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SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
I did this at my brothers company too. I thought that the program "ran on minimal resources" while the computers were being used. But shortly after installing them on a dozen programs, everyone was complaining about how slow their computers were, so I had to covertly remove them to hide the true reason why they were slow. Lesson learned. At least it didn't cost me my job.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
I heard this story on NPR this morning.
He probably shouldn't simply be installing software that isn't essential to his work function on machines that he does not own.
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence. The criminal charges probably stem from that and not just for installing SETI@Home (haven't read the TFA so just speculating).
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Look, kids, it's a 1-million-dollar civics lesson. "Screw up in county-level government, and we'll sic the cops on you and paint you up as a UFO-worshipping freak or something." Uh-huh. And they wonder why the school systems of the nation can't hire anyone competent.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Only a school district or the government could have taken 10 years to find a CPU hog running on 5,000 computers.
We just all went up a spot!
Little taken aback by the tone of the write up in the local news and the quote by the superintendent, "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research, [..] however, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
The whole article implies that SETI is some out there kookie search for aliens and in no way a scientific endeavor that has at times been funded in part by the US government. That's local news coverage for you though.
40 watts x 24 hours x 365 days x 10 years x 5000 machines x $.06 /kwh = $1,051,200
The criminal part (that apparently wasn't in TFA) was the 18 school computers they found at his house that he'd taken home with him. This is a better source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html
Yes, because those CPU's are now running 100% load all the time. So no speedstepping down to a couple of hundred Mhz and saving power that way (which can be a lot). Plus he probably left them running 24x7.
http://virtualize.wordpress.com/
Most businesses or schools will have an Acceptable Use Policy. To paraphrase the AUP where I work, A person must have permission to install 3rd party software. This permission must come from building administration or Tech Department administration. If Joe Employee installs Seti without permission, that could be cause for termination. If I install Seti in my buildings' computers, it will be because I gave myself permission to do so. (Which I have, so I did.)
However, this case seems to be with a difference of opinion. Ftfa: '"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."'
This is why the Tenure system was instituted. To prevent dismissals due to political or idealogical reasons. To say he would allow protein folding but not seti is asinine. When I decided between the two, I figured that finding ET would have a greater impact on society that a cure for cancer. Who knows, maybe ET will be able to help us cure diseases while curing diseases will not help us find ET.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
The school administrator has already decided that there are no ETs, so it's silly to search for them. Science should only look for stuff we already know about! (:-)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I agree, filing charges was way out of line. His only real mistake was not asking permission, and getting that permission in writing.
Free Martian Whores!
It actually does use more power running the CPU full throttle vs idle. The rule of thumb I learned was a buck a watt per year. By which $200 sounds nuts. School PCs do not have 200W worth of CPU in them.
But..oh, over 10 years. That's $20/year/system. Very plausible.
This guy learned the following lesson the hard way: Systems you manage are not yours. They are your employers. The potentially mitigating factor here from TFA, is that he claims he had permission. If so, whoever granted permission should be fired. $1m is real money, especially if you're a school district.
The aliens probably wouldn't help with a cancer cure. Consider what would happen if another substantial cause of death were eliminated. Lifespans would be extended beyond our unusually long lives now. The world's population is already too high, and growing beyond the unsustainable level. While it's nice to think we can get rid of something that causes pain and death, pain and death are part of life. If you reduce the death rate, you'll have to reduce the reproduction rate.
I'm sure the next effort would be to identify and control the "grow old" gene. They already know how old age works, but they'd want to control it. Ok, so you stop the aging process, so people live for 100 years as if they're in their 20's and 30's. Great. I'd hope we have a whole lot of new planets to extend to, because sure as hell this one will be used up quick.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
it ran as a screen saver
However it might have ran, it certainly didn't 'save screens.' Back in the day I saw many many CRTs with their phosphors permanently 'burned' by the SETI@Home display:
http://blog.sherweb.com/wp-content/uploads/seti_home_screen_l.gif
I used to advise people running SETI@Home to turn off their CRTs.
They were his machines to configure, as a technology supervisor. It's not like he hacked into the machines in the dark of night to set things up on the sly. Sure, his configuration may have been a failure as far as the business needs of the school system were concerned, but when TFA is claiming "there may be charges filed!!"
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws. This guy set up a SETI account in his own name, for whatever joy he gets from being at the top of SETI crunch lists, and used government-paid electricity for his own purposes. Over 5,000 computers with say (conservatively) 200W PSUs, that's not an insignificant amount of electricity/dollars. If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
A little silly? Perhaps, but judging the degree of his "ethics violation" and the subsequent consequences is the job of a judge or jury. The fact that an "ethics violation" that breaks an ethics law has been committed isn't really debatable.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147847
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Yeah, pinning equipment failures on SETI is a stretch. But $1000000 for power consumption is not so far off the mark. SETI estimates $5/month/computer. If he's been doing it for 9 years, 12 months a year, at that rate it would require 1851 computers to reach $1M. IIRC, this guy was in charge of about 5000 computers. It adds up.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
On the other hand, his contract never said he wasn't able to run these types of background calculation programs. Even superintendent Denise Birdwell admitted, "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research." So the issue is not the installation of the program, which would have been okay if the technician had installed Cancer@Home instead.
Furthermore Birdwell said the massive software cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts. How did he arrive at this 1 million dollar figure? Can he produce actual calculations derived from collected data, or did he just pull the number from his nether region?
I would not resign.
