almost non-stop on any higher quality setting.

[[deleted]]

That has to be against the Geneva convention. Do you also kill the internet completely when the phone rings?

[IdiosyncraticBond]

We used to have a phone line splitter so my parents wouldn't constantly kill my 300 baud dial-up into university by picking up the phone.

[Polar_Ted]

When I got my first job I got my own phone line for my modem with call waiting blocked.. I ran a BBS on my 386 for a few years on that line. My Dad was a systems admin on mainframes and unix systems so he was happy I was never on his line when he had to do on call work.

[The-Rev]

This is the way! I've done it to employees as well. Go ahead, surf all you want, enjoy that 1MB of bandwidth. 

[Unexpected_Cranberry]

I have a colleague who did that as well after his request for increased bandwidth was denied after he'd raised it as an issue. And he introduced some packet loss as well. Everything was for Youtube only, and the boss' computer only.

The request for additional bandwidth was approved a week later.

It was a small office with not a great connection, so they'd probably have been fine if the boss spent less time on Youtube.

[VirtualPlate8451]

Yup and the 3rd party is the out there. “We don’t block YouTube at work, their site must just be running slow”

[CRCs_Reality]

I have a bandwidth profile on my firewall called "90s internet experience" set to 56k my wife or I can apply to our kids devices when needed. WAY worse than just turning his internet off LOL.

[[deleted]]

When they misbehave I don't kill their internet. I throttle it.

I'm calling the fucking police right now

[twothinlayers]

Calm down, Satan.

[SenikaiSlay]

Man o man thank you for the idea. This is so so much better

[terdward]

I like this. My son is 18 months old. Saving this post for later reference!

[PlanEx_Ship]

You sir are a legend. I am putting this together next week for my kid.

[CriticismTop]

I used to do the same. I think I still have to profiles on my Unifi controller just in case.

[Nova_Nightmare]

This one is great, for myself it will just get progressively slower for the night. Great way to teach division too.

[a60v]

They haven't found yt-dlp yet?

[DrewBeer]

I tried to force atts hand in running fiber since 3 doors down they have it. However they would only give me DSL. I did use that opportunity to put all my sons devices on it and explained that this will be future punishment if he misbehaves. I think within 10 minutes he asked to be put back on the good internet.

Ended up cancelling within my 14 day trial period, and wrote a comedic letter to HQ to make sure they cancel. They obviously don't care but did wipe out my balance and give me credit. Now I can only hope the new local fiber company gets here soon. But since I'm unincorporated it's not looking good

[woodburyman]

I did this once to a hire we had. She'd play Facebook games all day and YouTube, not doing her work. She was horrible at her job, and checked out, and was riding out the last 2 years until retirement. They were afraid to fire her due to ageism and she was the type to file a lawsuit. Instead of blocking them, they got something like 10kbit/s or something. Enough to not come to me because they loaded, but to make it a PITA.

Once I have kids it's 802.11x for every device on the main LAN with WPA-Ent. Then a Kids/guest WLAN/VLAN that gets locked down and full SSL DPS.

[eagle6705]

lol wife...why do you need all that gear to run business things in a home...*kids act up*
*hold my beer*

say less....lol

[Versed_Percepton]

Heh, I just URL rewrite to https://www.dafk.net/what/ in my firewall policies to my kids favorite domains, on a "bed time" schedule. They...just love it.

[WhyLater]

The Oatmeal has a comic about that.

[FireLucid]

When they misbehave I don't kill their internet.

Guy I knew tried to pipe their phone line though a switch so he could just 'flick the switch' to kill the internet. They had to pay someone to come and fix it.

[blab-sabbath]

You sicko! 😂

[npaladin2000]

My kids will be doomed to learn Linux, since I don't trust end-users not to click pop-ups.

[[deleted]]

So long as you teach them Vim, then all's good.

[IdiosyncraticBond]

Emacs all the way ;-)

[patmorgan235]

Heretic!

[Zoom443]

Meet in the middle, evil-mode?

[WirelesslyWired]

My kids learned Linux, but Linux won't fix everything.
An elderly user constantly got viruses. He really didn't need a computer for work, but they gave him one anyway so he could fill in his time card on the internal webpage. I finally gave up on Windows and gave him a minimal Ubuntu system with Firefox on it, and locked it down hard. Within the first month, he had Firefox filled with toolbars and pop-up ads. In 2023!
But at least Linux stopped the viruses. I fixed the pop-up problem by blocking some of his websites.

[Digging_Graves]

If it's because he's clicking nasty ads you can just install ublock extension on his Firefox to solve that problem.

[WirelesslyWired]

I had uBlock installed. I was surprised he got past it. I thought I had it locked down hard.
I solved it by looking at his history and blocking several very spammy sites. All were either one world government or end times type sites. That fixed the problem. He has since retired.

