This is something that the school/district tech department is talking about doing to stop people from changing things on the comps. First, they want to take away the ability to use Windows Explorer and use Novell to launch everything. This is after a while of saying not to use Novell to launch programs. The goal is to stop us from installing programs and using program that are on our USB drives and such. The major problem with this I see is the advanced computer student will sufer. For the average district computer user, this will be ok (a shock, but it will be ok), but for the student who is in classes where they need said powers, now we have to work harder to do these things. In my AP Comp Sci class, we use Eclipse for coding Java (w00t for open source), but technically we are not supposed to because we installed them and not the district (technically, we should be using notepad, and no JDK for this stuff if we wanted to follow restrictions to the letter), and this restriction would prevent us from using our programs we need. Also, using Novell to launch program will bog down our already slow network. There is talk that students in such courses where advanced things are needed that we will have the taskbar and explorer, but others wont. This will be seen unfair as then only 50 students in the entire district will be allowed to use this stuff. I was also filled junk on that the proxy restrictions are the same for everyone in the district (teachers, public network, elemntery, middle, and high school students), but then I see my AP Comp Sci teacher able to get on Eclipse site, but we can't (and he was not on a proxy). I think if we were to stop us from doing what is not allowed, they should not let us login to the local machine as an admin, that would take away a lot of what we could do (but still get done what we need). Students then in need of the perms of local admin can be given a password for a second account on the machines for admin use. We will see where this goes.

Wow, that does'nt sound too pleasent.

(btw, almost your 4000th post )

It isn't pretty at all. This is stuff that we are not supposed to know though, it was leaked to my AP Comp Sci class from a kid who works in the admin building (ok, not so much as leaked as he came in and said that this was on its way).

Ouch... That will be bad if they do do that... Restricting windows explorer, wow.

Our school has blocked windows explorer. They then removed student access to the "Shared" drive (It allowed all others to look at whatever you saved. Great for group projects). Next, they gave access to our pesonal files to every teacher. Keep in mind, most teachers leave their comps logged-in and unattended. All this in <2 years.

Ouch, that sucks. We have access to the shared drive (though they do restrict it to only the school where you are registered, and since I take a class at a different building, I have to have things flashdrived to me, trying to get them to allow me acces to that building one). Currently, only admins can acesses our files and no one else, which is good. Our teachers are actually smart on what they do with their comps (they get trained on how to use them). Also, they wanted to wait to give all students their passwords to the network till the end of this month, but computer techers got angry and started demanding passes for their students and got them.

btw, this is my 4000th post.

Win98 doesn't have native flashdrive support, and anyone caught trying to install software/drivers is suspended for at least three days, and usually you aren't allowed on a comp for the rest of the year without a teacher directly behind you watching you constatly.

Yeah, they're pretty strict. They're known for leaving us comp-sci kids alone if we're in class, though...

Well, I took our schools networking course last year, and anyone in that class is automatically added to the heigtned security risk and are watched more closely becase of the level of knowledge we get in that class. They know we know how to get around their things.

Now you know that you are being watched

yeah, I don't know if they are watching me as tight this year (wouldn't supprize me either way), but it is annoying knowing that I am singled out with 2 other students because we took a class.

We had Novell for all four years of my high school, and it bogged down the network terribly. :/

I set off one of my schools "alarms" on one of their comps one time...I'm probably still on their watch list of some sort...



I have 4 security cameras in my Calc room (It's the room right next to the discipline office; maybe it's the detention room? )

I take it you are not allowed to bring in a laptop to do your work on then, are you??

I wonder if their is any reason why they put *you* in a room with four security cameras... Have you done anything bad lately?

I am allowed to use my laptop usually (and their, they don't know really who is doing what. Most of the time, I am off the network, and when I am on, they don't know who it it (I don't have to authenticate anywhere at all).

That thought crossed my mind the first day...but then it made me wonder; is there someone else in the class who needs 4 security cameras?

It says in the rule-book you can't. Only one person ever tried, and no one said anything about it. She was a n00b anyway.

EDIT: And she was a jock. They're treated differently by administration...

Wow, another case of idiots running a network... Our school has it pretty much correct. You are a limited user, it uses the windows networking, but you obviously can't install anything, and all the local drives are "locked" and invisible, the command line is disabled, and you save everything to your network shared drive. Then someone monitors the shares for unathorized programs (which is easy to scan for, of course)

If they want to lock it down, rather than doing all this Novell crap, just do a whitelist on what a user can run, rather than a blacklist of what they can't. Impossible to get around that (easy way around the novell crap - just open up Internet Explorer and type "c:/" in the URL, lolz)

And I *was* on the suspicious list - having MSys and Cygwin installed on my network drive got me a "talk" (that, and I found a hole in the network giving me full access to everything on the network servers, w00t)

Recently I met the guy in my school who's become (in)famous 'underground' for getting the school's password list and for giving every admin rights in the comp lab

Really easy to do at the comps at my school (especially the ones with '98; you don't even have to try to get admin rights )

Well, a friend and I got into the BIOS and got admin rights by doing something simple, but we have no idea why it would happen. Usually the BIOS screen isn't shown when the PC at our school boot (no clue how you do that), typically this would stop anyone from even attempting to enter the BIOS. But a friend of mine was rebooting (after trying some live disks/tiny distros (Ubuntu, DSL, Tinfoil)) and left his USB stick in. Upon reboot, I noticed the BIOS screen and wanted to get into there. The first time we missed it, but when XP booted and we logged in (as users), instead of the boring 98 scheme they usually give the users, we see XP stuff. Admin rights were even given. Unfortunately we were unable to find the master drive for Deep Freeze, but does anyone have any idea how that could happen?