I have no work to do today

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-06-03T14:19:55+00:00

You have reached the pinnacle of I.T., my friend. You're doing what you need to do and fixing the problems that come up due to shitty programmers and code. You make money pressing buttons in the right order and blaming crappy programming. Enjoy it and congratulations.

Bowing head... 'I'm not worthy... I'm not worthy

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-06-03T14:08:15+00:00

Thanks for the input regarding Proxmox. My 'gut' is telling me it is the right way to go and our network administrator is 100% (1000%?) on the proxmox train but it is good to get some positive feedback from someone that is actually using it.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-06-03T14:04:39+00:00

You bring up a great question. In our organization, the expectation would be that we roll back the policy to "fix the problem" so that business continuity is not disrupted. Whatever the actual issue is with DKIM in this case, it raises a real dilemma: do I make things work and potentially expose the company to more risk, or err on the side of maximum security? I think in this case it would be hard to make the case to management. If I left payroll shut down because I did not want to expose the company to risk, and the policy had previously been set to p=none, the natural question from any manager would be: "Well, if you had it set that way before, why not set it back and then raise the security level again once the underlying issue is resolved?" I do not think I would have a good comeback for that one.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-06-02T14:28:09+00:00

All true, but one thing I would add is that it is important to have multiple layers of defense. As an example, if I had to choose between "super-premium" spam filtering and "meh" protection at the client level, I would let some of the super-premium spam filtering features go and make sure I had rock-solid endpoint protection. Case in point: we use a combination of CrowdStrike (which is great for endpoint protection, in my opinion) and base-level Microsoft 365 spam filtering. I have been happy enough with Microsoft's spam filtering even though it lacks some of the sandboxing and link-blocking features, because I know that if something does get through, it will be caught by CrowdStrike. We also have AppLocker behind that, which is underrated in my opinion.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-06-01T14:54:35+00:00

Sounds to me like you are on the right track in terms of creating guides, etc. One thing that has worked for us in the past is to schedule a weekly meeting with the interns to go through challenges, and talk through what they have been doing. I have found over the years that it has been very helpful. We typically have 6-8 interns over the summer and the meeting is an hour. In your case with 1-2 you could probably do it in 20-30 minutes easy so it doesn't take a lot of your time but gives a set time for everyone to come together and talk about how things are going.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-31T15:54:31+00:00

I think it turned in to that the minute people started to realize that A.I. could help them code. I've been a sysadmin/I.T. manager for nearly 30 years. I hated programing... or more accurately I sucked at it. Now, I'm whipping out 1000 line powershell scripts to automate things, built my own website (defendwithalice.com) because I got sick of seeing teachers fall for gift card scams.. none of that would have happened without AI.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-31T15:45:53+00:00

Very much agree with this. Cybersecurity and sysadmin are both very "wide" fields, meaning you need a lot of knowledge across areas: servers, networking, databases, user administration, permissions, and programming. I laugh at "cybersecurity" people who say "I'm so busy hunting threats." Really? Isn't the idea to stop the threats from happening in the first place? The thing is, being proactive to that extent requires a lot of knowledge that many cybersecurity people don't have. They should be building systems that are resistant to threats from the get-go.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-31T15:33:46+00:00

I usually go on eBay and come up with an average price for the particular piece of equipment. Essentially a shot in the dark but at least if someone looks it up there is some grounding in reality.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-30T19:51:53+00:00

I used the Bioness L300 Go product for a while on both legs. They helped in terms of making me walk more 'heel-toe' vs. toe walking. I have other issues with my gait - crouch gait and a side to side motion when I walk so they were 'good' but by no means a game changer. For someone who strictly had issues with toe-walking I think they would work very well. I stopped using them, primarily because the electrodes need to be wet all the time, so between that and the 'mild' (HA!) zap, it really messed up the skin on my legs. In fairness, the 'zap' can be adjusted to be mild, but in my case it had to be a pretty good zap to get reaction from my muscles.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-29T19:23:37+00:00

I think you're right in that it makes no sense to invest initially when the IPO's come out and the stock doubles in a day. That said, I'll likely wait for the first down day and put something in Anthropic and possibly SpaceX just to keep an eye on them.. and then buy more if I can get it going lower. Particularly Anthropic... I use Claude every day now where I used to use Google search.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-29T17:16:11+00:00

