So every computer in the school board is down...

[Mr Buckshot]

http://www.vancouversun.com/Technology/story.html?id=1152945



A virus hit computers across the Vancouver school board Wednesday, locking accounts in schools and offices.
VSB spokesman David Weir said the district-wide virus was annoying, but didn’t disrupt academic or administrative business.
“It was a nuisance virus that caused challenges, but it’s not a destructive virus,” he said. “No student data is at risk.”
He said the virus, which escaped detection from anti-virus software, kept computer users from logging into the system.
New student registration and other business was completed through paperwork, he said.
Problems are expected to be solved within two days.
“It’s not compromised our data. It’s a nuisance.That’s the only way to put it,” said Weir.


It's been a pretty annoying problem thus far, but at the same time it's a bit funny how the carnage spread across the ENTIRE PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT. Also, the technicians promised to fix everything within 2 days, now it's January 14 and the school is still computer-less.

I wouldn't be surprised if one of the younger kids (8th/9th grade) caused this. Most of the computers in my school are shitty Windows 98 machines that have issues with documents created by Microsoft Office XP (except Word, usually powerpoints have lots of problems). They have inadequate virus protection, and a lot of the younger kids keep using proxy servers to go on game sites at lunch (bypassing the web filters) and play those really sad in-browser games. Many of these game sites are not secure (typically the eastern European or Asian ones) and can install all kinds of shit on your computer without your realization if you don't have adequate anti-malware scanners.

Some of the newer machines at my school (mostly for the graphics class which I don't take) are lower-end Windows 2000 or windows XP systems with old pentium 4s/celerons (1.5Ghz to 2.8 Ghz) and 256 MB to 512 MB of RAM, and while they do run faster they don't have the latest antivirus software, which imo is far more important than new hardware. There is a Mac lab with past-gen iMacs, not the ones running Intel parts.

Without any computer available at school, I've had to be super extra careful about homework, because if I forget to print something out the only option now is to run home and get it.

So how low-end or insecure are the computers at your high school/college? I've heard of some high schools in Ontario having so much funding that they can afford computers with AMD Phenom processors for classes like graphics and web design, and also the best antivirus software money can buy such as AVG and spysweeper.

[itszutak]

Our school (In california- the budget is tight, always) spent over $1m on dells one year. They're all obsolete garbage now, but we don't have the money to replace them. Needless to say, the teachers were pissed. Our labs have nothing but the bare essentials; the emergency showers lack drains, teachers have to buy their own supplies with their salaries.

Securitywise, the only thing that can really get through is script kiddies, with a bit of difficulty. I've never seen a virus on these machines, but those that have had proxies used on them tend to be slower.

What I find terrible is the way other students abuse these machines. Floppy trays are used for gum and trash; CD tray belts are gone on half the machines; they've been in use for more that 4 years and never been dusted. Parts of the cases have been ripped off, especially the flap that protects the USB ports. Some have had the front ports ripped out or pushed in, and many more imaginative things have been done with the mice, keyboards, and screens.

Luckily, the traffic monitor on our computers is fairly secure; (Lightspeed Systems, if you're curious) Proxies are blocked within a week of use. Youtube occasionally unblocks itself, but I think that's a local problem, not the monitor's fault. I don't know what we use for an antivirus, but I've never gotten a virus from those computers (I plug my flash drive in every day to play Marathon).

[Amit]

I live in the GTA. Whitby, 30 mins east of Scarborough. My school, Sinclair Secondary, is the headquarters of the district (Durham); spanning 5 cities.

