Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Working in IT 3.0: xp_cmdshell

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

H110Hawk posted:

Eh, there is a certain level of not letting a hostile work environment brew which I can understand. They also may want to know if you are sending out terribly worded emails to outside the company. I would be happy if we could just force spell check via gmail.

The first part of that is horrible, but who cares if the laptops are in exchange for a week or two? Are you not allowed to keep a buffer stock of uniform approved hardware? User has busted laptop, they hand it to you, you hand them back a working laptop, and off they go. Then in 2 weeks you put the replacement laptop back into the "new laptop intake" pile.

Edit: I guess asset tagging is annoying, but that is "just" a sticker.

We do have a buffer stock but we try to give back the user their own laptop. You know how gross laptops get? I'd rather not spend time cleaning it up perfectly if I don't have to.

Plus a lot of the people here put stickers all over it, which I'm not sure why is allowed. Go Packers wooo stickers.

# ? May 6, 2016 16:35

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 00:43

Arsten: Feb 18, 2003

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

On email privacy, what do you think of the following scenario:

An employee is mad at a manager. Writes up an email with inappropriate language to express their anger. Outlook saves a draft 5 minutes into the letter. An automated process running in the background defects the bad language and flags the email draft invisibly behind the scenes.

The employee looks at what they've written, feels a little less angry, and deletes the email without sending it.

The IT manager gets a report about an inappropriate email, and forwards it to the appropriate manager, who then fires the employee.

This is stupid. For internal emails, wait until someone receives and reports "inappropriate X" before IT even gets involved. What if I shoot an email to Jimmy the Mail Boy saying "loving hell, our sports team DIED last night! :v:

" ? Why would you A) Care and B) Even want to see that bullshit?

If you want people to be productive and contributive members, outright forcing them to keep "clean and professional" emails is basically the easiest and fastest way to get a group of useless, petulant whiners and/or productivity drops.

anthonypants posted:

So there's kind of a huge difference between "inappropriate language" and "threatening language".

In terms of "writing a letter and not sending it" goes, I don't think there really is a huge difference. "I'd smack that :smug:

look off your face if I had half a chance, you douchbagglet." is, of course, threatening language. But It's not like every person everywhere hasn't said that to themselves about someone they've dealt with in their life.

# ? May 6, 2016 16:44

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Arsten posted:

This is stupid. For internal emails, wait until someone receives and reports "inappropriate X" before IT even gets involved. What if I shoot an email to Jimmy the Mail Boy saying "loving hell, our sports team DIED last night! " ? Why would you A) Care and B) Even want to see that bullshit?

If you want people to be productive and contributive members, outright forcing them to keep "clean and professional" emails is basically the easiest and fastest way to get a group of useless, petulant whiners and/or productivity drops.

The recent instances of police departments using their email servers to send out racist jokes and chain letters provides one example where legal liabilities arise when these kinds of communications turn up later. I probably wouldn't let that change my own policy at any of the places I've worked, but it's worth considering.

# ? May 6, 2016 18:10

H110Hawk: Dec 28, 2006

GreenNight posted:

We do have a buffer stock but we try to give back the user their own laptop. You know how gross laptops get? I'd rather not spend time cleaning it up perfectly if I don't have to.

Plus a lot of the people here put stickers all over it, which I'm not sure why is allowed. Go Packers wooo stickers.

This makes the man-child in me want to put a sticker on my laptop just for you.

# ? May 6, 2016 18:15

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

H110Hawk posted:

This makes the man-child in me want to put a sticker on my laptop just for you.

Nothing like spending a day with rubbing alcohol trying to get a laptop looking good enough to give to someone else.

# ? May 6, 2016 18:23

SyNack Sassimov: May 4, 2006; Let the robot win.
��--Captain James T. Vader

10 years ago I registered for this site.

Gotta say, if it weren't for SH/SC it's unlikely I'd still be here.

So hey what's everyone's opinion on whether you should use antivirus? I heard it was the best thing ever c/d?

# ? May 6, 2016 18:24

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

GreenNight posted:

Nothing like spending a day with rubbing alcohol trying to get a laptop looking good enough to give to someone else.

You need proper label remover: http://www.amazon.com/Goo-Gone-Original-Cleaner-oz/dp/B00006IBNJ. Test it on a non-obvious area of the laptop first though if it's plastic, don't want to melt it.

# ? May 6, 2016 18:25

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Thanks Ants posted:

You need proper label remover: http://www.amazon.com/Goo-Gone-Original-Cleaner-oz/dp/B00006IBNJ

Cheers. I'll try that out.

# ? May 6, 2016 18:26

Arsten: Feb 18, 2003

Vulture Culture posted:

The recent instances of police departments using their email servers to send out racist jokes and chain letters provides one example where legal liabilities arise when these kinds of communications turn up later. I probably wouldn't let that change my own policy at any of the places I've worked, but it's worth considering.

I wouldn't call those a "liability" seeing as nothing happened to any senior officer that sent racist emails. The worst was that one in upstate New York that retired - at full benefits - early. I also haven't seen anything that would shift liability from the users themselves and onto the company because normal people see e-mail as analogous to regular mail. If I mail you a sexually harassing or racist letter, you don't get to sue the post office for delivering it.

In my personal opinion, interjecting the company into those conversations in any way is what makes the company liable. If you monitor for dyke or spic but don't monitor for hoe bag or dirty Mexican you open the company up for litigation. Why? Because you are enabling sexism and racism. Everyone knows that you should monitor for every word that has been at one time, or will be at one time, used in a derogatory manner. :v:

Whereas if you say that you just pass the emails on and only look into things if a report is made, you can't be liable unless there was a complaint and you promptly sat on your thumb.

# ? May 6, 2016 18:34

H110Hawk: Dec 28, 2006

GreenNight posted:

Nothing like spending a day with rubbing alcohol trying to get a laptop looking good enough to give to someone else.

Amateur hour over here, but I see someone else already told you about goo-gone. Do you also not scrape off those INTEL WINDOWS NVIDIA INSIDE LOL HAVE A HOLOGRAM metal stickers off?

I love that it peeks out a hair at the bottom.

# ? May 6, 2016 19:10

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

That is exactly how it showed up.

# ? May 6, 2016 19:58

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Arsten posted:

I wouldn't call those a "liability" seeing as nothing happened to any senior officer that sent racist emails. The worst was that one in upstate New York that retired - at full benefits - early. I also haven't seen anything that would shift liability from the users themselves and onto the company because normal people see e-mail as analogous to regular mail. If I mail you a sexually harassing or racist letter, you don't get to sue the post office for delivering it.

Amusingly, the LAPD chief of staff just resigned over this five days ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/us/los-angeles-police-official-resigns-over-racist-emails.html

PDs are interesting in particular because their emails are available under open records laws, as with Tom Angel above. In this case, they have a PR liability to the community, whose claims about racist policing have been effectively validated. In the case of an ordinary company, two male coworkers emailing each other about Jill from accounting's great big tits creates a legal liability for the company if there are any claims of a hostile work environment. Fishing this stuff out before it becomes a legal problem may be of interest to HR professionals and other risk managers.

I'm in no way advocating for the efficacy of The Great Cuss Word Firewall as an actual implementation, of course. If you want to get fancy about it, there's lots of machine learning and sentiment analysis techniques you could look at to determine potentially problematic content, anonymize it for human moderation, and then identify the senders only if there's a real potential legal issue.

# ? May 6, 2016 19:59

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

GreenNight posted:

That is exactly how it showed up.

The thought of that showing up in a meeting is pretty lol. I mean the NRA sticker alone has to be a decent way to alienate a large percentage of your audience.

# ? May 6, 2016 19:59

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Thanks Ants posted:

The thought of that showing up in a meeting is pretty lol. I mean the NRA sticker alone has to be a decent way to alienate a large percentage of your audience.

He was one of our sales managers too, so he brought that with him to ALL HIS GOD drat CLIENT MEETINGS.

# ? May 6, 2016 20:01

alg: Mar 14, 2007; A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watch-dogs.

Do you work for duck dynasty

# ? May 6, 2016 20:02

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

alg posted:

Do you work for duck dynasty

Haha

# ? May 6, 2016 20:03

GreenNight: Feb 19, 2006; Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

We think the one that was ripped off is a Trump 2016 sticker.

# ? May 6, 2016 20:04

Vargatron: Apr 19, 2008; MRAZZLE DAZZLE

What better way to represent your company than Trump and the NRA.

# ? May 6, 2016 20:14

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

What was the top left one about?

# ? May 6, 2016 20:15

ChubbyThePhat: Dec 22, 2006; Who nico nico needs anyone else

GreenNight posted:

That is exactly how it showed up.

This person really loves pheasants.

# ? May 6, 2016 20:18

mewse: May 2, 2006

ChubbyThePhat posted:

This person really loves pheasants.

Can't tell if he loves shooting pheasants or just loves pheasants

# ? May 6, 2016 20:48

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

Pheasants Forever is either pheasant preservation or it's a taxidermy thing.

