[King Bob On The Cob]

At my school, they put filters on programs so that we can't go installing a virus, ect... We can't access C (Or any other drive except F A and D)
All's good and well.
The only problem, there's ways around these.
My friend showed me earlier in the day that if you right click on the desktop and select create new shortcut, you can make the shortcut point to C and it would load up with full access to the C: drive. But he couldn't figure out how to make AIM (which had been installed at a much earlier date before they had gone gay on us) run. So he opens up WinZip's folder, selects the name, then walks off. I absentmindedly hit the spacebar renaming Winzip. Low and behold, WinZip would no longer run. I renamed it back to WinZip32 and it would run. Hey, this could be interesting I , so I named AIM to WinZip32. By golly it ran. I could get any program to run by naming it WinZip32 (or WinWord, or powerpnt). If you start Netscape, it gets around our school's content filter. (Bad bad things are sure to happen now)

This just goes to prove, once again my school's system admins are utterly retarded, and I'd make a better one than them.

[Scotttheking]

What OS? NT4?

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
What OS? NT4?

Server's running 2000, the rest are running 98.

[Scotttheking]

mmmkay...
Either your school has a very limited budget, or your admin doesn't like win2k.

--Scott, who happily retired the last nt4 machine he admined today, and hopes to not having to use it again.

[Brien]

Don't think the whole IT department is full of idiots; sure, the techs might be, but the head guy is usually a guy who knows how to do things right, but really just doesn't give a load.

[bradoesch]

In high school the only way I could change screen resolutions and bit depths was through the registry. They locked us out of the control panel.

[ryju]

My school won't even let me right-click on the desktop or in folders. And our little content blocker, Bess, won't allow us ANYWHERE, the only sites I can get too that I visit at home are MacNN, Spymac, mac webmail, and Gawker. All flash content is also blocked.

[mitchell_pgh]

Actually, in school environments, they prefer hiring fools.

The evolution of their hiring is usually something like this.
- 1980's - Computers run by Math teachers

- 1990's - Computers run by Math teachers and "Computer Teachers" no special certificate needed (and the math teachers didn't want to hire anyone that knew more them them)

- 2000+ - New tech staff is hired, but they have paid the lowest amount of money possible (When you demand a college degree, MSCE, OS X, OS 9, Norton, Networking, some 10 year old Unix certificate and teaching experience and about three different state clearances (a good thing)... obviously you aren't going to get the best talent when you could make more working at Kinkos). The math teachers don't want anyone that knows more then them, and the "computer teachers" don't want anyone knowing more then them, and more to the point, NOBODY wants to change a damn thing! You receive comments like "Well, I didn't ASK to be upgraded from Windows 3.1" and "Well, I received this new Dell, and I don't know much about computers, but I wanted to install Windows 95 over Windows XP so I did, but I don't know what to do after the reformat". Their budgets (even when you go entice good IT folks) is 1/100 of that of a regular business and the principal ultimately makes the final decision on everything... so solid ideas are overlooked and "We need a flat screen messaging system in the lobby like school XYZ!" does get approved. This compounded by the fact that every single student is trying to hack the system (think of working IT at a business where all of your coworkers were purposely trying to either break or hack their computers and the computers of their neighbors!!!) These people also have to field 5X the amount of questions a normal IT staff would get because the teachers generally aren't motivated enough to learn a new application (because UNLIKE the real world, teachers are locked in to their jobs and don't need to worry all that much about gaining skills... and if they are going to worry about skills, computer stuff isn't #1 on their list). The also have to deal with their bosses now knowing anything "Mr. Kob, I need you to immediately come down here to plug in my new G5 and $5000 laser printer and install AppleWorks 4... Oh, and somehow gum got into my CD-ROM drive... can you clean that as well"

I'm not trying to bust on you King Bob On The Cob because in my book you are cool, but the IT people in schools usually have a thankless job where at any moment they could be given the boot. Also, it must be hard keeping good people when you could potentially find a job making 2X as much and working in a more relaxed environment.

It's also sad that the brightest students are the ones you usually have to watch out for because it's "cool" to hack.

[Scifience]

My dad is a teacher, and I have *wonderful* stories to tell about that school's security procedures.

The passwords for their e-mail and grading systems are the school number + teacher initials. Every one. Because I know my Dad's info, I can get into any other teacher in the district's accounts/info.

They have a silly filter system that blocks 99% of sites on the Internet, including National Geographic, Discovery.com, and other sites that are most definately educational. I got around it in less than a minute by simply taking the proxy server info out of the settings.

Their passwords for the staff network storage (grades, etc.) are the name of the school plus the school mascot.

Their wireless network is not encrypted or password protected in any way. I brought my laptop and got on without configuring anything.

The school e-mail accounts are down half of the time and have no server-level spam filtering at all (my dad's account gets ~300 spams a day).

Student grades are posted online for parents and students to access and are protected only with standard Apache password protection and done through standard HTTP, not HTTPS.

They have a single T1 for the entire school (divide 1.5mbps by 60 computers trying to get online at once and you get slower than dial-up speeds).

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by Scifience:

They have a single T1 for the entire school (divide 1.5mbps by 60 computers trying to get online at once and you get slower than dial-up speeds).

That's actually not all that bad...

What are the odds that all 60 people are trying to download LARGE content at the exact same time? I would guess slow downs were other issues...

Passwords are always a problem for faculty... having everyone with the same in insane.

They shouldn't offer wireless unless they know what they are doing...

[DeathToWindows]

Try mine for really crappy bandwidth:

1 T1 line - 100+ wired workstations
200 iBooks

all of them on teh *^*&* net at once. speeds are worthless.

at least its a pureMac system

[Scifience]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
That's actually not all that bad...