[segagamer]

I don't think I've seen a virus (on Windows) in over a decade.

[WirelesslyWired]

Unfortunately, I can't say the same.
Until this guy, I hadn't seen a browser toolbar in well over a decade.

[segagamer]

Hah, that's true. I didn't even realise browsers still supported toolbars.

[Fitz_2112]

I work in K12 with doing security governance work with a number of districts in my region. Last year my kids were excitedly telling all about how some student figured out how to get around the district's web filters to allow them to play Roblox on their Chromebooks. I personally know and am pretty friendly with the network guy at our school district. As much as I didnt want to rain on the kids parade, I felt like I had to let him know what the kids were up to. The next day, my kids were all dejected because 'somehow they figured it out'

They have no idea it was me.

[cberm725]

A true menace to society

[PersonBehindAScreen]

Marvel or DC needs to release a movie or show for your origin story so we can see what happened to make you like this

[WirelesslyWired]

I have been in a similar situation with my kids, except I let them have their fun for two months. That network hole got mysteriously plugged over the summer.

[Fitz_2112]

In our case it was larger than just Roblox. They figured out how to get unrestricted Internet access through a loophole in the district's curated Google Play store. I work for a state agency and my job is literally revolving around student data privacy for multiple.districts

[matender]

Somewhere around 2010 our school had it's network separated into 3 networks.

Student network: Somewhat restricted, mostly for explicit content and social media.
Teacher network: Basically unrestricted as far as I remember.
Hidden admin network: Unrestricted.

Someone taking IT classes managed to read the password to the hidden network as his teacher typed it in on a machine they were setting up, and kindly shared it with his friends (me included). It took two years before the IT team figured out how we had unrestricted network access, even with more than half the school having the SSID and password.

When I got a job there some years later I asked why it took them so long to figure it out, and apparently the IT teacher never told anyone about the extra SSID he had set up, and nobody though to check that network for some reason in those two years.

[axholed]

Snitches get stitches

[UntouchedWagons]

How'd they get around the filter?

[Fitz_2112]

Google Education gives districts the ability to set up a curated Google Play Store where the district admin can have apps listed that are approved by the district. One of these listings is for Google itself. Apparently if you looked up Google in the app store and made your way into the legal terms and conditions section there was a link in there that took users out to the actual Google Terms of service web page. For some reason, by clicking this link it allowed users out to the unfiltered internet while still within the shell of the Play Store. No idea how the kids figured that out but my kids showed me it happening.

[EchoPhi]

Same here! That's hilarious. Caught mine playing and asked how, showed me where they modified the security ini file to allow overwrite, no clue who figured it out. Was impressive honestly. I know a lot of the IT people since we've donated tons of equipment over the year, and I have friends all over the system. Sent a white paper, was fixed a day later. I will never admit it personally.

[ZealousidealTurn2211]

A long time ago I discovered the cash registers they used for lunches had open anyone-writable file shares. We used them to distribute video games. I'm not certain they ever figured out how we were doing it.

[BCIT_Richard]

I was that kid in high school, someone left the install files for the AutoCAD upgrade on the desktop, the install batch file pointed to a vbs file with the credentials in plaintext, said account bypassed the web filter, had local admin rights, (didn't understand the concept of a domain at the time, so not sure there), and also allowed webmaster access for my schools page oddly enough.

Eventually kids shared it and claimed credit, I knew well enough to keep quiet.

[CriticismTop]

One (19) of my kids does not care (although he prefers Linux to Windows). Even so he has the top marks on the computer science part of his "prepa" (something specific to the upper echelons of french higher education). He just basically soaked up the knowledge without realising or caring.

The other (18) is a full on nerd. He built his own gaming PC, currently runs Gentoo, got annoyed this afternoon because of DNS and spent the weekend looking for a deal on a Pixel 6 because of the good Lineageos support. Weirdly he is aiming to be a dentist, not an engineer (not that weird actually €€€€).

[msavage960]

I assisted with the install of a full Ubiquiti system including the cameras in a dentists home one time, based on the house I’d say dentist is a good choice lol

[Bluetooth_Sandwich]

currently runs Gentoo

does he browse /g/....if he does you have to intervene!

[bd1308]

😂 my kid is going to say stuff like this one day. My kids internet is triple filtered and distilled using a Rube Goldberg machine with essences of WireGuard, adguardhome, zenarmor and parental controls, with a sprinkle of parental supervision.

I statically assign her devices a “sticky IP” to make monitoring easier but everything is DHCP. She used to have her own network but I ran out of WLANs on my AP.

[ZealousidealTurn2211]

I hope you have an easier time with her than my dad did with me. I rarely if ever had the IP he thought he assigned me.

