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Read-Only Friday

Read-Only Friday November 18, 2022

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It’s coming to the end of the year and only a handful more ROF for this year, which can also mean agreements and renewals for a lot of people. How do you manage them? Do you have dedicated software, excel, sharepoint, SQL, or something else?

Do you have any automation built in for reminders to bring up to management, reminders for yourself, and/or request quotes from vendors? And yes I said for yourself, who enjoys renewing software then realizing you didn’t put in the new license and everything stops..

Going a little deeper, what about  cost wise? Do you have it so you can see upcoming costs and expected costs for the year. I know not all organizations are lucky enough to have enterprise grade software and/or dedicated departments to manage all of this. For smaller organizations, it can easily start out as an excel/sharepoint/google sheet and grow into local/cloud SQL or other scaleable solution. If you start now though, you’ll know what you want and don’t want which will make selecting solutions much easier. And from my years in the industry I can tell you that even with enterprise grade software you will still need to do some custom integrations, just a lot less of them.

Read-Only Friday Nov 11, 2022

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With today being a holiday, and more holidays coming up in the last days of the year, send out reminders to your users to keep be extra careful when clicking on links. Attacks have been more minor so far this year, which makes me feel it’s going to ramp up shortly. For the parents, think of it when your child is quiet for too long by themselves… it usually means they are planning something or doing something they shouldn’t be doing. That’s how I feel about bad actors currently.

  • A few things to remind them:
    • Do you normally get emails from that company service? (ie UPS, FedEx, PayPal, etc)
      • If not, don’t open it, and definitely don’t click on links or download an attachment
    • Does that person normally send you links to click on? If they do, are they the type the current email is asking you to open?
      • I’ve seen it before when a company you normally work with gets compromised so spam/virus/malware protection doesn’t pick it up as it is coming from a real email, but the bad actor over took that users account and is sending links/attachments from it.
    • Is the email the real identities email?
      • I know the name says it’s your president or CFO, but what is the real email sending it? It can be tougher seeing it quickly on a mobile device, but have them double check. Have them check those headers.
    • Don’t respond to the email
      • When responding, you are showing them that the account is live, and they will keep on attempting to compromise that email address.
    • If it looks real, contact the person/company from known number
      • If the email looks mostly real, but they don’t normally send you links, call the person/company from a known number. Nothing from that current email. If you normally contact them check previous emails or ask a coworker if they have a direct number. I would say check their website, but that could be compromised as well, so not always the best spot to get their number.

I’m sure all of these are pretty common, but it’s a great reminder for your users, especially with the end of the year rush starts happening.

What are some tips you would give to your end users?

Read-Only Friday November 4, 2022

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It’s Friday, and today I have some great resources to keep you from doing any major unplanned changes to your network today.

Have you heard of Matthew Dowst? I hadn’t until I listened to the PowerShell Podcast on Monday. He is the man behind PS Weekly. If you haven’t heard of it, check it out in the links below. It’s a weekly recap of great PowerShell finds that he has put together.

And even better, he has a book out now(in MEAP form) that will be finished in 2023, called Practical Automation with PowerShell. I’ve already taken a quick look at it, and will be picking it up too.

Definitely check out both as well as the PowerShell Podcast if you haven’t already

PSWeekly:
PowerShell Weekly

Practical Automation with PowerShell:
Practical Automation with PowerShell

PowerShell Podcast:
PowerShell Podcast

Read-Only Friday October 28, 2022

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It’s Friday and the day for no major unplanned changes to your infrastructure.

How does your team share documentation between each other? Is it all in GitHub, Teams, Sharepoint, OneNote, Notion, ConnectWise, BookStack, etc? Or is it simple as word docs on a network share? Would you recommend the current way you are doing it?

If you use a combination, I’d love to hear the process of how you have it setup. If you prefer, you can message me, and I’ll do a summary of what everyone is using.

I know I have friends in all different size companies, curious to see how some of the solutions scale.

Read-Only Friday October 21, 2022

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It’s Friday, so you know what that means!

I like todays, because it’s another one of those it’s easy, but we either forget to check or believe it’s working but it may not be.

What is it? Event logging and dashboards. I’ll admit the dashboard part isn’t easy, but the event logging is. And I’m not just talking about your scripts(which you should be adding event logging to them when possible), I’m talking about any of your infrastructure that you manage. Even if you have alerting on, how do you know the alerting is actually working? Maybe your script or application you are using to go through the logs has an update but you don’t see it since you haven’t checked it in a month thinking it just works?

It’s always better to be proactive than reactive. Also while going through the logs you may find something else you want to start alerting for. Maybe you adding a new feature to your firewall or you added a print server and you want to setup alerting for those?

Hope you take out some time today and go through your logs, and if you’ve done that, do you have dashboards and/or alerting in place? If so, check those as well, and see if there is anyway you could improve it.

What scripts/modules/applications do you use to manage your event logs and/or create dashboards with?

Read-Only Friday October 14, 2022

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Todays selection is tough only because it’s so easy but we never do it…

Organize those repositories. Go through your GitHub, local drive, azure, or wherever else you keep your scripts and give them the once over to see what you still need to keep. Your future self will thank you. For one, it will be easier to find scripts and two, you may find a script you forgot you had that you needed for a recent project. Furthermore, you may review some of the code and see some quick updates that you can do or make the script more flexible or powerful( if it’s affects more than your computer or can’t be done in a test environment, I’d wait till Monday).

Schedule the time in now to make sure you do it, so the next time you or your coworkers take a look at the repositories, it a joy and not a game of Guess Who.