inquiry

Less than fun work day in progress, here.

I awoke with numerous ideas and excitement to work on them, but immediately ran into a virtual machine that I needed to power down, but of course I see some assfuck message like to there effect of there being no power options available... as in I couldn't restart or shut it down... so had to dig for how to remedy that situation, eventually got there, restarted it... but it never came back up... so had to enlist IT department services, which in my situation is akin to raising one's hand, and waving it wildly whilst screaming “I'VE BEEN DOING THINGS ON THAT SYSTEM THAT COMPLETELY COMPROMISE ITS SECURITY!!! MUAHUAHUAH!!!”, when in fact all I did was user the fucking thing for about a week, and decided to restart it for aspects of it becoming flaky over time.

But, as I'm hinting, there will be questions I'll have to waste time answering....

Finally got that rectified, only to discover a server I've seen deliver content through its external IP address many times in the past no longer doing that... HTTP GETs seem to get through only when specifying the internal IP address... which of course is useless when you're hoping to have “webhooks” contact your server from without.

Something is providing an empty-html response, but it certainly ain't my shit. Probably some security mechanism... but that's going to mean more “swallowing on one's knees” in the IT department lounge... and more questions, including “Why do you want to do this anyway?” when of course the answer is “because my manager wants me to”, which should be sufficient, but won't be....

Point is, it's four hours after those moments of “ideas and excitement”, I'm drained for trying to figure shit out (on a system where I'm not allowed to do too much of value in the diagnostics realm because THAT WOULD CONSTITUTE SURRENDERING TOO MUCH POWER TO A MERE MORTAL (i.e. non-IT-dept personnel), or some ridiculous such. The initial ideas are mostly gone, or (likely) morphed to less informative – if not misleading – versions of their former glorious selves.

(Were this 40 years ago, I'd likely be en route to “filling out the forms in triplicate” to engage molasses bureaucracy....)

And what does this all come back to for me?

The fact that the bulk of my job keeps reverting to dicking with side-effects of Asshole Access Prevention™ instead of the at least somewhat more fulfilling act of useful software creation... not because “security is difficult”, but because we need it in the first place given it makes perfectly good sense that “shit happens” in the general vicinity of, um, shit for a species....