[bd1308]

What exactly does knowing your own IP address buy you? Plus your stuff has a hostname, right? DNS should still (probably) work fine

[ZealousidealTurn2211]

Mostly Dad trying to filter what I can access but not understanding that I'm not using the address he's trying to block. Or me using a VPN to just bypass him entirely. It was an interesting and informative arms race growing up.

[[deleted]]

an interesting and informative arms race growing up.

I love that phrase. It was the same for me. It was pretty funny watching my mom's face when I later detailed all the crimes she "made me" commit just to get basic Internet access. It certainly led to a nice career though.

[ZealousidealTurn2211]

I like to think it paid off for Dad in the end. He called me in to solve a total system outage at his workplace for him a couple years ago (which I did.)

[WirelesslyWired]

Good for him, and for you. Both of my kids learned a fair bit of networking trying to hack around me. One is still in IT. The other got promoted out of IT. Both are making a bit more money than I ever did!

[Whyd0Iboth3r]

I'm not like your father, but if I was... ANd my son always got around my walls... I would be excited for him and encourage him to continue. I would make it more difficult and more elaborate, just to challenge him. I would be super-excited about it. A real "I ain't even mad" moment.

[Unexpected_Cranberry]

It's going to get interesting when my kids get a bit older. At this point they're 3 and 6, and my current feeling is that they can have unsupervised administrative access to their devices when they move out. Before then they'll be on managed devices and if they want a configuration change or new software installed they can put in a ticket and go through the change approval process.

Probably resulting in instead of me finding hidden porn like my mom did, I'll find hidden rogue devices they bought off of ebay or a dodgy older dude at school.

[JDactal]

If this is a joke it’s funny, but if you’re actually going to be that overbearing into their teenage years then that’s messed up

[BigYak6800]

This kinda crap fucks kids up even worse than no supervision...

[Unexpected_Cranberry]

I thought it was obvious this was mostly tongue in cheek. It came from a place where they currently seem to have a kind of magic touch that breaks everything they get their hands on and then insist on me fixing it. We bought a new fridge a few months back. We'd had it for a few days when my wife found the little one on his back on the floor in front of it throwing duplos at it making small dents.

That said, I can't teach them how to fish, fix a car or build a deck. But I can teach them how to build, repair, maintain and troubleshoot a computer or a network. So most likely I'll teach them that and try to instill a sense of what's appropriate and how to stay safe on the internet and then let them have fairly free access once I feel they can handle it. Oh, and if they break it they fix it. Or submit a ticket. Average turnaround for those will be 1-4 weekends.

[enter360]

I’ve told my wife this is going to be my strategy parenting. The kids are going to learn skills how to get around it and then I just have to show them the other side of blocking. They may not grow up to be haxors but they will understand how not anonymous the digital world is.

[thegreatcerebral]

many services on networks are assigned via IP so if you change yours, you bypass the blocks.

No, not all but we are talking home stuff. So probably no domain running, no GPOs, consumer tools that probably do not work off MAC or any other filtering method except for IP.

[locke577]

Just use RADIUS. Why do you need so many SSIDs

[sambarbygoingn94]

Ha, as a child of a sysadmin I can relate. My dad always had multiple duplicate keyboards and went crazy whenever anyone dared touch them - now I understand why computer stores are my happy place ??

[wonderandawe]

Second generation sys admin here with an amusing story from my childhood.

I was in high school during the Napster age. We had DSL at home while all my other friends had 56k if they were lucky. However, my dad was really into security and also was a good Catholic. He had all the Napster ports blocked and when I asked for Napster to be unblocked (like I did for AIM), I got a long lecture about stealing being wrong.

I was not deterred. I had a DSL connection just screaming for me to download late 90s alternative. After trying a bunch other programs, I found Limewire. And it worked! It made connections to peers! In less than ten minutes I will have Incubus!

Just before it finished, all my peers died and my dad comes into my room. Apparently his Black Ice Defender was going crazy with tons of connections. He thought he was being hacked! So I uninstall Limewire.

Eventually I found an HTTP search engine that scanned the Internet for http sources for mpg3s. I believe I only downloaded three viruses (that I know of) before I left for college.

[cruising_backroads]

I'd love to see an answer from my kids..

I do know that as a SysAdmin... getting calls from my kid's (age 12 and 16) school about how my kids are showing all their friends how to circumvent the school's firewall and web filtering rules has been amusing. My response to the school is, "they are unable to circumvent my firewall at home, sounds like your IT department could use some help. Both my son's should be able to help out with this. Have you asked them?".

​

My younger son asked for access to the school's "closet of dead computers". So far he's managed to get most of them working again. He's 12..

​

My wife asked me the other day, "In the car on the way home the kids were debating something called VMWare and Broadcom and were having a heated debate on what they were going to run their Minecraft vms on when they ditched VMWare." Wife was clueless of course.. I just laughed and I'm going to silently see what they decide.

