A few Microsoft bloggers (some prominent, some less so, none that I know of are employed by MS) are doing a bit of crowing today…OpenSSL, VMware, AWS….all #Heartbleed vulnerable while Azure & Windows & Hyper-V are secure! <Nelson>Ha Ha!</Nelson>
I’m new to IT blogging, but one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s dominated by consultants who are selling something other than just software: their skills & knowledge. That goes for Hyper-V bloggers or VMware bloggers, SQL bloggers or Oracle bloggers. And that’s just fine: we all have to find a way to put food on the table, and let’s face facts: blogging IT doesn’t exactly bring in the pageviews, does it? However, making sport out of the other products’ flaws can bring in the hits, and it’s fun.
Me? I’m what you call a “customer” who has always supported Microsoft products, had a love/hate/love relationship with them, a curiosity about the other camps, and a desire to just make it all work together, on time & on budget in service to my employer and my users.
So I blog from that perspective.
And so while it’s tempting to join some of my Win32 colleagues (after all the BSOD & dll.hell jokes are getting old 20 years on) as they take joy in other engineers’ suffering, I say no!
I remind the reader of that great engineer of words, John Donne, who wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
This poem gets me every time; Donne knows his stuff.
No :443 is an island entire of itself, especially in the internet age. And every network is a part of the great /0.
If one datacenter falls, our infrastructure is the less.
Any engineer’s pain diminishes me, because I have been in his shoes*, RDPd or SSHd into the device at 3am, worried about my data and my job, just as he or she is right now.
So to my friends & colleagues in the open source world trying to stem the bloodloss, I ask; do you need a hand?
Working from home today and be happy to help and I know my way around putty.
*Chinese hackers, the NSA, and other malefactors are of course exempted here
Wilson.tech 