11-Year-Old Becomes Network Admin for Alabama School 345
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."
Why pay for the software? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why pay for the software? (Score:5, Informative)
AVG Free is free only for personal use. To deploy it across an entire network of computers belonging to a budgeted organisation, rather than purchase a license, is abusing Grisoft's generosity. It's not really excused by the fact that this is an educational organisation rather than commercial. I quote:
If you don't want to pay for your AV, why not go with ClamAV rather than leech off Grisoft's update servers? The restrictions of AVG Free (won't run on server OSes, won't scan network drives, etc) probably mean it's not optimal for the school network anyway.
That said... I use AVG Free myself for my personal computer. It really is good, and I'm grateful to Grisoft for it. Oh: one other thing. AVG Free is free as in beer, but it's not open source. I suppose some people might care about that.
Re:Translation: 11-year old's parents get him a jo (Score:5, Informative)
The child labor laws don't stop you from hiring children.(tho your insurance might complain) They limit the types of jobs and the hours they can work. I have a 17 year old working for me at my store when she started she was 16 just above the cutoff point but still regulated as to what kinds of jobs she could do. She only works weekends for a few hours a day but it gets her use to the idea of getting to work on time and doing her job (well when she's not being a giggly teenage girl).
You can find the rules here:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/ [dol.gov]
work? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Easy? (Score:3, Informative)
When you grow up, and start having to work with groups of people, you will realize the value of having a multiple points of contact for some things. 2k is nothing to know that if this kid is sick, dies, is unreachable or just moves on that the person who comes in after him or subs for him will be able to get support if something goes wrong without having to scour the kids notes on which version of which beta open source project he compiled on each system.
I used to do some work for a university that decided to go the free route to fix a problem. The only real problem with it was, only one person in the entire university knew everything about the free route implementation. If he was absent, any problems that went outside the standard scope that the lower admins were involved with went unanswered until he came back. On the other hand, any of the paid solutions we had at least had an 800 number for support.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Translation: 11-year old's parents get him a jo (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Bah (Score:1, Informative)
When I was growing up I was a good friend of a very, very well-known white hat (as in, if I dropped his handle I bet many of you would recognize it), what pretty much everyone didn't know though was - he was a fellow grade 9 student (one school over).
He refused to get involved in our games, but me and some of the other tech-savvy kids in the district were enormously more powerful than the district administrators - who were completely oblivious as we used to compete for our power over the school districts network.
Why are school districts able to be administered by 11 year olds, then? A few reasons, for one - we're on sight every day from 7-8am to 3-4pm, we know the systems anyways because for most of us its the biggest real network (home networks dont count) that we are intimate with (and consequently we know the systems quite well generally), and the people in charge are largely there because they're good at bullshitting their way into positions while standing before 40-60 year old school administrators who can't differentiate between a calculator, a cell phone, and a PSP.
Our school had its own in-house, full-time technician, her qualifications? She was pretty and had a beginners understanding of HTML. Compared to that - I started teaching myself Java and C in grade 5. How are people like her supposed to protect against children like I was? The honest answer is they can't - but the surprising bit of this story is finding a school whose administrators actually recognized that.
I call BS... (Score:2, Informative)
The computers are too old to support all antivirus programs? What does that even mean? To be fair, brand new computers do not support all antivirus programs either, since there are incompatibilities between various Windows releases.
Letting an 11y/o provide support and give advice for a network of any importance, regardless of how smart he is, will lead to many critical mistakes. The statement I quoted is a good example of this. The kid went to CompUSA, talked to an employee, and then came back to repeat what the employee told him. This isn't news.
I wish my school thought of that.... (Score:2, Informative)
They were horribly over-worked, and often the students suffered. For instance, they recently installed a new server, which required them to take down the old server and copy all the files to it... during the school day because the district couldn't afford to pay them overtime. So for a week we had NO COMPUTERS because the server was being fixed. And, whenever an issue were to happen at another school, the IT people would have to run over there, leaving no one to fix the problem they were working on before.
So many of the things the school makes them do causes all the issues. Like the Group Policy settings that restrict EVERYTHING imaginable, from the File menu to the Task Manager. This causes major headaches because students and teachers have to call them down to fix something because the Group Policy blocks them from fixing it themselves, like switching printers and program shortcuts, taking more time away from them.
I think he listened to me about the Group Policy though, one day they were less restrictive (although they were still very annoying, you could at least use Task Manager to end processes, which is very important because programs crash on those computers every day).
But if I were an IT person like that 11 year old, things would be different. Linux would be used instead, no expensive office programs or tutoring software, just open-source stuff that does everything the current expensive programs do, and decent support.
Sometimes the over-workness shows. For instance, in my middle school, I noticed that there were no security permissions on everyone's files, so anyone who knew how to load the Finder on the Mac computers and navigate to the servers (like me) could get access to EVERYTHING on them. I told the IT person about the issue, she fixed it in a day. But God only knows how long those files were accessible...
With kids learning more about computers (I learned basic computer stuff when I was 6, older programming languages like QBasic and Visual Basic when I was 10, Linux when I was 12, and C++ right now), why not give the kids who can be trusted these responsibilities?
Re:Easy? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Goes to show (Score:3, Informative)
And generally the school voucher implementations reimburse significantly less than the amount spent per student in public schools-- so if they were to enable a significant number to attend private instead of public school above those who would attend anyways, they'd actually increase per-student spending in public schools.