Coding Horror

purifol0

GreeBo wrote: »

Yeah, you probably dont want to be reading emails that aren't yousrs...

Email contents are encrypted. The TO and FROM are not and are necessary for administration.


The company just wanted more business and were perfectly happy with trying to throw me under a bus.


Said company still tries to sell new servers with SAS spinning rust in em for top dollar. I can only imagine they have a stockpile of em they need to offload. These were €250 300GB Hard Disks sold to clients last I dealt with them in 2019!

GreeBo

purifol0 wrote: »

Email contents are encrypted. The TO and FROM are not and are necessary for administration.


The company just wanted more business and were perfectly happy with trying to throw me under a bus.

How are you deciding they are throwing you under a bus from the TO and FROM in the headers...

Anyway, you dont need to be personally looking at emails to administer your email server, I can't imagine it would go down very well with your employer.

purifol0

GreeBo wrote: »

How are you deciding they are throwing you under a bus from the TO and FROM in the headers...

Anyway, you dont need to be personally looking at emails to administer your email server, I can't imagine it would go down very well with your employer.

I didn't have to open any email. I had to ring them on my holiday for bollicking up my network, and they had a cheek to tell me to lodge a ticket. I wasn't taking that, told them to get their installer to immediately remove the new Firewall. Next thing you know they are in damage control, and decided to go on the offensive. I saw the emails going to the Directors and asked them, they told me exactly what I expected. 3rd Party was trying to throw me under a bus.

The Continental Op

GreeBo wrote: »

How are you deciding they are throwing you under a bus from the TO and FROM in the headers...

Anyway, you dont need to be personally looking at emails to administer your email server, I can't imagine it would go down very well with your employer.

I used to support software that looked at all the email headers, logged them and produced no end of reports for administration.

Most of the time you can ignore the reports (best kept away from micro managers) but usage trends are really handy for spotting how the companies email system is being used or abused.

purifol0

Brother got a new job with a small engineering shop. They have an IT guy but he's young and apparently plays video games on his company laptop. Bro asks me to come in and have a look because he's not happy with the set up, so I wont charge for a quick consult, and his boss gives the go ahead.

IT kid has no certs, or formal IT education. The backup server is a SINGLE DRIVE 4TB NAS standing upright, it is also the file server. Now apart from how ****ed that it, I wanted to know how it was backing itself up. Yeahhhh turns out the windows backup was also backing up its mapped drive to itself. Drive IO was near zero at most times of the day and I was pretty sure the poor WD digital home NAS wasn't going to last past its 2 year warranty as the web console took ages to load and the SMART reading, had a warning on it.

The IT kid also didn't understand Active Directory at all, and had made everyone local admin, no AD accounts, email was Office 365. There was no link to peoples pc and there email account. This would have meant IT kid spent ages setting up accounts manually all the time.

The NAS is on the same subnet as everything else and since file permissions were set on the (single) Windows server, you could simply log in to a file share directly on the NAS via IP and default credentials. All the IT equipment was plugged into a single extension lead, no UPS.

That was when I stopped looking.

GreeBo

The Continental Op wrote: »

I used to support software that looked at all the email headers, logged them and produced no end of reports for administration.

Most of the time you can ignore the reports (best kept away from micro managers) but usage trends are really handy for spotting how the companies email system is being used or abused.

Oh yeah I know, but this wasnt someone happening to notice something on a report...in any case, those reports would be used by management to decide what action to take, if any.

PommieBast

If you think software is bad wait until you see hardware. Still have this gem from a decade ago..




Half-height PCI to PCI Express adapter with a full height PCI card on top. Case needed modding. It was shipped to a customer.

purifol0

The Continental Op wrote: »

I used to support software that looked at all the email headers, logged them and produced no end of reports for administration.

Most of the time you can ignore the reports (best kept away from micro managers) but usage trends are really handy for spotting how the companies email system is being used or abused.

Bingo. I worked at a place where the bosses wife used her company email as a personal one and though nothing of signing up to a million mailing lists. Everything from Lidl to Etsy clogging up the poor Small Business Server 2011 Exchange's DB and it's weedy 25Mb internet connection. Since she was too snobbish to use a gmail for bull**** like that I told them they'd be better off just moving to Offce 365 and let Microsoft deal with it.


She was employed by the company but it was funny when I got a call every few months to say that her pricey XPS13 skinny laptop was having problems connecting to shares. Turns out she did so little work the laptop was only ever turned on approx every 6 weeks and so it's (the laptop, not hers) Active Directory password had expired. That was a fun and very short report to write!

