* Posts by Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

10 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2014

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

It's everywhere...

I found quite a few like this working for local authorities.

The funniest one was a Megastream (2Mb/s pipe for those who don't remember them) going all the way to the county council office, costing back in 2000 about £8k/year. When I looked at it, I recognised the name of the office as one that had been demolished ten years ago...

Microsoft pledges to give Teams users multi-account sign-in then reels it back to one work and one personal

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions
FAIL

Wot a Waste...

Teams is a nightmare if like me you work for multiple organisations. I currently have to run 4 profiles, and do a "runas" to get all the Teams windows open on one desktop, and even then there are issues with using files :-(

Being able to have a personal account on there is a total chocolate teapot!

Let's Encrypt? Let's revoke 3 million HTTPS certificates on Wednesday, more like: Check code loop blunder strikes

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions
Go

Easy-peasy

Got email - 3 out of about 30 certs affected, one of which was redundant now anyway. Ran the renewal, done and dusted in 5 minutes.

Compared to the last time a certain company cocked up my certificate issuing and I was down for a week, this was heaven!

I agree it's a bit of overkill - but on the other hand NOT doing it might be worse for reputation.

Brother, can you spare a dime: Flickr owner sends mass-email begging for subscriptions

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

Been a Flickr Pro since they were founded...probably won't renew

I've had a pro account for years, but basically the site has been going downhill and the only reason I didn't cancel last year was because I forgot... I also got the begging letter which I thought somewhat ironic as I'm already paying them.

There's no code now to automatically upload from Lightroom, they dropped it a few API changes ago and haven't replaced it which was for me the key USP - I could maintain all my online photos from Lightroom.

The activity and comment levels have dropped right off; the storage whilst nice is now duplicated elsewhere.

As other have said, innovate or die...

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions
Thumb Up

A great read

Great read, and a lovely historical perspective.

Late with your financial paperwork? Here's a handy excuse: Malware smacked your bean-counter cloud offline

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

Krebs has a different view...

Krebs claims that he reported the issue and had spotted open file areas (not customer data) on the server:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/whats-behind-the-wolters-kluwer-tax-outage/

Buying a second-hand hard drive on eBay? You've got a 'one in two' chance of finding personal info still on it

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions
FAIL

Experience with SD Cards is similar...

I have bought a lot of old 2Gb SD cards to keep some old kit that can't cope with larger cards running. Out of 12 I bought, 6 still had data, 1 failed and 5 were reasonably well wiped. All had been formatted, which is good, but only the 5 (from 1 seller) were fully wiped.

There was personal data on all 6 of those that had data on, although only one had data I'd consider sensitive. I destroyed it all after testing of course.

Microsoft reveals terrible trio of bugs that knocked out Azure, Office 362.5 multi-factor auth logins for 14 hours

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

It's gone again!

They reckon it went over again at 14:25GMT - update in an hour or so.

Cheque, mate? Barclays Bank borked as website, apps take cheeky siesta

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

Not just one day...

It wasn't just Monday - there were service issues all weekend too.

I couldn't logon on Sunday, online or in app, and the Secure Message service (what you need to use to complain if you don't want to listen to hold music) was borked from Friday evening to my certain knowledge.

Had a long conversation with specialist complaints today about other issues - overly aggressive fraud prevention measures repeatedly stopping me making online payments to people like Amazon, the TrainLine, major retailers, and the fraud department diverting to a call centre that closed at 8PM - which was what I was trying to complain about on Friday having had more payments blocked. Decided following that conversation ("we can't change this because it's a shared service with other providers") that after Christmas it's time to go and talk to another bank :-( Apparently 24/7 banking means something different to Barclays and the rest of the world...

Helpdesk/Service Desk Recommendations

Steve @ Ex Cathedra Solutions

Re: Helpdesk?

Yep, completely agree. I rolled the OSS version of OTRS out to over 3000 users successfully and it worked beautifully from day 1. It became the go-to solution for IT, FM and most other internal service needs.

Run it on LAMP, preferably on its native database. It's pretty good for most of the other ITIL stacks as well as incident too.