Random Tech/IT Thread

[Elessar78]

Presently, I cannot login into iTunes without it getting stuck trying to authenticate my password. The last two updates have sucked for iMac.

Amen. Can't remember what I originally posted on it but it also crashed app store for about a week. App Store. SMH. 

[Mufumonk]

Ah, thanks. Not minimizing that (no pun intended) but is that all? I always thought they made it sound like some highly complex actions.

It's a bit more elegant than that. Here are a few examples:

I thought that Motorolla was Google's phone of choice, meaning that it came with pure Google.

Ive never owned an android though, so I'm just going on what I've read about it.

Only devices with the Nexus designation come with pure Android.

Edited November 29, 2015 by Mufumonk

[Zguy28]

Ok, so I never thought I'd say anything positive about Symantec, but their Symantec Messaging Gateway has a very good spam filter. It is blowing our Websense Email Gateway out of the water. I guess its not kudos to Symantec though since they just gobbled up Brightmail is all.

[Gamebreaker]

Ok, so I never thought I'd say anything positive about Symantec, but their Symantec Messaging Gateway has a very good spam filter. It is blowing our Websense Email Gateway out of the water. I guess its not kudos to Symantec though since they just gobbled up Brightmail is all.

 

LOL! I was just about to say that! 

[tshile]

They also make a pretty cool data storage management system but I'm pretty sure they bought that too.

Which means both will be trash, but more expensive, in 3 years

[tshile]

i love when you buy software and it works.

 

especially when you buy two different pieces of software from the same developer, and both work.

 

it's just rare. i don't really recall the last time I bought software that worked in every single environment without issues. I've deployed this stuff to 15 different environments already without a single issue.

 

if you're having trouble keeping your computers up to date then i highly recommend you try out Admin Arsenal's PDQ Inventory and PDQ Deploy. that's the software I'm talking about. It's $250 for a license for each, but it's per user not per machine/node/etc (per user meaning the person using the PDQ software, not the endpoints. I am the only one using it, so we only need 1 license to manage all our environments) - so for $500 you can deploy it across all environments. i'm setting up schedules to deploy applications using their heartbeat triggers and... it works... it's awesome...

Edited December 4, 2015 by tshile

[tshile]

need a term for when you:

 

send change requests to people but they don't never give feedback because they're "too busy" (ie: just don't care about your request), even though they just need to spend 5 minutes on it, so you just make the changes anyways and wait for them to realize their thing 'doesn't work right anymore' (when it's just slightly different, but not the way they want, because they never gave you feedback on what they want) so then they have to give you an answer on how to change it.

 

Proactive User Experience Survey was one of the ones suggested that I liked the most.

[Roger.Staubach]

I own a government contracting company.  That's all I do.  DoD 8570 had a big bush to get people certified to work on contracts.  It was and is an absolute waste.  People working on the contracts passed around "study guides" which basically were questions and answers for every possible question on the exam.  I was still working contracts at the time, I was required to get a security + certification.  I still laugh at one of the questions on that exam.  It asked what a vampire tap was.  LOL  I haven't seen a vampire tap in ages.  It's sad that some of these requirements get forced onto contractors.  The CISSP may be devalued but some contracts require it.  The managers from the big contractors were all doing whatever it took to help each person get their cert.  They didn't want to lose that revenue.

 

While 8570 is now defunct, they still stick to it because they haven't quite figured out how to implement 8140.  The roles are much more clearly defined in 8140 and the certification paths are more difficult.  The biggest problem I see is finding a way to map them to existing job duties and such.  For someone like me, who is still quite technical but is used as a catch-all for projects that require lots of experience in multitude of subjects, I may find myself having to focus on one area vice many.  While primarily IA and Incident Response for the last few years, I still do a lot of networking, policy creation, and provide guidance to my younger peers who haven't learned the nuances of the DoD.  And while my degrees are in IA and forensics, I don't use the technical aspects of the forensics so much as I use the theory to engineer solutions that consider what I would want if a 'worst-case' scenario were to happen.

 

I just hope that they find a place for a bum like me.

[Springfield]

The iPhone 6s Plus batter is legit as ****.

Compared to all of my other prior iPhones, the battery on this thing goes hard. I seldom get my battery down to 20% in a days time.

[Zguy28]

Quantum Computing is here!

