It does get sadder indeed. As company mergers went along, I actually winded up with less and less control on my computer base. I was forbidden to do hardware support, even with my long experience in the field. They preferred "certified" rent-a-techs support from machine suppliers. I had less and less to do on support also, as they tried to implement nearly-experimental-like products to remotely install software company-wide, with poor configurations (not just antivirus-software) and bugs all over the place, all in the sake to achieve some unrealistic objectives in an equally unrealistic deadline. The support I couldn't deliver was done by newbies, going with default or company-wide approved standards, thus sabotaging the efficiency and the reliability of my Web. It came down to a point where I just decided to shut it down. I pulled the plug, which wasn't as hard as setting this all up: I just turned off the alarm and removed the shared directories used for logging and distributing. I had previously run a batch file that forced a more "standard" configuration on the PCs, and that was it. But it got worse. I had changed job and went to a multimedia development shop, where they actually seemed to care enough about virus protection. Their Symantec software was pulling updates regularly (weekly), but from Symantec's web site. Did you try to connect to these sites on the day I love You.txt.vbs came out? If the web were like a telephone, you would have received busy signals.
But I had learn the hard way that multimedia shops aren't the most security-conscious places around, and I found myself picking up a bunch of unstable poorly configured systems, using old (and probably holed) software. The systems crashed often and I saw some very weird things that left me wondering of what was really going on. Although their net was relatively safe from outside attack (thanks to a now moved-on-elsewhere UNIX admin), the inside was severely crippled. But the mix of delayed-for-too-long urgent projects and constant fire extinguishing brought me to a burnout before I could even take a look at stabilizing the systems. I actually quit that job before losing anymore of my health in that place (they had plans to migrate from Lotus Notes to Outlook ~shivers~).
10. The brown stuff
12. In conclusion
Table of contents