How common is this mentality still? I mean I certainly felt the same way when 1st taking on IT responsibilities and seeing the boss had a 9GB mailbox (the fuck?). But email is mission critical, and it's an archive of written communiques between us and vendors and client and partners. It holds contracts, statements of work, design docs, documentation, promises, admissions, delivered files, whole conversations about how something is/has/will/might happen, and who knows what else the users decided to put there?
Anything truly "mission critical" should not be contained in the body of an email. Make it a savable attachment. That's not to say you don't need to take all possible steps to protect and back up your email databases, but "contracts" and "statements of work" and such shouldn't be things people just write into the body of an email and expect to have that preserved until the end times.
That being said, Exchange 2010's DAGs and archive groups, and functional obsolesence of .pst's makes email a pretty damn reliable place to store shit, so we could actually see a shift in that mentality in the near future.
I could leave it up to end users to backup their shit individually, but it's easier for everyone if I just make the mailboxes safe and recoverable since they are using it as an archive no matter what I direct them to do. It's hard to enforce quotas when the big fish don't want quotas.
As long as the big fish are willing to write the check for the storage, let 'em have what they want. Otherwise you create a retention policy & quota for the execs and retention & quotas for the plebes, and tell people that email isn't file storage, and point them to their personal/departmental network storage.
Amusing email anecdote: We had a user here who threw a shitstorm when we emptied her deleted items folder because she used it to save emails in, and had sub folders and shit in it.
Anything truly "mission critical" should not be contained in the body of an email. Make it a savable attachment.
Ahh, I don't really distinguish between the body and an attachment. Best practices would dictate end users save and backup their attachments, but I know a significant portion of the userbase won't do that (of if they do they cannot be arsed to look into their backup share and they still rely on their mailbox as an archive).
I'm just wondering if my experience is dictated by my dealing mainly with ISV's and law firms.
Amusing email anecdote: We had a user here who threw a shitstorm when we emptied her deleted items folder because she used it to save emails in, and had sub folders and shit in it.
Amusing email anecdote: We had a user here who threw a shitstorm when we emptied her deleted items folder because she used it to save emails in, and had sub folders and shit in it.
Been there and done that.
I had a user who got mad for that same reason. She used it as a folder to look up old emails.
And speaking of annoyances...A remote user had a laptop and her hard drive fried. Dell gives her a new hard drive and instead of shipping it to me and creating a domain user, setting it up, etc., she says she needs it right now. Due to her position in the company, I can't force her to ship it. Fast forward two months to last week. It gets brought to me finally, so I set it up on the domain, copy over any files on the local desktop to the domain account and ship it back. Friday I get a nasty email saying all her emails are gone and why did I erase her data. I find out she was using the local account's Outlook for her non-business email account and when she logged on to Outlook through the domain account, all her non-business email account email was gone.
Wanting to cover my bases, I have HR sit in on the conference call because I don't want this user to lie about what I'm saying. I try to explain to her over the phone about local account vs. domain account and to log onto the local account using the username and password SHE set up but she's pissed that I "partitioned" her drive and says "I am not going through all that hassle." I tell her to ship it to me and I'll do it but she won't have that either. So now two months of "business email" from her non-company emails are gone to her and she says she'll use her company email account when she is forced to.
The upside is HR knows she's an evil bitch as she's been an annoyance to a great number of people.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
When I was in the military, I had to rebuild the chaplains computer and forgot to backup the .pst with several years worth of email in it. At first he was so mad he left the room quickly and slammed a door, which made me feel terrible, and then after he calmed himself down he just kept giving me those "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" vibes.
Never in my life have I felt more like I was going to hell.
I was sooo glad I was a programmer and not a computer tech in the USAF.
Though I did wipe out a principal's profile at a school district once. I kinda felt bad, pointed her to the policy she accepted that said only network drives are backed up, and then managed to recover 99 percent of it with a freeware program undelete thing.
Ooo, if you can remember the program I'll be happy.
