I wanted to start a Work From Home aka Teleworking thread so that people can post things such as:
Tips and tricks to be productive
Pictures, tips, tricks
VPN woes
Need to print with a home printer but on work’s VPN? (I just connected strait to USB)
etc
I know we have a healthy bunch of experienced people here that have been working from home long before this covid thing. Time to share notes haha.
I’ll start:
I already had a WFH setup for the occasional special situation where I wanted to bring some work home. This is in the form of a work provided docking station, my “battle station” desk, monitors (LG 43" 4K monitor, 23" Portrait to the side) etc, and a @wendellLVL1 dual screen display port KVM of course!
I find my 43" 4K helps with productivity (vs work setup) when having a few VMs open, with some notes and also working making a document at the same time. Side monitor is work email.
I’m finding I need to have a designated room for work, close the door and stay disciplined in staying in said room. I don’t treat this as a “work has to do this” thing and don’t want to take advantage of this. I just recently moved into a new role that affords me the ability to work from home before this covid mess, so I don’t want to burn any bridges on keeping this privilege post crisis. So I’m finding myself being a self starter, looking for projects to do, volunteering to do things, staying engaged with management etc.
Pick a room and designate it as “The Office”. Don’t have a room, that’s okay, pick a corner and designate it as the “The Office”.
During non-working hours, do not go into said room or corner. A lot of beginners make this mistake, putting their work computer next to their gaming computer or using their gaming computer as their work computer. This is not a good idea in the beginning. You can eventually train or program yourself out of this and “turn off work” while at the same space, but in the beginning it’s important to have separate spaces.
Take breaks, go outside, maintain a schedule. If you roll out of bed between 7 AM and 10 AM and work until 4 PM or 8 PM, then you’re going to be miserable. Set your alarm, get up, and go to work at the scheduled time.
Pets will start being more clingy if you haven’t already noticed. Be patient and maybe get into the habit of shutting your door initially.
This. Last time I was home for an extended period of time and the dog got used to it, it killed me to see (hear) later when going back to work that the backyard IP cam caught her howling. Took a few days for her to get back into the groove that we leave during the day.
Use pomodoro technique to instill focus. A 25 min non-stop work followed by a 5 minute do everything else to allow yourself to be permissively be distracted. This 25-5 pattern is a cycle. If you finish 4 cycles, get a longer 30 min break. Then repeat.
Normally I’d also suggest that you set yourself to work as usual (breakfast --> shower --> drive to starbucks to get coffee --> drive back home to work in home office). But if you have a lock down / community quarantine, start as usual, then instead of driving to starbucks, just make you own coffee --> get on your car --> drink said coffee in car --> get out of your car and start working.
Was required reading for a class. I still need to load the powershell ebooks to this Kobo that @AnotherDev pointed me to. Edit sorry @SgtAwesomesauce I get you twos mixed up all the time…
I think IP scans might be on the rise. I’m going to do a longer period query to see trend, but I have a feeling there are ass hats (and/or analytics groups) scanning for open ports/easy targets due to WFH. I fear for small businesses that might be taking the easy routes for access. My home logs below
There are likely a lot of bored hackers out there. Time and boredom are the workshop of the devil or so they say. Do I need to do something extra if I have a default pfsense box in front of my desktop linux desktop pc?
That Splunk dashboard is taken from my home pfsense logs. I typically see the same sources that seem to do routine scans. Maybe that midwest one is a node for Shodan? I donno. But I’m going to do a longer trend query just to see if I’m right/see if my public IP is getting hit more often.
There is a constant ‘heartbeat’ or background noise of scans, but I’m interested to see if there is a change- though my dataset is extremely small… just my IP haha.
Okay, first thing’s first: Run Linux. Everyone knows you can’t game on Linux. Productivity++
Now for some actual tips:
Act as if you’re at an office while working from home. This means no “oh, I should really adjust the angle of the toilet water supply” and DEFINITELY no “Can you do the dishes/vacuum the kitchen/take out the trash/etc…” You’re not even in the building.
Wireguard + Ansible + AWS OP.
But for real, we’re a 90% remote company, so transitioning to 100% remote was a matter of making 25 VPN accounts.
I started WFH mid-January just as a perk of the current contract I’m on, but I’ve realized that one monitor isn’t enough. I really need to get a bigger desk so I can fit a 2nd monitor like I intended to do a year or two ago.
wish i had a larger one so i could do more with it but im just making do.
