Using IMAP is fine if you're talking about one account, but if you're talking about hundreds, there's nothing quite as efficient as firing up ExMerge and coming back the next day to a folder that contains a PST file for every Exchange mailbox on the server, nice and portable.
Used to be, back in the NT4 days, you could get around with just a keyboard quite easily. You can still do it today, but the amount of time you save by using a mouse has increased dramatically. Just think about the web experience today vs 10 years ago. Now some websites have dynamic menus that you have to hover over to select your choices - can't do that with a keyboard. Also, there are many sites that have hundreds of links, would you really want to tab through those when you could just use a mouse to click? And what about tabbed browsing? Now you have to first select the tab you want, before it used to be as simple as Alt - Tab to switch to the browser window that had the site you wanted. Not saying tabbed browsing is a bad thing by any means, but it does make operating with a keyboard a bit more difficult.
Cananda and Mexico are usually treated differently than the rest of the world when it comes to US cellular carriers. Many times, service there is included with your plan, or if it's not, it can be added on rather inexpensively. AT&T and Verizon have Mexico and Canada plans which allow you to roam in those countries at a much lower rate than, say, roaming in France or Japan.
Also, keep in mind that if you add the plan for only the time you're roaming, the data caps are prorated too. So if you add a 5GB international data plan for 7 days, you only get about 1.2GB of data. 5 * 1024 = 5120 MB in 5 GB. 5120 MB / 30 days in a month = 171 MB per day. 7 days = 171 * 7, or 1195 MB.
If you only want to take courses related to your field, then a trade school such as ITT Tech is probably what you're after. They typically offer associates (2yr) degrees, because aside from the fact that most people wouldn't be able to afford the time and money it would require, it would be difficult to provide a 4 year curriculum that is 100% focused on CS.
A bachelor's degree means you've taken art, literature, english and math. Subtract that and you've got an associates degree. So I'm not sure why the OP feels like he should be able to get a bachelor's degree while only doing the work required for an associates degree.
Businesses look at a bachelor's degree and realize that a certain part of earning that degree is having the fortitude to stick it out and go through all the crap courses like financial accounting and biology that are most likely unrelated to your chosen career path.
If you want to work somewhere where your entire job will be 100% technical, then I don't think you should have a problem getting an interview with an associates degree in a proper field from a reputable school. On the other hand, if you want to work at a "normal" business, which is not in the technical sector, then they want to see a bachelors degree because they want to know that their employees are well rounded.
In short, I don't think the question is valid because it seems the OP is essentially asking for a bachelors degree without having to do all of the extra work. What he wants education wise is an associates degree, but if he wants to work somewhere that requires a bachelors degree, then he just has to tough it out like everyone else.
Cause, let me tell you, AppleTV sucks. It's pretty nift in the sense that it's in a 4"x4"x1" form factor, but other than Airplay (which is buggy enough currently), I can't think of any reason to want one. I can get a lot more for a lot less in terms of a Roku or other device. And Apple - that little microscopic remote control sure looks cool sitting on the coffee table, but did anyone at Apple actually functionally test that thing? Geez, my hand cramps up just thinking about having to use it.
Your problem is you didn't think on your feet and come up with some reason why you couldn't get your PIN. My e-mail is down! There are a lot of companies that try crap like this to get you off the phone, you just have to be a dick to them and actually make them do their jobs.
If they insist they have to mail you the PIN, tell them your server is down, you won't be able to get the PIN until at least tomorrow and you have an emergency that will cause you to cancel your account if you can't talk to someone about it RTF now.
Keeping you on hold also costs them money. Think about it - try and name one major company that has a support line that doesn't have a toll free number. I'd imagine the big guys are paying something really tiny, maybe half a cent per minute or something, but if you're on hold for 10 minutes, that's 5 cents. Now multiple that by the other 200 people on hold at the same time and now you're talking a dollar per minute. Assuming you have this same level of calls 24x7, keeping those people on hold costs you about $1500 a day or half a million a year. When you break it down that way, the call back services start to sound pretty darn good.
