Routing around stupid IT departments

Question

As developers, we often have special requirements in terms of setting up workstations, networks, etc. IT departments, as a rule, do not understand this, and we are forced to use a standard environment with several changes along the edges.

We are faced with this situation at the moment, except that the IT department we are dealing with is halfway around the world.

Can you suggest (concrete proposals or military stories) routing methods around the IT department so that the work can still be done?

FWIW, we are very Windows-oriented, but the team I'm working on is working on a Solaris-based project. The main impedance mismatch.

EDIT . Specific examples of things we are against are:

• The source repository is located behind the corporate firewall. If you are on a remote site, the only access to the repository is only a VPN with Windows. Not very useful when all this is Solaris code.
• One laptop for the developer. You get either (a) access to corporate resources of the local network, including e-mail, source code, etc., Or (b) code development.
• Only one laboratory contains the equipment with which we are developing, and access to the US dollar is $ 1,000 per day. It is considered "too complicated" to create your own laboratory.
• A standard list of applications and penalties applied when installing software other than the specified one. If you are caught.
• Two levels above you must sign up in order to gain administrator rights to local machines.

Answer 1

I have successfully worked on this through virtualization. I am using a program called VirtualBox that allows me to run multiple linux instances on my windows machine. The performance is pretty good, and it allows me to configure my own network environment in a virtual machine, but it still appears on my desktop via NAT.

Some of the network settings are somewhat involved, but the documentation is good. I am currently running windows 2k, Ubuntu and RedHat with memcached in RedHat instances. None of them are supported by my IT department. I told them that I need 4 GB of RAM to run Eclipse for Java development and an external backup hard drive (I run my virtual machines on it).

Another advantage is that I can always restore problems by restoring a backup of the VM file. Virtualization is your friend!

Answer 2

Get your manager to support you on the material you need. This is one of the things that managers manage: move things out of your way.

Use virtual machines if necessary. Many IT departments are less concerned that you can “smash” a virtual machine, as it can be easily recreated.

Honestly, I did not have much experience with this. In most of my environments, I was an IT department. Currently, our management is very suitable for developers, and I would prefer not to perform IT tasks, if I can avoid it - I save the image on my dev machine.

Answer 3

My solution was to start VMWare to start another OS (either win or linux), and in this OpenVPN start, get the SSH-encrypted channel through port 80 from the company's firewall.

I have a linksys home router flashed using DD-WRT firmware that includes OpenVPN.

Thus, basically all of my IM and browsing the web traffic that I do in VMWare (which usually works full screen on a second monitor) gets SSH encrypted, sent through port 80 to my home router, and the router redirects everything to real the internet. I do the same in my current job because they have a “website blocker” that denies many blog sites, and as a programmer, there are many times when I solve Google problems, and they are on the codes of people coding blogs, and ultimately gets blocked here. Copy-paste the URL into firefox in VMWare, and come in handy :)

Answer 4

Jeff Atwood changed components on his machine at his own expense until he completely rebuilt it. From comments on my blog: “To be clear, I pay for all my own computers from my own pocket. Therefore, I am either“ lucky ”or“ stupid, ”depending on how you figure these things out." March 14, 2007

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000816.html

Answer 5

Do not join your workstation to a domain. Then you can be a local administrator and do whatever you want. The obvious drawback would be to constantly enter the domain credentials, every time you access a network resource. But if you have an unresponsive IT department, there can be no other way.

Answer 6

Thanks for the specifics.

Of course, I have many military stories, but I will need to create another login in order to repeat them.

The first stop should certainly be your immediate guide. I don’t know if they are technical or not, but you need to write, say, the three main questions and why they cause the problem. Offer a solution, but agree that this is just a suggestion. In my experience, the reason for the disagreement between IT departments and software development teams is that the latter always want to offer solutions that are considered problems, and the former want to know what the problem is and why. Software users are disappointed, explaining what is the obvious solution for them, and therefore think that IT people are idiots. And IT people, who may or may not be idiots, like to find the real problem and come up with a concrete solution, not something more general. General generalizations are presented here.

The reason I propose the three main questions is because you have to solve the problem as a solvable one and not look like a big list of complaints. Depending on the relationship in your company, you can choose one. Make it the easiest to fix and strive for a quick victory. Praise the solution when you receive it, and then go on to the following: “The guys, by providing a shared VPN, really helped us. Thank you. Since we have this, we thought about something else that really helps” ... . etc. etc.).

Yes, it's crappy, but you have a human problem, not a technological one. I don’t think that in your case there is one comprehensive single technological answer (although I liked some of the suggestions, especially rally25).

Answer 7

Use all the social skills necessary to create good relationships with one or two people in the IT department. Once they understand your needs and find out that you are not going to disrupt their network, they will usually be pretty cooperative.

And if that doesn't work, you might need to write some harsh emails to the larger companies in the company explaining how IT is stopping you from doing your job.

Answer 8

Be careful, especially in closed environments, you may get into trouble or quit to install material that is not approved by someone.

However, in one situation, I wanted to use SubSonic , but did not have the privileges to install it, and I didn’t want to wait 2-3 weeks for the request to be dropped, so I downloaded the source and compiled it myself.

Answer 9

I'm glad you didn’t ask, chairs and tables :) As for the software and equipment, everything can be sorted out only if your boss and their boss “talk”. The most convincing argument is the time factor. Show them how slow the machine is compared to another preferred environment. Defragmenting the developer may not solve the problem, but the schedule is 50% complete in most cases. Virtualization is another very economical option.

Returning to the chairs, buy them! it’s easier than going through a bureaucratic hell.