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Being School District Admin?
Bananatree3 asks: "I am a high schooler in a fairly large school district, and have always wondered what it is like to manage a large school network. What is it like to be a school district admin? What kind of unique things do you have to do that are outside the realm of 'normal' IT departments? When is the most hectic/slow time for you? How big of a network do you manage? Also, do you have any favorite stories about being a school district IT admin?"
Taking Deli meat out of the floppy drives of Apple SE/20's. My friends used to love doing that.
Go ask your bloody network admin(s) what it's like. Much better responses, and you might get to help out, etc. Stripping cat5 is always good slave labour..
Death by snoo-snoo!
"Also, hypothetically speaking, how would someone go about getting in and changing grades? Strictly hypothetically, of course."
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
the biggest difference i noticed between normal admin and school admin, is that in a school, your worst users are actively trying to bypass your security and restrictions, and they can't be fired for it.
I helped manage a mid-size district (2400+ total) with about 400 computers on the network when I was in high school. One thing that made it interesting was that the REAL admin was almost blind, and gone half the year for eye surgery. I remember a lot of manual labor. I was carrying cases/monitors/other items between 4 buildings most days. In the elementary school, when you go in you're a magician. If you're lucky, you step in during a snack break with a particularly generous teacher. In the middle school rooms, you're a nerd, and hear 12 year olds talking about their "skills" in fixing things. In high school, maybe you know some people, but still feel out of place. Teachers, for the most part, know nothing about the workings of their computers. They know their username and password (because it's written on their monitors) and how to check e-mail, and that's about it. They attract spyware like honey-covered shit attracts flies. Kids are pretty much harmless, save for physical vandalism to cases. The beginning of the year and right after Christmas break were crazy. Also, whenever they got a technology grant shipment was hell. 2 people unpacking, labling, and distributing 60 workstations in a day?! Not to mention clearing out old ones. Thankfully, the admin made network images of each model, and all the lab computers ran DeepFreeze. Things outside normal IT are explaining to very small children how the computers do and do not work. Although, it's probably similar in the real world.
I work for a fairly small school district in a rural community. As far as the managment of the systems goes, the lack of automation for things causes the most headaches. Other than that it's mainly sitting in my office watching the servers. Every now and again one of our drives will fail. Now, as far as things that bug me that aren't really part of my job go, the student management software is hell. It's poorly made and all that, but, even more annoying is that faculty doesn't know how to use it, and we get constant calls on "how do I set whatever code" and I don't really know. We paid to send ALL of our faculty to courses to learn how to use it, but not the IT staff. So, we have to tell them to just call the company. They get pretty upset when we say that. My manager is ... unique. He's one of the most shady people I've ever met in my life, and I grew up with drug dealers/addicts. He drives me insane. I'd say working for a school district isn't probably too much different than working in any other IT department, other than our customers are students and teachers.
David Lightman, is that you?
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm not a school admin, but I know some friends who are interns at some public schools. They claim it is the worst job ever. Besides being underfunded, they have to put up with all sorts of bullshit. Employees can get fired, students can't. Teachers typically don't watch the computers, so the vandals always get away with it. Filtering content is extremely important. They have to make sure nothing bad is on the network and the kids can't get to any questionable sites. The teachers act like students. When the teachers are being taught how to use programs, they act like students. They won't pay attention, talk to eachother, take cellphone calls, etc. The budgets are typically terrible. Though that is usually evident in the hardware. There isn't much to administer anyway. It doesn't matter if servers go down, etc. The computers will only have microsoft office on them in most situations. Usually you'll have a firewall, a mail server for the faculty, and then a file server.
(My post above tells about my adventures as a sys admin asst. for my middle school). I also also granted a pretty much unrescricted username on the network, with PLENTY of days when I had no jobs to do. I checked into it, changing grades would've been quite easy....though I had no need, I was an A student, and never told anybody that I could change them (so no pressure to do it).
Ideally, users should learn to help themselves instead of complaining to the network admin or Help Desk. I get a lot resistance from some users who insist that the Help Desk fix their problem even though I provided links for them to fix their own problems. I been tempted to walk into work with a smiley coffee cup and wearing "No, I won't fix your computer!" T-shirt.
Hey, I'm a former student a current employee of a large school district, and I think I can answer some of your questions:
... how do they know ... can they see everything we type?" They walked over to the technician who had controlled the computer and asked, "Can the district monitor what your computer is doing?" He smiled and answered, "They can monitor everything." Heh.
What is it like to be a school district admin? What kind of unique things do you have to do that are outside the realm of 'normal' IT departments?
One of the things that's a bit quirky, but not much different than most other IT departments is how the users are made to interact with the personel.
Often times you will get a teacher who has done something to their compuer that is outside the scope of the service agreement which the department has with the school, and then wants the IT department to fix it for free.
Because school districts work on tax budgets, our method of dealing with purchases and such is interesting as well. The IT department makes administrative decisions without consulting the school board, and thus, is not allowed, in any part, to be unionized.
We recieve a budget from the school board that we use to pay for our costs, (like buying parts or laptops or a new server), and then the schools, out of their budget, pay the general fund back for any services they buy from us. Certain services, (like internet, printing, etc.), are provided for free. Others cost the school money that they pay back to the district.
When is the most hectic/slow time for you?
By far, the most hectic time is September-November. All the new things that got implemented over the summer are being used for the first time, and things go wrong.
How big of a network do you manage?
I can't really give specifics... but its upwards a quarter million computers over a hundred or so square miles.
Also, do you have any favorite stories about being a school district IT admin?
We use Novell ZEN Works around the district, and by far, the most common misconception among users is that 'snapping' an application, (a network driven installation), means they no longer need the CD to use the program. *rolls eyes* We distribute applications, we don't crack them.
