![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
awmperryAt my university we have possibly the most incompetent IT department in existence, though I realise it's up for some stiff competition.
Over the summer they installed a new campus management system; after connecting our computers to the network points in our dorm rooms (or anywhere on the university network, for that matter), we are directed to a page telling us that we have to download and run a small application to scan our system to ensure that it's up to the lofty standards of this wondrous network.
So I did. And I got a bunch of error messages.
First of all, it requires Windows XP Service Pack 2, the buggiest update known to man. Then it requires McAffee anti-virus (because that's the one the department could get free), Spybot Search And Destroy anti-spam (because that's the one the department could get free), and so on.
I eventually persuaded it to accept Norton (which I use, having grown royally sick of McAffee), but it said I needed to update my virus definitions - because, though I updated them the night before, a new set had appeared that morning. But without network access, I couldn't use LiveUpdate. "No problem," ITS say helpfully, "download the definition files from the problem fix screen."
So I did. But it didn't work - and suggested I use LiveUpdate instead.
Eventually I got everything working, and used the network without any trouble for all of a fortnight. And then... the whole thing went down.
Because the campus management system requires systems to be re-scanned every 30 days. And that isn't, I found, on a per-user basis - it's system-wide. And the IT department hadn't read the campus manager's readme file, so they didn't know that 5000 computers were coming up for re-scanning on the same day, so the whole network came crashing down.
I went down to complain. I wanted to tell them what was wrong and ask them to fix it. "No problem," they said. "Send us an email."
Then, just out of interest and for the sake of system security, I asked what the scanning app looked for and how.
"We don't know."
"All right," I said, "does it leave anything resident on my system?"
"We don't know."
So the program they demand that everyone use... could be installing spyware, keyloggers, just about anything on my system, and they don't have a clue.
Great, isn't it?
Over the summer they installed a new campus management system; after connecting our computers to the network points in our dorm rooms (or anywhere on the university network, for that matter), we are directed to a page telling us that we have to download and run a small application to scan our system to ensure that it's up to the lofty standards of this wondrous network.
So I did. And I got a bunch of error messages.
First of all, it requires Windows XP Service Pack 2, the buggiest update known to man. Then it requires McAffee anti-virus (because that's the one the department could get free), Spybot Search And Destroy anti-spam (because that's the one the department could get free), and so on.
I eventually persuaded it to accept Norton (which I use, having grown royally sick of McAffee), but it said I needed to update my virus definitions - because, though I updated them the night before, a new set had appeared that morning. But without network access, I couldn't use LiveUpdate. "No problem," ITS say helpfully, "download the definition files from the problem fix screen."
So I did. But it didn't work - and suggested I use LiveUpdate instead.
Eventually I got everything working, and used the network without any trouble for all of a fortnight. And then... the whole thing went down.
Because the campus management system requires systems to be re-scanned every 30 days. And that isn't, I found, on a per-user basis - it's system-wide. And the IT department hadn't read the campus manager's readme file, so they didn't know that 5000 computers were coming up for re-scanning on the same day, so the whole network came crashing down.
I went down to complain. I wanted to tell them what was wrong and ask them to fix it. "No problem," they said. "Send us an email."
Then, just out of interest and for the sake of system security, I asked what the scanning app looked for and how.
"We don't know."
"All right," I said, "does it leave anything resident on my system?"
"We don't know."
So the program they demand that everyone use... could be installing spyware, keyloggers, just about anything on my system, and they don't have a clue.
Great, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-25 02:53 pm (UTC)Poor sods, slaves to their own kindness...
H.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-25 02:55 pm (UTC)No, ITS is staffed by professionals. Well, at least in the sense that it's a paid full-time job, not in terms of ability. Obviously.