Obviously the numbers would be more or less depending on call volume, but if you're someone like Comcast, I'm guessing that across the country, you probably have a lot more than 200 people on hold at any given moment.
If this passes, it'll totally erode the business model of a lot of companies that make replacement AC adapters. Look at eBay and type in "Dell Power Adapter" and you'll see that there are tons of "knock offs" out there. On second thought, maybe this would be a good thing for the economy since most of the knock offs come from China. Oh wait, so do the real ones. Oh well!
I find the idea moderately interesting. But, the article says that the water would be filtered by the permeable membrains. I don't know if the laws are different in NY, but here in FL, any non-residential swimming pool has to have a pump and filter running 24x7, so I'm guessing this is also true here. The membranes keep the big junk out and the traditional pumps and filters keep the water somewhat clean.
If this actually came about, it would probably be a fad that people found interesting for a year or so and then interest would probably die off. I'd be interested to know how many times the water is changed per hour/day/week, etc. If the membranes only change 10% of the water a day, I don't know that I'd want to swim in it. If they don't chlorinate the water and 20 people take a leak in it, I don't want to be swimming in there.
From my point of view, they are enough ads already. I'm a hulu plus subscriber and I shockingly expected it to be ad free, seeing as how I'm paying for it. Yes, I understand that they're trying to keep the cost down by offsetting it with advertising income, but still. The amount of ads currently is at an acceptably annoying level. If they add in more, well, they can go pound sand.
Typically I see maybe one ad per 30 minute show, which is okay. I have noticed that I see more or less ads depending on how I access the content. I.E. I usually use my 360 and I see maybe one ad. If I access it from my PC, I usually see more ads, if I access it from my Roku, I very frequently am ad free. On the iPad I don't recall, but I think it's about the same as the 360.
Haven't you ever read Rainbox Six? That was SOP for anywhere they deployed. They had a disk that they stuck in to the cell site equipment and it denied all calls except for those that were prefixed with the secret code. Of course, that assumes that they can magically get into any cell site on about 10 minutes notice (not the easiest thing to do if you've ever actually walked up to the base of one of the larger cell towers, first you have a barbed wire and sometimes electrified fence, then each carrier has their own little equipment hut which has about 5 different locks on the door). That's also assuming that every carrier uses equipment that would be compatible with the "blocking program", and it says nothing about data usage. I don't really see any way around that except for providing a list of allowed IMEI / IMSI numbers and turning data off for everyone else.
Of course this is all in a perfect world where one person has the authority to summarily decide to turn off cell coverage without needing to get approval from anyone else, and somehow magically not get sued for doing so.
Yes, for $100k they could've hired a security guy.
If they actually want to implement any of his suggestions, they have to add the cost of additional hardware/software procurement, cost of implementation (even if you do it yourself, that's time that other projects aren't getting worked on), cost of disruption to business operations during implementation, etc. So, yes, they could hire a low to mid-level security guy for a year (assuming maybe 65-70k of that 100k is salary, the rest is benefits, taxes, etc. Is this really the type of person you want to put in charge of your security?
You're on the right track with option #2, 100k can go a long way in security consulting. It may not cover the whole job at a publicly traded company, which I'm guessing is probably somewhere in the 500-1000 employees range based on your description.
So, yeah. You can spend the 100k on beefing up security, but that doesn't happen overnight and if the "hackers" were smart, they'd already be in the network with a method of causing work disruption and/or publicly embarrasing the company, in which case it's already too late.
You can argue it both ways though, as already pointed out, it could be a 12 year old kid yanking their chain. I'd like to believe that they had some way of verifying the threat was real before wiring 100k.
Bottom line, at this stage, you really can't win. You pay the 100k and then maybe they demand another 100k. Or you pay the 100k, breathe a sigh of relief, then get hacked in 6 months by someone else because they heard about your lax security. It just goes to show you that security really needs to be an inherent part of every system rather than bolted on afterwards.
