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Our 50Mbit internet connection started maxing out every day last year before Christmas. Six schools, probably 3500-4000 students and ~450 staff. It was like pulling teeth to get our provider (used to be Qwest, now I think it's CenturyLink) to reconfigure the port to upgrade it. Weeks went by with our increasingly cloud-based systems having loads of trouble, and constant back-and-forths with the provider. "We did upgrade you!" "My monitoring is still showing a 50Mbit ceiling". Then someone with a brain got hold of the ticket and got us up to 100Mbit in a couple hours. Now I think we're up to 500Mbit. Ancient ticket: Boss brought me in to 'fix' the board room audio system. They couldn't get it working right before the bench tech left, so it got dropped into my lap with very little information beyond "It doesn't work very well." Either fix it or price out a replacement. It's a FrontRow 940R with an IR pendulum mic with one IR receiver mounted in the ceiling. The 940R is wired directly into in-ceiling speakers. Turns out the unit went to sleep after 20 minutes no matter what was happening on it, and wouldn't reliably wake up unless you powercycled it. FrontRow says that 'feature' is baked into the firmware and it can't be disabled. The bench tech supposedly spent plenty of time trying to find ways around the system. I dig around for a while and can only find two suitable drop-in alternatives, both also IR-based systems. Anything RF-based I could find would require additional hardware like an amp or mixer, and the board & superintendent want to keep things simple as possible. But maybe they don't have a stupid sleep mode. I take a better computer out there to replace the all-in-one Micron POS they had as a presentation system, and start investigating. I fire up Youtube and play some Orbital and sure enough the audio goes dead after 20 minutes. Twice. I call up FrontRow and the support immediately knows why I'm calling about the 940R, and says the volume level on the computer might not be high enough--the 940R has a volume threshold for staying awake. I max it and it still sleeps. Then I realize the system's wired weird. The 1/8" input jack in the wall plate actually goes up to the mounted projector, then out from the projector to an RCA connector on the 940R. This is apparently so they can control the volume from a wall-mounted control or a remote for the projector. The wall-mounted control is hooked to an IR blaster glued to the front of the projector. The projector's volume was at <50%. I maxed it out, and played a concert on youtube for 45 minutes with no problems. As long as they only control the volume with the 940R's knobs, this might still work for us and save $1000 on a replacement (although I still want a couple more IR receivers since one is stupid). The ticket for this is nearly two years old. I got some staff poking their heads in wondering who was playing strange music in the board room for 2 hours, though.
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Oct 29, 2014 08:00
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Jewel posted:Where are people getting Crypto____ from? Is there some vulnerability right now (is it network based?) or are people downloading bad files? I suspect mostly the latter. This lady did get a variant that attacks network shares, but luckily she has access only to her home directory and a small shared folder.
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Oct 29, 2014 12:27
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Most variants I've seen so far (crypto/wall/locker/thingy) use some variant of a local appcache to run out of initially. It wont make it impregnable but a couple GPOs blocking .exe's from running out of the appcaches (winzip, local, browsers etc.) can help mitigate it in house.
