Who's to blame?

http://bit-tech.net/article/124/

Disgruntled IT staff to flame here please.

 

Agree 100%. Another analogy would be the Safety Officer who says "Well, he shouldn't have been doing that, it's dangerous" rather than fitting some extra guards. Murphy's Law applies.

 

I also agree…I run a full Norton spread on all our servers and clients and have all but a few ports shut down on the routers…That’s what I'm paid to do…most of the time

 

I'm liking your recent bout of editorial pieces very much...

*n

 

Eventhough I totally agree, it's still fun to belittle the user every now and then for doing something completely stupid like opening up an atachment from someone they don't know with the title OPEN_ME.EXE -- yes, that has happened here

 

Nice article, I totaly agree!
Where I work we give users limited accsess to everything, we have filters on mail and web, AV on every server and client that is managed from th IT department, our firewalls and proxy servers stop all the trafik that arent allowed to reach the internett etc.

It is much easier to restrict than to trust

 

The amount of email I get regarding Kazaa is obscene, so many people install it here and trust everything they download from it. I've had graduate students loose entire projects because they've downloaded 'need for speed underground' in a 4MB file that's turned out to be some awful program...

Corporate computers need to be completely locked down, because as kna said the users don't give a monkeys what happens to the computer until they loose their work.

I too am liking these recent 'editorial' articles, good on you.

 

Having worked for a company that lets itself out as an IT department for other companies, I agree entirely.

One of our clients backs up all of the companies data every week onto a tape drive, they had had to kick the tape into the drive for a month or two, it was only when it got stuck (and completely broken) that we were told about it. We then discovered that the tapes with the backups on were stored on a shelf above that server.

 

I keep all our daily tapes in a fire safe and I take all Friday backups home on Mondays…off site baby. Can you believe my boss (company GM) asked me why I was taking the tapes home? I immediately started to wonder how he rose to that position…

 

Nice article. Actually everything you have said is implemented here! I must give our systems admins full credit for their work.

 

Grrr.... I just spent 30min typing up a reply and had it eaten. Does this thing have a time out or something equally silly?

 

loved the article. granted, it is fun to give people a hard time when they ask why they are getting porn popups or when IE defaults to a porn site for their home page. however, it's still our job as IT to help make sure it doesn't happen in the first place. sure people are going to get upset if you kill off p2p apps, but they just take up precious bandwidth anyways, in addition to all of the other problems that they cause. that's what cable modem and your home computer are for.

 

Thanks for the words of encouragement people, nice to know I'm not alone

Shouldn't do.. although as I've had IE do weird things in forms before, I tend to type them out in notepad first.

 

Wow. That article is about dead-on. There are just some users out there are are blatently stupid, (and no matter how much you teach them) will stay that way. I've even heard of people advocating a license you have to test for before being able to use/own a computer.

ps: As for IE doing weird things in Forums, this is why I use Mozilla, and only use MSIE when I absolutly have to.

 

Nice editorial! Its been a while since i've visited Bit-tech (yes, i was far too busy on my 5hrs a week uni course at Birmingham! tbh, there IS no excuse!) and its nice to see something other than news articles and reviews

Plus ur right Kna, you can't go blaming the user, not everyone WANTS to, or can be bothered to be computer literate, so when you run a network you should have protected it sufficiently so that u can rpotect ur back.

An advert comes to mind, for that Cisco Networking ("the power of the network today" is their moto or summat, its not a plug btw), where that woman is explaining to this head-honcho how the network stopped a worm from entering the system, then asks who could've let it in, where upon his little girl comes running in saying "i've put this new game on your computer".

In today's malicious society (perhaps a little harsh there) you've got to be prepared.

 

Hmm there is a big difference in the Uk with that statement. The Health and safety at work act makes it a legal requirement for both employer and employee to be responsible for health and safety. As far as the employee is concerned it is his legal duty to comply with their employer with regards to health and safety. If you transposed this to IT then you would find that anybody who opened a virus infected email would be liable for any damage that it caused and the IT person responsible would liable as well if the network was not secured "as far as reasonably practicable".

I do however agree with article 100%, where I am working at the moment we are very lucky to have a very competent IT manager and so far have suffered no major problems

 

I like your article. Dispite my limited experience in the IT field, I have discovered the alot of what you stated is true of not only large, office networks, but even smaller home networks.

I somewhat volunteer at a nearby school to help out with thier network. I sometimes am almsot disgusted by a user's ignorance in reference to the machine they use. But then, as you so aptly put it, they do not care. To be honest, I gave up trying to teach teachers (I still find an odd bit of irony on that note) except just very simple things. Still, I have made progress. After a few messages, and asking the administration to throw a tidbit over the PA system, teachers and students seem to have caught onto a few things. While it is true that your average user doesn't care, it is possible to teach them things (if only after faculty has threated school wide punishment).

As for smaller networks, several family members and friends' familys rely on me tech support. This is actually kinda a cool thing because its extra cash in my pocket. Anyway, I find the same holds true. Most of the people don't care as long as what they use works. I was recently handed a system to "fix." I was amazed at the issues this machine had. Everthing from viri to file system errors.

All and all, I msut admit that even I tend to bring myself above the user. But you do make a good point of what all of thier jobs do for us.

 

Yep, its so true KNA, keep the user dumb, and happy, thats all that matters.

I work at my schools IT department as well (great place for volunter hours, 2 hours a day times 4 years ), and its amazing how simple we've made the system when you look at it on a whole:
1)Login name is your name.year
2)Pass is your ID thats been engraved into you head since you came to the district.
3)Word, IE, and My Docs, and "Apps" are the only icons on the desktop.
4)The start menu has: "Log Off, Shut down, and the programs folder which has about 20 icons.

Thats it...
Thing is, it works really well. Untill you try to do somthing actually useful

***Edit: Hehehe, i found this on Ctrl+Alt+Del

 

They did that at my school, no right clicking on the desktop, only log off shut down and programs, no control panel, within a few months i managed to take off the securty, well most of it and had every thing back, I changed the screen saver to read something amusing, i did this while my teacher was watching and she didnt care/ didnt understand :S the problem is the used registry settings to change the options and disabled regedit but their was ways around it. Good article.
'doc

 

yeah, we had all of the registry files they used. In our college we had a few machines that no one else seemed to use, in the corner. No security whatsoever, we had whatever software we wanted, and a few mp3's etc

Edit: In my last year there they moved over to XP with a RM login. A m8 of mine cracked the admin password and now has free print credits.