Posts made by Gigalith
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RE: School/Education Network Security
I just had to register to reply to this thread.
At the school I am related to in a rather complicated fashion:
1) They have a computer lab with around 10-20 computers. Because of severe severe lack of space, this lab is shoved into a small room, barely large enough for the kids and computers, let alone the teachers. Also, the room that the only door leads to is used by a preschool (don't ask) so the door cannot be opened during the lab's use. And for a while, there was no ventilation whatsoever. The result: Random crashes in a sweatshop-like environment.
Only later did they add a single vent.
2a) Hideous laptops. Not in the sense of ugly to look at, but all sorts of wrong things with them. Some have copies of XP passed down from teacher to teacher for years, and never have been reinstalled. One has a dead battery. One has a user with a messed-up keymap (the others are fine). One has a terribly broken copy of Vexira Antivirus, (which is itself a WTF) that will slowly destroy the OS every Sunday when it tries to update, forcing the use of a recovery partition. There is all kinds of unimaginable junk in there and some totally bizarre programs/files. I've bequeathed a few things of my own, such as a small webserver with a large website, a FTP server, VLC and other junk I've forgotten.2b) There are a set of twenty new laptops. Their problem: Vista. Not only are they not quite powerful enough, but Vista has multiple WTFs out of the box. Did I mention that they are loaded with Vexira?
3) The ultimate: They took the precaution of giving teachers separate password-protected accounts. This is entirely useless however, because the student (non-passworded) account has administrator rights!