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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

There are many cases where this is good advice--and certainly if you're the director of the CIA. There are of course additional reasons, including company policy and as peer comment says side projects, to keep personal and work devices separate. But I also don't think one-size fits all rules apply. I'm not going to carry two laptops when I travel.

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I carry 3 and I just flew to back home to Europe for the summer.

- 1 MbP for my actual job. I’m not admin. I can’t even trigger a update.

- 1 MBP to access the parent company system. Like … 1 a month. ( it has a vpn client that I can’t install on the first one … that’s all )

- my personal laptop. Because I can’t do shit beside working on the two first.

It’s ridiculous

Did you consider booting off an external drive? Macs work really well in this scenario. Windows is notoriously bad at booting off USB (though I'm not sure if this is still the case). But Macs can do it really well. Linux too.

I used to do this in earlier times when personal use was still a very dark thing (in our company it has since become normal - at least web browser stuff). In the days I carried a ThinkPad T42 I would just slip the HDD caddy out and stick in my own at night in the hotel.

Later on I ran my own macOS on a company mac from a USB 3 HDD. Just hold option when booting. You can even encrypt both to secure them from each other.

Luckily these days I don't have to bother with any of that anymore. But they weren't too bad options as long as you don't need both environments at the same time.

On Windows systems with BitLocker, booting off an external drive (or shoot, even opening the bios to look and see how much RAM was installed, as happened to me once) will often trip the BitLocker recovery prompt which means you have to call IT and ask for the magic 48 character password to get back into your laptop, to which they inevitably ask "why did that come up".

I think OS 11 got rid of booting from external drives, but I'm not sure. I know that CCC can't make bootable backups for 11.

Ha, nifty. The previous job had the bios on lockdown. It would have trip something up. But here I could pull it off and not take my personal laptop.

What’s annoying me is to have to carry 2 work laptop.

Oh well :)

But good tips.

I had 3 macbook pros in my apartment and a spiritual chick I had over found “the energy to be misaligned” because I had excessive consumptive goods

So I’ll keep those others in the closet

(next to the flux capacitor)

Yeah, the carrying two laptops part is also my issue. Of course, I am well within my rights to not take my work laptop with me when I go anywhere and if a disaster strikes, I can just tell my manager to sod off - but it's just easier to take the work laptop and do my YouTube watching on it.

(I'm technically not on call but on practice it's messier)

Not the most environmentally friendly and may be against company security policies in certain places, but if you’re going traveling you could leave the work laptop plugged in and remote if disaster strikes (part of the point of this is that it shouldn’t be routine).

As for me, I’ve done the two-laptop thing when traveling since 5y or so. It’s actually worth it for other reasons too - having your only computer have a hardware failure or be stolen in the jungle is no fun. If both are of the same make you could even boot one’s drive off the other in a pinch.

For all the “what about X?” questions in this thread... you will figure it out easier and faster than you think once you force yourself to change habits.

> Not the most environmentally friendly

Solvable with wake-on-lab.

*wake-on-lan

I love the shocked Pikachu face when I show up at someone's desk, let them know their laptop is part of an ongoing investigation, and IT will be by soon to give them a new one.

How does that work these days when people no longer work at their desk in the office?

Just one of the many ways that dual-use is becoming more common. And OSes are increasing their abilities for it too. Mobile OSes are already great at separation. Windows is coming along slowly with Windows Information Protection and Azure Information Protection. Mac has user enrolment but it's in its infancy, sadly.

Your companies lawyers or personnel security people call you and say your devices are being placed on a legal hold. Don’t deleted anything or you might have to deal with the courts. The large MegaCorp I work for had some training that included stuff about lawsuits.

Ok yeah we do get that sometimes in our company but it's always triggered by external causes (some supplier being unhappy about a deal or something, they never tell me the full story). So it only affects people dealing with external parties. And always in the US, never seen it anywhere else. Though it seems to be increasingly prevalent there.

They are using company owned assets, or devices that the company has an interest in. For example one of my former employers paid a percentage of your monthly cell phone bill as part of the BYOD program, which also involved you agreeing to turn over and unlock the device on request.

You can also be compelled by the courts to surrender a device that holds information relevant to a civil or criminal matter. For example sending text messages to a coworker on your personal phone about how you are going to coordinate your efforts to block someone's promotion.

this_definitely_happened.txt

Unless you actually have rogue employees I'm guessing you'll be able to do this once or twice before you get told to stop making people lose an afternoon or even entire days of productive work because of bullshit like that.

Work laptop + personal iPad seems reasonable if you are in the Apple ecosystem.

That's a reasonable approach assuming you're not doing anything personal off-the-clock that requires a laptop computer.

It's something I'm not worried about in general given our work policies and practices. I just travel with a personal MacBook or Chromebook.

You can set up a server at home with wireguard if a PC is absolutely necessary. But yeah, a MacBook Air is lighter than an iPad in some cases

> personal iPad

Personal Apple devices are closest to the definition of "PC".

Yet my multi-user Linux desktop system is called a "PC".

I actually believe that certain government officials (including the director of the CIA) are asked not to have personal cellphones because that could reveal their location. IIRC, Obama needed to have some special technical work done so he could use an iPhone.

At all the jobs I've had, any code that I write using company-owned resources, even if done on my time, the company asserts ownership over. I like to work on open source projects on the weekends, and so that absolutely requires a non-work computer.

I mentioned elsewhere, but I run an encrypted linux VM for anything personal and run all its network traffic through a VPN. I think it's a pretty good compromise between mixing work/personal, and carrying two laptops.

remote desktop for personal?

Hotel WiFi can be pretty awful. To be honest, this isn't a problem for me. I don't separate usage pretty much at all. I'm not sure what I would do if it were a bigger deal.

This was part of the reason I bought a PinePhone. It's not for everyone but it's a bout as powerful as my personal laptop (yes I know, it's 10 years old though.) I've carried work+personal laptops before and that can get heavy enough to start hurting my back so I generally avoid it now.

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