Tag: SysAdmin

Learn how to eliminate time wasters and get 30 minutes of your day back

It's been a year since Sony Pictures employees logged into their workstations, expecting to start a normal workday, when they were greeted by soundbites of gunfire, images of skeletons and threats scrolling across their monitors. To date, the Sony Pictures attack is arguably the most vivid example of advanced persistent threats used to disable a commercial victim. A corporate giant was reduced to posting paper memos, sending faxes and paying over 7,000 employees with paper checks.

Here at Ipswitch I have the pleasure of working closely with U.S. Government agencies to help them sort out their most pressing network monitoring challenges. Government IT pros know they need tools to monitor their networks but have a difficult time choosing one. And once they buy what seems right, it can end up costing even more time and money trying to get it to work right.

There is only a day left until Ipswitch Innovate 2015 and to get you excited for this fun and informative virtual summit, we had the chance to interview some of the speakers prior to their sessions.

Leading up to Ipswitch Innovate 2015, we were fortunate enough to survey the presenters at our upcoming virtual conference. We asked each of them several questions about their pain points as IT professionals.

Leading up to Ipswitch Innovate 2015, we were fortunate enough to survey the presenters at our upcoming virtual conference. We asked each of them several questions about their pain points as IT professionals.

Ipswitch Innovate Virtual Summit will be here before you know it. Between now and the kickoff on Wednesday, October 21, I’ll continue to preview our sessions to be presented by eight customers and Ipswitch experts. Today brings us a best practices story by Michael Roth, the senior systems engineer at University of North Georgia. His talk is called “Inventory Automation with WUG.” (WUG is shorthand for WhatsUp Gold, in case you didn't already know.)

Today we announced the results of our Summertime Blues Survey. The findings reveal that IT pros felt the heat this summer as they worked to keep networks buzzing along for remote workers. The study confirmed that most organizations see a significant expansion in the number of remote workers throughout the summer months, which can make the job of a network manager or sysadmin more difficult.

The phrase “quick and dirty” is popular in the business world, but in some ways it’s really kind of a misnomer. Take for example an IT department that is stuck in the mud of network, applications and server performance problems. Things are certainly dirty, but they are definitely not quick.

https://www.snapapp.com/ I had a lot of conversations with IT Directors, network administrators and other IT staff at FETC this past week in Orlando.  As we talked about their top priorities and challenges, there were three topics that kept coming up over and over again.

There are all kinds of potential IT emergencies out there that we should always be prepared for, network outages, system failures and data breaches come to mind as examples. However, there is another phenomenon that is starting to creep its way into enterprise networks: the zombie apocalypse. While it may sound like the plot of a B-level, made-for-cable Halloween movie, Network Zombies have quickly asserted themselves as the most troublesome nemesis to the modern-day IT administrator. They are dangerous and unpredictable, and without the right approach these zombies can cause downtime and lost productivity. However by adopting an approach that generates greater levels of network visibility, IT departments can effectively neutralize zombie problems once and for all.

Halloween may last one day, but network managers have to face IT nightmares that haunt them all year long. Nightmares like those caused by users exercising poor judgment. In some ways, they're not much different from the folks you see in horror films who always make the worst decision possible. Case in point is Geico's Halloween-themed commercial running on American TV this month. The piece depicts four friends running through fields, at night. They come upon a creepy farm house, and decide to hide behind... chainsaws.

Over the past few years, organizations have been forced to deal with the rapid rise of BYOD, which created a number of IT problems as more and more employees began bringing in their own devices to the workplace. Today, there is a new trend IT departments are preparing to deal with that could be more troublesome than its predecessor: Wear Your Own Device (WYOD). With the number of wearable devices steadily increasing, from Google Glass to Apple watches, it’s only a matter of time before we see a proliferation of wearables in the enterprise.

As you've likely already heard on Sept 24th a new computer security threat called Shellshock was identified and entered into the National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2014-7169.

Our Hero, the SysAdmin

As you may already know, there was a recent Security Advisory about new vulnerabilities in OpenSSL released in early June. This specific flaw requires a vulnerable OpenSSL library active on both the client and server ends of the transaction. The flaw allows a savvy attacker to sit between the client and server and turn off encryption, silently exposing information exchanged between those two end points. Technologies that only use OpenSSL to accept web-browser (HTTPS) connections will be vulnerable to this flaw only when the browser is using a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. Chrome for Android is the only major browser that is currently susceptible.

I was asked recently to speak on a panel entitled “What IT Skills/Roles Should Reside in the Business” Premier CIO Forum in Boston. The event, held earlier this week, was a well-attended and engaging event supported by SIM (Society for Information Management). There was an impressive roster of IT executives from across New England.

Today's tale from the front lines of IT comes from a customer who works at a global conferencing company. His firm's customers use online services that require real-time responsiveness for video and voice. So it was a shock when a playback service for recorded calls was suddenly afflicted by sporadic slowdowns several months after its launch. It pitched users into a black hole of lost recorded conference calls.

Convenience stores are the fast way for folks on the road to run in, grab what they need and be off to the next stop in their busy days. But when a regional convenience store chain known for its speedy service found itself spending as much as 6 hours to recover from fairly frequent failures of DVR servers used to help secure its stores, they gave Ipswitch’s network monitoring division a call.

Halloween represents the time of year that we embrace ghouls and ghosts, celebrate the macabre, and eat too much candy. This coming Thursday I’ll be greeted at my front door by trick or treat’ers, lined up for their packaged sugar rushes. In between trips to the check out the little ghosts and ghouls, I'll be watching one of my favorite horror movies. For me, being scared is part of the fun.