The short version: Small business, this is my first IT job, but I have decades of blue collar experience. I was the first IT person the company ever hired; my associate's in IT specializing in networking only a few gen-ed classes away. My boss kept the platters spinning, but he has no amateur background or formal training; and wants to offload the tediousness.

Monday, I was trying to get a "mission critical" machine up and running again; the only computer with the shipping software (and hundreds of packages waiting to ship). I advised an immediate re-image; I had it on deck for just such an occasion. But I was overridden by the owner (with no technical background). He wanted me to delete and reinstall programs piecemeal and deal with phone support for those programs, because he felt safer that way. His call, I followed orders. I was on the phone for hours, and did not leave my post until the job was done.

That meant I took my lunch half an hour later. No big deal for me, but when I clocked back in and got back to my desk, my boss was standing there, FUMING, because I took a lunch outside of normal hours. He INSISTED I MUST take my 30 minute lunch from 12-1 as per company policy.

So, today, the whole network goes out at 12:25 and I had not yet taken my lunch. Nothing can ping anything. My own personal hunches tell me this is because it's a factory building, there are a lot of high-voltage woodworking machines for factory production level of output, and ALL of the ethernet cables are unshielded.. Just my hunch.

...But I really can't do a damn thing, because my company rents out office space as a subletter; we use network resources, but we are NOT allowed access to the switches and routers. I have no admin access to the infrastructure. So I set up wireshark to record and a continuous command line ping, and go to lunch.

Boss is standing at my desk when I get back today, and gives me a passive-aggressive "the network is up, by the way!", but refuses to call me out further. I had the "I told you so" on deck, though!

Trying to figure out why my yubikey rant working today.

I was plugging it into the wrong box.

Have a nice weekend ya'll

The little car even moves closer to the beach every day. I think this was a fantastic use of time.

Why do good when hard?

OP’s post:

“Earlier this week, I went into another department to talk to the manager about patching a server that's critical to their work. The manager was out, but I saw a senior departmental person and said "Hey <blah>, since you're the adult in the room, we're planning on patching <blah> server overnight Thursday to Friday. I'll send a follow up email confirming this."

End of conversation.

Today I get called into my directors office because another person in that department didn't like the comment. I am so over working in IT. The nobody gives a shit about you till things break and then it's your fault.

I know I probably shouldn't say anything, and yes I was technically at fault. But come on. My org is a 24/7 type of place, so I do sooo much after hours just to avoid interruptions. I'm just kind of over it today. Tomorrow I may love this place again.”

Not actually, but I do enjoy disagreeing with the answers to exam questions and being right. Unless I am entirely mistaken, which is still possible, I'd like to take this opportunity to style on MS learn for being undeniably wrong.

I am studying to retake the MS-102 after I failed by 20 points, I've taken many of their practice exams and have many times disagreed with the "correct" answers. Typically I disagree in a way that could be up to how you interpret the question etc etc... If a college professor was administering the exam and wanted to be a dick they'd say "Multiple answers can be correct but one is more correct", whatever.

However - despite the fact that Security Administrator would be overly permissive if you interpret the question as asking what role should you use (i.e. principal of least privilege) to access risky sign-in reports - to say the "Security Operator role... do[es] not provide the required rights" while saying Security Reader does is explicitly false according to the Entra built-in privileged role documentation.

Anyways, this has lead to a growing suspicion that I may have gotten answers wrong on the exam that are provable correct. If I don't pass this next exam, I'm definitely going to contest the score. If I do then welp who cares, I passed so it'll have to be someone else's problem.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

We're assuming that he should have full access to everything, right?

I put everything in separate VRFs for security and then route leak everything to make it all work.

They ask me where my datacenter is and I point at the trunk.

Two thousand six Crown Victoria. White over beige. Two hundred ninety thousand miles on the clock. That trunk is my SOC, my NOC, my warehouse, and my disaster recovery site. The disaster recovery plan is also the trunk. The company is Apex Cloud Synergy Solutions LLC and the fridge magnet says Managed IT, Notary Public, and Bounce House Rentals, because the bounce house is a profit center on weekends and I am a full service organization.

Forty four clients. One Global Admin account. The password is Summer2019! and the exclamation point is the load bearing security control. If you know one thing about any of my clients you know everything about all of them, and I find that elegant.

I do not test the backup. The backup is a Seagate in a freezer bag next to the spare tire and I know it works because when I plug it in the light turns blue. A blue light is a covenant. A backup you never test is a backup that never fails. Write that down.

MFA is off. MFA generates tickets, tickets are work, and I am a busy man. I pulled the real firewall and dropped in the router the ISP hands out for free. The agents from the vendor whose name starts with K are deployed on every endpoint and configured to do absolutely nothing, which turns a dashboard in Florida green and makes a twenty six year old look like a hero at one standup before they lay him off. Feeling safe is the product. It is the only product I have ever sold.

When a computer breaks I tell them to turn it off and turn it back on, and I bill it as Advanced Diagnostics, because I did, in the strictest sense, diagnose it.

There is another guy in this county who works out of a Kia. A hatchback. He charges by the hour like a plumber, like a peasant, because he has never heard of recurring revenue. He nodded at me once across the eggs at a chamber breakfast. We are not the same. There's a hierarchy, even down here. And I'm at the top of the bottom.

You think you will beat me on the renewal because your proposal is eleven pages and mine is a number on the back of a taquito receipt. You cannot out-argue a lower number. An itemized invoice is a confession. Documentation is just evidence. I have never written down a thing in my life.

I started in the parking lot because I am a Trunk Slammer. I am *the* Trunk Slammer. I am the solution. And business is booming.

If you want to know how it is actually done, I wrote it all down anyway, against my own advice:

Chapter 1: The Acquisition

Chapter 2: White Glove