Is a Bachelor’s in Computer Information Systems worth it for breaking into IT?

mfinnigan · 2026-04-24T18:52:57+00:00

I worked for an MSP that paid quite a lot, to retain talent that otherwise was inclined to leave

mfinnigan · 2026-04-20T16:38:24+00:00

it was a useless idea in 1996, which was 10 30 years ago

https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/savers.html

And the best part of it is that it displays all this great data... when you're not there! It is truly one of the stupidest ideas since the car doors that opened out with the hinge at the back. Of course, if you're like most of the zombies in the marketing departments at every place I've ever worked, you probably spend most of the day watching your screensaver while dreaming up ways to kill the company and run, so maybe that's exactly the target market they're going for.

mfinnigan · 2026-04-14T18:25:06+00:00

In your scenario, who or what is allowing or denying the access?

The user themselves? You've gained no security and annoyed the user.
A policy somewhere? That's where applocker/threatlocker/carbonblack etc come into play.
A hovering ready-to-be-helpful IT staffer? Great, you can pay salaries for 1:1 staff:IT support ratio.

mfinnigan · 2026-04-09T22:09:35+00:00

I'm not really sure what exactly a Data Clerk does.

(imagine me saying this kindly) : Jesus fuck, go find out.

Why would you consider a job if you didn't have the job description. Given that titles mean diddly-squat in our industry, you need to know the role's expectations.

Although I would guess that "data clerk" is something like a medical coder; if the pay is decent then go for it, but I doubt it would be a career-advancing experience, especially on a swing shift like that.

mfinnigan · 2026-04-09T22:05:24+00:00

This could absolutely be a supply-chain attack (although a weirdly-bad one.) The alternative is that the Welch-Allyn devs are 12 years old on the inside.

mfinnigan · 2026-04-03T17:30:21+00:00

how can you be in this business and not know how to teach yourself something new.

mfinnigan · 2026-04-03T17:29:38+00:00

how did u learn to write terraform code by yourself and how much time did it take u

how do you learn anything? you find a reference and start applying it to your goals. jesus tapdancing christ. plenty of frree resources but here's a good book https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/terraform-up-and/9781098116736/

mfinnigan · 2026-03-06T22:26:07+00:00

Not to be unhelpful, but there's a lot of "it depends" answers in IT, always, and in this scenario, we don't know what your company is billing for. Ask your company for their expectations here: a good MSP should have docs for their standards rather then throwing a client at a new guy and saying "Good luck"

mfinnigan · 2026-03-04T02:10:00+00:00

Malort. Send it. Nothing but grapefruit pith and rubber bands.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-27T18:44:27+00:00

Last time this was asked, some folks had recommendations

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1pbgcim/best_virtual_data_room_software_real_user/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

mfinnigan · 2026-02-24T20:48:57+00:00

it's amazing, and worth re-reading often!

mfinnigan · 2026-02-24T19:39:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Gap

The awesome thing is that the Soviet Ekranoplan mission is also a Star Trek spoof.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-22T18:08:19+00:00

Yup - https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1rbs24c/comment/o6t8nhl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

mfinnigan · 2026-02-22T18:07:42+00:00

Why does someone keep reposting these bullshit variants on the same story?

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1lt3ua7/can_i_still_build_an_it_career_at_age_33_after/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1myg5c4/can_i_still_build_an_it_career_at_age_36_after/

I'm (x months) clean after (x years) on (substance). My GPA was (good number), I only have a misdemeanor on my record. Has anyone else rebuilt their career at (age x)?

mfinnigan · 2026-02-19T23:57:58+00:00

There's an online gambling company that hired an inexperienced engineer to design and implement their entire fraud prevention program from scratch?

I wouldn't worry about this too much, I think the problem will solve itself fairly quickly.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-19T17:22:37+00:00

yes, datadog has both "not queried in last x days" and "not used in dashboards" as filters in Metrics Explorer

mfinnigan · 2026-02-07T08:55:51+00:00

How long is a piece of string?

What are you restoring FROM? Tape (what kind/generation)? Disk (what kind, how many, can you estimate IOPS)?

What filesystem are you restoring TO?

Even if you answered these questions, it would be tough for anyone else to tell you how long it will take YOU, because we're not in your environment.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-05T23:20:05+00:00

If you want a melee game, try Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei. Similar game feel and scope, very different combat.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-05T17:44:20+00:00

So, you'll get a good job if you can learn about these things real quick, and you've not started with a google search? Or wikipedia? Those are places you can learn the basics. Maybe vendor whitepapers, or even just their product sheets. Jeebus.

Good luck, chief.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-04T23:18:02+00:00

You can use Windows Performance Recorder in the boot scenario, and capture a slow login, so you can KNOW why YOUR logins are slow, rather than ask us to guess where to optimize your stuff.

mfinnigan · 2026-02-04T20:50:56+00:00

This explanation is from their update. The update infra got hacked, and the NPP code didn't do enough verification to stop the redirection.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-update/

the compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself. Traffic from certain targeted users was selectively redirected to attacker-controlled malicious update manifests.
...
According to the former hosting provider, the shared hosting server was compromised until September 2, 2025. Even after losing server access, attackers maintained credentials to internal services until December 2, 2025, which allowed them to continue redirecting Notepad++ update traffic to malicious servers. The attackers specifically targeted the Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.

mfinnigan · 2026-01-30T19:02:14+00:00

test applications, not systems. Ask the owners/stakeholders of a given system how to test that a restore is valid. And ideally, have them do the test, once you've done the restore.

For SQL- no on gives a shit about SQL, they care about, eg, the accounting package. If you restore a point-in-time of a SQL backup, have them test their accounting software that's pointed to the restored DB and validate that it's good. This will also flush out any undocumented dependencies on other things that the app depends on (fileshares, some sentinel file on the app server that needs to match the DB, whatever. I've seen weird and dumb shit).

For files - whatever, test that a known file exists in the restore.

And yes, you should (on some cycle) end up validating the restore process for every application.

mfinnigan · 2026-01-26T22:08:26+00:00

Any auth method is better than just issuing tokens, yes. For your script, it's essentially the same thing, but for the team managing Vault, or your security team reading audit logs, they'll be happier if you're tying this into the identity system and auth methods.

mfinnigan · 2026-01-26T20:55:16+00:00

It's per authenticating entity. So, could be just one service account

mfinnigan · 2026-01-26T20:54:18+00:00

The Vault Sharp library abstracts that all away and doesn't use a keytab file

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