It's been a couple years since I've played it, but my friends and I used to really enjoy this game. From what I know, it's very similar to WoW, but it uses the free to play with cash shop items available model. Realistically, if you will be playing on a semi regular basis, there are a few things from the cash shop that you need, and that may make WoW a better choice depending on the costs involved. But this is one game that I downloaded for my wife, who doesn't play any games, and she actually played it for a month or two of her own accord, which surprised the heck out of me.
I have a similar problem. My e-mail address is first initial last name @ gmail.com, i.e. jsmith@gmail.com. There is a doctor in Canada that has the exact same name. His e-mail address is the same thing, but he duplicated the last letter, i.e. jsmithh@gmail.com. He is on the board for a church of some sort because I constantly get mail from people about things related to his church. I also get medical related e-mails, mostly stuff about conferences, etc...nothing patient related.
I did a Google of my e-mail address and found out that the hospital where he works has an online directory and they had my e-mail address published under his name. I e-mailed them 2 or 3 times over the course of as many weeks explaining their error and asking them to fix it. I received no response. So then I did a whois on the domain and repeated the process with the domain contact. I think it took three e-mails before I finally received a response, and to be fair they did apologize and fix the problem.
The big problem is that when the guy gives out his e-mail address, people glance at it and assume it is his first initial and last name, they miss the extra letter at the end.
So I e-mailed the guy and told him I was getting a bunch of his mail and suggested that he might want to think about changing to an easier to read e-mail address (after all based on the time this started happening, I'm guessing that I've had my gmail account a lot longer than he's had his). I never received a response from him.
So for a while I would forward messages intended for him to his correct e-mail address, but after about a year I got tired of doing it. So I e-mailed him and said that I was just going to start deleting the misdirected e-mails because I was tired of dealing with his mail. I still get stuff for him and just delete it now.
He's missing a ton of mail, and I guess he doesn't care. Some people just don't care it seems.
Well, the short answer is that if you're in a shared hosting environment, you probably can't do much and in that situation I probably would not recommend storing sensitive information. Assuming you are on a dedicated server or VPS, you can secure your server, but what you need to worry about is what type of security do they have in the network as far as IDS/IPS, network segmentation, and firewalling, as well as what type of physical security they have. I.E. where are the machines physically located, who has access to them, are they under NDAs, what type of background checks have been run on these people, etc.
Unfortunately, the truth is that a lot of this stuff may be spelled out in a service agreement, but it may not actually be practiced. If you care about CYA, then get it in writing. If you actually care about not having a breach so you can keep your customers, then the answer is probably something more along the lines of host it yourself in a secure physical environment, or colo a box that you own at a place that you trust, do not give root priviliges to the colo provider, and hash/encrypt the sensitive data on it.
This was my immediate thought as well. Why fuss over $200 when you're probably (hopefully) spending $75k+ on that person's salary, not to mention their benefits, etc. If it's important enough for someone to complain about, then it's probably worth the very minor cost associated with it.
It's not just developers - it's anyone that multitasks, really. That means just about everyone in IT and probably anyone that does any type of web/creative work. Really, those that don't need multiple monitors are those people that spend the majority of their time in one or two applications. People like your HR and finance types. They don't do a lot of switching around between apps, so the benefit isn't as great for them.
From TFA: "police told him they wouldn't pursue the case unless he filled out an incident report". So, what exactly is the reason he chose not to fill out this form and have the police handle this for him? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me...but maybe I'm missing something? Too much work to walk to the police station and spend 30 minutes filling out a form in order to get your $2k computer back?
Not say this isn't a dumb move on Sony's part, but in reality I think this is pretty common. I know that in some small - medium sized companies, there are miles of red tape in the form of change management processes that you have to go through in order to install software patches. You have to fill out the form, get it approved by your supervisor, then it goes up to the dept head and they sit on it for a month, then finally they send it back with a stupid question that you already addressed in your request, so then you point that out and it goes back up the chain and sits for another month. A lot of sysadmins may have the desire to install the latest patches, but their hands are tied by management that wants to have a nice paper trail that documents the justification for each and every system change. I think you'll continue to see stuff like this happen until someone can make the pencil pushers realize that it's not the sysadmins fault, it's their fault for making the patch process take two months.
