brokensyntax

What ever language you choose. User defined inputs never touch operational services.

20K isn't going to change your quality of life. It's not even likely to affect the size of your toys or vacations against consideration of your current income. It's not enough to pull me away in your situation.

If you haven't laid low a fortune 500 or two with a misconfiguration, are you really even an engineer? 😅😅😅. Honestly though, it happens, own it, think of ways the process or details could be better documented/communicated. Present those in the inevitable post mortem. The learning is the part that makes you more valuable than agentic, or just leaving directions with an intern.

Domain Computers theoretically would allow for that scenario. Still better than just any non guest Windows user.

It's true, any hosting provider with insufficient sandbox security, and leak detection. Likely a lot of web hosts with exposed PHP portals, etc. As that is technically, already a local privilege.

Copy fail is a local privilege escalation, gotta have initial access first.

Even Authenticated users is too broad for most scenarios. Domain Users is often plenty.

Auditing, monitoring, reporting.

Any time I've done this, the local admin account doesn't belong to ANY groups, not even domain users. Its only purpose is the controls necessary over a specific device. Also have to make sure you're not using "Authenticated User" everywhere on network shares. Definitely do want it in AD still for management purposes.

PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, Python-flask, FastCGI. Sky is the limit. But HTML is all you need to build a static site.

Only a good idea if its a project you are specifically passionate about.

No trouble. You're marked as a student. Students need good resources. I remember when I first learned about DR/BCP in school, and it didn't really drive home how important it is when it is in a text book. And a lot of businesses don't realize how important it is, until an emergency happens, and they don't have it. The list isn't everything, but it's everything you need to start understanding operations. ROI (Return on Investment) for doing these practices is MASSIVE. Being able to recover in days instead of weeks/months, at the expense of one employee spending time doing documentation up front, hundreds of times paid back. Every business has an incident at some point. Fire, flood, earthquake, explosion, sickness, ransomware, etc. etc. etc. Information is the most important thing for recovery efforts.

You can do it in excel of your clever and organized. You can do it in Snipe IT if your main concern is asset life cycle tracking. You can use programs like NetBox, or Nautobox, to get visibility and automation. You can use a combination of applications. At the end of the day you should have: Printable list of: all physical servers All virtual servers All backup locations All switches All routers Port and uplink maps VLANs and their purposes All services All recovery passwords Put it all in a virtual lockbox (encrypted storage) then store that in a safe place with the board/owner etc. This is the break glass in case of for the next guy. Then get to work on DR/BCD planning. Create a sheet that lists all the modes of compromise to business operations. Then for each mode, write a plan for recovery, and for mitigation. The initial sheet becomes an index reference for all other sections.

Spin up Xeams. Or similar on-prem/self managed anti-spam/SMTP appliance. Configure it to connect to and download from the oAuth account. Enable the ERP system access to the appliance over SMTP with appropriate IP access restrictions.

Ah yeah. This makes sense then. I'm going to give you an exercise, and it should accelerate your development. Grab a pen/cil and notebook. On the first page of the notebook I want to you title it: Main Gameplay Loop: Now just in point form bullets, write down the broad topics of how you expect this game to play.. - Level start - Load map - Spawn player sprite - Spawn mobs - Set win condition - Set lose condition A big part of learning how to code, is learning how to focus on meaningful parts of the project, and how to break them down into smaller parts. Each of those headings above, can be further broken down into what the game/engine/computer must do to process those steps. Level start might include things like, identifying what level the player is entering, accounting for their character's state (Max health/current health, modifiers/items/inventory) etc. The goal of this exercise ultimately, is with no computer code whatsoever, to define the program. I was taught to do this with flow-charts, and IPO (Input Processing Output) tables. A flow chart/decision chart helps to visualize, loops, if statements, booleans, etc. IPO helps to keep in mind what you're expecting from the player, what the system has to do with those inputs, and what the player is expecting as output (audio/visual information.) Once you have clear steps and goals, you can start to implement them one at a time. Can I load the map with no sprites/models. Can I spawn models/sprites. Can I control the main-character? Can I switch to control a secondary character if my game design has more than one controllable character? ChatGPT and other LLMs present an apparent shortcut, but honestly, they are only tools, and a tool is only as good as the one who uses it. Master first, the logic of the system, and the syntax and diction will follow. If you can't trust my handle about that, who can you?

And then employers believe its easy. They hire bottom of the barrel, they're all trash, and if the company is lucky, they catch one good one that is cleaning up the messes of another five or ten.

