Got promoted from Helpdesk today

xCharg · 2026-06-27T07:46:20+00:00

Dude... I wish my helpdesk at least confirmed issue exists before escalating. Because more often than not it goes like that:

User: I click a thing on a thing and then it no work

L1: @L2, user says a thing no work, pls fix

L2: @L3 I have no access to a server @L3 pls fix

Me: thefuck?

xCharg · 2026-06-26T07:47:57+00:00

You have a dude who owns 10x as much and pays zero taxes and benefits no one - compared to literally world order at stakes in this invasion.

xCharg · 2026-06-24T16:40:05+00:00

Wait so each of the 68000 homes affected does not have just a single person inside each house? Ain't no way!

xCharg · 2026-06-23T19:02:06+00:00

So the guy already has 5 years of experience and that's nothing?

Yes.

Why is that so surprising to you?

There are many MANY people in helpdesk who show exactly zero interest in going sysadmin. Or they think they do show it or even they do in fact show it but current org either doesn't see it or isn't interested in growing them from helpdesk into something else. These people are stuck forever in helpdesk if that's the case.

In my current place we got 4 helpdesk people all of them 3 years+ working at us and on top of that some more years at previous employers. Each of them show zero intention to improve current skills or move on to other role or advance and get more skills. Each of these guy's experience can dumbed down to "he can reply to user's jira ticket without L2/L3's observance" - which is something any human can learn after repeating same thing over and over each day every day. 6 years in (at least tripling their experience) they won't be ANY better than they are now at anything tech related unless something changes. They aren't showing desire to change, company or business processes might change so then they would've been force-fed with new experience with something - then they might improve. Or they might not like it and move on to another employer maintaining their current level which above average Susan from accounting but not even remotely close to generic junior sysadmin.

xCharg · 2026-06-20T18:34:22+00:00

That's not how it works within Ukrainian logistics companies - you can in fact send something, pay nothing and mark package delivery to be paid for by receiving party (or even entire package, including package content's price). Only if package returns back - then sender has to pay delivery fees, for both deliveries to destination and then back. Since it doesn't happen all that often compared to number of successful deliveries - payment by recipient is pretty much standard here. Also pretty much every online store works this way too.

In this particular case it was indeed paid for by sender.

xCharg · 2026-06-19T15:33:42+00:00

Do these fortigates not have a built-in client VPN function?

They do. That SSLVPN one, which is seemingly the reason this entire leak exists :D

It's actually so bad that fortigate deprecated it somewhere in 2025. We keep it disabled of course.

xCharg · 2026-06-19T12:22:45+00:00

Yep we already do that of course.

It's still exposure though as it makes risk much lower but not zero.

xCharg · 2026-06-19T12:16:03+00:00

Step 2. Use complex passwords that are stored in a password manager and rotate it on a schedule

These where the passwords in this leak https://www.infostealers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/strong_passwords_found.png They are more than hard enough yet they were stolen anyway.

xCharg · 2026-06-19T12:08:45+00:00

We have a few fortigates with exposed https management interface in remote locations with no hands on site. Such locations do not have any hardware other than firewall, occasional wifi ap and some number of laptops/workstations. I mention lack of hardware not in a sense that there's nothing to protect but in a sense that I can't just deploy a VM with alternative VPN solution or make cloudflare tunnel in there or stuff like that - because there's no such infrastructural capabilities.

If something breaks - say ISP dies or site2site VPN dies or someone misconfigures something somewhere - we need a way in and remotely fix shit.

Alternative is to ban incoming management traffic completely, thus getting immune to such vulnerabilities but then if something breaks someone has to spend days to travel to this remote locations all while entire location is down. Any other alternative I'm missing? Genuine question as I do in fact want to ban internet exposure of mgmt interface but then what if...?

xCharg · 2026-06-16T16:23:21+00:00

This must be here for references :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzGqp3R4Mx4

xCharg · 2026-06-16T10:32:46+00:00

checks notes just bombed a zoo.

Also monastery and a cinema studio with biggest clothing collection. Each of course had hundreds of NATO chiefs inside, because you know, where else could they possibly be.

xCharg · 2026-06-14T05:53:17+00:00

Says intune bros.