2960s are layer 2 switches - you say that layer 3 is the way to go but give a layer 2 switch as an example which might be confusing. For 100 devices, there is really no need for a layer 3 switch unless you have a need to segregate devices into different VLANs and need wire speed routing between the VLANs.
If you're serious about the unlimited budget thing, and you want to be responsible, don't try to "learn by doing" with someone's production network. Go out and hire a network consultant to help you. A consultant shouldn't have any problem if you want to be the one pushing the buttons, but you should have someone there to at least check your work to verify that what you're doing is sane and isn't going to cause any type of major problems down the road.
As far as learning, there is so much covered by "networking" that you really can't learn effectively by being thrust into a position where you have to come up with something that works on the first try. You need to identify the specific areas that are important to you. A good TCP/IP foundation is pretty much a universal requirement for anything to do with networking these days, so I would recommend either getting a good network essentials book or taking a class at your local CC. A lot of the early networking stuff is memorization, I.E. what's the max cable length for the various types of ethernet, what is an SSID, how do you update the code on a router, etc.
Being totally realistic with you, a lot of the early on, basic stuff isn't that fun to learn about. Especially if you're coming from the programming discipline. You'll get bored very easily. But once you start doing more advanced stuff it gets more interesting. I've always enjoyed VPN and firewall/security stuff more than configuring routers. Once you learn about VLANs and the cool stuff you can do with them, you will start to see the various ways you can accomplish a task, and you'll see where you have the opportunity to get creative with your solutions. Virtualization and storage networking are huge right now, and there's a ton of good info you can learn about them available for free online.
If you have a basic, flat network, then it's not all that complicated to get something up and running. Buy a firewall to do your NAT/VPN for you, connect that to switches for your clients and servers and you're off to the races.
Cisco is a good recommendation and I'll tell you why. Cisco engineers are widely available everywhere, plus you have the TAC at your disposal. If you run in to a problem that you can't figure out, you have very well defined avenues for getting help. Juniper engineers are also out there, but they're not as easy to find, and that may command a price premium.
KeePass has worked very well for me. I am a network engineer and I started using it to store all of our various IT passwords, now we have a single KeePass db stored on a secure folder on a server that all of our IT admins use to keep track of passwords. It works great. The only complaint I have is that the version we're using doesn't seem to actually close the file when you close the app. The next time you open the same db, you get a warning that the file is already open. You can just tell it to assume ownership of the file, but it's still an annoyance. This may have been fixed in a more recent version, but I haven't had time to check and subsequently upgrade everyone else using it.
That instead of being positive about this, all I can think about is how this group will inevitably be shut down? It doesn't seem like this would be somewhere I would want to work if job security was important to me.
I find your comment regarding offsite DR a bit off base. For small shops, I would agree that maintaining two data centers would be expensive, but for most places that have any kind of substantial investment in IT, it should be just an expense that is factored in from day one. For instance, the company I work for has an annual IT budget of about 2.5 million. We have three datacenters in addition to our computer room at HQ. Two of the data centers are for our public facing apps which are load balanced between them. We have a generator at HQ which can run us for about a week, but if TSHTF, we can move our apps to the remote datacenter. At HQ, I've put as much of the critical infrastructure as possible in VMs for portability and ease of management. HQ is backed up by the 3rd datacenter, where we put a single God box consisting of four 6 core CPUs and 96 GB of RAM. This is sufficient to run all of our critical apps on the single server until we can get our HQ equipment back up and running, or we have time to order and install new equipment elsewhere. The storage from HQ is continuously replicated to the offsite D/R facility, so in the event of a disaster, all I have to do is power up the VMs there, change the outside hostname of our HQ VPN endpoint to point to the D/R firewall and tell people to disconnect and reconnect to VPN. This setup cost us about 90k in capital expenditures including equipment, software and implementation and costs about 10k a year to run. Call it 150k for the D/R site and the generator at HQ, and I' say that's a relatively minor cost in the grand scheme of things.
