Posts by dmwalsh568

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Confidential.....

That brings back memories of many an hour spent in video arcades back in the day....really loved that arcade game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Re: Yet... some people are all in with Google

There are solutions for backing up a Google Workspace that are affordable for most schools to make sure all their eggs aren't in a single basket. But if the administration of the school won't budget for backup costs they are indeed setting up the IT folks for failure.

My district uses Syscloud currently, but we used to use backupify

For folks in this situation a decent (if a bit slanted in their own favor) article is at https://afi.ai/blog/best-g-suite-backup-solution

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Re: anything that plugs into a wall....

Just to be sure, the user should have one hand on an earth ground while using the fork with the other hand. That guarantees any short circuits goes to ground properly (through their heart....) :P

Charter won't pay out $7b after cable installer murdered woman. Just $1b instead

Forgery too!

You missed the biggest red flag in this case...Charter forged an agreement with the dead woman to try and force the family into arbitration where the highest cost to Charter would be one billing cycle! I hope the DA goes after them hard for that corporate shenanigans....

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Re: Other casual people

I actually have the opposite problem - I keep getting deliveries that aren't for me. My house number is 15 and the next town over also has a 15 with the same street name, which is literally 0.4 miles to the west of me on the same street! After years of getting their packages I finally gave up and told Fedex that I was fed up with being their delivery person and would consider any future packages to be gifts, thank you very much. Strangely enough we only got one more package via Fedex that was misdelivered....

But since the pandemic has caused a rise in food delivery services, I've started getting food deliveries left outside my front door. My wife even called one of the restaurants that had a company misdeliver to us to try and be good pseudo-neighbors. That netted us free food and the other folks supposedly got their food a bit late, but at least not cold from sitting out on the wrong porch.

It's gotten so bad I now have a large notice on my front door giving my address and in BOLD letters the name of the town they are standing in, it also informs them that they might want to look west if they are delivering to that other town. Still got one misdelivered order in the 2 weeks since putting up the notice. Sigh.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

more HVAC insanity

A similar story happened to me during a new building project, but the cause was an HVAC engineer who didn't notice we had 5 single appliance 30 Amp plugs in the server room (in addition to the normal AC outlets) and on an average day my server rack alone could put out over 30k BTUs....

Anyway, the summer before the school opened up I had configured the servers and the network gear was all in place. But the HVAC for the server room was a 2-ton heat pump that was shared with two offices! Things were warmer than they should have been under normal conditions, but one weekend the heat pump tripped and there was no cooling in the server room. I walked in on Monday morning wondering who was running a vacuum cleaner near my offices.... I open my door to a wave of heat and understood what had happened. Because of the undersized heat pump I had gotten a large thermometer for the server room that I had at the top of the rack so I could see instantly how bad things were at any given time. That morning the temp was 118F and all the PC servers had gone into thermal shutdown and a few Mac Xserve boxes were still chugging away with their fans running at max to keep the CPUs from melting.

Later after recovering from that I found out that the sprinkler head in the room (yes, a water based sprinkler head in a room full of server and network gear!) normally goes off at 123F so I was 5F from losing my brand new MDF gear even before we opened for school. I was not amused and had a serious conversation with the HVAC engineer along with the construction committee....that eventually led to getting two separate 2-ton ACs for the MDF and disconnecting the heat pump from the room (so my boss wouldn't be frozen in her office because the thermostat was in the server room...) Why two separate systems? The HVAC engineer was willing to die on the hill of his original plan so he installed a 2-ton AC and only after proving it was undersized did we get a second unit. All he had to do was admit he based the plan on old drawings that didn't have the extra 150 Amps of 120v service in the server room, but he couldn't admit making a mistake. Would have been easy enough to blame the architects, but nope he had his plan and we had to live with it. Grrr.

College fires IT admin, loses access to Google email, successfully sues IT admin for $250,000

Re: And using Google is a good thing?

Having just a single Google Superadmin account is plain stupid. Two should be the minimum to avoid the situation where your only admin won't or can't give you the credentials (imagine the admin dies unexpectedly...heart attack, hit by a bus, etc.)

So yes, free is good and assuming you have semi-competent managers so you have some redundancy then everything is fine. When you have Dilbert-style management and too small of an IT staff, woe be unto the PHB.

Re: Sounds like

I wouldn't assume that he sent back a wiped laptop, given normal IT practices I'd suspect that as soon as the laptop was returned that some low-level drone did the standard wipe so the laptop could be handed out to someone else for use.

Maybe he did it on purpose, but I'm willing to accept that the school did it to themselves...

Nielsen, eat your heart out: TiVo woos admen with prediction engine

Re: Alternative approach

TiVo users have to be TiVo subscribers, so they have some basic info on all regular TiVo users. And with the occasional sweepstakes, they can gather a lot of detailed demographic detail over time. That used in conjunction with show watching info can give a pretty detailed "view" of the TiVo households.

Of course, that assumes nobody would lie to TiVo on the various forms....sure, my birthday is April 1, isn't everyones?

And depending on how creepy they want to get, just imagine the big data possibilities of the TiVo boxes not only reporting what shows you watch and which ads you fast forward past, or even back up to watch a few times...but there is no reason the TiVo boxes can't report what programs get recorded via Season Pass (aka OnePass), or via individual requests. Recording habits can be just as useful as watching habits as the two don't necessarily line up for those of us with large HDs in our TiVo boxes....