Work laptop can't connect to home network. What do you do?



  • Do you:

    1. do nothing
    2. ask the IT person at work to help you connect
    3. ...or
    4. let your husband solve the problem by doing a clean reinstall of Windows, then complain at work when nothing works there (especially the program that you need to do your job)?

    I admit I haven't locked down the BIOS, because I never expected that anybody would even think of doing a nuke & pave on a company-owned laptop. Well, you learn something new every day.


  • I had almost exactly the same thing a few years ago. A user complained a program didn't work (it was some crappy thing that worked over 56k modems - it was that long ago), and after an hour on the phone, couldn't get it working (and it was before we had remote-control support options, so couldn't just hop on and look myself).


    I asked her to bring it in. She got very stroppy, claimed that I knew nothing, and that her husband who "worked in IT" knew more than me (it later turned out he sold CRM software, and was about as technically minded as a hedgehog).



    She came in the next day, with a laptop that had been completely formatted - Without even an attempt to install Windows...



  • I would assume that in both cases mentioned above there was some sort of disciplinary action taken against the users.  A company laptop is not your to mess about with.  In both cases the result is a waste of resources.  Plus such a move might allow circumvention of settings made by administrators.  Maybe I'm just being anal.



  • In my case, management got rid of her a few days later because she wasn't doing her job properly anyway. A salesperson bringing in the grand sum of zero sales a month ain't good...



  • @ender said:

    I admit I haven't locked down the BIOS, because I never expected that anybody would even think of doing a nuke & pave on a company-owned laptop. Well, you learn something new every day.
    Deliberately damaging company property? Sackable offence, surely? She's lucky if you don't call the police. In my book this is no different to getting frustrated and sticking a hammer through the screen, or some such.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @intertravel said:

    @ender said:
    I admit I haven't locked down the BIOS, because I never expected that anybody would even think of doing a nuke & pave on a company-owned laptop. Well, you learn something new every day.
    Deliberately damaging company property? Sackable offence, surely? She's lucky if you don't call the police. In my book this is no different to getting frustrated and sticking a hammer through the screen, or some such.

    Really? I wouldn't want to work with you.

    I think there's a bit of difference between physically smashing a screen and reformatting a hard drive. What property was actually damaged (maybe if she destroyed some critical information or something, but everything about this woman screams expendable)? It certainly was something she shouldn't have done, and would obviously require additional effort from IT support or whatever, and should have the effect of reducing her ability to perform her job. Of course, we now know that her performance wasn't really reduced, which is a much better reason to fire her.

    I'd say this situation, ceteris paribus, is reprimand material. Then again, I don't (and never have) work in any sort of IT support role, so maybe I just don't have same perspective.



  • @intertravel said:

    @ender said:
    I admit I haven't locked down the BIOS, because I never expected that anybody would even think of doing a nuke & pave on a company-owned laptop. Well, you learn something new every day.
    Deliberately damaging company property? Sackable offence, surely? She's lucky if you don't call the police. In my book this is no different to getting frustrated and sticking a hammer through the screen, or some such.

    anal retentive much?

    this is why you have standard system images that you can network install.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I think there's a bit of difference between physically smashing a screen and reformatting a hard drive. What property was actually damaged (maybe if she destroyed some critical information or something, but everything about this woman screams expendable)?
    She took a working laptop, and turned it into junk that requires significant amounts of someone's time to fix. Would you say that formatting the company fileserver would also just be 'reformatting a hard drive'? What about the backups? That would just be 'formatting some tapes', right?

    You don't have to sack her, but it's certainly a justified option. If she's just a replaceable drone, this kind of stupidity would put her top of my list anyway.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @intertravel said:

    @boomzilla said:
    I think there's a bit of difference between physically smashing a screen and reformatting a hard drive. What property was actually damaged (maybe if she destroyed some critical information or something, but everything about this woman screams expendable)?

    She took a working laptop, and turned it into junk that requires significant amounts of someone's time to fix. Would you say that formatting the company fileserver would also just be 'reformatting a hard drive'? What about the backups? That would just be 'formatting some tapes', right?

    I dunno...maybe you missed the part where I said, "some critical information." To be fair, the laptop might not have been working, since it was apparently having difficulty in attaching to networks outside of the office. So it was likely to need some attention one way or the other (though just as likely, some user education, admittedly).