We have a wide variety of computers but nowhere near the ridiculous specs of those Phenoms you're talking about. About 90% of the computers at the school are old Pentium 4 IBM Thinkstations with 256mb RAM, otherwise known as the"black" computers, from about 6 years back. About 5% of the computers are newer and slimmer Core 2 Duo thinkstation models with speakers built into the case or motherboard (not sure of exact specs) with 512mb of memory. Usually these newer computers are a hell of a lot faster but are rarely in regular computer rooms. Most of the labs have 4 of them placed in a separate section for normal use still (surprisingly) but the labs that they are in are only accessible if you have a class booked into the lab. The last 10% are the really old white IBM computers. usually 1 of those are placed in each of the many rooms there are in the school. If there isn't a white computer in one of the class rooms, that's because the new slim thinkstation is sitting in its place. I daresay they have better performing computers in the Board office which is connected to my school. They don't know how to run shit up there. But nobody is picked as a favourite for better computers. In fact, the computer engineering room has only regular black computers, some custom built pieces of crap, and the white computers. CAD and Multimedia classes in the tech wing don't get benefits either.

[Mr Buckshot]

Those computers are better than or about the same as the ones at my school for the most part.

In BC there's this company called Computers for Schools located in Burnaby. It takes all sorts of old low-end machines/monitors and refurbishes them before repackaging and sending them out to public schools all over BC at low prices. I've seen the place in person, it's pretty amazing how they're basically in control of the computer technology available to BC schools. That explains why most of the VSB computers affected are so outdated.

Sometimes when the teacher takes the whole class down to the computer lab for a computer-based activity, my friends and I strive to seriously complete the assignment ASAP, then we plug in our USB drives and play CS1.5 and Starcraft (the school technicians apparently don't know how to block LAN multiplayer game data from transmitting over the T3). However I really get pissed when younger kids hog the computers to play games (usually by proxy-ing past the web filters) during break or lunch because sometimes you may actually need the computer for an urgent academic task and these idiots are selfishly preventing that.

You play Marathon at school, itszutak? LOL. It's classic. You might wanna have a go at Combat Arms too, it's like a poor man's COD4. And yeah the way you describe the abuse to the machines is pretty disgusting, over in my school that never happens. We just have software abuse ;)

and lmfao, I forgot to add, the computer outage in the VSB prevents me from borrowing any library books, another major inconvenience. The librarians here are quite dumb, it's not that hard to track the check-out of books using pen and paper. They also assume that the simple changing of the desktop background is responsible for the problem that the printer is facing and so on.

[Timo]

The majority of our school (minus two computer labs) run off of a thin client system where little sticks of computers access everything (including processing, not just storage) from a slow server/pc somewhere else in the school. They run xp, but a bare bones version. It can run IE and Word ok together, but if you turn on spell checker or open up a couple more instances of word, there's about a three second delay between typing and seeing text on the screen. In theory its a great system but it's damn slow. There's a pod of thin clients above the library, and if everyone attempts to access the internet it either ends up either not working or slowing everyone down to less than 56k speeds. They also seem to be running a pilot program where around 10 clients run directly off of one pc which is slow as hell - the size of the clients are around the size of a credit card, but thick enough to stick a vga cable in.
I think they end up spending more money on failing systems than they would just buying normal computers to run inside the school. The normal pcs in the computer labs aren't that great either, they can't handle any games at all (other than pokemans) so there's no point trying.

Anything not educational is blocked (no sites that are remotely 'recreational'), and the proxy block list is updated daily so hunting a proxy down is usually more effort than its worth.

Doesn't bother me anymore though, because last year was my last year there :downs:

[TPE]

My school is pretty hard core when it comes down to blocking shit. They have this program where they can monitor, lock, log off, or take complete control of your computer. Their internet blocker is pretty good. Once it figures out something is related to anything that is normally blocked it will block it within a week (like back when the site was H2Vista.net it was blocked.)

All their PC's are dell core 2 duo's with 2 gb of ram and we just got a bunch of new i macs. Some old crappy P4's are left but most of them got shipped off to the jr high school. Sometimes me and my friends play halo trial but that gets pretty boring fast.

