- Users lie, but the logs won’t.
- Turn it off and back on, especially if the user insists that they have already done so.
- If it’s worth having, it’s worth having a backup.
- Never disassemble anything you can’t reassemble from memory.
- A problem does not officially exist until a ticket has been submitted.
- Not until the most experienced person in the room says “oh, shit,” is the issue an official “oh, shit moment.”
- There is no such thing as “extra” screws.
- A quiet ticket queue is not always a good sign.
- Nothing is, never has, or will ever be “user proof.”
- You never want to know what the mysterious fluid is.
- UPS and Mr. Screwdriver are not friends.
- If you can smell the magic smoke, you already done goofed up.
- “Working just fine” and “too screwed to log an error” look an awful lot alike.
- Loose wires will attempt to mate. When wires mate, things get messy.
- The Principle of Least Privilege is not a suggestion.
- Respect your sysadmin; they’re the one who fixes your fixes.
- A backup isn’t a backup until you’ve restored successfully from it.
- Online backups are only as reliable as their security is strong.
- RAID is not a backup.
- “Offline” is a required property of “backup.”
- Virtual machines. They’re a thing. Know them. Love them.
- Sandbox virtual. In a sandbox, no one hears your screams that the backups are worthless.
- The system logs prove you lied. Quit digging a bigger hole.
- Constantly interrupting and asking “How long until we are back up?” will not get systems operational faster.
- No Change Fridays.
- If something can fail, it will.
- Your network is only as secure as your dumbest user.
- If the service desk phone isn’t ringing, something is probably wrong with the phone system.
- There’s always a price for saving money.
- Product lifecycle is only ever a suggestion in the eyes of management.
- ALWAYS let a user demonstrate/provoke his problem. It’s the difference between digging deep inside the servers or immediately fixing the problem because the user went to offline mode. Again.
- If it works correctly on the very first run, something is wrong.
- If payment is submitted under the table, there will never be a ticket, thus continuing plausible deniability.
- We know where the bodies are buried; often, this is because we put them there.
- If you hide the body carefully, nobody will ever know you closed that user’s ticket without fixing it.
- A backup folder on your desktop is not a backup.
- No matter how well it works in dev and cert, you are going to find issues in prod.
- “Everything is down” does not mean everything is. Trust, but verify.
- Just because you CAN access everything, doesn’t mean you SHOULD access everything.
- Nobody cares about your video game streams.
Categories: Random Thoughts
Securing The Universe 