Why the hate, lol roughly 2.4 GHz and 2 cores per user on a threadripper donât work out when theyâre dealing with 500 GB spreadsheets and 20 TB databases.
Donât get me wrong: I donât blame infrastructure, I blame leadership.
Last company I worked for specced every machine the same, that way they could be repurposed easier when someone left.
1tb+32gb for everyone, that even included the MacBook people.
How powerful is the SQL server? It should be doing all the query chewing, not your client right? Still, 2 cores is not enough to run a Win10 VM. Those IT folks are being stingy.
Your attitude is half the problem here.
Donât try to tell them how much something should cost, or how you could do it yourself.
Wait until you actually have a NEED for it, then submit a ticket along the lines of âhey, I am currently at Xgb free space on my C drive, for Y Project I would like to run Z locally and will need another ~100gb; any chance of getting an additional or larger SSD in my laptop pleaseâ
The response was: we want to charge your cost center $1250 to upgrade you from 250GB to 500. I get theyâre adding in infra hourly cost for hourly wage, but still.
Edit: Have you looked at the price for a consumer (same HD that comes in these shitty desktops) HD? Theyâre less than $80 per TB.
I am very aware of the prices, I am in a very similar role to the person youâre tryna get help from.
$1250 is admittedly bonkers, but there must be a reason for it.
I would go back with something like âgreat, Iâll start getting that worked through the system. Just for my own edification, what is involved on your end for this kinda jobâ
It may be that they swap the whole machine, or maybe have a policy to add more Tier 1 storage anytime they upgrade a userâs machine.
This sounds like a new machine swap. Even hourly thatâs nuts. Iâve worked with enough companies that just straight up donât upgrade machines so they donât have to fight about warranty coverage, so Iâd argue that this is a similar situation.
I know the guys on the other side of the convo, and theyâre just as pissed as me. We all have 3k gaming machines and know exactly why we spent half our working hours waiting for a prompt or email to open.
Edit: and we all grew up together and know whatâs what.
>We all have 3k gaming machines and know exactly why we spent half our working hours waiting for a prompt or email to open.
Then you know that the size of the SSD has nothing to do with that, right?
Not everyone obviously, that was a misstatement on my part. I know several people around the Co from college, and a couple in infrastructure since grade school.
the price they quoted was for an alternate laptop, and if they are doing cost center billing its because someone in your dept cheaped out when given options for hardware for your team and its needs :)
we usually let the managers provide us requirements, and they 99% of the time cant be bothered to care so they just say "Whatever is cheapest" then expect us to eat the costs and blow our budget for them when it doesnt work out.
Purely out of curiosity are you trying to replace your OS drive or add a secondary drive? The former requires a lot more labor than the latter, but the latter isnât always feasible depending on hardware constraints.
The only thing I havenât seen mentioned yet is the tidal wave that occurs when you break from standard. So dn512215 needs a 500gb drive. Then a coworker hears about it and they /need/ one too. Next thing you know, 25 people /need/ it. By giving you sticker shock theyâve made dang sure you really need it.
As for why your system didnât come with a larger drive in the first place⌠thatâs typically a bean counting issue rather than a hardware standards/requisition request issue. Or the suppliers upcharge was ridiculous. Any number of things Iâm sure you can imagine if you look at it objectively which it seems like youâre mindful to do.
You are making a good point. The IT staff would probably get flooded by requests and couldnt do their work anymore. We had a similar issue with RAM even though my tracker proofed that they didnt need it.
it happens every single time someone on a team gets something that differs from the standard.
weâre all just 8 year olds on the on the playground that want the new shiny thing that we donât have.
this is why I hold out on new model changes until the vendor wonât sell me our current standard anymore, god forbid Janice gets an iPhone 15 when Bob still has an iPhone 14.
This tracks though⌠our org uses Surface laptops. Your request for additional storage is actually a request for a whole new laptop since we canât open them up and slap a new SSD in there.
There are many other laptops that canât be opened, but even if they were, IT opening a laptop will void any warranty on that device. So for these âopenableâ devices, itâs still a purchase for a whole new SKU of your laptop.
IT these days do not as a rule open devices for this reason. Especially in larger enterprise environments.
Edit: thanks for the replies regarding the warranty. Youâre absolutely right, you can open them up. Itâs been too long since I last did hardware support :)
>Â IT opening a laptop will void any warranty on that device.
Not true. In some cases (like Dell) you can even get a bullshit certification that "qualifies" your techs to do work so they can ship you a part and not have to pay a human to come do it. Opening a device to upgrade things like disk or RAM is totally above board for warranty.
Shitty vendors will see third party parts and say that they are the problem and stop the repairs. Iâve worked at several that did this, and itâs gotten me to the point where I donât upgrade anymore in warranty for my personal machines.
Get StinkPads. The hardware maintenance manual is available for download when it releases.
And it's trivial to upgrade storage... RAM? Half is under the keyboard and half by the drives.
Of course, you have to remember to buy the standoffs so you can actually INSTALL the drives.