I'd tell them, "Sorry I'll uninstall everything," and if they chose to fire me then I'd drag Mr. Birdwell into court to provide proof before a judge that I actually cost the school 1 million in damages. If they can't then it would be unjustified dismissal, and in violation of multiple employee-protection laws that exist when you work for a state government.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Let's say (pulling number out of ass) being busy vs idle uses an additional 25 Watts. They're saying it happened over 9 years. 25*24*365*9/1000 = 1971 KiloWatt Hours per machine. At $0.10 per KWH, that's a match. So then we fight over whether it's really a 25 Watt difference, really happened for 9 years, what the school actually pays per KWH, etc.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Reporters (in my personal tech experience which includes a stint at a metro newspaper) are one of the groups that understand Tech the least. When coupled with the self-importance and arrogance that is present in most journalists it means they can't even be bothered to go down the hall and ask the publication's own techs if their story makes any sense. So you have this idiotic type of hand-waiving reporting. Watch CNN when there is a tech-related security story. Jeanne Meserve will come on and spout psudo-technical garbage that makes no sense at all.
According to the documents, district officials said they found Niesluchowski had abused his authority in purchasing and oversight of district technology and equipment, downloaded pornography, and added to every district computer a University of California-Berkeley program that searches high-frequency radio signals for signs of intelligent life in outer space.
Much better article. Apparently the firing/resignation wasn't really about SETI, that was just icing on the cake. Of course, leave it to the media to run away with the "crazy guy looking for aliens" angle.
I almost lost my job when I was working in a NOC at a previous company. I was in charge of maintaining the monitoring and the machines that ran them. Really, these were workstations that were connected to a handful of monitors, all with webpages up that would refresh once a minute, they were not the servers that were running our actual monitoring software (firehunter, whatsup, big brother, etc) so since they were just running a few browsers they were never under any load. So I tossed SETI@Home on all these workstations, that no one uses, that just display browser windows, and it was all fine for several months.
One day I came to work, and my boss was breathless (I wished physically, not just literally), he couldn't figure out why all these boxes were all running at 100% CPU. After several hours (he was SOOO slow) he figured out it was SETI. He tried in vain to prove it was me, I wasn't going to admit it, I knew that between him and HR they would hang me, over at best the theft of some company power (which is stupid because every linux admin had super shiny screensavers that their computers couldn't quite handle, and they had to be running at 100% util for 16+ hours each day once they went home). It's been a while since I've ran SETI, but what I recall is he could have figured out it was me if he knew to check the ID it was uploading the results under, then went to SETI's site and check the ID, which would have at least pointed him to the name Tynin, which since my personal email address uses tynin in it, it should have been the nail in my coffin. Luckly, he was incompetent, and missed that detail, and I sail past what would have been one of the more silly disasters of my life.
If you are reading this Ed, please know your staff will celebrate the day you die, pizza and beer in the hallways!
And they wonder why the school systems of the nation can't hire anyone competent.
I'd like to add that a competent sysadmin would do his best to keep costs to a bare minimum, and that includes things like buying the lowest-power CPUs that can get the job done, sticking to the job's specifications for software, cycling computers into powersave when idle, and -- in a school environment -- switching the damn things off at night, when very few people have legitimate reasons to use them.
Treating your work computers as your personal playground to install random stuff on to amuse yourself is completely unprofessional. Why do you think he didn't ask for permission? Because for whatever the reasons might be, he would probably have been unlikely to procure it.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
The other article linked here really should be in the story: Higley firing tied to alien-search software. This one makes it pretty clear that the guy was fired because he's a bad employee and a lousy manager, not because he wants to find aliens.
Quite frankly, it's a little annoying that the OP's story only mentions "ET". That's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
Really, I think the people of Arizona would be better off if the school district officials were less interested in making a big showy news article about UFOs and filing criminal charges and dragging the legal system into things (and spending money on lawyers and courts and such) and more interested in just running the system effectively (let the guy go, quietly, and leave it at that). The world is a better place for everyone when we leave the legal system as a last resort. Of course, since these are officials in government service, let's ignore sense and guess which move will do more to further their career - the showy one, or the one that makes sense?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You'd be entirely wrong. Just how much CPU do you think those require, versus SETI running at 100% utilization...
I used to set up dnetc on many machines, it caused the machines to run flat-out all the time, using more electricity as well as more cooling. Whilst it did only use up otherwise unused CPU cycles, it definitely had an impact on performance for higher priority processes. Modern CPUs run very fast and depend on their caches to maintain performance, and any context switching and loading other apps, even small ones, eats up memory bandwidth as well as CPU cycles. I think this goes relatively unnoticed as most people naively count CPU cycle ratios between processes.
At work we have a large number of dual CPU/eight-core (16 with HT) machines with 24, 32 or 36GB running java VMs, and we notice there's a very big hit on performance if we try and run more than a few VMs on a machine, almost certainly due to loss of cache efficiency; this performance loss doesn't particularly show up in simply looking for CPU cycles used by the OS!
How did they quantify the $1 million dollar amount?
They got it from the guys that calculate the "street value" of marijuana busts.
Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell does not in fact welcome our new extra terrestrial overlords.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
Plug your computer into the wall through a power meter and you'll notice the difference between idle and heavy CPU use being easily over the 40 W the GP used.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Well, actually -- they claimed $1.2--1.6 million.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Regarding utility costs -- they might have a point on this one.
Bandwidth: Each SETI@Home work unit is about 0.25MB in size, padded to about 0.30MB with overhead they add to it. There aren't any stats I could find readily available online for how much network overhead is added to this, but let's say 0.35MB of bandwidth is used. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how much processor power is available -- so I'm going to take an estimated guess and say about 5 hours per work unit. That seems to be in the ballpark from what I've read online. So I'm going to round up to an even 2MB per computer, per day. He installed the software onto about 5,000 computers. That works out then to 9.7GB per day. Or about 294.2GB per month (remember, 4.33- weeks in an average month). That might add up to, I don't know, a few hundred extra a month if they had a leased line and a poor contract. But it's paltry in comparison to the electricity costs.
