My School's Stupid IT Policies

[DiamondShark286]

so my school is slightly on the dumb side of the technology industry. i mean they somehow make hardware acceleration look like software acceleration. they also use their worst laptops for the content creation department aka photoshop and stuff like that. i also think they might be network booting windows 7 enterprise because the slower the network is the slower the laptops run like last week one day it took 15 minutes to load photoshop where it normally takes under 5. and they have Untrained students work in the IT department and they don't even teach them how to fix the stuff they need to. my friend only had a key cap fall off his chromebook and he had them put it back on(not sure why he didn't do it himself) he said the just took a screwdriver and started pounding on the keycap t put it back on. 

 

comment your school's stupid IT policies if there are any.

[Mug]

They're not network booting, the computer is just pulling your data down from the school server. The server just takes time to process all the requests.

 

With the Photoshop thing it could very well be loading the programme remotely.I think it's a licensing thing, my university does it too.

[MoonlightSylv]

My school had the internet archive blocked for a while.

[IAR117]

My IT teacher is never there... And when she was she asked me for help, with a Mac.

[DiamondShark286]

On 3/13/2017 at 2:28 PM, Mug said:

They're not network booting, the computer is just pulling your data down from the school server. The server just takes time to process all the requests.

 

With the Photoshop thing it could very well be loading the programme remotely.I think it's a licensing thing, my university does it too.

could be the case just annoying AF when you want to actually you know do something

[EminentSun]

Some people at my school were cyber bullying, and so the administration blocked THE ENTIRE INTERNET (including, funnily enough, their own website) and only unblocked sites when asked by teachers. 

 

In the end everyone just used cellular to get around it and continue cyber bullying.

 

[DiamondShark286]

1 hour ago, EminentSun said:

Some people at my school were cyber bullying, and so the administration blocked THE ENTIRE INTERNET (including, funnily enough, their own website) and only unblocked sites when asked by teachers. 

 

In the end everyone just used cellular to get around it and continue cyber bullying.

 

sounds about right how bad was the bullying 

[Tieox]

If they're so dumb, just tape photos of Nicholas Cage under every mouse sensor. 

[EminentSun]

41 minutes ago, Tb428 said:

sounds about right how bad was the bullying 

From what I can tell nothing more than usual in highschool. I didn't get any, being 6' 2" and all.

[SeraphicWings]

My university's computers are so damn bad

The 17 inch LCD hurts my eyes so much it gives me chill

Thank god I can use my own laptop during classes in computer room

 

[DiamondShark286]

1 minute ago, EminentSun said:

From what I can tell nothing more than usual in highschool. I didn't get any, being 6' 2" and all.

i just don't get bullied by being an introverted nerd/geek 

[DiamondShark286]

6 minutes ago, JayKay3000 said:

Don't worry, from what I could tell the IT teachers didn't really know a lot about IT, but then as the school IT support we didn't know a whole lot about teaching.

 

In our school the software was all installed locally, but the users profile data was pulled from the server so login could be slow as it downloaded your files, but then an application like Photoshop was dependent on the age of the hardware it was running on.

 

There is also a lot of politics, stuff you kids don't see that IT is bound by. The IT department or support does not have free reign to put in what it wants and good IT technicians are not that cheap. I've heard a few schools or colleges that have students doing the work alongside a couple of trained professionals, but never seen it in action.

 

I've moved on to another job now, but working as schools IT was kinda fun. Although most problems were caused by the students rather than the hardware aging.

as far as I can tell the IT managers are less IT managers and more teachers trying to be IT managers meaning they don't have enough knowledge or experience in pure IT to actually manage a network solely by themselves. As far as the students helping that doesn't work very well just because the students are untrained the school is trying to give them experience interacting with  people not actually experience in IT.

[Jskn]

My old school the ITs were bricks. They didn't know how to click a button to update an iPad and contacted apple support several times a day to block an app on an iPad. They also thought ohh don't download jailbreak apps from the App Store or you get a detention. Some kid dropped an iPad, the iPad bricked on impact somehow and he was suspended for "jail breaking it". I also got a detention for a stupid batch file that stopped explorer.exe and triggered a vbs file that made text boxes that say reeeeee. The firewall was trash and people who played unblocked agaric lost iPad privileges. It was pretty funny how bad they were. 

