The are only a few real problem that I see (and have seen) with a school IT department with a lot of dependence on student workers.

(1) Students have a very limited amount of time in the department. It's like an IT shop with a really high turnover rate.

(2) The quality of student workers is very hit and miss. If a really talented student comes in and sets up a few good systems then graduates, other students are not always able to step in a maintain or update the system.

(3) The actual full-time IT workers become more paranoid and will spend a lot of time securing the network from their own workers. The high turnover along with the inevitable "bad apples" destroys trust between the full-time staff and the student workers.

That said, I still think that students should definitely have the option (or requirement, even) to work in a school IT department. For many programming students, it could be the only hardware/administration job they ever have, and it will help them understand computers on a different level.

I found my school's computer center to be a great place to gain experience. Unfortunately, since it was my first hardware tech job and it dealt exclusively with networked computers, I learned nothing about modems. Later, I took a job with a local PC shop doing tech work, and a large portion of the problems that I had to deal with were modem problems. It wasn't a big deal because I picked up on the modem stuff in a short amount of time, but it was a definite weakness after my college IT experience.

If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".

...as a student assistant sysop were most excellent.

• While the money wasn't the absolute greatest, the employers had no problems whatsoever working around my class schedule. Go figure -- my class schedule was the reason I was there!
• At 3:00 AM when we're all there working on the assignment, and somebody does Something Bad to the central server, it was very helpful to put on the "job" hat, fix it, and then go back to being a student.
• You'd better fscking believe that my code was portable. Every idea we (student assistants) came up with had to work on over a half dozen flavors of Unix, most of which nobody's ever heard of today. Many of the systems weren't "public" machines; they just were there to run small networks. So no cool utilities which happen to hog diskspace or require boatloads of RAM. That meant we had to learn the core common Unix tools well.
• We weren't allowed to run riot on the heavily-used systems. Basically, any systems on which professors might store data (e.g., final exams), we were by default not given the root password.

All of this has been to my benefit now that I'm working full-time. Good experience, good training. Even the professors liked it.

(I wonder if I'll be able to post this, given that /. seems determined to forget who I am...)

Student-run IT system means student root and to my college that's unacceptable.
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Sigmentation fault - core dumped

Also, for many years before Project Athena started, there was SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, which was all student-run, and provided the all-access computational facility for members of the campus. Students also ran many of the large academic computational facilities, such as the fabled EECS system (a PDP-10 which had a nasty habit of thrashing the nights before problem sets were due) used for such courses as Software Engineering, Introduction to Programming, etc.

And these things all ran well. Why? Because unlike some suit who went home at 5pm, the students had a vested interest in these systems and were available at nearly all hours. Sure there were problems, but there were some very creative answers. And the students running these systems understood the computational needs of the users -- because they had shared experiences. They knew how bad it could be when the main server died during the week before finals. They cared.

The bad part of this was that being in one of these (only sometimes paid) positions usually carried a hefty price in terms of academic performance. These students were essentially working full-time jobs in addition to taking full loads.

Is there a better solution? I'm not sure. At MIT, a paid professional staff won't be as talented as the students, won't be as dedicated, and won't be as responsive. But the community won't be taking undue advantage of them, either. For other institutions, a different answer might, naturally, be more appropriate.

- pz.

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Put my fist through my alarm clock with it's ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.

My experience: Politics Ruled, first, last and always.

A typical example. I wanted to run an IPv6 testbed, to gather experience on how to handle such a network. Answer: "No. It might damage our network."

Stage 2: Write a white paper, outlining how the head of the computer centre could increase the priority of his e-mail, using IPv6. The node was running within a week.

I could give other examples - there are many - on the infighting (Linux vs. Apple vs. Solaris), the politics (who can run servers? who has access to a secure system?), etc.

Nor was this the only such place such conflicts have taken place. The University of Glamorgan, at one point, banned the use of Gopher, because they wanted to have absolute central control on what outside connections people could run.

Fact is, central control of this kind seems to breed a kind of delusional paranoia usually seen in axe-wielding psychopaths.