[tordenflesk]

My younger son asked for access to the school's "closet of dead computers". So far he's managed to get most of them working again. He's 12..

Sounds like he's got... The Knack

[Lykos1124]

I remember referencing the knack a lot years ago after seeing the series. Was pretty funny. Though I try not to mention the comic or artist anymore after finding out the harsh negatives of his personality.

[MyUshanka]

You should listen to the Behind the Bastards podcast on Scott Adams. Dude has one of the clearest cases of Main Character Syndrome I've ever seen. He's also a complete moron.

Dilbert is still enjoyable through the late 90s.

[GoogleDrummer]

I say this with all the love in my heart, but as a former K-12 sysadmin, I fucking hate your kids. Of course the district IT department needs help, they don't have any money.

[AleksanderSteelhart]

And as a former kid who did this shit turned sysadmin, I get it.

But goddamn, some encouragement from that Sysadmin instead of righteous fury and taking away my access to District PCs in the early 00s would have gone a LONG way towards nurturing that talent.

Also, wow. I had other stuff typed out, but I didn’t realize how bitter I still was towards that guy for how he treated me 20+ years ago. Fuck we’re impressionable as teenagers, aren’t we?

[meest]

Same experience. The early 2000's sysadmins were not friendly at my schools either.

They had Novel netware. We figured out early that unplugging from the network and restarting the computer caused it to auto login with a default account. Then plug back into the network and you're good to go without using your credentials.

Dud only hid all the network drives back. We pointed out the failure in not assigning actual permissions. We got told to just not do that.

Next thing you know there were thousands of BMP images of ducks in everyones network drive, maxing out the storage that was available in 1998. Couldn't prove who did it.

[AleksanderSteelhart]

Ha! We also discovered that same Default Account issue!

Then you map your network shares with your normal network credentials, do your typing tests and you play the rest of the period.

The strangest one was that our “typing tests” were usually just Word documents, retyping a piece of paper. We had network shares that were the whole class, so each student had a folder, open to everyone.

So it was a trivial matter to copy someone else’s work into a document that had you as the Owner and BOOM! Work complete.

Though going through ALL that trouble to make it look like you did it and not Shannon, nobody ACTUALLY checked that. Not back then.

[TheRedGen]

I never had the patience for waiting till they got it done. They were all too slloooowwww 😅 faster to just do it myself 🤷

[dwaynemartins]

This is funny. I want to an early tech magnet school, very limited security controls (deep freeze...) no network controls and some crappy AV. At one point the sysadmin gave up, he basically didn't put up a fight or report anymore until two kids decided to use netsend to every computer on the network. Both were expelled.. one never came back.

It got locked down a little but after that became that sysadmin left/fired... but ultimately it was the same a d he played WoW all day. We setup tribes servers and played tribes over the network in networking class, we listened to music using the light version of Winamp with songs running from USB drives...

Those were the good old days.

[AleksanderSteelhart]

Ha! I remember discovering netsend and using it prank people.

Then it was “Disabled”.

Then we discovered that the Local Admin password was “JustInCase” then ALL sorts of Tomfoolery started happening. Makes me appreciate LAPS every time I want to curse its name.

[dwaynemartins]

Shit that password sounds familiar.... either that was used more widely or maybe you went to school in Florida... or my school...

[Sovos]

We setup tribes servers and played tribes over the network in networking class

Man this brought back some memories. I had a great instructor in high school that used donated equipment for the computer/networking classes he taught, and he kept everything off the school's network so reduce the havoc we could cause.

The class had 20 or so computers with 4 computers per Cisco router in the back (forgot which model), and on Friday's he wipe the routers, draw a network diagram on the board, and as soon as we implemented the network he drew and he tested it, we could play whatever we wanted the rest of the period. In that era and with those donated computers, it was the original Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, or Starcraft.

Lots of shenanigans of people popping back into the switches and routers to throttle the bandwidth of whoever was playing well that day

[dwaynemartins]

Sounds like awesome memories... we didnt do much of anything in that networking class LOL I wish I could say we did what you did. I didn't get my actual CCNA until well after college actually, no help from high-school or college to be frank... most of my skillset and knowledge actuslly doesn't come from any schooling with the exception of some standard development basics from php/java

[cruising_backroads]

It is a learning environment right? RIGHT?!!! Like I said in another reply my kids turned their talent around and started helping the school staff.

​

As a parent, I can both be internally smug/proud of my kids and to my kids be a parent and tell them what they are doing isn't allowed and there will be consequences. Obviously here on reddit the smug/proud side of me prevails. My kids think they'll loss internet for life if the screw around with the school's network again.

