The IT Anecdotes thread
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One of my schools also had a NetWare/NT-based setup. During my time there, a progression of new "security" features were added, that at least initially didn't quite work out.
One attempt at keeping people from playing games was to limit what programs could be run. For some reason this was done by whitelisting certain executables - by name. Result: suddenly there's a huge pile of things named "winword.exe".
The fix to this was to disallow executing stuff from any folder, and to prevent normal users from accessing certain folders, i.e. prevent the viewing of folder contents other than home directories and a few other places in explorer. Turns out that the Open-dialog in Word supported (at that time) a fairly large amount of file manipulation operations and wasn't really affected by whatever was done to prevent such things in explorer. Result: there's a "winword.exe" in every directory that had other (whitelisted) executable files.
IIRC the school's sysadmin finally managed to implement something that wasn't immediately worked around. (Result: we started playing MUDs using the built-in telnet.exe. And we figured out what you'd have to tell the proxy to connect through it by hand. This was never fixed during my time at that school.)
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We did something similar to keep the games from being deleted. One weekend they came through and deleted all of the tetris.exe and simcity.exe files from the computers, on Monday we put them all back with names like Winword.exe and such. If you changed the icons to reflect the change, etc, they had no idea.
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I don't recall us having executable whitelists or anything. We did have issues because most student-accessible computers had some kind of feature that prevented long-term disk writes, so upon every reboot the system was restored to some kind of clean image. Kept all kinds of viruses and such away, but it was very frustrating given the recent transition away from 3.5" floppies and ZIP drives, and that the security software also blocked USB drives, and that all the common webmail providers were blocked. This made it very hard to work on papers both at home and at school. Tablets weren't a thing yet and no one (well, students anyway) had laptops.
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I don't recall us having executable whitelists or anything. We did have issues because most student-accessible computers had some kind of feature that prevented long-term disk writes, so upon every reboot the system was restored to some kind of clean image. Kept all kinds of viruses and such away, but it was very frustrating given the recent transition away from 3.5" floppies and ZIP drives, and that the security software also blocked USB drives, and that all the common webmail providers were blocked. This made it very hard to work on papers both at home and at school. Tablets weren't a thing yet and no one (well, students anyway) had laptops.
Deep Freeze, perhaps? Although the setup I experienced didn't block USB drives. Also: was this before Flash cards were a thing? And, what about IEEE 1394 ports? (Good luck blocking something that can DMA all over the code that's trying to turn it off. ;)
Filed under: IEEE 1394 is so much fun...
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Firewire was around but nobody knew what they were for. Heck I still don't know what they're for.
CompactFlash existed but I'd never seen them outside of expensive digital cameras. Certainly not something students carried with them. IIRC I had a 128 MB USB flash drive at the time and that put me into a fairly elite category among students (not that I could use it on 95% of the school's PCs). The local PC vendor had a 512 MB he kept on a chain around his neck and cost him upwards of $600
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Firewire was around but nobody knew what they were for. Heck I still don't know what they're for.
Hard drives (as FW was around before USB 2.0 was) and digital video cameras (which is where I've seen it used). So, walk in with a 2.5" IEEE 1394 external disk drive in your backpack, and you're golden.
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Back when I was in HighSchool there was this clearly HILARIOUS joke where people would switch your keyboard-buttos around to spell out penis on your keyboard. It was more annoying than funny and that is saying a lot, considering the age-group I am talking about.
A friend of mine takes the crown though. He found a keyboard that had a handwritten letter on it, saying "There is a joke on the backside of the keyboard". If you couldn't tell already, all keys had been loosened.
To this day I still think that he is the only person in the whole wide world to ever fall for that trick...Filed Under: Oh no, I sad penis... I'll probably get banned. Oh wait, I didn't say Belgium... Oh damn! | Btw there was no joke on the backside of the keyboard. There was a letter saying "haha", though. classy!
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In my younger years, I had a bit of an anger problem. Teenage hormones, etc. One day in the computer lab the teacher said something that set me off and I slammed my fist down on the keyboard. Surprisingly it did not break, or rip off the keyboard shelf, but every key that was not under my fist went flying.
Off to the principal's office I go, when I come back to the classroom there are two students that had another keyboard next to the one I had struck matching up keys and putting them back in place. How the hell I ever finished school without being removed for disciplinary issues is beyond me.