I have a network security background so "I can't talk about it." Is a legitimate answer 😅. But honestly, a lot of companies that aren't some thousands of employees large corporation, are interested in your technical knowledge, not your job history. Talk to local employment programs to see if you can get funded to take either az-104 (Azure admin) or a similar AWS certificate to have something fresh on your CV. Aside from that, I'm big on honesty, but I know that could bite you right now. Truth is, you had to take some time to be with your family/loved ones/support structure, for personal reasons, and that time was well used to prepare you to be ready today to re-enter your original career path.

Ah, then I see no reason you couldn't (or shouldn't), get back into it.

Are you certain that IT is not the cause of the stress that lead you into that problem in the first place?

No need to say "Anymore"

Every modern company is an IT company. Not all of them have realized it yet.

Government... Ever look at the Ashley Madison dump? SO MANY .gov email addresses.

20:1 at best of we tall strictly IT and network. I think it gets a little better in software dev.

Yep

Good code is something most people can learn to do. Step one is the logic. worry less about the diction and syntax, and more about what the computer is doing. How to get from the inputs to the outputs. If you can design the logic you want it to use, then you can always look up the language bits until it becomes natural, or you at least have a large personal library to reference.

North Korea does this to plant workers in American companies. I wouldn't be surprised if other individuals, or groups, do the same.

It's been getting steadily worse, but it was always bad. Certainly, bad enough that I was driven to learn the CMD.exe, PowerShell, and straight-up program names/shortcuts early on. Largely the way I interact with a Windows based PC hasn't changed since Windows 7. ncpa.cpl, control, userpasswords2, lusrmgr.exe, etc. etc. etc. The shortcuts all haven't changed. The GUI has always been a hinderance. As fewer and fewer people learn what/how a computer is/works, the GUI and UX design travel further and further away from useful. I'm sure someone on SysInternals will be releasing alternate "power-user" Shells soon that look like the older versions of explorer :D As for settings/configs etc. Start backing up your registries, setting up group policies, and if you're doing it for a home user on a home edition, grab PolicyPlus. At least then you can have some normalized control over the desired state and configuration.

Unfortunately, some tools are as useless as they seem. Send them a Yubikey, and set-up a password vault it opens. Make sure to keep a backup copy of the yubikey, or enable a second access key for when they inevitably lose the Yubikey. At least with a physical credential you can start having them go through their manager to request (and expense to cost-center), the replacement each time. If it starts hitting their wallet, maybe they'll remember.

Well, what they're really saying to do is "Manage it." Disable it, comes at the choice to ignore, and therefore not manage it. However, all of the equipment needed to configure related address management, and firewall rules, ACLs, etc. is already in your environment. So manage it. Set-up and sink-hole IPv6. Disable IPv6 definitely has an impact on various MS services, it's been a few years since I've done it, but I recall Exchange server for one having significant issues when done. Configure WF to block all IPv6 traffic in both directions. Disable Teredo/IPv6to4 tunneling. Disable/block route advertising. Run a config script that sets the metric on IPv6 interfaces to some ridiculously high number like 4000.

Always concerned that things like this are part of the on-again-off-again cycle. Nice to be on the ground floor. Make yourself an excel sheet or similar document with a list of all the projects you see in need of being done. Get yourself a ticket tracking/project system setup. In your excel sheet, you can make tabs for each project's information. That should be things like, technologies included, assets needed, assets on hand, on-going maintenance requirements etc. When a project is ready to be initiated, it goes into the ticket tracking system. Make sure you understand the best way to do this in your chosen ticket system. (Many have some form of project ticket, that can have additional task tickets assigned to it.) This gives you an at-a-glance document for stuff above-and-beyond daily operations that needs done, or has been completed. The first project should probably be your DR and BCP documentation. Supporting documents likely include: - Network configuration (Switches and Routers) - Patching schedule (Port-to-Patch, Patch-to-Infra Systems, etc.) - Data backup plan details Since you are now the effectively Sr. Director of IT, expect to have to talk to the CEO semi-regularly about the business' needs, ROIs, TCOs, etc. as they pertain to the project list, and day-to-day. Other than that, Play nice with the MSP until you have enough staff to replace them. "Enough" depends on the number of systems, services, and users, you must support. I suggest not less than 4 in most scenarios (Though with 80, a skeleton crew can be successful. Preference should be for 2 needed any given day to field emergent issues, and 1 needed for pushing projects forward, reviewing documentation of fast-changing stuff, equipment audits, etc., and room for one person to be off sick/vacation/etc. if you end up with someone sick while someone is on vacation, you still have 2 people yay!) Don't forget to check what current SLAs are with the MSP, and what the user experience on response times has actually been. And, make sure that opening a ticket is EASY, and the information is accessible. Webportal+Email agent at minimum. And remember, if it isn't in a ticket, it didn't happen, so if you work something on a phone-call or desk fly-by, make sure to open a ticket behind it.