How much power does the average computer take? Answer. I'm going to say 80watts is pretty close. Again, just working with averages here and trying to get a ballpark figure. To convert this to a usable cost figure, we need to use these formulas: Watts=Amps*Volts Cost per hour= (Watts/1000)*(cents). Cents being the per kWh cost. This guy did this in Arizona, and conveniently enough, we know what the average kWh cost in that state is: It's 10.4 right now. So, each computer, per day, uses 1.92 kWh of juice, if it runs 24/7. If they were programmed to go to standby during that time and didn't -- we'll say 16 hours of that day, or 1.27kWh, went to SETI@Home beyond what those computers would have spent otherwise. This doesn't take into consideration holidays, weekends, or anything else... Someone else could probably create a much better estimate than this without too much work, but I'm in a hurry and this is slashdot. 5,000 computers use 6,350kWh of extra juice per day doing Seti@Home, when they could have been powered off. That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
PHB: I've got a great idea, why don't we run all our programs as screen savers?
Dilbert: How will we type? As soon as someone hits a key the application will close and we'll be back at the desktop consuming electricity again.
PHB: Couldn't we login remotely? We could create a terminal application that ran as a screen saver!
Dilbert: Again, how will we type?
PHB: We could type really slowly.
Wally: I already do, somedays I don't type anything at all!
PHB: See Dilbert, you need to be more like Wally!
It isn't that he was using more, or even less, electricity by running SETI@Home. The fact that he was using government electricity for non-governmental purposes is the problem. It is no different than hooking up a hose to a county fire hydrant to fill your personal swimming pool. You benefit, they pay.
SETI@Home as a background process probably does not significantly slow down the machine for the typical user. They never notice the lost cycles. So it isn't like you really slowed down the responsiveness of the machines.
But there is the consideration of whether the machines were running (switched on) when they normally would not have been. If it would normally be off instead of in screen saver, it is 100% waste, from the county point of view.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Well, that, and lying about removing the software when the problems caused by it came to light and he was ordered by previous administrators to remove it.
...and downloading pornography using school computers.
...and, on top of all that, generally not doing the job he was hired to do.
At least, that's what he is being accused of, according to this more complete article on the story.
SETI@Home is not the only issue here.
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation.
I doubt most organization's ethics rules would cover this - Particularly since he had the authority to determine how he wanted to configure each machine, and in no way profited from his actions. As for the cost of electricity (I think we can safely write the rest of the claims of "accelerated hardware depreciation" off as complete BS, talkin' about school lab computers, not a datacenter here), although he really should have considered that, I wouldn't call it beyond the realm of possibility that he simply didn't. Keep in mind he started doing this before self-throttling CPUs became popular, meaning it made next to no difference in power consumption whether you kept your CPU idle or pegged at 100%.
If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws.
Although most organizations actually do have rules specifically relating to network use (as opposed to what screensavers you may run, about which I've never seen anything more than "no porn walpaper/screensavers/themes"), in the absence thereof and depending on the terms of internet connection, I would arguably call that less abusive. If you have a flat fee for a fixed bandwidth, and limited your use to legitimate works (ie, no porn or copyright violations) and made sure it never interfered with legitimate traffic, such use costs the organization literally nothing. But... Beside the point.
I will further defend this guy for having school-owned hardware at his house - Schools and local governments rarely have proper procedures in place for EOL'ing older computers. I personally had two from a local college that technically would have counted as "stolen property" if it ever came up, but I had obtained them by as close to kosher means as possible (the guy in charge of their computer labs, the father of a friend, had literally hundreds of decommissioned PCs piled floor to ceiling in a storage area and begged anyone who dropped by to take a few). So if he had a dozen brand new quad-core boxes the district didn't even know they bought, okay, problem; If he had a collection of P4s and 32-bit Athlons in various states of disrepair, I'd have a hard time returning a guilty verdict on that jury.
Personally, the fact that they let him resign makes me wonder about the truth of the issue. Given the facts as stated - Generally abusing the hell out of his authority, outright failing to do his job, and stealing from the school - I find it mind-boggling that they wouldn't have him arrested and fired for cause, never mind the "spend more time with his family" line.
Luckly, he was incompetent, and missed that detail, and I sail past what would have been one of the more silly disasters of my life. If you are reading this Ed, please know your staff will celebrate the day you die, pizza and beer in the hallways!
Why you dirty son of a %$#& Ty, you'll pay for this! I knew it was you! No more pizza and beer for anyone or you're all fired!
I don't intend to troll but to get a response.
Seriously, I don't believe in aliens beyond movies, and I don't understand the interest about this program. I'd like to know why would someone install this, can some users tell me about it?
(But please no conspiracies)
You think the majority of these computers are either laptops or are desktops recent enough to do serious power saving? In a school system?
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Buying the lowest-power CPUs?! Are you absolutely sure about that? This seems like REALLY bad advice. Needs always rise (ALWAYS) to what "gets the job done" today won't tomorrow. This advice is a crock of ****, always was. You want to be efficient? Buy systems from the middle, not the slowest, and not the fastest. The middle is usually the right choice. The slow ones will have short lives (and replacing machines is expensive - not just in machine costs) the fastest machines cost a fortune (and there is always diminishing returns at the top end).
Now like all rules, it's there to be broken. If you don't expect the system to have a long life - consider cheaper (typical examples are harsh environments). If replacing the system is really expensive (because downtime is a problem, expensive specialists are required whatever) then consider something more expensive.
But always buying the cheapest is just bad advice.
Wow, just freaking wow...
I am wondering how long before I see the headline "Man arrested for using linux", just to read on and find out that he beat his wife to death using a Ubuntu Laptop.
