Posts by my farts clear the room

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

There was this one time ......

I was manager on call and the London NHS trust I worked for was in a partnership with two other much larger NHS trusts.

We had premises in one of the other trusts' campuses.

There was a saturday morning generator test which caused a switch to latch. That switch (theirs, not ours) serviced the door access controllers for our floor in their building.

None of the doors would respond to swipe cards. Every door had a 500 kg pull force maglock. Some doors had emergency overrides that cut the power to the mag locks (the terms "fail safe", "fail secure" and "fail open" are all relevant here) Rooms that didn't normally have human occupants were typically 'fail secure'. Everything that could be poked to gain access was on the secure side of the door.

To fix the issue, the switch needed to be rebooted or replaced. However the switch was on a UPS which was on a generator backed circuit that also fed critical stuff that could not be shut off by yanking the power.

The latching event happened at around midday and my on-call engineer had attended site then and was released because we could not fix it and there was nothing he could do.

The situation was resolved at 6pm by representatives from each affected trust - i.e. all 3 trusts - attending to secure their own equipment whilst a man with an axe fought his way through a fat, hefty, fire door.

Switch had power yanked and replaced, booted normally. My guy took some photos to show that our kit was not affected and everyone else went home, leaving the estates people for that Trust to reinstate some sort of door.

Moral of the story is to plan your infrastructure so that you have a way to release imnportant doors - using a key switch above the ceiling tiles that requests a door release (thats logged by the controller) and lets the doors be opened and closed again afterwards.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Bitwarden can work here

Bitwarden has a feature on the paid license that allows you to create recovery contacts that can request access to your password safe.

In the event of an event your configured contact(s) can request access to your password safe. You get emailed a notification to accept or deny. If you don’t respond they get access after the expiry of the time you configured per recovery contact.

I have 3 setup, the most trusted has the shortest timeout and the most capable has the next shortest. The third has 2 weeks.

I have 700 unique complex passwords and lots of useful info, like car insurance and so on listed as secure notes.

I’ve moved to Devon where people seem to come in droves to wait until they shuffle off this mortal coil and have been diligently explaining the hygiene benefit of a password manager along with the suggestion that people set up a recovery contact that could be their solicitor, friend or offspring. It’s a learning curve thing for everyone.

There are cheap solutions out there, the problem is that the generation that needs them most are not aware of them.

How CAPTCHAs can cloak phishing URLs in emails

Re: An automated scanner gets stopped at the puzzle.

Dinosaur!

ITYM an ALLOW list

Lists of colours aren't the modern way.

Court papers indicate text messages from HMRC's 60886 number could snoop on Brit taxpayers' locations

Any anonymising forwarder services out there?

What happens if the end user is connected via WiFi calling? - Three / O2 etc offer SMS and calls in and out bound over WiFi ......

Is anyone virtualising mobiles into a voip / wifi concentrator that receives SMS/calls and routes them down tunnels to the remote handsets?

Would all the crims be visible because their SS7 locations were a mast outside an industrial unit and a terraced house in Moss Side?

Asking for a friend .....

UK pharma supplier put into special measures after new IT system causes almost 10,000 missed medicine deliveries

Re: Sewer Rats are cleaner

The majority of patients don't pay for the drugs at all, they also probably don't even get sight of the prescription as its sent electronically to HAH and you are delivered the drugs.

You don't get the repeat part of the 'script like you would at a high street pharmacy.

Its all behind the scenes like a hospital pharmacy delivering drugs to a ward. Its easy for everyone to blame each other, but yes someone is making a profit here so they are shaping their staffing to maximise profits not ensuring a minimum performance threshold is preserved.

They may be contracted to exceed a minimum performance threshold, but they sure weren't being audited against their ability to do so during a business continuity event.

Want your broadband fixed? Best write to your MP, UK's Zen Internet tells customer

Re: Zen - bad and good

I've always just okayed the potential charges when they say they'll apply if the fault is in the internal wiring.

It's never been charged on any of the 60 or so DSL circuits I used to manage - 40 odd with Zen, 15 odd with A&A and 5 or so with Plusnet.

Weirdest was finding out my own copper pair has been clipped off in the manhole outside the flat so that the run from the manhole to the cabinet could be reused for someone else. I still had broadband, but no dial tone ..... 4 days after by dsl was provisioned :-(

I've had simultaneous cease/provides go hairy and weird problems when rural overhead lines have been cut and repaired (including putting a dacs into a line that didnt have it previously) and every time, 'yes I'll accept the charges'.

Toxic: Intel ordered to pay chip fab worker almost $1m after he was gassed at its facility in 2016

Re: Intel used to have good processes

Obligatory desk rabbit reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe9bBjJx4Lo

The hard hat is to protect you from the beating when you're discovered .......

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Re: Hmmm

Isn't an eicar a neutered virus .....?

Another use of a particularly precise tech term by the plebs!!

Minger

Finger

Nonce

Eicar

IP

The list of misappropriated words just keeps on growing ......

