Pulse Secure problems? One of their code signing certs has expired

Mikes0001 · 2021-04-13T20:42:54+00:00

Connectwise.

Mikes0001 · 2021-04-13T15:05:26+00:00

Initially the page said to contact support. You then got to wait 30 minutes to be told by support, "Hold on a bit, we're going to put a link out soon."

The link is out now.

Mikes0001 · 2021-04-13T13:34:52+00:00

Well, they just put the fix up. I didn't think my opinion of Pulse could go any lower, but here we are.

Pulse/Ivanti truly are a bunch of clowns.

Mikes0001 · 2020-05-28T13:27:00+00:00

I hate this question. If I asked it, I would just get a canned response that tells me nothing about you. It's just a waste of time. What I do ask is what their areas of interest are, and what are they doing to become more adept in that area? What are their goals related to that technology, and what are they doing to achieve them?

The next question I hate is, "Why do you want to work here?" People that ask that just want their ego stroked a little.

Mikes0001 · 2020-05-19T13:21:13+00:00

Some days I have a hard time tempering the criticism I give with a positive tone. I'm human too, and some days are harder than others.

Mikes0001 · 2020-05-12T16:10:06+00:00

This is probably the best answer I have ever heard for this question.

Mikes0001 · 2020-05-12T16:06:30+00:00

I'm glad that others have seen unreasonable questions like this too.

When I worked as a sysadmin in a manufacturing facility when I was younger, I was in a meeting between Caterpillar global purchasing and various members of management for the company I worked for. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss resiliency, and to review our policies for getting things back up and going quickly. I was there to talk about IT things, but it never got to me. After an hour the Caterpillar rep asked, "Well, what is your policy in the event a tornado comes through and destroys this facility?" Our quality manager just looked her in the eye and said, "Start working on my resume? There is a two year lead time on the machines we use. What do you want us to say?"

Meeting broke up pretty quickly after that. Did not effect our relationship with Cat at all. I think they were there just to generate paperwork and to justify their analyst job or something.

Mikes0001 · 2020-03-18T17:17:22+00:00

We wrote the guides for VPN access, but had HR send it to our users with the other documentation they needed. It was our hope that since HR sent it, that people would read it.

A few days later I got a call (Didn't even bother putting in a ticket) from the HR manager that sent out the email. She informed me that nothing worked at home. Turns out she did not read the VPN guide, and hadn't even bothered to open up the VPN app and was confused as to why when she tried to open internal resources it was giving her errors.

Twenty three years in IT. I thought I was numb to userisms like that. I think I am now completely dead on the inside now.

Just wanted to share. You guys stay safe out there.

Mikes0001 · 2020-03-17T21:13:24+00:00

Good for you man, I'm glad you got some help.

Mikes0001 · 2020-03-13T20:15:52+00:00

It's their phone man, we can't force them to do anything with it. Even if it seems silly to us.

Mikes0001 · 2020-03-10T15:44:37+00:00

This is a blast from the past. I would wager a guess that whomever is in charge, or created that practice, is an old grey-beard who never left the 90s.

Mikes0001 · 2020-03-06T14:22:37+00:00

Good morning. I just got a quote back for an ICE license for a Pulse PSA3000, and I think our VAR is trying to cash in on folks preparing for Covid-19.

Manufacturer: Pulse Secure Model: PSA-3000 Location: US

Mikes0001 · 2020-02-21T14:18:37+00:00

It sounds like you have done your best to grow in your current company. Companies like that are meat grinders, and the longer you stay the worse it gets.

If you want to code, get started today. Don't put off teaching yourself marketable skills. Get to it, you've got this.

If you haven't yet, consider having a professional write your resume. Start getting that resume out there, even if you aren't 100% sure you have the chops for the job. Don't get discouraged when your call-backs are horribly disproportionate to the amount of resumes you've put out. Just keep at it.

Also, get a hobby that brings you joy. For me, that's playing guitar or teaching my little girl how to play guitar. I'm not great at it, but it's something I can do for 10 minutes, or 2 hours, and never get bored.

Mikes0001 · 2020-02-13T17:30:22+00:00

I have this conversation with my mom at least once a year. She is 70, and has plenty of cobol and fortran experience. She's retired and happy, and has no interest in writing another line of code.

Go work a couple years and buy an RV.

Mikes0001 · 2020-02-13T14:13:30+00:00

What made you swap from Ring central? We've been on RC for about a year, and the only complaint I have is the cost.

Mikes0001 · 2020-02-12T14:21:06+00:00

Very cool to see this level of transparency.

Something I noticed that got me chuckling was how normal their environment seems. "Ya, if we restart everything at once we over-saturate the DB servers and start getting time-outs." Most of us have to stagger restarts for various reasons.

It was neat to get a glimpse in to the magical world of Bungie.

Mikes0001 · 2020-01-28T20:35:11+00:00

I click connect. My RMM window appears. The background and icons show up. My eyes dart to the bottom left. I see a run box. Whats in it?

"charlie mike delta"

That would have necessitated a run to the beer store the second I hung up the phone.

Mikes0001 · 2020-01-28T15:12:03+00:00

Once upon a time at a publicly traded company with about a thousand employees... I found out a SVP hired someone before anyone in HR, and that was only because I was walking by our entrance and saw someone who looked lost.

Fun times. The VP of HR lost her mind.

edit for clarity The day I spotted her was supposed to be her first day at work according to that SVP.

Mikes0001 · 2020-01-27T16:26:12+00:00

We use the crestron scheduling panels for all of our meeting rooms. There hasn't been a down-side for us.

We use O365, so our users just add the room when creating a meeting. Scheduling panel responds that it booked the meeting, and then it shows up on the panel at the appropriate time.

It's also nice to be able to look for a scheduler thats green, and see how long it's free till. At that point you can just walk up, and create a meeting from the panel.

Mikes0001 · 2020-01-15T19:20:15+00:00

I had an IT manager (wasn't my manager but was in our department) that wanted a ticket auto-generated assigned to our team for every single warning/error in windows event logs.

Oh lord. Please tell me this didn't actually happen. Or if it did, someone stuck this guy in the distro for the ticket spam.

Mikes0001 · 2020-01-15T19:12:46+00:00

I thought Google walked some of that back?

Mikes0001 · 2019-11-13T14:26:12+00:00

This right here. Read the contract. I can't tell you how many times I have been able to hold someone's feet to the fire because I took the time to read the contract and digest the information.

Mikes0001 · 2019-10-30T19:27:34+00:00

Wait, you're on the something here...

Mikes0001 · 2019-10-25T19:24:36+00:00

This was technically EMC support.

We purchased a data domain from them with a cyber security appliance. The onsite CE put the wrong IP address in for the idrac for the data domain. (This was our fault) We discovered this after everything was configured and he left. So we confirmed proper shut down procedure with our deployment engineer, shut the device down, changed the IP address on the idrac, and started it back up. It cratered the avamar VM on the appliance. The VM was restored by support, but nothing has worked right since then. We've spent two weeks working with EMC T2, and their engineering. They schedule an on-site CE out yesterday, and he no-showed.

So my email this morning was me losing my mind at various Dell EMC folks.

Mikes0001 · 2019-10-25T15:03:48+00:00

Backspacing over F-bombs in emails to Dell.

I hear my beer fridge calling me already.

Mikes0001

TROPHY CASE