Obsolete best IT practices
HardwareI was doing research into something – surprising though it may seem – and found this random Spiceworks thread. There are some goodies.
I’ve only been in the industry professionally for a decade, so my reach isn’t that great. But I’m sure if you looked back on the history of this blog you’d find most of these floating around:
-
Setting regular password rotation. All it does is encourages weaker passwords and insecure ingenuity.
-
Short, indecipherable passwords are secure. A longer password with plain words has more entropy, and is more likely to be used because people remember them.
-
Using FireWire 400 drives over USB 1.1 or 2. The transfer rate on the tin is slower than the latter, but it operates synchronously.
-
Regularly defragmenting drives. Especially counterproductive with SSDs and other solid state media.
-
RAID 5 and RAID Z. They get an unjustified bad rap now, but there are still better alternatives.
-
Using AVG or Avast with Spybot Search and Destroy to protect Windows boxes.
-
Setting Master/Slave jumpers on drives, because Cable Select is unreliable. And connect them with rounded ribbon cables for thermal efficiency! Except don’t do the latter, because those cables were non-standard and often introduced crosstalk.
-
Running 32 bit OSs on 64 bit hardware with less than 4 GiB of memory, to save system resources.
-
Recommending people use SyQuest ORB drives over Iomega Jaz, because it had more capacity for less.
-
Disabling HTTPS specifically for performance and resource use.
-
Disabling IPv6 if you “don’t need it.” Though turning it on still introduces privacy concerns you need to be aware of and mitigate.
-
Compiling your BSD and Gentoo ports from source, rather than using packages, to optimise performance. Better still, run overnight so you’re not waiting hours for KDE to finish.
-
Employing Web Safe Colours.
-
Always terminating your SCSI devices! Or a life hack, always use an Iomega drive or EPSON scanner as the last device because they self-terminate.
-
Using lighttpd over Apache, and MySQL over PostgreSQL, for performance and resource use.
-
Using data archives on anything other than FreeBSD/ZFS.
-
Writing with WordPress over Movable Type and Radio UserLand because its cleaner and lighter weight.
-
Have you heard of this thing called Exchange? It’s so much better than Notes!
And some things I was doing while still in school:
-
Using a Zip disk box with a padlock to secure data!
-
Using network hubs, and anything with an ISA interface, because network switches and PCI cards are more expensive.
-
Use 8.3 filenames on web servers, so old computers could still view your site assets.
-
RAMBUS that sucker! Okay, I could never afford that.
I’m sure Jim Kloss of XCHANGE and Whole Wheat Radio fame would have stories.