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Oct 29, 2014 12:47
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There's a free tool to protect your system that adds GPOs. https://www.foolishit.com/vb6-projects/cryptoprevent/ It even has regular updates.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:02
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nthalp posted:Most variants I've seen so far (crypto/wall/locker/thingy) use some variant of a local appcache to run out of initially. It wont make it impregnable but a couple GPOs blocking .exe's from running out of the appcaches (winzip, local, browsers etc.) can help mitigate it in house. You could always do a blanket block in the entire user profile with whitelisting. Applocker is best method since you can do publisher based whitelist. Software Restriction Policies are ok but are way more fidgety (hope you don't have too many XP machines). Also EMET seems somewhat promising but I haven't looked at it too much. spog posted:There's a free tool to protect your system that adds GPOs. fool i poo poo . com
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Oct 29, 2014 13:08
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Demonachizer posted:fool i poo poo . com Sounds legit
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Oct 29, 2014 14:22
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Pyroclastic posted:Our 50Mbit internet connection started maxing out every day last year before Christmas. Six schools, probably 3500-4000 students and ~450 staff. It was like pulling teeth to get our provider (used to be Qwest, now I think it's CenturyLink) to reconfigure the port to upgrade it. Weeks went by with our increasingly cloud-based systems having loads of trouble, and constant back-and-forths with the provider. "We did upgrade you!" "My monitoring is still showing a 50Mbit ceiling". Then someone with a brain got hold of the ticket and got us up to 100Mbit in a couple hours. Now I think we're up to 500Mbit. Having seen this exact scenario with CTL play out on multiple occasions, it's almost certainly because they forgot to change the QoS policy when performing the upgrade. In Colorado, where CTL proper is also the ILEC, they got really good at applying the policy maps to the wrong DLCIs in the LEC edge gear, which required a lot of patience and escalation to explain that the problem isn't at their POP router.
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Oct 29, 2014 14:38
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the moral of the story is gently caress CenturyLink
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Oct 29, 2014 15:00
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Migishu posted:So I had several tabs of Remedy open earlier, and we had just upgraded to IE9 at work (lol). We're upgrading to the web based remedy in about two weeks. I'm not looking foward to it. Just what I needed, more web apps. At least I get to use chrome. Also because of this thread, I had the following conversation with my supervisor:  "Hey Boss...the network drive doesn't have a backup, doesn't it..." "Hahahahahahahahaha. Wanna borrow my flash drive?"... 
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Oct 29, 2014 15:02
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Potato Alley posted:at least we can have guns. That was a low blow.  Every kid in primary school gets a computer on loan to keep as "their own" - paid by the municipality and maintained by us. One politician found out we don't have a porn filter and has donned the mantle of THINK OF THE KIDS! The teachers' union is against it, the parents are against it, the principals are against it, we are against it. It's a political case, so now we're looking into porn blockers.  This politician has apparently been working on his own, and came in triumphantly today with a private laptop with "the best" blocker installed. 15 seconds and a visit to translate.google.com later he left in a significantly less victorious mood than he arrived in. gently caress him. I still have to write up a case for/against some porn filter that no one wants or needs. Crowley fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 15:10
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For: That warm fuzzy feeling you get from thinking that what you are doing is making a difference. Against: It won't work, will hoover up budget, and will probably cause other issues (broken whitelist, etc.) Kids who previously had no intention of trying to get admin accounts on their computers will now have a reason to, and suddenly they are filled with poo poo.
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Oct 29, 2014 15:16
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I overheard a colleague give this great advice to a user: "I recommend you don't use a password on your home PC's account, because then no one can RDP into it!" Needless to say he had never heard of UAC when he started here either.
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Oct 29, 2014 15:27
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Thanks Ants posted:Kids who previously had no intention of trying to get admin accounts on their computers will now have a reason to, and suddenly they are filled with poo poo. They're already local admins - with select admin privileges blocked via GPO. We want them to make it their computer, not just "the school computer I have to lug around". (The computers are Dell Letitude E5440 with a 128 GB SSD and no optical drive. They easily last a day on battery and are actually pretty nice machines)
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Oct 29, 2014 15:29
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BigPaddy posted:Sounds legit It is: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptolocker-ransomware-information#prevent http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/11/how-to-avoid-cryptolocker-ransomware/#more-22877
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Oct 29, 2014 15:31
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E-Mail since I don't work with tickets...quote:Hi Mochiloc,
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Oct 29, 2014 15:53
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What's the recommended ticketing suite these days? If it does asset management too that'd be great. We're using Peregrine ServiceCenter / AssetCenter right now and after four years they've decided we're not moving to SCSM after all!
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Oct 29, 2014 15:55
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Mochiloc posted:E-Mail since I don't work with tickets... Should have installed the water proof app. EDIT: Check out Spiceworks. It's free and does have an asset management suite.