The students usually provide the best stories though. One of the onsite technicians was in a classroom removing sound drivers, (the students had been wasting time in class listening to things and the teacher requested we fix that), and noticed a student attempting to circumvent the security policy and reinstall his sound drivers. The technician remote controlled his computer from across the room and typed into the command prompt "Don't do anything stupid". The kids in the class gathered round in astonishment saying things like "they can't do that
FanFictionRecs.net
If hypothetically your school is like mine then every computer is connected to a central server "F", and if like my school your teachers place their grades in an excel file in their directory named after the period number (F -> hallway -> teacher name/class number -> period) than is would be a simple matter of going to the library opening it up and changing your's. The hardest part is making sure you don't get seen by the librarian, and knowing which grades are which because they aren't titled. This will work if like my school every account, even the student account with no password, has write permission. I have not done this I have just seen my teacher enter grades and show an idot get caught by the librarian.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
1) If you have good software that will handle the students screwing around (such as DeepFreeze or whatever).
2) Expect vandalism of the computers. All cases should be locked. All equipment rooms should be locked.
3) In general, the faculty has not a clue how to use a computer. They actually tend to be less teachable than the average person. If you have 50 faculty, 2 might be knowledgeable (as in, enough to build computers and such), 5 will not have to contact you about anything as they can fix it, and the rest will be nightmares.
Saw not show, sorry.
I was in high school (3 years ago) and was tapped by out district admin to help him, so I got to see what he sees from the viewpoint of you (the question asker). Here's what I found: Hectic times of the year: beginning and ending of every semester. Between the influx of new students that had to have user accounts and e-mail accounts created for them, and removing the ones that had graduated from the previous semester to keep the accounts right with the students in the district, those times were really straining. Also, the student grade/attendance system (STI, that piece of shit) would really put a huge load on our servers from all the data going in and out of it as well. Network size: We had ~400 computers in the high school that I was in charge of, that was 6 separate labs, and at least 1 computer in each classroom, most had 2. Then there were 4 big IBM servers and 2 smaller ones (big: district webserver, STI server, teacher e-mail server, teacher file server; small: backup file server, student e-mail server) You are also more than likely some form of tech support for every one that you manage. For one of my 4 periods a day my last three semesters at high school, I did the tech support and management stuff. Most of the time it was fixing problems for the faculty who had hosed soemthing up on accident, or fixing something a student did on purpose. It was fun doing the work. So fun, I've found the same thing at the university I am a student at, helping to manage another network, for the college that houses Computer Science and 5 other departments. Bigger network (4x), more headaches, but alot more leeway in what I can do, and something that may turn into a job offer when I graduate soon.
It's not that I'm asking the big questions, it's that I'm asking lots of small ones.
I'm sure it's a nightmare job, but the limited number of school admins I've encountered have not been up to the task.
/puts on flame-retardant suit
In one school district, the principals of each school got Windows laptops which were completely locked down. When one principal asked them to install an 802.11 card, she was told she wasn't allowed one because it was a security risk. This is the same district that turns OFF the mail server at night and weekends for security purposes. Heck, why not leave it off all the time, then?
In another, much smaller school district, users can't access the site for Bridge Construction Set - it's blocked by the NetNanny because it's a "gaming site." Because games and learning are mutually exclusive, of course.
I'm sure there are school IT admins who do it because they like working with students and teachers, or for the love of working in education. But for what school districts pay, if they're not doing it for the love of the job, or of the students, they are probably not up to the task.
Caveat - this is my limited experience, and there are exceptions to every rule. So if you're the exception to the rule, please don't take offense.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
The best (only!) way to survive adminning a school district is to convert every desktop machine to a diskless client., No hard drives, and no floppies on the desktop machines. (USB Key's are Ok for students and they don't have any moving parts or heads that need maintenance)
Stick one server in each room where there are more than N clients and make a subnet out of the room. N varies based on network speed, server size and typical client load.
Server is headless, keyboardless, mouseless, administered remotely.
Diskless clients almost never breakdown, and need very little RAM to run effectively.
All this concentrates your admin work to the servers and network equipment. (and replacing mice and kybds). And user accounts are more easily admined as well. Of course all user accounts should be managed on a centralized server/authorization system.
If licensing and managing licensing for all the servers and clients and user's email etc.. becomes problemsome or too expensive, all licensing concerns can be eliminated by using k12ltsp, a proven thin client system allready in operation at many schools in the USA and many other countries.
http://www.k12ltsp.org/
I was a High School admin for a couple of districts. I found the students in the private schools to be the most cruel and demonic to computers. The rual students where more respectful. Bigger districts varied from OK to bad, but not as bad as private school. The worst I have seen is someone putting hot glue into a computer's powersupply to breaking of pencils inside the floppy drives. The annoying ones are the teens that pop-off the belt on the CD-ROM drive tray motor. The worse student to a computer is a teenager. I have fixed spam/bot/malware infected computers and in 15 minutes it would be trashed again. Teachers gripe because of the draconian methods I have used to control the damage students cause and have demanded restrictions be removed. What they don't see, is the budget the district gives for time and parts, which is virtually nothing. Everytime a student is given more freedom on a PC, the more expensive it costs to maintain it. The best environment I have seen for students is an all Mac setup. Virtually no headaches, yet schools want to run away from them. They just don't see.
Whether you like it or not, God loves you.
I Love using Remote Desktop on Mac OS X to spy on other computers (If I am right, Windows included), and, to really freak people out, take control of that user's computer. Do it to someone in that room and see their reaction (ONLY if you are good at controlling laughing--you will NEVER be able to do it again once people know it was you). Youv'e got to know that computer's password, though, but most schools have them set to the same thing, or more often nothing at all.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
As a security auditor, I've audited College and High School networks.
Simply put: Wherein most organizations are trying to protect themselves from the internet - at a school district, they try to protect the internet from their organization.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
being a network admin for school districts can be pretty interesting. your biggest jobs include cleaning spyware and staying up to date on the latest sites for online instant messaging and flash games.
some of my fav memories would have to be watching conversations about myself and being called a "f*&^n immigrant" due to blocking a popular site.
one of the more interesting aspects of schools is that with all the sensitive information they hold on students, parents, teachers, adminitration, etc etc security seems to never be a huge issue. and by never a huge issue i actually mean nobody cares.
as for the busiest time that is summer roleouts (if you are looking for a summer job where you will learn a lot contact your it department and see if they need summer students), christmas rollouts can also be busy but generally not as tiring as the summer versions. the worst time is more then likely jsut after a big rollout when school starts back up. nobody knows their passwords or usernames, can't figure out the new system, don't understand why their version of software is gone... you name it people will complain about it.
