No interoperability on USB sticks

Stupid! I needed a 200 MB database file to do some work with it. I had been doing design changes to the database which were deployed to the productive system late in the evening. Then the last changes were done later in the evening by the content owner. The system admin who did the deployment staied so long and then copied the file to his USB stick. We had agreed to meet this morning at 06:55 in Zurich main-station for the transfer of the data.

So far a lot of things might have screwed up. But everything worked out fine. We met at a coffee shop and I had my Mac PowerBook up and ready. He came with the USB stick. Asked how long I have had the Mac. Produced the stick from a pocket. I plugged the stick in. He said that company rules enforced encryption and I should just start the program that was on the stick to decrypt my file.

I sighed, unplugged the USB stick and handed it back to him. He looked at me puzzled. “This is a Mac. You asked me to start an EXE file. This will not work”.

I have now setup an account on my server for him so that he can securely copy 200 MB over the net.

Wakeup call to corporate IT: There are computers out in the wild, that won’t run just any EXE file.

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