It's my honest opinion that computer centers should have mandatory psychological check-ups, every 3-4 months, before the plebs who run them do something really stupid.
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What does it take to make our world come alive? What does it take to make us sing? (SoM // Vision Thing)

In an ideal world, student run IT systems would be common place, but unfortunately there are too many issues with trust and beurocratic accountability that must be overcome in the eyes of the admins, which is a real pain.

Still, I suppose that fighting this sort of discrimination and wrong headed beurocracy can result in a greater experience of the ways of the world for these students.

A good preparation for real life.
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Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
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/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl

It would be nice if this was possible, but for me at least it isn't. You know the amount of trouble there would be for everyone if it went wrong?

I dread to think what the High Up Authorities would say if they heard "yeah, some student just trashed all our network". It wouldn't happen, but our sysadmin won't risk his job on it anyway.

Very true. They also want people who can be there full-time, who won't have to go to class in the middle of a "network down" fire, and who most likely will be there more than a semester or two.

Student work is great practice seeing a real network in action. If you want to run the network, don't talk to your university's student employment office, talk to the HR department.

If you're working part-time with all the laxity and lack of accountability that comes as a benefit of being a student, don't expect a great deal of respect from the experienced full-timers. You can't have both, unless you're willing to make the job Priority #1 and be a student only part-time (or night school).
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Impeach [tinyurl.com] the liar [tinyurl.com].

The point behind what I say is that 30 year old that does this and has to live off of it will be both viewing things from the outside (more on that later), and will simply cost more. A student right at the school, however, takes personal interest in the network because he and his friends depend on it. They won't mess it up because then they lose that position they love. And above all, they can't do it for a living because they have school.

Basically, you've got on-site labor that costs less and (personally) cares more. And since they rely on it, the systems continued success really matters to them - hence the "inside" view.

Consultant Ruins Student Created Network - It's just as likely you know!

The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
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Wanna see IPv6 take hold? STOP WAITING AND PUT IT ON YOU MACHINE!
SIG: HUP

Granted, having students run networking can be a good idea. I myself personally am a student in charge of five servers.

But having students run their own things is like a fox guarding a henhouse. I have to find students to help my run the network, which is not an easy task. Many of the people I have screened I found to be known hackers to other admins. Other students have come up to be asking for more access because they want to run IRC bots and other such items (which are prohibited by school policy). Meanwhile, I am constantly pressured by faculty to bring new students into the "inner circle." Many of these students know little more than HTML.

Can students run servers? The answer is most definitely yes. But I would not rush to give them root access, control over routing tables, or control over firewalls quite yet.

This is a very different setup to a University in that the university tends to have a much heavier admin sector and the place is most certainly not run by students in any reasonable sense.

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--Donovan Rebbechi http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/

At the time, many colleges were simply using dialup modems to connect to the university network, one computer at a time. Students in the rooms had no choice but to do the same. Administration of machines was performed, in many of the colleges, by essentially clueless PC-tweaker guys who had never used Unix in their lives and consequently had no idea what CS students wanted and knew was possible. So, around this time, students and a few of the more clued-in staff around the crescent started lobbying their respective administrations, most of whom knew nothing about IT, to start networking their colleges. After *much* butting heads up against heritage-listed stone walls, every college was connected to the wider university network through a very nice fibre-optic link.

At the same time, many of the colleges realised that their PC-tweaker "consultants" didn't have the skills required, and a different solution was required. Whitley went down the student-administered route. Other colleges did not, including my own. While I did consider pushing for it at the time, there are various issues, some of which are general arguments against student-administered IT systems and covered elsewhere, and others were largely political and specific to my particular college.

Anyway, Whitley do deserve plaudits for their system, and I'm glad it works for them. They have been somewhat lucky to have talented and dedicated students to fill the IT committee's role, and they'll have to be careful to make sure that continues.

I still hope that UC kicks their arses in the "chicks footy" (women's Aussie Rules football) tournament this year :)
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Anonymous

The other high school I go to, has an admin who is rather not stupid, but not wise either. He is knowegeable, but there are so many security loopholes in his system, it isn't even funny. He locks out telnet (pissing me off), but not doing anything about viruses, and other harmfull things. (this changed a few days ago, but I saw students ignore "there is a virus" type warnings, by killing the window.) And when I asked him about installing something so I could download a program I am working on, he was rather snobbish. Are you working on it in a class, no, but I am when I don't have college classes, then he proceded with a what educational value does it have line of questioning. My thoughts were "And this is a programming teacher..." This is after offering to help him maintain the schools computers (many x 486,some x P1 4 or so P2s).