After college I did a year long stint as a sys/net admin a small upstate New York school district. It was really my first time being a full time admin and man was it crazy. It was a small underfunded school district so everything was done on a shoe string. It was only two buildings with about 500 computers but when I got there it was still a hubbed network [shudder].
However its really not that much different from working anywhere else. There might be a little bit more bureaucracy because its a public institution but that's about it. Computer networks are computer networks where ever you go. Some school IT offices get sucked into teaching computer courses (or in my high schools case the IT department came out of the computer classes). But most of the time I got to avoid dealing with the students thankfully.
It was a rather steady flow of work. There might have been a little increase in workload around grading time but that mostly was other people's problems. My biggest source of trouble was from poorly written educational software. That stuff sucks big time. I think its written by educators who become programmers.
Sorry I don't have anything really cool to write about, but its really just like other jobs. At least as long as you don't sweat the bull-shit.
700 computers, 9 sites, 2500 users.
:)
:)
Windows Networks, all sites see each other, user logins for high and middle schools, windows 5 domains, 40 macs in a lab at the HS, 5 computer labs, 15 servers.
Networks/domains already existed when I got there.
Special things:
student server folders: nightly scripts to delete mp3, zip(sit rar etc) and exe(dmg bin etc)
daily run of quota script and notification to "over/close to the limit" offenders
Funny things:
Middle schoolers taping nickels to cds and putting them in and leaving the library, as cd-drive sounds like an out of balance washing machine..
High school kid with keyloggers, and other various hacking tools in his folder: Excuse:
he was learning to be an FBI agent...
Teacher purchasing a server (got the funds and all), so she could have enough room for the studendts to put their video projects... then a dozen kids fragging their files because they were trying to edit 4 & 5 gig files across a 100m network
(server must not be fast enough) hehe heheheh.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I'm the network mangler for a medium sized school system - 17 schools, 11,000 students, 3500 network nodes.
There are a few challenges that I can think of that deviate from what I encountered in the private sector:
1. Content filtering. Though you probably find content filtering of some sort at most companies, being in a school system I'm *required* to have content filtering by CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) or risk our federal funding and thereby my job. Unfortunately the extent of what/how you filter is ill-defined. Also unlike a company where as a rule sane adults realize they can get fired for surfing pornography, I have a few thousand middle and high school kids whose hormones are going nuts and often don't consider or care about the consequences. Now, I'm a bleeding heart liberal and censoring by and large goes against my grain, but I believe preventing young children from accidentally being exposed to something they weren't expecting (whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, for instance) is a good thing. However, if a pubescent child is determined to go looking I don't believe you can stop him from finding it. We could deploy draconian measures to stop it, but then you limit the value of the Internet (example: We blocked google images because there wasn't an easy way to prevent them from switching off the safe-search mode). We (IT) also bounce all requests to block a site that isn't obvious pornography to the curriculum folks for a ruling. That leads to decisions I don't always agree with, such as blocking plannedparenthood.com among others. Content filtering in a K-12 school system is a touchy business, balancing needs/desires of kids, faculty, parents, school board, and CIPA.
2. Funding/staffing. I used to work for the Family Channel. When a new IT project was floated, an adequate budget was attached and off you went. In the school system new IT projects come up all the time, often driven from other departments, but insufficient funding/staffing is attached to it in many cases. Work tends to pile on already busy people and so you get people who are very good at what they do yet they end up doing a half-baked job because they simply can't get to it all. We have a networking staff of 3 people to handle all telecommunications/networking/security (cameras) in the county, and for the 6 years prior to this July, only had 2 on the team. This is probably the most frustrating part of my job. We also have to deal with bidding procedures. Anything over $10,000 has to be put out to bid and approved by the school board. That makes something we might normally do in a few days to a couple of weeks (evaluate and decide to purchase a product) take a month or more. You also end up justifying an IT decision to people who might not understand the nuances of why the lower bidder isn't the best solution.
3. Atmosphere. This is why I work for the school system. It's *so* much more relaxed and rewarding than working in the private sector. Work in the private sector and you're making money for someone. Work in a school system and you really can give something back to society. It may sound cheesy, and certainly isn't my only motivation, but it really feels good to use your talents somewhere where chasing money isn't the goal. When the kids go "it's the computer man!" and light up when you fix their computer it's a rewarding warm fuzzy. I also get to work in jeans and comfortable shirts, work 8 - 4:30, get 2 weeks off for Christmas, 1 week for spring break, 1 week for fall break, 10 vacation days a year, 9 or so sick days, 2 personal days, and all the standard school holidays. My boss is fine if I want to go grab an hour at my daughter's school to watch her school play. It's a really personal life/family friendly work atmosphere. Of course, there are downsides as well -- for instance I often have worked over spring break or Christmas break to do things while the faculty/kids are out, but that's not unique to the school system environment. Just didn't want to give the impression it was all wine and ro
--- saint
Build Your Own Arcade Controls
I've worked two school districts thus far...
In the former, our kids loved to stick pens and pennies into the drive. There's also a significant problem at several schools with theft. Workplaces may have issues with theft, but replacing the ball-mice with optical-mice in a lab only to have one dissappear 15 minutes later is somewhat disconcerting.
Food issues include massive wads of gum under desks, chip wrappers, rotten bananas, etc.
In the current distict, I've heard stories from co-workers about teenagers caught copulating in the back rooms when a technician comes in to work early/late, some kids have no shame!
Add to that that teachers seem to think they know everything, but rarely know enough not to install webshots, spywarefuntime, and various other fun things... well it's not exactly a recipe for joy.
