"sudo !!" Will rerun your last command with sudo privileges in a Linux environment.

You're welcome.

Sudo me

"could I get admin privileges to reboot this server?"

Sounds valid enough, right?

OH YEAH SURE, YOU'RE A TINY USER ON A HUGE ASS SHARED SERVER, OF COURSE I'LL GIVE YOU ROOT ACCESS TO REBOOT THE WHOLE FUCKING SERVER.

Worst part, he didn't understand why that would be weird.

Can I buy a little common sense somewhere for this guy?

I need that stress ball. Therefore desperate times call for desperate measures:

Sudo upvote

When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.

Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.

So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.

Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.

The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.

If you thought your legacy code was bad, this is what I'm dealing with. The below SQL is stored in a cookie on login and executed to on every further request to determine the user / privileges.

Using your root privileges wisely..

Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”

Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”

Just found out that the generic router that our ISP gave us, which we use at work, has a port you can telnet into to get shell access with root privileges.

Dear uni, please don’t give us an ISO of a custom virtual machine that we are required to use, and then lock us into an account without admin or sudo privileges. It’s our VM, running on our own computers, with our own data. Wtf. I can’t even install a fucking text editor.

shutdown now
SUDO SHUTDOWN NOW

Boss hands over to me an old security audit report and tells me "Go through this and check if all the problems mentioned have been resolved". Quick glance through the report shows all expected issues - SQLi, plaintext transmission and storage etc. I tell him that I need access to the application both from admin and a user with restricted privileges.
He hands me the admin credentials and tells me, "After you login in, just go the "Users" tab. You'll find the profiles of all the users there. You can get the emails and passwords of any user you want from there."
I had to hold back a chuckle. There's nothing to verify. If they haven't resolved storing plain text passwords in the database (AND displaying it IN PLAIN TEXT in the website itself (which to my surprise wasn't mentioned in the audit)), they probably haven't even looked at the report.

Turning 18+ is like getting super user privileges!
Once a adult no more "permission denied" errors!

It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.

The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.

Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.

At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.

To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.

The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.

We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.

Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.

After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.

We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.

End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.

We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.

We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)

PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.

The fact that we can’t control all the functions and organs in our body means that we don’t have admin privileges.

"God Mode" in Windows 10:

1. Create a new folder on your desktop. Leave its name to be "New Folder"
2. Open CMD with administrator privileges
3. cd C:\Users\<your username>\Desktop
4. ren "New folder" ".{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"

Enjoy direct access to all and every settings. :-)

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

Well, just remembered a fuck up one of my friends and me did. Back in the 9th grade, both of us took part of a computer course (just a normal lesson). He got me into programming. So after half a year we "hacked" into the school server. Tbh it was quite simple. The server did a backup each week in a specific folder. The problem was, the backup file had no proper rights set. Everyone had access to it. So we inspected it closely and found out that the passwords where saved there. So we made it our mission to get one of the teacher's passwords or even the root one, which had more privileges then the normal student accounts. After about 2 days we managed to crack one of them (using a hash table available for download). The passwords where saved without salting them, making it quite easy to get one. Now we were sitting there, having access to a teacher's account. So we logged in and tried to figure out what to do next. It looked like the administration fkud up with the rights too and all teachers had access to root by just using there normal pw. Well, the Grand final is coming. We put a script into the startup of the server (which restarted at 4:30 AM each Friday). The only line that was written in it was "./$0|./$0&"

We never got caught. And it was a heck of fun ^^

I started a job as a developer on Monday for a large retail company. There was no computer available for me because of the IT department but I'm told it will arrive later in the day. It doesn't.
On Tuesday I get told that the PC is coming and later in the day a keyboard, mouse, monitor stand and two monitors arrive but no computer.
Today, Wednesday, I get into work and find that I now have a PC. Woo! I load windows, log into my user account with my new user and pass and go to install VSCode only to find that I don't have admin privileges and can't install almost anything. I'm told that IT will add me to the admin user group soon(tm). I wait. All day. They don't do what they are supposed to do despite us pushing them to do it.
I hope that tomorrow I can actually dev, but at least I've been paid three days wage for doing nothing lol

Anyone have any shitty IT department stories?

