Sunday, January 19, 2025

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Growing Up #1: Setting the stage

I grew up on a small, 11 acre, hobby farm outside a small logging town in Washington State.  The town was a single stoplight, single school, single policeman, single doctor, small library branch sort of place where folks all knew each other.  It had a hardware store, two small markets, a few restaurants and the main phone switching facility for that part of the county.  The town had several churches and taverns and we liked to joke that the tavern to church ratio was 2 or 3 when in reality it was probably 1 to 1. Basically one of your standard, rural logging towns that are all over the western US.  Now, 50 years later, the town has become a bedroom community for larger cities to the west and while there are still several churches, only a single bar survived.

Our house was a few miles from town.  I remember that you would drive along a winding road and then down a small hill with trees on right and pasture and power/telephone poles on the left. At the bottom of the hill the road bends to the right, starts to climb a bit and you see pastures on both sides.  Our land was on the right side - 11.25 acres of pasture.  Our house is in the bottom right of the picture with the cars in the parking area below it.


The road continued for around 200 yards and then did a partial turn to the right and our red, 2 story house was there on the right side. 50 yards past the turn, you could pull into a gravel parking spot on the right. Just across the road from the parking spot was our mailbox.  The house was back about 20 yards from the road surrounded by a white picket fence.  The front of it had a large porch with two brick columns holding up its roof.

Our land was all cleared to be used as a pasture for animals and surrounded by the fir, hemlock and cedar covered lands of the neighbors.  Facing away from the road toward the back of the pasture we had a creek on the right side of the property and another creek that came in from the left side, then turned in the middle and when almost to the back where it turned again and joined up with the creek on the right side (the trees in the middle of the property follow this creek). The house was on a small hill that we had to go down to get to the pasture area and barn (above and to the left of the house).

It was a great place to grow up and learn about the world.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

System Admin Maxim #2: Identify your infrastructure's risks to management

I have many, many examples of organizations closing the door after the horse is long gone as in Maxim #1.  The most painful one was where I warned the CEO of a small, public software firm that (1) developers were not saving all their data and code on the server, but instead keeping in on their local machines because that was much easier and faster and (2) we were only backing up the servers.  Because we were a public firm, we had to make our quarterly numbers or else the stock would tank.  I told him the cost to back up the workstations and recommended that we do so, but he decided against it. So about a week before the end of a quarter, the machine of the primary QA developer working on a new release that was expected to come out in that quarter, failed.  All the work was lost, the product was not released on time, stock tanked, lots of very, very unhappy people.  The CEO brought me into his office that same day and told me to spend whatever it took to back up all the workstations. Because I had identified the risks before hand there was not much else he could do. As a system admin you need to identify the risks to management.  They may or, as in this case, may not act on the risks.  If they choose not to act, then you must prepare as best you can to recover when the event happens.  It is more difficult these days as the risks are larger (e.g. ransomware), more insidious (e.g. attacks on supply chain vendors), and many are human related (e.g. social engineering cyberattacks) that technology really cannot solve or mitigate.

Monday, January 13, 2025

System Admin Maxim #1: Closing the door after the horse has escaped

I grew up on a small farm and we had a saying of 'closing the barn door after the horse has escaped'.  In my 40 years as a system admin, I can only think of a few times where this has NOT been true.  Most organizations I have worked for are resource constrained and cannot or will not do what is needed to protect their networks.  This is especially true today with the rise in number and costs of attacks on technology infrastructure.  I am reminded of this because I help out at a non-profit who just had their network hacked because, even though they were warned, continued using simple passwords and were sharing the password for their primary wifi.  After the attack, I segmented their network into staff, IoT, and public vlans along with using secure passwords for the network.  

I can only think of one organization during the dot com boom of the late 1990's that dedicated enough resources to protect their technology infrastructure. In this case it was when the owner decided to move to an on-prem Exchange mail server. I told him that Exchange servers were known to have many issues with cyber attacks and to defend against them we needed a multi-layered software approach of anti-virus software on the server and on all the clients connecting to the server from 2 different vendors.  This software cost was 50% of the Exchange server cost so was not cheap, but he decided to do it.  A few months after the migration, all is going well and he is off at a conference of peers; when a big cyber attack against Exchange servers happened.  His company was the only one at the conference who had no email issues because he chose to spend the money to protect the systems.  One vendor's antivirus software stopped some of the attacks and the other vendor's software stopped the rest of the attacks.  I remember him coming back and giving me a bonus because he sure did look smart at the conference.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Hachioji Castle

Western Tokyo is mountainous and only 2 hours away by train from our apartment in Hikarigaoka.  A few days ago Sawako, Joichi, and I hiked around the Hachioji Castle ruins - one of the top 100 castles in Japan.  We took the train to Takao station and then a short bus ride to a stop near the Castle where we walked to the trailhead.





The trail first takes you to the living area where you can see the old building foundation stones. 


 From there the trail climbs steeply to the top of the hill that has wonderful views of Tokyo and Mt Fuji. 




After hiking along the ridge a bit, we came to the Hachioji-jinja shrine which was built in 916 AD. A cover was built over it to protect it.


Then we hiked back down to the valley to visit the graveyard of Hojo Ujiteru and retainers.  Lots of steps to reach the ridge where the graveyard is located.



The loop hike took a total of 4 hours

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