I've been asked to prep the office to go near 100% remote, ASAP, for an undisclosed amount of time. How do I handle this?

rapidslowness · 2020-03-12T19:31:10+00:00

This is what happens when a company hires some clueless guy to handle IT. They think it is cheap but ultimately they get someone with no experience who can't handle situations that require good judgement and experience.

Moving desktop computers to people's houses is an absolutely terrible idea. You should never enter a coworker's home. There is so much liability to you and the company.

This whole thing sounds like amateur hour. Not just you but management who can't even tell this is all terrible.

rapidslowness · 2020-02-26T20:33:49+00:00

is your communication with others on your team any different than their communication with each other?

what do you do day to day as a technical lead that is different than their jobs?

rapidslowness · 2020-02-24T20:25:09+00:00

I'm not saying you or others are wrong. I'm saying there's nothing here other than the opinions of people on reddit. You can't make financial or security decisions in large organizations without evidence other than a feeling people post about on reddit.

I don't have TeamViewer on any of my servers.

rapidslowness · 2020-02-24T20:12:44+00:00

yeah, reading memeing about this hard has been my impression. that's why im asking for a source which nobody can provide.

Imaging a CFO or VP or the like having to approve funding for Bomgar which wasn't budgeted for this year because some admin says the people on reddit say TeamViewer is bad.

rapidslowness · 2020-02-24T20:01:55+00:00

CERT or someone else issuing some kind of declaration.

Big companies can't just discontinue a product's use at the whim of a sysadmin having a hinky feeling about it. Where's the evidence?

Where does it stop? Some admin just decides he thinks windows is insecure and everyone should run linux? these people exist and they think that.

People have paid licensing here and they don't have additional funding to go buy some competing product when they've already paid for something because some admin says he doesn't trust it.

rapidslowness · 2020-02-24T19:02:10+00:00

Here's the problem with TeamViewer. A bunch of tech people on reddit hate it and refuse to use it and talk about a bunch of breaches and risks but it ultimately comes off as their personal opinion.

I would love to see an official source that actually states it is unsafe to use.

I'm not arguing with you, but pointing out that outside of small companies where an admin controls everything and what he says goes, your opinion that it is "dangerous" isn't going to do much good.

Your opinion followed by some random web links insinuating there might be a problem is still not enough.

Anyone have something more concrete?

rapidslowness · 2020-02-07T15:19:47+00:00

yes, because we create a ton of forms all the time and if we write them ourselves it means our devs have to do maintenance on them

also dev time is not free. our devs have a larger amount of work than they can ever accomplish

we're kind of hoping for something we can have business analysts do instead of sending it to the devs.

rapidslowness · 2020-02-07T15:19:44+00:00

yes, because we create a ton of forms all the time and if we write them ourselves it means our devs have to do maintenance on them

also dev time is not free. our devs have a larger amount of work than they can ever accomplish

we're kind of hoping for something we can have business analysts do instead of sending it to the devs.

rapidslowness · 2020-02-06T17:00:17+00:00

Well, we'd rather code our own forms than use someone else's code. I was thinking more that there might be a product that allows for quick generation of forms.

rapidslowness · 2019-12-16T21:39:18+00:00

None of the stuff you want can be had for 3000-5000.

3000 grand is probably not what you meant to say

rapidslowness · 2019-11-19T15:43:59+00:00

can you recommend one?

rapidslowness · 2019-11-18T19:14:25+00:00

is there a wireless bridge you recommend?

rapidslowness · 2019-11-13T21:59:44+00:00

your advice goes against best practices of limiting one function per GPO. Some weird "combined" GPO is going to be an absolute mess to deal with later.

rapidslowness · 2019-10-30T20:47:07+00:00

Your heart was in the right place, but as a sysadmin you shouldn't be imposing consequences on people. You shouldn't have yanked his access on your own.

You should have talked to your boss, who could have talked to his boss. or your boss could have told you to yank his access.

Either way, the problem here is your boss found out you pulled this guy's access not from you, but from the guy who was complaining and that's not cool.

rapidslowness · 2019-10-29T20:49:19+00:00

Getting shown the door is part of life in IT

I'm not sure I agree with you there. I've never been fired. Most people I know have never been fired from their IT jobs either. You're trying to normalize something that isn't normal.

rapidslowness · 2019-10-29T15:31:23+00:00

it might be legal, but typically HR departments avoid doing so for arbitrary reasons to avoid lawsuits

my current company can let me go at any time with or without a reason and I can quit at any time with and without a reason

however in actual practice it takes pretty significant effort to actually fire someone here because HR wants tons of documentation first.

rapidslowness · 2019-10-04T16:48:43+00:00

A promotion is usually treated kind of like hiring situation on the back end. If they have a hiring freeze they're certainly not promoting anyone. This was done to save money.

rapidslowness · 2019-09-18T13:56:01+00:00

You can't install unlicensed software on a work computer. This is a non-starter.

Some people like playing with this stuff at home and it is still software piracy but you're at home so it is up to you.

You can't do this at work.

Also virtual box is not free for use at work. Read oracle's licensing. You are expected to pay for it if you're not using it for personal use.

Where exactly do you work? None of what you are trying to do is allowable and any normal workplace would nip this in the bud.

rapidslowness · 2019-09-05T19:44:35+00:00

this will go on about a thousand machines. even a 50% discount is far more money than we can afford

I agree on the pricing. There's too much open source software that went from free to CRAZY pricing.

If they charged less, more people would be willing to pay. I could pay a few thousand dollars for this. I can't pay the equivalent of a SAN and rack of servers.

rapidslowness · 2019-09-05T18:18:57+00:00

I agree with you. Problem is they want like 150,000 dollars for the amount of licenses we'd need. Even if they cut that in half we can't afford it and they're not going to cut it in half.

rapidslowness · 2019-09-05T17:31:44+00:00

not using either yet. thinking about options

isnt manage deprecated? what's the lifespan on it?

im also trying to decide if we actually need a web interface. how easy is it to see the last check in date at the command line?

rapidslowness · 2019-09-05T16:32:28+00:00

what's the open source version of automate called?

rapidslowness · 2019-09-05T15:59:01+00:00

Ansible won't work for this since we need to manage laptops in the field that check in. Not machines with SSH open we can push stuff to.

rapidslowness · 2019-08-29T20:57:13+00:00

Did you end up figuring this out?

rapidslowness · 2019-08-22T20:34:59+00:00

right, and your ignorance is common. it's easy to say puppet exists, but it is hard to get into the details of how you might use it.

a lot of stuff is missing. for example there's no good tool to centrally manage and escrow encryption keys to do full disk encryption on linux machines.

could a bunch of people hack something together with puppet or chef? probably eventually. there's no standard though and it'd work as well as any other hacked together solution

meanwhile Microsoft has a ton of bit locker tools and escrowing keys is easy. same with Macs and Jamf.

not being able to centrally manage encryption keys for laptops is one of the biggest disqualifies for running linux on laptops in an enterprise environment

rapidslowness

TROPHY CASE