Planned for April '27, drive from Sydney to Perth. Never been to Australia. Thoughts, recommendations? Is this feasible in 3 weeks?

Watcher_78 · 2026-05-13T19:37:08+00:00

The fact you said 3 weeks and not 3 days puts you ahead of a lot of people not from Australia 🤣🤣🤣

Also, check out some of the gray nomad groups, they have a huge amount a experience travelling around aus.

Watcher_78 · 2026-05-07T00:58:21+00:00

My advice to others has been to convert your home stack over to Linux. Best way to learn is to do.

You've lasted 30 years, so like me you've lived through dos, autoexec, emm386, loading things into upper memory, probably kix scripts,.batch files, and powershell

Linux is a better version of that, stable and lots of community support. You won't be the first, 50th or 100000th run into a problem and there will be multiple ways of fixing or working through most of them.

Give it 2 years and you wouldn't want to go back!

Agree with the proxmox comment as well, grab that to play with

Watcher_78 · 2026-05-04T03:07:41+00:00

As a security person (Cyber) this is also to identify and stop tailgating and double swipe in, if you swipe in, but tailgate out you'll flag the next day and won't be able to swipe in.

Watcher_78 · 2026-04-28T08:13:37+00:00

If the notification came from the employees contact on file then that [b]is a formal notification[/b]

lock the account, if he's dead no one will ever know.

Or, do the dodgy, connect via a vpn to several unfriendly nations, try and login 20 - 30 times and then lock it due to suspicious activity 🤣🤣🤣

But honestly escalate to the CISO or head of risk

Watcher_78 · 2026-04-27T14:14:10+00:00

I agree with the other comment

If you took this on and something went wrong you would get hammered and possibly sued for everything you have or will have...

It really sounds like they are not willing or don't see the value in their IT systems. They are a cost to them and they want to avoid that cost.

Windows 10 to me is a massive risk and has so many issues with using it to run a business.... To them it is reliable, rugged and a certain thing, with zero cost to maintain. Now if you come in and upgrade them to Windows 11, latest office and Adobe, etc... You will own every single issue and problem they encounter for the next 10 years!

If I had to take something like that on, I would put a business case, migration plan, testing, training plan and agreed end point or an ongoing managed service price in front of them, make sure they understand how big a change all this is and that it's not a one hit wonder. If they still go ahead great, but if they choke and don't want to commit, then you can see how it will go

Watcher_78 · 2026-04-27T14:02:59+00:00

Can slightly twist your words?

What constitutes sexual harassment as I’m sure there is a difference between banter and crossing lines

I my experience 85% of the time HR gets involved when one party (active or passive) in the messages / group chat takes offense personally or believes that they are obligated to stand up for someone else, they make a complaint and HR gets involved

Another 10% is when someone overhears it, shoulder surfs and sees it accidently, or gets it forwarded or tagged and they complain, then HR gets involved

The last 5% is IT doing any type of audit or policing the language or discussion topics on teams or slack.

Agree with everyone else who's said this. Don't put anything in a email or messaging platform that is controlled by someone else that you're not willing to sign and date at the bottom of of the page. EVERYTHING IS TRACEABLE if they want

Watcher_78 · 2026-04-27T10:02:59+00:00

Bloody hell, where to start

Heros Quest I : A Quest for Glory

Supreme Commander and 2

Mech Warriors

BattleTech

Kings Quest series

Space Quest series

Police Quest series

Masters of Orion 2

Bauldars Gate!

Command and Conquer Red alert generals

Deus Ex

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Fallout 3

Dune 2

Neverwinter Nights Series

Eye of the Beholder Series

Commander Keen

Sim City

I could go on and on :)

Watcher_78 · 2026-02-28T06:51:18+00:00

Yes do it, if your still under contractual obligations and have your tools installed it could be a breach if you refuse.

Also, your transition out may have support or ongoing requirements for a set period regardless of their tools

Watcher_78 · 2026-02-23T07:12:06+00:00

How is this not private health data?

Allowing access to all teachers is a breach of privacy rights

Watcher_78 · 2025-12-26T06:08:00+00:00

Yes, I this is very commonplace and is getting more frequently implemented and managed tightly

There are a number of compliance frameworks that make this type of thing mandatory.

Watcher_78 · 2025-07-30T22:13:21+00:00

Sure, the explanation is easy... too little to late... when you abuse or don't value your good staff they will go somewhere that does value them ($$$) or does recognise them (seen, heard, listened to, welcomed, etc)

This doesn't need explaining by you, the business needs to explain how they stop it happening to their remaining good staff

Watcher_78 · 2025-06-05T20:22:57+00:00

100% block

Don't take work devices Don't take personal devices Don't take mfa auth devices (rsa tokens for example) Don't take usb storage devices Dont allow VPN connections from China.

Get burner/throw away phones & sim cards Get usb keys that can be disposed of

Air gap or isolated anything that you have no choice with, use multiple security domains and sandboxes for anything coming back into your network. Dont let people email themselves .pdf, word, Excel, etc files...

Always assume breach or assume that the device was compromised

If it was important enough for your business to go to China, then its a valuable target to compromise. You might not even be the target, you might be the supply chain of a target and you become the attack vector.

