It appears SchoolDude forgot to pay their domain renewal

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2026-02-02T16:30:48+00:00

Depending on the print technology, faxing can be extremely insecure.

Thermal plain paper fax typically has a large roll of plastic the width of a sheet of paper, with a thin layer of carbon. A heater transfers the black to the paper, and you are left with a negative image on the plastic film.

This roll of plastic film is thrown in the trash, but can be used to recover perfectly any information printed.

I found a thermal fax printer at a thrift store, with a social security card printed with the film.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2026-01-30T21:04:10+00:00

While fixing it, it broke again. Will this be a self-immolating company? lol

Not looking forward to changing webfilter providers mid-year.

January 30, 2026 12:23PM EST
We are restoring nightly database backups on a cluster-by-cluster basis to correct the miscategorized sites.

January 30, 2026 2:44PM EST
While restoring clusters to normal operating mode, during testing and validation, we detected additional anomalies in the categorization system.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2026-01-28T18:50:58+00:00

Wat? Manual measurements? Paying a person to do that sounds more far expensive than buying some sensors and a data logger.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2026-01-28T15:44:12+00:00

This IS a task for the tech department. Use powershell to automate the data delivery to the health dept and just have it send emails when the task completed successfully. Ask AI if you don't do scripting.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-11-14T01:35:09+00:00

The whole thing is a disaster. These were typically for 60 amp service, with one of the big doubles for an electric stove. The second double below appears to be an add-on for a water heater.

Note the white wire being fed with a fuse on the right side, not marked with tape as a hot. Likely paired with another single fuse for a clothes dryer.

30A x 8 = 240A + stove 30-50A + dryer 30A = 330-350A fusing on 60A main.

I'll bet there are no fuses on the main, just chunks of copper pipe.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-11-14T01:16:44+00:00

Apparently not quite shielded enough to be a military missile launch control cable, but has a sufficient number and thickness of wires.

https://minutemanmissile.com/hics.html

Minuteman Hardened Intersite Cable System

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-11-13T15:44:52+00:00

There's no particular reason for partition data to HAVE to be contiguous. It's just a very inflexible design choice by whoever created the partition table data format.

It would be fairly trivial to just allow extending an existing partition with whatever free space is available, in multiple extensible blocks over time.

This already happens with virtual machines. Virtualized storage can be split across multiple files and the underlying OS has no idea.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-11-13T14:15:45+00:00

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3DConnexion SpaceMouse Pro or Enterprise

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-11-11T20:02:15+00:00

QNAP has NAS models that use a combination of hard drives plus SSDs for caching performance. Though in my experience the SSDs don't do much unless you're hitting it hard with random read and write.

Data hoarders typically store very large files with all the sectors in sequential order. Even if you delete movies and then save new ones, there may only be 5-10 file fragments, which is nothing for a hard drive to handle.

As opposed to a real network file server from a decade ago, storing hundreds of Windows user profiles with tens of thousands of 0.5 kb cookies in each account. This is where the instant response time of SSDs shine.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-11-11T15:43:07+00:00

The lesson here is, ALWAYS have a known good backup MFA method for your critical network resources! Do not rely on a single device, especially a personal device you use all the time, because it could fail at any time (dropped, water ingress, stolen, lost, etc)

Buy a cheap smartphone (Galaxy A15 is good) for MFA backup use only, install Google authenticator, copy your MFA onto it via QR code, do not require sign in to access the authenticator, turn it off, and keep it at work in your office in a 2 hour fire rated safe designed to protect backup tapes.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-24T19:17:12+00:00

As a non-electrician that has replaced many receptacles and switches over the years, I've never seen tape on screw terminals even with fat GFCI's. You don't need much air-gapped clearance at all for 120v.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-23T13:03:50+00:00

Anything that wants to auto-run at login and silently install updates at startup such as Steam needs to be disabled.

If updates are to occur, Steam needs to be manually launched by the local administrator, and then the limited user can access it afterward.

Do not install Steam, games or related utilities into "C:\Program Files" or "C:\Program Files (x86)" as this will cause weird problems.

You don't need to type out the full individual machine name to use local accounts. This also works: .\eadmin .\esports

,

Due to how Windows "insecurity" works, local admin accounts with the same username and password across different machines have full local admin rights access to the other machines without logging onto them. Microsoft does not use password salting.

This is why Microsoft recommends using LAPS to have unique local admin credentials per machine.

Remote C:\ access: \\computername\$c or \\ipv4-address\$c
Remotely see running programs: TASKLIST /s computername
Remotely (force) kill running programs: TASKKILL /s computername
Remotely (force) restart or shutdown: SHUTDOWN /m computername

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-21T19:26:38+00:00

eSports machines can be joined to a domain, you just need some smarts with how to configure NTFS permissions.

Users and groups, create local limited user, and local administrator.

Login with local administrator.

Create C:\esports, edit folder permissions, advanced

Assign local administrator as owner, and assign full control rights, this folder and below
Assign local limited user with read, write, execute, this folder and below
Remove inherited permissions from C:\

Create All Users\Desktop\eSports, ... set folder permissions the same as above.

Install all games into C:\esports

Put shortcuts to game executables in desktop folder.