I was a student aide in the computer lab last year, and managed to get administrative plrivelages for pretty much everything in the school. The district IT department, itself, is a bunch of incompetant controll-freaks. Schools certainly have interesting issues. The first is blocking all the naughty websites. To do this, they have the entire district (several miles wide) wired up to a single high-speed connection. Inbetween us and the web is a proxy server running their firewall. The firewall, though, can be bypassed by any motivated 15 year old, and judging by the fact that they havn't blocked Google Video yet, they probably don't care. Theres also the issue of managing the software on all the computers (eMacs). They all come imaged with an older version of OS 10, some remote desktop software (I had a lot of fun with that), a grading program that the teachers seem to complain about, MS office 2000, and (of all things) Dreamweaver and Flash MX. In order to install 3rd party software, drivers, etc. you need to file a request to the help-desk. If they aprove it (wich can take about 3 months) they e-mail you a password. Thus, we could not hook up our shiny new laser printers to our shiny new computers. Finally, When the district decided to get us these fancy 'smart board' things, no one had any clue what they did, much less how to use them, so they all sat in a corner the whole year. You'd think they might want to teach the teachers a thing or 2 on the technology, but no.
]blockquote] i did have sex with the school librarian in the server room though [/blockquote]
Ewww. *shiver* I can't imagine anyone having sex with Mrs. Edna, not even her husband.
I have the pleasure of administering a K-12 private school. The kids are very computer literate, and as such, you really need to make a good sandbox for them to play in. Thankfully, Apple and BSD provide great facilities that enable me to ensure that the kids are kept safe with content filtering, have roaming profiles and each client is locked down with respect to software installation. Surprisingly, the teachers have much less comfort with technology, and they mess things up more often than the kids do. If the kids didn't drop the laptops occasionally, it would be an almost ideal setup. Hacking gravity is still proving a little difficult. Damn Newtonian physics!
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
But as far as my school district goes, the work seems to consist of spying on students who know more than them and blocking their perfectly innocent Web sites, locking down the computer settings to the point where you can't even lock your screen to keep people from messing with it if you're not at the machine, discovering that all the restrictions make it impossible to remote-install software without running into enough problems that any students and/or school people watching can't help but laugh, and yelling at students using SSH tunnels, Firefox, and anything else they don't understand.
Although then again, that's just what I know from my experience as the only student in the entire district who not only knows what Linux is, but also even has his own version.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I have been in the education field, though not technically as a sysadmin. I have done a lot of my own system administration in at least one school, though, because the actual designated IT person was clueless and the security was so poor that I could change any setting I wanted.
For example, we had two computers in a teacher's lounge, one of which was connected to a simple inkjet printer. This computer got some virus, and the cure was apparently to wipe the hard drive and start over. I had nothing to do with that part. However, the clueless admin had no idea how to reinstall the print driver after messing with it for allegedly half an hour.
This was Win98, so there was no real concept of "administrator." I had to log in, but once on the system I could change anything I wanted. I was sick of the printer not working, so I poked around on the HP website, found the driver, and installed it. The whole thing took less than five minutes. The other computer was already set up to connect to this computer over the network for printing, so it immediately had print capabilities too.
About a month later, I was in this lounge using the computer and another teacher was using the other one. The "admin" walked in. The other teacher asked her some sort of question about printing, to which the admin answered, "Well, printing won't work because I couldn't get the print driver to install." The other teacher replied, saying that, no, she was able to print just a moment ago from this other program, just not from the one she was using. The "admin" replied, "Well, it must be magic then, since there is no print driver on that computer." I just stayed out of it. Later, I told the teacher (since it was one I trusted) what I had done, and she thought it was hilarious.
Frankly, in a lot of schools, the IT person is designated by an administrator. Quite often, that person is a school librarian that has a little bit of a clue how to do research and use programs on the computer, and that is it. Security is a joke most of the time.
What's worse is that what is often done in the guise of "security" makes computers practically inoperable. I can't even begin to explain the annoyances of the Novell "security" system for Win98 PC's (this was a different school system). No start menu; everything had to be accessed through desktop icons. File browsing on the computer was similarly prohibited, but all you had to do was open up, say, Word, and "open" a file. Then you could see whatever was on the computer. The proxy for "safe" web browsing was a joke; simply change your browser settings, and presto, you have a direct internet connection. I didn't bother because I had no reason to, but if a student had any knowledge of how to do this kind of thing, that student could easily bypass security.
As others have mentioned, the pay is pretty dismal, since if you actually are hired as a full-time system administrator with real qualifications, you could use those qualifications to get a much better-paying and more satisfying job elsewhere. So, as I said in the subject line, my recommendation is: don't bother.
I worked and also volunteered for a large school district (20K+ students) when I was in high school and college. My experience jives with others, kids will do NASTY things to the computers, all the cases will need to be locked and even then they will still get into them. If you enjoy working with kids and the district is structured right it can be rewarding, especially when you get a kid interested in productive use of a computer vs say just gaming or the 'net. But most of your work will be pretty mundane, with below average pay.
When I was doing this job I was more of a general "do it all" tech because of some of my skills and some interesting things I did:
1) Quite a bit of basic forensics. So just how did the porn get on the school computers? What user did it originate from? Who installed that keystroke recorder and what information did it obtain? What teacher gave out the password that allowed it to happen in the first places so they could get "help" from a computer savvy student. In other words A LOT of time spent reviewing logs because kids wouldn't rat.
2) Writing reports and documents outlining what student x did for the inevitable parent/principal meetings and subsequent discipline was an interesting part of my job, at least several hours per week.
3) Assisting in small criminal investigations. Theft is going to be common. Depending on your job description you could spend time inventorying equipment to determine what is missing or even directly assisting the cops by gathering logs and the like. I know at least one sys-admin who got to work with the FBI after kids jacking the computers from the school were transporting them several states away in order to sell them. His installing some "call home" software on random machines in the school with the problem helped a great deal when someone was stupid enough to boot the machine on the 'net before wiping it.
Cobb county in georgia outsourced their networking operations once me and a buddy got caught "hacking" (i use the term VERY loosely, they overreacted to what was at the time, unheard of scriptkiddy shiat) and it turns out im a little infamous for it. Ironically enough, im going for a major in infosec.
