The promise of BYOD is appealing in theory. I can bring my own device to your enterprise and make everything work. I can access my work files and my work email but have the comfort of my own keyboard and a picture of my own kids as my wallpaper instead of some restrictive corporate image. It’s the utopia that everyone wants to see and no one ever gets to experience.
That’s because the reality of BYOD is governed by policy that restricts everything under the sun. No VPNs. No Dropbox. No non-corporate email. You can do whatever you want with your laptop on my network, as long as it behaves like one of my corporate-managed devices. It’s enough to make you want to just start working from Starbucks every day.
Eric Abelson is no stranger to this difficulty. In a great post, he outlines some of the tricks that he uses in order to make his personal laptop work a little more effectively from inside the corporate firewall. Here’s a little taste of one of his solutions using multiple network interfaces to ensure he can check his personal email without getting in trouble with the security team:
But for something like an email client that doesn’t keep an open TCP session to the server, it means that on the next connection attempt it will end up using the priority interface (internal) and I have to start the dance all over again of swapping interfaces, making the connection and swapping them back again.
Make sure you check out some more of his tips, including some fun routing tricks in MacOS!
Read more at Stupid Network Tricks