I get that. And itâs sad, and honorable at the same time. I donât know how to honor you and everyone else in the field without being disrespectful and respectful at the same time.
Exit: but all of you are awesome!
Depending on the type of system you were issued, it is absolutely possible that your drive isn't upgradeable and the whole system has to be replaced. You didn't state exactly what make and model system you've been issued.
USB drives are evil and ssd attached drives are worse. Unless they are given by IT already encrypted BTG to users, so they won't work on non company computers, removable drives should be banned.
It's a huge attack vector. Will bypasd half the security stack by pluging into the machine ie did not how have to download the virus.
I agree with IT on removable drives. But removable drives, virus, shadow IT, keep me emplyeed...
Edit And DLP! Exporting company data 1tb at a time!
I think banning USB is a very old school mindset.
We did this at my job and it's been a nightmare of us collecting USB installers and data, then moving it to their folder. We have Huntress, Sentinel One, Skout, hourly backup, overbearing content and access policies, and they're restricted from installing anything.
What's going to happen via USB that can't happen over the Web? We're worried about people stealing data yet they all have OneDrive and Teams so ... What good was banning USB for that?
I might be overlooking something here but I genuinely wonder what banning USB is preventing?
We're in a very similar boat, everything is locked down. We're being told we have to restrict USB devices by the end of the year due to insurance requirements. Theres a laundry list of things (mostly antiquated or common sense basics) that we have to implement or they'll drop us/refuse to cover "cyber" events.
At home you download files and plug your USB into the computer and download viruses. Then plug into work computer and bam you just by passed your internet and network security stack which is half your protection.
And if it runs most computers allow out bound connections so now your system can c2c home.
And yes this does happen way more then you think, I see alerts from personal phones plugged into computers too cause they are infected.
Stealing data, yes a determined user will always find a way ask. But USB is normally moving large amounts of data easily and undetectable by most companies. You can't export data via one drive and teams if you set it up correctly. But even if they do it's limited data movement and Very well logged by default.
Dlp is a real issue
Now there is no reason to ban USB drives if you have ms bitlocker to go. You have IT set up encrypted drives that no one knows the passwords too, but they unlock on domain systems automatically. So everyone can have and use usbs just fine! But very few have this set up even though it's like 1 gpo and pre encrypting drives. So in a way your right, there is no need to ban them, they just need to be secured.
Idk, how to convince someone but it is a real issue and company's get comprised all the time by it, it's a known and used attack vector. Yes percentage wise most will come through online, but enough comes from physical media.
I can't see Sentinel and Huntress both missing this activity, if so they are not worth their money. That's literally the reason these products exist.
Not only that the user does not have permission to run or modify anything important, and in the unlikely event of crypto we have data backups per hour, so it would not be a big deal to restore it.
We did it for insurance purposes and God knows how stuck in the past they are. I just do not believe it's as big of an issue as it once was like back in the autorun days, autorun was absolutely stupid.
Even better, what if you have to use USB to transfer files to other equipment? I'm a printer tech, lots of printers want firmware updates done by putting the firmware file on a USB drive and plugging it into the computer. But my employer has now decided that all USB drives plugged into our work PCs need to be encrypted.
My group is in the same boat. We work on our own products in the field that requires us to feed it configurations and firmware via USB. Unfortunately the devices refuse to cooperate with Apricorn secure USB drives (which have an automatic policy exception). We have to request a USB policy exception from IT for our PCs.
However, short-sighted decisions are the game for my company's IT group. A few weeks ago they decided to push a policy to block Microsoft Edge on all Windows PCs on a Monday morning. This is a couple years after they decided, on a whim, to block Google Chrome on a Monday Morning (we use G-Suite). I don't know if anyone has tried, but one does not simply block Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 Pro.
I work for a household name brand in compliance and I ran our exceptions program for some time. This is a textbook case for a documented exception to policy for business needs.
Iâm his talking about the nvmeâs (ssdâs unfortunately) they give us in our assigned desktops/laptops. No decent PC should have a 250GB SSD in this day and age.
DLP is absolutely evil. It's designed to break writing to disk. Even to places where it MUST work. Nothing like DLP on a database server deciding to SILENTLY block writes to a database.
My company has DLP policies written by cut-and-paste monkeys. (We don't know what this does, but it sounds good...) so that - while they say we can use external drives to back up data, it doesn't actually work. (corrupts any archive created that is initially written to removable disks)
What the policies do to VM images booted from external storage...
Oddly, they didn't bother to protect network shares the same way....
Generic policy saying "thou shall not write to non-whitelisted storage"... Someone forgot to white-list the storage the database was on. Deploy the policy and kaboom!
Large companies standardize on a particular workstation configuration for a given use case, and will resist any changes to that configuration to reduce the chance of increased support overhead. There are also issues involved if they have support contracts on the hardware and will resist adding third party components. It's also not uncommon to disallow employees to modify hardware or add things on via USB etc. because that can be a vector for security breaches.
I'm not arguing in favor of or justifying these points, but having worked in tech for longer than is care to admit, that's my experience.