I likely sound like an annoyed person, but the refusal to accept that someone doesn't know everything, and ask for help is asking for trouble. Anyway thanks for reading my probably wasteful post, on to assembly...

tenure'd professors fear of accessing their home directories and pillaging it for whatever it's worth.

Being root means (indirectly) having read (and write!) access to all that. That's a bigger conflict of interest than any student (no matter how honest and well-meaning) should be subject to.

-y
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--
I am Government Man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- GIR

Second - That's OK for ever-money-starfing schools and colleges; but you shoulnd't take that habit to business - it'll destroy you after a very short time. You're right!

Finally - Disclaimer: I'm 40, CEO of a consulting company - we're troubleshooters, normally called in when some dumb-ass (both young and old ones :-) ruined a project. I had my shares of both young and old know-it-alls. Previously, they ruined my day. Now, I it earns my money. You're right again. But the difference is that I know what I know and don't try to make up what I don't!

The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
--

Wanna see IPv6 take hold? STOP WAITING AND PUT IT ON YOU MACHINE!
SIG: HUP

Please contribute to the list of source code on SourceBank.com

We have a strong privacy policy on whom has access to student data, and the student staff who do have that access take their responsibilities as seriously as any professional staff (and often more seriously when things like network security of private data were concerned)

Some of the things that helped us was good management (the Rescomp managers were flexible about our hours, and accepted our technical descisions, provided they were justified), and an internal student heirechy (most new hires were hired in their sophmore or freshman year as front-line techs, and then get promoted internally over time, which allowed the Rescomp "corporate culture" to be instilled. Also, some of the student positions were combination tech and managerial, which was also good).

It's probably not something that you want to just jump into immediately (it took Rescomp 6 years to build from a staff of 1 professional staff + 6 students to 2 professional staff members + 44 students), but the payoffs are tremendous. You get a dedicated staff of good people who work for cheap, and are constantly learning new technology and methodology to improve your IT infrastructure. Besides: working with students is a lot of fun. :)

I'm taking building it entirely without routers (hubs only) and using a combination of old WinNT and Linux boxes (like, version 3.0 of Redhat) didn't help.
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- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.

The College was fortunate in having a 'progressive' Dean who could see the benefits to the students in having a student run operation. However, it went both ways. The IT Committee in College was always very receptive to any concerns the admin had an would quickly outline plans to allay their fears.

I think the greatest factor that helped this who operation succeed was communication - there was a frequent and constant communication between the IT Committee and the administration. This helped build the confidence of the administration that the IT Committee knew what it was doing (or at least was heading in the right direction :).

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We have a variety of servers within the College and the staff and student networks are segregated. While most ITC have access to the student servers that run the webserver, samba shares etc, the email server and staff servers are only accessible by two students in the ITC and they are students who have proven themselves to be trustworthy (ie first year students would definitely not have access).

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There were a couple of 'leaders' in the ITC but only through expertise - and they weren't so much 'leaders' as in authorative figures, but more subject matter experts.

All in all, we had a very good team of students.

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Universities need a great deal of diverse IT support and cannot afford to pay salaries appropriate for trained grown-ups. Competent, curious students with interest can learn a great deal of valuable, marketable things in this setting very quickly, without the "experience" needed for comparable positions in industry. Academic tech support is generally more forgiving for gaps in expertise than the "real world" and is a good place to learn the basic necessities.

The disadvantage, from the university side, is the regular turnover as students learn enough to get excellent jobs. The disadvantage from the student side is seeing how preposterously screwed up things can be and having to put up with various politics, awful documentation and limited resources. Oh, wait- since things are often like that outside the university, maybe that is an advantage...