I totally need a freeware undelete thingy, just to cover my butt and say I tried. They've been using the machine for two weeks and only now said they are missing files (they were storing all the client resumes and client attendance sheets, on a folder, on a desktop, under the CLIENT USER PROFILE *forehead smash* and "somehow" it got deleted....)
They're SOL but to save face I want to run something. Trouble is all of the freeware utils either a) do nothing, and ask for money, b) show you what it could recover, but then ask for money, or c) work, but suck.
I have no idea anymore, it was about 3 years ago. I am pretty sure it was a use once then you get to pay for it kind of thing. But I don't even have an inkling of the name, sorry.
When I was in the military, I had to rebuild the chaplains computer and forgot to backup the .pst with several years worth of email in it. At first he was so mad he left the room quickly and slammed a door, which made me feel terrible, and then after he calmed himself down he just kept giving me those "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" vibes.
Never in my life have I felt more like I was going to hell.
I was sooo glad I was a programmer and not a computer tech in the USAF.
Though I did wipe out a principal's profile at a school district once. I kinda felt bad, pointed her to the policy she accepted that said only network drives are backed up, and then managed to recover 99 percent of it with a freeware program undelete thing.
Ooo, if you can remember the program I'll be happy.
I totally need a freeware undelete thingy, just to cover my butt and say I tried. They've been using the machine for two weeks and only now said they are missing files (they were storing all the client resumes and client attendance sheets, on a folder, on a desktop, under the CLIENT USER PROFILE *forehead smash* and "somehow" it got deleted....)
They're SOL but to save face I want to run something. Trouble is all of the freeware utils either a) do nothing, and ask for money, b) show you what it could recover, but then ask for money, or c) work, but suck.
I have no idea anymore, it was about 3 years ago. I am pretty sure it was a use once then you get to pay for it kind of thing. But I don't even have an inkling of the name, sorry.
Amusing email anecdote: We had a user here who threw a shitstorm when we emptied her deleted items folder because she used it to save emails in, and had sub folders and shit in it.
Heh, that's happened to me a few times. I modified the welcome email template to mention that deleted items will get purged as necessary. If they get pissed I point to it.
So I drew up a document that contained everyone's name and computer name since we all share documents between each other and it would be nice to be able to pull up a document to see everyone's computer name. Unfortunately my COO said it was some sort of computer risk and told me to scrap the idea. I didn't want to argue with her but I fail to see how having computer names on this document is a security concern. Oh well... I still kept the document for myself.
It's not really a security risk, you just work for incompetent people. See: platform-agnostic WYSIWYG layout/UI editor, a hardware anti-virus solution that sits between the physical HDD and the rest of the machine that requires you to start writing win32 drivers, being told that $50 monitor stands were too expensive and that you needed something in the $20 range and finally their bitching about your taking 15m breaks to do whatever it was that you were doing.
And speaking of incompetent sysadmin-stuff: I want to murder the admins at one of our client sites. We don't handle backups unless you specifically ask us to, and you pay us to. If you don't, then it's up to you to make sure you're getting backups of your data. Guess who's server SOMEHOW lost 2 out of 3 drives in a RAID 5 array yesterday? Yep! And the last backup either of us have for their data is from Aug-13. So, there's a month's worth of accounts payable and payroll data (including new hires, etc) just GONE. No fucking clue what they're gonna do (other than bitch at us for not having a backup). They're talking about data-recovery, but I don't even know how possible that is on a RAID 5 array with the striping plus it telling us we have 2/3 drives that are bad.
This week is not going well, other than that "had Monday off" thing. Sigh.
You COULD try SpinRITE...
though I don't know whether it can do anything with RAID....
The drives were sent off to some company in Ohio yesterday, so we'll see how this goes. They're supposed to be able to give us (the client-site) a timeframe and a quote sometime around 1PM.
I wonder if telling them that I only really give a shit about one 400MB folder would help...
You know, it's amazing what they can get data off of these days. A buddy of mine in the USAF was in their computer forensics group, and was on TV once where they took a floppy with some files, formatted it, cut it into little pieces (like a shredder would do), and then microwaved it.