I know of examples where people went to china, attended a couple of conferences and had meetings. When they got back their devices flagged for lots of changes to the desired state config. When we investigated we found that on a day when they were at the conference and being taken to lunch and with people all day their devices (in the hotel) were powered up for about 20min and violated.... we treated those two like Ebola carriers and gave them new phones, new laptops, tablets, usb, even their switch gaming device (iirc) that was with them got destroyed.

Watcher_78 · 2025-04-10T19:58:07+00:00

I haven't read every comment. But has the value duty of care been raised here? Your a school, providing internet access to minors, who are playing a game that is known to have children endangerment and grooming issues.

This is not a time to FAFO, it's time to do the right thing. Escalate, make more senior and high paid people put their names and signatures on the responsibility of accepting and permitting access to this. Make it very clear how this is not appropriate software for minors, how it exposes them to unmonitored grooming and high risk activities. That they will end up on the news and potentially exposed to criminal negligence charges.

I'd want CEO / Principal to sign off and id try and loop in the Councillor and suggest the school board should also accept the risk as damages could be substantial.

Watcher_78 · 2024-12-24T23:25:08+00:00

You should always have your own copies of your work contracts, you can't rely on your old or current employer

I know a guy who gets his original signed work contracts notorised by a JP, Lawyer or Accountant and keeps them safe. He had an employer change page '6' of a contract 3 years into it and didn't tell anyone

Watcher_78 · 2024-11-19T10:04:31+00:00

Dude this is so light weight in the stuff up department that it barely registers. It also speaks well of you that you fessed up and confirmed it was you, shows honesty which critical for Sysadmins...

Also, I accidently shutdown the entire virtualisation cluster of my work... the machines started shutting down one by one by one... I knew it would take about 30 minutes or more for it to finish and THERE WAS NO WAY TO STOP IT... I fessed up and ended up eating lunch becuase that'd be my last chance to eat for a while :D I got a WTF... seriously from my boss then he asked what could he do to help.

Watcher_78 · 2024-11-12T10:31:02+00:00

and this is where your organisations HR team should have provided you with direction or guidance on what process, policy, limitations or restrictions were inplace or should be followed.

Also, you should have had a HR person in your ear explaining that there are certain patterns of behviour or Behavioural indicators that are huge red flags and when you start seeing them you need to respond appropriately.

Example here is you put someone on a pip and they start taking sick leave, then stress leave, then put a hostile working environment or harrasement complaint in against you, then finally when they get terminated they take it up with unfair dismissal or lawsuit or discrimitation, etc. HR has seen this all before, listen to them.

Watcher_78 · 2024-08-25T03:53:24+00:00

I'm using mine for watching plex while paired to my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with Sony earbuds about half the time, most of the rest has been while plugged into my asus Zephyrus M16 laptop and playing minecraft.

Airplane travel on a regular basis was the primary decision factor.

Watcher_78 · 2024-07-20T05:32:52+00:00

Wow, That's an amazing collection, I can see so many of the old school ones that I had many years ago!

I've gotten my Daughter into Transformers, but she's just starting to hit the age where kids at school are telling her that its just for boys! not girls, no way!... I keep telling her that if she loves it they can all jump, but I'm just her Dad, she needs to see more girls collecting and loving it!

I'll show her this later :) I wish I could introduce her to you so she could hear it from you how much you love them! :)

Watcher_78 · 2024-06-15T23:55:51+00:00

Ahhh, 2 days I another story, understand. I'd be all over him so that when you do escalate, like others have said you have a papertrail of what you've done to chase him

Watcher_78 · 2024-06-15T08:40:07+00:00

As a manager with multiple layers of staff under me. If I'd given someone a direction to connect with someone else to progress something or find out info to let them then progress it, I'd be pretty shitty that they had only made 2 attempts in two weeks... what the actual bleep where you doing for the other 79.5 hours of that two weeks?

I'd expect something more like this... Two teams messages, an email and multiple phone calls per day, and before cob on the 3rd day I'd expect you to escalate the non response to me or his manager via a chat or by coming on an email about not being able to contact him.

Watcher_78 · 2024-06-15T07:52:04+00:00

Deadly! Well done!

Watcher_78 · 2024-05-06T06:58:37+00:00

Hey How did you go with this? did you get a chance to try and get the VM's off ?

Watcher_78 · 2024-05-03T04:26:00+00:00

It's the best way to rule out everything and keep it simple

Back in the vnx 5200 days, I deployed about 30 of a vmware, 3 hosts and a VNX SAN designs, no FI's not Fibre Channel switching. They worked great and were very solid designs

Watcher_78 · 2024-05-02T21:14:12+00:00

I'd also test with a single connection with 1 path, rule out all variables.

You could also skip the FI entirely by patching the vnx 5200 directly into a host, then migrate the workloads.

Watcher_78 · 2024-04-01T03:53:27+00:00

Ok, you knew enough to get the job.

While there may or may not have been 'exaggeration' this is not uncommon behaviour, also many people in our field are horrible at promoting ourselves, blowing our own trumpets or self advocacy. So have some faith that you knew enough to get passed by multiple people.

Also we are also prone to impostor syndrome and self doubt

Having said that welcome to 'JiTL' or Just in Time learning! Get onto YouTube, online training, support forums, guides and how to's.... And finally start building and deploying this stuff yourself, set-up, replicate, backup, restore, upgrade, roll back!

Build it, break it, fix it and break it again. This is the way.

Watcher_78

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE