I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme

Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn’t work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong

The final line of the one about the VAX machine is so perfect

Excel is the backbone of so many businesses though!

The amount of times you hear “OMG why did Microsoft change XYZ” across IT departments everywhere…

The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.

If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost

Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization

What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.

Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible

They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.

Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)

Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults

They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.

Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time

They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.

If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication

Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details

WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc

In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks

no benefit over GUI alternatives

Lol nice bait

My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter

This hit too close to home. I’m now in my second forced job change in 3 years, and honestly I’m trying to make the most of it by using this job change to move to a larger city, just like how I used my last job change for a big bump in pay and benefits. It’s been a goal to move for better resources for my special needs child, but now it’s also about ensuring more resiliencey in my finances because if the next place lays me off I’ll actually have no shortage of places to work within a 30 minute commute rather than commuting an hour like I did a year and a half ago and like I’m likely to start doing again soon. This shit makes me seriously wonder how people manage to work at places for 20 or 30 years straight

Or for the political bent, we need to make layoffs more expensive and tip the balances on mergers and acquisitions to make those far harder. Force companies to pivot to meet a competitor or die

Well he did say it wasn’t a good website. You really think they’re just going to take the criticism?

For public facing only use key based authentication. Passwords have too much risk associated for public facing ssh

What is it with these schools and not just using WPA Enterprise? They already hand out an email to every student so it makes it dead simple to deactivate the account’s PSK upon terming the student

About a decade ago I was playing a game on Linux and the game crashed and took the entire DE with it. So I went to a different tty and started a fresh x desktop session and started playing again until the game crashed again (I was running a bunch of mods so it would crash every couple of hours or so) and still didn’t feel like rebooting so I went to yet another tty and started yet another x desktop session. I did this about 3 times in total before I finally went “I should probably actually reboot because this has to be making a bigger mess of things”

I was making after hours config changes on a pair of mostly-but-not-entirely redundant Cisco L3 switches which basically controlled the entire network at that location. While updating the running configs I mixed up which ssh session was which switch and accidentally gave both switches the same IP address, and before I noticed the error I copied the running config to the startup config.

Due to other limitations and the fact that these changes were to fix DNS issues (and therefore I couldn’t rely on DNS to save me) I ended up keeping sshing in by IP until I got the right switch and trying to make the change before my session died due to dropped packets from the mucked up network situation I had created. That easily added a couple of hours of cleanup to the maintainence I was doing

However, that’s not the only way to use Secure Boot; I enroll my own certificates in addition to Microsoft’s, allowing code that I sign to be booted into. This requires some UEFI setup once.

Do you by chance have a guide or documentation you followed to do this that you could link?

Distro hopping truly is a way of life!

I have Kubuntu on my personal PC and it feels klunky to me. So I am not sure why is that, since it uses the same base.

In my (admitted probably slightly dated) experience KDE kinda is like that. It’s super loaded with bells and whistles, but then because it has so many bells and whistles it’s really clear when something doesn’t work right. Personally I really like XFCE for having a decent amount of customization while being very stable and very resource light, but it does look like development has become very slow on XFCE (and afaik it doesn’t yet have any Wayland support which might be a nail in the coffin moving forwards) but cinnamon is also very nice for similar reasons

Ubuntu is the only enterprise distro that I can run both at home and at work that also has reasonably up to date packages. Debian and OpenSuse and CentOS (RIP) all run much older packages that may not support what I want to do at home so then my home experience would not match my professional experience.

Sure there’s fedora but I don’t want to be reinstalling my servers every 8 months or so as a new release comes out

Ubuntu has long support windows and reasonably up to date packages on recent releases, so I can do whatever I want to without too much faffing about but not have to dist-upgrade every 6-24 months if I don’t want to. Plus it’s an easy one to whip out at work for something because it’s a well established enterprise vendor