Earthhorse

PommieBast wrote: »

If you think software is bad wait until you see hardware. Still have this gem from a decade ago..

At least it has handy stickers on the cables though which will never fall off at the slightest touch.

purifol0

Ha Id love to post pictures of hardware IT disasters but I don't want to doxx companies or myself, and I suggest you lads do the same, it small world.

Had great fun going into an office before and watching everyone plug in the ethernet cable into their laptops (which they'd been always told to do) only to tell them that because the wifi network adapter has higher priority than the hardwired eth port, this had changed nothing at all and is the reason the network still felt slow (although there was a lot of placebo going on).

Had a quiet chat with on-site IT about that, as the company just spent 8K on electricians to wire up a newly refurbed part of the office with Cat 6A.

purifol0

So Im working away and get a call about an email that one of the office admins reckons is dodgy, but they know the sender personally and they're another SME that sends us real bills all the time. I take a look and yep, spoofed FROM and a very direct invoice attack vector with complementary PDF payload.

I go check their DNS for SPF and DKIM records. None, nada. I ring them up about the spam email we received, woman on the phone nearly in tears, its Monday afternoon and shes been getting angry calls about this non stop. I tell her hey I understand and can help them fix the problem. Get a call back later from a higher up, "thanks very much, is there a charge?" tell em yes €250 and will do it today. He sounds outraged, and tells me no ****ing thanks.

Their domain is now blacklisted, and not just on my end. Last I checked they are doing invoicing via Fax. Some Oul lads dont reckon computer work is real work it seems.

purifol0

So covid Kicks in and mangement is unhappily greenlighting WFH.

Are people going to work just as hard from their beds as they would in the office? Well you see a few people did try it before and I was asked to keep an eye on them.

This involved checking the VPN. Employee dutifully connects at 8:30 and disconnects at 5. Thing is during that time no files were ever opened on her share. Well I figure I'll give her the benefit of the doubt until a few days later, same thing. Remotely switch Split Tunneling off. Gigabytes of Netflix, a constant connection to Facebook and a bit of RTE player from 2-3pm (Jooooooeeeee Duffy).

She doesn't work there anymore.

That said WFH home happened and the bizness is still going.

TheChizler

igCorcaigh wrote: »

Holy SF!

What kind of practices do some companies have!

I heard a rumour they gave it to a new guy to upgrade VM HD storage who tried to right-click cut and paste a couple of TB between windows shares, but maybe they were just winding me up.

Wombatman

purifol0 wrote: »

So covid Kicks in and mangement is unhappily greenlighting WFH.

Are people going to work just as hard from their beds as they would in the office? Well you see a few people did try it before and I was asked to keep an eye on them.

This involved checking the VPN. Employee dutifully connects at 8:30 and disconnects at 5. Thing is during that time no files were ever opened on her share. Well I figure I'll give her the benefit of the doubt until a few days later, same thing. Remotely switch Split Tunneling off. Gigabytes of Netflix, a constant connection to Facebook and a bit of RTE player from 2-3pm (Jooooooeeeee Duffy).

She doesn't work there anymore.

That said WFH home happened and the bizness is still going.

Was she using a personal device or one supplied by the company?

purifol0

Wombatman wrote: »

Was she using a personal device or one supplied by the company?

Company laptop, company phone and a watertight user agreement. Essentially it's the exact same as if she was at her desk at the office, I can monitor that traffic too (and it's not 2 gigabytes of Netflix an hour)

Wombatman

purifol0 wrote: »

Company laptop, company phone and a watertight user agreement. Essentially it's the exact same as if she was at her desk at the office, I can monitor that traffic too (and it's not 2 gigabytes of Netflix an hour)

Still probably better to to use a web filter than getting a hooman to "keep an eye on them".

the_amazing_raisin

purifol0 wrote: »

So covid Kicks in and mangement is unhappily greenlighting WFH.

Are people going to work just as hard from their beds as they would in the office? Well you see a few people did try it before and I was asked to keep an eye on them.

This involved checking the VPN. Employee dutifully connects at 8:30 and disconnects at 5. Thing is during that time no files were ever opened on her share. Well I figure I'll give her the benefit of the doubt until a few days later, same thing. Remotely switch Split Tunneling off. Gigabytes of Netflix, a constant connection to Facebook and a bit of RTE player from 2-3pm (Jooooooeeeee Duffy).

