Technology

I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as "..." (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you'd never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of "[program] service is already running" errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little "helper" script for years.

Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.

So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.

Oof.

I enjoy that the character that can break a lot of things is called the "non-breaking space".

Is this what chaotic good looks like?

 

I only know about it because it was a popular way to make an invisible folder no the desktop, teens loved it for stuff.

I did a lot of web scrapping this week at work and it's looks like that character is used a lot on XPaths and CSS selectors. I only noticed it because VS Code put a yellow box around the character and give you a warning that that character is not a whitespace.

I can't tell if you're starting a cult. Whatever, I'm in...

I love this

Where did you make the admin account if you don't mind me asking. You saying you made a local admin account or maybe an admin account in AD?

On late reddit I did a similar thing to brute-force past censorship robots. The kind that think "do whatever the fuck you want" is an insult, or silence any use of the word "fanboy." If those subs sent a 'hey we didn't allow this comment, please try again' message, that'd be okay, but no - your comment would simply be invisible to anyone but you, and you'd have no idea why a conversation suddenly died.

So I'd replace every vowel with that vowel plus a zero-width space. Or a pop directional isolate. Or a zero-width non-joiner. Or a Mongolian vowel separator. Or a musical symbol end slur. Or some combination of all of them, because fuck it, it's not like they take up space onscreen.

It's intolerable that anyone had to do this, though. Bigots and fascists can trivially spout garbage, but if you use the wrong words explaining why democracy is good, actually, you catch boot for "incivility." As determined by a robot programmed by people with freshman-level regex skills.

The software developer in me hates you. You're not wrong but still 😡

Kbin didn't feel like translating your example.

That's interesting but what I really want to know is what kind of evil things you did with the invisible superpower

Connect for Lemmy renders these as  

So it's at least acknowledging that there's something there.

"IDENTITY THEFT ISN'T A JOKE JIM! MILLIONS OF FAMILIES SUFFER EVERY YEAR!"

"Please give Mrs. Slackbot my condolences."

No, you're doing Ra's work. Thank you for your empathy.

I’m honestly baffled this is a thing (but appreciate learning the condemning phrasing of “SSO Tax”).

We implemented federated auth support for Entra, ADFS, and OIDC straight out the gate in our project. It’s just a base platform feature, regardless of tier. Charging for it would be like charging for MFA/2FA. I mean, it’s great for us. I’d prefer if everyone used the feature. What the utter fuck are some vendors thinking?

It would've been connected to his email... You just need good offboarding routines

Ignorance and/or incompetence.

Thats your answer to "I don't understand why"

Slack Business/Enterprise supports SAML single sign-on. At any scale larger than a single team or two this is probably the better way of handling it, then the account gets disabled as soon as it's disabled in the identity provider. Otherwise if I remember right Slack accounts are tied to the email address and users can set their own display names. I used to administrate Slack for ~60 users but now we're on Teams.

a poor IT admin guy has to manually search for the username of a leaving employee.

Your comment suggests you think IT Admins are told about departing employees, timely or at all.

HR doesn't trust Staff with that knowledge, even if that Staff member needs to disable an account because we must act quickly to protect the company against the same horrible criminals who enjoyed free reign and ultimate trust as the paragons of virtue they were the MOMENT before they were fired.

Our enterprise has all of that automated, who's searching for names manually in any business of nontrivial size....?

This can, and should, be scripted.

Also easier than resetting passwords for 15 different sites and accounts because a user lost their post-it note

Not necessarily to justify Gizmodo in this instance, but Slack does paywall their SSO feature behind their Business+ Plan, which seems to currently run $12.50/mo/user, which is about a 70% increase from their next pricing tier. See: https://slack.com/pricing

Given the price difference I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't want to pay for that.

Edit: someone later in the thread linked this page which helps explain why this is generally a bad practice https://sso.tax/

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this guy being a total shithead on Twitter before. One sec..

Edit: yep, catturd2 is a MAGA cultist - https://lemmy.world/comment/6563244

Edit 2: I took one for the team and checked bluesky catturd2’s profile on Twitter and it looks pretty anti-MAGA; there’s a couple tweets that address: cops hiding their badge numbers (bluesky catturd2 is against this), Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and generally talking shit about the trump family. I wonder if bluesky catturd2 intentionally co-opted the name to troll Twitter catturd2.