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

Junior dev requests for sudo access on a server instance for some package installation, gets it, figures out how to open the root shell - never goes back. They do everything on root.

Fast forward to production deployment time, their application won't run without elevated privileges. Sysadmin asks why does the application require elevated privileges. Dev answers, "Because I set it up with root" :facepalm:

Is @Root just @notroot with elevated privileges? :P

Writing code for SJWs be like

YAY.... fuck you Belkin!
Just found out my router is vulnerable to CVE-2017-14491.

For all you not following these issues, this one allows the attacker to intercept connections and perform a traffic hijack, or execute arbitrary code with unrestricted privileges as well as access all important and private data stored on the device aka: the devices login/password, the Wi-Fi passwords, and configuration data just by sending malformed DNS packets to the device.

Now this is all well and good, except Belkin haven't released firmware since 2013, which is strange... seeing how the damn thing was "NEW" out of the box in 2016.

Last time i buy a fucking router from these lousy assholes.

a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.

i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.

it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.

it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.

at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.

it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.

it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.

also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...

it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"

back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D

I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.

That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.

However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'

oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.

Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.

So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...

That was the time I discovered skrillex.

Anyone remembers that in windows XP you coud set any exe as screen saver, and it would run on time, even before you log into any user, as a default system user with administrator privileges?

Godammit Homebrew.

It's bad enough having to develop C on a Mac, now Homebrew is refusing to let me install a package that needs root privilege. Support simply says "no package needs root privileges" and "run as an admin". BITCH, THIS PACKAGE NEEDS IT.

So now I'm downloading homebrew source just to add a "--fuckingdoit" flag that skips their shitty "no sudo" rule.

Tooling should save me time, not WASTE it.

After three hours of emailing with a customer I can confirm that programmers are the worst customers.
Customer: We've found a bug in the system... <details>
Me: Thank you for letting us know, a ticket has been created and the issue is most likely to be fixed in the next release.
Customer: Please grant me UPDATE privileges in the live(!) database so I can fix it myself
Me: I cannot allow that. You have to use the client software for maintaining your data.
Customer: No, I don't want to spend my day clicking. I want to write queries.

We didn't reply to the last one yet...
If we give him access, then I would charge them at least 3x for fixing issues caused by him.

I HATE it when SCHOOL TEACHERS OF ALL PEOPLE Suspect me of hacking because I am coding probably in batch because I don't have admin privileges

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Putty remote executuon vulnerability(no patch yet)

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system.

The vulnerability exists due to unspecified input validation error when processing data, received from SSH server. A remote attacker can trick the victim to connect to a specially crafted SSH server and execute arbitrary code on the target system with privileges of the current user.

Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may allow an attacker to compromise vulnerable system.

Windows not powering off when I press the shutdown button.

Mandatory long rant warning

Oh my fucking god, how many times have I lost my shit because of this fucking bullshit.

When I press the shutdown button, I want you to shut the fuck down you sorry excuse for an operating system.

Me and my friends want to hang out together, so I shut down my PC and walk over to their house, expecting an intense session of doing programming stuff and debating linux distros. Whatever the fuck we do when we get together.

I get to their house and pull out my laptop,, only its hot as fuck. And then I see it: the battery indicator is red. "What the balls?" I think to myself. I open the lid, and guess what?
WINDOWS DIDN'T FUCKING SHUT DOWN, AND IT STAYED ON THE POWERING OFF SCREEN ALL THIS FUCKING TIME. WHAT THE FUCK?
Now, my laptop has a bomb ass battery, so I didn't even bring a charger with me, and now I'm fucking stuck at a programming session with friends without a computer. FUCKING BULLSHIT.

If this was a one time thing, I wouldn't have cared so much, but this happened countless fucking times. Too many.

I would have deleted this cum socket of an operating system months ago if it weren't for the Windows exclusive software I need for school, and now that Steam supports games for linux, Windows has even less of an excuse to stay on my fucking laptop.