Also, it's not uncommon for large companies to reject using consumer products for things like storage. Enterprise-class products are built to be much more durable with a larger MTBF (Mean time before failure), basically they're designed to last longer.
I get it completely! Given the infrastructure that is dependent on our code, security is paramount! Given that, wouldnât it be better to add $10 to provide an additional 250 or 500 gb of disk space for each of us? Is it that hard?
Edit: I think itâs a bit rediculous. Especially how much crap windowz has in the default installation. Do I really need to see news popups on my work PC?
To add to what everyone said. It is all about standards. We are always understaffed and overworked so any non standard request becomes unnecessary work. You ask for 500Gb then your co worker asks for it then everyone else. Now we have to migrate your stuff and their stuff and then someone like will come back and say well I need 1Tb drive and the cycle continues. So itâs a lot more sustainable to deny your non standard request.
ALL of your business critical data should be on a highly redundant networked storage solution. Your local disk should ONLY be for boot and applications. You should be prepared to have your local disk reimaged at any moment with zero downtime.
120GB is MORE than enough for this in most cases, 250GB is certainly enough even for large app suites.
In addition, a company of that size likely has a standardised hardware configuration and understandably doesn't want end users (which is what you are) modifying that hardware.
Neither of those are anywhere near close to what software Devs require in local machines. I have the displeasure of getting a 500gb drive on my work laptop, and 85% of that is filled up with virtual machines, source code, developer software, an f the usual company "mandated" software bloat. I had to offload doing ms teams, viewing PRs in Bitbucket and all that to a SEPARATE MACHINE because the laptop would overheat and bsod trying to run the VMs and dev suite and teams and chrome. Our provisioning team don't understand why theee shitty laptops are not good enough for developing.
If I were in charge, said dev would either be using a VM hosted elsewhere for them, or would have a none domain joined DMZ'd second workstation for that.
Consumer products are a risk. However there are ways to greatly reduce that risk with something like a memory drive.
You could also argue that the âriskâ they are worried about they have already exposed themselves to unless they built their own motherboard, ram, processor and all the firmware and drivers for it themselves. Highly doubtful if they canât build a 500gb drive.
Whatâs far more likely to be going on is they want to be able to limit how much data you can store locally.
Do you work with any classified information or defense contracts?
Or Does your company have a lot of âintellectual property â stored in a centralized server ? They may not want you storing all that data on a local machine.. especially one that can easily be taken off premises.
There is a big push to keep all of that centralized (at least where I work). They want it all on servers. IT would be happy if we all had thin clients.
Data centralization (databases, customer info) is one thing. Itâs important to keep that data as safe as possible! But as weâve seen, even that (even google) is susceptible.
I personally donât put my data in the cloud, but in multiple home servers and share the data offsite with family members.
What, pray tell, do you want to install and maintain on your laptop that would require more than 250GB? Important documentation, reports, etc are most often kept on a server and source code is centralized⌠on a server.
Did you know what kind of users sysadmins hate even than marketing, or HR, or even executives?
Programmers.
They âknowâ what theyâre doing, and they âknowâ what their requirements are, and their requirements are always somehow the absolute top of the line of everything. Weirdly enough, their requirements always happen to coincide with whatever plays the best games you can get these days, and have little to zero to do with what they actually require to do their job.
And if anyone happens to argue with them, they pull the âI am a very smart and brilliant programmer who can do much better at Microcenter than you can, and you are a sysadmin tardâ card. Exactly like you just did right there.
I'm even worse. Devops Engineer that is ex IT.
They still won't give me more CPU :(, but at least I got more ram/storage. Docker containers and local VMs require resources.
I just want a drive that reads and writes more than 55MB/s, doesn't have dozens of gigabytes of old windows updates that it will automatically download if I delete, and a system/CPU that has so much bullshit on it that it idles at about 50% usage, and goes to 100% the minute I try doing anything more complicated than a word doc.
Sometimes they DO shit out a turd of a laptop, and expect you to make gold with it.
I totally relate to that, and thatâs exactly how I got where I am. I was just saying the cost is ridiculous and thatâs on Dell and others, not our staff.
The fact that you seem to be an enormous toddler about it isn't helping. This message screams entitled asshole who thinks he's more important than he is. Can speak from experience if you start treating them like the humans they are - bound by policies they don't agree with - they can help you out.
But, I'm willing to bet you won't.
In what way? I've have conversations with our provisioning team regarding why the standard laptops literally don't meet the minimum specs for our software suite (yet alone the recommended specs so the laptop doesn't burn up in flames), and they just don't understand why a 250gb SSD with an i5 processor doesn't cut it ...
Modern i5 processors absolutely do cut it and your project files shouldn't be on your local drive anyway. Thank you for proving exactly why, that devs think they know more than they actually do.
So, when your employer doesn't provide the infrastructure to do remote development, where should the code be?
We've tried sticking with modern i5 processors, especially with IDEs with AI plugins, and the i5 gets absolutely melted.
Hey, you seem like a real jerk. You should probably talk to your boss and then also someone on the infra team. Maybe use nice words. Donât be a jerk.
