Changes

One of the roles of an operating system is to determine what to do with the files.
Based on the file extension, the OS decides on a program to use to launch a chosen file. Well, "decides" is inaccurate. Some person told it in advance what to do with it.
Yesterday I got a call about this file to program association being broken with regard to certain image files.
Users couldn't work.
Holy crap.
End of the world.
When I open a picture on my computer, Photoshop starts and displays the image. On these servers, clicking on an image file failed to call any application.
I looked at the file associations and everything looked good.
I even MS Painted a vaguely obscene doodle and clicked it from the desktop.
The proper application opened beautifully.
We ended up examining the network traffic, since the image files the users were needing to view were out on the network.
There was a standard "get" command, followed by a string of text containing no file name (even though one was selected) and correctly expecting an image file.
But there was no response.
A few hours later, we discovered that the server hosting the application itself had been turned off, decommissioned, and replaced by another server.
This would be the end of the story.
Process broke down, communication was never sent, feelings were hurt, and we worked around the difficulty to re-enable functionality to usher in a new era of end-user productivity.
But determining that the application had jumped servers had been so horribly complicated because the documentation for the change was so difficult to find.
And it was difficult to find because the application which was moved was our corporate seamless search application which makes finding documentation possible across our sprawling network.

I Have No Way To Fix This

One of the things I've noticed in moving from large cities to smaller ones is how the local businesses are arranged.
When I was researching the move to South Carolina, I verified that Amazon.com delivered here and took the job, without a second thought about how I'd grown used to purchasing things in Houston, the 4th largest city in the US.
Houston was big enough that stores could specialize.
There was a place on the Southwest Freeway which only sold furniture. For Dentist's offices. Not the special scary dental stuff, either. Just the waiting room stuff.
And they remained in business because either there are enough Dentists in Houston re-decorating their waiting rooms at any given time or it was a front for some kind of human trafficking/money laundering thing.
Actually, either is pretty likely.
But the point is that the smaller the town, the less dentists need new waiting room furniture and the businesses have to diversify.
This is how the tiny town I went to college in developed a store which offered laundry services, movie rentals, live bait and lingerie. I'm not making that up.
Columbia, South Carolina falls somewhere in the middle area where there are hobby shops which sell gaming supplies but not gaming stores where they throw funny-shaped dice at people who wander in looking for a remote controlled car or a train set.
Also, I'm not sure anyone else has noticed but the economy seems to be in a bit of a downturn. Don't spread that around, though. No sense throwing everyone into a panic.
This has lead to even further weirdness in business offerings.
Saturday I visited the outside of our front door.
I never do that, but in this case I was checking for something which I'd ordered online (a specialty item unavailable at a regular diversified store) and I was hoping it had been left there while we were out.
It was not, but there was a flier tucked between the doorknob and the door frame.
The flier was not the expected maid service/lawn care flier I've grown to expect, but one offering (I'm totally serious) "At Your Home Dentistry".
Apparently, a licensed South Carolina Dentist will just come to your house to do cleaning, whitening, extractions, fillings and crowns.
And they take some dental insurances.
You know, there are some things which frighten me.
This concept encompasses about four of them in one little flier.
I guess the appeal is that one can receive dental care without spending time in a waiting room with outdated furnishings, but the wrongness of it chills me to the very core.
I don't think I'd let someone come to my house to cut my hair because of the potential for mess.
Inviting someone over to dig around in my mouth with sharp things is in a new area just past "never going to happen".
When you invite a dentist to your house, do you offer him a cola or glass of wine?
What if he hates the decor? The guy is obviously ashamed of his ancient waiting area, but what if he hates the window treatment with the monkeys on it? Adorable monkeys wearing vests, even.
If someone is going to be digging around in your mouth, how certain do you need to be that they are actually trained to do so?

Team Building

I work on a blended team.
The guys hired before me concentrate on security on the desktop.
I and the guy hired a couple of months ago handle the server security.
Apparently, there is no clean way to name our group.
Also, even the guys that have been here seven years have their original titles.
Analyst.
Someone who analyzes.
There are a lot of people in I.T. hired almost in bulk with the "Analyst" title. This is because HR can fling out that word for just about any job role and no one has to explain what it entails by way of responsibility.
The guy hired after me is also an "Analyst".
I'm probably an "Analyst" too, but I skipped over that part of the job description and went straight to the number following the dollar sign at the bottom so I'm not totally sure.
As far as I'm concerned, for enough money a company can call me anything but French. Even I have my limits.
Anyway, we are restructuring our team at the moment to better define our role in the corporation.
As a side effect, we get to shed whatever title we were stamped with during the hiring process.
There are no rules around this, and I've actually been told to figure out my role and choose my own.
I toyed with the idea of "Internet Meme Analyst", but it still keeps that annoying and vague "Analyst" part, even if it slightly focuses the purpose.
"Duke of Citrix Security" was on the short list, since "DCS" looks official enough to hide behind my name in my email signature for potentially months before anyone asks what it stands for.
"Preventer of Information Technology" was actually recommended to me by a co-worker and I like it.
However, the self-printed, red-lettered, gothic-fonted sign under my name on the cubicle wall actually literally now reads:

"Dark Lord of Servers"

It has been a goal for too long to put off any longer. My rise to "Dark Overlord of Servers" is virtually assured, once I figure out who to kill or delete.

