best practices

Firing policy - Come on HR, work with us here

So it’s time to fire someone. A sad task that falls on HR because everyone else is busy doing real work.  Here are the two major ways that HR tends to fumble on this all too easy task.

1) You fire the poor schmoe and don’t tell us. Sorry HR, we need to know. There is lots of stuff we need to do to make sure that when you get rid of this guy like disable his account so that Mr. Disgruntled can’t screw up the company.

2) You let us know in advance but then don’t send the guy away. So here we are disabling this guys account and he is still working away at his machine. The problem isn’t going away on its own HR, you still need to inform him and get security to escort him out so we can confiscate his machine. Even with a disabled account there is still a fair bit of damage he can do if he is already logged in.

Please HR, try to work with us on this we can make this an efficient easy proccess and then we can go back to working and you can go back to whatever it is you do.

Migrating DNS records

I am really tired of the way some people handle DNS record changes. It’s like people (even people in the IT industry) don’t seem to realize that changes are not instant. It takes on average between 24-48 hours for any record changes to propagate across the Internet and yet you have DNS cowboys trying to cut-over records and then wonder why names aren’t resolving, or mail isn’t flowing.

Best rule of thumb I have seen is maneuver your record change in a way that for that 24-48 hour period either record will work, if you can’t do that at least make your change on Friday before you head to the pub and make sure everyone knows that things may not work properly during the weekend.

Stop running services under domain admin

As a consultant I am more often than not working on servers that I myself did not build nor had any input on. One of the things that drives me crazy is when there are services running that are set up under the administrator log in. What this means in practical terms is that before I can change the admin password (which is a good practice to do on a regular basis) I have to log into each server and check what services I may or may no be affecting. I don’t need to tell you that I have much better ways I could be spending my time.