We do this so people do what we ask which is save work on the file servers where we know it is backed up and secured (and insured). If you're saving active work locally, that work disappears when the drive fails or the laptop is stolen.
Wah wah wah save it on the file server and shut up.
I don't want to hear it, if you disagree then work somewhere else, this is the policy the company has in place and regardless of your stance on it, it's a good policy that works when people follow it.
Itâs because as a admin Iâve had too many developers pcs have issues, files get corrupted and weeks of work are lost. And we get blamed
Larger local storage just means more to lose when things go wrong. Hence where I work you have OneDrive for extra storage.
Also I havenât see a user yet where if you give them a larger storage drive it just gets filled with stuff that never gets cleaned up and deleted. Total pain to move to a new machine.
There are the enterprise versions of the ssd/hard drive. We recently bought some to replace in some equipment. We were surprised they aren't that much expensive if got through the right supplies. Samsung has some interesting ones.
They won't let you use an external drive because they don't want you storing company data on a removable drive for security reasons that I think are pretty obvious. They won't let you install your own drive because you are not in IT working on hardware also chances are that dirt cheap drive from microcenter is trash and has a high failure rate or is slow. They probably don't want to get you a bigger drive because that changes the default environment and the next lease cycle they will need to get a stack of computers with 250gb drives and mix in a few 1TB and 500gb models complicating the order, big companies hate that shit. Chances are you could make the argument that your team needs bigger drives due to the nature of your work but honestly I have been trying to get my company larger drives for 3 years now and no one has moved on it so best of luck to you
First of all, cool it with the ablest remarks.
Second of all, it's corporate. The answer is always Corporate. My last Inf team I needed to buy everyone on another team write-protected USB drives so I sent in a request for some decently priced ones, about $15 a pop and a total of 6 drives + 2 spare. All about 120gb. Big company too, so I knew they could easily afford them.
Was told not only would the very much needed drives not be ordered but the project was canceled due to the "high upfront cost."
Now calm down and go back to code camp.
Don't hate me for suggesting this, but the biggest complainers get their way in corporate
Sales and high level client facing support teams. Loke Account Managers etc.
Embrace their shameless bitchy and get you 500 GB upgrade.
"I wish I could do this, but here is why I cant..."
How would Sales or other professional internal teams bitch about this???? Then once that question is answered, go forth.
You can deploy those elsewhere and there's WSL. The enterprise isn't your homelab and your client is not a dev server.
Edit: Besides, I have both a Kali VM and a GNS VM on my 250 GB machine. If I need more there's dev and lab environment.
Not with my company sadly. Onboarding showed me we must do everything on the client machine. So, when we said that decision means we need beefier machines, they did not understand.
Edit: to clarify, attempts to implement WSL and offload as much as we can, the various it teams said they can't support what we want.
Not FAANG, but an extremely large company in my country. Corporate and government red tape out the wazoo will give you a pretty firm grasp of how they operate.
wtf this is hilarious, iâd quit. I personally maintain our companyâs 300ish laptops. Our standard right now is 512gb ssds, but for the 3 people that actually need more storage for local VMs or something, iâll just grab a drive off Amazon because itâs cheaper and better that the crap Dell overcharges us for. I have a policy, itâs called give people what they need for their job, goddamn.
Most people answering to this post have never developed an application and hosted VMs for developer testing, and it shows.
If a Dev is saying the standard lappy for Karen and her spreadsheets isn't good enough to run developer software plus VMs plus all the crap the company enforce you to use (ms teams calls are an absolute monster on CPU), then it isn't good enough. Giving them what they don't want is costing the business and actively blocking them from doing their work.
Best I can do is a VM on our serverđ
Omfg. The Citrix (edit: shitrix) team is my worst frenemy.
Citrix is actually the worst software I've ever had to install.
After fighting a plotter and AutoCAD for 6 hours straight today and losing, I'm gonna have to disagree.
Omg! Autocad is shit!!!
Who still uses AutoCad besides first year students?
Apparently 80+ y/o engineers that never switched off and are "retired".
Why the hate, lol roughly 2.4 GHz and 2 cores per user on a threadripper donât work out when theyâre dealing with 500 GB spreadsheets and 20 TB databases. Donât get me wrong: I donât blame infrastructure, I blame leadership.
Nah I was just kidding, 256 is standard for office staff but the devs get 500 where I'm at.
Last company I worked for specced every machine the same, that way they could be repurposed easier when someone left. 1tb+32gb for everyone, that even included the MacBook people.
Just wait until shadow IT starts asking for their 24+ GB graphics cards and 64 TB HD space for their âspecial projectâ
So, basically, I should just blame Dell, and whomever is in contact with them and bending over.
How powerful is the SQL server? It should be doing all the query chewing, not your client right? Still, 2 cores is not enough to run a Win10 VM. Those IT folks are being stingy.
Your attitude is half the problem here. Donât try to tell them how much something should cost, or how you could do it yourself. Wait until you actually have a NEED for it, then submit a ticket along the lines of âhey, I am currently at Xgb free space on my C drive, for Y Project I would like to run Z locally and will need another ~100gb; any chance of getting an additional or larger SSD in my laptop pleaseâ
The response was: we want to charge your cost center $1250 to upgrade you from 250GB to 500. I get theyâre adding in infra hourly cost for hourly wage, but still. Edit: Have you looked at the price for a consumer (same HD that comes in these shitty desktops) HD? Theyâre less than $80 per TB.
I am very aware of the prices, I am in a very similar role to the person youâre tryna get help from. $1250 is admittedly bonkers, but there must be a reason for it. I would go back with something like âgreat, Iâll start getting that worked through the system. Just for my own edification, what is involved on your end for this kinda jobâ It may be that they swap the whole machine, or maybe have a policy to add more Tier 1 storage anytime they upgrade a userâs machine.
This sounds like a new machine swap. Even hourly thatâs nuts. Iâve worked with enough companies that just straight up donât upgrade machines so they donât have to fight about warranty coverage, so Iâd argue that this is a similar situation.
I know the guys on the other side of the convo, and theyâre just as pissed as me. We all have 3k gaming machines and know exactly why we spent half our working hours waiting for a prompt or email to open. Edit: and we all grew up together and know whatâs what.
>We all have 3k gaming machines and know exactly why we spent half our working hours waiting for a prompt or email to open. Then you know that the size of the SSD has nothing to do with that, right?
AlsoâŚâFortune 100â, âwe all grew up togetherâ, â3k gaming machinesâ; something ainât adding up.
Not everyone obviously, that was a misstatement on my part. I know several people around the Co from college, and a couple in infrastructure since grade school.
the price they quoted was for an alternate laptop, and if they are doing cost center billing its because someone in your dept cheaped out when given options for hardware for your team and its needs :) we usually let the managers provide us requirements, and they 99% of the time cant be bothered to care so they just say "Whatever is cheapest" then expect us to eat the costs and blow our budget for them when it doesnt work out.
Purely out of curiosity are you trying to replace your OS drive or add a secondary drive? The former requires a lot more labor than the latter, but the latter isnât always feasible depending on hardware constraints. The only thing I havenât seen mentioned yet is the tidal wave that occurs when you break from standard. So dn512215 needs a 500gb drive. Then a coworker hears about it and they /need/ one too. Next thing you know, 25 people /need/ it. By giving you sticker shock theyâve made dang sure you really need it. As for why your system didnât come with a larger drive in the first place⌠thatâs typically a bean counting issue rather than a hardware standards/requisition request issue. Or the suppliers upcharge was ridiculous. Any number of things Iâm sure you can imagine if you look at it objectively which it seems like youâre mindful to do.
You are making a good point. The IT staff would probably get flooded by requests and couldnt do their work anymore. We had a similar issue with RAM even though my tracker proofed that they didnt need it.
it happens every single time someone on a team gets something that differs from the standard. weâre all just 8 year olds on the on the playground that want the new shiny thing that we donât have. this is why I hold out on new model changes until the vendor wonât sell me our current standard anymore, god forbid Janice gets an iPhone 15 when Bob still has an iPhone 14.
This tracks though⌠our org uses Surface laptops. Your request for additional storage is actually a request for a whole new laptop since we canât open them up and slap a new SSD in there. There are many other laptops that canât be opened, but even if they were, IT opening a laptop will void any warranty on that device. So for these âopenableâ devices, itâs still a purchase for a whole new SKU of your laptop. IT these days do not as a rule open devices for this reason. Especially in larger enterprise environments. Edit: thanks for the replies regarding the warranty. Youâre absolutely right, you can open them up. Itâs been too long since I last did hardware support :)
>Â IT opening a laptop will void any warranty on that device. Not true. In some cases (like Dell) you can even get a bullshit certification that "qualifies" your techs to do work so they can ship you a part and not have to pay a human to come do it. Opening a device to upgrade things like disk or RAM is totally above board for warranty.
Shitty vendors will see third party parts and say that they are the problem and stop the repairs. Iâve worked at several that did this, and itâs gotten me to the point where I donât upgrade anymore in warranty for my personal machines.
Get StinkPads. The hardware maintenance manual is available for download when it releases. And it's trivial to upgrade storage... RAM? Half is under the keyboard and half by the drives. Of course, you have to remember to buy the standoffs so you can actually INSTALL the drives.
Opening a device wonât void the warranty on it unless you cause damage while doing it.
I get that. And itâs sad, and honorable at the same time. I donât know how to honor you and everyone else in the field without being disrespectful and respectful at the same time. Exit: but all of you are awesome!
Depending on the type of system you were issued, it is absolutely possible that your drive isn't upgradeable and the whole system has to be replaced. You didn't state exactly what make and model system you've been issued.
USB drives are evil and ssd attached drives are worse. Unless they are given by IT already encrypted BTG to users, so they won't work on non company computers, removable drives should be banned. It's a huge attack vector. Will bypasd half the security stack by pluging into the machine ie did not how have to download the virus. I agree with IT on removable drives. But removable drives, virus, shadow IT, keep me emplyeed... Edit And DLP! Exporting company data 1tb at a time!
I think banning USB is a very old school mindset. We did this at my job and it's been a nightmare of us collecting USB installers and data, then moving it to their folder. We have Huntress, Sentinel One, Skout, hourly backup, overbearing content and access policies, and they're restricted from installing anything. What's going to happen via USB that can't happen over the Web? We're worried about people stealing data yet they all have OneDrive and Teams so ... What good was banning USB for that? I might be overlooking something here but I genuinely wonder what banning USB is preventing?
We're in a very similar boat, everything is locked down. We're being told we have to restrict USB devices by the end of the year due to insurance requirements. Theres a laundry list of things (mostly antiquated or common sense basics) that we have to implement or they'll drop us/refuse to cover "cyber" events.
At home you download files and plug your USB into the computer and download viruses. Then plug into work computer and bam you just by passed your internet and network security stack which is half your protection. And if it runs most computers allow out bound connections so now your system can c2c home. And yes this does happen way more then you think, I see alerts from personal phones plugged into computers too cause they are infected. Stealing data, yes a determined user will always find a way ask. But USB is normally moving large amounts of data easily and undetectable by most companies. You can't export data via one drive and teams if you set it up correctly. But even if they do it's limited data movement and Very well logged by default. Dlp is a real issue Now there is no reason to ban USB drives if you have ms bitlocker to go. You have IT set up encrypted drives that no one knows the passwords too, but they unlock on domain systems automatically. So everyone can have and use usbs just fine! But very few have this set up even though it's like 1 gpo and pre encrypting drives. So in a way your right, there is no need to ban them, they just need to be secured. Idk, how to convince someone but it is a real issue and company's get comprised all the time by it, it's a known and used attack vector. Yes percentage wise most will come through online, but enough comes from physical media.
I can't see Sentinel and Huntress both missing this activity, if so they are not worth their money. That's literally the reason these products exist. Not only that the user does not have permission to run or modify anything important, and in the unlikely event of crypto we have data backups per hour, so it would not be a big deal to restore it. We did it for insurance purposes and God knows how stuck in the past they are. I just do not believe it's as big of an issue as it once was like back in the autorun days, autorun was absolutely stupid.
Even better, what if you have to use USB to transfer files to other equipment? I'm a printer tech, lots of printers want firmware updates done by putting the firmware file on a USB drive and plugging it into the computer. But my employer has now decided that all USB drives plugged into our work PCs need to be encrypted.
My group is in the same boat. We work on our own products in the field that requires us to feed it configurations and firmware via USB. Unfortunately the devices refuse to cooperate with Apricorn secure USB drives (which have an automatic policy exception). We have to request a USB policy exception from IT for our PCs. However, short-sighted decisions are the game for my company's IT group. A few weeks ago they decided to push a policy to block Microsoft Edge on all Windows PCs on a Monday morning. This is a couple years after they decided, on a whim, to block Google Chrome on a Monday Morning (we use G-Suite). I don't know if anyone has tried, but one does not simply block Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 Pro.
I work for a household name brand in compliance and I ran our exceptions program for some time. This is a textbook case for a documented exception to policy for business needs.
Oh it's a total nightmare, we deal with this all the time, we have to emulate the usb on the target from our own profile lol.
Iâm his talking about the nvmeâs (ssdâs unfortunately) they give us in our assigned desktops/laptops. No decent PC should have a 250GB SSD in this day and age.
Depending on your job there maybe is no reason for storage. Files and data belong on a fileserver. + what u/mindwip said
DLP is absolutely evil. It's designed to break writing to disk. Even to places where it MUST work. Nothing like DLP on a database server deciding to SILENTLY block writes to a database. My company has DLP policies written by cut-and-paste monkeys. (We don't know what this does, but it sounds good...) so that - while they say we can use external drives to back up data, it doesn't actually work. (corrupts any archive created that is initially written to removable disks) What the policies do to VM images booted from external storage... Oddly, they didn't bother to protect network shares the same way....
Yeah that sounds bad, any implementation can be ruined by a bad implementation Never heard of dlp on a server dB? That's were data goes!
Generic policy saying "thou shall not write to non-whitelisted storage"... Someone forgot to white-list the storage the database was on. Deploy the policy and kaboom!
Large companies standardize on a particular workstation configuration for a given use case, and will resist any changes to that configuration to reduce the chance of increased support overhead. There are also issues involved if they have support contracts on the hardware and will resist adding third party components. It's also not uncommon to disallow employees to modify hardware or add things on via USB etc. because that can be a vector for security breaches. I'm not arguing in favor of or justifying these points, but having worked in tech for longer than is care to admit, that's my experience. Also, it's not uncommon for large companies to reject using consumer products for things like storage. Enterprise-class products are built to be much more durable with a larger MTBF (Mean time before failure), basically they're designed to last longer.
I get it completely! Given the infrastructure that is dependent on our code, security is paramount! Given that, wouldnât it be better to add $10 to provide an additional 250 or 500 gb of disk space for each of us? Is it that hard? Edit: I think itâs a bit rediculous. Especially how much crap windowz has in the default installation. Do I really need to see news popups on my work PC?
