“As the Blaster virus was poised to crash computers and clog networks around the globe, Dillard High School already had matters under control. But it wasn’t corporate engineers, private vendors or school district staff safeguarding more than 350 workstations and servers on campus. Students were — just two of them,” Marci Richardson reports for The Sun-Sentinel from Broward County, FL.
Richardson then goes on to describe the yeomanlike erroft performed by the students to save the high school’s Windows PCs.
“In all, the school has eight servers and about 360 virus-susceptible laptops and PCs. Although most of the school’s computers are Macintosh and not affected by the worm, every server and computer with certain Windows operating systems had to have the patches installed,” Richardson reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: To any superintendent considering moving from Macs to PCs in their districts, consider your decision carefully.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Pinellas County Florida schools forces migration from Mac to PC – September 15, 2003
We all know that the Windows hegemony keeps IT people employed and inflates IT budgets. It looks like this school district figured out a solution to that problem: take two kids out of the classroom and make them fix the Windows PCs for free. Just imagine how much they are saving!
A case for xServe servers.
All very well, but if it was your kids taking time out of lessons to do this, you wouldn’t be happy about it. When are school districts going to wake up?
To both Turkey & Dave H. – did you read the whole article?
If you had, you would have noted that these two students were not “taken out of the classroom” nore were they forced to “take time out of lessons.” This all happened before classes began in late August – they chose to do this during the last week or so of their summer break.
These two students jumped on an opportunity to get some real-world experience and demonstrated quite handily their already apparently well-developed skills. They’ll both probably be making big bucks very soon fixing other peoples’ PCs so they can continue to buy the best Macs out there for their personal use. Can’t fault that, now, can we?
OK, so I didn’t read the article before posting the comment. They were lucky that all this occurred during the holidays though. This tactic wouldn’t be an option for most of the year.
As for these two enterprising youngsters making big bucks fixing machines, probably not. It’s very easy to follow a procedure and fix the same problem hundreds of times. It’s a lot harder to see a bunch of symptoms, figure out where the problem is, and then find the right solution for that occasion. Just like any other career, you become expert at IT support with experience. That’s why the industry has got into such a mess. Too many people jumped on the bandwagon with nothing more than an MCSE and dollar signs in their eyes.
… but is is preparing for the REAL world experience when they get out of high school!
A perfect example of the low maintenance costs of Macs vs. PCs. Shouldn’t stories like this be on the front page of the newspapers when a virus hits the PC “world?” Wanna spend hours and hours, and dollars and dollars fixing things when you could be working?