Can Developers Work in a 'Locked-Down' Environment?

Posted by Cliff on Friday October 26, 2001 @06:52AM from the coding-under-lock-and-key dept.

brad-d queries: "My company is seriously considering enforcing a SOE on all employee computers, including developers. The level of lock-down would likely include baring the Windows registry from changes (and in effect stopping the installation of new software). The goals of this SOE are to prevent users from installing unlicensed software, plus some support issues. What are others experiences with situations like this? Can a developer really work in a lock-down environment? What compromises could be made between developers and IT services? And no, Linux would be likely banned." It depends on how "locked-down" said environment is, and what the developer would be will be working on, however if the Registry is locked with no mechanism provided for the Developer to add in whatever keys are necessary, how much real developing can one do?

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Yes, but at a much slower rate... by Gid1 · 2001-10-26 06:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

I'm just at the end of a six-month contract to put together a PHP/MySQL/Apache based website, in a locked-down Windows 95 (!) environment with a few thousand users.

They're migrating to W2K shortly, but I put my foot down and they allowed me to wipe my box and install RedHat on it -- the only way I managed that was the fact that it was in a nice shrinkwrap box.

Well, all fine, but I get no support and I'm not allowed to put it on the network, so it's sneakernet for me. Access to the internet is done with floppies. =(

The point is that you may be able to persuade them to let you have a purely standalone machine, as long as you keep an SOE machine next to it for running Outlook =)