Windows is supposed be fucking simple, but linux takes it by a goddamn long shot. When I type "shutdown now" or "poweroff", linux shuts the fuck down, no questions asked. And if I ever need root permissions, I just type "sudo" instead of restarting the fucking program and requesting admin privileges.

Most of the software I use is compatible with both MacOS and Windows, and I already have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, so what do you guys think, should I butcher Windows off of my SSD and give MacOS a try?

Also, what is this magic? Ranting actually calmed me the fuck down... I need to start ranting more.

FUCK MICROSOFT AND FUCK WINDOWS, I WISH I COULD BURN TO FUCKING OBLIVION

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

So I just started a part time job in a hospital research center - because the processing is long I got a temporary user name and password (that belong to the main HR secretary) so I can start work straight away (mainly data analytics)
The kick?
Administrator privileges.
I can access edit create or delete everything in the entire fucking database. On my first God damn day.
In the 2nd largest hospital in the fucking country.
Agh. How do systems survive with so many dumb security breaches?

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

I get very annoyed by sites that ask for too many privileges. If I want to comment on some post why would I give write access to all my source code repositories?

Now that I have a ++, I changed my BG Color so that it looks nice but I think we need a full color picker now.

BTW @dfox any ++ privileges on this? Maybe you could add my Drafts feature 😉😏

Another story of mine is when me and my friends were playing games in the school library. I decided to fuck around on windows XP file systems to see what I could find. After clicking around for a bit, I found a way to access all of the student files in my year, with full access privileges.

What ended up happening was that my friends figured it out too, many of them changing files and writing messages for the other people in our class. After writing messages to each other and leaving messages to students here and there, I decided that it probably should be a good idea to report this.

The response at the IT room wasn't like the woman's response (bitch from last rant). They were like "Cool, thanks." The fix happened immediately and I wasn't really told off. It was a good day c:

Fun fact, I left my old job in October last year. I still have a full access to their github. With admin privileges. I could just delete all their repositories. This is too much power.

If I have the same privileges (time, money, connections, environments, energy etc) that they have, I will surely achieve 3x more.

I am not trying to find an excuse, that's the reality. I already achieved way more than most people with the same background. I should be proud of myself, and other people who think otherwise can go fuck themselves.

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

I have been growing this creepy stache for a month now. I am hoping the "not fitting company culture"-ness of it will steadily attain me work-from-home privileges.

If it does fit the company culture, I am fucked in more ways than one.

Not have privileges in prod database, so i have to create a simple 'hidden API func' in the backend of apps that i develop, so it can receive raw query and give response for the results, the REST API is (/getReport). Still Works :/

So much for privileges....meh

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

-4 Domain Administrators in my organization-

Me, a Doman Administrator: "Boy, I sure hope the FDIC IT Audit goes well!"

Braindead FDIC Examiner: "So let me get this straight, you use your administrator account to do things on a day-to-day basis?"

Me: "Uhh, I'm an admin so yeah, my account has admin privileges."

Examiner: *gives disapproving glare* "And your personal account has administrative rights?"

Me: "...I'm an admin... So I thought that'd be fairly obvious."

Examiner: "I'm sorry, but that is unacceptable. How can we tell which admin made what change when?"

Me: *dumbfounded* "...I'm sorry, what?"

Examiner: "You're going to need separate accounts, 1 normal user account and 1 admin account per domain admin."

Me: "You do realize that everything I do while I'm working requires elevation of SOME kind, don't you?"

Examiner: "I'm sorry, but you need to make this change. Thank you."

Me: *stares at the short pile of braindead shit as he walks away*

I wanted to rant like 10 times today but was on a tight schedule (yes its fucking sunday), so here is everything:

*********
Fuck you, i dont give a shit that you need to present data tomorrow, its weekend, you cant just fucking call me to get things done asap. Im working from the code of a dead guy do you know how fucking hard it is to ask a dead person whats their code do?

