The joys of College Networking - with lusers for Admins...

[CodeDragon]

My girlfriend just enrolled at college to start her degree. Living with an IT Support tech has given her a certain eye for PCs and networks, so when she came home after her IT induction reporting that all the workstations in the college labs were running Win98SE, with the exception of 5, which were running Win95, I was inclined to believe her.
Given that the IT coordinater of the college actually said to the students "The network is state of the art since the upgrades over the summer - We've got a Windows 2000 server, and all these workstation machine are the best you can buy", I'm also inclined to believe that the IT department at that college (which shall remain nameless) couldn't find their a$$ with both hands and a picture guide.
I'm tempted to hack the network from the labs (there is no physical security), but that would be illegal....

Why is it that people like said IT Coordinator manage to get the jobs they do? Anyone else had a similar experience? Stupid question?

Cad

[Wayward Clam]

This IS my college, is she going to Confederation College?

Our network is Win98 machines with a smattering of Win95s... the lab I support is K-6-II 500 machines with 128 MB of RAM, but the other three labs are all P-233s with 64 MB of ram. The college internet server is running off of a Pentium 166. I've been in their tech room, most of their servers are running NT or one of various -nixes. There was also a huge red button labelled "Emergency Stop" on the wall near the door, and not one of the staff there could identify what it was for.

Even worse, a freind of mine worked at the local university last year and he told me that up until Y2K their main server was still running Windows 3.11 !!!!

[furlong47]

Sounds very similar to our school as well, after last year they FINALLY updated the 486 DX-33's that were in most of the labs...I am not kidding. Our network goes down for days at a time while they run about trying to figure out what is wrong. The DNS server goes out all the time as well. This summer they brought in "techs" from outside who couldn't figure out how to do their work from inside the confines of the firewall, so they took it down. The network was hacked and our e-mail server used to send out spam. Now our e-mail addresses are blocked by many domains

[FreeFreak]

Ah.... the joys of competent IT managers and lots of money... UT Austin rocks!

After reading this I'm now more grateful of this network i'm on.

[Outcoded]

Then there's this place (University of Lincoln in UK) 100's machines up to 1Ghz with 512mb RAM running 95. The only ones running 2K are the P200's that do the library enquiry system. Weird huh?

[PitaBred]

We just built a new building on campus here, and it's teh new IT building, so they went all out. Optical mice on all the new (100 or so) computers, 17" LCD displays, 1GHz or so machines with 512MB RAM (I haven't looked too closely)

Oh well... just my bragging... heh

[Stalemate]

In late 1997 I looked into applying for qa degree at Concordia University in Montreal.

The orientation session infromed us that Win95 had been installed on the workstations that very same year

[ßracius]

[quote]Originally posted by FreeFreak:
<strong>Ah.... the joys of competent IT managers and lots of money... UT Austin rocks!

After reading this I'm now more grateful of this network i'm on. </strong><hr></blockquote>

Hell Yeah DUDE! Hook'em!

[Milenko]

I still run win95 on about half of the 300+ machines on my network. There's not anything wrong with 95 for what we use it for and the machines that have 95 on them probably wouldn't run anything else anyway. What really counts is this: will the machines do what the (l)users want them to do? If the answer is yes, then people should stop complaining. My biggest pet peeve is when I walk into a comp lab and all the kids proceed to start telling me about how slow these systems are and blah blah blah. Somehow none of them are willing to blow $30,000 for a new lab though.

It's not always the fault of the admins if the machines on their network are crappy. In my case, it's just that my school is slow to spend money on new machines. Even with only a couple hundred machines, it would still cost them 50,000+ a year to keep them all updated with the latest stuff. That doesn't count my salary and the cost of network equipment and servers either. I can't imagine the costs involved on a U campus with 2000 machines.

Granted, a lot of network admins suck (There are lots of them in my town), but sometimes stuff like new OSes and new machines are out of their control.

However, running 3.11 on any "server" machine should get you shot in the head.

[Outcoded]

They occassionally do their job. Can guarantee this one's gonna crash within 45 minutes though.

[ephmynus]

Our local U runs their website on a p266. Every semester around registration time, all you get is an error when attempting to access it. Sucks for the students (my wife) and that's why I always register for her early so we don't have to go through that.

[ilovetheusers]

[quote]Originally posted by Caddarn:
<strong>
Why is it that people like said IT Coordinator manage to get the jobs they do? Anyone else had a similar experience? Stupid question?

Cad

</strong><hr></blockquote>

I bet you mean the people who are running the show and not the actual admins and I really have no idea how these people get hired. They usually get huge salaries and really have no clue what is going on. It's like this in many places with the IT director not knowing their a$$ from a computer yet they are running the show. This is how companies that sell garbage keep on selling garbage - people who don't have a clue get a sales pitch and think it's true and, well, you get the picture. Things are rough where ever someone who hasn't a clue is in charge but it happens all the time.

Guess I could use the good ol' boy theroy of he who knows the most people and can BS his way into his buddies company can make the mostest. Shame that the people who know the most and work the hardest often get paid the least. I'm gonna stop writing before I get all preachy... I hate this sort of thing.

[PitaBred]

That's when companies hire people like me and the company I work for to come in and set up their sh*t, and act as auxiliary support when things go wrong that they can't fix (about once a month. Often related to the morons playing with the routers.)

[CodeDragon]

[quote]Originally posted by PitaBred:
<strong>That's when companies hire people like me and the company I work for to come in and set up their sh*t, and act as auxiliary support when things go wrong that they can't fix (about once a month. Often related to the morons playing with the routers.)</strong><hr></blockquote>

Having said that my own Uni is having fun at the moment. The IT dept has spent nearly £50K upgrading the network from ATM to Gigabit. All well and good, except that the whole network couldn't be converted at once.
So what do they do? Go out and buy the cheapest, most lame a$$ed bridge that I have ever seen, and hope that it will allow the same bandwidth... D'Oh.
I'm not involved in NetOps (Network Operations) so I don't have a say.

CD

[Darth Etz]

You all want to talk about the most stupid Adminitration team in the world....look at the school that I am the Net Admin for. They want to give every student (800+) a laptop, and try to run a wireless network over 802.11b. With Video and Internet usage over a 512 fractional T1!!!!

How are you gonna fit 800+ students plus 80+ teachers over 802.11b with video and a 512 fractional T1.......someone just please shoot me!!!