She doesn't work there anymore.

That said WFH home happened and the bizness is still going.

Kind of points more fault to the employee than WFH, I think it depends a lot on the person

In our place we've been WFH for the past year. The pace definitely slowed down for the first couple of months, but since then things picked up and work is getting done at a regular pace

I find there's 2 types of employeee, those who work by the hour and those who work by the task. My place is definitely the latter, we were told pre covid that if we got all our jobs done on Monday and spent the rest of the week watching cat videos then that's management's fault for not giving us enough to do

I think that attitude has filtered better into WFH since as long as stuff gets done by the due date then nobody really cares if it took 5 mins or an all nighter

I feel like employees that view work by the hour have a harder time adjusting to WFH as they've lost that clear separation between work and personal time

the_amazing_raisin

My personal coding horror is Perl

I just can't wrap my head around it, the syntax is at simple and bizarre at the same time, and it seems like writing totally unreadable code is encouraged

I feel like it's brilliant for what it was designed for, searching and parsing large data files, but as soon as people started using it for things like web apps it just got abused

I know in the next 5 mins I'm going to have 100 people yelling at me about how it's a brilliant language and they've used it for years without issues and that's fine, I just feel like it's still my personal coding horror

oscarBravo

I'm with you. I've never been able to get my head around perl.

purifol0

Wombatman wrote: »

Still probably better to to use a web filter than getting a hooman to "keep an eye on them".

We have a WAF proxy for gambling, porn and violence. I never added social media because frankly I'm okay with it, Netflix binge-ing is taking the absolute piss though.

purifol0

the_amazing_raisin wrote: »

Kind of points more fault to the employee than WFH, I think it depends a lot on the person

Yep, agree 100%.

PommieBast

purifol0 wrote: »

Ha Id love to post pictures of hardware IT disasters but I don't want to doxx companies or myself, and I suggest you lads do the same, it small world.

This particular firm has since dissolved but yes see what you mean. Anonymity is not the same as it was even only 5 or so years ago.

My personal software horror was having to contend with this CI system where each module had to be in its own repository. Think there were 40 or so by the time I left. Lost count of the number of times that unit tests had to be nobbled so that a cross-module change could be committed..

JoyPad

the_amazing_raisin wrote: »

My personal coding horror is Perl

I'll see your Perl horror, and raise you a Mason horror.

I used to work for a very large company whose entire website was built with Mason, and it was a huge mess. It was supposed to be Perl code embedded in HTML, but most modules were the other way round, Perl code that produced HTML snippets. If Perl is a horror, you can imagine what Mason would look like.


The author of Mason, Jonathan Swartz, was an employee there, and he shepherded the migration.

GhostyMcGhost

Whoops! Someone’s getting a P45 ….

Mediatonic Accidentally Leaked The Fall Guys Source Code

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/05/mediatonic_accidentally_leaked_the_fall_guys_source_code

the_amazing_raisin

GhostyMcGhost wrote: »

Whoops! Someone’s getting a P45 ….

Mediatonic Accidentally Leaked The Fall Guys Source Code

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/05/mediatonic_accidentally_leaked_the_fall_guys_source_code

Oh I can imagine how that guy is feeling

It's a bit like that moment of terror when you accidentally push to the production branch

PommieBast

Only time I felt real terror was during a customer acceptance test, which was taking place on a military base somewhere in Sandopia. I had spotted a fault in plain sight and was hoping like hell no-one else had...

Capt'n Midnight

On Reddit somebody in r/sysadmin mentioned that he had an user with a dial-up modem.

Everything worked beautifully, but then the user got ADSL.

And ADSL doesn't warboe, beep or boop. User was most unhappy.

Cue brainstorm - every time user want to "connect" to the internet, a script is run playing a .WAV of a modem handshaking and connecting - and user was happy.

the_amazing_raisin

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

On Reddit somebody in r/sysadmin mentioned that he had an user with a dial-up modem.

Everything worked beautifully, but then the user got ADSL.

And ADSL doesn't warboe, beep or boop. User was most unhappy.

Cue brainstorm - every time user want to "connect" to the internet, a script is run playing a .WAV of a modem handshaking and connecting - and user was happy.

I wonder did they also have to hook the hang up switch on his house phone to a power switch for the router, so that it would kill power to the internet connection when he picked up the phone

Don't want to break the illusion

iLikeWaffles

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iLikeWaffles

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