    The "significant amounts of...time" isn't necessarily so, either, in this day and age of standard images.

    @intertravel said:
    You don't have to sack her, but it's certainly a justified option. If she's just a replaceable drone, this kind of stupidity would put her top of my list anyway.
    Sorry, but unless you expand the scenario from what the OP said, it shouldn't be a fireable offense by itself. Like I said, some sort of reprimand, which, in a sane environment would, in fact, move her to the top of the list. I'm certainly not defending her. But you're overreacting to her like blakeyrat likes to about a windows app where every control isn't native, or something.


  • @boomzilla said:

    To be fair, the laptop might not have been working, since it was apparently having difficulty in attaching to networks outside of the office.
    I'm pretty sure the difficulty was "I can't set my home network to be anything else than Public network (because I don't have admin password)" - nothing else. This is one of 2 laptops that this particular client bought about a month ago, both were installed from the same image and then customized for each user (there's some software that has to be installed manually, since it creates a directory on the root of C:\ drive where it needs R/W access; inclidentally, this was the software that user was missing today).

    The laptop will get a fresh image and some further lockdowns, and the client will charge the expenses directly to the user.



  • @boomzilla said:

    But you're overreacting to her like blakeyrat likes to about a windows app where every control isn't native, or something.

    Hey I represent that!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @boomzilla said:
    But you're overreacting to her like blakeyrat likes to about a windows app where every control isn't native, or something.
    Hey I represent that!

    Gonna start using that more often as a metaphor.


  •  @boomzilla said:

    But you're overreacting to her like blakeyrat
    I see no over-reaction.  You don't fuck with things that don't belong to you.

     @galgorah said:

    A company laptop is not your to mess about with. 
    This is something that people tend to forget.

    When I first started fooling around with Google Chrome I noticed that it installs into a weird non-standard location and the installer doesn't allow you to change it.  So I did some Googling to see if it was possible to put Chrome in the normal location used by every other program.  Apparently, the official explanation of why Chrome uses its weird non-standard location is "so it can be installed on computers where you don't have the necessary access privledge to install to C:\Program Files."   Wait . . . . What?  If you don't have sufficient access to install something into C:\Program Files then it almost certainly means that YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE INSTALLING STUFF ON THAT COMPUTER.

    I used to think that the IT people were a bunch of pricks with all their stupid rules and restrictions until I shared an office with a person who would somehow manage to install random shit and fuck up her computer on a daily basis.  And then ask me for help fixing it.   And I didn't have much choice because my preferred choice of answer, "tough shit, it's not my problem" would mean having to do all the work myself while she sat there waiting hours or days for IT to come fix it.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @El_Heffe said:

    @boomzilla said:
    But you're overreacting...

    I see no over-reaction. You don't fuck with things that don't belong to you.

    So what's the "fuck with things" threshold that gets you fired? I don't think anyone has disagreed that she did something wrong. I'm saying this is more like Lindsay Lohan shoplifting than a Bernie Madoff investment opportunity.

    @El_Heffe said:

    I used to think that the IT people were a bunch of pricks with all their stupid rules and restrictions until I shared an office with a person who would somehow manage to install random shit and fuck up her computer on a daily basis.  And then ask me for help fixing it.   And I didn't have much choice because my preferred choice of answer, "tough shit, it's not my problem" would mean having to do all the work myself while she sat there waiting hours or days for IT to come fix it.

    See, just like intertravel, you've added to the situation here. If this were a recurring problem, then I'd be right there with you. But the OP wasn't talking about your loser coworker. I work with someone who has similar issues about once or twice a year (usually some Chinese malware). After getting the computer reimaged, it usually takes about a week for said person to set up the dev environment and start being "productive" again.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Wait . . . . What?  If you don't have sufficient access to install something into C:\Program Files then it almost certainly means that YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE INSTALLING STUFF ON THAT COMPUTER.
    Guess what? That's next on my to-block list. Looks like I'll have to set up Software restriction policy to block all executables except those in Program Files, Windows ... and that world-writable folder in C:. Some day I'll have to have a nice long chat with the developers of this program (among it's problems are complaining that .NET 2.0 is not installed on machines that run Windows 7 and requiring special fonts that the program apparently only tries to install on-demand, which of course fails when it's run with limited privileges).



  • @Sutherlands said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @boomzilla said:
    But you're overreacting to her like blakeyrat likes to about a windows app where every control isn't native, or something.
    Hey I represent that!