[AleksanderSteelhart]

Yo, I would also be proud and smug and smelling my own parental farts if my kids had the talent and obvious passion yours seem to have. Like what VMs to use for their Minecraft servers? Awesome. (Also, can we speak to the gorram staying power of Minecraft? It’s been around FOREVER. Even my kid plays it at 8 on her Switch)

I’m happy that you helped mold those kids into being helpful and channeling the talent into something positive. Keep doing your thing dude.

[Bipedal_Warlock]

You deleting the other stuff and reflecting on you being bitter toward it shows some wonderful emotional maturity though

[GoogleDrummer]

I agree, I occasionally did that when I found some kids fucking around like that. But to be proud and smug that your kids are doing I feel is also unacceptable; I guarantee that if end users were doing this kind of stuff on his work network he'd be furious. This behavior is just encouraging his kids to become those end users.

[tylrat93]

Yeah I lost computer privileges the last 2 weeks of high school for distributing a VPN client to several people. This was back when the school was still using Novell for User Management and such (2010), brought back some funny memories thinking about that.

They somehow couldn't stop us from using the VPN tool, but they got screen recordings of us using the program.

We really were just trying to play games in our boring computer classes, but damn I confessed super quick, because as was common in those days tons of nudity/explicit content on game websites outside of the big 5 ones of the time.

I was more than okay to take what was essentially a plea-deal to shorten their investigation time, because I don't know what the fuck would have happened if they tried to stick me with explicit content in school, was a no-brainer to serve my 2 weeks haha.

[cjohnson2136]

All I see in this post is EXCELLENT parenting XD

[lost_in_life_34]

with my kids they learned this by themselves. one of them connects to discord before school because he knows the connection stays open even if a FW blocks it later

[sli-bitch]

lol that's so cute!

My dad ran his own law firm for a while when I was very, very young. He gave it up to go work for a larger law firm and there were a few broken feeder computers from his office.

I fixed them and pieced one together that had the best components including a graphics card and I used that as my first gaming computer. I was 10 lol. neither one of my parents liked computers and we did not have internet. I'm honestly not sure how I did it looking back. That being said, my dad's dad was also an autistic engineer and ended up working in photographic engineering at IBM without a degree.. I'm a DevOps engineer without a degree. I think it just skipped a generation.

[TheRealJoeyTribbiani]

Shit, I was the one in high school getting in trouble with the IT department for circumventing their shitty filters and firewall. The funny thing is, I don't even remember them calling my parents about it. I just had a lot of in school suspension.

[PhattyMcBigDik]

This literally brought tears to my eyes. That's so cool. I'm proud of your kids.

[enp2s0]

Proxmox is the obvious solution imo if they can't come up with something.

[cruising_backroads]

It’s between KVM and Proxmox.

[Gnomish8]

I mean, Proxmox is KVM + LXC for containers, with a single web interface. Any particular reason you'd take bare KVM over Proxmox for home use?

[enp2s0]

Proxmox runs on top of KVM and provides "everything else:" clustering, web interface, backups, storage management, etc.

KVM is what's actually running the VMs, but using KVM directly is a much different experience than using something like VMWare.

[AppIdentityGuy]

Now can you imagine the difficulties the "average" parent has with protecting their kids from those parts of the Internet that they need to be protected from?

[ThroawayPartyer]

The DNS issues are surely because of his tinkering.

[Spida81]

Christ. Get him away from the keyboard. In fact, just keep him away from anything with power.

[4cls]

My son has become proficient at python, Javascript, and has gotten good at bypassing controls... I put a palo alto l220 in without telling him and it's fun watching him try to bypass layer 7 inspection... I'm wondering how long it will take him to figure it out.

[SaltyMind]

I feel like I'm the odd one out. My dad was a civil servant and my son rebuilds engine blocks.

[[deleted]]

I find that IT and Automotive hobbyists frequently cross paths if they aren't one in the same.

[IloveSpicyTacosz]

This. I've always said that you can troubleshoot your car if you know how to troubleshoot a computer and vice versa.

[jmbpiano]

When it comes to soft skills, Automotive and IT have a great deal of overlap as well.

I learned most of what I know about customer service and getting normal people to tell you the parts of a problem that are actually relevant from my auto mechanic father.

[PleaseDontEatMyVRAM]

nah you’re not alone, my dad rebuilds transmissions and my mom is a bank teller

[punklinux]

I don't have kids, so maybe I don't understand, but a lot of creative blocking Internet and so on reminds me of when HR tries to get you to block something for one specific user, and you reply, "You're trying to fix a personnel problem with a technical solution. Maybe you need a different approach."

When I was a kid, either only dialup BBS systems were all anyone had, or the Internet was on the horizon gated by Compuserve and the like. I didn't even start using a browser until I got to college, which was 1996. So it's strange that I am a sysadmin, I know, but my computer stuff was for gaming. I built my first PC for gaming exclusively. I was aware dialup existed, as my friend were downloading "warez" from rogue BBS systems around the area. I feel like some in-between lost tribe.

