11-Year-Old Becomes Network Admin for Alabama School

alphadogg points out a story about 11-year-old Jon Penn, who took over control of a 60-computer school network in Alabama after the old administrator suddenly left. Penn provides technical support, selects software, and teaches his classmates about computers. From NetworkWorld: "The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network manager was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it. He bought some tools for this at CompUSA and realized there was an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam, so he pressed the school to invest in filtering and antivirus protection. 'These computers are so old they don't support all antivirus programs,' Penn says. The school took advantage of a Microsoft effort called Fresh Start that offers free software upgrades for schools with donated computers, switching from Windows 98 to Windows 2000."

Comments

Baptist, eh?

[decken]

Good for him, though comments like "technical people must have 'integrity and character,' and should use their skills for beneficial, not malicious purposes" and "It's his job to fight the bad guys" make his parents sound a bit loony.

Dmitri Gaskin: 12 year old Open Source contributor

[kbahey]

I had the pleasure of meeting Dmitri Gaskin recently.

Dmitri is from the Bay Area who has been contributing to the Drupal project and maintaining some modules.

The funny and amazing part is that he is 12 years old, and was 10 years old when he started with the community. The co-maintainers of the modules did not know he was that young when he started contributing patches and gave him CVS access to their modules, based on what patches he contributed already.

When Google started the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) for high school students, he was too young to qualify, so instead he was mentoring the 15 year old high school kids!

He even presented a session at DrupalCon Boston.

When I saw Dmitri, I felt happy and humbled. I just did not think he is so short!

See also:

• Audio interview with Dmitri.
  
• Dmitri's profile on drupal.org
  

Don't get your hopes up.

[k3r3nsky'sr3v3ng3]

In all likelyhood, he probably either hasn't heard of Linux, he isn't allowed to install Linux or other FOSS, or the computers are so bad that windows 2000 probably actually runs better on the machines. I live in Alabama, and did the same thing for my teacher's assistant period, albeit while in the 7th and 8th grade. Depending on the county he lives in, he's probably adminining machines with an average spec of: AMD K6 series or Intel Pentium 2/3 series processors, 128 MB RAM, integrated video, 4-10 GB HDD,CD ROM drive. Maybe (hopefully)he has something better to work with. In my county (Morgan), the majority of the computers we had to work with were donations (throwaways) from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. As far as FOSS goes, his county likely has a mandate that his school install McAfee AV (oh the horror) on every computer in the school, networked or not. FOSS, including Firefox, was simply not allowed on the machines. The only way to get permission to use FOSS would be to climb the bureaucratic chain all the way to the county Superintendent of Education, who likely doesn't know a whit about computers and is likely to view anything free (as in beer) with suspicion.