How to Hide on a Network

[tbsingleton73]

Quote: Originally Posted by cwtnospam ...but I challenge you to find a dealership with an entire service department unable to do so. If you were able to find such a dealership, how would you feel about taking your car there for a tune up?

While true about cars, if my company only uses an automatic (Windows) I don't care if the can't fix standards (Macs). I would be totally fine with that becuase as a company I have made my decision not to purchase a Mac becuase it costs more to buy.
Believe me I love the Mac, and when my cleints ask about getting new computers or even what to initially get, even after explaing the benifits of getting a Mac, the initial buy price it why the get PC's. They don't care about the cost of maintaining or anything else.
It's all about how much will it cost me to get up and running. So they don't care if I could or could not fix a Mac, they don't have one, they are not going to buy one.
Likewise I also know a client of a friend and they have all Macs, and don't use PC, so they don't care about wether he can fix a Windows box, they just want there Mac's up and runnning.

My point being, you don't have to know the other to be a good IT person.
Knowing both makes you a better overall more knowlagable Technication but in some cases there is no need to know the other platform and not knowing so doesn't make you any less an IT person, especially if your cleints have no need for the other platform.

And when money talks, right or wrong, the customer isn't going to change.

[cwtnospam]

You're confusing a persons rights as an individual with their duties as a professional. Individuals have the right to be stupid. Professionals don't.

In any profession, be it automotive, medical, or computers, the practitioner has a responsibility to their employers and/or customers to honestly examine the total cost and the total benefits and make the proper decisions. Anyone (or any department) not doing that just isn't doing their job.

Edit: The Mac represents the only significant alternative to Windows on the desktop, with Linux also being an alterntative primarily for servers at this point. Clearly, an entire IT department that has banned both in favor of Windows cannot possibly have examined the costs and benefits honestly. What's more, they've crippled their own capacity to examine these costs and benefits in the future, since they won't know anything about them.

[tbsingleton73]

While that was fun.
I fold.

[mark hunte]

Quote: Originally Posted by cwtnospam Individuals have the right to be stupid. Professionals don't.

what about clowns

P.s

This thread is way overdue for the cloakroom...

[tbsingleton73]

Dude, clowns are just scary. Everyone I see reminds me of the movie "It".
Or is that IT???

[cwtnospam]

Quote: Originally Posted by tbsingleton73 Or is that IT???

LOL! It depends on the department, I suppose.

[timchet]

Quote: Originally Posted by cwtnospam Even if that isn't true, I don't buy the premise that simply adding a device to the network is a security risk.

That alone clearly explains your lack of knowledge in regards to network administration and security. I'm having a hard time believing you typed that with a straight face.

Don't get me wrong; on networks I admin, I prefer Mac's as the client OS. But someone that put a wireless access point on a corporate network who doesn't see that as a GAPING security hole (policy violation aside) might be the same person who would unintentionally make his Mac insecure.

There aren't too many networks I admin (or have admined in the past) that non-IT sanctioned equipment was allowed on the network. It's possible that his IT department had moved to a common platform to ease software rollout, OS imaging, there are a whole bunch of possible reasons. What if his hard drive dies? If they have a decent imaging solution, they can have one of their 10,000 windows workstations up in 10 minutes, where as our Mac using friend is SOL for who knows how long. Best bet would be to prove to his boss why he 'needs' the Mac, and let them handle it from there.

CAlvarez has posted a vast amount of common sense in this thread. All should re-read his posts.

Quote: Originally Posted by kennethmv I get the idea that they were particularily put out by the unauthorized wireless access point.

How are you still employed there?

[romulet]

I used to work in a state job where the same crap would go on. I was told to remove firefox. I didn't as i needed it for what I was doing. Tab browsing saved alot of time in checking links of the company website for example. The companies interal sites only supported IE 6 + .

When I was in college I brought in a mac (ibook) and the head of IT said that I would have alot of trouble getting it to work on the LAN. So I did a scan and as all the bios names are the machines users I took his static IP for my own. He was wrong, very easy to network.