# ? May 6, 2016 21:01

Arsten: Feb 18, 2003

Vulture Culture posted:

Amusingly, the LAPD chief of staff just resigned over this five days ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/us/los-angeles-police-official-resigns-over-racist-emails.html

PDs are interesting in particular because their emails are available under open records laws, as with Tom Angel above. In this case, they have a PR liability to the community, whose claims about racist policing have been effectively validated. In the case of an ordinary company, two male coworkers emailing each other about Jill from accounting's great big tits creates a legal liability for the company if there are any claims of a hostile work environment. Fishing this stuff out before it becomes a legal problem may be of interest to HR professionals and other risk managers.

I'm in no way advocating for the efficacy of The Great Cuss Word Firewall as an actual implementation, of course. If you want to get fancy about it, there's lots of machine learning and sentiment analysis techniques you could look at to determine potentially problematic content, anonymize it for human moderation, and then identify the senders only if there's a real potential legal issue.

Okay, so two resignations. And if you think this was where the LASD lost PR with the public, there's like 50 years of history for you to brush up on. And, for once, I don't mean that in a dickish way. No one who lives in LA think the SD or PD do good jobs.

And my cynicism says that he got full benefits or full roll over to his next PD job, even though that article doesn't list his tenure. I wouldn't be surprised if he rolled into another SoCal PD, too.

As for your hostile work environment, that only flies if one of those two male coworkers are harassing Jill or have power over her in some way and she reported it, but got nowhere.

I'm not saying that being a raging d-bag to your fellow co-workers - even behind their backs - isn't something that will come back and bite you in the rear end, I'm saying that taking care of these incidents as they arise is less liability than having a record that flags that content for review. In the best case scenario, you never have a harassment lawsuit but you harm productivity.

# ? May 6, 2016 21:23

Docjowles: Apr 9, 2009

Today was a good day. My company is pretty cool, and has an annual two day "Hack Day" event. If you're participating, you're basically free of normal work duties and able to work on whatever the hell you want. At the end, you present what you did and the company votes for a few winners in various categories.

I built out a sweet Logstash cluster at my last job and have been going through major withdrawal symptoms since moving on. Life without it just feels like flying blind. So I jumped at the chance to build out a POC deployment along with another ops guy, and a dev who could point us at the highest value logs to present.

Won "best engineering project" by a landslide, and the only question after our presentation was "this is not a question, but I just wanted to say, thank you" :lol:

# ? May 6, 2016 23:54

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

That's pretty sweet. It's good to do stuff that interests you but isn't really your job, those sorts of days are a decent outlet for that. I wish we did something similar - I try and do pet project stuff in my spare time but there's not a huge amount of that in the day.

# ? May 6, 2016 23:56

Ursoph Haz: Jul 23, 2014

Been running my own IT firm as a director for years now. Going really well. I started off thinking it would just be a hobby but actually it's the one thing I'm pretty good at!

# ? May 7, 2016 00:24

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005

Sweet!

# ? May 7, 2016 00:49

Fiendish Dr. Wu: Nov 11, 2010; You done fucked up now!

Docjowles posted:

Today was a good day. My company is pretty cool, and has an annual two day "Hack Day" event. If you're participating, you're basically free of normal work duties and able to work on whatever the hell you want. At the end, you present what you did and the company votes for a few winners in various categories.

I built out a sweet Logstash cluster at my last job and have been going through major withdrawal symptoms since moving on. Life without it just feels like flying blind. So I jumped at the chance to build out a POC deployment along with another ops guy, and a dev who could point us at the highest value logs to present.

Won "best engineering project" by a landslide, and the only question after our presentation was "this is not a question, but I just wanted to say, thank you"

That's awesome dude congrats. My company does a similar thing with what they call "hackathons" which are usually a 3 or 4 days. My team won last time by building a chrome extension for our app. It was a hell of a lot of fun doing something that I don't normally get to do.

# ? May 7, 2016 02:41

negromancer: Aug 20, 2014; by FactsAreUseless

I'm a sysadmin turned infosec guy, and I currently work in a place where I have to show up everyday in person, even though my entire team is in Chicago and I'm in the NYC office. I'm pretty sure (156% sure) I want my next job to be partially remote or fully remote. I need to figure out how to find those jobs.

# ? May 7, 2016 07:37

LochNessMonster: Feb 3, 2005; I need about three fitty

Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:

That's awesome dude congrats. My company does a similar thing with what they call "hackathons" which are usually a 3 or 4 days. My team won last time by building a chrome extension for our app. It was a hell of a lot of fun doing something that I don't normally get to do.

My company also does hacakthons and even though we do several a year and theres big PR behind them, my manager still refers to them as "hacking-tons".

Not sure id serious....

