Fear of technology I got in some crap at school the other day.

I brought in my notebook to work on a few things (all school work mind you). Anyway, my ethernet port was not behaving like it should and I was losing my connection every few seconds. So when it started to piss me off my mind entered toubleshoot mode. You geeks know how it is, when something doesn't work your brain instantly starts to think of a way to get arond the problem and get it going. Well my brain's first thought was Wifi. Now our school doesn't have WIFI but I do have an extra router that I carry with me in case I ever ned it. So I got it out, hooked it up.

Before I go on I'd like to state what security proecautions I setup before I setup the DHCP client on the router to have it connect ot the network server. I setup WPA, I also locked it down to the MAC address of the WIFI card I own. I disabled all ethernet ports on the router. I alsoset ip addy ranges to 192.168.0.100-192.168.0.100 so that it could only give out IPs to one machine. I then set a static IP of 192.168.0.1 to my MAC address.

Anyway, after all those security measures I thhen enabled the DHCP client and it connected to the network and I was able to continue without any problems. Well that was all good until I was called away from the scene and I took my laptop and stuff with me, forgetting about my router still on the network. Well it ends up that I didn't get back into that lab until about a week later and found out that my router was no longer in there. It has been taken down my the "sys admin". I had left my name on it both digitally in the SSID and also on grey tape on thebottom. But no one contacted me about it. It was not only til I asked the vice principal about it did I hear anything. They were extremely pised about having a wifi box connected to their LAN. They told me it was a security breach and that I didn't understand the risk I put the school's "sensitive data" in.

Now the person who told me this is no technology expert. So it was useless to try and explain that I was thinking of the security of the school and that they were in NO danger.

They ended up giving me my router back, but I have get to get the DC adapter for the unit.

What upsets me is that they go nuts over a little thing like that that wasn't really a security issue. I do know that having an unknown device on the network is an issue but I couldn't go through proper channels because the IT guy seems to never be there and when he is there he blows me off and feel like I'm just showing off when I"m around him, but I never do. At least that is what I get from him.

My issue is that they have HUGE security issues that happen all over the school everyday.

1) About 1/2 of the teachers leave their machine on and logged in all night. Boom instant access to restricted network resources

2) On top of #1, most teachers leave their machine LOGGED INTO THE DATABASE SOFTWARE when they are out of the room and when they leave for the way!

3) 2/3 of the school's rooms don't have doors on them

4) There are LAN ports all over the school and the network doesn't care about mac addys or anything, ANY machine can connect to the school's LAN and login.

5) Many of the teacher's machines are shared on the network with no passwords on the machine's driver shares

6) Some of the machines have VNC on them with NO PASSWORD

7) Network logins are SHORT, dictionary words, would take 2 secs to get with a dictionary PW cracker to crack

8) They are running Windows98. 'nuff said.

So they are yelling at me for my little thing when the above has been happening for years. But who am I to care? I graduate in 4 months. Posted by chris at 09:55 PM Complaints • (13) Trackbacks