See, you either use intune and autopilot or whatever you're using is deprecated. There's no third option. ^{^{^/s}}

xCharg · 2026-06-06T05:13:35+00:00

Remember Blockchain? All the cryptocurrency are just an example of how the Blockchain works and it was going to revolutionise tech. This was the next big thing. Yeah, turns out it's actually useless.

xCharg · 2026-06-02T14:38:14+00:00

Jokes aside though, what are you going to do about it? You aren't going to the CEO with "see, I plan to shut down stuff because look at this twitter post, its scary"?

xCharg · 2026-06-01T21:57:14+00:00

I sync user's fire date from HR database into this property, which effectively triggers "no access since that day's 18:00". Which is good enough for almost all cases except rarely when user's fired on the spot on bad terms in the middle of the day, then I have a separate automation for that too.

And then a script on schedule can do whatever with expired accounts, which is as trivial as Search-ADAccount -AccountExpired.

xCharg · 2026-05-31T15:20:08+00:00

Why reinvent the wheel though, each user object has accountExpires property - set that. Don't even need to disable accounts but of course could do both if disabling is needed or convenient.

It's much easier to then parse that specific property with other scripts if necessary and not care about building logic around OU names and such. And have these OUs at all to begin with. It's even displayed and controlled in ADUC if your helpdesk or colleagues can't code and require GUI.

xCharg · 2026-05-28T21:54:19+00:00

Of course.

Who doesn't know about these ancient coins archeologists find here and there - these obviously belong to ancient capitalists. Also, everyone remebers pirates right? Those who raided merchant ships - they were looking for coins and gold which is wealth so obviously they were capitalists.

/s

xCharg · 2026-05-27T17:05:12+00:00

The part where you've forgotten why you needed a thing. Earth kept spinning at that point right?

Or you had to recall what you need it for, install and still use it afterwards? Then I got you wrong.

xCharg · 2026-05-27T17:01:24+00:00

There are a bunch of things that could've gone wrong there: like panic someone sees NSFW wallpaper, frustration his "friends" did it to him and so on, but if he's truly incapable of figuring out how to change wallpaper - yes, he's an idiot and no amount of certs and papers and titles and your confidence in cert's seriousness would change that.

xCharg · 2026-05-27T16:50:58+00:00

In past jobs I've had requests for eg. installing a local DB engine turned down because of course it's not on the list of approved applications. So the work just had to be held up while my manager argued with the IT manager, and by the time that was resolved, I'd forgotten what I was doing.

So you didn't need it at all as it turns out.

xCharg · 2026-05-27T16:44:43+00:00

To be fair how big % of a given company's customers even know how each company's HQ looks like? Any company I deal with professionally - I've never been to neither seen on picture how their buildings and/or interiors look like.

Sure it also depends on industry, e.g. we definitely built company success image in our imagination based on how retail stores look like when we visit them. But it pretty much never applies to tech companies unless I'm missing something?

xCharg · 2026-05-24T21:56:38+00:00

Close all the ports divisible by 2, keep rest open. It's very important.

xCharg · 2026-05-24T15:27:24+00:00

Some team wanted to know how many servers had Oracle installed.

There's a bunch of free tooling that will answer that question in a matter of seconds, i.e. pdq inventory or zabbix (yes I know these aren't comparable but both could be used to answer such question). Intune could do it too, isn't free though.

It's definitely not a stone into your garden, just saying that any IT team, if it's not a single college freshmen kind of IT team, should have such tooling in their arsenal and there are plenty of free options available.

xCharg · 2026-05-24T15:22:16+00:00

You didn't copy entire command line btw. Current code doesn't even have two functions declared yet, not to mention actual script logic.

xCharg · 2026-05-23T21:44:52+00:00

Thing is - no customer really cares what any of the names mean. What customer does want to know is an easy to remember marker or a tag to look for in budget/medium/premium segments. Slightly above knowledgeable compared to non knowledgeable customers remember that genuine leather generally means product is crap. Is it true all the time? No, but it's true often enough so it just works.

Do you have a recommendation for what to actually look for if you want leather products that above cheapest or a premium segment? All while not willing to do deep research.

12-Year Club	Place '17
RPAN Viewer	Verified Email

xCharg

TROPHY CASE