The State of the Internet - Frankly I'm Worried

Ok, advocacy post, but I'm really getting worried about the state of the internet, so I'm dedicating a post to have people sign this online petition to the FCC asking them to block the proposed merger of Time Warner Cable and Comcast.

Three things have happened in the past few months have made me stop and really look around at the internet. I'm very concerned about its well-being.

1. The fact that Netflix is now paying Verizon to keep their traffic flowing. Verizon customers are already paying for this data to be delivered. This opens the door to Verizon extorting any data provider on the net to pay up, or something might happen to their packets along the way. What's next, Google? Cloud storage providers?

2. The fear that the Time Warner/Comcast merger might actually go through is very troublesome to me. Here we have ISP's who have been paid billions in government subsidies to improve speeds and extend network coverage. These ISPs are also in the content game and are trying to shut down competitors (See #1). It's NOT ok for a company to be providing the pipe AND the content. Also, the ISPs have been given monopoly status in most areas. They've been so brash as to sue municipalities to stop cities from building their own infrastructure. From the petition above, an approved merger would result in:

• Comcast would control two-thirds of the nation's cable subscribers, five times any other cable company and 50 percent more than the largest satellite TV service. 
• They would control nearly 40 percent of the U.S. broadband market. 
• It would be trivial to leverage this power to force content providers to pay more to get their programming on, passing those price hikes on to customers.
• And finally, it would combine two companies that already rank at the bottom of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index based on surveys with over 70,000 consumers. 

THIS IS TOO MUCH POWER.

3. The NSA. What the NSA is doing to the internet is shameful. This is supposed to be a bastion of free speech. What people don't really get is that all of this collected data is being stored somewhere. Try to think ahead 30 years; can you guarantee that there won't be some dictatorial regime in charge of the USA? Things that aren't against the law could be against the law then, and if someone wanted to know your political leanings, or whether you every did X, they need only access that data.

The citizens of the US need to pay attention to which politicians are not on the people's side in these matters and vote them out, but right now, we need to make them understand that we are watching them!

Some CellPhone App Recommendations

Recently, I got an HTC One, and after rooting it I finally got everything tweaked the way I wanted it to. I ran across a few great apps that I didn't know about before, so I though that I would share. :)

The first on the list is called List My Apps. I'm probably going to have to wipe my phone in the future, and this little gem allows me to export a list of all of my installed apps. Even better, I can export in HTML with links to the Google Play store so I can reinstall them easily.

I ran across an amazing anti-theft app called Cerberus. I really like being able to control my phone via the web.

Night Mode is a tool that turns your screen's brightness WAY down, so you can glance at the screen in, say, a dark movie theater without it being annoying to other people. Be warned, it's so dim that if you try using this when you aren't in a dark room you might have trouble getting the phone back to normal!

Swiftkey is another 3rd party keyboard that can look through your Gmail and Facebook items and learn to suggest words based on how you text. It's uncanny how good the prediction is.

SwipePad allows you to set a hotspot (or multiples) which opens a 'dialer' type interface to start a shortcut. For example, if I press in the upper right side of my phone, I can then drag my finger down and choose between a number of items - call my wife, start a program, etc. There are various extensions you can or need to buy for certain functionality, but this app has served me very well.

Timely is an absolutely beautiful stopwatch/alarm clock app.

I like to automate my phone, so I use Locale to change settings based on my location. When I'm at work, my phone goes to vibrate only. If I go to the grocery store, GroceryIQ starts up and my phone changes to not turn the screen off, etc. That really helps my battery life, because I keep my wifi off unless I'm somewhere I know I can connect, or I connect manually.

I FINALLY found a good program that I can use to stream things from my media server at home to my phone. I only use this on the network, but it's called Emit, and it works great so far.

I use FolderSync to sync up files on my local filesystem every night while I'm sleeping. I use KeePass to keep my passwords at home, and only ever edit the master list on my computer. At night, FolderSync downloads the the KeePass file from my PC and overwrites yesterday's copy on my phone. I always have a copy of my passwords should I need them. I also use it to copy pictures to my file server. I use the cloud too, but Google/DropBox/etc. doesn't care about my files, and if I don't take care of them they might get lost. I don't completely trust cloud storage providers yet. I use them, but I still do my own backups.

Automating an Audit of Service Accounts

The goal today is to show you how I am automating and documenting a list of which log on account my services are using.

To start, I have a master list of servers, which is simply a text file, out there on my scheduled task server. I made adding a server's name to that list part of my commissioning checklist (which you totally should have).

Where this has come in handy, besides answering the "How did I do this on the other server" question, is when you have to change the password for a service account. Now, you'll know where else you need to update the password and can plan appropriately.

As an aside, I like the idea of the Windows Server managed service accounts, but there are too many things that they don't work with for me to use them. I don't really need more exceptions to remember.

One thing to keep in mind is that the output is subjective. If you DON'T see something under a certain server's name, it may be good, or it may not be. A SQL box shouldn't be using LocalSystem accounts for its services, while something internal to the server, like the DHCP client off the top of my head, doesn't really need to be using a dedicated account.

