I remove games from school 'puters!

[Jerboy]

I have an empty period this school year and I am an aide for library and computer lab(depending on the day). Our school's computer is not secured whatsoever and everyone log in using the default user name and password. The C drive is fully accessible by students meaning bunch of crap get installed every freaking day. My assigned task is to set the desktop theme back to standard green Win98 background and remove all the student installed crap out of the computer. This is never ending, because it takes my fellow aide and me whole period to take care of 50+ computers and by next day and same thing has to be repeated the next day. The desktops are back to funky crap and bunch of games and instant messengers. This is just so dumb. Is there a easy very cheap solution for preventing students from changing the desktop and installing games? It needs to be cheap, because as usual, the school distirct is VERY cheap. If I could free myself from this task, I could be sitting around in library finishing my homeworks, thus more sleep time at home.

 

[Quad]

my school uses winselect. this prevents anything from being installed on the harddisk. when the computer reboots, the harddisk is re-imaged. so basically, anything extra that gets installed, is automatically deleted

 

[MrCodeDude]

My school uses FoolProof Security. Easy to uninstall if you know something about computers. But most people who waste their time installing Instant Messenging programs every day on the schools computer will be dumbfounded by Foolproof.
-- mrcodedude

 

[Goldfish]

Norton Ghost.

 

[UberNeuman]

You should PM AntNYC - he knows a lot about FoolProof..

 

[gopunk]

this is perhaps, one of the most inefficient solutions i can think of. get some kind of imaging software. the uw uses pc-rdist.

 

[Schlocemus]

<< My school uses FoolProof Security. Easy to uninstall if you know something about computers. But most people who waste their time installing Instant Messenging programs every day on the schools computer will be dumbfounded by Foolproof.
-- mrcodedude >>



Yep, that's what our school did until we figured out how to reboot into Safe Mode and run $root/windows/system/unfool.exe
Then they thought they were smart by disabling Safe Mode, pretty soon they found themselves reimaging computers every other day
Now they use network-based unix security by authenticating your assigned username/password combination with the server. For example, certain teachers have slightly more privilages than the students and junk...
The setup would be almost half-way decent if they weren't using WINDOWS 95 and FAT16 !

Ugh!

 

[yakko]

Just kill all the students.

 

[halik]

my thing uses harware/software combo - proxim centurion. No matter what you put on there, as soon as the machine rebooots its gone

 

[dirtboy]

I had this same problem when I was a net admin for a library. Our public computers would get filled with all kinds of junk. They had some hardware solutions and some software solutions - none really worked well. I finally installed WinNT 4.0 on them all, did a bit of customizing and 99.5% of the problems went away. When someone did find a way to load something, I'd just test it and then make a patch to block it. Very effective.

 

[Danman]

Yea, I am a Tech Student just like you and I help the network admin on everything. We have Windows 2k Pro on every computer and everyone has to log in and the students have a account where all there priviliges are taken away and given regular usage, network access to other computers is forbidden and we have a network scan program that scans every computer and checks if the kids put some files or programs on the c drives we check the properties and get the kid's account disabled for the rest of the year. Very effective method and really no one is that dumb anymore since we started this.........

 

[j0lly]

<< You should PM AntNYC - he knows a lot about FoolProof.. >>

 

[Dually]

I hate anal Librarians in the public schools. They don't udnerstand what is going on. They love to excersize their power over kids, its sad.

 

[jsbush]

Deep freeze works really well. Every time you reboot the computer it is restored EXACTLY to what you set it up as, no matter what files you delete or what programs you install.

 

[BlueApple]

My school uses... Novell... on Dells that run win 95 with Office 2000. Doesn't help you at all but I thought i'd point it out.

 

[Gunbuster]

Make a auto booting/loading ghost image

Just be sure to look busy as ghost does its thing

 

[Soybomb]

Well I'd say either get an imaging program and have them autoimage like every weekend while everyone is gone. Other have the school buy fortress. I think its one of the better programs out there. This season's issue of 2600 has a great in depth article of how fortress works too.

 

[helloedchen]

not sure if this would help you much: Link

used it and it isn't too bad...

 

[Jerboy]

<< I hate anal Librarians in the public schools. They don't udnerstand what is going on. They love to excersize their power over kids, its sad. >>



I'm not one of them. Never exercise my power over any students in an attempt to show my power. I'm just trying to approach a technical solution to prevent them from hogging the system by playing games and holding up others from using the computers for school stuff. The gamers are bored kids or people who can't afford to buy computer at home. Either way I'm gonna lock'em out, because I am responsible for keeping all the computers game free

 

[Thrlskr]

My work just installed Win2000 Pro and fixed it so nothing can be DLed and none of the settings/drivers can be changed.

 

[AnthraX101]

Our school used norton ghost. You would think that that would be pretty foolproof.

Never let a kid look over your sholder while you are typing in the password...

Now its even easier to get to our games! They are on ALL the computers! You just gota be our friend so we let you know how to get into the unaccessable directories

Armani

 

[ATLien247]

Depending on how smart your lusers are, you could always try Policy Editor first. If that doesn't work, then look into imaging software.

 

[flot]

Get a copy of some drive image software, partition the drive into 2, store the image on one and automatically reimage the machine every night at midnight. Cake.

 

[Mday]

i would recommend ghost if you don't know what you were doing...

 

[CStroman]

My idea: Replace all PCs in your school with imacs, and have them share a 56k connection. Nobody will want to take the time to use them for anything but work.