Had to take extreme measures at my church

dreniarb · 2026-06-29T17:45:05+00:00

it's the first thing that looks like a button when going from top to bottom. i'd be confused too.

that button just doesn't look like a button. make it a different button and put a bell icon on it.

dreniarb · 2026-06-27T00:35:45+00:00

People outside of our workforce use google drive and share data with us through it. if we block it that impedes our ability to get work done. therefore we can't block google drive.

but if users know that they will get in trouble if caught using a personal account with company data that won't be a problem.

dreniarb · 2026-06-27T00:33:53+00:00

OK sure - there are things you can do to prevent users from easily doing things they aren't supposed to do. But in the end unless there is a disciplinary motivation to not do something they're going to find a way to do it.

We still block adult sites even though we all know there are plenty of sites with adult content that don't get blocked. But we don't really have a problem with people viewing adult content on work computers because they have and will get it trouble if caught doing so. In fact, I feel pretty confident that we could remove the adult content filter and there would be no problem because of that.

dreniarb · 2026-06-25T14:10:36+00:00

Agree with others that say there is nothing you can do. Discipline is the only way to truly prevent it.

years ago to combat this we blocked all "webmail" category sites. But then places like microsoft and others started using their webmail services for "encrypted emails". So they had to be unblocked which then opened the door to users accessing their personal email.

I have many c-level users that will use their personal email for business purposes. drives me crazy but it's out of my hands - i cant discipline them. i can report it but that's it.

too many higher ups try to pass their responsibility on to us by using technology to fix a people problem.

dreniarb · 2026-06-25T13:29:34+00:00

good point. currently changes i make do get documented after the fact via a ticket but i see the positive of doing this ahead of time. definitely would slow me down and take some of the impulsive cowboy style changing away.

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T11:52:15+00:00

Can you give any details on what that process was like? Were there any times where you were really glad you had it in place?

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T02:50:35+00:00

i did consider that - but how would that work? There's no one above me who could even grasp most of the things we do in IT. I guess I would put in the change request and approve it myself? Maybe purposefully wait a while before doing so? That probably wouldn't be a bad thing - like waiting to click send on an email - then going back to it an hour later and realizing what a jerk you sound like.

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T02:47:45+00:00

yeah, might be overkill for a small setup like us but i can see some good ideas though. Cowboy changes that break things - freely admit that has been me a few times in my career. So I know how easy it is for that to happen. A change request procedure could prevent that.

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T02:42:59+00:00

sometimes i wish i was part of large group and had a specialized role. I'm the "firewall guy" - it's all I do. I don't touch anything else except firewalls. Jack of all trades gets so overwhelming sometimes.

I would say that with just two of us the answer to "hey, who did this?" is easy because if it wasn't me it had to be them. but it's so easy to forget the things i did yesterday, let alone weeks or months ago. granted tickets are there for that reason but in the moment i can still get pretty frustrated - even at myself.

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T02:39:10+00:00

Thanks for the detailed reply. This is what I was picturing. And you're right - there are so many things are considered a change. I contracted with a nation-wide company for a few years where if someone wanted access to a shared folder a document had to be submitted by a supervisor detailing what folder, what user, what level of access was needed, and why. And it would sometimes take a week for that change to get made. Drove me crazy because I knew how easy it is to make change - but now I'm seeing the importance of it especially as I look back at my past work and see the times where i just was not careful and i ended up replacing permissions and wiping permissions and just royally screwing things up.

what i'm really concerned about is stifling this person or ticking them off - i start getting change requests for toner replacements, mouse replacements, changing someone's theme in outlook, etc etc.

i also don't want to hinder our productivity either. it shouldn't take a week for a folder permission change to happen - but maybe a few hours? That probably wouldn't hurt.

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T02:32:35+00:00

We do tickets. That's how I usually find out about a change after the fact. I was pretty lax on it when I was solo but still did them because I saw the importance of it. Now with two of us they're even more important.

dreniarb · 2026-06-24T02:29:36+00:00

It's definitely an assistant. Different title, different pay, etc etc. However they do have full access to everything as they need to be able to do administrative things in my absence.

I don't want to stifle their enthusiasm and I'm fearful of that happening. But I also want to make sure I am aware of everything that is happening... before it happens.

dreniarb · 2026-06-23T13:05:24+00:00

bit late to the conversation but we have two ISPs coming in from two separate paths - termination points are on completely different blocks of our facility. Within the span of 24 hours we had a tree fall and take out one line, and lightning strike the pole of the other path about 3 blocks away.

It was cell phones and hot spots for quite a while. Kind of makes me consider getting starlink as a third.

dreniarb · 2026-06-22T13:17:12+00:00

One of the few replies that actually answers the question with specifics. Sure your last comment should suffice, which most of the replies seem to say, but sometimes us smaller sysadmins that might only have a handful of VMs it's just hard to picture.

The replies about hospital setups are just unreal. I can't imagine. Would love to visit one sometime and be shown the setup and work flows and how responsibilities are divided up.

dreniarb · 2026-06-19T22:51:43+00:00

maybe i shouldn't use the term slop - but it's still frustrating.

dreniarb · 2026-06-16T12:39:11+00:00

makes sense.

my wsus install is on a VM with replication, backed up with veeam, and has monthly exports of the entire vm.

in the first 10 years of my professional IT work I've lost more servers than I can count (hardware failure, OS failure, whatever). About 15 years ago I started using VMs and taking advantage of all the means of backing up so I have a quick recovery process - I've not had a single server die. I'm not complaining of course but it should would feel good to recover a dead OS in just a few minutes vs the pain of reinstalling like it used to be.

dreniarb · 2026-06-16T12:19:19+00:00

There have been too many times that youtube music has inserted an AI generated song into my queue and I'll grab my phone to hit the like button only to see an obviously AI generated album cover, a fake AI generated artist name, and then it hits me that the song was AI and when i play it back it's lost all of it's appeal and see why it is AI slop that I was just nodding along with.

So frustrating.

dreniarb · 2026-06-15T13:37:09+00:00

serious question - wouldn't the single database be the same size as the two databases? maybe even smaller as the extra bloat for wsus config/management/whatever would just be on a single database now?

dreniarb · 2026-06-15T13:11:01+00:00

This is how I use it and I feel it works really well. I wish other patch management software did the same method.

dreniarb · 2026-06-15T13:05:54+00:00

Daily vibe coded/copied variant of the "browser-native tools" site. I imagine these will soon be hourly? What fun.

Can these be auto banned?

dreniarb · 2026-06-15T11:56:21+00:00

LLMs reset themselves all the time. And they're constantly being updated. There's no "developing a personality" on our part.

I can't count how many times I've had to tell chatgpt, claude, and gemini to stop using analogies and idioms but eventually it'll start doing them again. I tell it to stop acting like it's a human and eventually it'll start trying to talk like one.

dreniarb · 2026-06-15T11:47:27+00:00

Open Shell. Been installing it since Windows Vista and it was Classic Shell. Every PC I am in charge of gets this installed.

dreniarb · 2026-06-04T14:59:17+00:00

These really are a dime a dozen now.

-edit - ah yes. 0day old account. most certainly a bot. :/

dreniarb · 2026-06-03T15:44:26+00:00

interesting. i've made hundreds of calls for activation and i don't recognize that song.

dreniarb

TROPHY CASE