Who will think of the childrens?

Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind

Re: It was deliberate

Why the down votes?

When you know something inside out and line management instructs you to do it in spite of your protestations that it will have wide ranging consequences because of a,b and c - where does responsibility lie? Society.

Sometimes you have to let stuff break to reinforce that it is critical infrastructure and needs to be respected. This is how people learn and always have done. Its called learning from your mistakes.

When your mistakes have always had negligible consequences you are much less inclined to take advice from others because their advice has no reference value in comparison with your experience. The lessons learned through experience have been 'low value'. If, not when, the big one comes its cost is understood.

Hence the expressions 'learned a valuable lesson' and 'valuable experience'. This is why allowing people to make mistakes early on gives them an appreciation of the risk space they inhabit. The shame of it though is that 'learned experience' takes a long time to influence 'organisational culture' unless its an experience.shared simultaneously and widely. Even so, a widely experienced phenomena might bring about undocumented behavioural changes - because the common experience means it doesn't need to be discussed or recorded, everyone knows. Until a generation arrives that has no direct experience, no first hand knowledge - and no inclination to learn from the past because they need immersive experiences to pique their interest. They can't learn from black and white media.

Thats why the morons parroting anti-vax rhetoric, 5G and windmill cancer 'risks' are so dangerous. They haven't lost 13 out of 15 children to polio, cholera, typhoid, TB, smallpox, plague, famine or eating the wrong mushrooms. When the apocalypse comes they'll be looking for wifi and amazon prime to survive.

Office supplies biz owned by UK council shrugs off ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoin

Email continuity

There are dozens of online email archiving/continuity services that give you access to a cached version of your mailbox and store copies of your outgoing mail until you have got your recovery organised.

Currently their mx records point to mxtls.expurgate.net, a visit to www.expurgate.net redirects to cyren.com/en which has this apochryphal text:

91% Of All Cyberattacks Start With A Phishing Email.

If they are still down (and a visit to kcs.co.uk suggests that they might be) then it really is too little, too late.

Plusnet holds off spirited charge from Vodafone in broadband complaint charts

Plusnet billing

After nearly 20 years with zen (my adsl username was firstnamelastname@zen) I switched to plusnet fttc on a contract term that halved my bill. I also paid upfront for 18 months of line rental.

However, after 6 months I really wanted to expand my public ip range and asked how to get at /29 allocation. Not available on the consumer product, but I could change to the business product line - not as painless as you'd imagine, I had to be allocated a new dsl username as the old name was going to be cancelled. I could keep the existing phone number (doesn't get used) and had to be issued with a new (identical) home hub thingy. All the billing was changed to my ltd. co.

Everything went well, I was assigned a /29, I paid £20ish for the home hub and was refunded the balance of my upfront phone line payment. So I was £20 down on the hub and £100 up on the line rental.

My next bill is Feb 9th 2019 - I have a DD in place that they've never drawn against, there is an undertaking on the forums that everyone will only be charged 90 days worth of fees once they get the billing fixed. As it stands today I'm 6 months into the new contract and have paid £20.

Any accountants out there want to tell me how much I should be accruing against the inevitable invoice which at this stage looks likely to arrive in the next financial year .....?

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Re: Sexing up the good old CV

I applaud anyone with the cahones to change industry.

Send him to www.cybrary.com where he can have a crack at the training courses and see if they float his boat.

There's room for everybody, just recently I had to explain to a newbie that IP addresses don't get activated, if it doesn't work there are loads of things to check from the floor port to the clips on the network cable plugs, via the voip phone, the wattage of the PSU powering the docking station, is wifi connected (and should it be) and of course typos in any fields that matter.

12 years ago I employed an HGV driver who wanted to move into IT so he'd been learning SQL, he was the most balanced and normal person I have ever seen in an IT department. The day before I interviewed him he had been 'in Glasgow, in front of a man in a hat'. Just recently on LinkedIn I saw that he was promoted to a senior management position. The direction changers have the drive and wherewithal to overtake those in their comfort zones.

It takes a lot of gumption to actively change direction, but with so many in IT being nearer to Moss than Roy, there are plenty of incubation niches to be found.

Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary

Re: Spooky

I had a similar issue when registering with my GP.

During the onboarding session we discussed my many ailments and the nurse typed them into the EMIS, the patient management system.

She then asked me about my asthma as she could see I had a prescription inhaler from the notes. I told her I don't have asthma. I also asked how there could be notes on there if I was on boarding to which she replied that she had been updating my medical record. So I asked what the address was one the system.

AND IT WASNT ME!

I had the same problem at the nearest pharmacy to my home where they kept giving my prescriptions to the other me. I'm sure that his ventolin went down well with my hormone gel, citalopram, metformin, ramipril and amitriptyline. They soon sorted it out when I stood in their pharmacy asking them to describe the other me. Him being black and in his 20's with dreadlocks was not easily confused with me - a pastie white colour knocking 50 and thinning locks.

