Running IDEA on an encrypted drive

We use PointSec here. It seems to run OK on the extremely crappy, sub-par hardware they give us.

Well, the first of our devs to have this done to their machines now can't even launch IDEA. It simply dies with nothing in the log. We will try again once the encryption is complete, then try a reinstall, then go beat some corporate security committee folks with tire irons. I'll keep this list informed, for future googling by those who find themselves in a similar position.

--Dave Griffith

Dave Griffith wrote:

Evidently, the corporate security folk here have decreed that all of company laptop drives must be encrypted. Does anyone know of any performance issues running IDEA in such an environment. The encryption product is Credant Mobile Gaurdian 5.3.

Just out of curiosity, what's so bad about this policy? Seems prudent to
me...

We are using TrueCrypt on our notebooks and did not had some noticeable
slow-downs compared to direct hard-disk usage.

Tom

My general belief is that software developers need complete control over their personal development machines. If that means they need to be sandboxed off from sensitive data, so be it, but doing standard corporate installs on developer's machines is just a bad idea. Even today, software development still taxes machines in ways that system administrators at non-software shops do not anticipate, and which system software designed for business users is often unable to handle. I regularly read and write hundreds of megabytes of data in the course of testing. Doing so with corporate-standard encryption/antivirus/application-inventory/indexing applications running with standard settings would be incredibly unproductive, if it even worked. Mostly, it wouldn't even work, as my colleague is currently finding out.

--Dave Griffith

I agree with Dave.

I am stuck on the same system as our general users. They seem to think that the same 1gb ram Dell Precision M60 that works fine for email and web browsing should serve me just as well when running a web server, application server, database explorer and a code editor.

Should it bother me that I have a 1.5gb paging file and the virus scanner pegs the CPU every time I write to a file?

I've experienced similar constraints and it is a huge productivity loss. When the network support drone heads dictate such policy on software engineers, companies are hamstringing themselves and often blithely unaware. It is utterly amazing how maladaptive corporates can be. :)