    Gonna start using that more often as a metaphor.

    Credit where credit is due:



  • special fonts

    Fonts. I hate fonts. Wish each user had a private font folder they had write access to so you don't need pretty high ranking privileges to use that awesome font you found on a work/school machine. Maybe better if there was a "browse..." option in the standard font menu. And have you ever had to use Freetype? Wish there was a simple "here's a string, render it" function, but instead you need a degree in typography to print "hello world" with correct spacing.



  • @nexekho said:

    Fonts. I hate fonts. Wish each user had a private font folder they had write access to so you don't need pretty high ranking privileges to use that awesome font you found on a work/school machine. Maybe better if there was a "browse..." option in the standard font menu. And have you ever had to use Freetype? Wish there was a simple "here's a string, render it" function, but instead you need a degree in typography to print "hello world" with correct spacing.

    ~/.fonts



  • @boomzilla said:

    See, just like intertravel, you've added to the situation here. If this were a recurring problem, then I'd be right there with you.
    It's all my fault. I wrote 'sackable offence' meaning that she could be sacked on that basis, not that she must be. Hell, I took a support call a few years ago where someone reported that their PC was 'dead'. I started on the usual trouble-shooting, and the user stopped me, said 'don't bother' and explained that he'd stomped it to death in anger at losing a major sale, and just needed a replacement. He had indeed pancaked the thing. His line manager had given him a ticking off, but that was all the action to be taken because this guy earned upwards of £100k per year himself, and was worth maybe ten times that to the company. If he'd made a habit of pc-stomping, they'd have taken them out of his wages or something, but he was effectively unsackable.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @intertravel said:

    Hell, I took a support call a few years ago where someone reported that their PC was 'dead'. I started on the usual trouble-shooting, and the user stopped me, said 'don't bother' and explained that he'd stomped it to death in anger at losing a major sale, and just needed a replacement. He had indeed pancaked the thing. His line manager had given him a ticking off, but that was all the action to be taken because this guy earned upwards of £100k per year himself, and was worth maybe ten times that to the company. If he'd made a habit of pc-stomping, they'd have taken them out of his wages or something, but he was effectively unsackable.

    Excellent. At least he didn't let you work through the script. Successful sales dudes live in a different world than the rest of us.



  • @boomzilla said:

    At least he didn't let you work through the script.
    I am pleased to say I have never worked anywhere with a script, and never will unless I'm writing it, not working from it. But yes, it was nice that he stopped me going through all the usual (unscripted) checks :)



  • Ask the IT person at work. It's the company's notebook. They are not obligated to help you use it at home, but certainly they have the exclusive right to play around with the settings. If you're working at home in the evenings and on weekends then it is to the company's benefit to get it to connect at home. The IT guy may not be able to get it to work at your house, but he's the best hope for getting it to work at both places. Your husband doesn't know what the workplace requirements are, so he's likely to mess it up (sorry guy).

    When you're in the office, take it to the nice IT support person and ask. He can look at it there. Don't just phone him from home; he needs to be able to look at the settings on the screen.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @AndyCanfield said:

    They are not obligated to help you use it at home
    That's a rather (incorrect) sweeping statement there.
    @AndyCanfield said:
    If you're working at home in the evenings and on weekends then it is to the company's benefit to get it to connect at home.
    And that's when, in the cases where it's part of your contract that you (can) work from home, it's incorrect.



  • @intertravel said:

    @ender said:
    I admit I haven't locked down the BIOS, because I never expected that anybody would even think of doing a nuke & pave on a company-owned laptop. Well, you learn something new every day.
    Deliberately damaging company property? Sackable offence, surely? She's lucky if you don't call the police. In my book this is no different to getting frustrated and sticking a hammer through the screen, or some such.

     

    I have done similar, the IT policy was just too long winded and inflexible to allow engineering dep. to install applications freely and play with network settings etc.  So i just repartitioned and added a second install of windows for actually doing work.



  • I give that bitch a cake.  Bitches love cake.



  • @intertravel said:

    His line manager had given him a ticking off, but that was all the action to be taken because this guy earned upwards of £100k per year himself, and was worth maybe ten times that to the company. If he'd made a habit of pc-stomping, they'd have taken them out of his wages or something, but he was effectively unsackable.
    Also it doesn't sound like 10K a year in equipment charges would hurt him much.  That's assuming he breaks like 10 a year.