EDIT: I forgot to say this was middle school

[DiamondShark286]

1 hour ago, Jskn said:

My old school the ITs were bricks. They didn't know how to click a button to update an iPad and contacted apple support several times a day to block an app on an iPad. They also thought ohh don't download jailbreak apps from the App Store or you get a detention. Some kid dropped an iPad, the iPad bricked on impact somehow and he was suspended for "jail breaking it". I also got a detention for a stupid batch file that stopped explorer.exe and triggered a vbs file that made text boxes that say reeeeee. The firewall was trash and people who played unblocked agaric lost iPad privileges. It was pretty funny how bad they were. 

EDIT: I forgot to say this was middle school

sounds normal don't think my school has discovered the batch file that shuts down the computer i renamed to google chrome and changed the icon of that i put on the desktop of someone who didn't log out. They blocked cmd but not batch files and not powershell but device manager and task manager are blocked

[Jskn]

9 minutes ago, Tb428 said:

sounds normal don't think my school has discovered the batch file that shuts down the computer i renamed to google chrome and changed the icon of that i put on the desktop of someone who didn't log out. They blocked cmd but not batch files and not powershell but device manager and task manager are blocked

Lol. They're too stupid to block antything except webpages. I can even get the wifi password cuz the admin password is the schools name. 

[TheNewbiestONewbs]

My school blocked youtube and many other sites including history channel's site, firefox (pain in the butt cause I use linux on my laptop I bring to school), and our own school website. I had to "fix" all my teachers computers. I just let them borrow my vpn off my phone to get around it. Within the week they blocked all the vpn's they can think of. We didn't do any class work for the next week because ALL the lesson plans were online, on the school's website.

[KingKeith55]

They don't actually maintain anything. They block every social media site they can think of, except youtube. Kids just use free VPN's to get around it, people aren't stupid anymore.

 

If you look at the C drives on almost any computer, you can find all sorts of games and junk on there. On one computer I managed to find GTA San Andreas, NFSU2, CS1.6, HL1, Minecraft, and CoD4. That's 5 games on a C drive that probably sat there for who knows how long. I think it might have to do with the fact that they hide the C drive in explorer, so you can't find it. And I guess some of the IT people don't know how to look through the C drive without it showing up there. 

 

CS1.6 is the most common, with probably 3/4 of all computers having it. You can pretty much just have a big lan match in a computer class because almost all of the computers in that lab will have the game. Not many library PC's have games, I think because they started to give kids shit when they tried to play games on them.

 

The computers also feel like they're network booted (which doesn't mean it is), so the rule is never turn them off. If you turn them off, they take like an hour to work again.

 

Also the login server is slow as shit, it can take anywhere from 1 minute on a good day to 15 minutes to log in.

[Inversion]

My school banned USB drives out of fear of USB killers. My USB looks like BB-8 from Star Wars!!! How is that a USB Killer?!?!?!?!

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, Inversion said:

My school banned USB drives out of fear of USB killers. My USB looks like BB-8 from Star Wars!!! How is that a USB Killer?!?!?!?!

The casing of the USB is immaterial. You could gut it and turn it into a USB-Killer type device, same as any other.

 

Many large corporations are banning USB devices now. Even disabling the USB ports on computers. This is to prevent a number of things, including the spread of malware, as well as the theft of corporate IP - obviously the latter is less of a concern for a school, but the former is still very much a risk.

[DiamondShark286]

On 3/17/2017 at 8:28 PM, KingKeith55 said:

The computers also feel like they're network booted (which doesn't mean it is), so the rule is never turn them off. If you turn them off, they take like an hour to work again.