*********

I really wish devrant had some kinda longboard/skateboard in the profile pic

*********

Im still not a fucking designer i can make like does-not-make-you-barf tier designs, JUST TELL ME WHAT TO FUCKING CODE JESUS

*********

whys the new rick n morty episode not out yet wtf

*********

Yo i love linux but set the fucking privileges right you dipshit, i cant exrcute my damn code on your crappy ass 2008 xeon server fuck you

Can I please rant? So my Acer Computer started misbehaving and turned my firewall off by itself a few weeks ago. After that, the dumb thing decided to revoke my admin rights, and since I was the ONLY admin, I have zilch admin privileges, can't download any apps, and can't make any new user profiles.

How in the living fu*k am I supposed to do my schoolwork and homework for school on a piece of sh*t computer I paid lots of money for? I have tried the built-in admin trick, and it did NOT work. My other user account I can NOT open, as Windows 10 states that "you need an app to open this".

due to some error on GCP, my and friend got locked out of a prod server over ssh.

And the fucking admin was not giving us privileges to do it through serial port, why you ask cause submitting keys from dashboard was not working.

Later, found out google runs a startup script from startup-script metadata tag.

It felt like showing a middle finger to the admin and google

Today, my manager received a brand new Macbook pro with all its cool features while I am still stuck using an old Macbook pro (mid 2012 model). I always complained him about performance issues and all he did was to approve an OS upgrade (to Sierra). How does that even enable me to be productive? I am already running applications at the peak of the machine limits. Sometimes, the JVM crashes and other time Node.js runs out of heap space.

The manager is not a programmer. All he really does is attend online meetings, track and report to management, and write emails. Ideally, he would need a Mac Air or perhaps a Windows machine. I still wonder how did the company management allowed this. He is simply misusing his privileges as a manager and I can do nothing about it.

My employer requires admin privileges to update cleartype settings :) I forgot my glasses at home just let me fix it :/

locked myself out of Jenkins by adding security and not giving myself admin privileges. whoops!

Random guy messages me on WhatsApp that he needs help, that his friend told him I'm good at blah blah blah.........

the issue: he paid for some random php bitcoin thingy blah blah, sent me a link to the site, pretty straightforward instructions on how to use it. I explained everything to him and he says he wants to tweak the php script before he puts it out.
me: then do it

him: how do I start?

me(in my head): did you not think of this before paying for the script?!

also me: oh well, download xampp, good for beginners, easy to setup.

him: not working! please help me

I knew from the onset that he was a windows user.

he started by running it without admin privileges
I had no idea and kept solving problems that didn't exist until I asked him to snap the log, after explaining how to run a software as administrator, we Solved it

port 80 was taken. had to go through the process of changing the ports, I had to validate every single change.

going through the procedure of reinstalling because he installed to some crappy directory. after all the headaches and then redoing all the processes stated above, it still doesn't work.

one final solution left and I am dropping him like a hot potato. I must have close to a hundred pictures of someone's screen on my phone.

little question: when he types localhost on his browser windows IIS page thingy pops up. I was thinking of changing the server name to localserver: new port address

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

less than a week into my new job I'm already writing shell scripts and python scripts to automate my tasks
- it's a windows machine
- Cannot install anything without admin privileges
- powershell is locked, cannot run scripts
- can't even change my wallpaper without privilages
thankfully git bash for windows runs without installation
python also runs without installation

Does somebody know how to send data to the PHP CGI executable directly and how to receive it (stdin/stdout)?
Or point me to a useful resource?
In a side project (just for fun) I try to implement the interface on NodeJS so I could process PHP through ExpressJS (long story).
I've been able to send and receive stuff, but the PHP CGI always tells me that I am "not allowed" to use this interface...
Docs/mailinglists seem reeeally old and don't want to go through the Apache source code 😅
Or does Node not have enough privileges for communicatig with PHP CGI exe?

Most the devs are yelling Linux is best and blah. But since I installed eOS on my new ideapad my productivity is zero.

I'm just solving problems with the OS or other software. It seems some of the drivers are missing, because sometimes this fucking piece of shit just don't boots or just hangs. Installing node and npm was definitely one of the worst experiences because I messed up sudo privileges... I had to change my workflow because node-sass wasn't able to compile because of this.

And still I kind of feel more comfortable with eOS. 😥

The worst part about working for a big company is that whatever is the problem that you google the solution is always like "try changing this global parameter that only the CEO has the privileges to change" or "the only solution is to raze to the ground your 1 year old technology and use this state-of-the-art edge solution".

And it looks like I'm the only one that complains about this.

I mean, really do people have no constraints when they work?

If your relative's computer doesn't have a TeamViewer (or similar) client running 24/7, you're a failure and deserve to have your rant privileges revoked.

This has been bothering me for a while. I have an old freelance client of mine I’ve created an web site for (his company) it was small one so I took the complete payment before deployment and I needed no contract. I deployed the complete version of the site on my server, bought the domain for his company under my name and it has been running for a year now.
Lately he had asked me to give admin privileges to his son (cs student 1y) to upload some photos of their new building. I noticed he ruined several functions on the site in doing so, but I was never paid to support that just the hosting for a year.
When I was making the design I made a simple but pretty logo as a placeholder for the site which went in production since they never gave me company logo. All good, no contract small cash all delivered, everyone happy.
Up until few days when I saw my f**king logo cut out from the site as 250px jpeg and made as a huge banner on the company building..
From my pov I would’ve never given permission to use that since its not something i’m proud of and would suggest to make a better one for a fee. I see this as stolen/unauthorized use of intellectual property. But the laws are super shitty in our country so at this point I am stuck at taking their site, domain a hostage until they pay for the logo they used or take it down or taking legal actions.. we never signed anything about that logo.

So I’ve been working on a tool to do offline domain joining in an active directory for about a month in my company, and so far everything is functional and done EXCEPT that one thing.

Essentially to do an offline domain junction, you need an AD account that has sufficient privileges on the domain controller. It will then generate a key that you can use on the client machine to make the junction to the domain.

I have tried literally every possible option that I could think of and I cannot for the life of me figure out why the client machine does not accept the generated key. I’m using methods from the Netapi32.dll which are barely documented anywhere, I even searched on GitHub code references and I couldn’t find much… Theres also a tool called djoin.exe that supposedly does that, I’ve tried with that tool too, to no avail.

This is the last thing missing for the project to be complete, and it’s pretty essential as well…

So close yet so far….

If anybody here knows anything about that kind of stuff (admittedly very niche) I’ll take anything.

Note: I think I’ve browsed all the websites and forums referencing to these functions and the tool now…

I am messed up at installing a bunch of server app in proxmox, messed up the config, privileges etc.

Guess i need to start over -_-

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

Inherited a legacy system from a previous "developer" who wrote code to sanitize input from sql injection in the front end and then called an web method called execSql which accepts am sql statement in a string value!

Obviously the app ran under admin privileges.

Made an Ubuntu update. Now my user does not have admin privileges anymore!

When you see: "Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo." in the Jenkins console log and realize that XCode was updated.

When I ask to my co-workers where I going to find the files I need.

Anybody know of any enterprise software for password storage and sharing?

We have an issue where multiple people across different teams use the same accounts and need them to be able to access certain login information but not all login information.

I’m hoping for something free/open source but at this point I’m open to anything. Must have the ability to give users privileges.

Do you think that Dev's should have sudo privileges? As I Linux Engineer that thought scares the shit out of me.

FFS people. If you're going to ditch the Mac App Store (because Apple sucks, I'm such programmer I need to hate it) when releasing your software, get your installers right. ESPECIALLY if it's paid software.

Some people choose not to work on their systems with an admin user all the time. So don't assume your shitty installers will have sudo privileges.

I'm looking at you Atom and Paw.

When your IDE is installed a so fucked-up way you have to launch it with root privileges for it to start, you can't manage to find a good Git GUI client, and you already wasted 3 hours trying to solve both problems without fixing anything... You know it's time for you to get the hell off your PC, cry out and get some sleep.

What can you do if your boss is basically refusing to give you access to a server that you need access to to do your job? It's really weird to me. Only he has access to any prod systems we have. Is this realistic? Is this more of an attempt at staying necessary and needed? I'm pretty fed up with it as I've had prod access at every other company I've worked for and have nearly ten years of web experience .. what gives?