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3013214/hardware/nasa-google-reveal-quantum-computing-leap.html

[Zguy28]

DISA having DNS issues with the mail.mil domain. For those in DoD military or civilian work. Your email is intermittent.

[tshile]

http://www.root-servers.org/news/events-of-20151130.txt

Hrmmmmmm

[tshile]

oh my god... i think comcast finally fixed my problem...

 

4 tickets, including a tech visit, and i think they finally fixed my problem... i'm going home at lunch to find out.... pray for me.

[tshile]

I thought a few of you might get a kick out of this.

 

I'm troubleshooting email dispatching from a system; a system that is very expensive; that is used by some major government systems.

 

The email notifications for this one part of the system are not working.

 

After 5 days of back and forth with the developers of the system, opening a ticket asking how to set up SMTP authentication, they sent me an article saying "We found this" and it's a link to a microsoft blog about how to turn on anonymous relaying in exchange.

 

The ticket is still open. They will not respond to my last post. Which was asking for them to find someone who actually understands what it means to use SMTP authentication. I think they're a little offended by my tone.

 

Anyways. So that's why I'm troubleshooting this. Here's what I've found.

 

- At least 6 different areas where email dispatch settings exist. Two of them are in the SQL database. 1 is in a random XML file. and 3 others exist in various locations (settings inside the actual application for the specific part we're troubleshooting)

 

- It seems to pull different parts from each location. never pulls all the settings from any one location. It pulls the from NAME from one, the from address from another, the server to send it through from another, and even though it does all that it somehow grabs the internal domain of the network and uses that as part of the 'from address' for one part of the email (it sends an email to the person, then sends a log to the person responsible for ensuring the email was delivered correctly, one uses the from address, the other uses the from name@ the internal domain name it found elsewhere)

 

- if you put a valid email address in one of the "from email address" settings, it throws an error saying "invalid character in header: @". it wants a from email address NAME, but it's not labeled correctly.

 

- oh and the logging system that tells the supervisor that the correct person was notified via email, tells you the email was successful even when it wasn't

 

this is a **** show. a complete **** show. these are people designing important systems for government use. for big money contracts. paid for by the rest of us. their knowledge and education in the basics of software development isn't worth the paper whatever degree(s) or certification(s) they have is printed on. even if that's only their high school diploma.

 

**** show.

 

i can't wait to submit my write up to their bug reporting system.

 

(they set up and configured this, i'm just stuck figuring out how to fix this mess now.)

Edited January 6, 2016 by tshile

[jpage520]

Seems that I might have the right group here to ask...

 

Fellas and ladies, I'm thinking about expanding my career horizons and looking into some IT certs. I'm currently doing AV(Audio Visual), which I have a few years experience and related degrees. I'm not sure which direction to go in regards to getting certifications that I can expand upon the background that I've already built. A few folks have recommended going for the CCNA because it's fairly general and could be used to in relation to my current field with video conferencing and device networking. My aim is to increase my own value in my current position/workplace if I can.

 

Anyone have any advice? Recommendations on certs or direction?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Renegade7]

Seems that I might have the right group here to ask...

Fellas and ladies, I'm thinking about expanding my career horizons and looking into some IT certs. I'm currently doing AV(Audio Visual), which I have a few years experience and related degrees. I'm not sure which direction to go in regards to getting certifications that I can expand upon the background that I've already built. A few folks have recommended going for the CCNA because it's fairly general and could be used to in relation to my current field with video conferencing and device networking. My aim is to increase my own value in my current position/workplace if I can.

Anyone have any advice? Recommendations on certs or direction?

Thanks in advance.

Have you had a chance to look at places like dice.com or indeed.com to see what jobs you find most appealing and what certifications (if any) those positions are looking for/requiring? You'll get a lot of good advice from people in here, that's what I'll recommend. Edited January 6, 2016 by Renegade7

[Gamebreaker]

A few folks have recommended going for the CCNA because it's fairly general and could be used to in relation to my current field with video conferencing and device networking..

I disagree, unless your networking equipment at work is Cisco equipment. I have a CCNA, I wouldn't necessarily call it fairly general. It is tailored specifically for Cisco IOS and touches on some network basics. I would recommend looking into Network+ instead.

[tshile]

It's funny to see the look on some people's face when "The IT guy" tells them no. They tend to consider "the IT guy" this person that they can order around.