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Oct 29, 2014 15:56
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Holy loving poo poo https://access.redhat.com/solutions/439573 I just took down an entire facility trying to ID a duff cable 
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Oct 29, 2014 16:37
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Crowley posted:They're already local admins - with select admin privileges blocked via GPO. We want them to make it their computer, not just "the school computer I have to lug around". So, is 30 too old to go back to primary school and get one of those?
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Oct 29, 2014 17:10
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Pyroclastic posted:
I've been on an Underworld kick lately and changed a testbed free conference call service hold music to Pearl's Girl. It sounds weird over the phone.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:19
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Ataraxia posted:Holy loving poo poo Well hopefully you've learned your lesson. 
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Oct 29, 2014 17:23
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Bitesize posted:I overheard a colleague give this great advice to a user: Snap his neck then leave him in the dumpster.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:39
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I had one of our program managers ask a rather simple question yesterday. He wanted to turn each page of a 12 page PDF in to individual PDFs. I walked him through it and after five minutes he came back, having given up. I offered to help (do it for him) and as I'm dividing this document up, he starts bragging about scalping tickets. I did not even notice what I was dividing up was a bulk order of tickets. According to him, he pre orders hundreds of tickets at all the venues this show is playing, mainly winter concerts at around $100 a piece and resells them on CL across the country for $1k each. This has to be illegal, right? Sadly our management is too drat incompetent to even questing why he was doing this on a work computer, during business hours.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:10
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the spyder posted:This has to be illegal, right? Sadly our management is too drat incompetent to even questing why he was doing this on a work computer, during business hours. If you're in the States, generally no. There's no federal laws about it, but some states have limits on it (though you can just sell them outside of the states that do).
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Oct 29, 2014 18:46
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the spyder posted:I had one of our program managers ask a rather simple question yesterday. He wanted to turn each page of a 12 page PDF in to individual PDFs. I walked him through it and after five minutes he came back, having given up. I offered to help (do it for him) and as I'm dividing this document up, he starts bragging about scalping tickets. I did not even notice what I was dividing up was a bulk order of tickets. According to him, he pre orders hundreds of tickets at all the venues this show is playing, mainly winter concerts at around $100 a piece and resells them on CL across the country for $1k each. This has to be illegal, right? Sadly our management is too drat incompetent to even questing why he was doing this on a work computer, during business hours. Tell him you want a cut for doing his work for him.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:47
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Ataraxia posted:Holy loving poo poo And RedHat has no interest in resolving it at this time. Fantastic.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:54
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the spyder posted:I had one of our program managers ask a rather simple question yesterday. He wanted to turn each page of a 12 page PDF in to individual PDFs. I walked him through it and after five minutes he came back, having given up. I offered to help (do it for him) and as I'm dividing this document up, he starts bragging about scalping tickets. I did not even notice what I was dividing up was a bulk order of tickets. According to him, he pre orders hundreds of tickets at all the venues this show is playing, mainly winter concerts at around $100 a piece and resells them on CL across the country for $1k each. This has to be illegal, right? Sadly our management is too drat incompetent to even questing why he was doing this on a work computer, during business hours. Did you save a copy of the pdf? Those tickets will work for whoever uses them first. Just saying.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:58
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the spyder posted:I had one of our program managers ask a rather simple question yesterday. He wanted to turn each page of a 12 page PDF in to individual PDFs. I walked him through it and after five minutes he came back, having given up. I offered to help (do it for him) and as I'm dividing this document up, he starts bragging about scalping tickets. I did not even notice what I was dividing up was a bulk order of tickets. According to him, he pre orders hundreds of tickets at all the venues this show is playing, mainly winter concerts at around $100 a piece and resells them on CL across the country for $1k each. This has to be illegal, right? Sadly our management is too drat incompetent to even questing why he was doing this on a work computer, during business hours. While not illegal, you could probably have just stopped helping at that point and told him that you aren't there to provide personal support for non-work related issues.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:03