Here's the script. Inline comments as per usual.

#----------------------BEGIN SCRIPT-------------------

#Create Temporary output file
$OutputFile = "c:\temp\ServiceAudit.txt"

#Get the list of servers from my master list
$Computers = (Get-Content "c:\Lists\ServiceAccountAudit-servers.txt")

#For each server in the list
Foreach ($Computer in $Computers){
#Append the server's name to the temporary output file
Add-Content $OutputFile $Computer

#Use WMI to get each services StartName (Log in account), EXCEPT for the common ones, select the name and account, append to file
Get-WmiObject Win32_Service -ComputerName $Computer | `
where {$_.StartName -notlike "LocalSystem" -and $_.StartName -notlike "NT Authority\LocalService" -and $_.StartName -notlike "NT Authority\NetworkService" `
-and $_.StartName -notlike "NT Authority\Network Service" -and $_.StartName -notlike "NT Authority\Local Service"} `
| select Name, StartName | Add-Content $OutputFile

#Add some space between server entries
Add-Content $OutputFile "`r`n"
} #End Foreach

#Declare email parameters
$To = "itreporting@contoso.com"
$From = "helpdesk@contoso.com"
$Subject = "PS Report - Services"
$Body = 'This is a list of services on all servers that are not running under "system" credentials'
$SMTPServer = "mailserver.contoso.com"

#I get the temp file as attachment simply because I copy it to our IT Sharepoint once in a while as documentation
$Attachment = $OutputFile
Send-Mailmessage -to $To -Subject $subject -From $From -body $body -smtpserver $SMTPServer -attachments $Attachment

#Delete the Temp File
remove-item $OutputFile -force

remove-item $Attachment -force

#-------------------END SCRIPT---------------------------

A Day in the Life.....

It's been a really crappy week. I had the flu and was out sick Monday through Thursday, and now I have to leave early on Friday to tend to the sick kids. :(

So, I didn't learn much this week, and REALLY haven't felt like writing. I guess I should be upfront and let everyone know: If you're checking this blog for daily posts you're going to be disappointed. I don't learn new things that are worth writing about every day, and some days I just don't have the time!

So today I'm going to bore you with my daily work routine. <grin>

The first thing I do before I sit down is walk through the server room and check for red or amber LEDs where there shouldn't be.

I get into my office and boot up my laptop, and see this.

The two screens on the top are running of a custom desktop I built to run VMware Workstation for testing. I've appropriated some additional hardware that I've found lying around, and now it has 3 SSD drives, 32GB of RAM, and a 3TB spindle drive. I can run quite a few things at once, which comes in handy when you need to spin up a domain controller, a SQL backend, a Sharepoint server, and a mail server all at once. Most of the time, though, it just sits there and is my heads-up display.

On the left side of the left monitor, I have Veeam ONE running, and next to that is Dell's SANHQ, which shows my Equallogic SAN activity. On the right side is a custom dashboard I built in PRTG. That thick green circle is my "donut". My co-workers joke about it all the time: "Don't make his donut turn red!" Those little graphs on the right side show me file system usage on my file servers. In the tables at the bottom I'm looking at top 10 highest bandwidth, least available diskspace, and slowest pings.

In just a minute, I can tell whether I'm having network, application, or storage issues, and I can see if someone dumped a bunch of stuff on my file server that probably shouldn't be there.

COFFEE!!!!! One cream, 3 sugars. Spare me your health lecture, or how non-manly my coffee is, because I have a ton of emails to read.

Usually, there's nothing in my inbox. I use the 0-inbox policy. Every email I get goes into a ticket or is cleared out when the conversation is finished. Right now, I have 3 emails because I'm conversing with some vendors and am awaiting replies.

I open the IT Reporting mailbox to about 70 emails. Most of these are simply reporting backup successes. Quite a few are from various Powershell scripts that run to report things like whether I have running VMware snapshots, or if there are any unassigned computers in WSUS, and I also get a DCDIAG report. I try to create scripts so that I get good info in the email's subject. Being able to glance at an email and tell whether I need to read further saves a lot of time.

Once I've cleaned out the inbox, I move on to the ticketing system. We use Spiceworks, and I feel like I have a pretty good system worked out to keep myself organized. Organization is key for sysadmins; it's too easy to get overwhelmed without a good system. I keep my tickets separated by priority: High for things that are very important, or that I plan on working on today. Medium for stuff to get to when the high priority stuff is done. Low for things that have a due date that is not today, or that I am waiting on someone else before I can proceed.

Due date, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean when the project has to be completed (of course, it can), but instead means that I need to do something with it on that day. For example, I had a project called "Roll out Syslog Server". The due date was only there because I needed to check on the size consumed by the logs after a week. If I had something else to do thereafter I would set a new due date or clear the due date and set the priority to medium (when I get to it), depending on what was needed.

I now clear out tickets for all of the things I just did above. I have a script that creates Spiceworks tickets for the tasks that I just went through (Checking backups, looking at my donut, yada yada yada). So right off the bat, I have 10 tickets done. YAY!

And now, I get to work on things and hopefully learn some stuff!