BTDTBTTS.  I was forced to &quot;resign&quot; a sysadmin 4P3 FTE job at Stanford because I refused to sign off a vendor&#x27;s rushed and unreviewed demand to likely weaken the security of well-planned credit-card processing private network.  That&#x27;s after we successfully lobbied the university to have departmental firewalls of networks, especially those connecting admin staff computers, which were previously directly on the internet with routable IPs and very little filtering... often found to be serving malware and dumpsites.  There was even a gal from Shmoo brought in to make change, but was unable to due to institutional resistance.  Later on, a laptop went &quot;missing&quot; with all staff social security numbers because of the failed ITS mantra of &quot;security is everyone&#x27;s responsibility [and therefore no ones, because it&#x27;s allowed to become a preventable Tragedy of the Commons].&quot;   There were next to no concrete, practical standards (apart from ostensible and vague policies) for securing Windows, Linux, etc. and every pocket of IT did their own thing, without any sort of minimum standard of rigor.<p>Let&#x27;s not also bring up how vendors were allowed to supervise and set vague plans for themselves, waste millions of dollars on many projects, at numerous levels, and not have any material results to show for it.  They had these vendors sitting on-site coding away for a couple years on some zombie project, still getting paid to do almost nothing, because it would too embarrassing to admit it was mismanaged and a total failure.<p>Students had no clue how I had access to all of their personal data, including the VIP pseudonym database and the housing draw, which was running on a Linux minitower which sat behind me.  As a joke, a coworker and I ran Nessus against it and found all sorts of unpatched vulerabilities which could be used to gain root access to it... it was cluster-fuck that the admin didn&#x27;t want to deal with and pretended was fine.<p>Running academic computing networks is balancing openness and freedom with the routine tasks and security costs of cleaning up owned computers... we observed unpatched machines owned in anywhere in as little as 17 to 30 seconds, with a mean average of about 25 but no longer than about 2 minutes.  The most important thing for campus IT: it needs to be kept to high standarda of professionalism, without being run like either a profit-centric corporation# or a small-town school district.<p>Note: the housing and dining dept (R&amp;DE), is part of Budgets and Auxilliaries, which is code for one of the largest profit-center, cash-cows of the whole unversity... to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars.   So if you ever wondered why drinks were so expensive in Tresidder or why the dining hall food used such cheap ingredients, it&#x27;s because it&#x27;s a business, not a center for learning.