[Cortexian]

My old school was outfitted with two labs of Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 2GB RAM, and Nvidia 8800GT graphics cards. Our library had a mixture of those and some with integrated graphics cards and only 1GB RAM. The rest of the school was Acer laptops that had wireless internet anywhere on the school grounds, and two or three labs of old Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, integrated GFX PCs... We also had two of the 24" iMacs and two "fully loaded" (at the time) Mac Pros that had dual 3GHz processors, 16GB of RAM, a couple Terabytes of storage, and whatever Nvidia Quadro card that Apple was using at the time... Needless to say I hung out on the Macs (using Windows XP 64-bit of course) and did all of my video/photo/3D work there.

When we had some script kiddies figure out how Net Send worked, and then how to create Net Send SPAMMERS, I sat back and switched to OSX and laughed at the kids that could get rid of the 100,000 Net Send "DOS IS THE FUTURE" messages on their screens. Of course, I got my hands on that script and modified it to send out over the "*" domain, so every school in the Calgary Board of Education that had PCs on picked up my message.

It was my "graduating gift".

This is interesting, and it seems that the Vancouver kids are following along in our footsteps...

[Dr Nick]

If school boards knew anything about computers, they could easily make machines that lasted at least 5 years, and didn't cost much. Unfortunately, most of them don't.

[Kornman00]

Most of the computers in my school are shitty Windows 98 machines.
:confused2::confused2::confused2:

How is that even possible??

Did your school miss the time frame to at least get 2000 before MS stopped pooping them out after XP came around? Then once again decided to wait until XP was dirt cheap as they tried with 2000 but were once again cockblocked with Vista coming out and MS stopping the production of XP?

Damn

[Advancebo]

Last year, my school replaced all their old IBM Desktops with Lenovos, every teacher then got an IBM Laptop. And every classroom got an IBM Projector.

Nothing for students D:

[Heathen]

Ugh....so many longposts.

I have had my share of school/computer problems this week D:

[CabooseJr]

I simply just hate the computers our school uses. I'm still waiting for them to upgrade to Vista. The new laptops we just got have Vista, but they downgraded them to XP, which has me puzzled.

[Limited]

Computers are uni are always messing up, mainly USB drives not working >:| and taking time to login. Then again thats due to al the security they use.

Apparently theres a virus going around via USB. People keep reinfecting the pcs using USB's that have viruses on. Its a constant battle the techies have to face.

[Dwood]

Our computers are all mac. And only lately has anyone got some kind of remote-viewer program in. My next class which is Networking, the teacher is a flippin' nazi despite the comps at least being XP.

We have these uber-fast machines in there but He decided to BLOCK EVERYTHING except WORD I was like "you've got to be kidding me"

[Saggy]

I live a little bit north of the GTA and all the computers at my school are shitty Compaq PC's that can barely run Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer at the same time. We do have NOD32 as our anti-virus software which is pretty good.

[Syuusuke]

Heh my friend ran a script from one computer, don't remember what it did, and the entire classroom couldn't use the internet because it had to be blocked in any case of modification...maybe the entire school couldn't use it.

It only lasted for 20 minutes.

[Sel]

This is the reason I use my own laptop at school :)

[kenney001]

We had Pentium 4 pc's with 512 mb, but last year we got small "servers" that shares a single intel C2Q with 4 stations, and its pretty damn fast for everything and apparently pretty cheap, since its 4 to one.

Anyway last year in my "programming 2" class for shits we made a simple java program that dumped 20mb of random garbage into a file on the network storage drives, and looped with a different name. Within 30 minutes of running, the entire school got warning messages saying the "G" drive was full, and the incompetent techies were boggled. They eventually cleaned out the drives and deleted everything, managing to completely miss the complete installation of halo.

Last year I was sitting at a station, with a copy of Command Prompt open shutting down the LanSchool monitor and unlocking my computer to have admin privilages, and the tech walks behind me and asks me if im "programming the computer" and chuckles and walks away...