The danger of an entirely-student run network comes from the regular turnover, so perhaps that would be a problem. The better- run academic IT departments that I know have a number of permanent staff who were former students, and who decided that there were some nice things about the academic computing environment (or who just wanted massive bandwith to play with) and stayed around.

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In search of the Antland of Fnoor...

Would it really be proper to handle IT duties of the school, where such duties would include access to other student's records?

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Mattel - SLAPP Terrorists intent on destroying free speech. [barbieslapp.com]

Not a chance that UC will beat Whitley in chicks footy. We will run you into the ground! ;-)

Ben Fon
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While I haven't done exactly this, I have had a lot of past experience which is directly applicable. I worked at reasonably good-sized University (+35k users) as The Mac Guy at our IT Helpdesk for a long time. Before that I held together a school district, while being a student. For most of that time I was a student. We were the front end for the admins in the basement that really didn't have time to answer hordes of basic questions. We did the phone, e-mail, and walk-in tech support. Myself and a few others went the extra mile and did onsite calls for free. Our supervisor was a full-timer who had been there for a long time. Our relationship with him was excellent. He's a great guy (I'm switching tenses because he's still there while I've moved on). Between our admins and the helpdesk it was sometimes another story entirely. Some treated us well and respected the work we did to keep the masses away from their doors. Others thought we were dirt beneath their feet. In fact I recently sent an e-mail too one of their rather fickle admins advising him about two of their hosts send SNMP GetRequests to the broadcast address in the building that houses one of my servers still there. I have yet to hear from him. I'm now working at a peer University not as a student but as the Network & Systems Manager. Apparently the added length to my title isn't enough to get a little respect from him. Back to the helpdesk. From the students/faculty/staff we were usually praised. Occasionally we were on the receiving end of a lot of grief. The powers that be (read: admins in the basement) would elect to do something that affected the campus at large. Did they ask our opinion since we were the ones that actually dealt with the masses and knew them best? No. Never did. That usually promoted many irate people to stop by for a friendly visit or would temporarily double our work load. Another sign that we weren't respected in the least is that we had no budget. None. They also kept cutting the allowed number of students employees on us. During the course of a day, you will probably have 6-8 different student work just to cover the office while working around their schedules. Being the type of person I am, if there wasn't enough people when it was time for me to leave for class, I'd stay. That reflected in my grades. People would forget to show up, leave early, make excuses, blah blah blah and the supervisor and I would have to cover for them. This happened almost daily. No wonder the poor man was so frustrated and in bad need of a vacation. There was also the problem of unprofessionalism among the students. I'm not talking about wearing ties, talking in a perfect proper English accent (it's a joke people), or anything that extreme. Just a general professional conduct among the students workers. Some would argue with the customers, call them names, horse around with customers in the office, stop what they're doing with a customer to AIM their buddy about going out and getting drunk later, wearing clothes with holes in the butt, etc... I'm not perfect by any means but I know when to act like a pro and when I can relax a bit. Some students were so lazy that when a someone called to see if their computer was fixed, they student that would answer the phone would field the question, say they're gonna go check, set the received down, play some Quake for a minute or two, pick up the received and inform the user that it wasn't. They wouldn't even extract their asses from the chair to walk in the back and check. Sometimes they'd answer a question with a blatantly wrong answer. Sometimes it's a question that would have required a little research but they'd never look into it. They'd just guess.

We also had some really good students work for us; students that you'd actually miss when they left and had trouble finding another student of the same caliber to fill their shoes. They might not have always been on time for their shift. Sometimes they would have their back to the door and get caught telling a dirty joke when some older female faculty member walks in the door. They were honest though. If they didn't know the answer to a question, they'd make an honest effort to find the answer. If they needed some time off for a big test coming up, they'd ask you for the time off because of it or offer to sit in the back and study and come out if you needed some help on the floor. They were knowledgeable about what they did and they learned something new each day. Maybe they took the time to learn something new on their own time. Those are the people that wrote scripts to make everyone's job a little easier; scripts that are still in use today, thank you very much. If some obscure problem cropped up with the network in such and such building, they would feel comfortable calling the campus netadmin and telling them something was wrong and possibly what was wrong. They'd also keep him on the phone for a lengthy conversations and tag along with him on trouble shooting calls (thanks Richard!). Those students could easily go on to a successful career in the IT world. Some would become netadmin such as myself. Those students of today would become tomorrow's admins.

