Replying to School Network

I have finished my last year at the Marches School, Oswestry, Shropshire, England, UK and this year they introduced Inpero. Which gives the staff complete control of any computer in a classroom whilst they can view them all at the same time. It includes interaction with users, locking computers shutting down, starting up message writing.

I agree that some control is necessary in schools but when you have got a piece of software which bans any site including search engines because of a word or phrase such as a google search for Haley Westenra which came up with the word Youtube was banned instantly. I think that it is one thing to ban a website but not to prevent searches this is in my opinion over the top.

Inpero also has the feature of blocking all websites apart from those on an approved list, which I have known to just block everything and at times it just locked people out for no reason. It also has a number of security issues which we found out about a couple of which are: running "Firefox" bypasses the word blocker as does loading internet explorer without addons.

All in all Impero is a product with a lot of potential but it needs a lot of sorting out. One way of finding out security issues is using students such as myself to mess about with the software. if only!!!


How nice it is to finally have a rant!!!

BESS aka Websense is pointless, 5 minutes and ill get past it. Https is blocked also where I am. LOL @ the keyboards bit. Firefox, deploy it yourself, just import IE's connection settings, if the admins actually are qualified then they will understand. Also removing IE isnt possible.

Both kids sound like they already can beat the system. My friend took control of all the computers in our school and opened all the CD drives. Monitoring systems can be killed by CTRL - ALT - DELETE

You guys are all yuppies. The High School i attend, the techies and i are at war, along with my comrades. I feel that blocking e-mail and games is unreasonable, especially when they give us our own account for e-mail. I like my own.

First of all, I am related to a developer at Novell, and from what i've heard from him and found myself, novell is full of holes. Apache is pretty tight though, why i use it. Windows 2000 NT is also pretty lousy.

The blocker on Novell? It can be set as transparent, but no one set it like that does which is why Firefox off a USB drive works. They have to delete it off my server space once in a while.

And the teacher in charge should monitor the students. RC is cruel. Any cruel admin should have there system spoofed, and they're hard disks partitioned to a million 4 kb tables. Any student who reads this, read up on Novell and understand what you are dealing with. Tell IE not to use the fricken proxy.

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First of all, the school itself usually does not block the websites. All of the schools in Ohio have a program called Bess to block websites, that is implimented by the department of education at all of the main servers for each county. The school admins have just about no control over this.

You should be happy that you get your own e-mail address. No one at our school gets their own e-mail address. If you really want to use your own e-mail, get a gmail account, and log in through http secure.

If you don't like the techs at your school, try going a month without them. I guarantee that you will have a new found respect for them after kids start to screw with the computers and they won't work, and there is no one to fix them. I am one out of four techs at my school, and I have to replace computer's daily, because kids steal stuff out of them. We keep about 5 dozen boxes keyboard keys, because kids pop them out, and throw them at people. You should try to type an essay with only half of a keyboard. If you really want to use firefox on your computer, you should talk to the admin and see if he could put it on the computers at your school. This is what I did, and now IE has been removed from all of the computers, and replaced with firefox.

If some kid is looking up porn through a proxy, or a student is trying to put a virus on the network, wouldn't you like to know? If every schiool had a teacher to monitor the computers at our school, we would have to hire about 20 more teachers to do the same job as one person at a admin console with the remote control software. If your school's hard disks are really partitioned to a million 4 kb tables, that is a hell of a lot of students.

Yeah my school's admin doesnt have a clue, he only finds problems not fix, our techy is a great woman and is helping us put Firefox on all the computers as we speak, why not use the novel hole i just read about http://secunia.com/advisories/14611/ and get what you want, show them who's evil but they will probably patch pretty fast.

You guys are all yuppies. The High School i attend, the techies and i are at war, along with my comrades. I feel that blocking e-mail and games is unreasonable, especially when they give us our own account for e-mail. I like my own.

First of all, I am related to a developer at Novell, and from what i've heard from him and found myself, novell is full of holes. Apache is pretty tight though, why i use it. Windows 2000 NT is also pretty lousy.

The blocker on Novell? It can be set as transparent, but no one set it like that does which is why Firefox off a USB drive works. They have to delete it off my server space once in a while.

And the teacher in charge should monitor the students. RC is cruel. Any cruel admin should have there system spoofed, and they're hard disks partitioned to a million 4 kb tables. Any student who reads this, read up on Novell and understand what you are dealing with. Tell IE not to use the fricken proxy.

for me, i think it is ok. anyway, it is a school. It should be controlled. we dont want to see school internet being used for bad things such as porn or whatever.

but, the most important thing is that the admin should be very responsible. he/she should not abuse their power. if an abuse happened, students are needed to report the incident to the management.

long time ago, i've come to a company which was really restrictive about their internet usage policy. users can go to the companie and their partner website only. no email or anthing else. only port 80(for HTTP) was open, other access was imposibble. wasnt that annoys you?

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Yes, i couldn't agree more with those comments, the administrator should definitely be able to lock a computer or so on, as long as its for a reason and not just for fun. As someone could be doing a very important piece of coursework and just have someone lock your pc is stupid.

i hope some one can help me.. i used os windows xp as server and window 2000 as client but when i sharing printer from client and test print.. the window show owner "guest" not computer client name...

p/s refer attachment

yeah if you don't intend to do anything against the policy you won't protest as much to being monitored.

As a former Novell network administrator, I can tell you that although you have a degree of power, you shouldn't get carried away with it. Yeah, it can be fun to watch someone's surfing or takeover their mouse and keyboard, but by doing that more for fun than out of necessity, you make the complainers point for them. If their complaining gets loud enough someone might take your admin privileges away.

I'm sure you're not being a jerk and messing with people all the time. And sometimes you have to try a bunch of things with new technology so you can learn its limitations. Just remember, in your position, you're supposed to be the "good cop." You're the one they call when something breaks and they need to get it running again. You should get to know your ethical code because you will often be responsible for dealing with users doing unethical things. You're sort of like Spider-Man - part cop, part vigilante, part everyday nice guy. That's what it takes to be in charge of a network and keep your users confident that you are not taking advantage of them.

As for the users, tell them if they were at home they could do whatever they want with fewer prying eyes. But on the school network it is your job to keep bad people from doing bad things so you have to watch out for everybody and keep track of what everyone is doing... ethically.

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I completely agree with ther fact that we should not get carried away with our power, which I usually don't What we do not allow at our school is porn, games, and anything that is not within reasonable limits of being at school. We have a rather strict url blocker, but as most blockers are, they cannot block everything. That is where we come in. Although I myself cannot use the remote control software, my computer teacher/network admin can. So, if we don't have anything to work on, we monitor the computer labs and library. If we find someone doing something that is not school appropriate, we lock out the controls, and exit firefox for them. My opinion is, that if you don't want people looking over your sholder, you are probally doing something that is able to be considered as not school apropriate

I think it depends on the usage policy the school has instituted and what warnings they give. If you say in the policy that computer usage may be monitored and give warnings in the lab to that effect I don't think there is an issue because they know that monitoring may occur and their actions are public. If the policy does not state anything about monitoring then it would be an issue because then the students think what they are doing is private and when they discover that they have been watched, feel that their privacy has been invaded. IMHO.