[Donut]

my elementary school was using windows 98 machines with pentium 3 processors. they didnt suck for what we used them for in 6th grade (l2 type with wordpad), but i really dont have much to compare them to because all we did was type.
then a new teacher took over and got a bunch of donated machines with windows 2000 on some and windows xp on others. but those were a load of shit too. he opened up one of the cases and found a piece of spaghetti inside. SPAGHETTI!
so, i made sure everybody realized that the windows xp machine in the corner of the room with enough balls (re: raisins) to run gmax, belonged to me.
now in my highschool we have pretty decent windows xp desktops in the computer lab, and fairly powerful xp laptops for the science lab. i have no complaints

[Sel]

My school seems to think that Nvidia FX 5200s are high end. :downs:

[Masterz1337]

My College has pretty decent PCs, the ones for general use are P4's but all they are ever used for is internet and word, so they run plenty fast. I've never sued the CAD computers, but they do look nice from the window, probably 2 or 3 years old. Our Mac labs got an overhaul like 2 years ago too.

[343guiltymc]

My school actually have Pentium Ds. :)

[Dwood]

My school seems to think that Nvidia FX 5200s are high end. :downs:

That reminds me... there were 6800's for $20 in the bargain bin somewhere I once saw.

[Bodzilla]

:confused2::confused2::confused2:

How is that even possible??

Did your school miss the time frame to at least get 2000 before MS stopped pooping them out after XP came around? Then once again decided to wait until XP was dirt cheap as they tried with 2000 but were once again cockblocked with Vista coming out and MS stopping the production of XP?

Damn
i was thinking along the same lines lol.
posted it in the other thread though :p.

kinda bizarre aint it.

[Hotrod]

We have a wide variety of computers but nowhere near the ridiculous specs of those Phenoms you're talking about. About 90% of the computers at the school are old Pentium 4 IBM Thinkstations with 256mb RAM, otherwise known as the"black" computers, from about 6 years back. About 5% of the computers are newer and slimmer Core 2 Duo thinkstation models with speakers built into the case or motherboard (not sure of exact specs) with 512mb of memory. Usually these newer computers are a hell of a lot faster but are rarely in regular computer rooms. Most of the labs have 4 of them placed in a separate section for normal use still (surprisingly) but the labs that they are in are only accessible if you have a class booked into the lab. The last 10% are the really old white IBM computers. usually 1 of those are placed in each of the many rooms there are in the school. If there isn't a white computer in one of the class rooms, that's because the new slim thinkstation is sitting in its place.]
It's basically the exact same situation here...down to the specs and colours...

[Mr Buckshot]

wow you people are really lucky 0_O

If it's only a school I don't need to see gaming-spec computers with nvidia 8800s and stuff, but I would definitely appreciate, say, a 2.8Ghz P4 with 256/512MB RAM and integrated intel IGP and adequate virus protection and Windows XP as a common machine at school. The windows 98 machines at school barely handle more than 2 different apps at the same time.

Some of my friends in Silicon Valley say their school's computers are pretty powerful, with Intel Core 2 Duos, 1 GB RAM, and Intel GMA 950. Now THAT won't come close to lagging when doing simple tasks, unlike my school computers. It can also handle some light gaming with ease, i.e. Halo 1 trial or Combat Arms or Starcraft. I believe the elementary/middle schools there get Macs donated from Apple, because every school I attended there had Mac labs with the latest machines, and nothing else.

My school librarians show their stupidity again by refusing to allow people to install alternative browsers like Firefox - we're stuck with Internet Explorer 5 or 6 on most machines and it really sucks, especially the pop-ups and general insecurity.

Like I said earlier, the reason why many VSB schools use totally outdated machines is that they're all recycled and refurbished by one company, then sold at 2-digit price tags. The so-called "newer" machines still run on Windows 2000 and have Pentium 3's or low-end Pentium 4's.

[Phopojijo]

You do realize Virus Scanners *really* don't help much right?

Our computer lab at school has Symantec Suite on all of them... about half of them have viruses in quarantine (and not the same virus mind you), and many run slow as piss (~7-8 minutes, no exaggeration, to log in from XP login screen to turn on firefox).

