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Feb. 3rd, 2007 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickWent out last night and, among other things, slept on couch. Note to self: You do not especially like sleeping on couches. In the future, it might be a good idea to see to it that you can drive yourself home at bedtime.
I also have a headache from following the Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants ultimatum from the NYT. While I don't love the near-starvation thing, it does wear off in about a week, so I look for that to improve about next wednesday.
I spent the bulk of the day fixing a virused laptop. The laptop came from someone's work and was handed to his nephew to take to college because the someone would apparently rather eat his toes, braised in red wine, than actually run Excel or do his own wordprocessing. For assorted reasons, the main one being that the someone's Network Admin is not a total wanker, the laptop didn't arrive in my hands with a functioning Administrator password. It, er, has one now. :)
Here's what I learned:
1. Executives (who are the only people besides techies who qualify for take-home laptops at most companies) are the sort of people who write their BIOS password on a post-it and then laminarly tape said post-it to the laptop. (It's not in the sprout's handwriting...)
2. If anyone can press F10 or whatever and get into the boot options so's to force booting off of a handy CD or similar, whatever passes for security on the machine is gone, gone, gone because there exist some VERY helpful (and free -- did I mention the free part?) bootable CD options out there on teh intarwebmotron.
3. I like that the network admin didn't let there be a list of people-to-log-in-as on the 'doze splash screen. That was nice and counted as a useful effort. However, refer to points 1 and 2. By the time I got to the 'doze splash screen, I'd already seen the list of available log-in options and taken that opportunity to reset the admin password (and full marks for calling "Administrator" something other than "Administrator") to something I knew-what-was.
4. Almost any data is insecure if people can get physical access to it and hammer away at it long enough. Removing physical access is Job #1. With a laptop, the network admin is going to fail because the damn things are DESIGNED to be picked up and carried off by unauthorized persons.
I took notes on what I did and left the (invisible to the sprout) admin stuff in place so that if it gets killed again, I can fix0r again.
I also have a headache from following the Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants ultimatum from the NYT. While I don't love the near-starvation thing, it does wear off in about a week, so I look for that to improve about next wednesday.
I spent the bulk of the day fixing a virused laptop. The laptop came from someone's work and was handed to his nephew to take to college because the someone would apparently rather eat his toes, braised in red wine, than actually run Excel or do his own wordprocessing. For assorted reasons, the main one being that the someone's Network Admin is not a total wanker, the laptop didn't arrive in my hands with a functioning Administrator password. It, er, has one now. :)
Here's what I learned:
1. Executives (who are the only people besides techies who qualify for take-home laptops at most companies) are the sort of people who write their BIOS password on a post-it and then laminarly tape said post-it to the laptop. (It's not in the sprout's handwriting...)
2. If anyone can press F10 or whatever and get into the boot options so's to force booting off of a handy CD or similar, whatever passes for security on the machine is gone, gone, gone because there exist some VERY helpful (and free -- did I mention the free part?) bootable CD options out there on teh intarwebmotron.
3. I like that the network admin didn't let there be a list of people-to-log-in-as on the 'doze splash screen. That was nice and counted as a useful effort. However, refer to points 1 and 2. By the time I got to the 'doze splash screen, I'd already seen the list of available log-in options and taken that opportunity to reset the admin password (and full marks for calling "Administrator" something other than "Administrator") to something I knew-what-was.
4. Almost any data is insecure if people can get physical access to it and hammer away at it long enough. Removing physical access is Job #1. With a laptop, the network admin is going to fail because the damn things are DESIGNED to be picked up and carried off by unauthorized persons.
I took notes on what I did and left the (invisible to the sprout) admin stuff in place so that if it gets killed again, I can fix0r again.
