We interrupt our regularly scheduled post on Sudo to bring you a General Rant rant.
Last week, I was oncall. We also received new laptops for our team. The current corporate policy states that we cannot have two laptops at the same time. The problem is that most members on our team actually run some flavor of Linux, which means we manage our own OS installation. I backed up all of my stuff on Friday when I came off of oncall, downloaded a new OS ISO to “burn” to a USB thumb drive, and dropped off the old laptop. I picked up my new one before leaving for the day. The new one doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive of any sort. This is why I had to use a USB drive.
Today (Saturday as I write this,) I began the process of installing the new OS. I interrupted the boot, went into the UEFI/BIOS to set the boot order, and… nothing. The USB drive doesn’t show as a boot option. It’s in a list at the bottom, but it’s not selectable as a boot device. I was going to wait until Monday to borrow the external DVD drive there, but I was informed that we bought one of those for my daughter at some point. I borrowed hers, downloaded the ISO (again) and burned it to disk.
The drive we have here at the house? Same problem. It “shows” but doesn’t show as a bootable media option as it should. It could be driver related, but it shouldn’t be. I’ll try again on Monday with the one we have at work, but I may have to give this back to Corporate as “faulty” if the one we have there doesn’t work. It’s also possible that they applied some kind of corporate policy to lock that out, and I don’t know the hoodoo voodoo to make it work from that perspective.
In the mean time, I’ve got plenty to work on for my home business(es) and will focus on those since this attempt was a bust.
It would have made more sense if they had let us have both laptops (new and old) at the same time for say… a week. Due to the nature of my job, I can’t leave one sitting in their little build space while I remote in to set things up, since that would give them physical access. Then again, “I got trust issues.”
Next rant…
I would build this with OpenBSD, but there are some software restrictions. First, our Corporate VPN solution requires a specific agent that isn’t available on OpenBSD. There is a third party client port available in the ports and packages, but the VPN service itself is configured to reject that. There’s also a chance that the consoles we have that require Java won’t work with the Java clients available on OpenBSD. I know that the OpenJDK has had issues in the past for some of them, so we download Oracle’s version, and I’m not aware of an Oracle provided OpenBSD build of Java. Then again, I haven’t looked in a while. I could be wrong, and one might be available. I would have a higher peace of mind if I could run OpenBSD, rather than some flavor of Linux, but Linux is better than Windows any day of the week.
General Rant ending transmission.