OK, assuming the district had a policy in place to shutdown unneeded systems at night, and assuming he instead configured SETI to run all night, they yes, there would have been a significant power draw. Or, if he had SETI set to run at 100% and prevent idle modes, perhaps (assuming all the PCs supported a low power state). If it doesn't support sleep states (most computers in 2003 didn't, or were not configured for it if they did) then on is on and off/sleep is off, than that's about the only differences.
SETI uses very little HDD resources, and set to run in standby only modes automatically suspending, with reasonable CPU limits, and considdering schools use warranties on the systems they don't lease anyway, there's little technical reason to believe SETI increased the rate of system failure. Maybe if he tweaked them to run at full out 100% CPU, and chose bad settings for user mode interactions he could have run into some heat issues, but if a retail/business PC can't run at 100% CPU for extended periods, that's a warranty issue anyway...
I don't buy this. Years of running it, and noone noticed? No, they;re using this as an excuse to fire him on some other issue, probably a personal one, that they can't otherwise fire him for, and leveraging SETI as a counter to any wrongfull dissmissal suit he might otherwise file (which pretty much guarantee's he'll HAVE to countersue at this point...
Another case of a school system loosing millions of taxpayer dollars fighting frivilous suits.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Funning SETI@Home 24/7could indeed cause the premature wear and malfunction of computer parts over a long period of time.
IMO this would probably affect hard drives the most (as one of the most likely internal parts to fail due to extended use), but the excess heat generated
by running SETI could also prematurely age the CPUs and RAM modules to the point that they need to be replaced sooner that usual.
This of course would all depend on how intensely the program was run (was it being run as a 'low CPU utilization' background process or not).
Having said that, to claim that this program alone could have caused all of the maintenance/repair issues with these computers is specious.
These computers would have incurred maintenance/repair costs irregardless of whether SETI@Home was installed or not and it would be
nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly how much this one particular program contributed to the costs mentioned. Assuming these computers
would have been left on in some fashion even if SETI@Home wasn't installed, they would have been using electricity either way as the computers
would always be running some sort of background/idle process even when not being used.
I think the bottom line is whether or not this Administrator violated the School District's terms of acceptable use and whether or not the installation and
running of this program clearly contributed to those violations. And for what it's worth it may well have, but for this superintendent to make all
sorts of grandiose claims about the costs involved with running this program without a true knowledge of the technical nuances is just irresponsible, IMO.
If need be let the details be hashed out and examined in a court of law before spouting off.
To me the real 'crime' was that it took the school system 10 years to figure out that a resource hogging program like SETI@Home was being used in the
first place.
I love that it took 5 different technology companies to figure out why the PCs were running slow.
The first 4 have never heard of the Task Manager.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
So the issue is not the installation of the program, which would have been okay if the technician had installed Cancer@Home instead.
Anybody wants Cancer@home?
As others have pointed out, it sounds like a reasonable estimate for the additional electricity used to run 5000 computers for 10 years when they normally would have been in sleep or suspend mode. But really, I think the $1 million is the price some "consultant" quoted to remove SETI@home from all the district's computers -- which brings up the question: wouldn't it be cheaper to just leave it running on the old computers until they fail, then replace them with new computers without it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The article says the district hired "five experts" and reports on "one company" that did a district-wide technology audit.
It doesn't say "five companies". It also doesn't identify the problem the five experts were hired to address as being "why the PCs were running slow?" I suspect from the description of the problems (though its not clear which were uncovered when, and which motivated the action) that a variety of intermittent problems with systems and higher than anticipated maintenance and replacement costs, which their in-house tech staff couldn't adequately explain, are what the outside experts were brought in to explain, which goes beyond "why computers are running slow?" to "why are paying so much for tech and still having so many problems?".
I don't know if you know this or not, but for more than 10 years now when a computer isn't doing anything, it generally goes to sleep. In sleep mode, even the most ancient, piss-poor power management cuts the power consumption of the PC by a large fraction.
I don't know if you know this either, but generally applications like SETI@home are designed to monitor your computer usage, and if you aren't doing anything with it cranks up the CPU share to 60-70%.
I'm not sure if you know this too, but generally a computer that is actively sending data across a network cannot go into sleep mode, nor can a computer that is consuming large amounts of processor time (30%+ definitely).
If you want proof, try starting a download and then putting your computer to sleep. It will do one of two things: It will either kill the connection and go to sleep, or it will simply not go to sleep. You can't do both, it is not possible, and in either case the computer won't go into sleep mode automatically.
In other words, Starry Night and My Pictures stop running after 10 minutes, cutting their power usage to nill, while SETI@home continues crunching away, burning up 100-150w (I doubt they used much more than that though) as opposed to 10-20w. Some quick arithmatic shows that the Starry Night PC is using about 240-480wh per day, while the SETI@home is using roughly 2400-3600wh per day. The SETI@home PC would use about an order of magnitude more power per day than your standard screen-saver laden PC. Multiply these rough figures out by 5,000, and the SETI@home is costing the school district 18mwh per day more electricity usage than a standard PC with a standard sleep mode.
Now that's worst case scenario, it's probably costing more like 10mwh per day more energy consumption, because they are using these computers for school. Since the average cost per-kwh is about 10 cents (it varies a lot by region, it can be as low as 5 and as high as 25), we can estimate that this guy was costing the school district between $1000 and $1800 per day with his SETI nonsense. If he ran it for several years (I did not RTFA, so I don't know how long he ran it) he could have cost the school district several million dollars.
If that's the case, not only should he lose his job, he should probably face criminal charges for stealing government resources.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I don't know all the details of this but a decade or so ago I was a (volunteer) administrator of the IT system at our local rural school district. Sometimes I'd take computers home to install software so I could play with the kids while the software installed instead of sitting on my ass (for free) at the (empty) school and do it. Besides, they locked the schools up and wouldn't give me a key.
