Quote:
Originally Posted by Grue
So day 2 at new job at GIANTCO.
Given a skylake HP with 16gb ram and... windows 7. Git bash is ~5 second delay between commands so doing command line stuff with cmd.exe. Windows 7 or bloatware, who knows?
Cannot download anything or run .exes but no surprise there.
Usual netnanny sites blocked, but not reddit or imgur. OK?
Cannot set default browser?
Cannot globally install npm packages i.e. update the PATH env variable? But can run them if I type out their real path. Fun.
No problem installing git from their "appstore" though. Because I couldn't just clone in a virus and run it? I couldn't just use curl from git bash to curl in an exe virus?
No problem with people bringing in their personal cell phones because they couldn't just take a picture of their screen to steal sensitive information?
And heres the worst: chrome extensions blocked. Firefox? No problem!
There used to be a great little feature in Chrome that allows all computers on a network to share and entire browser config, same session cookies, and so on. This means you can look at other people's emails, grab other people's session data, see their browsing history, and download porn on everyone's computer.
****
I guess I can share my recent Windows story. I was working a contract and some system needed to talk to the database via ODBC. I seriously thought about declining this because a) it's Windows and b) other people already tried to configure this.
I connect to the machine and you guessed it; whoever worked on this last downloaded a propriety driver, that driver was not paid for, and good luck getting anything to work. I immediately uninstall said driver and continue on.
Windows and ODBC are violent enemies, as far as I can tell. ODBC makes an effort by creating MSI files, but... it doesn't always work as expected. Some drivers are x64, some x86, some are both. The trick is figuring out which driver is the correct one, and if you guessed that a 64 bit Windows machine takes a 64 bit driver, nope, very wrong on that one. And if you think ODBC is easy to configure, let it be known that exactly one source on the internet shows the correct technique. I spent a good 40 hours of my life figuring it all out.
The x86 driver didn't work, so I
tried to install the x64. I wasn't completely surprised that the download process was corrupted and had to think of some reasons why:
1- I used the wrong ODBC driver, but I know it can be one of either versions 1 to 6, either x86 or x64 or dual, and I don't know if I want the original or updated release. To be sure, i'd have to install, uninstall, and test each of 25 drivers.
2- The propriety driver successfully uninstalled, but there is still a bunch of cruft in the registry which has to be manually deleted, and until this very dangerous process is done, I won't be able to install ODBC drivers.
3- Who the **** knows why and it won't ever work on this machine.
Even I, who has done this for about 50 computers across Windows, Mac, and Linux, ended up taking over 4 hours to get this issue figured out. If I was in control of 50 dote heads running on a network of Windows computers, I'd lock their stuff down tighter than a library computer.
Last edited by daveT; 08-18-2017 at 07:27 PM.