So now I'm doubly vigilant because who's to say his details haven't overtyped mine in some system somewhere.

What happened to those people that we all thought were the benchmark for 'normal' - you know, washed regularly, held down a job, managed a bank account, could cook dinner without cutting their own hands off. How did they get replaced by people lacking basic maths, probably basic spelling and with nothing engaged between eyes and fingers?

Techie's test lab lands him in hot water with top tech news site

Banana isn't English

It's Spanish ....

according to my Spanish word of the day app.

Comms-slurping public bodies in UK need crash course in copy 'n' paste

Nigel who?

Nigel Land?

Nigel Lang, I think you'll find .....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39328853

Former ZX Spectrum reboot project man departs

Give it up and build your own .....

Game are selling a bluetooth/USB zx spectrum retro keyboard for £29.99, open the case and put a raspberry pi zero w in it (theres room for a full size raspberry Pi 3 if you have a dremel and a glue gun). Either plug cables in and trail them through the back of the case or get fancy with adapters and make it look pretty with fixed sockets on the back.

The entire project can be done for less than £50.

Put Batocera Linux on the microSD card. https://batocera-linux.xorhub.com

Plenty to think about here: https://blog.hackster.io/a-beautiful-raspberry-pi-powered-zx-spectrum-489deb2020ab

Job done.

PayPal patches bone-headed two factor authentication bypass

Re: 2fa choices

I'm in the UK and I had a paypal 2fa card, credit card sized with a button on it an a little lcd to show the OTP.

I used it for about 5 years before I ditched it - the paypal iphone app didn't support it and I mainly used paypal for ebay on my phone so it became a pain in the arse switching to a PC to finish the ebay checkout.

I would be happy using something like Google Authenticator if that was an option.

The last post: Building your own mail server, part 2

Horde supports Activesync ....

But I don't know how straight forward that would be to bolt onto a PI running OpenBSD :-)

VMware wins cool reception for two-CPU eval software

Surely this 2cpu license lets you run a nested lab with a tiny vsan by running 3 vsan hosts as guests on a single 2 CPU vmware host?

Not enough to do anything more real world than poke it - certainly limiting the capacity to run your own AD, Exchange etc on older servers.

I would be interested in a proper write up of a home lab running a £200 vsan that could be legally used for home learning - as an alternative to the way some people do it with keygenz and serialz.

Silk Road admins: Sorry for the hack, we're sorting out refunds

I've got it on already .....

"early indications are that no members of the administration were behind or complacent in the attack"

ohhhhh me thinks they were complacent .............. not complicit maybe, definitely complacent.

NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source

What they really need is a national pki system .....

It could cut through the nhsmail is more secure nonsense and be an enabler for encryption, digital signing and could be used nationally as an NHS P2P identification factor.

Writing as someone currently battling with Vodafone (formerly Careless and Worthless) - they run the nhsmail heldesk - and trying to get them to explain to me why they delete my outbound email and then don't even do me the courtesy of notifying me that they've done it .... I have limited faith that the national infrastructure will ever really work.

Shocking really. I wonder if this means they'll be improving the documentation on the opensource projects they take from .....

Microsoft watches iPads flood into world's offices: Right, remote desktop clients. It's time

I tried loads of ios rdp clients before finding one that was both free and supported rdp gateways.

The freerdp client is more flaky than the all but identical Thinstuff RDC app (which is still a bit flaky).

http://www.freerdp.com/

http://www.thinstuff.com/products/rdc/

Neither is as good on an ipad as logmein, but they've been useful for getting me out of a hole in the past

Japan's free public VPN project tunnels through Great Firewall

its tcp over udp and it installs in user space .....

This is terrifying, the underlying software - softether - installs in user space specifically to circumvent the IT department (or lack there of) and provide individual staff their own VPN back into the office.

It works via outbound SSL tunnels so it gets through virtually everything ..... it can be installed by any idiot that can click next ...... it bypasses your firewall and network policies ..... and a single checkbox joins in with the public VPN Gate volunteers

This could already be running on your network with your staff running it!

Baby got .BAT: Old-school malware terrifies Iran with del *.*

Re: Frightened by del *.*?

"What's the singular of MS Windows?"

Pane ......?

Texan schoolgirl expelled for refusing to wear RFID tag

I am a well practiced regarder of beans .....

3 for a tenner suggests that the beans are small. I am not a small bean regarder, although I have been known to flick beans and have found they sometimes get bigger.

What do your magic beans do when flicked?

Indiana cops arrest violent 6-year-old

Re: The good old days when a quick smak fixed 99% of the se problems.

clobber was what I used to put on before heading to the discotheque .....

Plod to retain personal data from DNA innocents

What if I'm asked who I am and refuse on data protection grounds

What if I'm askd who I am by a policeman and refuse to consent to him tsaking my details and recording them?

Can I opt out on data protection grounds? what legitimate exclusions to the dpa do they have if I refuse to consent to them having my data?