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Using IMAP is fine if you're talking about one account, but if you're talking about hundreds, there's nothing quite as efficient as firing up ExMerge and coming back the next day to a folder that contains a PST file for every Exchange mailbox on the server, nice and portable.
Used to be, back in the NT4 days, you could get around with just a keyboard quite easily. You can still do it today, but the amount of time you save by using a mouse has increased dramatically. Just think about the web experience today vs 10 years ago. Now some websites have dynamic menus that you have to hover over to select your choices - can't do that with a keyboard. Also, there are many sites that have hundreds of links, would you really want to tab through those when you could just use a mouse to click? And what about tabbed browsing? Now you have to first select the tab you want, before it used to be as simple as Alt - Tab to switch to the browser window that had the site you wanted. Not saying tabbed browsing is a bad thing by any means, but it does make operating with a keyboard a bit more difficult.
Cananda and Mexico are usually treated differently than the rest of the world when it comes to US cellular carriers. Many times, service there is included with your plan, or if it's not, it can be added on rather inexpensively. AT&T and Verizon have Mexico and Canada plans which allow you to roam in those countries at a much lower rate than, say, roaming in France or Japan.
Also, keep in mind that if you add the plan for only the time you're roaming, the data caps are prorated too. So if you add a 5GB international data plan for 7 days, you only get about 1.2GB of data. 5 * 1024 = 5120 MB in 5 GB. 5120 MB / 30 days in a month = 171 MB per day. 7 days = 171 * 7, or 1195 MB.
Was I supposed to read that in Jeremy Clarkson's voice? Because I did.
+1
If you only want to take courses related to your field, then a trade school such as ITT Tech is probably what you're after. They typically offer associates (2yr) degrees, because aside from the fact that most people wouldn't be able to afford the time and money it would require, it would be difficult to provide a 4 year curriculum that is 100% focused on CS.
A bachelor's degree means you've taken art, literature, english and math. Subtract that and you've got an associates degree. So I'm not sure why the OP feels like he should be able to get a bachelor's degree while only doing the work required for an associates degree.
Businesses look at a bachelor's degree and realize that a certain part of earning that degree is having the fortitude to stick it out and go through all the crap courses like financial accounting and biology that are most likely unrelated to your chosen career path.
If you want to work somewhere where your entire job will be 100% technical, then I don't think you should have a problem getting an interview with an associates degree in a proper field from a reputable school. On the other hand, if you want to work at a "normal" business, which is not in the technical sector, then they want to see a bachelors degree because they want to know that their employees are well rounded.
In short, I don't think the question is valid because it seems the OP is essentially asking for a bachelors degree without having to do all of the extra work. What he wants education wise is an associates degree, but if he wants to work somewhere that requires a bachelors degree, then he just has to tough it out like everyone else.
Cause, let me tell you, AppleTV sucks. It's pretty nift in the sense that it's in a 4"x4"x1" form factor, but other than Airplay (which is buggy enough currently), I can't think of any reason to want one. I can get a lot more for a lot less in terms of a Roku or other device. And Apple - that little microscopic remote control sure looks cool sitting on the coffee table, but did anyone at Apple actually functionally test that thing? Geez, my hand cramps up just thinking about having to use it.
Your problem is you didn't think on your feet and come up with some reason why you couldn't get your PIN. My e-mail is down! There are a lot of companies that try crap like this to get you off the phone, you just have to be a dick to them and actually make them do their jobs. If they insist they have to mail you the PIN, tell them your server is down, you won't be able to get the PIN until at least tomorrow and you have an emergency that will cause you to cancel your account if you can't talk to someone about it RTF now.
Keeping you on hold also costs them money. Think about it - try and name one major company that has a support line that doesn't have a toll free number. I'd imagine the big guys are paying something really tiny, maybe half a cent per minute or something, but if you're on hold for 10 minutes, that's 5 cents. Now multiple that by the other 200 people on hold at the same time and now you're talking a dollar per minute. Assuming you have this same level of calls 24x7, keeping those people on hold costs you about $1500 a day or half a million a year. When you break it down that way, the call back services start to sound pretty darn good.
