Normal Goings-on

[Charger]

Well plumber came and plumber went and water heater should be up and running...ofcourse won't know if everything works as it should until tomorrow morning as it's warmed up but no leaks and it fit nicely so I am cautiously hopeful.

[Zzzptm]

That is good to know.

[Charger]

And I am happy to inform everything works and I have showered...so the public hazard notice level around me has gone down to only 92%.

[Zzzptm]

All this shower talk got me thinking of this...

[Charger]

Oh man! Classic Seinfeld! Gotta love it!

[Zzzptm]

Next up will be the low-flow shower episode, should you get one of those black market Serbian fixtures...

[Vyn]

My company has just completed a refresh of some network gear. Combined with a bunch of old laptops, we had a rather sizeable collection of electronics that were slated to go to the recycler.

However, I decided to give the laptops away to staff who wanted one. Even went so far as to mail them to folks in other offices.

Then there was this one gal who noted that we had a bunch of other stuff, and complained that we should give that stuff away as well. So I had to explain to her that the wifi access points (about twenty of them), along with ten switches, two firewalls, a management device, an email processing device and an analysis device were all made by a company called Fortinet. And Fortinet requires a paid license to use their stuff. And that all of those units were sunsetted by Fortinet, meaning they are no longer going to provide software updates to them. The upshot being they were all malware attacks waiting to happen.

She was not put off. So I asked her what she wanted. She was interested in a device called a FortiMail (all of Fortinet's devices have names with "Forti" in them. It's fucking annoying...FortiMail, FOrtiGate, FortiAP, FortiSwitch, etc.). I asked her why (keep in mind she is just some random accounting clerk). She said she wanted to make sure her email at home was safe.

Long story short - we had a discussion for an hour about how that thing would not do what she thinks it would do. I think she finally "got it", but more than anything I think she was scared off by the fact that a license for the FortiMail was a few thousand dollars per year. But for a while she was trying real hard to make me feel like I was screwing over the staff by not passing those things out. Wasn't good enough that I just gave out a pallet worth of laptops - I was now responsible for any malicious email she received at home.

Funny thing is, if she would have been interested in learning some of that kind of thing, or had a family member that was trying to learn that stuff, I would have loaded her car up with all of it

[Zzzptm]

^ When I was learning networking, I got some devices off of eBay. Most had been scrubbed clean, but I got one that had been part of a telecom's switch closet and still had its config on it. Before I reset it, I got in via ROMMON and read the config... passwords everywhere, along with SNMPv2 community strings. That told me the company didn't do its due diligence before letting employees walk home with their decommed gear.

[Vyn]

That's awesome - probably a case of the people who knew wtf was up with a switch weren't the same people who handled the inventory. "It's a stupid switch Bob, it doesn't have any information on it, just go ahead and get rid of it."

Gotta go set out some milk and cookies for the fat guy who talks to flying reindeer!

[Zzzptm]

We had all the family over yesterday, nice time together. Today we will watch a friend's kids because she has to work at the Amazon delivery center.

My wife and I have resolved to do all we can to buy locally. We've been cutting back on Amazon as we watch that company grind away at our friend, but this is too much. Frankly, it'll be nice to have less cardboard passing through the house.

[Zzzptm]

My Discord account got hacked because my nephew's Discord account got hacked and I fell for the first half of a Discord scam... no bank details went out, but I have to start over with a new Discord account and use it to warn people on servers I was a member of...

[Vyn]

That blows.  Especially since you're tied into so much stuff.

[Zzzptm]

Fortunately, Discord is only Discord and my YouTube channel, and that was easily contained.

[Charger]

Ugh...that's always a drag. There's been couple of attempts to hack my facebook lately with odd messages from people that never send me messages so I've been able to sniff them out and not even open them.

[Charger]

Cut some Sorbuses down from the yard as they had gotten bit too big for their locations...caught between two of my sheds the cutting down wasn't quite as easy as normal...Some rope and bad luck was needed to bring them all down... One did fall on the roof and cracked few tiles... luckily I had spares.

But no major damage and eventhough I was using the chainsaw up on a ladder: A) I did not fall down and B) I did NOT cut my arm or leg or head off...granted the last one might have been an improvement though.