RGB == Red, Green, Blue VERY specifically, in that order. 0x0 == No saturation 0xFF == Full saturation That's it, that's all the magic to RGB. There are other indicators used by various graphics systems to denote characteristics outside of simply colour saturation. 120, 120, 120, (0x787878) just means "set saturation of Red, Green, and Blue, to 120, or ~47%." There are some interesting tricks of the eyes in the way colour data makes it to the pixels on the monitor that can affect how we see the output from our screens as well. There were some interesting games back in the era of BASIC that would take advantage of, for instance, the differences in frequency between PAL and NSTC, where an image would be grey on PAL, but end up a strange two-tone graphics on NTSC outputs. Game developers would use this characteristic intentionally, and sometimes doing a full screen refresh could invert the colours, so they would include a colour inversion button in their application to reset the colours, even though you were playing on what was ostensibly a "black and white" monitor or television.

You are, in this instance, completely sane. I put on a tie and clipboard, and walked around a IT Security class (Think people who WANT to work in cybersec). Hey, <teacher name> asked me to do a quick security audit of all the student's passwords, can you share that with me? Literally every student started giving me their password, some of them didn't stop when I told them to, insisting, no no, it's okay, then trying to continue to give me their password. We're doomed man. Doomed.

So, what do you think of Confluence then? *evil cackle*

I'm impressed ReactOS is in that list.

You don't need any, I simply mentioned that I personally have created a helper because of the amount of time I spend in that environment. Same as I have hundreds of personal BASH scripts that I lean on from my time in Linux environments. The whole standard commandlet with pedantic flags is right there, and similar nftables and universal firewall commands for comparison. PowerShell is, in fact, good, out of the box. For the environment it is working in. Just as some would argue that BASH, CSH, ZSH, TCSH, KSH, or FISH are "good out of the box." Your inability to adapt to an environment, says more about you, than it does about the shell in that environment.

Years of experience is a TERRIBLE indicator in tech. Just look at the platform you're currently using, or RSS feeds if you've ever used them. How many years of experience do you think Aaron had at age 14 when RSS 1.0 released? Ever seen the framework NodeJS, how about FastAPI?? Both Ryan Dahl, and Sebastian Ramirez have experienced job postings they don't qualify for because the posting required "N" years of experience. They were the creators of their respective technologies in these positions. Learn from people who have created things you admire. If you admire this person for their output, great decide if this is right for you. The price doesn't seem terrible if I compare it to bootcamp programs etc. But there's also platforms like CodeCombat, Boot dot Dev, LowLevelLearning, etc. that teach many coding concepts for very little cost.

They insinuate no such thing. They explicitly state, they don't know about the case of Linux. The big difference there being though, that BASH' tab completion encompasses the core command name. Intellisense (The tab completion used by PowerShell) will tab through, and suggest the flags/arguments accepted by the command.

Yes, it is pedantic, but it's also easy to understand. Set-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName -PolicyStore -Description -Enabled -Profile -Action -RemoteAddress -Direction -Protocol -LocalPort I have helper functions written that I can just feed some basic details to to get a baseline. Set-RBFirewall -Roles @{"iis","mssql"}, and the function will give it my preferred baseline firewall settings for those roles. It just depends how frequently you do it. Not like nft add table ip filter nft add chain ip filter MS-SERVICES { type filter hook input priority 0\; } nft add rule ip filter MS-SERVICES ip saddr 10.13.42.0/8 tcp dport 3389 accept is much simpler, and being less pedantic can make it more difficult to read for newcomers. Or UFW Unless you've set-up a profile document. sudo ufw allow from 10.13.42.0/8 to any port 3389 proto tcp

You need to work towards finding and understanding the powershell native alternatives. There are aliases for some executables (most CMD things you run are just small executables.) Powershell might be running the alias, which expects different inputs than your executable designed to do a similar thing, or powershell globbing might consume your command flags or variables in a way you didn't expect. A lot of that can be cured with --%, however --% will prevent variable resolution.

Sounds like a skill issue. I've been using powershell daily for over a decade, and any failures have been wholly on me. I have voice macros, encryption/decryption programs, user management, mailbox management, binary file modifiers, complex multi-service monitoring and reporting. I've never, however, found it difficult.

They already have that idea, there's even a name for malware that does such.

So yes, you are underpaid, most in I.T. are. You're doing multiple jobs. Leave while you still have your health (mental and otherwise). Take what you can while you're there. Of course, depending on the management style, you may have the opportunity to bring forward the fact that you are: Planning, purchasing, architect, help desk, engineer, developer, storage admin, backup admin, etc. To improve your compensation, and potentially, title. Look at websites like glassdoor and see what others in your physical location are making, but with the level of responsibility on you, the company crashes without your presence, and how much do they lose per day of failure to operate?

