Non technical:
This weekend me and the neighbour spent the weekend over at Greftek and LadyDragon's for a movie funfest. We ended up whatching Final Fantasy, Spirited Away, From Hell, and the next morning Ever After, where Ever After was one I hadn't seen yet.
LadyDragon made a great pile of waffles, and she and Butterfly made a great Tomato Soup.. and we had tosties aswell. Had a lot of fun with Loki also. All in all a very nice weekend!
Technical:
Work has inproved its interest rating somewhat.
There is relativly little plain end-user support to do, so I can concentrate on the somewhat deeper issues, like SUS server and Windows system policy.
For instance, I just discovered that the netlogon share on their DC's hasn't properly replicated in over a year. This due to the fact that they are starting a resident tool via loginscript, directly from the netlogon share. This causes over 40+ open file handles to this share, and then the replication service cant use it, as it needs exlusive access. I ran into this issue when I noticed that many clients where not recieving System policy properly.
Discovering and fixing this has certainly scored some points with the peeps here, though it suprises me how little attention they seem to have payed to such basic domain functionality. They use SiteScope for monteroring of their servers, and strangely enough, the replication problems never seem to have appeared. Perhaps I will have to configure some more alerts myself.
Of course, this company is not that concerned with their office enviroment, as their core business lies in their production servers. This company is responcsible for providing digital television to a number of large cable operators in the Netherlands, and are currently experimenting with straming channels via internet using media Encoder 9 from MS.
These people are all very technical, but their attention is certainly focussed primairlity on their production enviroment, so it might explain their rather lackluster approach to their office operation.
I am trying to convince them of the need to get their office bit up to date with Windows Service packs and updates, but they put all their trust in their firewall. I cant blame them really, cause they have a really great firewall solution, which I will post about at a later date, but they dont seem to understand the prinicples of in-depth security that well it seems.
For instance, what if one of their unprotected pc's downloads a malicious activeX control (http/80, and isn't filtered out), that builds a network infector. Before they know it, their office enviroment is down and completely infected, or unsalvagable, and I am sure there are less protected ways into the production enviroment via the office network. Just think of admin passwords alone you could get your hands on inside the office enviroment, where all the admins of course also have pc's!
Somehow, admin dont often seem to think about these kind of risks, of if they do, figure its too much work to sort it out anyhow.. often I see them shrugging when I inform them of the potential dangers. They simply cant be bothered to really solve security issues properly.