Now, this doesn't mean that I feel students can completely take over an IT department. Someone earlier in this thread mentioned something about maturity. That's part of it. Some said they don't have the sheer knowledge required to do the job. That's part of it too. Someone else also they just don't have the ability to be profession. That can be true sometimes. If you could find enough students of the highest grade, the top caliber of IT-thinking students, you could possibly do it. The problem is, those people that are usually of the high quality that you need are all leaders. They might not work together in the best manner possible. Too many chiefs arguing over how to do tend to a horse leaves no one to watch the fire in the teepee and it all burns down. They also might not have the experience with large budgets to control such a beast. Suppose they spent $300k upgrading the labs on campus and forgot to set aside some $$ for their I1 leased line. Whoops. Privacy issues come up too. When I worked the helpdesk, to assign a person their userid/passwd we had to see a photo ID, get their birth date, get their last name, and get their SSN. Then we'd write down the userid/passwd on paper and give that to them. What would stop us from using that info maliciously? Honesty. We were employees of the State. We could only see some much info. The rest was reserved for people that actually needed to see it like our supervisor. In an all student environment, who's the supervisor? Some part time student? I hope not. A student-run IT Helpdesk would work if there was a full timer over all of them, helping to coordinate their efforts. Students running servers? Mmmmmmmmaybe. I think back to what I knew about Linux when I lived in the dorms and I shudder. I was such an easy target it isn't even funny. I was a horrible security risk for our campus. Would you want a student like that running your university's mail server? Hell I know full time people I don't trust with something like, let alone a student.

Another thing to think about is that there is a much higher turnover rate with student than full time people. A student helpdesk worker is only likely to work for the helpdesk for 1-3 years and then leave for an internship or better paying job. A full-timer may be there for years upon years. The knowledgeable staff turn over rate goes down greatly when there are more full-timers. Now this might not hurt in the helpdesk arena but in the server arena it matters a lot!

What about netadmin positions? Do you really want students having master keys to buildings? To be honest I sure don't. I don't even want them to be able to check out a master key. Temptation is Man's worst enemy. Let's talk about knowledge for a while; network knowledge. Think back to when you were in college. Pretty good with computers, right? What did you know about networking? You know much about routing? How about spanning tree? Understand what switches and hubs really do and how they do it? VLANs? Media selection? How about wiring rules, do's and don'ts? Ever do VPN for specific users within a building? Ever use ATM? I didn't think so. I was lucky. I had early exposure to networking and it made a good impression on me. I liked it and I understood it. That's more than I can say for some of the people I've worked (and work) with. Would you really want a student in that position? Sure you can train them but do you really want to shell out $4k to send them to a class for a week and then have the up and decide to leave a few months later? A position like that requires 24/7 on call availability too. Sometimes you're lucky that a student shows up for work at all. Let me ask ya'll something, how many of you have ever been drunk and done something stupid on your computer--sent and e-mail or something? How many of you have ever been root while drunk? Now would you really want a student to have access to root on your campus mail or auth server when they're drunk? What about during their hangover afterwards (unless they are like myself who's lucky enough to not get hangovers)? I'm not ragging on students. I think something like this has great potential. That former university of mine employed what they called "Student Administrators". Those were students with programming background in their 3rd year of college that had the ability to take on some of those mundane sysadmin tasks. Those student usually went on to great IT jobs or were hired in house. That's excellent. Making every IT position a student position isn't quite so excellent. I think this would be an interesting story to follow up on though.

Cheers,

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Students are in college for at least 4 years. Four years at the same company is a long time in the IT world, at least so far as I have seen.
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This is partly in response to people who are talking about the privacy implications of letting students work as admins.

In my secondary school (i.e. high school), they had a teaching network and an office network (Running something crappy from Research Machines. Unfortunately, they were joined together. Even more unfortunately, the drive which contained the school database was publically mountable. As well as the addresses for every pupil and staff member, there was a whole lot of more confidential stuff accessible to anyone - such as "So and so's parents are divorced, but don't make this information available to students *or* staff".