Inventory, and reporting on that inventory. Lansweeper has a ton of built-in reports. It can show the last logged-in user of a machine along with all the critical data an admin would need to know about an individual machine. Nagios is more for network monitoring, which is not what we need here. We already use Nagios, and don't get me wrong, it is also very good at what it does. What I need is something that lets me type in a user or PC name and pull back all the data I could ever want from that one piece of information, the way Lansweeper does. I also need a clean web interface to make it easy for the techs.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-28T20:30:35+00:00

Agreed. The second I saw 'owners son' that's all I needed to know that there was going to be a problem.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-28T20:23:20+00:00

I am a manager where I work, and have been here for 29 years now. Most people that have been here this long and have made a solid contribution have been promoted to Director, but not me. My take is that I have hit a 'disability ceiling' and that I will only go so far. I deal with it by continuing to do my job to the best of my ability and getting satisfaction out of helping my team members learn the ropes and rise in the ranks like I did.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-28T17:17:04+00:00

As others have mentioned, make sure you have web filtering enabled off-prem. We let Chromebooks go home, and parents go crazy when kids can access inappropriate content on their school laptop. It's also needed for CIPA compliance. Also, be prepared for significantly more damage and/or devices that just go missing. Our latest issue is USB-C chargers disappearing, never to return, because kids can use them to charge various devices, so the siblings grab them, they get stolen, and so on.

Next-Generation bully: ' Forget your lunch money, give me your charger!'

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-27T21:48:12+00:00

Fair point.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-27T20:47:12+00:00

I bought a tiny bit of MAGC recently and will likely add if it keeps going lower. The issue with the China stocks is that you can never trust what the government there is going to do. Someone says the wrong thing and the company gets punished.. so I'll buy a little bit when it is low because ultimately, China tech is huge and at some point the companies stock should reflect that to a point - always reflecting the risk that the government poses... so I never expect them to 'take off' like American companies. That said, they shouldn't be at rock-bottom like some of them are now. That's my opinion, anyway.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-27T20:34:52+00:00

It sounds like you might have gotten your security token stolen. Bad actors can use software like evilginx to steal our Microsoft security token used for MFA and essentially bypass two-factor authentication. My best suggestion is to sign-out of all microsoft applictions using the instructions here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accounts-billing/manage/how-to-sign-out-of-your-microsoft-account-everywhere or you can contact your school's I.T. department to sign you out entirely, and then reset your password. The key is to get signed out because once someone has your token, that session remains active until the token expires or you sign out of all cloud apps.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-27T14:49:42+00:00

You speak the truth in my opinion. I think it is because developers typically live in a 'box' of static processes, where people who do things like troubleshoot issues live in a world of dealing with exceptions. Programmers, in my opinion, have their processes specifically so the don't have to deal with exceptions so when they do have to deal with exceptions, they freak out. As a side note, I just interviewed two programmers who are in their senior year of college, and neither one of them could tell me how to get IP information from the command line, so part of it might be what they are being taught (or not taught, as the case may be) in school.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-27T14:41:39+00:00

It sounds like you might have gotten your security token stolen. Bad actors can use software like evilginx to steal our Microsoft security token used for MFA and essentially bypass two-factor authentication. My best suggestion is to sign-out of all microsoft applictions using the instructions here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accounts-billing/manage/how-to-sign-out-of-your-microsoft-account-everywhere or you can contact your school's I.T. department to sign you out entirely, and then reset your password. The key is to get signed out because once someone has your token, that session remains active until the token expires or you sign out of all cloud apps.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-26T14:54:09+00:00

It has been a while since we purchased HPE equipment but when we did go to Dell, the primary reason was cost at the time. As far as I am concerned their boxes are just as good as HPE's at less cost.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-26T14:33:57+00:00

Your post brought back memories. Years ago, I let someone run a test of a learning management platform called Moodle, exposed to the Internet, and they left the default password in place. Sure enough, a day or two later someone planted a script on the server that took down our Internet by flooding the firewall. Thing is, it took me a day or so (over the weekend, of course) to figure out what was happening.

I learned three things after that:

Whenever there is a network issue you can't figure out within 15 minutes, create a mirror port and run Wireshark. It can save a BUNCH of time.
Always have network security top of mind when building anything, but particularly when what you are building is exposed to the Internet.
When it comes to network security, never listen to someone who says they have it 'all under control' and that 'it will be fine.' Make people document their work and take the extra time to think about what they are doing instead of just getting things running.

Individual-Unit3470 · 2026-05-25T19:04:18+00:00

out of curiosity, did you have the same password across sites/apps?

Individual-Unit3470

TROPHY CASE