You don't give hammers to kids.
Seriously, your script is an excellent tool. I'm against the practice of running it just because someone else is running it.
TL;DR:
I understand your stance. You assume the person you’re handing the pencil to is illiterate when circling multi choice questions. If phrased in another way; this means you’ll remove the cd-rom drive so the client doesn’t use it as a cup holder.
I understand that this approach keeps mistakes from happening, and technical support to a minimum (for you) and them. Especially considering how most people don’t touch their routers until the internet stops working and there is a problem to fix. In the original poster case he felt frustrated when he couldn’t find documentation or it didn’t work out of the box. A legitimate frustration.
Still I find the don’t break it way of thinking a little much if you umbrella everyone to the same level of technical knowledge. I’ll be quick to admit I don’t have remotely the knowledge or experience you or adamm have, but I’ll break a system a 100 times to correct it myself because it’s a learning experience, and not everyone needs their hands held. But yes when supporting another you need a different perspective.
I’ll agree with you, but still think it needs flexibility. Start simple determine how comfortable, and competent they are and go from there. I’ve works years of technical support, and can tell you I have the most trouble with this. That and particularly organizing my thoughts.
Anyways Adamms tool is pretty great. You’re likely correct in that even a daily update to the community blocklist may not be aggressive enough to find and clean the blocklist when the ip address is no longer malicious. But for me it does give me a tool to better manage and research what my devices maybe doing with the outbound connections (assuming you trust alien-vault’s results). Visually this is nicer then looking at raw firewall logs. Inbound the standard firewall will blanket deny any connections made to your router without a prior outbound knock to its destination.
Still I understand why preemptively blocking something that “might” be useful to the client could cause them problems with connecting to a server. So to avoid the hassle of the what if, and the what if they lack the knowledge to understand how to whitelist, and subsequently remove the whitelist if no longer blocked by a community list; it’s easier to not recommend it.
Btw if I’m wrong about this feel free to correct
Edit: fixed spelling, clarified, added more to essay.
