All Things Microsoft > Microsoft as a Company
Microsoft bans democracy
toadlife:
woah. I replied to Oritheius without reading the rest of the thread.
*bad toadlife!*
Okay, I've seen a lot of stuff in here that are interesting but I'm too lazy to properly quote everyone. You guys will jsut have to pick your quotes out yourselves.
--- Quote ---"This isn't like 1990 where we only have one computer for 6 kids."
"We DO pay them to buy them for us, and the ratio in the States is roughly five computers to every registered student."
--- End quote ---
??? Wow. Those ratios are foriegn to anything I've ever seen.
In 1992 when I was a freshman in highschool, there was approximately 1 computer for every 50 students. In 1996 when I was a senior, the ratio had not changed.
Today at the school I work for, there is about 1 computer for every 11 students.
--- Quote ---"That being said, really, what's to stop someone from just booting off a LiveCD and doing what they want from VMware anyway?"
--- End quote ---
In the labs I run, the computers are set to boot from the harddrive and network only. To change, it you need to BIOS password. To boot from the network, you also need a password, so booting from the hard drive is pretty much the only option.
--- Quote ---"The only solutions I've heard you advocate so far are all software-based, and you have to admit, that's no substitute for having someone actually watching the physical systems."
--- End quote ---
California state law (education code) requires a fully credentialled teacher to be present in computers labs while students are using them. Sometimes this rule is bent, but there is *always* someone there watching. Aside from that, the software/hareware (permission/BIOS) restrictions I have in place are fairly effective to begin with. The people there to supervise prevent student from opening up the cases and reseting the bios password via a jumper.
--- Quote ---"All it takes is one student who tried to finish a paper or had to print it, but couldn't because the machine had al kinds of spyware on it. It can happen, and it DOES happen."
--- End quote ---
If the IT people are incompetent. In my labs, the students can't mess the computers up because they are locked down properly via Windows (yes Windows) permissions. I have labs computers running Win2k that I havn't touched in three years. They look/act/work exactly the same as they did the day I cloned them due to the fact that I set them up properly in the first place.
--- Quote ---"I don't understand why people are talking about students screwing up a computer, Internet Explorer does that to the computer by default, so you can't totally blame the students for computers being destroyed."
--- End quote ---
Correct, you can't blame the students. You can blame the IT staff that set the computers up. When logged on as a restricted account in Windows, spyware installs via IE do not work.
--- Quote ---"i am not allowed to use any school computers or bring my own laptop in because they belive i am a hacker trying to break their crappy windows network because i use linux and know wtf im talking about
skyman8081:
I was naming a hypothetical situation. I'm on my schools IT staff, the student accounds are locked down to a level below that of the windows guest account. Can't install, see the C: drive, right-click, see anything in the programs section of the start menu. The students can only access the program groups that ZenWorks puts in.
Here is a question for you. Do you NEED to allow students to access PopCap games during a tutorial period that is DESIGNATED for students to be doing school work? Didn't think so.
EDIT: I should add that we also lock the BIOS and boot in the order of:
PXE
Hard Drive
CD-ROM
Floppy
anything goes wrong, and we mark the machine to be re-imaged in ConsoleOne, and send somebody to re-boot it, and makesure that Zen re-images it.
toadlife:
--- Quote from: skyman8081 ---Here is a question for you. Do you NEED to allow students to access PopCap games during a tutorial period that is DESIGNATED for students to be doing school work? Didn't think so.
--- End quote ---
Is that directed at me? :confused:
--- Quote from: skyman8081 ---EDIT: I should add that we also lock the BIOS and boot in the order of:
PXE
Hard Drive
CD-ROM
Floppy
anything goes wrong, and we mark the machine to be re-imaged in ConsoleOne, and send somebody to re-boot it, and makesure that Zen re-images it.
--- End quote ---
Sounds kinda like the setup we have, sans the fancy software. We lack the budget to buy much management software, so we have to make *full* use of built in Windows security structure. We do have Norton Ghost 7.5 which has numerous bugs and is not supported by Symantec any more.
[OFFTOPIC]
Sopeaking of Symantec..they make Microsoft look like fucking saints when it comes to supporting older versions. We bought Ghost 7.5 and paid a helfty chunk of change for it, and one year later they comp[letely dropped support for it even though it still contained some really bad bugs. When you search for the bugs in their knowledge base it says "This issue is resolved in version 8.0 of Ghost" Please contact your resller to purchase an updated version.
There should a fucksymantec.com or symansuck.com site.
[/OFFTOPIC]
skyman8081:
That question was not directed at you. We seem to be on the same page here.
And ZenWorks is way the fuck better than Ghost, hence why my school switched to ZenWorks Imaging from Ghost.
toadlife:
--- Quote from: skyman8081 ---And ZenWorks is way the fuck better than Ghost, hence why my school switched to ZenWorks Imaging from Ghost.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, when we finally get some money to buy new management software we will NOT be buying anything from Symantec. I'll be sure and keep zenworks in mind as something we evaluate.
The bug in Ghost 7.5 that we are stuck with is having the ghost console joining machines to our domain after being cloned. Out of a lab of 25 computers, an average five will mysteriously fail to join the domain after being cloned. There is no ryme or reason to it. This means we have to be there when the computers are cloned, and manually join the machines that failed. It's a *big* time waster.
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