  • @Xyro said:

    @nexekho said:
    Fonts. I hate fonts. Wish each user had a private font folder they had write access to so you don't need pretty high ranking privileges to use that awesome font you found on a work/school machine. Maybe better if there was a "browse..." option in the standard font menu. And have you ever had to use Freetype? Wish there was a simple "here's a string, render it" function, but instead you need a degree in typography to print "hello world" with correct spacing.

    ~/.fonts

    Or ~/Library/Fonts

    In XP you could simply cacls C:\WINDOWS\Fonts /e /g users:f – then everyone can install their own fonts, simple as that. I've never checked Vista, but this doesn't work in 7. C:\WINDOWS\Fonts doesn't even get a Security tab in Explorer and cacls is banned – I guess this is payback against the whole world for breaching the Xbox with a defective font.

    I have no idea what Microsoft staff use computers for. They evidently don't use any fonts that didn't ship with Windows and Office.


  • Garbage Person

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I have no idea what Microsoft staff use computers for. They evidently don't use any fonts that didn't ship with Windows and Office.
    Well, considering their marketing department uses fonts that ship with Windows and Office, and nobody else should give a flying fuck about fonts at all, this seems quite plausible.

     

    Anyway, any user adding fonts has the same ramifications as any user adding software - licensing. And fonts can get MIGHTY FUCKING EXPENSIVE. However, taking away the configurability sounds like an inadvertant omission. Complaints made and/or bugs filed?



  • @Weng said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I have no idea what Microsoft staff use computers for. They evidently don't use any fonts that didn't ship with Windows and Office.
    Well, considering their marketing department uses fonts that ship with Windows and Office, and nobody else should give a flying fuck about fonts at all, this seems quite plausible.

    I will take that to be sarcasm, because I don't want to believe that you're serious.

    @Weng said:

     

    Anyway, any user adding fonts has the same ramifications as any user adding software - licensing. And fonts can get MIGHTY FUCKING EXPENSIVE. However, taking away the configurability sounds like an inadvertant omission. Complaints made and/or bugs filed?

    Fine, let's have yet another Group Policy to allow admins to ban fonts for micromanagement organisations. After all, we can't have too many ways to ban people from using their own computer, right down to banning the desktop. I only rediscovered that one after a virus thought it was really funny to ban someone from using the desktop (it took me a while to figure out why the desktop wasn't working – no icons, no context menu, nothing, yet at the same time, no errors and nothing crashing). There are policy settings to ban every menu in Explorer selectively – Microsoft are far too busy appeasing petty-minded vindictive network admins to waste time making a computer more usable instead of less.

    The configurability wasn't removed, anyway – UAC simply clamped down on the security "hole" wherein an administrator could once override Microsoft's failings. Microsoft were never truly interested in users being able to make per-user configuration changes and installations – there isn't even a UI for HKCU\Software\Classes (the only people who seem to know about this key are virus writers who reassociate .exe files at this level).

    As for complaints? You serious? Look at the amount of people complaining about the Windows 7 Explorer tree scrolling bug. Microsoft apparently insist it's supposed to work like that, and utterly refuse to resolve it. Classic Shell resolves it with around five lines of code that simply filter out a stray window message that scrolls the tree panel the wrong way. If Microsoft lack the resources, kindness and sanity to resolve something that trivial, I doubt that I'd succeed in convincing them single-handedly to introduce AppData\Roaming\Fonts. After all, I appear to be one of exceptionally few people who've picked up on the problem that restricted users cannot install fonts whatsoever in 7. That tree scrolling bug has pages and pages of vain protests, and yes, I found it very quickly and it is annoying.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @Weng said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I have no idea what Microsoft staff use computers for. They evidently don't use any fonts that didn't ship with Windows and Office.
    Well, considering their marketing department uses fonts that ship with Windows and Office, and nobody else should give a flying fuck about fonts at all, this seems quite plausible.

    I will take that to be sarcasm, because I don't want to believe that you're serious.

    No, he's spot on. If you don't work in a typographic/design role, and you find yourself wanting non-standard fonts, you're doing it wrong.

    And your rant about 'petty-minded vindictive sysadmins' suggests that you've never met a user in your life. Sysadmins don't lock down systems for the fun of it - it's a lot of work. They lock down systems so that people don't 'break' the computers. If a user doesn't have privs to install fonts, it's for a damn reason.