I wish it was as easy as:

> hack FBI
Cannot hack, root privileges needed
> sudo hack FBI
Hacking...

I am currently playing dumb with a potential hire and it's just so much fun I don't know if I should stop.
We gave the dev a little coding challenge to code a small expense tracking app. Nothing fancy, just to see how he well he could do on his own. We told him to take as much time as he requires.
He submitted it and I tried to run it. It worked alright but I could not register or login.
I debugged the issue with him for a while and told him I would look at it later since I am tied up with other tasks..
We are communicating via an IM.

Him: Or how did you run the project. I wish I was there to run it for you. Lol

Me: dotnet run. start without debugging

Him: From the cmd?

At this point I about to get pissed. Where else would I run 'dotnet run' from??

Me: I would hope so

Him: I always run it from the cmd. With administrative privileges

Me: Really?? Where can I find cmd?

Him: Yes. Do you use a Mac?

Me: nope. I am using windows

People who do remote work, what's your stance on making calls to get together to do things?

In my case, I have this tech lead boss now who's always available to start calls so I can share my screen and point at what problems I'm having, and I really appreciate that.

Other people at my job are really hard to get into contact with, they're never available when you need them, so if there's some conversation by the nature of which there needs to be a lot of back and forth exchange to get both parties on the same page, more than a day or more can be spent before work based on that conversation can be done.

I'm not talking about distribution of tasks, but rather "person with access to X, I need you to do Y". I invite them to have a call so we can explore how to do Y together, because neither of us know it too well, but they just do whatever, ask how it went, and it turns out wrong. In this particular case, I've got a marketing guy who has access to the company's business account in a social media platform. I need them to add me there as a developer, and make sure I and another developer have all privileges necessary to create and configure an application which will use the social media platform's APIs. Marketing guy just takes hours to respond and generally acts like we're not worth his time, but can't do the things we asked and dedicate the time to see with us if things are working before he sets out to do other work.

This isn't an isolated case, we've got other people who don't look at their messages and are just generally unavailable. Not sure if I have incorrect expectations. Everyone in the company works remote, but we're all in the same time zone.

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

I am working on partitioning my life and getting my tech stuff and online life organized. Partially fun, partially dread. Still one of the better things I'm dealing with right now.

Tech stuff mainly includes desktop PC (Qubes OS), network (to be driven by openwrt) and smartphone (already running Lineage OS, but I want to build my own LOS). This is the fun part. I want to add a NAS, but I'm too cheap for a proper one (at least for my >20TB media).

Furthermore offline stuff: Remove clutter, get analog documents properly organized (with a sustainable system) and possibly digitalized. I already have maybe half of the things I own in boxes each with a specific purpose (e.g. audio cables, network cables and game controllers each have their own box). Can be tiresome, but it's easy to see a progress and that makes it quite okay.

Online life: That's a big one. A large chunk is email and the hundreds of website accounts. I have them in a keepass file, but all running under the same address. Unfortunately I need to have a Facebook account for some purposes, but I'd like to start over with a new one. Not so easy when you have to transfer group admin privileges though, when I tried the last time I tripped some system and the new account was banned. Annoying.

If I work at home this weekend to get some undersized stuff done by monday . Should I ask them to pay me extra?
Or we devs do not have those privileges?

I just found the Android Termux app. With a wireless keyboard, I can use Vim on my phone! :D

Is it safe to give it admin privileges or something so I can actually use ls to see what is in the current folder?

I got 2 chromebook 11 3180 and 3100 and got home turned them on and what do know the fuck administrative lock 🔐..... I try everything on them I can't get them unlock or bypass administrative privileges...... developer mode is blocked and yeah, and what make matters worse the school they from don't have them on file .......... I don't no what to do ......anyone else have any clue how to get them open?

Today a colleague of mine managed to run cmd as admin without credentials. He does not have admin privileges so normally he can't do that.
He refuses to tell us how he did it.
Any idea how to do this in windows 10?