I discovered that the kids could find porn so used a proxy and some regexp filters to try to keep porn at bay. But it turned out that the kids could find porn faster than I could block it so I started grepping the logs for the seven bad words you can't say on television and then adding those sites. Then I started making headway. The HS math teacher was involved in this too. We'd see a suspicious site in the log, check the site for content and if it was porn we'd block it using a regexp expression. Simple and cheap.
But that took time... so I'd add them at home remotely (everything, including the routers, was on Linux boxes that I built and installed) but the teacher who was helping was observed after working hours going through thi process. Unfortunately the person watching thought the teacher was surfing porn (instead of checking sites for content) and turned him in. Quite the brouhaha. One parent was incensed that we used the students to "find porn". Good grief!!!
That incident very nearly cost the teacher his job but I attended the school board meeting that addressed the issue and explained what we were doing and why (no money in the budget for servers, software, etc.). The teacher kept his job and we got to buy some blocking software to work with the proxy and I didn't have to spend an hour every night checking logs. One problem solved.
The administrator in this particular case probably faced some of the same issues as I did. So they found school property at his house (they would have at mine too) and are investigating him for downloading porn (they would have probably done the same to me). I think getting the cops after him was overkill.
$1M in expenses for running SETI is ridiculous. However according to the newspaper report from his home town he was instructed by a former school district administrator to remove the software and did not. Of course, that admin might just be trying to cover his own ass. But at least someone knew SETI was on those boxes prior to the new Superintendent taking office.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Yes, but it was *alien* pornography. I don't think there are any applicable Earth laws..
RTFA It says in the article that "the software was authorized by a previous administration". He did ask (supposedly) and was allowed.
By running all of the school machines at 100% load the school used more power and network then they would have otherwise and so this situation did "cost" them. The fact that he was given approval will probably shield him from any legal action regardless of the 'change of administration'. Where they got the $1M number I'm guessing is straight out of their posteriors but who knows over 10 years what the real delta probably was.. they are just laying the groundwork for a potential lawsuit, restitution or just a cooler news headline.
My favorite part of the article is the fact his wife sounds like she thought he was *directly spending all of his time at work searching for aliens. He should probably tell his wife how his fleet of software toys work. Gave me a good chuckle which is always worth the article read.
According to the more complete article on the story, "Former administrators, including former superintendent Joyce Lutrey, knew about the software and told Niesluchowski to remove it" and "[h]e assured them he had removed it". So, I'm guessing, that's why "I'm sorry and I'll remove it now" wouldn't have been an adequate response, even if SETI@Home was the only problem issue, and there wasn't the porn issue, and the issue of the school equipment at his house apparently being used in his home-based business.
...after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines.
IIRC, this guy was in charge of about 5000 computers.
Your memory is astounding.
That screen saver will also allow the computer to go to sleep mode after a few minutes, slashing the power consumption. SETI@Home cannot allow this, or it would defeat the entire purpose of the program (which is to crunch numbers during idle time).
When a computer is in sleep mode, it is essentially off. The only power flowing through it is the power that keeps the data in RAM, and the power that allows the BIOS power management to monitor for that little mouse wiggle and bring everything back up. The CPU is off, the hard drive is off, virtually all of the motherboard is off, and the monitor is off.
To compare that to a program crunching numbers (which is a CPU intensive task) is silly, the number crunching app needs the CPU at almost full throttle, obviously the motherboard powered up, the NIC powered up and actively sending and recieving data. Depending on how well it was written, they may get away with little or no hard drive usage, but that's iffy.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I don't intend to troll but to get a response.
Seriously, I don't believe in God beyond the movies, and I don't understand the interest about religion. I'd like to know why would someone go to church, can some god-people tell me about it?
(But please no conspiracies)
I wonder if the problem wasn't him trying to prove aliens existed, schools can be weird on religious grounds - is that a subtext here?
No, the problem was that he was stealing a lot of idle processing power to pursue a personal hobby. Maybe if he had gotten somebody to sign off on this it wouldn't have been an issue.
Apparently, he told them that the first time he was caught. And then didn't bother to actually uninstall anything.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The world's population is already too high, and growing beyond the unsustainable level. While it's nice to think we can get rid of something that causes pain and death, pain and death are part of life. If you reduce the death rate, you'll have to reduce the reproduction rate.
My school district's network of 8000 computers is running NUKES@HOME, helping our government figure out ways to build better nuclear weapons to save the planet for the right kind of humanity.
This is my sig.
The school computer may be "on" all day, but you can bet your ass any half way competant IT manager is going to have those computers sleep after 10 minutes or less of inactivity. In sleep mode, most of the PC is off, with primarily just the BIOS and RAM recieving power. It sips, as opposed to guzzles power like even an idle desktop does. If he had set it up to hibernate during off-school hours, they would have used no power at all for 16 hours a day. That's a massive difference.
Besides that, even a complex screensaver (like thos nifty aquarium screen savers) uses almost no resources and adds very little to the power consumption of an idle PC, but SETI@home is a number crunching app, and number crunching is extremely CPU intensive.
Why the hell do you think they need to do this distributed number crunching and data sifting in the first place? It's because they cannot afford the super-computer it would require to get the work done in a reasonable amount of time.
It's not cheap to run, SETI@home will tell you that your power consumption will definitely go up, but for an individual user it ends up costing $20-30 per year for something they care about. In the case of this guy, he was costing the school district upwards of $300,000+ every year, and if he was doing this for several years the total cost could easily be in the millions of dollars.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
As like most posters here, I ran seti@home, years ago, but I ran it on a Quad core PPC G5 - it ran one instance on each core, causing the machine to draw about 840VA - for about 20 hours a day...I figured out this was costing me about $30-35 a month. That's when I stopped running seti@home...
wha'? where am i?