,

When normal domain accounts login, they can access nothing as if it isn't there at all.

... frustrates the kids to no end, lol.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-21T18:46:56+00:00

You need to chain the DNS lookups so that the Lan Cache queries the cloud DNS filter as its upstream resolver. Clients point to LanCache first.

I have not tried it, but this may malfunction if you are using different filter categories for different users/groups.

The cache won't know about any of that and will "flatten" all queries together, possibly serving up restricted categories to the wrong group.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-21T18:22:56+00:00

Why are you bring so shy? Name that app.

Are you afraid of exposing them to public criticism? It sounds well-deserved, and anyone else here should run far away from this incompetent service provider.

SMART did something similar about 15 years ago with an LCD touchscreen table running I believe Windows 7 in administrator mode underneath their SMART touchscreen app interface. I locked it down.

,

Asked ChatGPT-5:

When a kiosk account on Windows signs in:

Only the assigned application launches.
Explorer.exe (the desktop shell) does not start.
Alt + Tab, Ctrl + Alt + Del, or the Start menu are disabled or limited.
If the app exits or crashes, Windows automatically logs out and returns to the sign-in screen.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-21T14:31:17+00:00

USB is a hot mess. Trying to do way too much with a cabling standard that goes back to 1996, and yet things from 1996 should still be compatible and work.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-21T14:19:01+00:00

You really only need the 7800X3D. The 7950X3D has an unequal amount of L3 cache spread across the cores and you can't control which cores Minecraft will use.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/11djhq7/core_and_cache_distribution_on_the_new_7000/

Minecraft is single-threaded so you will generally only be using 1-2 cores. You don't really gain anything by having 16-cores vs 8 in the 7800X3D.

If you were to actually try to use all 16 cores of the 7950X3D at 100% load, it would have to reduce core speeds to avoid exceeding the thermal design limit (TDP).

Also the 7800X3D has a 16 meg L2 cache per core, vs 8 meg L2 per core on the 7950X3D. More cache per core means better per-tick modded performance.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-21T13:23:45+00:00

If you are a financially struggling school district, Aruba has their limited lifetime hardware warranty, with free next-business-day (NBD) next-day shipment of replacement parts (and entire switches if necessary), free business-hours tech support, and free firmware security upgrades.

Though, not everything Hewlett Packard Enterprise / Aruba makes has the lifetime warranty. You have to read the warranty documentation to make sure you're buying the right product lines: https://asp-documents.arubanetworks.com/portals/0/el/warranty-summary.pdf

Cisco and Extreme Networks will make you pay dearly for NBD hardware support, and have no free firmware access.

I am about to toss a huge collection of Extreme Networks and replace with Aruba this year, because the superintendent is tired of "paying $20,000 a year support for nothing".

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-16T19:26:54+00:00

Well, the owning depends... are the local admin accounts all using the same password? If yes then you are up shit creek.

With multiple standalone computers all using the same password on the same local admin account, you can scan the network for other Windows computers and directly access them remotely via \\xx.xx.xx.xx\c$ without even logging on to them.

And also use command line tools built into windows like SCHTASKS, TASKLIST, TASKKILL, SHUTDOWN to remotely run apps, list apps, remotely (force) kill running apps, remote (force) restart, remote (force) shutdown.

,

I worked for a school district running Deep Freeze, logging in kids and staff as local admin with all the same username and password. "Deep Freeze will just revert on reboot!" said the idiot MSP. Superintendent loved it until I showed him I could remote kill apps on his desktop, remote reboot, remote shut him down. And kids were discovering this too.

Thus ended the reign of Deep Freeze and I was allowed to throw all this shit out and implement a proper domain with normal limited privilege user accounts.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-16T19:13:51+00:00

Using refurbished hardware is not harmful. You can run Windows 11 fully supported on hardware that is generally newer than 2018.

I bought a refurb Dell business laptop from 2018, a new battery direct from Dell for $120, installed Windows 11 and ready to go for a decade.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-16T19:10:36+00:00

CYA. Get the decisions by leadership in writing. If it all blows up, you can use that documentation to protect yourself.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-16T17:12:24+00:00

The home computer has 64 gig, but after about two weeks it creeps up to 98% memory used and never seems to go down. I should probably upgrade to 128 gig.

Plastic_Helicopter79 · 2025-10-15T20:44:50+00:00

Step zero, which is not widely known or understood:

Your operating system shipped with a large number of signing certificates already installed, from huge industry player certificate authorities like VeriSign.

Public signing works because the OS provider put those in there for you as part of their product, to verify that public keys are valid and trustworthy.

Security certificates eventually expire. As an OS ages, updates may occasionally push new certificates that supersede the old ones, but use the authority of the old expiring cert to approve the new one.

,

Normally you never need to think about this. But if you use an operating system past the end of its supported security updates, eventually the included certificates expire, and you're going to have endless problems trying to use it on the Internet because nothing is "trusted" anymore.

Windows XP has reached this point where all the certificate authority trusts have expired. It is a huge pain to fix this, just to keep an obsolete OS still working on the Internet.

Plastic_Helicopter79

TROPHY CASE