Obviously the numbers would be more or less depending on call volume, but if you're someone like Comcast, I'm guessing that across the country, you probably have a lot more than 200 people on hold at any given moment.
If this passes, it'll totally erode the business model of a lot of companies that make replacement AC adapters. Look at eBay and type in "Dell Power Adapter" and you'll see that there are tons of "knock offs" out there. On second thought, maybe this would be a good thing for the economy since most of the knock offs come from China. Oh wait, so do the real ones. Oh well!
I find the idea moderately interesting. But, the article says that the water would be filtered by the permeable membrains. I don't know if the laws are different in NY, but here in FL, any non-residential swimming pool has to have a pump and filter running 24x7, so I'm guessing this is also true here. The membranes keep the big junk out and the traditional pumps and filters keep the water somewhat clean.
If this actually came about, it would probably be a fad that people found interesting for a year or so and then interest would probably die off. I'd be interested to know how many times the water is changed per hour/day/week, etc. If the membranes only change 10% of the water a day, I don't know that I'd want to swim in it. If they don't chlorinate the water and 20 people take a leak in it, I don't want to be swimming in there.
From my point of view, they are enough ads already. I'm a hulu plus subscriber and I shockingly expected it to be ad free, seeing as how I'm paying for it. Yes, I understand that they're trying to keep the cost down by offsetting it with advertising income, but still. The amount of ads currently is at an acceptably annoying level. If they add in more, well, they can go pound sand.
Typically I see maybe one ad per 30 minute show, which is okay. I have noticed that I see more or less ads depending on how I access the content. I.E. I usually use my 360 and I see maybe one ad. If I access it from my PC, I usually see more ads, if I access it from my Roku, I very frequently am ad free. On the iPad I don't recall, but I think it's about the same as the 360.
Haven't you ever read Rainbox Six? That was SOP for anywhere they deployed. They had a disk that they stuck in to the cell site equipment and it denied all calls except for those that were prefixed with the secret code. Of course, that assumes that they can magically get into any cell site on about 10 minutes notice (not the easiest thing to do if you've ever actually walked up to the base of one of the larger cell towers, first you have a barbed wire and sometimes electrified fence, then each carrier has their own little equipment hut which has about 5 different locks on the door). That's also assuming that every carrier uses equipment that would be compatible with the "blocking program", and it says nothing about data usage. I don't really see any way around that except for providing a list of allowed IMEI / IMSI numbers and turning data off for everyone else. Of course this is all in a perfect world where one person has the authority to summarily decide to turn off cell coverage without needing to get approval from anyone else, and somehow magically not get sued for doing so.
Yes, for $100k they could've hired a security guy.
If they actually want to implement any of his suggestions, they have to add the cost of additional hardware/software procurement, cost of implementation (even if you do it yourself, that's time that other projects aren't getting worked on), cost of disruption to business operations during implementation, etc. So, yes, they could hire a low to mid-level security guy for a year (assuming maybe 65-70k of that 100k is salary, the rest is benefits, taxes, etc. Is this really the type of person you want to put in charge of your security?
You're on the right track with option #2, 100k can go a long way in security consulting. It may not cover the whole job at a publicly traded company, which I'm guessing is probably somewhere in the 500-1000 employees range based on your description.
So, yeah. You can spend the 100k on beefing up security, but that doesn't happen overnight and if the "hackers" were smart, they'd already be in the network with a method of causing work disruption and/or publicly embarrasing the company, in which case it's already too late.
You can argue it both ways though, as already pointed out, it could be a 12 year old kid yanking their chain. I'd like to believe that they had some way of verifying the threat was real before wiring 100k.
Bottom line, at this stage, you really can't win. You pay the 100k and then maybe they demand another 100k. Or you pay the 100k, breathe a sigh of relief, then get hacked in 6 months by someone else because they heard about your lax security. It just goes to show you that security really needs to be an inherent part of every system rather than bolted on afterwards.
