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[giza]

If there's ever a reason why I can't stand clueless MCSE's who think that pointing and clicking around Windows makes them some sort of computer genius, this would be it. The short story is that a student installed Firefox on a lab machine at his university, and got his account suspended for it. The reason? The "network admin" told him that "the computers had to be reformatted". Riiight. Could you please show your work? No, I didn't think so.

Remember kids: MCSE == Must Consult Someone Else

Comments

[vesuvius.livejournal.com]

Most of the schools that I've visited 'ghost' their machines anyway. They have a saved image that they push to the machine daily or weekly instead of trying to clean up after a couple thousand people that think they know what they're doing. We did that when I ran the lab at the community college. Once a week, when we start up the lab, insert the ghost disk and let it do its thing. We let the students install what they needed, though most of what the teachers used were included in the ghost. If a student ever 'broke' a machine, put the CD in, reboot and *ding* instant fix!

We even had a few nights where all the lab techs came in and installed Carmageddon. Lots of fun and no hassle. If you're managing that many public computers, expect people to screw them up.

[giza.livejournal.com]

That's an awesome approach! Another interesting idea is Deep Freeze (http://www.faronics.com/html/product.asp), which restores user/system settings when the machine is restarted. It's a bit draconian, but seems to be effective. (Also good for relatives with single computers, when ghosting isn't an option)

[vesuvius.livejournal.com]

Never seen that. Looks like that just protects the settings, whereas ghosting clears off saved junk and restores deleted win.com

I loved the common complaints of losing saved schoolwork. There were signs telling people to save to disk or class network folder. When people complained about having to buy disks, we would point to the overflowing lost and found box of forgotten floppies.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

And actually there's a hardware device (unfortunately I dont have a link) that does that... Every time a user writes on the computer it saves the difference (somehow; I suppose it has a hard disk of its own), and on next boot it gives you the choice to commit or discard changes. It's marketed mostly for schools.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it's saving a journal of changes, kinda like how the ext3 filesystem does. Sounds neat, though.

[vesuvius.livejournal.com]

That has its downside, too. Users reboot all the time in public labs. "Its not working fast enough, must be locked up; I can fix it: reboot!"

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Well, I think you need a password, like in the bios, to do that..
Not sure :X

[bigtig.livejournal.com]

We ran a lab that used revrdist which was available from perdue. It would essentially sync the files from a reference copy on a server and toss all the stuff kids tried to hide into a "lost and found" folder and deleted it oldest-items first.

Very effective in letting someone heavily use and abuse the machines. The lab would reboot automatically overnight and clean itself.