Re: life at macrosoft?

["Mike M." <http://profiles.yahoo.com/handmeat>]

> 
> We have McAfee anti-virus at work.  It hasn't bothered me so far.  The
> only problem I had was Windows's firewall -- which of course I poke holes
> in.

MS has its own internal anti-virus that everyone on
redmond corp domain must use.  It may be different for
you guys.

> Can you/do you use ssh?  That's not blocked, right?

yes I use ssh every day, you have to install a thing called "ISA Proxy
Client" I think, to run it.  Or, maybe you need the ISA client to run IRC
w/o ssh, which I used to do.  now I ssh into a (external) box and irc from
there.  you can get the ISA client i think at "http://itweb";, or
http://msweb, one of those.  the intranet is, well, quite huge.

> 
> I also install http://www.colinux.org on my Windows machines so I can run
> all my home-written programs without porting 'em.  I hope I can install
> that, as well as Cygwin, Firefox, and Gaim.

yeah i'm sure you can run all that stuff too.

> I may just keep two computers, then -- one for doing my work, and the
> other for accessing the corporate network (i.e., reading e-mail).  Seems
> such a waste to have an entire computer just for reading e-mail, 'tho.

that's really not a bad idea, and pretty common.  at AOL last year i did
linux development but had a windows laptop just for email pretty much.
KVM switch boxes are pretty common too, if you have a couple desktop
machines to operate with one KB/mouse.

i think the MS security is basically around corpnet.  you can't, say, run
an externally accessible ftp server, or wireless access point, on a
machine connected to corpnet.  and you must run their antivirus (so they
can push out changes to you).  there's probably something wacky they do
with outlook too.  frankly, i wouldn't mind having a separate machine just
for outlook as it is such a pig.