Well, the first week back at work has been… hectic.
It's been quite the shock to the system going from full-time Uni student
back to full-time employee. 8 hours feels like forever.
I was issued a laptop on my
first day, which was rather impressive. The problem was, it was installed
with Windows XP according to the new company SOE, which may be well and good
for one of the sales people, or someone who worked in one of the company
offices, but I'm working out onsite at a client, with a LAN that is nothing
like what the SOE expects.
I have two LANs that I can connect to: a management LAN, which has DHCP but
no Internet access, and a filtered Internet accessable LAN, from where we
can VPN back into the office LAN so that we can read our email, and surf the
web and whatnot. This LAN doesn't do DHCP.
Problem number 1 is that as I don't have local Administrator access to my
laptop (Power User would probably suffice), I can't statically set an IP
address, so I can't get onto the Internet LAN to VPN into the office LAN, so
I can't read my work email, and I can't submit my timesheets.
Problem number 2 is that on the management LAN, we have to set a few static
routes to access a few networks, and as I don't have local Administrator
access, I can't do that. So this SOE is making it extremely difficult to do
my job. I'm currently using another random clunky laptop that was spare as
my computer on the management LAN, and my work laptop in Linux on the
Internet LAN for general Internet access, however as the smartcard software
only works under Windows, I'm unable to VPN into the office.
Finally, I can't install software, so to start with, all I had was Office
and the VPN software. I needed at least PuTTY, preferably Firefox, and
probably VNC to be reasonably productive. There's also a few firewall GUIs
that I might need installed. The SOE is generally quite unworkable.
My boss' boss' boss has unofficially told me that I can "take whatever steps
necessary in order to do my job". I think that's going to have to entail
hosing the laptop and reinstalling it. I'd really like to tow the company
line (I'm the first person out on this client's site to be running the new
SOE) but it's just not going to be workable for me in its current state. I'm
just trying to make sure I'm not going to get myself into trouble
company-policy-wise, or license-wise.