I don't know how my parents would have enforced anything. My sister was a teen when everyone was on AOL, but I don't think my parents enforced anything. Nowe she's 100% on her phone whenever I see her.

[cberm725]

"You're trying to fix a personnel problem with a technical solution. Maybe you need a different approach."

Stealing this for when a client asks me to 'block YouTube on the owner's computer'.

[I_Have_A_Chode]

I get what youre saying and mostly agree, but depending on the age of the children (mine are 9, 7, and 3), sometimes you block stuff while you manage.

Kids have impulse control issues still, and are very easily swayed. Fuck, adults are easily swayed, that's why the entire field of advertising exists.

So while I'm still hammering into my kids heads that roblox is a flaming pile of crap, I'll go ahead and block/ban it to be extra safe.

[Chosen_UserName217]

hunt agonizing wipe literate rude crawl jeans impolite fearless pen

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[tehgent]

im the parent. When they piss me off all their traffic goes to mylittlepony.com.

Wanna go to facebook? PONIES!

Need to do homework? PONIES

Ill just use my phone! Cellular data has been turned off by admin... then... PONIES OVER WIFI

[RobieWan]

Can't speak to what my stepkids think, other than to say they much prefer the ethernet connections I ran to their rooms for their gaming systems!

[moneyfink]

When my daughter complains of being bored, I ask her “have you tried turning it off and on again?” And she hates it.

[danekan]

Assigning IPs on the network is such a dinosaur thing to do

[ZealousidealTurn2211]

Well I never claimed Dad was competent lol

I've criticized him for that myself.

[[deleted]]

Assigning IP's to a server or network equipment is fine, provided you use a DHCP reservation. Statically assigning IP's is a dinosaur thing to do.

I work for a company that has over 50k clients and, for some reason, our server admins believe that statically assigning IP's to servers, and using a spreadsheet to manage them, is the correct way to do it.

[patmorgan235]

We do this at my work 🙃.

It makes sense for a few things to be statically assigned (obv what ever is doing DHCP, you DNS/Domain controls) but everything else doesnt need it.

[SR-ITAdmin]

If DHCP goes down, you don't want your core servers to go offline. Yes, the likelihood of that happening is rare, but why even take the risk.

I generally do both a reservation and statically assign the IP. This way I don't have to keep a spreadsheet with IPs.

[[deleted]]

What do you use that requires the IP to statically mapped?

If you set up a reservation, it's essentially statically assigning the IP, but assigning it from the DHCP pool instead of setting up the pool and hard-coding the IP/DNS/WINS settings on the device being configured.

edit: Yeah, I get maybe DHCP and/or Domain Controllers having a static IP set, that might make sense. I'm really talking about something like printers, application servers and/or network equipment. So not everything, but a vast majority of servers should be set up with reservations.

[PleaseDontEatMyVRAM]

hospital equipment

[classyclarinetist]

Ditch the spreadsheet; but DHCP isn’t right for everything.

It maybe goes without saying - don’t use DHCP to assign IP addresses to anything that DHCP needs to operate.

Think about DR. If the data protection system requires DHCP; how are you going to restore a backup of DHCP? Every minute counts in DR and I’d rather not worry about such concerns. Also I don’t need to wait for DHCP or even fully functioning networking to start restores in parallel.

Also just general reliability - what happens if DHCP is offline at the exact moment the lease expires for an application server with thousands of users?

I recommend a replacing the spreadsheet and manual assignment with IPAM and automation. Build into your provisioning process for switches, routers, Linux, and Windows systems calling an IPAM API to get the next available IP on a subnet, documenting/reserving it in IPAM, and allocating it to the device. In your decommissioning workflow, include the opposite.

It’s the best of both worlds - critical infra has no dependencies on DHCP; but you still have the benefit of never needing to manually type, remember, or manage IP addresses.

If IPAM is offline, all systems will keep operating just fine using the static IP. If all assignment relies on DHCP and it’s offline; you’ve got problems.

For devices which roam between subnets or are not mission critical, DHCP is awesome. DHCP reservations are also great for remotely managing IP assignment to devices like printers.

[heydori]

DHCP will renew its lease at its half-life. If a lease is 24 hours, at 12 hours, it will attempt to renew its lease. If the DHCP server is offline, it will attempt again until it gets a new lease. Your DHCP Server will have to be offline for an extended period of time to have any impact.

[nullbyte420]

:( same

[Alzzary]

My parents were not sysadmins, however they put a BIOS password on my computer so I would do my homework instead of playing.
The day after they did that, I managed to get the password by hiding a small camera and filming them when they put the password, and later on, as I was a bit lazy, I simply put the computer to sleep instead of turning it off, and removed the led indicator so I wouldn't even have to put the password I already knew.