I worked for 4 years for the School I graduated from. Medium size network, 1200 students 200 faculty, 500 computers. One biggest difference than any other sector, you get 3 months(summer) where you have to support only 5% of your network, and the rest is yours. This allows you time to play, but most of that time, you have things to do. I worked as part of a 3-5 person team as I was there, mostly over the summers creating images to be used for the next year. 3 months for an image, well, the last year of there, the room we were using for image building had roughly 500 different software titles in it. Licences ranging from Full campus, to 20 copies used only by special ed. All of these had to be sorted and installed in the correct areas. Then, the users you are supporting are not required to know ANYTHING about the computers they used, so most of the users were completely stranded if anything went wrong. Also, your working for a government, so funding is special. One year you get a grant to buy 300 computers for the campus, but who gives grants for wiring(no one, cause who cares if your company donated 4 miles of cat 5, or a layer 3 switch, when your competitor donated 300 magical computers). Then 4 years later, try explaining to non tech that you need 300 new computers. They stare at you, thinking, chalkboards don't need replacing every 4 years, nor do books or desks, what did we get into). I was lucky to be separated from all the finance shenanigans by a boss who's almost sole job was to play finance and liaison between Superintendents, and school boards, and Parents for Responsible Technology (yes, a techie parent started this as well) and keep of clear of the bull shit. This one person made the job extremely laid back and joyous for us, though if I was in here shoes, I think it would have been the worst job in the world.
(example: We blocked google images because there wasn't an easy way to prevent them from switching off the safe-search mode)
Just add "&safe=vss" to the end of all queries sent to *.google.com. If you have a proxy, there's probably an easy way to do this. Our school district implements this, probably through their Lightspeed Systems' filter.
Also unlike a company where as a rule sane adults realize they can get fired for surfing pornography, I have a few thousand middle and high school kids whose hormones are going nuts and often don't consider or care about the consequences.
Ask your school district if they'd consider implementing a username and password for each student, so they can put violations into the regular disciplinary system for "abuse of resources" or whatever else is in the student rules.
Any school where students have even read access to the places where teachers keep their grades needs to fire the sysadmin.
I worked as an intern at my high school's IT department. One of the biggest problems was students stealing mouse balls.
Solution, super glue the bottom of the mice on. Sure they wouldn't work so well once they got dirty and you couldn't clean em but eh, that's what the bastards get.
I've been working with the Department of Technology for DPS since sophomore year and can tell you that the most hectic time is during breaks when it's most acceptable to make changes. Outside normal is dealing with a full spectrum of user types. Everything from teachers and administrators with no computer knowledge, to students in programming classes, to script kiddies with something to prove are on the computers and network. Security is insane because there is no way to determine who should have what rights. Teachers and students must be kepts from doing damage by accident but allowed to perform necesary tasks. The best way to learn about this would be to assist in the IT department at your highschool so that you get a feel for how much has to be accounted for.
-Tim Louden
First, I am currently a high schooler and manage my dad's small business infrastructure (some workstations -- most running (K)Ubuntu depending on the users preference -- and 1 Apache server and 1 file server both running Debian. Additionally, I help out the IT people at my school.
My school's IT Department is fairly well funded -- we have 8 labs with 20 or so computers each; all of the ~350 faculty members have laptops and there is a projector in every classroom. All of the computers (unfortunately) run Windows XP.
The biggest annoyance is that the IT people in my school are idiots. They have a strict policy of "IE only," even though it's well known that other browsers are much better security-wise. But the department members, being idiots and everything, cannot for their life enforce this policy correctly (not that they should but w/e). Other students constantly bring in Portable Firefox and can run it even though they technically shouldn't be able to. We have blocked execution of all outside executables except just renaming "firefox.exe" to "iexplore.exe" can easily circumvent that. I have pointed this out to the IT people numerous times but they refuse to do anything -- even though we have had significant downtime when some kid brought one virused executable (can't remember which one) and renamed it purposefully and downed the network.
Besides that, most of the teachers have install priveleges on the machines loaned to them. Everyday one of them brings it hosed with some oddball virus/spyware/adware/whatever. I can see why sometimes we might want to give admin-priveleges on the laptops we loan to them but they really shouldn't.
Our web server is a joke. 20 GB of space for the whole district! I mean with storage being so cheap these days, I can't figure out why they can't replace the old hard-drive with a fresh 250Gb one. With all the clubs/sports sites and the school sites of the 30 elementary schools, 8 middle schools and 2 high schools, that hard-drive is 99% full and the webmaster is always trying to cut down usage by saying no to a new club or whatever that wants to use that hosting space.
We pay WAY too much for stupid software. For example, our image runs "Geometer's Sketchpad" which I believe costs $20 a license and we 410 or so licenses. Now, the KDE educational suite has a much better alternative -- for free. I have asked the district to at least install Kubuntu on the math computers to save some money but we have MS-Fan boys on the board.
Our filtering software is pretty horrible. We are supposed to block webmail etc. but can't. Just putting in a Linux router at the gateway blocking everything but port 80 and 443 and then blacklisting traffic would be so much more effective.
And then comes our file server. Has all the district's "important" files -- WITHOUT backups. Nope. Not a single backup. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
I sometimes have to wonder how some of the IT people got a job there. Seriously, they have no idea how to manage a restricted environment -- at all.
"to save some money but we have MS-Fan boys on the board."
I welcome you to the world where instead of a technocracy we have mediocracy. Management (of any kind) will always resist change, sometimes despite obvious benefits.
Let's assume that they did what you said, and it worked perfectly, no better than perfectly, that it beamed knowledge directly into the kid's heads. The question will come up why a student was the one to suggest it and why wasn't it discovered and implemented earlier. Making the "professionals" and management look bad.
Everyone is worried about how others see them, and the nightmare of a manager is to be considered out of touch and a bad decision maker (including past mistakes). Which fosters in an atmosphere where it is very hard to atone for one's mistakes.
