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P2P Programs on K-12 Networks?
deque_alpha asks: "I am a system administrator for a small K-12 public school district. I am taking over after a bunch of goofballs have really messed things up, the technology department is in utter disarray. I have near infinite problems, but the hairiest are with people sucking up what little bandwidth we have, introducing virii, downloading warez, and generally causing problems with P2P file sharing programs. I don't generally have a problem with these programs, but they are not an appropriate use of the limited bandwidth of a K-12 institution as they provide little in the way of an educational resource, not to mention the legal liability they potentially introduce. The rub lies in that these people are teachers, and I have virtually no policy to back me up if I come down on them, but shutting them down is neccesary to maintain harmony (and legality) on the network. I don't have the authority to pen new policies myself, and my supervisor cannot to be counted on to do it either. Have any of you been in this position before? How would you approach solving it without totally alienating your users? How do you broach the subject of introducing new policies with supervisors?"
Install Linux schoolwide cos there isn't any good p2p software! :)
N2H2 is definetly not your best option.
My school district uses N2H2's Bess and after a stupid moron at our school told one of the teachers about a anonymity proxy server that were were using in multimedia class to get around bess and access some soundfx it took the division 3 weeks to block that individual site. This is because N2H2 manages the entire policy and only they can block sites.
If you are willing pay a bit take a look at Sagebrush & Symantech's WebManager/IGEAR.
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