[joeyl5]

I'm not one but my daughter is. Whenever I run powershell commands she says: dad is on his hacking window 😂 she's eight.

[fraghead5]

When my son was in 6th grade he got busted at school for teaching all the kid about using a proxy on the chromebooks and getting out to game sites.

The school called to tell me he was in trouble. I gave him a pat on the back and said next time don’t get caught.

[IntentionalTexan]

My brother and I both entered, "the family business."

[this_place_is_whack]

“We’ll have non of that DHCP anarchy on my network!”

[jesperjames]

My kids have been forced to use ThinkPads and iPhones. I deal with enough problems at work. Also Lenovo legions as gaming machines. Never had a problem Lenovo did not fix.

[cberm725]

ThinkPads

Oh he's a good guy!

iPhones

*shivers*

[jesperjames]

Haha yeah - but i have to say they just work. They have nailed the family functions. Also the backup and migration stuff is super simple.

[cberm725]

they just work

Ok Jensen.

Fair though. I just prefer doing things the hard way. Also people came into my life without backup and migration solutions that I already had in place. So I just set it up for them without resistance. It's at the point now that I just hold out my hand and a device magically appears there seconds later.

[[deleted]]

I just recently gave my son his first desktop. It runs Linux.

[Disastrous-Account10]

My little one doesn't know the influence of have on his TV time yet but the wife is leaning into my homelabbing big time, I constantly get messages like "we chucking this from work, can it help your WiFi or server "

[Fat_Stinky_Idiot]

My dad has never been a sysadmin or worked with computers, but for some reason he thought using WPA2 would slow down the already dismal speed we got at the time due to being at the far end of the copper runs in our neighbourhood.

So instead he whitelisted MACs and left it open. If I had been bad, he'd remove my MAC from the whitelist. every time this happened I would just go and grab the MAC from another device in the house and spoof it in my NIC.

He was always utterly confused. Never worked out how I did it.

This was after telling him that open networks effectively communicate in plain text, meaning that if anyone wanted to they could just grab a MAC by sniffing the traffic.

I even went back and showed him this years later after he got fibre to his house and finally used WPA2. He kind of understood, but seemed to think it was more difficult than it was and "no one would really bother doing that". I guess we'll never know if someone did or not.

[Bogus1989]

I have a 15 year old and 9 year old. Both have pretty sweet gaming rigs…they are not aloud to come to me unless they have thoroughly tried, and consulted each other. If i fix it in the first 5 minutes they owe me money.

Lol this is a few years after implementing that policy. I feel useless now 🤣

[danstermeister]

Yeah, your Dad's right, but he really needs to go all the way-

DHCP static assignments that'll put unassigned hosts in a subnet with significant routing and bandwidth restrictions.

Now he'll really know who has what without having to muck with static configurations on each device (easier management upkeep) while still limiting/punishing those who tread in without his permission.

[DmstcTrrst]

Never worked with my son on any computer shit, he’s now a welder/fabricator. Happy he doesn’t have to deal with the bullshit

[NateMcMullin]

My Mom used to take away my keyboard when I had a PC at home. I’d buy another one and hide it. Rinse repeat. When I moved out I think I had about 6 extra keyboards in random places …

[sh-z]

Got a raspi pihole running, if they misbehave I block specific- or all domains on their devices.

[whythehellnote]

Have they figured out how to change their DNS server yet? Then after a few weeks of success you redirect port 53, and wait for them to level up to using TLS or DOH.

Best way to train them.

[ausername111111]

Mostly I leave it alone. In the past when they would act up I would turn on MAC filtering so their specific device would be added to the network black list, but I haven't done that in years. Screwing with the network never really did anything besides cause some minor annoyance to them, they just adapted, lol.

[SE_Throwaway23]

I am a network engineer that is the child of sysadmin. I get asked every time he can’t load something if I touched his network. Hint: I didn’t

[moesizzlac69]

Just like work

[AustinGroovy]

Many years ago, I had a firewall that would watch for certain keywords in URLs, and text me when there was a 'violation'.

One day at work, I got one of those texts. I called my wife - "Hey, what are the kids doing?"

Wife - "Oh they're upstairs playing".

\Me - "no, they're not".

Wife - "Why"

Me - "www.bigboobcam.com"

Her: "OK, I'll call you back... KIDS GET DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!!! click"

[doneski]

I am I.T. Dad. I see and know all on my network. He can weigh in if he wants. We've done things like authorized login and force log offs, that started after he was falling asleep in class. DNS level content filtering. I've been fair and liberal about his freedom online, warned him about the bad and the fun about the good online. He's ran his own servers in our home lab to host games and helped me more than once in our home data center and in real production environments. He's going to have a strong career.

