Story #5 – Real Secure, A**hole -
Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace -
I mentioned in an earlier story about Ben cloning PCs with Norton Ghost in an attempt to “improve” upon the existing image. It improves the image in only one aspect, and that is that it causes a huge number of problems and ensures that I have job security, which I guess I should be thankful for. Ben's image is nothing but a headache, pure and simple. It was poorly thought out, made entirely out of spite, and was rushed to completion. The time that he hoped to save when creating it has now been absolutely overshadowed by the total time it will take to sort out his foolishness. The most recent problem that I've come across is with yet another of our security measures. We use a security program made by RSA which protects login on our computers by forcing the user to login with a number that is generated on a synced key fob that everyone carries. Personally I hate RSA because it is designed to error on the side of security and will commonly just stop working to protect the computer instead of going the kinder, gentler route of allowing access, which I suppose is a testament to how secure the program is. As you can probably imagine RSA just LOVES PCs with a cloned operating system, and it will bring users to tears if not corrected in a timely manner. Guess who has the fun job of sorting out that correction? Yeah, that would be me. So now I have to back-track my steps for the last week and re-install RSA on 10+ PCs that I made the mistake of allowing Ben to create. A mistake that I truly cannot afford to have happen again in the future.
Episode 2 – Attack Of The Clones -
This morning when I got to work Ernie shambled his way over to my desk and with his head hung low somberly told me that Lonny was in the hospital. “It is life threatening?” I asked, in my usual even tempered tone. “Oh no, I don't think so” said Ernie “He was just dehydrated last night or something.” Curses. I guess I won't be getting his job THAT easily. I smiled and reassured Ernie that Lonny would be fine. Ernie then jumped into a 5 minute long rant about a problem with one of “my” computers that he had to fix early in the morning before I was here. Apparently RSA had not allowed a couple of users to log into their new PCs and he had gotten one of our engineers involved to determine what the problem was. He then explained that he wanted to me to work with the engineer to sort it out as he had “other stuff to do”. Fair enough, I told him I'd work it out. I got in touch with the engineer and got things moving. As I thinking about the problem at hand I suddenly remembered something that Ben had been raving about a weekly earlier when he created his PC image. He was saying that he thought RSA was causing a problem with the port authority certificates and he was thinking about disabling it on his image. I dismissed it as lunacy as RSA couldn't possibly have an effect on the port authority as that is governed by the switch long before RSA “comes alive” on the PC. The error that I made was believing that Ben wouldn't actually disable RSA for his image, which he did. Terrified I went to check my theory and found that RSA was indeed turned off on the new PCs, and now would have to be re-installed in order to work properly because of the way he configured it. This is why Ernie and the users couldn't login in the morning with their RSA key fobs, because as far as Windows logon was concerned RSA didn't exist and it was looking for their standard windows password. My suddenly boiled and I called the engineer I'd been working with to eat my crow and let him know what the issue was. Now all I have to do is locate all of the PCs that are screwed up and sort them out.
Does anybody know a good place in Phoenix to get a large amount of kerosene?
Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace -
I mentioned in an earlier story about Ben cloning PCs with Norton Ghost in an attempt to “improve” upon the existing image. It improves the image in only one aspect, and that is that it causes a huge number of problems and ensures that I have job security, which I guess I should be thankful for. Ben's image is nothing but a headache, pure and simple. It was poorly thought out, made entirely out of spite, and was rushed to completion. The time that he hoped to save when creating it has now been absolutely overshadowed by the total time it will take to sort out his foolishness. The most recent problem that I've come across is with yet another of our security measures. We use a security program made by RSA which protects login on our computers by forcing the user to login with a number that is generated on a synced key fob that everyone carries. Personally I hate RSA because it is designed to error on the side of security and will commonly just stop working to protect the computer instead of going the kinder, gentler route of allowing access, which I suppose is a testament to how secure the program is. As you can probably imagine RSA just LOVES PCs with a cloned operating system, and it will bring users to tears if not corrected in a timely manner. Guess who has the fun job of sorting out that correction? Yeah, that would be me. So now I have to back-track my steps for the last week and re-install RSA on 10+ PCs that I made the mistake of allowing Ben to create. A mistake that I truly cannot afford to have happen again in the future.
Episode 2 – Attack Of The Clones -
This morning when I got to work Ernie shambled his way over to my desk and with his head hung low somberly told me that Lonny was in the hospital. “It is life threatening?” I asked, in my usual even tempered tone. “Oh no, I don't think so” said Ernie “He was just dehydrated last night or something.” Curses. I guess I won't be getting his job THAT easily. I smiled and reassured Ernie that Lonny would be fine. Ernie then jumped into a 5 minute long rant about a problem with one of “my” computers that he had to fix early in the morning before I was here. Apparently RSA had not allowed a couple of users to log into their new PCs and he had gotten one of our engineers involved to determine what the problem was. He then explained that he wanted to me to work with the engineer to sort it out as he had “other stuff to do”. Fair enough, I told him I'd work it out. I got in touch with the engineer and got things moving. As I thinking about the problem at hand I suddenly remembered something that Ben had been raving about a weekly earlier when he created his PC image. He was saying that he thought RSA was causing a problem with the port authority certificates and he was thinking about disabling it on his image. I dismissed it as lunacy as RSA couldn't possibly have an effect on the port authority as that is governed by the switch long before RSA “comes alive” on the PC. The error that I made was believing that Ben wouldn't actually disable RSA for his image, which he did. Terrified I went to check my theory and found that RSA was indeed turned off on the new PCs, and now would have to be re-installed in order to work properly because of the way he configured it. This is why Ernie and the users couldn't login in the morning with their RSA key fobs, because as far as Windows logon was concerned RSA didn't exist and it was looking for their standard windows password. My suddenly boiled and I called the engineer I'd been working with to eat my crow and let him know what the issue was. Now all I have to do is locate all of the PCs that are screwed up and sort them out.
Does anybody know a good place in Phoenix to get a large amount of kerosene?