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    After all, I appear to be one of exceptionally few people who've picked up on the problem that restricted users cannot install fonts whatsoever in 7.
    As far as I know, and bear in mind that I haven't a W7 system here to test, the reason you're the only person who's 'noticed' that is that you're completely wrong. Security policy settings can, I believe, be set to allow/prevent font installation, but once it's allowed for all users, you're good to go. I guess the fact that they finally removed one method of installing fonts that was deprecated when XP came out (if not before - was it iWin 98?) because they introduced a new and better method really bothers you?



  • @intertravel said:

    No, he's spot on. If you don't work in a typographic/design role ...

    What, you don't think anyone in design might be using Windows instead of a Mac? Yes I am talking about a designer who can't install fonts onto her own PC.

    On topic – users are capable of proceeding the whole way through a laptop factory reinstall (from F11 at the BIOS to completion) seemingly without having any idea what they're doing, and then wondering why all of their programs and files have disappeared. Possibly this is why some BIOSes completely hide all the keys needed to do anything special at boot, which leads to lots of Googling and trying various suggestions until you find the right ones. (You might have the manual, but I'm very irritated with an incorrect printed Lenovo troubleshooting guide that gives vague instructions on performing factory restore on a ThinkPad T500, when so far as I can tell, no such data exists on a T500, and another manual I found online indicates that I would need more CDs anyway, that didn't ship with the computer. Booting from TRK, I can't see a copy of Windows on the recovery partition anyway.)

    Finding the dividing line betwen stupid users and stupid developers is hard, but the amount of thoroughly stupid software in the world that perplexes even power users, sysadmins and developers must leave you wondering how an ordinary user is supposed to make head or tail out of it. By the time you're banning menus in Windows Explorer, if you've not questioned the principles of computer operation itself, you've failed.

    @intertravel said:

    Security policy settings can, I believe, be set to allow/prevent font installation, but once it's allowed for all users, you're good to go.

    I had a very brief look on Google, and all the top hits indicate that everyone else is in the same boat as me. Feel free to actually share this sacred knowledge if you do possess it.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    What, you don't think anyone in design might be using Windows instead of a Mac?
    No, I think they're a special case who might well need extra fonts.@Daniel Beardsmore said:
    Yes I am talking about a designer who can't install fonts onto her own PC.
    Yeah, that's for the best, given my experience of designers. If they need them, they can request them.@Daniel Beardsmore said:
    @intertravel said:
    Security policy settings can, I believe, be set to allow/prevent font installation, but once it's allowed for all users, you're good to go.

    I had a very brief look on Google, and all the top hits indicate that everyone else is in the same boat as me. Feel free to actually share this sacred knowledge if you do possess it.

    Are lmgtfy links still funny?

    Basically, you're not supposed to use the 'just copy them to the Fonts directory' method any more - I don't think that works properly even if you do it as administrator. The other methods will work fine as long as the security policy allows it.





  • I've certainly had weird behaviour copying them to the Fonts folder, but do you feel that there is a sufficient rationale for breaking this? It does work, but it's just erratic – the fonts don't always show up for the regular user. Given that this method has worked for years, and still tries to work now, should it be my fault that Microsoft left a standard feature with erratic behaviour? What does right-click > Install do that can't be replicated trivially by Explorer after a drag operation? This is the same as I was saying with Explorer's tree scroll bug – these should be simple fixes, but they're left broken.

    Besides, I just watched a YouTube video from your link, and he clearly demonstrates right-click > Install, drag and drop and copy and paste as all being perfectly valid approaches. But the Install context menu has one of those nice shields on it, so you're no better off than you started, in that it's a protected operation, because you're modifying global state for an operation that should be personal as it is with Mac OS X, with its awesome tiered Library system. I'd have to dig more deeply here into this apparent security policy, but I've already wasted hours trying to find any way of permitting restricted user font installation in Windows. It's not for the lack of trying, trust me. I am sure I suck (I know I suck at life, I know that better than anyone) and I don't do any of this out of choice, either.