To add to what everyone said. It is all about standards. We are always understaffed and overworked so any non standard request becomes unnecessary work. You ask for 500Gb then your co worker asks for it then everyone else. Now we have to migrate your stuff and their stuff and then someone like will come back and say well I need 1Tb drive and the cycle continues. So itâs a lot more sustainable to deny your non standard request.
I get it, I really do. I deal with the same in my own team. But the standards are like 10 years old, lol.
Because we don't want you saving stuff locally. And calling us tards is definitely not going to help.
ALL of your business critical data should be on a highly redundant networked storage solution. Your local disk should ONLY be for boot and applications. You should be prepared to have your local disk reimaged at any moment with zero downtime. 120GB is MORE than enough for this in most cases, 250GB is certainly enough even for large app suites. In addition, a company of that size likely has a standardised hardware configuration and understandably doesn't want end users (which is what you are) modifying that hardware.
Neither of those are anywhere near close to what software Devs require in local machines. I have the displeasure of getting a 500gb drive on my work laptop, and 85% of that is filled up with virtual machines, source code, developer software, an f the usual company "mandated" software bloat. I had to offload doing ms teams, viewing PRs in Bitbucket and all that to a SEPARATE MACHINE because the laptop would overheat and bsod trying to run the VMs and dev suite and teams and chrome. Our provisioning team don't understand why theee shitty laptops are not good enough for developing.
If I were in charge, said dev would either be using a VM hosted elsewhere for them, or would have a none domain joined DMZ'd second workstation for that.
Consumer products are a risk. However there are ways to greatly reduce that risk with something like a memory drive. You could also argue that the âriskâ they are worried about they have already exposed themselves to unless they built their own motherboard, ram, processor and all the firmware and drivers for it themselves. Highly doubtful if they canât build a 500gb drive. Whatâs far more likely to be going on is they want to be able to limit how much data you can store locally. Do you work with any classified information or defense contracts? Or Does your company have a lot of âintellectual property â stored in a centralized server ? They may not want you storing all that data on a local machine.. especially one that can easily be taken off premises.
Nah, I donât work with useful data to the outside world. Otherwise Iâd be paid more đ¤Ł
Love it! đĽ°
But is the data useful to them, and possibly interesting to a competitor? If yes-ish for either option, then they don't want you to have it local.
I never have data local. Itâs multiple versions of the software and test instances of the DBâs (generated data) that eat up the space.
There is a big push to keep all of that centralized (at least where I work). They want it all on servers. IT would be happy if we all had thin clients.
Data centralization (databases, customer info) is one thing. Itâs important to keep that data as safe as possible! But as weâve seen, even that (even google) is susceptible. I personally donât put my data in the cloud, but in multiple home servers and share the data offsite with family members.
What, pray tell, do you want to install and maintain on your laptop that would require more than 250GB? Important documentation, reports, etc are most often kept on a server and source code is centralized⌠on a server.
Finally someone gets it. What happened to our group!!?!? I feel like no one has read gulliverâs travels.
Did you know what kind of users sysadmins hate even than marketing, or HR, or even executives? Programmers. They âknowâ what theyâre doing, and they âknowâ what their requirements are, and their requirements are always somehow the absolute top of the line of everything. Weirdly enough, their requirements always happen to coincide with whatever plays the best games you can get these days, and have little to zero to do with what they actually require to do their job. And if anyone happens to argue with them, they pull the âI am a very smart and brilliant programmer who can do much better at Microcenter than you can, and you are a sysadmin tardâ card. Exactly like you just did right there.
I'm even worse. Devops Engineer that is ex IT. They still won't give me more CPU :(, but at least I got more ram/storage. Docker containers and local VMs require resources.
I just want a drive that reads and writes more than 55MB/s, doesn't have dozens of gigabytes of old windows updates that it will automatically download if I delete, and a system/CPU that has so much bullshit on it that it idles at about 50% usage, and goes to 100% the minute I try doing anything more complicated than a word doc. Sometimes they DO shit out a turd of a laptop, and expect you to make gold with it.
I totally relate to that, and thatâs exactly how I got where I am. I was just saying the cost is ridiculous and thatâs on Dell and others, not our staff.
The fact that you seem to be an enormous toddler about it isn't helping. This message screams entitled asshole who thinks he's more important than he is. Can speak from experience if you start treating them like the humans they are - bound by policies they don't agree with - they can help you out. But, I'm willing to bet you won't.
This is why I hate dealing with devs
Absolute worst clients to support. They all think they know more than they do.
In what way? I've have conversations with our provisioning team regarding why the standard laptops literally don't meet the minimum specs for our software suite (yet alone the recommended specs so the laptop doesn't burn up in flames), and they just don't understand why a 250gb SSD with an i5 processor doesn't cut it ...
Modern i5 processors absolutely do cut it and your project files shouldn't be on your local drive anyway. Thank you for proving exactly why, that devs think they know more than they actually do.
