an IT rant

[cellio]

This is (basically) a rant I posted on the work wiki, with serial numbers filed off of course.

I have (customer-supplied server) running on a (corporate) laptop with a scrawny little hard drive. The C partition is only 83GB, and while there's another 40GB languishing on D, IT can't repartition without risking data loss and it took too long to get this set up in the first place. So there's a "why can't I just use Partition Magic to fix it?" rant wanting to get out here, but that is not this rant.

This week I ran out of space on C. Usually this means the server has written a bunch of logs that I need to delete, but that wasn't it this time -- I reclaimed maybe 2GB that way. Defrag wouldn't even run well because it didn't have 15% free and couldn't buffer on D -- but that is not this rant.

No, the rant is that when I went looking for the culprit (it's a pretty lean machine as these things go), I found that Proventia Desktop (firewall -- it ought to be called Prevent-ya, as in "prevent ya from getting any work done"!) had written 70GB of logs -- and tampering in any way with firewalls can be a firing offense, not that I have privileges anyway. 70GB -- really? On an 83GB partition? Haven't the guys who make that ever heard of rolling logs? Or archiving? They zipped down to a hundredth their original size. Sheesh!

(Fortunately we have a very helpful on-site support person who was able to fix this for me.)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I think all of those are valid rants! I feel that anywhere you work you should have local admin and access to appropriate software, as well as privileges to modify what you want (with the assumption that if you break it, you fix it, or get down on hands and knees to beg IT to help).

70G of log files is truly insane. As if anyone will be able to parse through them and figure anything out.

[cellio]

While our IT restrictions (particularly internet filters) chafe, I do work for a government contractor that is a frequent target of not just script-kiddies but (probably) hostile foreign governments. It's reasonable for them to try to keep our network reasonably locked down. Some of the restrictions are IMO not security issues but "we know best", like not allowing access to personal email, and those ones bug me, but firewalls in principle are both reasonable and necessary.

However, this particular case is either poorly-written or poorly-configured software that is not under my control -- hence the rant.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I worked for healthcare companies. It was scary how unprotected we were. But even so.. yes, 70G of log files is more than Windows security updates that persist forever takes up even after a decade of use.