They still recovered like 60 percent of the data. Freaking crazy.
Ah well that's not the way to ruin magnetic media.
You need a few rare earth magnets Put one on one side stationary, and attach the other to the end of an handheld egg beater (off center). Turn on and wave it around slightly over the magnetic media. You'd be lucky if the disk is even usable after that, to be honest.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Hey not to pimp my own company, but one of our techs who is really savvy with 32/64 bit printing architectures wrote this little article for us and I think you guys would find it useful if you ever tried to sort out the clusterfuck that is 32 bit print drivers on a 64 bit server:
So I need some SharePoint help. I've created 2 custom columns in a document library and I define them as check boxes, but when viewing the document library, I can't see any check boxes in those columns. Any thoughts as to why I am unable to see the check boxes?
You know, it's amazing what they can get data off of these days. A buddy of mine in the USAF was in their computer forensics group, and was on TV once where they took a floppy with some files, formatted it, cut it into little pieces (like a shredder would do), and then microwaved it.
They still recovered like 60 percent of the data. Freaking crazy.
Of course, who the hell uses floppies anymore.
Oh man. I remember watching that on discovery channel. Or something very similar at least. They had to glue the individual disc fragments to blank floppies to read 'em.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Sent an email out to everyone asking which type of monitor stand they want. One guy wanted one that lowered his monitors to below his desk? How in the shit am I supposed to find something to do that?
Sent an email out to everyone asking which type of monitor stand they want. One guy wanted one that lowered his monitors to below his desk? How in the shit am I supposed to find something to do that?
High school CFO approved my $17,000 project plan for multipoint servers in the computer lab.
It'll be nice to finally have a current gen server in this campus though. I'm so used to VC firms that I forget 17k is a big deal sometimes.
symantec endpoint protection and it's hardwareid key
according to the docs, if you image a machine with SEP they all have the same ID. thus if you're running them managed they don't show up. the solution is to delete the hardwareid registry key and restart the service. so, i made a group policy object to delete the key, didn't work. try it manually, no joy. figure, well duh, the service is probably running and protecting it. sure enough, after a google that seems to be a thing. can't just stop the service in the services mmc, you have to run an elevated 'start smc -stop'. that works, see the service stop in the mmc. still can't modify the registry key. looks like a permission issue. can't change permissions or take ownership. get frustrated.
i don't have access to the management server, just my subset...
hrmm... when i was reading stuff on friday, there were multiple posts saying there were no tools available to do this. but, following the link on that page to http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO54706, there's a tool. and it worked! now i just gotta push it and run it on the clients.
thanks for having better search skills than me, cog.
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
edited September 2012
I am bashing my head against what should really be a simple Cisco problem. I have an ASA, it has 3 networks connected to it, it should be simple, but somehow I am failing.
We have the Outbound Network - this is where the ADSL modems and so forth sit, all traffic to the internet goes over the Outbound Interface.
We have Insecure Network - this is where guests connect to our network and we host a smattering of services for the guests. This network should be unable to access the Internal Network, but should be able to access the Internet. There are also one or two services which send reporting data to an Internal server via a static NAT. I don't want this network to be able to connect to the ADSL modem management interfaces.
We have the Internal Network, which should be able to talk to any other network on the ASA (except, obviously the management network).
At the moment, I have the internal network talking to the Outbound network and the Internet. And that is basically it - if I create a NAT rule for the Insecure network to talk to the internet the reporting data won't go through to the Internal Network. The internal Network won't connect to the external network at all!
Can anyone help me with the theory here? I don't want to just post my config and insert voodoo, I'd like to properly understand the theory - if you know the right KB article/guide/part of a manual for something like this it would be much appreciated.
Ultimately, I suspect that this is partly because I don't have an elegant way of referring to the internet other than ANY which also matches internal networks, which seems bad.
TL;DR - please help me understand what an assymetric NAT rule drops are and why portmaps are failing when I expect that internal network should be able to go anywhere?
