Engineers vs. Help Desk Technicians

Second post coming out of my work combining two teams and creating a help desk.

I've spent a lot of time studying the different between an engineer and a help desk technician. I think it's easiest to approach it through bullet points:

Help Desks

This post isn't security oriented, or technical. It's just what I'm working on most recently. At work a management decision recently blended our Network Infrastructure and Security Teams together and I was asked to run a project melding the two "on call responsibilities" and figure out a single point of contact or help desk setup so people would know how to contact us.

Is I Robot coming?

Google has been in the news a lot lately for buying a number of robotics companies. If you're not familiar, just search "google robotics" and read an article similar to, "Google plans to take over the world with advanced robotic war machines" (or something that sounds catchier with the same meaning).

Why you should pause before signing up for the Circle

If you have a Facebook account you've probably been overwhelmed by invitations to join the new "Local Network" the circle. If you're thinking about signing up for it, I'd encourage you to

Cyber Security Exhaustion

Do you feel overwhelmed by cyber security?

Me too. Let me give you my brief personal background.

How do I patch the things good?

My team was recently asked to do an assessment of our companies patching strategy and to suggest improvements. Senior management's questions came down to, "How do we patch the things good?"

That AIN'T REST

I don't have screen shots for this because it happened a while back and I've switched jobs, so I'll tell this tale in text.

Working on migrating articles out of a company wiki I wrote a script to download these articles automatically using the wiki's rest API. Here's the general algorithm:

1. Start with article 0 and request a batch of 100 articles (maximum allowed)
2. Request the text for the first article returned
3. Request list of attachments for each article
4. Download each attachment
5. Repeat for the next article in the batch
6. Grab the next batch
7. Stop when the batch returned is less than 100

Since the API is labeled "RESTful" this should be fine, right? Each batch of 100 will always return the same 100 articles, so asking for them sequentially is fine, right?

Wrong. So very wrong. Putting the word "REST" next to the word "API" does not necessarily mean they gave you a REST API.

One article was failing, making my whole script bomb. Thinking I could pop in and try to exclude that specific article, I found the index number and excluded it. But the next day it failed again. I tried to figure out why and realized that the bad index was moving down the index once every 6 - 10 hours. Which means that the indexes were stateful. Which means it's not REST.

I get it. I honestly do. Not cleaning up indices makes for a painful system that can get bloated fast. But don't use the buzzword if you can't actually make it work.