I know it sucks, and I feel lucky that at that age I was completely apathetic towards myself and fellow students. If I actually wanted to improve their situation I might have got myself into a lot of trouble.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I'm a contractor that's been with a fairly small district (2500 student enrollment) for about eight (8) years. I'm a self-employeed contractor, and work with a mix of educational, governmental, and private-industry Customers.
At my districg, I manage ten (10) servers (Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, and a couple different flavours of Fedora Linux), and a mostly Cisco Systems branded Ethernet infrastructure. I've got about five-hundred (500) Windows XP Professional-based PC's, and about eight-hundred (800) Windows 98SE-based PC's. Our network infrastructure is all Ethernet based, with gigabit-Ethernet based fiber links between our buildings, and 10/100 switched Ethernet inside the buildings. Besides running basic "File 'n Print" services, Microsoft Exchange 2003-based email, and providing access to the Internet, our LAN/WAN also supports about three-hundred Cisco IP phones. Our Internet access comes over three (3) bonded T1 lines. Major applications include our telephone system (Cisco CallManager and Unity), email, file 'n print sharing, gradebook (Pinnacle Excelsior... *blech*), student management (a AS/400-based application), and a host of small "boutique" apps (library automation, planning for "special needs" students, cafeteria POS, various student assessment systems).
I've been with this district since they deployed their first networked PC, and I've managed the entire infrastructure since the beginning. I brought us thru the Windows NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 days to where we are today. I don't handle PC problems (we have a combination of in-house and contracted support for broken PC's), but I handle any communcations / networking issues, management of the Active Directory installation, and provide general planning, design, and guidance.
We use a Linux-based disk imaging system that I put together for imaging our PC's via either CD-ROM based imaging or multicast network imaging. _ALL_ user data is stored on servers and PC's are re-imaged as a first response to PC issues. This fixes the majority of reported issues, and our lowest-level response staff are trained in these activities. I've eschewed what I consider silliness with programs like "Deep Freeze" or "Fortres", and use "System Policies" for my Windows 9X PC's and Group Policy for my Windows XP PC's, along with judicious use of re-imaging when necessary. (It takes around 15 minutes to re-image a Windows 98 PC and 25 minutes to re-image a Windows XP PC.) PC's (or, at least, their software environments) are disposable.
Overall, I'm pleased with how well things work. My duties are an approximately 20% full-time equivalent. Over our entire technical staff, we have approximately 2 full-time equivalents managing the network, phones, servers, PC's, and applications. It's split over six (6) people, including myself, and works out really well. We do most of our communcation via email, and I may go several weeks w/o seeing any of the other staff face-to-face.
The things that have helped most include:
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
Seems like a sweet deal to me - I'd take a $10K paycut for that in a heartbeat.
Spring break and fall break are often not full weeks for us as administrative staff, so call it 5 weeks a year. So.... yeah, it's pretty nice :)
Did I mention during the summer we work 4 10-hour days (7 AM - 5 PM) and have 3 day weekends?
--- saint
Build Your Own Arcade Controls
There are around 350 computers spread over 5 labs with approximately 30 each, with one 90 computer lab, and the rest are in classrooms. Every teacher has a computer, and all the computers are newish dells. We spend approximately 30 thousand dollars a year on hardware upgrades (1/3 of hardware every three years) + occasional expenses we have extra money for.
The network is almost brand new, with fiber links between switch closets(6 of em), and 10/100 ethernet to every computer. There are also POE switches that power the phones (everything is nortel), and there is a wireless network to accomodate cordless phones, and administrators pdas.
Everything is kept under a tight, tight control with Symantec Internet Security software at the proxy server filtering almost everything. There is also Symantec managed anti-virus on every networked computer. We use Winclass to manage students, and It works great, for the most part. All of the updates, security or just plain software are pushed out through the domain, and if it can't be done then the assistants(Myself and other students) get to manually install it on all the computers that need it. Everybody gets a "Z" Drive where their stuff is stored(even the My Documents folder is mapped there), everybody loads a default profile when the log on and then that profile is theirs on that computer, but everything is extremely locked down with policy, so if they can do it it's because we said they could.
It's a pretty relaxed enviroment, stuff doesnt crash very often, and we have a great budget, considering what other schools have. The biggest problem we have as far as students screwing with stuff is occasionally somebody will go into the bios and set a password. Another one of my favorites is when a retarded student puts tape over the sensor on the mouse. That one was pretty confusing the first time it happened to me...
This is all from the perspective of a HS Junior, BTW, but I feel that is a pretty good at what goes on at my school, without revealing too much.
I admin a 1200 node network for a small sized school district. 5 buildings in all. A lot of our time is spent on very small irritating tasks, mostly problems caused by mal-intending students, or under informed staff. Like any admin, we have the occasional drive failure, and we have to cater to the systems our predecessors setup because our users are accustomed to the "old" environment. You have to be very good people person to make any drastic changes to your network without feeling the pain back from the staff (and your boss). If you want to upgrade the mail server, or switch to a new fileserver because the old one is on its last legs, you either have to bite the bullet and be a bad guy, or you need to play politics for 2 months in advance.
Student management systems are a pain in the rear and usually don't integrate well with any of your existing systems... especially your login system (ldap, Active Directory, ANYTHING). The most hectic time of year is the first two weeks of school... this is when you find out about things that have been broken for "2 years" and "why haven't you fixed it yet". Also, unlike the private sector, the federal government requires you to filter the net for porn etc. Full compliance with this will take a little work as the "default" filters usually don't do the job right.
In regards to unique things, you will find that you will have almost unlimited amounts of http traffic over your internet connection. Invest in a packet shaping device of some kind (we use a packeteer) to segment your traffic it WILL save your butt when some punk decides to fire up bit torrent.
Once at one of my buildings, a principal was having issues connecting to the internet, so he unlocked the network closet and started re-arranging the cabling on the switches. When he was done, he had managed to plug most of the switches into themselves, unplugged the fiber that connected his building to the main server closet (the connect to the internet for him) and them managed to plug the fiber in backwards. Needless to say, he screwed up a lot. The real problem: he changed his proxy settings on accident.