You sound like my ex. That poor Toshiba laptop had no right working as long as it did in her hands. Anywho. Before writing the code, stop and think. What is the input for this function? What is the expected output? (To screen? As a variable? to command line? Integer? String? etc.) What happens to the input, to generate this output? (The processing) This is pretty simple to mock up into three columns, and help keep your thoughts straight. The next level would be flow-charting, but may not be necessary for a lot of what you're trying to accomplish. The next thing to do is logging, debugging, and prints. I have a logging function I wrote that prints to stdout, and to a debug log, that captures the name of the function it is running inside and prepends the output line with that. [fnFoo] -- \\epoch_stamp\\ "Failed to loop over bar because bar is empty." You can also add breaks in execution etc. Though I don't use those as often as I should. :D

I've done coding on my phone. Even with a decent IDE app, it's annoying. There are often community organizations you can look for that do e-waste recycling. Similar to the Kramdem Institute that Gamers Nexus does work with. This, and just posting on places like Kijiji/Craig's List/FB Marketplace, etc. that you're seeking a simple laptop reasonable for study and internet use. You might get someone who has something they're getting rid of. Or someone with a spare they've been using as a node in a home lab that they can part with.

Then this sounds like a training issue, not on IT side, but on the organizers side. They have controls to set who can record in Teams when making the invite. They have controls to set who can access the recording or its transcripts. You need to go back to the requesting party, and make very sure you understand their goals, nailed down in specificity they would be willing to place before a tribunal. Yes that leaves whether or not a meeting with a particular individual gets recorded or not up to the organizer, but at the end of the day, with all of the options on how a recording may happen, this could only ever have been a policy issue, and needs to be addressed as such. Anything else is going to scapegoat IT when someone uses an alternative channel to take a recording.

I write onboard and offboard scripts anywhere I manage user accounts. So that part is easy. Get-ADUser -filter {indicator} |?{$_.property -eq indicator} |%{Offboard-User $_.identity} As for "clues", there are likely clues that are illegal, but available, for you to access as IT. Running searches against all the HR and exec mailboxes from the exchange backend. Other than that, all you can do is keep your ears open. Eitherway, the first round of mass layoffs is a resume generating event for those who are still employed IMHO. The "you survive" e-mails reminds me of a story from Blizzard where they intercepted all the devs in a department on the way in through the lobby and separated them left/right, only after they had them all, did they say what was going on.

How sensitive are we talking? Do people join these Teams meetings remotely (as in from home/hotel/cell phone)? Or just from various office locations? I ask because, if these are sensitive enough that they can't be recorded, then they are sensitive enough that they should only happen in person. Even if you control the laptop that someone uses to login to the meeting so they can't install a USB capture card, or OBS or XSplit, or use/access built in Windows screen recording apps, etc. I can point a camera and microphone at my laptop and capture all the details.

I'm not a Database Architect or anything of the sort, so my novice approach. Look at what data I need to drive the application. Look at what data is going to be called independent of other data. Look at what data is going to be relied upon by other calls. Ensure I have separate tables for things that make sense as such. For instance, customer information, doesn't care what restaurants exist, what drivers exist, what drivers are available, etc. So clearly Cx_Info is its own table. Driver information is useful to the customer front end, the restaurant portal potentially, HR/Finance, etc. So again, this should probably be its own table, and accessed largely via JOINs. The restaurant list doesn't care about customers, or drivers. Continue down the line. You'll end up with a bunch of tables, a bunch of JOINs that are needed to process orders, updated the client front-end, etc. but all will be logical. The one I'm stuck out on most right now, is if I'm using a classical SQL database, as opposed to some JSON based noSQL database structure. How do I want to handle individual restaurants menus?

Dynamic Linked Library, a library of code, that is linked, dynamically. Seems to me, the whole purpose of such a thing, is that you can patch/append/over-write it with updated versions. Why do you see patching as a failure of software in any era? I'm much more concerned with the external import stack than with developer maintained code. We now have entire libraries that you can import and with a couple of quick tutorials, example code, or LLM assistance, have "functional" Machine learning, Machine vision, etc. Without ever understanding what the imported code is doing, or how it does it. Then go ahead and use a framework like NPM/NodeJS, some developer delists their project that 80% of the web was built on, and what happens? Chaos for the next week while politics and ethics debates occur over going against the developer's wishes. All over 8 lines of code. DLL Patching as such, is GREAT by comparison to what we have today.

Offsore, and outside expertise, are not inherently bad things. Chasing the bottom dollar however, cutting QA, and shipping whatever slop regardless of quality, provides no incentive to be good. There is good software produced all over the world. It's chasing the cheapest slop that will trick an investor or client into paying that is the specific issue.