This hole had been open and known to various students for months by the time I got the admin to close it. When I informed him, he turned white and looked like he was going to be sick. He'd obviously had no idea.

My point is this: in a school (i.e. a high school), something which is common knowledge to students may not reach the ears of staff for several months. Wheras students often have a much better idea of what other students are up to. If a student had been involved in running the network, [s]he'd've instantly heard about the hole on the "grapevine", and closed it.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying which school this was; even so, I don't want to get done for libel, so I have to say this: if you think you know the school I'm talking about, you could well be wrong.
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perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'

"Residential College" is Australian for "dorm", it's actually a dorm for University of Melbourne. The dorms in Australia are different to those in the US, try to imagine a cross between a co-op, a fratenernity and a dorm.

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--Donovan Rebbechi http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/

The key to making a student work-force put out consistent high-quality IT work is to manage effectively. It is true that the students are among the most gifted technologists you'll find on a university campus. It is further true that the best campus IT managers are gifted technologists, preferably who did student tech work themselves. It is unfortunately also true that technologists do not, by and large, make good managers, especially when they are managing folks who are as talented if not more so then they were/are.

I had the fortune of working for one who understood what we as human beings, liberal arts majors, and geeks brought to his organization. When he left, we functioned without an IT director for three months, at or exceeding our previous levels of service. This was only possible because he trusted us to run our own show - we then had a vested interest in how things went. If he hadn't given us authority or decision power, we would have been content to get paid above campus average to surf the web and occasionally work on a cool project.

Under new management, it all fell apart. The new director took all of our power away, and soon thereafter, we graduated. They now have four full-timers, one of whom is shared with another group. From what I have heard, they canned all the open projects and are generally thought to be useless by the faculty. It makes me kind of sad, but since I'm working professionally now for my old manager, we basically shake our heads whenever we hear about the latest SSA IT disaster, and are very glad that we have a view of the lake instead of a cramped and windowless basement office.

In sum, my point is that it takes effective management and really good recruiting to make student IT work. Also, it is often good to have some liberal arts folks with tech skills in the mix, just because their perspective is often refreshingly different.

All student run, completly funded by students and industry.

A side note: other engineering socities in Canada get frustrated with us Carleton folk because EngSoc is a computer system at Carleton, not the Student Government. Now that all "engsoc.universityname.ca" domains point to student governments, this leads to confusion. Why is it like this? Did I mention we gave out email, shell, application and network access as early as 1994 before the evening news ever knew what the internet was?

Unknown to us at the time, but we were developing skills that the industry was craving! We were already maintaining mission critical servers, in a fast paced environment and were relative experts with, then complex technology like, sendmail, DNS, networking & perl scripting.

Unlike a summer internship, you are able to get continous work experience by working while you are in school and break the 'catch 22' of not having adequate work experience.

I remember getting my first job as a sysadmin at SGI. I couldn't believe they were paying me big buck$ to do exactly the same thing I was doing for $5 per hour. The work seemed so easy, it felt like I was stealing!

Student run IT systems is a win win for everyone. The school gets readily available and inexpensive labor. The students get work experience and earn a little money for books and beer. The school gets a great rep for putting out quality talent and the big companies keep coming back for more.

1. Students move on... so how would you make sure that your system was kept secure and clean of any little backdoors etc. This is especially an issue with some of the more confidential information that must be kept on the system.
2. Education IT networks need to be run for the benefit of that whole educational community. It's all well and good the IT whizzkids setting up a killer Quake environment.. but folks doing boring stuff like business studies still need to be having their needs met.

Mummy told me not to talk to strangers.
I will not respond to ACs.

Students are in college for at least 4 years. Four years at the same company is a long time in the IT world, at least so far as I have seen.

You've got a point there, but the students don't necessarily work in the computer center the entire four years. At college I attended (a work-study school), it was rare for a freshman to work in the computer center, and most CS students didn't work there until at least their junior year.

If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".

perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'

The admin wasn't too happy about it, though.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.