    And yes, I don't use 7 enough yet. I don't have time during the day to completely rebuild my XP work PC with 7, and I'm not sure I'm ready yet to throw my finely customised PC into turmoil. I can't test at home – even if I had a decent home PC, I only have one big display at home instead of the two smaller ones at work, so I can't test multimonitor behaviour safely (e.g. UltraMon + True Launch Bar in 7 – two monitors needs two taskbars!). I've set up my old laptop with 7, but I rarely use it. (I'm holding off on a replacement home PC until I can be certain that I know what I want. And it may well be Linux, not Windows. I need to boost my masochism level.)



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    I'd have to dig more deeply here into this apparent security policy, but I've already wasted hours trying to find any way of permitting restricted user font installation in Windows.
    Seriously? You know there's a 'Security Policy Explorer'? Open it up, browse through it until you find the right setting, toggle it if necessary.


  • Garbage Person

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    As for complaints? You serious? Look at the amount of people complaining about the Windows 7 Explorer tree scrolling bug.
    Googled this. Tried the repro instructions. Works fine for me.



  • @Weng said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    As for complaints? You serious? Look at the amount of people complaining about the Windows 7 Explorer tree scrolling bug.
    Googled this. Tried the repro instructions. Works fine for me.

    I only reinstalled my own laptop with Windows 7 a few weeks ago and I was sure I could reproduce this in Service Pack 1, because that's when I installed Classic Shell. However, I've just installed another laptop with Windows 7 and you're correct – Explorer appears to have been fixed. Thank goodness for that! :)



  • @intertravel said:

    @Daniel Beardsmore said:
    I'd have to dig more deeply here into this apparent security policy, but I've already wasted hours trying to find any way of permitting restricted user font installation in Windows.
    Seriously? You know there's a 'Security Policy Explorer'? Open it up, browse through it until you find the right setting, toggle it if necessary.

    According to Google, nothing called Security Policy Explorer exists. You're not helping your cause by pulling names out of your backside ;-) I presume you mean gpedit.msc/Local Security Policy.

    It looks like you can mess around with Group Policy to remove the lock on C:\WINDOWS\Fonts, but even then, it appears that UAC must still be shut off as it religiously protects that folder.

    I freely admit that I suck at Google, but I'm not seeing any sign that everyone else and their dog knows of a magic unlock for this -- everyone's messing around trying to rip the protection off this folder, be that with attrib, GPO or whatever. Your suggestion that a simple "Allow restricted users to install fonts" policy exists, appears to be unfounded.



  • @intertravel said:

    And your rant about 'petty-minded vindictive sysadmins' suggests that you've never met a user in your life. Sysadmins don't lock down systems for the fun of it - it's a lot of work. They lock down systems so that people don't 'break' the computers. If a user doesn't have privs to install fonts, it's for a damn reason.

    Gah! I detest small-mindedness when it comes to IT policies. I used to work at a research facility where you could find almost all sorts of users: industrial designers, FPGA designers, ASIC designers, AI researchers, various programmers, 3D modellers, you name it.
    As always they standardized on the lowest common denominator. Result: not good.

    Considering the amount of tools that you install in order to get your work done, do you really believe that there is any subset of "approved" and supported programs which will fulfill all the needs of an entire company?

    The answer if you ask me is a loud and clear NO. I believe that its sufficient to just make sure that everyone is responsible for their own actions, provide basic protection such as antivirus and subdivide networks or take other external measures in order to prevent virus outbreaks and other malice. A personal workstation should be personal. Freedom under responsibility.

    If any employee keeps screwing up their compy due to incompetence, offer a volontary lockdown of it. If they do it by negligence, warn them and fire them if the problem persists.



  • @Obfuscator said:

    @intertravel said:
    And your rant about 'petty-minded vindictive sysadmins' suggests that you've never met a user in your life. Sysadmins don't lock down systems for the fun of it - it's a lot of work. They lock down systems so that people don't 'break' the computers. If a user doesn't have privs to install fonts, it's for a damn reason.
    Gah! I detest small-mindedness when it comes to IT policies. I used to work at a research facility where you could find almost all sorts of users: industrial designers, FPGA designers, ASIC designers, AI researchers, various programmers, 3D modellers, you name it. As always they standardized on the lowest common denominator. Result: not good. Considering the amount of tools that you install in order to get your work done, do you really beleive that there is any subset of "approved" and supported programs which will fulfill all the needs of an entire company? The answer if you ask me is a loud and clear NO. I beleive that its sufficient to just make sure that everyone is responsible for their own actions, provide basic protection such as antivirus and subdivide networks or take other external measures in order to prevent virus outbreaks and other malice. A personal workstation should be personal. Freedom under responsibility. If any employee keeps screwing up their compy due to incompetence, offer a volontary lockdown of it. If they do it by negligence, warn them and fire them if the problem persists.

