Let's be clear up front, we are not advocating anything below and doing anything proposed below may not be permitted by your local authority. However, we know of at least one instance where these types of things were permitted for certain mission requirements. We are also not sure if all of these would work as we have not tried them ourselves. Your mileage may vary. We'd be interested to hear any test results.
What if we could run a
real application on our NMCI machines without violating the rules about installing software? Do you long to use Firefox or Thunderbird or a real FTP application? Do you need to use secure shell (SSH) to talk to devices or other servers?
Although it was rumored that you could install Firefox without modifying the registry at a non-S&T seat, doing so would still be prohibited by the "install no software" rule. Here is a way to use the full-blown Firefox and other applications without actually installing anything.
Portable Firefox is available which can be run off a USB drive. You can save all your settings and even import settings from your legacy machines.
They have several other applications available at the
Portable Apps Site which
should run fine on NMCI desktops and laptops.
What if you need to do something that just isn't possible in Windows 2000? Could you load Linux on an NMCI machine? No.
Well, maybe.
There is no reason that
Damn Small Linux could not be booted from a CD. Or if you need more horsepower,
Knoppix is certainly the king of bootable Linux CDs. It should recognize all the hardware on both NMCI laptops and NMCI desktops. It would leave the internal hard drives untouched. Leaving the NMCI machine connected to the NMCI network while booted into Linux would probably not be advisable.
Of course one extremely valuable use for a bootable Linux CD would be disaster recovery of a damaged NMCI Windows installation or a hard drive failure. Both Knoppix and DSL should mount both the internal hard drive and an external USB device. This would allow you to copy documents off the hard drive and on to the memory stick or other external drive. As the internal hard drives are (presumably) formatted as NTFS, you would not be able to write information to the internal hard drive of an NMCI computer. That's probably a good thing.... Although Linux is close to being able to mount an NTFS drive as read/write.