I now work in a mac only environment but the irony of it all is that the security systems (bio-metrics) are all run by windows machine's

As security is so good with the mac's users are given just a dvd and are told go and install Tiger.

There is only one deadly mac virus that I worry about. Its made by Symantec.

I do however agree that unauthorized hardware would upset the IT department and I am surprised that they didnt make a big deal of your WAP.

In a previous job I brought in a Logitech keyboard as I didnt like the work one's. Oh the IT department didnt like that. Sometimes it is just a power trip also.

But for a company that as big as the one i worked for I can go to their website and make myself the CEO (according to the website) As there is not security at all for there site to change such things. Also the site cost 6 Million euro's to deploy.

[CAlvarez]

Quote: the practitioner has a responsibility to their employers and/or customers to honestly examine the total cost and the total benefits and make the proper decisions.

That's a management job. It's not for the "IT guy" to set policy and study ROI/TCO.

And what you're saying is that it's someone's job to make sure that Macs are found to cost less. Because you won't accept it if in a certain situation, there IS a cost study and they still settle on Windows. You really have no idea if there was a study done in any of these cases, but you assume there was not because you assume the Mac would always win.

I have several clear cases where they would not. You have a very narrow view of the IT and business world.

[cwtnospam]

Yes, it's IT management's job, and they're not doing it. What I don't accept is that Windows always wins for a company with thousands of users, nor that it will always win in the future. That's statistically impossible. The only conclusions I can see are: 1) They didn't do an honest study when they made the decision, and 2) They aren't capable of doing an honest study now or in the future, since they aren't qualified to securely set up a Mac on their network, let alone compare it's costs and benefits to another platform.

Quote: Originally Posted by timchet That alone clearly explains your lack of knowledge in regards to network administration and security. I'm having a hard time believing you typed that with a straight face.

So you're saying that merely adding a dumb terminal to a network is automatically a security risk?

You can come up with all kinds of rationalizations like ease of maintenance to justify anything anyone or any department does. At the same time, I can point to articles that demonstrate the Mac to be easier to maintain, more secure, etc. See post 27 for one. Results are what matters though, and any IT department that settles on one and only one platform is obviously more interested in its own agenda than serving its company.

[CAlvarez]

Quote: So you're saying that merely adding a dumb terminal to a network is automatically a security risk?

It is.

Quote: Results are what matters though, and any IT department that settles on one and only one platform is obviously more interested in its own agenda than serving its company.

[cwtnospam]

Quote: Originally Posted by CAlvarez It is.

Such eloquence! If you want to be philisophical about it, anything is a security risk, but it certainly is less risky than installing a Windows machine.

As for using only one platform, numerous scientific studies have shown that a homogeneous environment is more suceptible to attack than a heterogeneous one. That's why it's better to plant multiple crops on a farm and use large genetic samplings when breeding. Computers aren't that different. If they're all the same and one is breached, your entire network is compromised. If security were an honest concern, settling on one platform wouldn't be an option.

[CAlvarez]

There are dozens of concerns, but once again, you close your mind to all of them and insist that every network has to accept your chosen platform. And once again, this grows tiring as you refuse to see any possible line of thought but your own.

[NovaScotian]

Let me start by saying that I bought my first Mac in 1986 and still have all but one of the Macs I've ever owned, all in working condition (the oldest being an SE/30). In spite of that, when I was in a position to decide (and fund) a large student network in a University, I didn't have any difficulty deciding that it would be a PC network and would be restricted to that. (In the Faculty of Architecture, their student network was all Macs because that fit the design software they wanted to use, and PCs were excluded.)

The reason was simple: money. That I could have several hundred machines produced by a local assembler to our template, all with hidden ghost partitions from which whatever a student did to screw up a machine could be resolved in a few moments with a magic floppy, with an on-site maintenance contract with the builder for them, and all of the software provided over the network standardized and license-controlled from a central server was clearly the way to go.