If you want to have it easy: find a way to convert EVERYTHING over to a single platform, and automate everything you can. Expect to work in an environment where you don't have the budget to upgrade anything at a regular pace, expect to have to know Mac OS 7-X, Windows 9x-XP (and then vista), all of your server quirks, and spend a lot of time finding ways to save your precious bandwidth.
My advice: don't do the job unless you have a degree. Cause if you ever want to leave that district, or get better pay, you'll have a hard time without it.
More like lynch. :-).
But I don't entirely disagree
This makes the assumption that school districts use hardware that can network boot. I've run into this problem many times. Plus, as cool as terminal clients are, it is hard to muster up the hardware to support the server side. Remember your budget is often somewhere close or below 0.
You do get breaks, you may work more days out of the year than the teachers, but 3 months of it: students and teachers are gone. This is when you get some of your best work done. Plus, if your boss is cool with it, you can shift your summer schedule to fit the things you like to do by working 4 10 hour shifts instead of 5 8 hour shifts. If you make good friends with the right staff, you can make some real decisions about how the network runs and how to make it better. In addition, if you play your cards right, you can develop pet projects like converting all the servers over to linux from win2k. Sure, the kids glue the mouseballs or steal them, but you can always replace them with infrared mice and save yourself the hassle next time. The job can be really sweet some days, especially when you can convince your regular vendors to let you "test" a peice of equipment for a few months. My best advice to you is still get that Bachelors degree, here's why: If you become a k12 network admin, and you have a Bachelors degree, in some states you can get a vocational teaching cert. and teach some of the fun tech classes. You'll get a little better pay and sometimes you can make friends with some of the students, which will in turn help you out by keeping some of the student population on your side. My best advice for cutting down spyware: Use your content filter to block all the advertising servers you have. Protect your network by blocking things like hotbar and other software you don't want installed. Oh btw, forcing proxy through Active Directory is futile, students can just install firefox/opera/pick a browser and cruise past your proxy if they have a direct connection to the firewall.
I work at a local secondary school in the UK. My advise is to NOT work there unless the money is really good.
h read=1016710
:)
Due to the nature of the pay scales, at least in the UK, you can't ever earn more than about £16,000. And if you ever think of leaving and returning, you're put back on basic wage.
Because of this, most staff are Technicians or just interested in Computers but don't actually know how to work the network, or correct procedures.
There's a good discussion I commented on over here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/F1720303?t
Get in contact with me if you want to discuss or chat about this kind of thing! Anyone, that is
Dug
> This makes the assumption that school districts use hardware that can
:-) (see below)
:)
:( "
> network boot. I've run into this problem many times. Plus, as cool as
> terminal clients are, it is hard to muster up the hardware to support
> the server side. Remember your budget is often somewhere close or below
> 0.
Most PC's manufactured for approximately the last 8 years have the built in ability to do a "PXE" boot without ever activating a hard drive, cd-rom or floppy. The PXE boot means the machine can boot up an Operating System from across the network. They don't need any Operating system to be resident in the PC itself.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
These machines are the easiest to convert to thin clients because they are already capable of diskless operation.
Now you can remove the hard drive, floppy and cd-rom from the PC, reducing hardware issues and the amount of electricity consumed by PC's. What do you do with all the extra drives? Keep some for spares and sell the rest on Ebay to pay for PXE NIC cards.
For machines which lack built-in PXE boot capabilities there are several techniques which can be used to give them PXE capabilities:
#1: wipe the hard drive, and image it with a PXE boot instead of an OS Free images here: http://www.etherboot.org/
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#2: same as number three, but image is on a floppy. (make it permanent by moving the floppy drive inside the case and covering the slot with a normal empty drive slot panel. Set the bios to boot from floppy.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#3: Same as 3 & 4, but do it with a cd-rom drive.
Uses existing PC hardware, COST $ZERO
#4: Add a PXE boot rom to the current NIC cost ~$15-20 per. (Remember that empty socket you see on most NIC's? This is what its for.
#5: install a PXE capable Network card, cost ~$20-50 per
#6: Need a large number of boot roms? buy a rom flashing device and blanks roms, download an image from etherboot.org and flash the roms yourself. Cost ~$6 per ROM. Eprom programmer cost ~$40 to "as much as you want to spend". Chances are someone in the district has one you can borrow. Especially if there is an electronics class in the high school.(and if they won't lend it to you, then they can flash the ROMs for you!)
SERVERS: Issue - "We're too poor to buy a server!
RESPONSE: In this case, "server" does not mean what you think.
Typical Thin Client server Needs:
1 GB RAM for every 10 clients
~10 - 20 GB hard drive, any number of clients
Two Network Cards
1Ghz+ CPU
Thin client servers are typically underloaded. Since the diskless client does all the work to display the screen, the server only does the behind the scenes calculations. A 1.3 GHz celeron chip, with 2 GB of RAM can easily serve 20 diskless clients doing web browsing and word processing, fairly memory intensive applications. Given that this is possible, any robustly configured desktop PC, puchased with the last three years can be used for a server as long as you make sure it has enough RAM. Since your diskless clients only absolutely need 64 MB of RAM, you will have plenty to scavenge from to fill up your server. Don't have simms/dimms large enough to get enough RAM in the server because the mainboard only has two RAM slots? Sell the extras (pulled from now diskless clients) on EBAY and use the $ to purchase larger sticks of RAM. COST: 1 GB stick, ~$75 - $150 per.
Got Questions or need help? Want more info? Leave me a message in my jounal.
I was the de facto admin of our high school's computer center. Bascially, all I had to do was make sure the MX-80 was stocked with fanfold and the DOS 3.3 floppies hadn't been nicked from the drives. Of course, there was always a wise guy who popped the covers off between classes and unplugged the Disk ][s from the controller card. Jerk. Other than that, it was non-stop Apple Panic and Karateka on those glorious Amdek Color-1s! What a great job!
I love the "in case" blocking of various sites. At a district I previously worked for, I was told to block "deviantart.com" because there was a section which contained semiclothed/nude pictures. Well, that section is well marked, contains warnings beforehand, and isn't so simple to get to that one could accidentally click on.