Left To Our Own Devices

My frame of reference is skewed, possibly, but my point of view has been mostly the same for more years than I care to mention.
Once upon a time, I didn't work in I.T.
I was in marketing. I did sales. I had a design job. I worked at a radio station. I sold cookies at the mall.
But those jobs were so long ago I honestly can't imagine having worked them.
I.T. is different.
Not really "bad" different, but I get the impression (again, fully based on my perspective) that working around I.T. people is different than working around regular people (or as we call them "the Normals").
From a distance, our I.T. infested cubicle farm looks much like the accounting cubicle farm down at the other end of our shared workspace.
Closer comparison reveals subtle differences.
On the I.T. side, the subjects on the wall calendars are mostly science fiction related. The accounting people tend to go with motivational landscapes and cars.
There are kitten calendars on both sides, but you can almost taste the irony in a kitten calendar in an I.T. worker's cubicle.
I'd like to know what the power consumption is across the floor.
The accounting people have a computer and generally a couple of monitors per cubicle.
On the I.T. side, everyone seems to have between two and three computers and between four and six monitors, as well as a constantly-charging array of MP3 players and communication devices.
Every week someone gets a new phone and hours are spent going over the features and comparing it to the previous week's phone.
And there are toys.
The accounting people have corporate-branded stress balls.
The I.T. area is covered in action figures and model starships.
I can't remember the last time a nerf projectile's proximity to my face even made me flinch, no matter how fast it had been modified to travel.
In-cubicle coffee makers are forbidden due to the fire codes. I'm certain there are none on the accounting side of the floor.
I've seen no fewer than three coffee makers on the I.T. side carefully mounted into a modified bottom desk drawer with a lock on it.
Eventually that may kill us all, but I think our caffeinated edge will carry us out the building faster than those poor accounting bastards.
Is this normal?
Are all offices like this?
Are the accounting people hiding all the coolness somehow?
How do things work in your office?

Insecurities

Some fears are perfectly reasonable.
Yet I'm amazed at the amount of fear-related email I get every day.
About three days a week, I get an email from my manager.
This email is invariably a forward of a chain of emails back and forth between executives and upper management and their personal technology coordinators.
The forward itself is populated with a single word from my manager: "Thoughts?"
The email yesterday revolved around the use of AT&T cellular modems for traveling marketing people who would like to check their company email from their hotel rooms.
It must be noted that the cellular modems and associated data plans had made it through Purchasing and had already been delivered to the users for installation in their personal laptops.
Now, I've learned a few key things about that early morning question from my manager and the format in which it arrives.
First, replying to everyone with my "thoughts" is a bad idea since they generally ramble and often end up with a recommendation that the executives submit to "random" drug testing as a way to eliminate the root cause of 90% of these discussions.
Second, there are two ways to analyze most technical issues which arrive in most inboxes.
In this case, that specific issue being the question of security concerns associated with the use of cellular modems in conjunction with a secured internal computing environment.
You could check the protocol for encryption standards, analyze the technical documentation provided on the AT&T website (which would lead one to believe the technology has actually been replaced by magic), review the standard White Hat message boards for known exploits and then try to obtain data from within the connection from outside using a variety of techniques and hacks.
However, if you'd like to answer in a time frame which allows you to go to lunch, you should employ something I like to refer to as "LPPDF".
The Litigation Potential and Publicity Disaster Factor is a powerful time-saving tool which provides an accurate answer to security concerns with minimal effort.
Employing LPPDF is simple. In this case, I need only to ask myself who AT&T markets their cellular modem data service to. Given the placement of advertising in Business Week, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, it is a safe bet that the service is marketed to businesses over individual users. Also, the fact that marketing guys knew about it in order to request it through Purchasing means they saw it somewhere marketing people see things indicates that they are the target user base. AT&T would prefer individuals purchase their DSL service.
The next question is "What would happen if some executive had something important stolen while using an AT&T data service?"
There would be a lawsuit. A loud and angry one.
Executives all over the country would panic like a herd of buffalo and begin hurling themselves off cliffs and out of any agreement which involves giving money to AT&T.
Therefore, the service can be assumed to be secure.
Also, LPPDF allows us to compare executives to herd animals, but that's just a bonus.
"Is this rollercoaster safe?"
"I know there isn't a warning sign, but is this pool too shallow for diving?"
"Could this chicken be undercooked?"
All of these questions can be answered without costly labwork or the scientific method if we simply apply LPPDF.
Disclosure:
While blazingly fast, LPPDF would have actually been slower than the response I supplied to this particular question.
In this case, I just said that since it was technically already possible to check corporate email over the internet through use of the web interface provided, the risk of any data loss has already been assumed by whatever group provides that service regardless of the method employed by the user to access the internet.
This response generated enough finger-pointing to allow me to slip away and get a cup of coffee and compose and publish this post.
Through the use of my AT&T cellular data card, no less.

