Hacker News Reader

Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

> So maybe you have a perfectly capable 24x7 tech team,

> but the guy who manages license acquisition is on leave today.

Then I wouldn't have "the" guy for anything.

You are right. I think the people downvoting you just misunderstood the point you were making: In a “perfectly capable 24/7 tech team”, you should not depend on a single individual for anything.

In real life, however, this kind of thing happens all the time. Someone forgot to write down the login when they left and no-one caught it in the offboarding. Or someone set up 2FA on a system but didn't put that info into 1Password / the wiki, etc.

Unfortunately a few comments here have honed in on one contrived example of why I think this strategy is broken. To give another contrived example: I personally had a logon to this portal, but it broke last year when they integrated logons with Azure and it took me like three months to get it fixed.

The fact a critical security update can't just be downloaded is bad. I don't care if someone in sales thinks every licensed user should probably be able to get it. Here NCC produced a list of "valid" files to help people scan for not legit files. Except they don't have Exchange 2019 CU 8 because they couldn't get it:

https://github.com/nccgroup/Cyber-Defence/tree/master/Intell...

Microsoft has a hard limit (5?) on the number of individual accounts you can grant access and in a big enough org it's still plausible they'll be scattered across the world and you'll find none of them available the exact hour you need this update.

The failure mode of clever? It's "asshole." -- John Scalzi

I know you’re trying to save the original comment but that comment can legitimately be taken the way the downvotes are taking ... that the commenter believes that guy should be fired for being away from his phone. Why legitimately? Because I’ve worked with people like that.

It is not the guy that's guilty, but you for having such bad organization that one guy under the buss is sinking the entire ship.

I think that's what they're saying - that the problem is that there is a single "the guy".

Then it should've been "wouldn't have a guy for anything". The issue with funny quips is that if you don't do them correctly ambiguity reigns supreme.

I get what they're saying, but in the majority of organisations the persons who spends their entire day reading Adobe's EULA and counting Oracle client installations isn't considered the sort of role that anyone has ever considered needing redundancy or full time availability until this thing broke out.

I’m pretty sure he’s saying that guy is the problem for not being available and should be fired. The way it’s worded, it’s not clear who has the correct interpretation.

I thought it was Microsoft that was guilty for hiding a security update in the licensing portal!

MS sucks, but a manager can't change them. What you can do is to have good processes, knowledge sharing, and maybe even the balls to take down the entire mail service if it is exposing it to a hack and you need time to patch.

Why do people still use MS products in 2021. Where are developers coming from that actively want to learn which hoops to jump through to be allowed the privilege to briefly use the hardware they rent out to Microsoft?

You mean sysadmins, not developers right? :)

"You took a vacation the same day that a zero day dropped. You're fired"

Yeah uh, I don't think I wanna work for you then

I think their point is that "the guy for a specific task" can't exist on a team that actually is "24x7 perfectly capable".

If your organisation has key person dependencies that’s a problem in itself.

Not all organizations can afford to double up in everything.

That's fine, but that means you don't have a perfectly capable 24/7 tech team.

Yes it does. 24/7 means all the time for any reasonable given scenario. If someone taking leave means you can’t fulfil a function properly then you’re not 24/7 even if you are perfectly capable.

Exactly.

If you cannot afford to double something mission critical up then you at least should have a backup plan what to do in case something critical happens while that one person is unavailable. If you cannot come up with a plan, consider if you should be running this.

Since when are licenses mission critical? ( OP said the update is only available via the licensing portal)

If your 3rd party license expires and takes down your whole system then it is mission critical.

Since you need the licensing portal for critical updates at the latest.

Agreed, but I’m curious how often you see how often this actually works out as it should.

Pretty sure the poster is talking about having one single point of failure for all license acquisition in the first place, not about firing the single point of failure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com