However, in the meager amount of facts presented, it was said that he had gotten permission from a previous supervisor.
From the comments in this article (thanks to this post) from people who are there, it sounds like a real hatchet job.
Salient points:
Some of those computers date back to 2000 - sleep mode?
Also, as comments in this article point out, the techs were forbidden from rolling out a script that would have turned the computers off at night, as it was against school policy.
Read the comments - some are from people who worked there, some from people who live there. It looks more like the guy was fired because someone - Superintendent Denise Birdwell - wanted to polish her image.
I would not resign.
I'd tell them, "Sorry I'll uninstall everything," and if they chose to fire me then I'd drag Mr. Birdwell into court to provide proof before a judge that I actually cost the school 1 million in damages. If they can't then it would be unjustified dismissal, and in violation of multiple employee-protection laws that exist when you work for a state government.
If he also took home 18 computers for his own personal use and was downloading porn as claimed, I don't think that'd stand up in court.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
... and ...
Christ, I want to upmod you.
My wiring looks like this. And for the exact same reasons: No, we can't have the downtime to move any wiring around, no we can't take the time to pull those old cables, we don't have time/money to order cables, use the wrong length cause that's what's on hand, it needs to be in production today/it's unfunded, for cable management you can use all the zip ties and velcro that you can scrounge, and multiply it all by ten years. And now they want to use it as evidence that the guy is incompetent or even criminal? Because he hasn't had the backing to incur costs and downtimes for neatness? Because he lacked the pull to make them build buildings and buy new infrastructure?
And, knowing that he's getting unfairly accused on these counts makes me mistrust the remaining accusations as well.
Did I just get modded troll for quoting the article?
I broke the sacred /. commandment of not reading TFA!
What was I thinking?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
His wife says that in TFA. In the more complete, newspaper-sourced story, the district says that a the problems had come to the previous administrator, who had ordered the software removed, and that the tech supervisor who is now under investigation claimed, at the time, to have removed it as directed. Now, as far as I know there is no public concrete evidence of who is telling the truth here, but its worth noting that the wife could be telling the truth as she knows it and the district could be telling the truth, the only thing required for that to be true is for the tech supervisor to have lied to his wife to make himself look persecuted when the trouble started coming down, and for her to trust him. And how hard is that to believe?
You should probably re-read your article, because you forgot some things, like:
- Taking computer equipment home (at least 18 computers and other equipment for personal use)
- Downloading pornography
- Inhibiting the teacher's ability to do work (SETI@home)
- Increasing network usage (SETI@home)
- Punching holes in the firewall to allow unapproved software to run (SETI@home, massive security risk if done improperly)
- Generally not doing his job
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately severely impacted their system.
It also wasn't like he installed it on just the lab computers or whathaveyou, something he might be able to get away with. No, he installed it on EVERYTHING.
They are estimating close to $2 million to fix all the problems this guy caused, and based on what I've seen I can believe it. I figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000, and if they are contracting the work out (they will probably have to) it will cost more like $100,000-$150,000 because of project overhead and profit markup for the consultant. That's serious business.
You say it's all political, but what ever happened to ethics, huh? If this guy had time to download porn at work, why the hell wasn't he fixing the absurd rack wiring in the photo? If they had a firewall policy, why the hell was he breaking it run some pet project (on thousands of school district machines, no less, I'd have some simpathy if he kept it to his own machine). He apparently compromised the security of the entire network just to run this app, if that doesn't scream unethical and incompetant to you, then I don't think anything will.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I work at schools myself and have lots of old school gear at home, and scattered all around the place. I often take stuff home to work on, and such is common practice for my coleagues.
Really?
SETI@HOME is doing intense math calculations using as much CPU as it can. Starry Screen Server is not.
Suppose someone left that hydrant running?
Suppose the person who is in charge of the fire hydrants decided to use one to fill his own pool
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000
Oh please. The worst-case scenario is that someone writes a script that calls msiexec to uninstall the software, and either makes it a startup script for all PCs using group policy, or they use psexec to call it on all systems by name. If someone thinks they have to pay $50,000 for that I'll give them a great deal and do it for $10k, but the actual cost should be 1-2 days' wages for one person.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately* severely impacted their system.
* For definitions of "almost immediately" that include "almost ten years later".
In terms of power used, yes they do. Bear in mind that the vast majority of public school applications aren't going to involve 100% utilization 100% of the time. These are machines that are expected to not consume a lot of power simply because the work they're tasked to do isn't going to be that complex in the first place. Take your typical school computer's power consumption in kilowatt-hours at idle CPU and compare it to full CPU and there will be a significant difference. Multiply that across every machine that has SETI@Home running in the background and you've got quite a lot of power being used (and being paid by taxpayers).
If this guy was truly competent enough to earn his salary, those computers, at very least, would not have been "bogged down" in the first place. The SETI@Home CLI client can be installed as a service and set to idle priority, so that full CPU utilization can be achieved without slowing anything down, and installing it as a service would mean no obvious CLI presence unless your users have the presence of mind to open up Task Manager and look at your process list. And of course, what competent admin would allow users access to Task Manager in the first place?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Perhaps you need to get some reading comprehension skills.
Nope - they estimate that for fixing the problems with the network, etc., that have accumulated over a decade of lack of funds, etc. This includes things like a secure building for the servers. Certainly not his fault.
The "downloading porn" is an unproven allegation. If we were to fire every admin who's ever downloaded something that a prude would consider "porn" (like accidentally clicking on a goatguy or tubgirl link), there'd be no admins left.
$10 to $30 per computer to click the "uninstall" button? I don't think so, Clyde.