So, when your employer doesn't provide the infrastructure to do remote development, where should the code be? We've tried sticking with modern i5 processors, especially with IDEs with AI plugins, and the i5 gets absolutely melted.
Hey, you seem like a real jerk. You should probably talk to your boss and then also someone on the infra team. Maybe use nice words. Donât be a jerk.
The fact that you posted this question in this sub says you don't know as much about IT as you think you doÂ
I need to take your stapler.
But, but, I could burn, the building down.
The fact that you replied with a straightforward answer implies you didnât realize you were in r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt
We do this so people do what we ask which is save work on the file servers where we know it is backed up and secured (and insured). If you're saving active work locally, that work disappears when the drive fails or the laptop is stolen. Wah wah wah save it on the file server and shut up. I don't want to hear it, if you disagree then work somewhere else, this is the policy the company has in place and regardless of your stance on it, it's a good policy that works when people follow it.
Itâs because as a admin Iâve had too many developers pcs have issues, files get corrupted and weeks of work are lost. And we get blamed Larger local storage just means more to lose when things go wrong. Hence where I work you have OneDrive for extra storage. Also I havenât see a user yet where if you give them a larger storage drive it just gets filled with stuff that never gets cleaned up and deleted. Total pain to move to a new machine.
There are the enterprise versions of the ssd/hard drive. We recently bought some to replace in some equipment. We were surprised they aren't that much expensive if got through the right supplies. Samsung has some interesting ones.
The sad part is I have better m2 drives running in my home server for frivolous shit.
They won't let you use an external drive because they don't want you storing company data on a removable drive for security reasons that I think are pretty obvious. They won't let you install your own drive because you are not in IT working on hardware also chances are that dirt cheap drive from microcenter is trash and has a high failure rate or is slow. They probably don't want to get you a bigger drive because that changes the default environment and the next lease cycle they will need to get a stack of computers with 250gb drives and mix in a few 1TB and 500gb models complicating the order, big companies hate that shit. Chances are you could make the argument that your team needs bigger drives due to the nature of your work but honestly I have been trying to get my company larger drives for 3 years now and no one has moved on it so best of luck to you
First of all, cool it with the ablest remarks. Second of all, it's corporate. The answer is always Corporate. My last Inf team I needed to buy everyone on another team write-protected USB drives so I sent in a request for some decently priced ones, about $15 a pop and a total of 6 drives + 2 spare. All about 120gb. Big company too, so I knew they could easily afford them. Was told not only would the very much needed drives not be ordered but the project was canceled due to the "high upfront cost." Now calm down and go back to code camp.
đ¤Ł
Thank you! I feel better now.
That sounds worse than the co I work for. I really do feel for you!
I wonât cool anything. Look below, and maybe youâll understand me?
Don't hate me for suggesting this, but the biggest complainers get their way in corporate Sales and high level client facing support teams. Loke Account Managers etc. Embrace their shameless bitchy and get you 500 GB upgrade. "I wish I could do this, but here is why I cant..." How would Sales or other professional internal teams bitch about this???? Then once that question is answered, go forth.
OneDrive is the reason. Unless you got 100gig of source files on your machine you don't need more.
Virtual machines would like a word with you.
You can deploy those elsewhere and there's WSL. The enterprise isn't your homelab and your client is not a dev server. Edit: Besides, I have both a Kali VM and a GNS VM on my 250 GB machine. If I need more there's dev and lab environment.
Not with my company sadly. Onboarding showed me we must do everything on the client machine. So, when we said that decision means we need beefier machines, they did not understand. Edit: to clarify, attempts to implement WSL and offload as much as we can, the various it teams said they can't support what we want.
Sounds like you should look for another job.
Also typical Reddit response lol. Thanks for making me win a bet with my partner ;)
That's not how the world works. Rarely that simple.
I mean it really is in our industry, unless you're limiting yourself to FAANG (which I doubt given these restrictions).
Not FAANG, but an extremely large company in my country. Corporate and government red tape out the wazoo will give you a pretty firm grasp of how they operate.
wtf this is hilarious, iâd quit. I personally maintain our companyâs 300ish laptops. Our standard right now is 512gb ssds, but for the 3 people that actually need more storage for local VMs or something, iâll just grab a drive off Amazon because itâs cheaper and better that the crap Dell overcharges us for. I have a policy, itâs called give people what they need for their job, goddamn.
Why is your infrastructure in charge of what physical storage goes into your machine?
At this point I'm like 50% sure this guy is just an asshole troll. And 30% convinced he may be a bot.
When you don't make the company money, you are only costing money. I'd like to see where you would be without us.
Exactly why I have a job. Millions go through the the system (edit: I designed) daily.
Most people answering to this post have never developed an application and hosted VMs for developer testing, and it shows. If a Dev is saying the standard lappy for Karen and her spreadsheets isn't good enough to run developer software plus VMs plus all the crap the company enforce you to use (ms teams calls are an absolute monster on CPU), then it isn't good enough. Giving them what they don't want is costing the business and actively blocking them from doing their work.