PC ProSchools – TechTalk

IT professionals and Administrators in particular are trusted with a lot of power on their companies network, this power is necessary in order for us to do our jobs, unfortunately though less ethical IT professionals will use this power to spy, on co-workers, management, that cute girl/guy in accounting or just to poke around in people’s document folder because they are bored.

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to stop this, except to remain vigilant for such abuse, and to encourage ethical behavior in our profession. IT doesn’t have a governing body to make and enforce rules but we do have organizations that offer us support and guidance, such as USENIX , SAGE (the USENIX special interest group for administrators)  and LOPSA (The league of professional Administrators)

The above three organizations have adopted an Administrator Code of Ethics;

Professionalism: I will maintain professional conduct in the workplace, and will not allow personal feelings or beliefs to cause me to treat people unfairly or unprofessionally.

Personal Integrity: I will be honest in my professional dealings, and forthcoming about my competence and the impact of my mistakes. I will seek assistance from others when required. I will avoid conflicts of interest and biases whenever possible. When my advice is sought, if I have a conflict of interest or bias, I will declare it if appropriate, and recuse myself if necessary.

Privacy: I will access private information on computer systems only when it is necessary in the course of my technical duties. I will maintain and protect the confidentiality of any information to which I may have access regardless of the method by which I came into knowledge of it.

Laws and Policies: I will educate myself and others on relevant laws, regulations and policies regarding the performance of my duties.

Communication: I will communicate with management, users and colleagues about computer matters of mutual interest. I will strive to listen to and understand the needs of all parties.

System Integrity: I will strive to ensure the necessary integrity, reliability, and availability of the systems for which I am responsible. I will design and maintain each system in a manner to support the purpose of the system to the organization.

Education: I will continue to update and enhance my technical knowledge and other work-related skills. I will share my knowledge and experience with others.

Responsibility to Computing Community: I will cooperate with the larger computing community to maintain the integrity of network and computing resources.

Social Responsibility: As an informed professional, I will encourage the writing and adoption of relevant policies and laws consistent with these ethical principles.

Ethical Responsibility: I will strive to build and maintain a safe, healthy, and productive workplace.

I will do my best to make decisions consistent with the safety, privacy, and well-being of my community and the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might pose unexamined risks or dangers.

I will accept and offer honest criticism of technical work as appropriate and will credit properly the contributions of others.

I will lead by example, maintaining a high ethical standard and degree of professionalism in the performance of all my duties.

I will support colleagues and co-workers in following this code of ethics.

Following these guidelines will not only allow you to hold your head high as an ethical IT Professional, but many of them will actually make you a better administrator.

Cloud Computing offers convenience. You can access your data on any browser or mobile phone. Yahoo, Google or another company maintains your data with good backups. Or do they? The recent data loss for Sidekick users points to a lack of good backups. Microsoft’s subsidiary Danger had a server failure that led to the loss of data. This incident reminds us that hard drives and servers can and do fail. Microsoft was able to recover most of the lost data. Which means not all of the users will be able to get their data back. Does this mean you shouldn’t trust your data to the cloud? No. Clouding Computing offers a set of risks as well as rewards. You have to decide how much risk you can afford. If you use collaborate on projects and can’t afford to loose that work and use a web-based app like Google Apps, you should consider saving your work to your hard drive and maintaining a backup of your system. It’s your data can your really afford to lose it?

Most IT people recognize Port 25 as the one most commonly associated with SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Some of us even teach our students little mnemonics to remember the protocol and its port. (eg. SMTP = Send Mail To People and also SMTP starts with S and so does the word Small, 25 is a small number.) Well, guess what. There is another port to remember for SMTP. Its port # 587. (See this RFC for more info: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2476.txt )This port number can be used by clients to send mail to an SMTP Server. From there the server may send the mail to other servers and this transport would use the standard port 25.

The use of port 587 is not widely implemented. However there is a growing number of email software solutions that are requiring the use of port 587 and also some of the larger ISPs (AOL for instance) are actually blocking port 25 from clients because it is so widely used by trojans and bots to send out junk mail. Microsoft’s Exchange 2007 uses port 25 only between servers. The clients are required to send mail to their SMTP sever using port 587.

If you are one of those people that can remember port numbers and their associated protocol just add the info to your memory banks and continue on. If you are one of the people that makes a living troubleshooting problems for users, make sure to check that port number a second time when configuring a mail client. It just might be something other than what you are used to!