Apothe0sis on
0
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Hmm
Got a client who needs Office 2003 installed. Problem is, he has an Enterprise product key, and I just have the standard Professional disc image.
Anyone have an idea as to where I might be able to get an Enterprise .ISO?
symantec endpoint protection and it's hardwareid key
according to the docs, if you image a machine with SEP they all have the same ID. thus if you're running them managed they don't show up. the solution is to delete the hardwareid registry key and restart the service. so, i made a group policy object to delete the key, didn't work. try it manually, no joy. figure, well duh, the service is probably running and protecting it. sure enough, after a google that seems to be a thing. can't just stop the service in the services mmc, you have to run an elevated 'start smc -stop'. that works, see the service stop in the mmc. still can't modify the registry key. looks like a permission issue. can't change permissions or take ownership. get frustrated.
We used to use SEPM. Best decision we ever made was to run far far away from it.
But IIRC, it has something to do with copying the sylink.xml file... or something.
Really vaguely remember dealing with this. I'll ask the other guys.
Question: What type of company should I call to help mount a projector into the ceiling? The problem is that we have a drop ceiling and it's not going to hold a projector on it. I'm not even sure where to start... An audio/video place?
Posts
Anything truly "mission critical" should not be contained in the body of an email. Make it a savable attachment. That's not to say you don't need to take all possible steps to protect and back up your email databases, but "contracts" and "statements of work" and such shouldn't be things people just write into the body of an email and expect to have that preserved until the end times.
That being said, Exchange 2010's DAGs and archive groups, and functional obsolesence of .pst's makes email a pretty damn reliable place to store shit, so we could actually see a shift in that mentality in the near future.
As long as the big fish are willing to write the check for the storage, let 'em have what they want. Otherwise you create a retention policy & quota for the execs and retention & quotas for the plebes, and tell people that email isn't file storage, and point them to their personal/departmental network storage.
Amusing email anecdote: We had a user here who threw a shitstorm when we emptied her deleted items folder because she used it to save emails in, and had sub folders and shit in it.
Ahh, I don't really distinguish between the body and an attachment. Best practices would dictate end users save and backup their attachments, but I know a significant portion of the userbase won't do that (of if they do they cannot be arsed to look into their backup share and they still rely on their mailbox as an archive).
I'm just wondering if my experience is dictated by my dealing mainly with ISV's and law firms.
If it's in the email, I've made it explicitly clear that it will not be backed up.
Been there and done that.
I had a user who got mad for that same reason. She used it as a folder to look up old emails.
And speaking of annoyances...A remote user had a laptop and her hard drive fried. Dell gives her a new hard drive and instead of shipping it to me and creating a domain user, setting it up, etc., she says she needs it right now. Due to her position in the company, I can't force her to ship it. Fast forward two months to last week. It gets brought to me finally, so I set it up on the domain, copy over any files on the local desktop to the domain account and ship it back. Friday I get a nasty email saying all her emails are gone and why did I erase her data. I find out she was using the local account's Outlook for her non-business email account and when she logged on to Outlook through the domain account, all her non-business email account email was gone.
Wanting to cover my bases, I have HR sit in on the conference call because I don't want this user to lie about what I'm saying. I try to explain to her over the phone about local account vs. domain account and to log onto the local account using the username and password SHE set up but she's pissed that I "partitioned" her drive and says "I am not going through all that hassle." I tell her to ship it to me and I'll do it but she won't have that either. So now two months of "business email" from her non-company emails are gone to her and she says she'll use her company email account when she is forced to.
The upside is HR knows she's an evil bitch as she's been an annoyance to a great number of people.
There are 3 levels of deleted.
Deleted
deleted
and what the fuck IT? What did you do!?
I have no idea anymore, it was about 3 years ago.
I've had some luck with Recuva.
Heh, that's happened to me a few times. I modified the welcome email template to mention that deleted items will get purged as necessary. If they get pissed I point to it.
