@Kaligraphic said:
I hate to break it to you, but these kinds of workarounds are the reason so many companies have messed up IT processes. You're trying to engineer around a business problem because technical fixes are politically cheap. The fact is, your client has given you multiple sets of incompatible requirements, and you need to harmonize them, rather than trying to get by on technicalities until you can't do anything.
The fix for this involves three perspectives - the side that hired you to do work, the side that asked you to use a non-client-managed machine, and the side that won't allow you to do your work using a non-client-managed machine. Get representatives of those three positions in a room together, and have them figure out a solution. At this point, you're going to have some explaining to do about how you've been able to work for three months and why this is becoming a problem - ideally this get-together should have taken place your first week there.
Realistically, the ultimate solution is likely to be that your client either issues you a laptop or kicks you out for "breaching their security".
Your point might be valid. But, as often, politics and egos play a huge part in my current problem.
Even with a corporate laptop (or workstation, mind you), I cannot access remote desktop (just-because-don't-ask). No one can (except one guy, but my guess is he's using the exact same workaround I am). As I said we had a commercial ISP connection at the beginning and didn't bother about the "can I access a remote server ?" because we could.
This project's history is a huge mess. I'll try to be short :
I'm working for a former non-tech company. The guys that deal with the network, hardware and stuff set up everything with that in mind (i.e Just block everything that's not on port 80 or 8080 and contains some words like "hack", "games", ...). That was a few years ago.
My team grew faster and faster as IT became important for their business.Apparently too fast for the network and hardware guys. They started asking a lot of things (like : opening ftp ports, setting up IIS web server, ...). I guess it went too fast, they freaked out and blocked the process. I let you guess what happened next.
Now, relationships are a "little" tense with them. And as I've often seen here, these guys have the power to block everything and don't hesitate to use it (wether it's legit or not is not the point, here).
We don't have any web integration server. In fact, we just have a production web server, we are not allowed to have more. Not that they don't want to, but the price is too high : around 50 to 100 times more expensive than just renting a random web server. So, we rented one, knowing they would be angry if they knew it, I admit it.
Oh and they cannot kick me for breaching security, the workaround comes from one of their guys. We just asked to have access to both remonte connection and source control from one connection (even if it involves using vpn), he refused, saying that we just have to switch between the two. I wasn't aware of that login limitation thing by that time.