That didn't mean that faculty, students, and staff couldn't own and use a Mac on the University network, it just meant that if you did, you couldn't connect to the engineering student network directly (which operated separately over the same fibre backbone) - there was just no route unless you ran a Windows emulator. We even provided Mac support on the general network which was all based on MAC address recognition so a student or faculty member could take a laptop to a classroom or lab provided it was within their subnet but still couldn't connect to the open and public student network on its own net. Running a router on the student net would have cost the student his computing privileges for 336 hours from the moment he was detected (as would playing Doom or viewing pornography).

I don't think there's some sort of nefarious plot out there to crush Macs or even necessarily a lot of ignorance among IT folks. It boils down to money.

[cwtnospam]

Quote: Originally Posted by CAlvarez There are dozens of concerns, but once again, you close your mind to all of them and insist that every network has to accept your chosen platform. And once again, this grows tiring as you refuse to see any possible line of thought but your own.

That's a load of crap and you know it. The fact is, anyone suggesting that it's ok to ban all systems but one has closed their mind to all current and future possibilities. I haven't suggested that the network should be all Mac. Only that it shouldn't be all Windows.

One other thing: It's important to remember that the network does NOT belong to the IT department. It isn't up to them to limit any other department or department member's access to technology. On the contrary, it's their job to facilitate it.

[giskard22]

A lot of this discussion is really quite silly. CWT obviously thinks that in any organization, the actions/responsibilities of an IT department should be entirely driven by the needs and desires of the other departments. If someone can do his job better using certain equipment/software/whatever, an IT department should try to accomodate that. Others are comfortable with an IT department focusing on providing only a specific set of functionality/equipment/software. Two ways to do things, with different pluses and minuses and different resource requirements. Maybe agree to disagree, mkay?

I think that IT should be as user-driven as possible, and that the Windows mindset is hugely wasteful, but my opinion isn't what works best for every organization.

[cwtnospam]

Quote: Originally Posted by timchet What if his hard drive dies? If they have a decent imaging solution, they can have one of their 10,000 windows workstations up in 10 minutes, where as our Mac using friend is SOL for who knows how long.

Wow! So we're supposed to believe that A) No one in that entire department could figure out how to back up a Mac, and B) They're still competent.

[timchet]

Quote: Originally Posted by cwtnospam Wow! So we're supposed to believe that A) No one in that entire department could figure out how to back up a Mac, and B) They're still competent.

You must live in a neat world. I suggest you go actually work at an IT department for an enterprise-level facility. It's quite clear you don't have any valid experience in that area, and I believe it would be an eye-opener. Of COURSE someone in the department (if not all) could figure out how to back up the Mac. It's really quite simple. That doesn't change the fact that the management has decided on a common platform, that doesn't include the Mac. So while it's easy for them to back up the mac, it's currently not their job.

Cwtnospam, you spout come up with a lot of idealistic viewpoints on how you thing thinks should work, and there's really nothing wrong with that. I wish I lived in your world. But, we're talking about reality here, and the reality of enterprise-level network administration.

We're also not talking about adding a dumb terminal to a network, we're talking about adding a non-IT controlled computer, and a frickin WAP. That one still blows me away. I told other network admin friends of mine about it this morning (most of whom mainly support Macs for workstations), and we all had the same look on our faces. Someone should have taken a picture.

[mark hunte]

Quote: Originally Posted by cwtnospam YResults are what matters though, and any IT department that settles on one and only one platform is obviously more interested in its own agenda than serving its company.

What about Microsoft's IT department. Do you think they will agree with that.

[timchet]

Quote: Originally Posted by cwtnospam Results are what matters though, and any IT department that settles on one and only one platform is obviously more interested in its own agenda than serving its company.

So for a company that does lots of word/excel type things (using MS Office or OO.o, either way), or any other task that a windows machine does as well as a Mac, the fact that they have their folks on Windows machine (at a much lower cost than if they were on Macs) is providing a dis-service to the company how, exactly? By saving them money and giving the users computers that do exactly what they need them to?

Again, I prefer Mac's as client machines, and will prefer them more when I can better run apps like Autocad on them. But my situation is not their situation. Neither is it your situation. If the company still runs with 10,000 windows machines and one lone Mac, I'm guessing it's not the lone Mac that's keeping the company together.