Those whiteboards have been reported elsewhere to have deployment problems - it has nothing to do with seti@home, and yu'd have known that if you had a clue. It also certainly didn't "immediately impart their system" if it's been running for almost a decade.
As for the rest - "taking computer equipment home" is often done with obsolete systems or "parts boxes", the "increased network usage" is 150 tb over 10 years, which sounds like a lot, but is really 41 gigs a day or less than 10 meg per box a day - incidental traffic (think 10-20 slashdot pages - heck, I've done 400 gigs in one month on a single box at home without breaking a sweat) - that wouldn't interfere with normal network usage in a system capable of supporting 5,000 computers. As for the "punching holes in the firewall" - you might want to read this and this - do you have a problem with ports 80 (http) and 443 (https/ssl) being "open"?
Riiight - having ports open so that users can surf the web is a terrible thing - quick - block ports 80 and 443 on your machine! It's a security risk!
Don't be a tool, mkay?
If it's anything at all like Queensland state schools when I worked there, some PHB would've seen there were no classes and eyed the IT department... yeah. I was expected to work during school hours only. "You're still here? Go home, we can't pay you." The IT motto when I worked at EQ was "doing everything on nothing". Meanwhile, four hundred million dollars on a new stadium for the state's capital city? No problem.
Seriously? Open text editor, write small shell script, tell group policy to run script on all machines... done. If however the school is running 5,000 machines with no imaging, network booting, group policy or central user storage - which I find bloody unlikely in this day and age - yeah, somebody should definitely be getting fired. Just maybe not the guy in the article.
Bullshit! You need a budget and you need authorization. Without both of those, you end up with a rats nest. Same as telephone systems from Ma Bell. Same as anywhere else.
OMG BLOCK PORT 80 (http) AND PORT 443 (https/ssl) NOW!
It wasn't until right before the school board elections that the board member pushed this. The hardware problems with the white boards have been covered elsewhere on slashdot - they're not unique to this school. Teachers complained about being given the hardware and no training beyond "Here's the install cd. Good luck."
The $2 million is for updating hardware and a new secure building - infrastructure improvements - NOT to "fix his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior"
You should probably re-read the article too. Some of the money apparently includes a new building. Unless the tech supervisor was moonlightning as a demolitions expert, I doubt he's responsible for that. And some of the comments in the article by the locals are very... interesting... as well.
That remains in doubt. The tech supervisor at issue probably had that authority assuming no specific instruction was received from above, but the more detailed news articles on the case relate that the district position is that this came to the attention of a prior administrator, who provided specific direction to remove the software, following which the tech supervisor reported that he had complied with that directive. If that is true, after that point he arguably did not have the authority to configure the machines with that particular software without requesting and securing a change in directives from the administrator or that administrator's successor.
Of course, that's more an issue of direct insubordination than "ethics rules" at that point.
Local governments, including school districts, generally have (often from higher authority, such as the state) laws and regulations which must be followed in disposing of computers (which include procedures to assure that confidential information which may have been stored on them isn't compromised.) The responsibility for assuring that policies and procedures exist that meet those requirements generally lies with the person with lead authority over IT for the local government at issue, which appears, in the case at issue in this thread, to also be the person at the center of the whole controversy.
So its not clear to me that he can get out of responsibility for the computers at his house because the district didn't have a process for dealing with EOL computers, because establishing such a process would appear to be part of his job.
He resigned "in lieu of termination" after getting a termination notice. Its not at all unlikely that there are civil service rules applicable to the case that, while allowing "administrative leave", prohibit firing without a notice period to allow for appeals within the civil service system. Of course, if he chooses to resign after the notice but before the required notice period has expired, the issue becomes moot.
They initiated the process of getting him fired for cause (that's what the "termination notice" is), and also the process of getting him arrested (that's what the police investigation is.)
He made the first irrelevant by quitting after the termination notice, and the second process hasn't yet come to a conclusion.
Actually, the C1 "idle" state was added with the 486DX4, and the HLT instruction it's based off of dates back to the 8086 (source here), so it's a lot older than ten years.
As for SETI@Home being "designed to monitor computer usage," when I used to run it, this wasn't the case, and I doubt seriously this has changed much. If the process is running at normal priority, it'll attempt to use CPU cycles the same as any other program running at normal priority. Proper configuration practices for "unnecessary" background processes/services would have them running at idle priority, at which point it's the scheduler's job to allocate spare CPU cycles when nothing else other than all other idle processes actually needs CPU time. If the SETI@Home CLI client was configured in such a manner (even better if it was configured as a Windows service) the user would see no impact whatsoever in system performance because all of the user's programs would run at a higher priority than SETI@Home.
And SETI@Home doesn't constantly use network resources either. It downloads a work unit, processes it, and then sends it back, as opposed to something like bittorrent which actually generates constant network traffic even if it's not otherwise doing anything of note.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Does ANYBODY ever fairly calculate damages? Sometimes one has to wonder how they calculate these numbers they pull out...
SETI costs will not be as high as the legal burden on the system; sure the FA was missing some of the details but having seen some college IT workers who largely come from the student population and few stick around-- it doesn't surprise me they'd have some issues. Some of the top guys are just the kids who didn't leave.
As far as porn on a staff computer-- don't get me started. I'd say that is quite common; sometimes its not intentional... http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ strikes true in too many ways (on both sides of the IT/staff.) We have a situation where staff are encouraged to take laptops home, answer personal emails etc-- to blur the line between home and work so they can get unofficial worktime from people without them realizing it. Being on call with a cell phone without pay... etc. This clever movement to sucker employees with these kinds of "benefits" also has the side affect in that they think of the stuff as also being THEIRS-- or loaned; again, business tries to blur professionalism and friendship/family to get the best of both worlds.