That of course means... that more than likely there's computers that are infected and the antivirus didn't help them... and the ones which antivirus helped, probably got a hell of a lot more that the antivirus didn't pick up.

[klange]

My school's computers run in deep freeze, which it seems no one really looks into when writing viruses these days.

[Phopojijo]

Well it's pretty hard to write a virus if you constantly re-install Windows every time you reboot. (Which is the ONLY way to erase a virus btw... reinstalling Windows)

... Provided you cannot find and infect the boot image that is.

[klange]

Well it's pretty hard to write a virus if you constantly re-install Windows every time you reboot. (Which is the ONLY way to erase a virus btw... reinstalling Windows)

... Provided you cannot find and infect the boot image that is.
You could infect the freeze image, which in this particular case is somewhere on the hard drive to begin with.

Not that I care, I bring my netbook every day.

[kenney001]

Deep freeze is a great package for schools, no matter how much I hate it.

[Phopojijo]

Again, assuming you can't access the boot image.

[itszutak]

My school's computers run in deep freeze, which it seems no one really looks into when writing viruses these days.
Looking up that program, I think our school uses it. The only thing that is saved is stuff on the network drives.

[Mr Buckshot]

My school (and the rest of the VSB) has deep freeze on its computers except for files saved into the "My Documents" folder. So even if we download new browsers to avoid using the shitbox known as IE6, they get deleted on reboot.

And despite deep freeze, the entire school board network still got hit by a mother of a virus...it's January 15 and everything is still down except for administrative computers :( I didn't think it would be that hard to fix everything.

Anyway, hallelejah for laptops. Mine just happened to be hosting about 15 different powerpoint presentations today because I was one of the few people in the class who brought one and so all my classmates immediately plugged in their USBs to my LG P300. The teacher had actually requested some students to bring laptops because he didn't want to go behind schedule and the classroom computer was still down.

[Cortexian]

My school (and the rest of the VSB) has deep freeze on its computers except for files saved into the "My Documents" folder. So even if we download new browsers to avoid using the shitbox known as IE6, they get deleted on reboot.
Download portable Firefox into your My Documents folder...

However, couldn't you still just fucking ruin the BIOS with a Deep Freeze workstation? It seems like it only protects Windows, not the BIOS settings or anything else. So you just reformat the BIOS with a dummy BIOS or a BIOS that's for a different motherboard (there are BIOS flashers that let you flash a BIOS with whatever you want), assuming you have access to boot from CD/DVD/Removable....

[legionaire45]

My school runs a range of hardware; the oldest includes G4 iMacs which havn't been maintained in several years. They regularly eat word files/powerpoints, so I stopped using them forever ago.

After that, we have older IBM 13" laptops using Pentium M's (1.6GHz iirc). They aren't bad for doing word processing but trying to access the internet with them is painful for some reason. I'm guessing it has something to do with the wifi.

We used to have some old dells (more Pentium M's) and iBooks, but they all failed. iBooks actually got to the point where some of the chargers could give you a shock, so there weren't enough chargers to go around. The batteries for the Dells had been overused and regularly had only a half an hour of usable time from a full charge. Those were replaced with newer Dells in phases. Some have Core Duos, some have Core 2 Duos. Pretty much overkill for what we do.

The most recent lappys our school got replaced some of the IBMs; HP Mininote 2133s. They run really well and they are probably the best computers in the school, considering they have actually been maintained since they were set up. The keyboard is a bit annoying but I just use a $20 roll-up keyboard and a cheap logitech notebook mouse.

We had some IBM desktop PCs, but they were replaced with the iMacs. Even though the PCs were actually usable. Makes perfect sense.

We also have a few Alienwares, but only 2 out of 10 work. The only people who really had access to them were the Robotics students. They all started dying off within a few months of purchase as well. The IT guy never bothered sending them back to Alienware to have them replaced even though they had a three year warranty. Really stupid IMO.

[Phopojijo]

Or just boot from a custom Linux live CD. That might have interesting consequences.