 

Also the login server is slow as shit, it can take anywhere from 1 minute on a good day to 15 minutes to log in.

on some of the school laptops if you press the power button to turn it off they can't even find the logon server anymore so you have to shut them off through the start menu

[DiamondShark286]

On 3/17/2017 at 0:12 PM, Jskn said:

Lol. They're too stupid to block antything except webpages. I can even get the wifi password cuz the admin password is the schools name. 

my school can't make up their mind on whether to block these forums or not some days its blocked others its not same with pcpartpicker and they just flat out blocked intel ark

[grimreeper132]

hey the school I went to still have single core laptops which have 2HT, and say that they were good, and until a year ago had core 2 duos in all bare 8 PCs (most of them have i5s now), which had i5s

[grimreeper132]

8 hours ago, Inversion said:

My school banned USB drives out of fear of USB killers. My USB looks like BB-8 from Star Wars!!! How is that a USB Killer?!?!?!?!

ours needed to install the drivers every single time, to the point that you could unplug it and then immediately plug it back it, and it would need tro instalkl them again

[Zodiark1593]

On Wednesday, March 15, 2017 at 9:24 AM, JayKay3000 said:

Don't worry, from what I could tell the IT teachers didn't really know a lot about IT, but then as the school IT support we didn't know a whole lot about teaching.

 

In our school the software was all installed locally, but the users profile data was pulled from the server so login could be slow as it downloaded your files, but then an application like Photoshop was dependent on the age of the hardware it was running on.

 

There is also a lot of politics, stuff you kids don't see that IT is bound by. The IT department or support does not have free reign to put in what it wants and good IT technicians are not that cheap. I've heard a few schools or colleges that have students doing the work alongside a couple of trained professionals, but never seen it in action.

 

I've moved on to another job now, but working as schools IT was kinda fun. Although most problems were caused by the students rather than the hardware aging.

I can do both IT and teaching, and have had teachers for family friends, so the political aspect is a known factor, I feel I could manage if I choose to do so. 

 

1 hour ago, grimreeper132 said:

hey the school I went to still have single core laptops which have 2HT, and say that they were good, and until a year ago had core 2 duos in all bare 8 PCs (most of them have i5s now), which had i5s

Honestly, for what students are supposed to use the school computers for, Core 2 Duos are plenty. Only thing needed is (minimum for Windows, less if Linux) 4 GB of RAM each, and small SSDs. 

 

10 hours ago, Inversion said:

My school banned USB drives out of fear of USB killers. My USB looks like BB-8 from Star Wars!!! How is that a USB Killer?!?!?!?!

The biggest impact felt by the USB killer isn't the fact that it can kill devices (or at least, damage the port it's plugged into), but the heavy handed policies put into place in response. This is unfortunate, as USB drives are the most efficient means of transferring files between systems without aid of a network or Internet. 

 

In a corporate setting, the casualty of a machine at the hands of the USB Killer is fairly inconsequential compared to the value of the data on the system. In a budget constrained school however, a vandalism that targets an entire computer lab would be a major setback.

 

Personally, we're a school to set up new systems, I'd think utilizing a central server while each user gets a VM would probably be the safest option from a physical standpoint. If a student wanted to plug in a flash drive, an administrator would have to plug it into an isolated port. 

[DiamondShark286]

2 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Honestly, for what students are supposed to use the school computers for, Core 2 Duos are plenty. Only thing needed is (minimum for Windows, less if Linux) 4 GB of RAM each, and small SSDs. 

well that depends on the students use case most High schools like mine need computers that can do video editing CAD work with autodesk inventor and coding so a single core would not be sufficient nor would a core 2 duo and i doubt a school would spend extra money on a ssd for students since the speed of a program opening is really not that much of a worry and lots of times programs and files are stored on a NAS anyway

 

5 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

In a budget constrained school however, a vandalism that targets an entire computer lab would be a major setback.

how would a usb killer target a whole computer lab the usb kill just provides a shock to the motherboard and maybe some other components as well the shock would most likely be cut off by a motherboard trace or wire acting as a fuse and breaking before hitting the wall power and even if the surge made it past the motherboard to the psu there are probably some sort of diodes to rectify the ac wall power that would stop it anyway