Earlier this week my company bought a LIDAR from Ouster. The LIDAR is a network device: it has an ethernet interface, it gets its IP from a DHCP server and then it talks to whichever machine runs the Ouster application.
The engineers and the marketing guy in charge of evaluating it installed the software on a Windows 11 laptop and tried to make it work for 2 days, to no avail. The software simply wouldn’t connect.
So they came to me, the unofficial company “hacker”, to figure it out. And I did: the culprit, as always, was the Windows firewall. Because of course…
But here’s the twist: because it’s Windows, you need some sort of additional antivirus on top of it. Our company uses WithSecure, which is phenomenally annoying and intrusive, and constantly gets in your way when you try to do any work in Windows that isn’t Word or Excel. And of course, WithSecure wouldn’t let me punch a hole in the Windows firewall, because of course…
Anyhow, after trying to work around Windows and the hateful compulsory antivirus, I called IT and told them I needed WithSecure disabled, at least temporarily. They told me to fuck off because they’re not letting an unsecured Windows machine on the intranet.
Fine. I pulled another, older Windows laptop without any antivirus, connected it to an air-gapped router, configured DHCP in the router, connected the LIDAR to the router, launched the Ouster app and… it didn’t work.
After 3 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally found the problem: the stupid app is an Electron app built with an older version of Electron that had a bug in node.js that prevented it from working if it couldn’t resolve some internet address.
Sigh… Electron… Because of course…
This was getting too painful and annoying with Windows. So I blew away the Windows partition, installed Linux Mint on the laptop, configured the ethernet interface as a private interface, installed the DHCP server so I could do away with the router, connected the laptop to the guest wifi so the stupid Electron app could resolve whatever it needed to resolve to work, installed the Linux version of the Ouster app, and hey-presto, it worked rightaway.
So I made an account for the guys in Mint and handed them the laptop. They played with the LIDAR for a few hours without any problem, pulled records and files out of the machine on USB sticks without any problem, viewed some Excel files in Libreoffice without any problem.
Eventually the marketing guy asked me:
“So what was the problem then?”
“Windows of course” I said. “What else?”
“Wow. That Linux stuff is really good. We tried so hard to make this work but we never could. But it worked rightaway in Linux. That’s slick!”
“Well yeah, I keep telling you guys Windows is crap. There are reasons and this is one of them.”
“Yeah I can see why you don’t like it. And that Linux desktop is really nice actually. I might give it a spin at home.”
So hey, I managed to impress a marketing guy with Linux 🙂
It shows how polished Linux has become, if ordinary computer users can be convinced this easily now. It wasn’t like that for a long long time and it feels kind of rewarding to know you bet on the right horse all along and you’re vindicated at last.
How do you sell what you did as “it just worked”? Rightaway? You lied to them. You have your coworkers on an unmanaged machine with a foreign OS on the guest WiFi with custom networking. Don’t oversell a workaround as a solution.
Simplifying the problem to “Windows” seems unfair, given how many problems you found. All of them still require a long-term solution for regular operation.
Which, at any of my last few corporate jobs, would be grounds for termination, if not immediately throwing you out of the building and telling you if you come back we’re calling the cops.
You really don’t bypass controls in a corporate environment like this if you like working there.
(And yes, not EVERY job will react that way, but any that’s got any compliance requirements absolutely will.)
It is especially damming that they said they can’t turn off the security solution. If they won’t be flexible enough to add an exception then I’m pretty sure they definitely don’t what ghost IT. This could end up costing this company a lot of money down the road