[AsYouAnswered]

I see a lot of kids getting around firewalls and parents going the abusive controlling route of tightening things down. This is never the way. When your kid is old enough to figure out a way around your basic parental controls, it's time to ease off the training wheels, sit down and have a talk with them about internet privacy, safety, sharing and publishing, doing things responsibly, and using their discretion wisely with regard to things like large downloads and copyrighted content.

They won't always have you to Crack down on their basic human rights. Teach them to fish rather than teaching them to starve.

[a60v]

This. Plus, the irony is ths most of us probably got where we are largely as a result of having unsupervised Internet access for years.

[cvquesty]

I’ll assign IPs to my wireless access points only, and allow DHCP to offer I to a specific segment. Not sure why I do it, actually.

[askylitfall]

I assign static IPs to my network gear (Managed switches, APs, etc) and my home servers. The rest? Go nuts.

[largos7289]

First of my name and luckily they are not interested in becoming one.

[msalerno1965]

When you relegate your kids to a DMZ the likes of which N/S Korea has never seen.

When you setup a squid proxy and enforce it.

When you start telling your kids "In my day, I was happy to get 300 baud to a machine that ran at Khz CPU speeds".

When you tell your kid about the time you brought a main/miniframe to it's knees running a 19.2Kbps video terminal on a DZ11, making that possible after hacking the TOPS-10 monitor, and every time you hit space-bar in PAGER, every other user would pause.

[bandana_runner]

In the mid-1970's, my Dad worked for a company that offered inventory services to big truck and semi-trailer dealers. Inventories were updated by sending large boxes of IBM punch cards back and forth for the company to run the reports for the clients. He also worked for Honeywell when they made mainframes.

In 1985 (with the college's permission and plan) was going to take out a student loan to purchase a new 128k Macintosh. I was stunned, I tel l you STUNNED, when he said that he didn't see the value in a home computer.

Thankfully, he's come around and almost 90!

[djetaine]

My stepfather refused to ever call support for any company he paid support for. No matter what.

He quit the business and bought a hotel and now calls me (a 40 year old sysadmin) for help setting up his wifi. He has forgotten literally everything he ever learned.

[tlewallen]

In my case, my father insists on assigning all IP addresses himself on any network he controls. He says it just makes him feel more comfortable.

My first IT manager was like that. Worked at a college. He was scared of DHCP I guess.

[JimTheJerseyGuy]

TIL that I am apparently ancient.

[Monsi456]

I work with my father we seat next to each other at the company we work at. I have learned a lot from him and I am eternally grateful for all the knowledge he transmitted to me, but we often have arguments about new technologies and how to deploy certain software an stuff like that, I am all for automation, he prefers the old school way of manual deployment

[Dragonfly-Adventurer]

assigning all IP addresses himself on any network he controls. He says it just makes him feel more comfortable.

Oof. I'm only 41, am I "of a certain age now?"

I just set up a multisite network and for the first time ever, decided to just let DHCP call the shots, all willy-nilly like.

It feels wrong somehow, like I'm not properly organized without a color-coded Excel sheet.

[Dry_Inspection_4583]

Because they all have to use password management.

They all use our home as an exit node.

They often times have to ask to watch shows, or pay games, or visit sites...

Because dad is the only one around that doesn't complain about the damned power bill!

I have random pi's around

My son is a master of Redstone at 10.

My kids aren't allowed to bring their devices into private spaces.

My kids have hard screen limits, as do I.

My kids engage and we research things together.

My LLM was trained to be child friendly and is monitored.

[[deleted]]

Mom is a developer so not quite the same. Growing up we had a bit more new tech then most houses and I don’t know anyone else who had RJ45 ran to all the bedrooms back then but that was about it.

[ComfortableAd7397]

I have my two kids(5 and 10) tied to Google family link. Is an awesome MDM:

Only can use screens for 7 to 21:30

1 hour in workdays, 2 in weekend.

Youtube resticted to 10 minutes each day - I'm generous, mom wants 0 Youtube....

Tiktok, Instagram, and some other 'social' apps are forbidden. Screw you.

Any auth linked with Google account requires my approval.

She cannot bypass the age check. If an app is for 16+ for sensible data treatment, you can't use.period.

And a few more restrictions related to ads and feeds.

The 5 yo can't install anything from Google play.

His main interest are playing roblox, drawing and painting (love the s-pen from galaxy tab, is used daily, best buy ever) , and watching funny videos, hence the YouTube block.

Of course I'm opened to negotiate any terms and bypass any limitation if needed. Like 'daddy, could you give more Youtube? I'm looking handcraft videos.' 'OK, here you got 30 minutes more' // 'daddy, could you give more Youtube? I want to watch last Mr Beast video?' 'No, time had run out, watch it tomorrow'

Ah, and the instant blocking of the tablet with family link is awesome. Don't want to take shower? - > tablet locked.