[Trilug-ontopic] driving windows from linux, off the network

Douglas Whitfield douglasawh at gmail.com
Fri Sep 30 09:12:44 EDT 2011


On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 05:01, Jason Watts <jsnonzzr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe you can get with them and figure out how they are getting around it.


Tom, correct me if this isn't accurate, but...

My guess is they aren't "getting around" anything.  The MACs on the work
Linux machines are either registered or they have static IPs (or both).  At
my last job it was standard practice for Linux machines to have static IPs
(that wasn't the case 100% accurate, but accurate enough for these
purposes).

I think the issue isn't likely Linux as much as something the sys admins
don't manage.

Slightly unrelated, but this is what is affecting my reasoning here:
We had a guy at my last job that used Wubi as much as he could because he
couldn't get two machines.  We had exceedingly lax install policies though
in a quasi-libertarian utopia.  It was a "if you can get your job done with
your personal machine" go for it type of place.  We used 802.1x
authentication, so people had to figure out how to do that.  It was quite
possible with certificates for them to do that.  We just weren't going to
help them...but we weren't going to stop them either.  Now, we did a fair
amount of vendor testing as a software develop company, so there were good
reasons for not worrying about MAC addresses.  A draconian IT policy
probably would have worked about as well as the drug war in that particular
environment.

And to be clear, people did a lot of stupid stuff with their IT rights.  It
was a rare occurrence for us to revoke someone's VPN access...but it did
happen.
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