My company once blocked access to its own website.
You can never be too careful.
Noticing a lot of suspicious activity coming from there…
I no longer waste time.
Because i have already broken all the company security policies.
Protip: convince the IT team that Linux is essential for your development work. Small percentage of the IT team is aware about security on Linux.
It’s been ages since I did IT. If I had a user who wanted to run Linux then I knew that, on average, they were going to cause me a lot less headaches with random user issues so I wouldn’t mind being flexible. Endpoint security will be different, but a lot of network security is handled through network devices that don’t care what the client is.
If I had a user who wanted to run Linux then I knew that, on average, they were going to cause me a lot less headaches with random user issues
In my case, it’s the IT team which creates more issues for Linux users.
Whenever they change security policies, they never test it out on Linux and our connection goes down (some VPN/Firewall/DNS policy). It takes ages for us Linux users to convince them that we didn’t do any changes on our system and this problem is on their side.
I’m so glad to be away from corporate IT and working with small teams of highly technical people where every request isn’t “ok I’ll fill out the paperwork” but "Hmm, we could do it like this: " We just created a small network, gapped from everything else, where you can just use the bandwidth but cannot possibly affect the production network. Since our bandwidth utilization is generally around 5% of maximum it’s not issue to grab things using a 10Gb chunk of a few hundreds of Gb of bandwidth. The traffic is tagged with a low priority QOS packet so even in the worst case it will never affect network operation.
It’s like going back a quarter century when all of the ISPs would only officially support Windows or Apple. I’d have to let them know exactly what information I needed (which if I remember right was pretty basic, like 2-3 items) and tell them to trust me to do the rest. Usually there was a little pushback because they wanted to go through their support scripts. I found when I started working in corporate jobs, I’d talk to the IT people and promise to do my own troubleshooting and I just about always was able to run Linux at work. Made for a much more enjoyable, and productive, work day.
Once, many moons ago, a group of devs at my old work got deny on internal zone-to-zone Firewall open request that they needed for integration between two internal systems, so they ended up making a script that e-mailed the info to a hotmail.com (SMTP was open) account and then wrote a script to login and screenscrape the mail info from hotmail back to the other server (https was open through surf proxy).
As someone in IT that is both wonderful and horrifying.
My employer blocks adblock.
My employer after finding out I’ve been moving my mouse in circles 3 hours straight
Where is “meetings that could have been an email”?
My favorite method is an SSH Tunnel. If you don’t have access to SSH then you can usually get away with a portable Cmder install on a USB stick.
My company blocked the Microsoft store. But I convinced the IT guy to make me an admin on my machine so I can install anything I want. I still can’t unblock the Microsoft store and no one I can talk to in IT knows how to unblock it. So I have to spend time finding websites that have the software I need (like nugget package explorer or other Microsoft apps that IT doesn’t officially support) and hope that the download doesn’t kill me.
People use the Microsoft store? I moved to chocolatey and if it’s not there install things like it’s windows 98.
Fyi you can download and install Microsoft Store programs without using the store directly, but still from the official source.
It’s interpreting work item descriptions & acceptance criteria over here 🙃
Insert jesus christ meme
