People Stuff

Out-of-Office Messages are a Security Risk

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Every once in a while I get asked why I don’t have an out-of-office message for my email or voice mail. Truth is, I’ll often monitor my email even when I’m out, though I often practice good operations discipline by not responding. Just as intermittent problems with computer systems are hard to deal with, a staff member that’s supposed to be gone but isn’t acting like it is just as confusing. Humans can, and should, drain-stop and remove themselves from clusters for maintenance, too. Sometimes I’m really out of the office, though, crawling around in the backcountry wilderness or on an island somewhere. I’ll do it if I have to, but even then I don’t like setting an automatic response. …

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Free, Like a Puppy

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I’ve found that things that are free of charge are often not a good deal. TANSTAAFL, or “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” You’re always paying in some way. Maybe the piece of hardware is marked up more to cover the development cost of the “free” software that comes with it. Perhaps it’s the drug dealer model, where the first one is free to get you hooked. Sometimes you’re the product, and the “free” thing is spying on you with the hopes of making more money from ads or sales later. Certainly nearly every “free” web service is structured that way. Beyond monetary cost, though, you paying for things with your time. “Free” things often fall into …

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CODE Keyboard

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“You spent $150 on a keyboard?” – My wife There are two kinds of people in technology: those with an opinion about their keyboard, and everybody else. I happen to be one of the first. I grew up using the IBM Model F and M keyboards. They have a spring in the key switches that buckles as you press down. That gives you two things: a prominent clicking sound from the keypress, and solid tactile feedback from the key. You definitely know when that key switch actuated. Years ago I had to give up my Model M keyboards. They’re built to last but it was getting harder to find working ones, it was getting inconvenient to adapt them to USB …

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Midnight is a Confusing Choice for Scheduling

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Midnight is a poor choice for scheduling anything. Midnight belongs to tomorrow. It’s 0000 on the clock, which is the beginning of the next day. That’s not how humans think, though, because tomorrow is after we wake up! A great example is a statement like “proposals are due by midnight on April 15.” What you actually said: proposals aren’t welcome after April 14. What you probably meant: you want the proposals before the date is April 16. There’s a 24 hour difference there, and if you enforce the deadline accurately people are going to complain because they were all thinking the second thing (before April 16). Similarly, this is a problem in change notices and customer communications. When you say …

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How to Troubleshoot Unreliable or Malfunctioning Hardware

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My post on Intel X710 NICs being awful has triggered a lot of emotion and commentary from my readers. One of the common questions has been: so I have X710 NICs, what do I do? How do I troubleshoot hardware that isn’t working right? 1. Document how to reproduce the problem and its severity. Is it a management annoyance or does it cause outages & downtime? Is there a reasonable expectation that what you’re trying to do should work the way you expect? That might seem like an odd question, but sometimes other people do the procurement for (and without) us and there are gotchas they didn’t think to ask about. In my case with the X710s I felt I …

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Let’s Just Keep An Eye On The Time

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“You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.” – Alejandro, Sicario I’ve enjoyed the eclectic roles Benicio del Toro has been playing these last few years. His appearance in recent space movies reminded me of this quote of his from the movie Sicario. Often enough in our own technological roles we are asked to explain ourselves, explain why something is the way it is or why we want it to be a particular way. How do you convey to someone in just a minute the years of school, decades of experience, days in noisy data centers, nights bringing systems back online, hours staring at configurations that are wrong and scripts that don’t work, dumb …

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7 Ways IT Staff Can Prepare for the Holidays

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For us IT types it is important to maintain a good balance between work and our lives. Just as they say that good fences make good neighbors, I’ve found that a good delineation between work and home improves both. The holiday season is taxing, though. People rush around trying to wrap up loose ends, they’re using vacation they’re going to lose, and they’re generally scattered and distracted, which isn’t a good thing. If you’re lucky enough to work somewhere with a true 24×7 operations center then coverage over the holidays is already thought out. However, most IT staff in the world aren’t in places like that. Here are some thoughts I have about how to defend your time off over the …

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Let’s Prosecute Unlicensed Engineering in IT

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Have you been watching this whole dustup with the Equifax CISO, and how people are saying that she is unqualified because, instead of a Computer Science degree, she had an MFA in music composition? Not surprisingly, there’s a massive backlash from the IT community, much of which doesn’t have a computer science degree, either. That’s part of the appeal of technology for many — on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. I’m a mutt, too. I’ve always found computer science programs intentionally inaccessible, with the faculty actively eschewing any form of practical curricula because they’re not a technical college. Snobbish? Yeah. Not my style. What I find very interesting in all of this is the ignorance of some of the …

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The Dangers of Experts Writing Documentation: A Real Life Example

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There are some real, tangible dangers to having experts write documentation. Experts have the perfect tools, skip steps, know where things are based on experience, use jargon, have spare parts so mistakes aren’t a big deal, and as a result make terrible time & work estimates. This leads to confused, and subsequently angry, people, which is probably not what you wanted. I was thinking about all this as I entered my fourth hour of installing a trailer wiring harness on my Mazda CX-9 today. It’s a unit from Curt Manufacturing, kit #56016. When my CX-9 was in the shop for an alignment a few weeks back I had them put a hitch on it. They got squirrelly & weird when …

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How Not To Quit Your Job

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I’ve thought a lot lately about Michael Thomas, a moron who caused criminal amounts of damage to his former employer in the process of quitting. From The Register[0]: As well as deleting ClickMotive’s backups and notification systems for network problems, he cut off people’s VPN access and “tinkered” with the Texas company’s email servers. He deleted internal wiki pages, and removed contact details for the organization’s outside tech support, leaving the automotive software developer scrambling. The real-life BOFH then left his keys, laptop, and entry badge behind with a letter of resignation and an offer to stay on as a consultant. More than a decade ago I did some consulting for a company that had this happen. They fired their sysadmin and …

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