It's been a couple years since I've played it, but my friends and I used to really enjoy this game. From what I know, it's very similar to WoW, but it uses the free to play with cash shop items available model. Realistically, if you will be playing on a semi regular basis, there are a few things from the cash shop that you need, and that may make WoW a better choice depending on the costs involved. But this is one game that I downloaded for my wife, who doesn't play any games, and she actually played it for a month or two of her own accord, which surprised the heck out of me.
I have a similar problem. My e-mail address is first initial last name @ gmail.com, i.e. jsmith@gmail.com. There is a doctor in Canada that has the exact same name. His e-mail address is the same thing, but he duplicated the last letter, i.e. jsmithh@gmail.com. He is on the board for a church of some sort because I constantly get mail from people about things related to his church. I also get medical related e-mails, mostly stuff about conferences, etc...nothing patient related. I did a Google of my e-mail address and found out that the hospital where he works has an online directory and they had my e-mail address published under his name. I e-mailed them 2 or 3 times over the course of as many weeks explaining their error and asking them to fix it. I received no response. So then I did a whois on the domain and repeated the process with the domain contact. I think it took three e-mails before I finally received a response, and to be fair they did apologize and fix the problem. The big problem is that when the guy gives out his e-mail address, people glance at it and assume it is his first initial and last name, they miss the extra letter at the end. So I e-mailed the guy and told him I was getting a bunch of his mail and suggested that he might want to think about changing to an easier to read e-mail address (after all based on the time this started happening, I'm guessing that I've had my gmail account a lot longer than he's had his). I never received a response from him. So for a while I would forward messages intended for him to his correct e-mail address, but after about a year I got tired of doing it. So I e-mailed him and said that I was just going to start deleting the misdirected e-mails because I was tired of dealing with his mail. I still get stuff for him and just delete it now. He's missing a ton of mail, and I guess he doesn't care. Some people just don't care it seems.
Well, the short answer is that if you're in a shared hosting environment, you probably can't do much and in that situation I probably would not recommend storing sensitive information. Assuming you are on a dedicated server or VPS, you can secure your server, but what you need to worry about is what type of security do they have in the network as far as IDS/IPS, network segmentation, and firewalling, as well as what type of physical security they have. I.E. where are the machines physically located, who has access to them, are they under NDAs, what type of background checks have been run on these people, etc. Unfortunately, the truth is that a lot of this stuff may be spelled out in a service agreement, but it may not actually be practiced. If you care about CYA, then get it in writing. If you actually care about not having a breach so you can keep your customers, then the answer is probably something more along the lines of host it yourself in a secure physical environment, or colo a box that you own at a place that you trust, do not give root priviliges to the colo provider, and hash/encrypt the sensitive data on it.
This was my immediate thought as well. Why fuss over $200 when you're probably (hopefully) spending $75k+ on that person's salary, not to mention their benefits, etc. If it's important enough for someone to complain about, then it's probably worth the very minor cost associated with it. It's not just developers - it's anyone that multitasks, really. That means just about everyone in IT and probably anyone that does any type of web/creative work. Really, those that don't need multiple monitors are those people that spend the majority of their time in one or two applications. People like your HR and finance types. They don't do a lot of switching around between apps, so the benefit isn't as great for them.
From TFA: "police told him they wouldn't pursue the case unless he filled out an incident report". So, what exactly is the reason he chose not to fill out this form and have the police handle this for him? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me...but maybe I'm missing something? Too much work to walk to the police station and spend 30 minutes filling out a form in order to get your $2k computer back?
Not say this isn't a dumb move on Sony's part, but in reality I think this is pretty common. I know that in some small - medium sized companies, there are miles of red tape in the form of change management processes that you have to go through in order to install software patches. You have to fill out the form, get it approved by your supervisor, then it goes up to the dept head and they sit on it for a month, then finally they send it back with a stupid question that you already addressed in your request, so then you point that out and it goes back up the chain and sits for another month. A lot of sysadmins may have the desire to install the latest patches, but their hands are tied by management that wants to have a nice paper trail that documents the justification for each and every system change. I think you'll continue to see stuff like this happen until someone can make the pencil pushers realize that it's not the sysadmins fault, it's their fault for making the patch process take two months.
