Sunday, September 30, 2012

How to say lots without revealing sensitive details...?

Hmm. Let's see if I can indicate what I'm working on without violating any agreements... Coming back into an actual, real Unix job after so long, I'm having to review Windows Server 03 and 08... yes, right. And for which there's actually a good rationale. Not only are many customers flying that product (although not as many as CentOS plus RHEL at our shop), but many server problems are conceptually the same. A reboot's a reboot, a password change is a password change, and a brute force annoyance is the same as well in all camps. And another thing's the same: the support surprise. I found out that we were supporting WinServer 2012 when we went into somebody's new build and saw that our build technician had provisioned it. NOBODY TOLD SUPPORT ABOUT IT. We just kinda found out. One or two other products have recently "appeared" on our plate like that. But there's all the things that aren't a surprise, and that the average tech should keep up with anyway: DNS, shell, awk, log locations for server OS's and control panel products, plus networking (and internally constructed "custom" networking). And one surprise is how useful nmap has become. It's almost a whole command family of its own and doesn't any longer have the reputation for instability that it shook during the last decade. It can do much more than find a port; their documentation book is on my buy list.