I did IT for a bit. I found porn. The MEN who blurred the line the most also had the stuff or more of it and not really hidden either. I also found those with laptops INCREASED this tendency. If its partially THEIRS then they treat it as such. I think it is fair for them to do this simply because I strongly oppose the intentional blurring going on but a contradictory professionalism that comes up when the darker sides surface. Don't want abuse? don't "loan" your "family member" hardware for their personal use.
My IT job was harder because of these modern management methods; people were extremely upset if they couldn't run what they wanted to, have a laptop to take home, surf anywhere (from any location,) etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What exactly would cable management look like for a switch like that with wires running up a single "chimney"?
Their they're doing there hair.
From what I read it sounded like he had set very tight screen-saver policies to maximize his SETI@home time. It was so bad that teachers using a whiteboard application in class would turn around for a couple minutes to explain something, and SETI@home would kick in and hose the whiteboard app. The only way to get the whiteboard back at that point was a reboot - likely a buggy app itself be the teachers should be able to do their jobs. The point of a school is not to "win" on SETI@home, but to teach kids their three R's. It sounds like this guy was becoming a significant hindrance to that.
The point is, he had no business putting SETI@home on his or anybody elses computer. He is actually the person who should be removing that application and any other unapproved software from teacher's machines whenever he finds them. He should have been configuring the computers to minimize operational costs by setting reasonable idle and sleep policies. Someone said they did not want him turning the machines off at night, well that's fine, sleep mode lets them wake instantly and it cuts the power consumption to almost nothing.
That's what his job was - efficient management of the school network. Not only was he not doing his job, he was doing the exact opposite of his job, and doing it for notoriety among the SETI@home community.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I'll bet that you were running it on some of the older P4 machines with HyperThreading. If you have HT turned on, idle processing will NEVER work right under Windows, and it will cause the types of slowdowns you saw. (I experienced the exact same thing with Folding@home when I installed it on a P4 w/ HT.)
Here's why: Hyperthreading uses a single core, but presents itself to the OS as multiple processors. If you run power-hungry software that uses 100% of the CPU time, it actually shows up to Windows as using 50% time on two processors. Add in something that runs in idle mode (like the @home programs), and they see 50% unused processor time - so they go ahead and fill up that other 50% - which puts the processor's ACTUAL usage to 200% - causing everything to run at half speed.
Yes, this is an over-simplified and not-exactly-right explanation, but it's close enough to the observed reality to suffice.
In any case, turn off hyperthreading and run it again, and you'll have no, or very little, slowdown.
It has nothing to do with conspiracies and everything to do with science (I support SETI, but I don't believe that aliens have visited Earth or anything. I don't even believe aliens exist, I just believe they might exist).
There isn't any reason there couldn't be aliens out there, and if there are, one of the best ways we know of to find evidence of them is to look for their radio signals (either for their own use, or that they intentionally broadcast in order to be found). SETI ran for many years from Arecibo and then from the Very Large Array. The budget was never that big, and as the amount of data that could be gathered increased and budgets decreased, they came up with SETI@Home as a way to crunch the data without spending $$$ on supercomputers.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I'd say neither article is any good. TFA is very scarce on details and put too much emphasis on "looking for ET", while yours has some pretty silly claims. The picture of the lack of cable management is rather unremarkable (sure, it could be improved, but it's hardly a huge mess: most of the wiring looks fine, it's just that large bundle to that one switch with lots of extra wire hanging down), and the "firewall" story is bull (SETI@home probably requires a hole out, not in, which already suggests that the network setup is paranoid if they default to blocking all unknown outgoingports). They also make it sound like SETI@home is malware, with the "hard to uninstall" stuff. And the dollar estimates are clearly crap too: it doesn't take millions of dollars to clean out the same program out of all your computers. If your setup is any good, you can just reimage them. If it isn't, just make a script to do it for you and slap it onto a dozen USB drives that you can plug in and out.
Did he deserve to be fired? Probably. Should he have installed SETI@home on those computers? Nope. But all this crappy media spin and criminal charges stuff is way over the top. So he took some stuff home and downloaded some porn, fire him and move on.
Really...$100k to remove seti from 5000 machines? ...because I *REALLY* want that job. It's an hour of scripting and a few days (at most) to test. Push it out over a weekend, run an inventory...follow up on the few failures.
To say Seti "fucked up the computers" is pure BS. It may have caused problems with their operation but it's a simple, essentially self-contained, program. Remove it and you're back to where you started...no re-image needed.
As for the rest of the cabling "problems" I suggest you walk a mile in a tech's shoes. Who's to say the guy's supposed to work during the 3 months that school is closed too? Get off your high horse.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
No, but I think that the school district refusing for the last 3 years to allow their employees to institute a policy of turning most machines off automatically between 6pm and 6am is a big part of the problem. If they had allowed this, your question would have been mooted.
This is not about energy consumption - this is about a school board member who wanted to polish her image at election time.
Has to be said
When will they start firing administrators for installing Windows!?
This is a better source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html
Be sure to read the comments on that article (and other similar articles) as well. It is obvious that this is all political. They guy's "crime" was neither that he ran SETI, nor that he took computers home for repair. It's that he occupied a position that Birdwell wanted to fill with one of her family members.
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence.
This is quite common practice in lots of schools. Maybe the guy wanted to investigate problems with the computer or install new needed software in the comfort of his home?
Of course, the bitch that wants to fire him in order to put her own crony into his position isn't going to tell that to the media...
Since they've gotten rid of significant numbers in their IT department, couldn't it be possible that they've lost everyone who knows how to create a new image and then push it? A lot of the tech people in my area are merely running on the work established by knowledgeable former employees (which is unfortunate but simply the way it is).