Peter’s Soapbox

Why Do People Have Trouble With Attachments?

People have trouble with email attachments. I’m not talking about opening them, I mean just sending them. And I’m not talking about technical limitations, virus scanners, or file size limits. I mean just attaching a file to an email.

How many times has this happened to you: You compose an email, and you ask the recipient to “please see the attached file.” Only there’s no attachment.

Because you forgot to attach it. I’ve been on the sending and receiving end of this one. Has it happened to you? Do humans just get so obsessed with the composition of their email that they forget to attach the file and can’t wait to hit the SEND button? I don’t know, but I know it’s not just me.

Verizon, You Suck

Verizon, you suck. You cannot suck enough. I am so looking forward to Fairpoint Communications taking over your business here in New England because I am not convinced that, no matter how bad they are, you are worse.

Thank you, Verizon, for making me take yesterday afternoon off, to wait for your technician, between the hours of 1pm and 5pm, to come and install my new telephone line. Except, you never showed up. Instead, you called me at 5:15pm to say “due to unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to keep our appointment.” (No $#!+.) “We will be sending someone to your location tomorrow between the hours of 8AM and 5PM. You do not need to be there at this time.”

What?! Then why the ^&*@ did I need to be there all afternoon?!

That was yesterday. Then, this morning, I came in to work to find our business DSL was down. Here’s the backstory. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered an upgrade to our account. Basically, it doubles the cost of our DSL so we have a static IP address. I wanted to do this because I wanted to run our Outlook Web Access (Exchange) server on a public IP. Since they block inbound port 80 connections, I wanted the static IP because they allow you to run a web server with that package. Then I realized that they do not block inbound port 443 connections with a dynamic IP address. So I installed a self-signed SSL certificate on my Exchange server, and presto! I can access OWA via my DynDNS-assigned IP address.

So I had my assistant call and cancel the order. Somehow, I knew when it took her almost an hour to do this, that things were not going to turn out right. My suspicions, although put far on the back burner, were confirmed this morning, as our Internet connection was down. After a half an hour on the phone with these jokers, my assistant got

• confirmation that they had switched us over to a static IP, despite our order to cancel, and
• disconnected.

I called back, more than a little irate at this point. The charming lady on the other end of the line stated that “I’m not showing you as having a static IP address on your account.” Of course, that doesn’t help, as we still have no Internet connectivity at all right now… So I told her this, insisted that we were offline, and she was nice enough to reconfigure our account so that we could get online again. Total time wasted, 7 employee-hours.

As I was finishing the call, the customer service rep said “Usually when people order the static IP and decide to cancel the order, we tell them to wait until it goes through, and then cancel it, so they don’t have to go through this long down time.” First off, no one told us that. Second, wow. You guys really DO suck. Your internal processes are so messed up that you cannot cancel an order even if the cancellation notice is given over a week in advance.
So, they expect to have things repaired within 3 days. Until then, we wait…

No Sugar Added

Today I’ve decided I’m going on an official diet. My first step will be to not add sugar to anything I eat. This will be interesting. My first cup of coffee today is bitter, and I’m so tempted to put some sugar or maple syrup into it.

/sigh

Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You (With Good Reason!)

Last week I read an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You. It’s a really good article.

My first reaction to hearing this was “the writer and editor who approved it should be fired.” There are reasons we don’t want people to know this stuff! So here’s one of the most respected news publications in the country is telling people how to circumvent corporate content filters, access their company files on their home PCs, and how to install applications on their work PC that aren’t allowed. Brilliant, WSJ. Way to turn a bunch of ordinarily (mostly) harmless users into serious threats to network integrity and security. Not to mention how many kids you just informed of ways to circumvent content filters so they can surf porn while at school. Oh yeah, brilliant move.

Yes, like the Anarchist’s Cookbook, if someone really wants to learn how to do any of these things, there are plenty of other places they can go to find them. And now, thanks to the WSJ, a lot more people know this.

However, after further consideration, I asked myself “is just another form of full disclosure?” After all, all the WSJ has done is pointed out that these techniques and tools are out there, which is really no different from what security analysts and hackers do on a daily basis when they find flaws in applications and systems across the Internet. Okay, so now everyone knows about file-sharing sites for sending large files. So we need to YouSendIt.com on our content filter along with Playboy.com. Now they know you can use Google as a proxy. Similarly to how we block Gmail, Google Talk and Google Image Search without blocking the rest of Google itself.

I’m curious to do some further reading on what the rest of the sysadmin/security community has to say about this.

Lost

Okay, so I never called myself a trend-setter. My wife and I are watching the first episode of Lost now. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. More later, assuming it’s worth writing on.