At Least It Is Honest

Okay, so sometimes things get a little crazy at work. I'm sure it happens everywhere.
We can't be the only company with a Procedure Manual weighing in at over 300 pages (single spaced) where people still have to call in favors to get stuff accomplished between teams, right?
That is just the way I.T. works, in my experience.
Whoever is responsible for the equipment in question has to be coerced into making it do something special for someone else or, sometimes, into making it work at all.
I don't go near network firewalls. I haven't logged in to administer one in years.
That's okay, since there is a group of people I can call if I need a port opened or closed.
According to process, I'd just open a ticket and wait, but . . . . Waiting sucks. I mean a lot.
What if it is an emergency? Like I need it done before everyone leaves for the weekend.
In that case, I have to supply the paperwork in addition to promises or threats, depending on the time of day.
Last week I had to tell someone that if a port didn't get opened so that I could apply some patches to a server, God would kill a kitten.
I further said that it was clearly spelled out as such in Leviticus, probably.
The point is that there is a lot of process around doing things at any job and then there is a lot of process around getting things done, and these processes rarely line up as anything which could be called similar in a sane universe.
This last weekend I worked on Friday, did what I was supposed to do, and got thrown under a bus by someone on another team because (my theory goes) the change I requested got put in late or wrong, so it was pretended that it never happened.
Since my call log and network log clearly refute the guy's claims, it was a really weak bus to be thrown under. Like gauze. Or tissue paper. In bus form.
But this is the way things go, and they go this way everywhere, I have to assume in order to maintain my "sanity".
This is the first job I've ever had where the motto seems to be: "*sigh* It is what it is".
I submit as further evidence an email I got from a recruiter yesterday. They were looking for someone to work here and sent it to me because recruiters don't read resumes.
Anyway, after the "skills needed" crap there was a line for "Behavior Characteristics".
Punctual? No.
Team-Player? Not listed.
Able to type 45 words a minute/lift 45 pounds? Nope.
Vaguely hygienic? Doesn't seem to be an issue.
The only "Behavior Characteristic" desired seems to be (and I'm not kidding, I printed it and hung it in my cubicle) "Comfortable with process ambiguity".
If you see that on a job listing, the translation is "the last guy ran screaming from here, be prepared to be tossed into a sea of confusion while wearing a life vest of paperwork".
If I didn't already work here, I'd probably apply.

My Cubicle

I haven't had the opportunity to sit in my actual cubicle since . . . Well, I haven't actually been here at all, ever.
When I started here in April, I sat at a folding table for a couple of weeks and worked from my laptop.
After that, my whole group was moved to a corner of an upper floor in the building with most of the company.
It was determined that we, as a group, were too close to the "normals", and we were shuffled off again.
This time, we left our cubicles and moved into a training room in the dungeon area where we could share classroom-style desks and go about the collaborative effort of making this whole project thing happen.
While we did that, our stuff got packed up and moved to another location.
This set of cubicles is surrounded on one side my other (lesser) I.T. people and on the other by some type of loud buzzing machinery. Maybe it is an air conditioner.
The machine noises are really only loud from outside the building, though, and the hum of it is actually a bit soothing from inside.
Either way, it didn't matter since I was still in the dungeon of another building doing project work and largely ignoring my primary focus Monday through Friday.
While the project itself is still in full swing, I've been moved again.
After over seven months, I'm actually at my desk for the first time, working on the security junk I was hired to work on.

I have no idea what to do with myself.

I've placed some assorted Batman and Star Wars toys around my computer, as required my OSHA regulations (I assume) and I've put up a rear view mirror on my monitor so I know who has invaded my personal space, even though I probably wouldn't mind.
The sheer novelty of having personal space after this long without it makes up for an awful lot of invasion.
I pulled out my handy I.T. Services Official Company Calendar and turned the pages from August to December, then pinned it to the wall with a bent paperclip.
At some point I think I had a desk phone, but it seems to have wandered off.
Perfect. Disposing of the desk phone is officially off my to-do list.
I pulled out a box of paperwork which had been moved along with my belongings from the old cubicle and threw it all away since it was so terribly out of date.
I loaded my stapler.

Now what?