- Joined
- Nov 30, 2016
I couldn't find a proper thread to vent my sorrows, so I'm creating one. The point of this thread is to vent when a simple task turns into an hours-long rabbit hole, possibly due to factors out of one's control.
I'll start.
Recently, at my work, I ordered some programmable gaming mice. I work with software a lot, so having programmable buttons on my mice is a useful development tool. When the mice came, they had an obnoxious button placed front-and-center to cycle DPI profiles. Never, in my entire life, have I found this to be a useful feature. Naturally, I go to install the manufacturer's GUI to program the mouse.
The manufacturer's GUI is set up in such a way that it can only be installed in a specific path on the C:/ driver. As luck would have it, the security software running on my work PC would not allow the installer to modify the C:/ drive, even when running as admin. I was SOL if I wanted to program the mouse from my work PC.
I then boot up my personal machine and go to install the GUI. They don't support Linux, so I would need to set up a virtual machine. First thing I needed to do is download the Windows 10 ISO. For whatever reason, the Microsoft website would not allow me to download the ISO from my Linux machine, no matter what browser I was using. The MicroSoft website kept throwing up this error:
"Some users, entities and locations are banned from using this service. For this reason, leveraging anonymous or location hiding technologies when connecting to this service is not generally allowed."
So, basically, If I wanted to install their spyware on my machine, I would need to disable my spyware evasion tools. Makes total sense.
For whatever reason, I did not get this error on my work machine. The next thing I needed to do was install the 5gb ISO file on my work PC, and then move the file to my computer. It took nearly half an hour to download the ISO and copy it over to my main machine.
Finally, on my Ubuntu machine, I have the ISO in my file system. I point gnome boxes at the ISO, and go to run it, but get an error. For whatever reason, gnome-boxes thought I didn't have virtualization enabled on my CPU, even though I did. (I could run VMs for other OSs just fine.) I spent about an hour faffing about with Gnome boxes, switching between the Flatpak and Apt versions until I gave up and switched to qemu.
Miraculously, qemu spun up first time without a hitch. I was finally running windows in a VM. After another half hour setting up the windows installation, and another half hour of playing around with the USB passthru arugments, adjusting devices permissions, etc. I was finally able to get the manufacturer GUI to pick up on the mouse, and program the buttons.
This whole process wound up sinking about 4 hours of my time, all because the security software at my work attempts to thwart its users from actually doing anything productive at every step of the way.
I'll start.
Recently, at my work, I ordered some programmable gaming mice. I work with software a lot, so having programmable buttons on my mice is a useful development tool. When the mice came, they had an obnoxious button placed front-and-center to cycle DPI profiles. Never, in my entire life, have I found this to be a useful feature. Naturally, I go to install the manufacturer's GUI to program the mouse.
The manufacturer's GUI is set up in such a way that it can only be installed in a specific path on the C:/ driver. As luck would have it, the security software running on my work PC would not allow the installer to modify the C:/ drive, even when running as admin. I was SOL if I wanted to program the mouse from my work PC.
I then boot up my personal machine and go to install the GUI. They don't support Linux, so I would need to set up a virtual machine. First thing I needed to do is download the Windows 10 ISO. For whatever reason, the Microsoft website would not allow me to download the ISO from my Linux machine, no matter what browser I was using. The MicroSoft website kept throwing up this error:
"Some users, entities and locations are banned from using this service. For this reason, leveraging anonymous or location hiding technologies when connecting to this service is not generally allowed."
So, basically, If I wanted to install their spyware on my machine, I would need to disable my spyware evasion tools. Makes total sense.
For whatever reason, I did not get this error on my work machine. The next thing I needed to do was install the 5gb ISO file on my work PC, and then move the file to my computer. It took nearly half an hour to download the ISO and copy it over to my main machine.
Finally, on my Ubuntu machine, I have the ISO in my file system. I point gnome boxes at the ISO, and go to run it, but get an error. For whatever reason, gnome-boxes thought I didn't have virtualization enabled on my CPU, even though I did. (I could run VMs for other OSs just fine.) I spent about an hour faffing about with Gnome boxes, switching between the Flatpak and Apt versions until I gave up and switched to qemu.
Miraculously, qemu spun up first time without a hitch. I was finally running windows in a VM. After another half hour setting up the windows installation, and another half hour of playing around with the USB passthru arugments, adjusting devices permissions, etc. I was finally able to get the manufacturer GUI to pick up on the mouse, and program the buttons.
This whole process wound up sinking about 4 hours of my time, all because the security software at my work attempts to thwart its users from actually doing anything productive at every step of the way.