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Lightning Jim posted:And RedHat has no interest in resolving it at this time. Fantastic. "We're not going to break kernel ABI by trying to backport enormous patches which change ioctl handling for edge cases, like leaving ethool running for so long that it blocks other processes" isn't "no interest". It's fixed upstream and fixed in RHEL7, but a fix is unlikely to land in RHEL6 unless someone presents a really compelling use case with common reproducers.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:05
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evol262 posted:"We're not going to break kernel ABI by trying to backport enormous patches which change ioctl handling for edge cases, like leaving ethool running for so long that it blocks other processes" isn't "no interest". It's fixed upstream and fixed in RHEL7, but a fix is unlikely to land in RHEL6 unless someone presents a really compelling use case with common reproducers. Oh, I misread it. I can see leaving it alone for RHEL 5 but RHEL 6 is expected to have support for at least the next 6 years (where Phase 3 ends) and the fact that most servers I'm aware of with NetExtreme I are more likely to be running RHEL 6 than upgrading to RHEL 7. But drat, sounds like a simple symptom with a super large resolution required.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:12
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Lightning Jim posted:Oh, I misread it. RHEL6 is in support, yes, though sometimes support means "don't do this, it causes problems", annoyingly. Open a case. If there are enough cases, the fix will get backported. But, yeah, it's a large resolution because it requires a ton of drivers to be changed even after the fix lands.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:44
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Renegret posted:Stealing equipment It is sad when thieves come up to a huge coil of fiber for a new buildout and cut the fiber thinking to score a huge bundle of copper, after the cable was laid, before it was terminated inside the building. ISP had to pull the fiber back under a 6 lane hwy. The wooden spool had FIBER written in bright orange spray paint. Also, did you know those men's urinal handles are worth like $12 a piece as scrap? An enterprising thief stole all the ones from the men's bathroom on each floor, during the day. The flooding prompted a call to maintenance. Now we have auto flushers.
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Oct 29, 2014 20:14
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Man Yam posted:Now we have auto flushers. Ticket closed, successful resolution.
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Oct 29, 2014 20:18
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Volmarias posted:While not illegal, you could probably have just stopped helping at that point and told him that you aren't there to provide personal support for non-work related issues. I had already finished by the time he started in on his story. He knows I won't help him again with crap like this.
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Oct 29, 2014 20:53
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The only thing worse than managers who insist on you calling someone rather than emailing, despite the email conveying the exact same info, is when the recipients treat such calls at higher priority than the emails. I realize that emailing someone instead of calling and the preference thereof is the height of goony goon behavior, but it sucks nonetheless.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:23
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"Hey Renegret, can you help us test the new ticketing system?" Ticket couldn't be closed because three of us managed to crush the entire ticketing system designed to be used by thousands of people. And this doesn't change the planned rollout date sometime next week.  It'll never cease to amaze me how such a huge project with so much time and money invested into it, not to mention the numerous highly paid contractors and experts, can be taken down by three people running stupid queries.
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Oct 29, 2014 23:26
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Sickening posted:What amazes me that there is jobs where all you do is backups. 2 jobs ago I worked with someone who had been doing it for more than a decade. This is what I do. There's ~20 of us in this company, and all we do are manage the backups. The role ends up being a sort of weird hybrid between Oracle DBA, MSSQL DBA, unix sysadmin, windows sysadmin, and SAN engineer. The majority of my time is spent doing troubleshooting and doing recovery exercises. Failing backups are a pretty good indicator that something's not behaving as expected. edit: whoops, didn't notice I was a few pages behind...
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Oct 29, 2014 23:43
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Well hopefully you've learned your lesson. Buy Intel.
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Oct 30, 2014 02:44
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Renegret posted:"Hey Renegret, can you help us test the new ticketing system?" What system?
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Oct 30, 2014 02:59
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vosk posted:This is what I do. There's ~20 of us in this company, and all we do are manage the backups. Having a dedicated backups guy isn't bad, but if I was a manager and found out that we didn't actually have usable backups I'd probably lose my poo poo.
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Oct 30, 2014 04:05
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