Wired Life in the Roanoke Valley

Each year I go solo with fantasy football. Maybe I just don’t know enough people or enough people that aren’t already in a league, but I am always playing people I don’t know. Maybe I will head over to ESPN again this year and pray for better luck. I usually make it about 4 weeks before I get destroyed to the point it isn’t fun any longer. Let’s hope I make it to week five this year.

I have to admit, I am still sore about Microsoft’s change to Prometric from Pearson VUE and the lack of a single-test upgrade path for the MCITP:Enterprise cert. Thankfully Microsoft just sent me a very cathartic survey about the MCP program. I didn’t pull any punches and I urge you to do the same. Be honest.

There are many stories on the Internet of extreme makeover wiring edition. We have just come through one of our own.

We started with over a pickup truck load full of old DB25 cables, abandoned Cat5e cables, and power cables that Thomas Edison might have put in.

Our staff has put in at least two weeks worth of work re-racking servers and plugging items into our new PDU. We decided to run all new cat5 (yellow cables only this time) and power cables (blue whips off the PDU) so that anything that was old would be easily identified. Once all the old power had been disconnected we literally had to cut cables out of the floor. We decided to keep only one type/brand of rack and to actually use cable management arms this time around.

I am proud of the work that has been done and we look forward to easier management and a better equipment environment.

Lessons learned: make sure to use proper cable management techniques each day, never abandon cable – ever, make sure to use cables of the proper length, label cables, and standardize-standardize-standardize.

We have started a renewed security push at work. I have finally motivated myself to task us all out with reducing the number of Domain Admins and service accounts that run with domain admin privileges. It stinks.

I already knew what a pain it was to get Symantec (Veritas) Backup Exec to work without a shared Domain Admin service account. Honestly, I figured that Symantec would have been smarter than this – why aren’t they leveraging the backup operators group. Who knows.

The other frustration is with the multitude of small vendors that we work with. The thorn in my side at the moment is our time clock vendor. This software has danger written all over it. I noticed it when I first walked into our server room many days ago and saw that the server running the software was auto-logging as an elevated account. I couldn’t believe it. Yesterday, I tried to fix the problem by stopping the auto-login, using XYNTService to launch the apps as services, and running the apps as SYSTEM. I thought it looked ok but today I got a ton of reports about service instability and the need to constantly bounce the services. Now I get to punt the test and undo everything. Security initiative for this server = canceled for the moment.

Honestly, I have no idea how running as SYSTEM or not being logged in affects the software. The software is written in COBOL it performs horribly. It isn’t resilient, doesn’t run natively as a service, and just generally stinks. Our vendor has limited ability to troubleshoot it.

Why do companies by this stuff? Microsoft is constantly encouraging people to insist on better software. I am not sure there is any. Sadly, there are a multitude of programmers that sacrifice everything (security, reliability, etc) to the God of functionality. IT ISNT WORTH IT.

If you are a programmer, please help us IT Pros – write software that is functional AND secure AND resilient.