What are the odds that all 60 people are trying to download LARGE content at the exact same time? I would guess slow downs were other issues...

Passwords are always a problem for faculty... having everyone with the same in insane.

They shouldn't offer wireless unless they know what they are doing...

Actually, it is bad. I was trying to download a security update at one point and was getting 3KB/second. In the summer I get the full 1.5, but during the school year it seems that the bandwidth is always getting sucked up by something, even at night.

It could be the fact that they leave all of their Windows computers on and every one is infected with a plethora of viruses and spyware that they don't seem to notice.

[goMac]

Originally posted by Scifience:
Their passwords for the staff network storage (grades, etc.) are the name of the school plus the school mascot.

Wow. I thought the district I admin was the only one that did that.

When we moved to OS X though we went the LDAP route for admin accounts, so we change the password a lot.

We also secured our AirPort using RADIUS. It got scary when teachers were reporting that people were pulling up to schools in the morning and browsing the web on their laptops on the morning.

[coolmacdude]

Originally posted by Scifience:
during the school year it seems that the bandwidth is always getting sucked up by something, even at night.

Probably Kazaa. When I was in high school I did tech support with our head admin and we found a teacher who left Kazaa running all the time to download porn.

[TheMosco]

At my high school, they bought all new HP computers with flat screens this year because they opened up a new Library building and computer labs. They were in such a rush at the beginning of the year to get everything set up that they didn't install any filters or put any restrictions on the computers. So we went a couple months thinking that we could actually use the computers without the stupid limitations and when he came back from christmas vacation, they restricted everything. you can't even go to slashdot because BESS blocked it. they even started blocking public proxies so students could not use those.

[Scifience]

Originally posted by TheMosco:
At my high school, they bought all new HP computers with flat screens this year because they opened up a new Library building and computer labs. They were in such a rush at the beginning of the year to get everything set up that they didn't install any filters or put any restrictions on the computers. So we went a couple months thinking that we could actually use the computers without the stupid limitations and when he came back from christmas vacation, they restricted everything. you can't even go to slashdot because BESS blocked it. they even started blocking public proxies so students could not use those.

Yeah, BESS can be really nasty if it is step up properly. Luckily whatever filtering software my dad's district uses isn't set up correctly (it is able to be bypassed very easily).

[Scotttheking]

60 comps on one T1 is not bad, they just need to setup a proxy server to cache data coming in. Works great, especially for software updates. First machine DLs it slowly, and then it's fast for everyone else. It's one of those budget / knowledge things though.

[macintologist]

Originally posted by ryju:
...

All flash content is also blocked.

I wish my school did that.

We have an ISDN 128k connection serving 30 computers and all the stupid kids are downloading the damn flash games. Flash is utterly pointless. Anything you do with flash that is remotely useful you can do in Java or HTML. If you need some kind of multimedia presentation then use Quicktime or Java, Who needs all those silly mouse-over animations anyway? I wish it would die. HTML 4ever. I wish my school would get ADSL dammit.

[TheMosco]

Originally posted by macintologist:
I wish my school did that.

We have an ISDN 128k connection serving 30 computers and all the stupid kids are downloading the damn flash games. Flash is utterly pointless. Anything you do with flash that is remotely useful you can do in Java or HTML. If you need some kind of multimedia presentation then use Quicktime or Java, Who needs all those silly mouse-over animations anyway? I wish it would die. HTML 4ever. I wish my school would get ADSL dammit.

I hate when kids play flash games with the sound on. If they really want to hear the sounds, then they should just bring some headphones into school but they don't even do that.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by TheMosco:
At my high school, they bought all new HP computers with flat screens this year because they opened up a new Library building and computer labs. They were in such a rush at the beginning of the year to get everything set up that they didn't install any filters or put any restrictions on the computers. So we went a couple months thinking that we could actually use the computers without the stupid limitations and when he came back from christmas vacation, they restricted everything. you can't even go to slashdot because BESS blocked it. they even started blocking public proxies so students could not use those.

Setup your own proxy

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally posted by brien:
Don't think the whole IT department is full of idiots; sure, the techs might be, but the head guy is usually a guy who knows how to do things right, but really just doesn't give a load.

Oh, I'm quiet sure it is, We're a pretty small school (1200 students or something of that number) and our school sent out a newletter that was begging for money (we already spend $2000/student under what the average school in IL spends on their students) There's one guy who used to run everything and had the server stowed away in his office. That was good and all, he knew his **** and could track students down that were doing bad things.

Now we have a new tech teacher, she convinced our school to get a behemoth of a HP server and have it put in a place were anyone could have physical access to it (In our most busy computer lab) She is fully certified to teach Office, but I doubt there's much more she could do.

[ryaxnb]

Originally posted by coolmacdude:
Probably Kazaa. When I was in high school I did tech support with our head admin and we found a teacher who left Kazaa running all the time to download porn.

educational!

[nonhuman]

A T1 for 60 machines isn't bad at all. My college has 6 T1s for 2000 students, however many faculty, and a couple hundred lab machines. It actually doesn't work too bad because we also have a packet shaper to ensure that web-traffic isn't unreasonably slow except in extreme situations (and believe me, it can get pretty damned slow). And, there's a proxy server for fast HTTP and FTP connections which is thankfully not advertised so it's bandwidth doesn't get eaten up.

And, of course, since I'm a SysAdmin for the CS department I can abuse my root access to tunnel other sorts of connections through the academic (much faster) network instead of the residential (clogged and slow) network.

[Scifience]

Laptop + T-Mobile card = GOOD in stupid schools with stupid unbreakable filtering software