 

Requester: Need access to subordinate's mailbox

 

Helpdesk: Ok, Done

 

Requester: I need to be able to send email from their mailbox.

 

Helpdes: Ok, Send on Behalf Of rights granted.

 

Requester: No, I want to be able to send as them.

 

Helpdesk -> Escalated.

 

Me: Nope.

 

Requester. Excuse me?

 

Me: You don't get to pretend to be someone else unless you have a really good reason to. Do you have a really good reason to?

 

Requester: I am their boss.

 

Me: Nope, Ticket -> Closed.

 

Requester goes into rage mode.

 

[Gamebreaker]

tshile,

I wonder what that guy is up to. I've fulfilled request to have a mailbox forwarded to another mailbox, or to link a mailbox to another mailbox. But only when the user has been terminated or quit, and the supervisor is trying to catch any clients attempting to contact that user and retain business. But never while the user is still employed, that's wild.

[tshile]

they have some weird practices when people are out of the office.

 

not something i like, or honestly have ever seen anywhere else, but someone at some point decided that was the way to do it and we cannot convince them to change. story of the IT world, someone shows a group a terrible way to do things and you're now stuck supporting it.

 

anyways, they're just being lazy. and i know that. which is why i refuse to allow them to pretend to be each other. at the end of the day it's their stuff and they get majority say in how things work, but i get to draw the line. and impersonating another person, especially in a work environment, is definitely over the line.

 

edit: it took me 6 months to convince them to stop storing everyone's passwords on a spreadsheet

 

the only reason i was able to get that changed was because they were audited and I found a way to make that qualify as failing the audit.

 

which is hilarious that a security audit didn't outright ask - do your users share passwords. i had to find a roundabout way of using that to fail the security audit. the amount of time and money spent on audits (especially government) is nuts consider how ineffective some of them are (or clueless.)

Edited January 6, 2016 by tshile

[Gamebreaker]

Have they never heard of distribution groups/list? Auto generating replies telling people to address their email to someone while they're out? There are so many better ways to handle it then sharing your password. So strange.

You could have the best firewalls, and the best network security plan in place, and you're still likely to have a network breach/hack due to user error.

[tshile]

Not to mention once you give someone your login you've now allowed them to do things on your behalf.

 

Like send out emails to clients. Delete files.

 

Or I don't know, surf child porn?

 

Why the hell would you risk that? It's not like you're going ot have much of a defense when they find child porn on your computer under your account. That's not exactly an accusation where you receive the benefit of the doubt from anyone.

 

Or less extreme - people who check the 'remember me' box for their back account. Now they can log into your account...

 

People just don't think.

[chipwhich]

Here is my pet peeve on passwords. Some systems are getting so complex with their requirements that people are forced to write them down. My customers access 5-10 systems. 16 characters. Two upper case two lower case 1 number and a ! $ @ #. It's so ludicrous all the customers end up writing them on notes on their desk.

[tshile]

Here is my pet peeve on passwords. Some systems are getting so complex with their requirements that people are forced to write them down. My customers access 5-10 systems. 16 characters. Two upper case two lower case 1 number and a ! $ @ #. It's so ludicrous all the customers end up writing them on notes on their desk.

The username/password system is broken. There are studies that show that the more complex you make them the more likely people are to record them in plain text files on their computer or just write them down on something on their desk.

 

That said, I run about 20+ environments and have 10+ passwords for each that i'm responsible for. I store them in an encrypted database but working faster means remembering a lot of passwords. Plus I have my own personal life passwords. So... people don't exactly get any sympathy from me on the password situation

 

This is why single sign-on implementations are important. It's really, really annoying to take over an environment where ever system has independent authentication. Super annoying.

 

I've taken over so many office 365 migrations where they never synced the local network with the o365 system and I want to roll up a newspaper and smash the people responsible on the nose. idiots.

Edited January 6, 2016 by tshile

[Gamebreaker]

Here is my pet peeve on passwords. Some systems are getting so complex with their requirements that people are forced to write them down. My customers access 5-10 systems. 16 characters. Two upper case two lower case 1 number and a ! $ @ #. It's so ludicrous all the customers end up writing them on notes on their desk.

I've begun helping the users who constantly can't remember their passwords to start using phrases. With actual spaces in between words. Brute force password programs won't crack it and it's easier to remember.