    Right, so I'll just add a super charger, cut the springs and redo the paint job on the company-owner devilvery car I drive every day?

    Letting everyone fuck up their *company owned* machines, plus potentially everyone else on the network because it's "easier" to administer is just short sighted and will end up costing you more money via down time, repairs, etc.  The principal of least privilege is a great start, but they then need to have different security policies for different types of users.  Devs should have VS2010, but don't need Photoshop, etc.  The other reason you shouldn't just let your users go nuts is because of licensing: if they use a product that is licensed for personal use on their work machine, their employer can get sued.  If you genuinely need something, just tell them, and also why.  If you really do need it, it won't be a problem. 

    EAST READER: Quit fucking around trying to install stuff you don't need and get back to work.



  • Regarding the supercharger: I wasn't talking about the formatting, but the font restriction. I dont think its justified to bypass sane security measures or play around, I'm just saying that some devs want Notepad++, others VirtuaWin and gvim. Someone needs some obscure tool to parse their electrical layouts they get from the Korean clients, whatever. You cant standardize people. You can support them, by providing VS for devs and photoshop for designers, but to assume that a non-designer will never need to install a font is way too restrictive. Too much lockdown and you start loosing the creativity of your workers. Bad idea.

    I guess that what I'm trying to say that when a user has screwed up their compy you shouldnt react 'oh another stupid user, lets tighten the security policies some more for everyone', but rather 'this individual clearly doesn't respect our security policy, lets warn him/her'.



  • @Obfuscator said:

    Regarding the supercharger: I wasn't talking about the formatting, but the font restriction. I dont think its justified to bypass sane security measures or play around, I'm just saying that some devs want Notepad++, others VirtuaWin and gvim. Someone needs some obscure tool to parse their electrical layouts they get from the Korean clients, whatever. You cant standardize people. You can support them, by providing VS for devs and photoshop for designers, but to assume that a non-designer will never need to install a font is way too restrictive. Too much lockdown and you start loosing the creativity of your workers. Bad idea.

    Fair enough, and as I said, if you can justify it, then go ahead...  I just wouldn't want to hear "I *need* XYZ program".  "Why?".  "Um, because..."



  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    Fair enough, and as I said, if you can justify it, then go ahead...  I just wouldn't want to hear "I *need* XYZ program".  "Why?".  "Um, because..."

    I hear you. What i do think is that giving people freedom also somewhat lessens this type of behaviour. People who have no influence have a nasty habit of blaming everything on others and circumstances. I have no experience in IT support so I suppose my view could be somewhat idealistic, but I am of the opinion that if people take responsibility of their actions IRL, so should they when it comes to IT.



  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    @Obfuscator said:

    Regarding the supercharger: I wasn't talking about the formatting, but the font restriction. I dont think its justified to bypass sane security measures or play around, I'm just saying that some devs want Notepad++, others VirtuaWin and gvim. Someone needs some obscure tool to parse their electrical layouts they get from the Korean clients, whatever. You cant standardize people. You can support them, by providing VS for devs and photoshop for designers, but to assume that a non-designer will never need to install a font is way too restrictive. Too much lockdown and you start loosing the creativity of your workers. Bad idea.

    Fair enough, and as I said, if you can justify it, then go ahead...  I just wouldn't want to hear "I *need* XYZ program".  "Why?".  "Um, because..."

    That's a bad idea, unless you are ok with the answer, "I don't know yet; I need to play around with it and see how it helps my workflow."



  • You can have deviations that are temporary.  So if you need to work with it for the trial license period, then at least track that it's installed on your machine.

    Look, I didn't invent these types of rules, but I do understand the need for them.  I've been in shops where you have FULL admin control and in others where you have very limited (i.e. you need to ask for permission to enable JS debugging in IE).  Personally I found it much easier to work in the full control env., but I can easily see a case for limiting business users (read morons) to have neutured settings.  They install stupid shit that they don't need to bog down their machines and they have a horrible tendency to click every link that crosses their field of vision and ALWAYS click "OK" when the activex warning comes up...


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