# ? May 7, 2016 07:50

Dr. Arbitrary: Mar 15, 2006; Bleak Gremlin

LochNessMonster posted:

My company also does hacakthons and even though we do several a year and theres big PR behind them, my manager still refers to them as "hacking-tons".

Not sure id serious....

Maybe he read that Neanderthal is supposed to be pronounced Neander-Tall and he's applying it universally.

# ? May 7, 2016 07:54

psydude: Apr 1, 2008

gfsincere posted:

I'm a sysadmin turned infosec guy, and I currently work in a place where I have to show up everyday in person, even though my entire team is in Chicago and I'm in the NYC office. I'm pretty sure (156% sure) I want my next job to be partially remote or fully remote. I need to figure out how to find those jobs.

Just be up front about it in the hiring process that you're looking to work from home part time. A lot of places are moving to part time telework unless there's an obvious reason not, such as being an intelligence agency.

# ? May 7, 2016 15:24

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Judge Schnoopy posted:

Wholeheartedly disagree. You'll see MORE msps with lower-budget packages for cloud services.

Want your cloud / desktop hybrid environment managed in-house? You still need 2 full timers to cover all hours / vacation / sick time which runs 100k/yr minimum if they know what they're doing (you need cloud management, network, desktop support which are three entirely different realms).

Your business needs a thousand new laptops? Here you go and I bet you need a few extra techs to help install those. I'll get them contracted out but I see you haven't replaced your SAN either? Yup, I know it's expensive but as you're already getting a bunch of gear I'll throw in a discount! Plus I'll even give yo the next edition of DigitalOffice 2016 for free!

A big part of IT has been more or less removed with automation and less of a need for internal hardware resources. Compute and Storage are largely becoming entirely Cloud-only or some Hybrid combination which eliminates a lot of typical traditional revenue generators of VARs/MSPs. As a significant amount has historically been on hardware upgrades but not just the physical hardware itself but the labor and additional services included.

Granted, it's not going to be completely eliminate these traditional IT Vendors but there is without a doubt going to be a significant squeeze and I don't believe you'll see these businesses growing.

adorai posted:

that's true if IT is just a cost center, but then they won't have any institutional knowledge of your business and can never align IT with the business.

edit: fixed quote brackets

Could you go a little deeper into detail here?

Methanar posted:

It's that time of year again: I just got a new job!

Jesus Christ.

I'm going to be migrating 38 tiny rear end locations to office 365. Every location is a complete special snowflake in it's own lovely way and there seems to be no real plan.

There are some sites with XP machines running outlook express with 10GB PST files. Some are Office 2010, 2013, etc Every site has 2-4 email accounts on an icewarp server and not a single computer is on the domain.

Each machine has a 1-2 local accounts with a local password, neither of which seems to be written down. Each email account has a standalone username/password combo, neither is written down but I at least should have access to the icewarp server to get those myself. The username part of each email address is also pretty inconsistent and dumb, I'll try to standardize it. Each user has a new premade standalone office 365 account (no AD integration) with a password/username that is kinda written down.

There are 6 different email domains in use for no real reason and it's super confusing when you're spreading those domains across everything. I think I'm consolidating it down to 2? Not exactly sure. Nobody was able to give me a proper answer to any of my many, many questions.

Maybe tomorrow I will be able to actually get some tools to do my job and take a look at how I'm going to give everything a new proper consistent naming scheme, alias the old stuff to the new stuff, migrate everyone's self maintained contact list/calendar/PST file to office 365.

Eventually I hope to put all these machines on a domain and set up a unified credential system with ADFS SSO. And throw the XP machines into the garbage.

If you're trying to get into Microsoft technologies this is an excellent way start building that career. You'll have plenty of problems, work and money.

DigitalMocking posted:

Yes we have.

Do not do this thing.

We've had almost 18% return rate for repeated failures on our SP3 and SP4 systems. Always the same complaints;
1) Keyboard stops functioning, reboot required.
2) Touch pad stops functioning, reboot required.
3) System overheats/Fans run 100% of the time, no fix.
4) Touch screen stops functioning, multiple reboots required.
5) Camera stops working randomly, reboot does not fix.

We pulled almost all of them but from users that just love them and have never had an issue.

The surface books however, are amazing. They finally got it right. We deployed 10 as a test run, one of which has become my daily driver. Only problem I've had is #5, but that's ONLY on the login screen for facial recognition login, camera still works fine in skype/lync etc.

I love mine, and they'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands at this point.