You COULD try SpinRITE...
though I don't know whether it can do anything with RAID....
I wonder if telling them that I only really give a shit about one 400MB folder would help...
They still recovered like 60 percent of the data. Freaking crazy.
Of course, who the hell uses floppies anymore.
You need a few rare earth magnets Put one on one side stationary, and attach the other to the end of an handheld egg beater (off center). Turn on and wave it around slightly over the magnetic media. You'd be lucky if the disk is even usable after that, to be honest.
http://www.printmanager.com/cms.php?aid=54&fullpage=1&support=8
/self pimpage.
"Oh what a day, what a LOVELY DAY!"
Oh man. I remember watching that on discovery channel. Or something very similar at least. They had to glue the individual disc fragments to blank floppies to read 'em.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Or buy him a desk with a monitor drop where it's inside the desk with a glass top.
My company was not cool with spending $50 for a monitor stand. I doubt they'd be okay with this. But I think it's exactly what he needs.
Monitor desks are a thing.
http://www.spectrumfurniture.com/products/productDetail.cfm?pc=3&psc=26&prod=1298#
http://www.smartdesks.com/2fi-dual-monitor-computer-desks.asp
I've seen some that have flat surfaces of glass with a monitor beneath. Gave me some bad neck pain though trying to look at it.
Would love to but he's in a much higher position than I am. :P
I only vaguely knew what a unix was!
On the upside, 3 weeks here has taught me more than the last 2 years of college
It'll be nice to finally have a current gen server in this campus though. I'm so used to VC firms that I forget 17k is a big deal sometimes.
symantec endpoint protection and it's hardwareid key
according to the docs, if you image a machine with SEP they all have the same ID. thus if you're running them managed they don't show up. the solution is to delete the hardwareid registry key and restart the service. so, i made a group policy object to delete the key, didn't work. try it manually, no joy. figure, well duh, the service is probably running and protecting it. sure enough, after a google that seems to be a thing. can't just stop the service in the services mmc, you have to run an elevated 'start smc -stop'. that works, see the service stop in the mmc. still can't modify the registry key. looks like a permission issue. can't change permissions or take ownership. get frustrated.
i don't have access to the management server, just my subset...
hrmm... when i was reading stuff on friday, there were multiple posts saying there were no tools available to do this. but, following the link on that page to http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO54706, there's a tool. and it worked! now i just gotta push it and run it on the clients.
thanks for having better search skills than me, cog.
We have the Outbound Network - this is where the ADSL modems and so forth sit, all traffic to the internet goes over the Outbound Interface.
We have Insecure Network - this is where guests connect to our network and we host a smattering of services for the guests. This network should be unable to access the Internal Network, but should be able to access the Internet. There are also one or two services which send reporting data to an Internal server via a static NAT. I don't want this network to be able to connect to the ADSL modem management interfaces.
We have the Internal Network, which should be able to talk to any other network on the ASA (except, obviously the management network).
At the moment, I have the internal network talking to the Outbound network and the Internet. And that is basically it - if I create a NAT rule for the Insecure network to talk to the internet the reporting data won't go through to the Internal Network. The internal Network won't connect to the external network at all!
Can anyone help me with the theory here? I don't want to just post my config and insert voodoo, I'd like to properly understand the theory - if you know the right KB article/guide/part of a manual for something like this it would be much appreciated.
Ultimately, I suspect that this is partly because I don't have an elegant way of referring to the internet other than ANY which also matches internal networks, which seems bad.
TL;DR - please help me understand what an assymetric NAT rule drops are and why portmaps are failing when I expect that internal network should be able to go anywhere?
Got a client who needs Office 2003 installed. Problem is, he has an Enterprise product key, and I just have the standard Professional disc image.
Anyone have an idea as to where I might be able to get an Enterprise .ISO?
We used to use SEPM. Best decision we ever made was to run far far away from it.
But IIRC, it has something to do with copying the sylink.xml file... or something.
Really vaguely remember dealing with this. I'll ask the other guys.
PSN - sumowot