This was my first thought as well.
2960s are layer 2 switches - you say that layer 3 is the way to go but give a layer 2 switch as an example which might be confusing. For 100 devices, there is really no need for a layer 3 switch unless you have a need to segregate devices into different VLANs and need wire speed routing between the VLANs.
If you're serious about the unlimited budget thing, and you want to be responsible, don't try to "learn by doing" with someone's production network. Go out and hire a network consultant to help you. A consultant shouldn't have any problem if you want to be the one pushing the buttons, but you should have someone there to at least check your work to verify that what you're doing is sane and isn't going to cause any type of major problems down the road. As far as learning, there is so much covered by "networking" that you really can't learn effectively by being thrust into a position where you have to come up with something that works on the first try. You need to identify the specific areas that are important to you. A good TCP/IP foundation is pretty much a universal requirement for anything to do with networking these days, so I would recommend either getting a good network essentials book or taking a class at your local CC. A lot of the early networking stuff is memorization, I.E. what's the max cable length for the various types of ethernet, what is an SSID, how do you update the code on a router, etc. Being totally realistic with you, a lot of the early on, basic stuff isn't that fun to learn about. Especially if you're coming from the programming discipline. You'll get bored very easily. But once you start doing more advanced stuff it gets more interesting. I've always enjoyed VPN and firewall/security stuff more than configuring routers. Once you learn about VLANs and the cool stuff you can do with them, you will start to see the various ways you can accomplish a task, and you'll see where you have the opportunity to get creative with your solutions. Virtualization and storage networking are huge right now, and there's a ton of good info you can learn about them available for free online. If you have a basic, flat network, then it's not all that complicated to get something up and running. Buy a firewall to do your NAT/VPN for you, connect that to switches for your clients and servers and you're off to the races. Cisco is a good recommendation and I'll tell you why. Cisco engineers are widely available everywhere, plus you have the TAC at your disposal. If you run in to a problem that you can't figure out, you have very well defined avenues for getting help. Juniper engineers are also out there, but they're not as easy to find, and that may command a price premium.
KeePass has worked very well for me. I am a network engineer and I started using it to store all of our various IT passwords, now we have a single KeePass db stored on a secure folder on a server that all of our IT admins use to keep track of passwords. It works great. The only complaint I have is that the version we're using doesn't seem to actually close the file when you close the app. The next time you open the same db, you get a warning that the file is already open. You can just tell it to assume ownership of the file, but it's still an annoyance. This may have been fixed in a more recent version, but I haven't had time to check and subsequently upgrade everyone else using it.
That instead of being positive about this, all I can think about is how this group will inevitably be shut down? It doesn't seem like this would be somewhere I would want to work if job security was important to me.
I find your comment regarding offsite DR a bit off base. For small shops, I would agree that maintaining two data centers would be expensive, but for most places that have any kind of substantial investment in IT, it should be just an expense that is factored in from day one. For instance, the company I work for has an annual IT budget of about 2.5 million. We have three datacenters in addition to our computer room at HQ. Two of the data centers are for our public facing apps which are load balanced between them. We have a generator at HQ which can run us for about a week, but if TSHTF, we can move our apps to the remote datacenter. At HQ, I've put as much of the critical infrastructure as possible in VMs for portability and ease of management. HQ is backed up by the 3rd datacenter, where we put a single God box consisting of four 6 core CPUs and 96 GB of RAM. This is sufficient to run all of our critical apps on the single server until we can get our HQ equipment back up and running, or we have time to order and install new equipment elsewhere. The storage from HQ is continuously replicated to the offsite D/R facility, so in the event of a disaster, all I have to do is power up the VMs there, change the outside hostname of our HQ VPN endpoint to point to the D/R firewall and tell people to disconnect and reconnect to VPN. This setup cost us about 90k in capital expenditures including equipment, software and implementation and costs about 10k a year to run. Call it 150k for the D/R site and the generator at HQ, and I' say that's a relatively minor cost in the grand scheme of things.