I'm using a SP4 day-to-day and I've only run into a few of these but hopefully the next iteration will improve. My biggest complaint is the awful DPI-Scaling that Windows 10 has included. Skype and Internet Explorer are the worst offenders.

gfsincere posted:

I'm a sysadmin turned infosec guy, and I currently work in a place where I have to show up everyday in person, even though my entire team is in Chicago and I'm in the NYC office. I'm pretty sure (156% sure) I want my next job to be partially remote or fully remote. I need to figure out how to find those jobs.

While my commute is about 20 minutes one-way I'm not sure I'll ever be able to accept a 100% On-Site Position. It's not just the time saved it's also less stress of fighting rush hour traffic.

# ? May 7, 2016 18:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

gfsincere posted:

I'm a sysadmin turned infosec guy, and I currently work in a place where I have to show up everyday in person, even though my entire team is in Chicago and I'm in the NYC office. I'm pretty sure (156% sure) I want my next job to be partially remote or fully remote. I need to figure out how to find those jobs.

Last time I was on the market, I had zero problem giving people a salary number that I knew was just outside the company's range for the position, then negotiating back down into their range with remote work as a benefit.

# ? May 7, 2016 18:58

Chickenwalker: Apr 21, 2011; by FactsAreUseless

fart

Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Sep 23, 2018

# ? May 7, 2016 20:49

H110Hawk: Dec 28, 2006

Chickenwalker posted:

Guys thoughts on this quote: better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

In my current position I have more autonomy and feel like I have a quicker path to the top, but it's the top of a crapheap. And I'll probably never surpass my current boss or be able to make any really meaningful decisions on my own. I have a potential offer for a new position with probably better hours, pay and benefits, plus everything won't fall on me all the time because I'll be surrounded by competent coworkers. But advancement for that reason and the fact that it's a very corporate structure will probably be slower.

Edit: I misread something. Take the new offer and try to go up there. Otherwise, job hop. Quality of life is something which can be hard to get.

H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 21:12 on May 7, 2016

# ? May 7, 2016 20:53

Vargatron: Apr 19, 2008; MRAZZLE DAZZLE

Is your end goal executive management or simply the monetary benefits of being promoted? I'd kind of lean towards the new job offer myself since it seems like it will be less stress than your current one. An acceptable work/life balance can far outweigh financial compensation if it is of value to you. I also think that it's pretty common to change positions in order to move up in title.

# ? May 7, 2016 20:53

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Chickenwalker posted:

Guys thoughts on this quote: better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

In my current position I have more autonomy and feel like I have a quicker path to the top, but it's the top of a crapheap. And I'll probably never surpass my current boss or be able to make any really meaningful decisions on my own. I have a potential offer for a new position with probably better hours, pay and benefits, plus everything won't fall on me all the time because I'll be surrounded by competent coworkers. But advancement for that reason and the fact that it's a very corporate structure will probably be slower.

What's the actual gig?

# ? May 7, 2016 21:11

lampey: Mar 27, 2012

adorai posted:

that's true if IT is just a cost center, but then they won't have any institutional knowledge of your business and can never align IT with the business.

edit: fixed quote brackets

It costs a business close to 50k a year for a minimum wage employee after benefits, workers comp, taxes. The business will be better off using an MSP with respect to employee retention and institutional knowledge.

# ? May 7, 2016 22:46

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 00:43

psydude: Apr 1, 2008

Tab8715 posted:

Your business needs a thousand new laptops? Here you go and I bet you need a few extra techs to help install those. I'll get them contracted out but I see you haven't replaced your SAN either? Yup, I know it's expensive but as you're already getting a bunch of gear I'll throw in a discount! Plus I'll even give yo the next edition of DigitalOffice 2016 for free!

A big part of IT has been more or less removed with automation and less of a need for internal hardware resources. Compute and Storage are largely becoming entirely Cloud-only or some Hybrid combination which eliminates a lot of typical traditional revenue generators of VARs/MSPs. As a significant amount has historically been on hardware upgrades but not just the physical hardware itself but the labor and additional services included.

Granted, it's not going to be completely eliminate these traditional IT Vendors but there is without a doubt going to be a significant squeeze and I don't believe you'll see these businesses growing.

I agree to a point, but there is a certain inflection point where public cloud offerings become ineffective and inefficient, and I think we're beginning to reach an equilibrium. For most small businesses, there's really no drawbacks to moving to a public cloud model (certain exceptions include those that process highly sensitive data) while keeping two to three people on staff to manage everything else. Medium and large enterprises, however, are beginning to insource a lot of applications into their own datacenters once again as the scalable SDN and distributed solutions previously used only by the large cloud operators have become commoditized and simple enough for standard NOC/DC staff to integrate with some vendor assistance, rather than requiring a legion of Stanford and MIT grads to develop.

# ? May 7, 2016 22:59

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