I know many young people with artistic talent whom use (or could use) DA as an art repository. Despite my arguements against censoring it I was ultimately forced to blacklist the site.
Chasing around sites that offer some mixed content or chat capabilities seems to be par for the course. Instead of having to add a block for ever new one of a gazillion chat/etc sites how about you deal with the few students that are abusing them.
Any school where students have even read access to the places where teachers keep their grades needs to fire the sysadmin.
Yeah, because I'm sure that the school has a dedicated, well-trained sysadmin.
Whoops, looks like I mistyped "has a chemistry teacher working part time with computer shit he doesn't actually understand". Damned typos.
Seriously, have you ever looked at the payscales in public education? Anyone who could design and lock down the network properly is outside of their financial reach.
--saint
When I was in highschool, we had a service learning requirement to fulfill as a graduation requirement. I T.A.'d for the teacher who managed all the service learning stuff, apparently he was a school admin in order to log into the system and directly input the updated data. The system was connected to the whole district, and did not distiguish between what school you were logging in from, so his account had access to the whole district's system. During the time period that I was working for him, the district actually changed the system, they upgraded a 25+ year old system called Prime to a new one named SchoolMAX. So I've had experiances with both systems, and both were pretty easy to browse around in the system, you can easily view everything on just about every student. Since I never was hired to actually be an admin, I never had the real responsibilities for the job. My job was to only log in to update students' hours on the system, although I could have done more ;)
Sigs are overrated.
Reading through the responses I see a lot of current/former admins complaining about the students they have to deal with. For the most part I agree that there are many students that just want to cause trouble. What I haven't heard anyone talk about yet is the frustration that some students feel when it comes to technology in school. One of the worst classes I have ever taken in high school was a computer applications class everyone was required to take. We were put in a room and asked to perform agonizingly mundane tasks over and over from a book. All on old, spyware ridden computers that would crash before you saved your work. The keyboards were filthy and looked like they hadn't been cleaned since they were first bought. The teacher was by far the worst teacher I had ever had during my 12 years in the public school system. Once I asked to get some paper towels from the restoom to clean off my keyboard and I was promptly given a detention. I am not saying it is like that at every school but you can kind of understand why some students might rebel when put in a situation like that.
How ironic you should imply someone not knowing what that're talking about in the context of your own misguided arguments. Maintaining a free republic is the duty of its citizens, and an informed public is the cornerstone of that democracy, and you can't be well informed or independant in thought if you can't fucking read. Get rid of the public schools and they end up replaced by theistic institutions fostering religious dogma - not exactly the cornerstone of a free society.
This isn't just my opinion, it's what Jefferson said in the context of maintaining a public school system. He never intended it to be federalized or even compulsory, but he pointed out how having a competent public school system to educate the citizenry is as necessary to maintaining the free republic as a standing army.
I'm a sophomore at a private school in the Midwest. We have around 175-200 kids total, most of which have school-provided laptops. (Bad idea.) Our admin enforces use of a content-filtering proxy server. Well...It didn't work too well, since a lot of us knew enough about the internet to enter alternate proxies, download Firefox, set up a decent firewall, and forcibly evict Novell ZENWorks. It worked even worse with me and a friend, since we dual-booted Slackware 10.0 the second day we got them. In my experience, the students are going to be smarter than your average admin. Almost the only way around it is to take on a student (preferably the most competent one) as an assistant. Of course, there's always the danger that he'll tell his buddies how to circumvent the software that monitors their machines....Enforced Remote Desktop Connections wasn't the brightest thing ever to do. It's what drove me to hunt down and annhilate all traces of the Novell software that allowed it, plus the Windows tool. -A Proud Slackware User
I work at an American K-12 in Europe 1400 users, 700 computers-half win, half mac, and get 5 weeks some U.S holidays plus local holidays, and no limit on sick days... I won't be buying a BMW on what I make, but it's a good atmosphere, my colleagues are quite knowledgeable, I learn new tricks everyday.
Sig Hansen?
holy shit, you have to be kidding me. Ours was a little more complicated but still lacking in the security department, Our Schools use SASI (Student Administration Student Information) corny name for a peice of shit software package. It stores all of it's files in a "proprietary flat database" aka a whole bunch of plain text files, when you want info it goes to it's index and pulls that text file with whatever you wanted in it, so changing a grade was getting in to the SASI server, not a hard feat seeing it was on an NT4 box running an ancient version of novell, did I fail to mention they left the password post-it'ed on the screen, held on with tape for "extra" security? yeah, that bad. They've fixed most of those problems, they now lock the door to the room the server sits in, nothing the student body cards can't get passed but it's a start, and we get A's for effort around here. but shit, your school sounds even worse, probably not as expensive as SASI, but still, they could save a few bucks on MSFT licences by upgrading to linux and open office, and hell it might even improve their security.
Actually he is an english teacher who helps the librarian, not a chem teacher.
It's two jobs: the server-side/network-architecture/educational-licen ses etc. on one hand. On the other hand... : replacing stolen mice, replacing psu's (the 220/110-switch is a favorite), imaging hd's, replacing stolen networkcables, removing chewing gum from the opticals (cd/dvd-players), replacing stolen keyboards, replacing coffee+sugar+milk-keyboards, "Why is the FTP-port locked/closed?!", replacing VGA-cables, "Drop whatever you're doing and clean the administrators' room", replacing stolen DVI-VGA-adapters, "I want an inventory of all that's in the school, including everything I moved and never told you about", no holidays because that's the only time people are away so it's the busiest time for the slav^H^H^H^Hservicedesk, those nice IDE-collegues (IDE as in: master and slave...), being someones best friend the other day for fixing his laptop and his enemy the next ict-vs-teacher-meetings (nice knife in your back! why thank you sir, i believe it's yours?): so in short, just what I would advise you for other jobs,
to answer the question: What is it like to be a school district admin?
the answer is definitely: GO ASK YOUR LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICT ADMIN! HE MIGHT KNOW BETTER THAN SOMEONE FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE!
And it is my day off, to raise my children (full-time job but way more satisfactory).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.