Comment Here's what we did. not perfect, but: (Score 3, Interesting) 611
I'm a student PC/Net tech at a small college (1500 students, 400 staff/admin/faculty). We use an AD domain to corral our users, so to speak.
We did some testing with the Blaster patch before we encouraged our users to download it; I always check Bugtraq, personally, before I put anything on a machine I'm responsible for. Once we decided it wasn't breaking anything (at least it didn't break anything for us) we burned it to a whole bunch of CDs (with the Symantec removal tool, the Win2k patch, the WinXP patch, and the WinNT fix). Each RA/helpkid/tech also got a corporate edition of NortonAV on a disk (we have a site license) with instructions for students on how to update their virus definitions.
Each RA got this disk. Each help desk kid (there are about 15 student help desk kids) got one, and the other five PC/net techs (other than me) got one. We marched around campus for about a week wearing very visible "TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS CENTER" T-shirts and essentially infiltrated dorm life with our antivirus software.
Were there huge network slowdowns? Oh yeah. For the first day and a half when students came back there was little, if any, network connectivity. But the RAs were adamant about having the kids run the patches and install NAV. Did we use guerilla tactics, like disabling network ports or confiscating network cable? No, not at all. We just made help extremely visible, and with a horde of student tech workers getting $5/hr, it was not so bad for cheap labor for the college, either.
You might bitch and moan and say that a college kid with a virus will never go talk to his RA, but we had mandatory floor meetings for every floor for every hall across campus, and when you've got 20 kids and one RA, it's pretty easy to reach the end users. Users only understand that "my computer doesnt work", and you can bet that a college kid at a small, tech-oriented campus will go see his RA if he knows his RA can help him. (If the kids think the RAs are totally bogus, then there's problems with administration that have nothing to do with computing and is for another thread entirely.)
Do these tactics make Mac/Linux users feel discriminated against? I saw some whining in the comments about this, but guess what: Even if an RA is minimally intelligent in the realm of computing, he can PROBABLY tell a Mac from a PC. Mac users get left alone (like me.)
Full network connectivity returned at about 9 in the morning on the day after move-in. (you'd be surprised how fast 30 RAs and 21 tech kids can move.)
You might also bitch and moan and say that students shouldn't have L2 domain admins. Okay, I can understand that. One kid got forcibly removed from our staff last year for leeching software off a drive he had permissions to, so no, it's not a completely perfect solution, and a lot of trust is involved. But it worked okay for us and minimized a lot of headaches.
We did some testing with the Blaster patch before we encouraged our users to download it; I always check Bugtraq, personally, before I put anything on a machine I'm responsible for. Once we decided it wasn't breaking anything (at least it didn't break anything for us) we burned it to a whole bunch of CDs (with the Symantec removal tool, the Win2k patch, the WinXP patch, and the WinNT fix). Each RA/helpkid/tech also got a corporate edition of NortonAV on a disk (we have a site license) with instructions for students on how to update their virus definitions.
Each RA got this disk. Each help desk kid (there are about 15 student help desk kids) got one, and the other five PC/net techs (other than me) got one. We marched around campus for about a week wearing very visible "TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS CENTER" T-shirts and essentially infiltrated dorm life with our antivirus software.
Were there huge network slowdowns? Oh yeah. For the first day and a half when students came back there was little, if any, network connectivity. But the RAs were adamant about having the kids run the patches and install NAV. Did we use guerilla tactics, like disabling network ports or confiscating network cable? No, not at all. We just made help extremely visible, and with a horde of student tech workers getting $5/hr, it was not so bad for cheap labor for the college, either.
You might bitch and moan and say that a college kid with a virus will never go talk to his RA, but we had mandatory floor meetings for every floor for every hall across campus, and when you've got 20 kids and one RA, it's pretty easy to reach the end users. Users only understand that "my computer doesnt work", and you can bet that a college kid at a small, tech-oriented campus will go see his RA if he knows his RA can help him. (If the kids think the RAs are totally bogus, then there's problems with administration that have nothing to do with computing and is for another thread entirely.)
Do these tactics make Mac/Linux users feel discriminated against? I saw some whining in the comments about this, but guess what: Even if an RA is minimally intelligent in the realm of computing, he can PROBABLY tell a Mac from a PC. Mac users get left alone (like me.)
Full network connectivity returned at about 9 in the morning on the day after move-in. (you'd be surprised how fast 30 RAs and 21 tech kids can move.)
You might also bitch and moan and say that students shouldn't have L2 domain admins. Okay, I can understand that. One kid got forcibly removed from our staff last year for leeching software off a drive he had permissions to, so no, it's not a completely perfect solution, and a lot of trust is involved. But it worked okay for us and minimized a lot of headaches.
