I am so fed up with companies who buy in to some proprietary piece of shit software because that software claims to fufill all their business needs, make them margaritas every morning, and stay well hidden under their desk when the wife comes into the office unannounced.
This little excerpt is from my place of employments official documentation on VPN access:
What operating systems does the Nortel (Extranet-VPN) client support?
[...list of 8,000,000 proprietary systems that are in bed with Nortel...]
There is not a Linux client, but several Unix clients and a Macintosh client are currently being tested.
In addition, I had a talk with our helpless-desk this morning in regard to the restoration of direct (through the firewall) internet access from my workstation, as opposed to having to use the slow, cumbersome, and constantly failing proxy servers my company has set up. The man on the other end of the phone told me that the firewall is back up and that it is being used. In a flash of lightening make yet another request to get out. It fails. I inform him of this. He asks me if I have the correct "firewall" address in my browser. I tell him that I am not using a browser, nor do I wish to use the proxy. He informs me that when I plug an address into the big settings window for my browser named "proxies" that that is setting up a firewall, not a proxy server. I don't bother to argue with him. I ask him what services the proxy is willing to pass for me. He has no clue. I ask him how I am expected to access FTP servers. He informs me that the proxy will handle this (which I knew it did). I ask him what authentication method the proxy server uses for FTP. He has no clue. I ask him if the proxy server will handle SSH, or pserver requests. He has no clue. I ask him if there is a method that I can use to script proxy access into applications that used to work (without a proxy) without having to hardcode a proxy username and password. He has no clue. He starts typing. All though he is very annoyed with me, he would rather submit a ticket and get me off his back then to continue speaking to me on the phone. Just as I hear him finishing up the ticket I tell him,"You know what… I'll find my own way around it. Thanks for the help. There is no need to submit a ticket."
How can my company consider that a helpdesk when the people who man it know less than I do?