I've found that many companies (except perhaps the eCommerce companies that RELY on their IT folks to make $$$) treat IT as a necessary evil, but nothing that would be worth spending serious $$$ on. The politics between camps gets worse. Trust me - I worked for a large telecom/networking company (one that has a decent bond rating :) :) whose R&D labs were HP-UX for development and Macs for Management/Admin tasks. The CEO & CIO decided we had to migrate not just the Macs but also the Unix development stations to PCs. Switched ATM networking was canned in favor of Gigabit Ethernet (we used ATM for many reasons including the fact that we we had multiple subnets in the same building and the admin was killing us plus the switched ATM backbone was a godsend for our data center) The political infighting was a sight and having been on the losing side (notice I said 'worked for') I can tell you it wasn't pretty. I almost lost my job when I put together a white paper (which I published of course) showing how moving from our mainframe based email to Micro$oft Exchange vs a Unix based solution (iPlanet, etc) was going to cost tons of money. But our CEO wanted Microsoft since it would impress Bill Gates (it was a 80+K employee company = mega $$ for Microsquish) since he wanted to partner with Microsoft.

It goes on and on. But the parallels between what you see in academic life and the corporate world are scary in their similarity.

I personally think student run IT is something to be looked into and utilized where possible. Give students respect with some oversight and they will probably surprise you.

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Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages [keepersoflists.org]

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Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages [keepersoflists.org]

(For those of you... I am the only guy who gets paid to look after the network on these particular residences, and quite frankly I'd give that up if only accomodation would purchase some decent hardware. At the moment, the web server is a lovely little i486 that used to act as my workstation - and is still owned by me.)

Yes, there was a justification done up of the costs - a 30 page document; no less. There are still copies floating around. It definitely needs more work.

Call me the devil's advocate, but I can see a couple of problems with this. First, we're dealing with braindead^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Huninformed administration staff, who only think that we're "out to get them". Secondly, everyone in administration thinks it's everyone else's problem (Accomodation think that everything residence-related is the responsibility of IT services, IT services say "sure, but pay us first!". You see our problem. Students, as a rule, don't care as long as someone, anyone, fixes it). The way I see it, it's black and white - but I'm hardly management material. The other problem is that IT services (some of them, at least) would like to see the network separated completely - and that is something that accomodation won't allow, and that in itself would be a "reason" not to give residents more control. Don't ask about the logic; when I work it all out, I'll submit a story.

My thought is, as bigdan suggests, to write it all up. Sure, like last time, they'll file it and leave it - but it's worth a shot.

If anyone - anywhere - has some answers as to how to get through to braindead middle-and-upper management, let me know. I'd be glad to hear from you.

Iain (who really should be trying to sleep, but gave that up since he's been choking for the past three days, and won't be going to work for a while he guesses).

Just last year our town voted in spending ~35k to have the school and town networks administered by an outside firm. We are a very small town (~5000 people) Northwest of Boston.

I suggested we let the students of the local high school handle the administrative duties. You would have thought I asked for the town to sponsor the space shuttle.

It was pretty obvious the powers that be don't have a clue about what is now available for technology. When I mentioned Linux/FreeBSD, they looked like gomer pyle on a qualude (sp?).

It's really sad because I know many young people would really thrive if given this type of opportunity. Their technical skills are outstanding and could easily handle the small workload of our town.

Until the 'elders' get their heads out of their a**es, it appears that towns will continue to waste money.

We do our own software development, working with PHP, Perl, Java, and a few other cool things. It's a terrific opportunity to develop our skills in network administration and programming. We've even done some outsourced projects.

We get a lot of volunteers and we do our own training, which usually means that newbies get a quick walkthrough and some pointers about documentation.

So let's take those points one by one..

1. Be vindictive to other students in the dorm

   Who, us? Let's see. Occasionally people blatantly break the rules, like when they port-swap or download banned images, but we handle those cases rationally.

   I don't think there has yet been a case of abuse of power around here. If there were, then the other sysads would probably step in and reprimand the person. We're all in the dorm, anyway. It's rather hard to hide, yes? =)

2. Do something illegal like script kiddying themselves to a DoS

   Okay. Sysadmining is a matter of trust. Only a few people have shell accounts and (naturally) even fewer have root. Script kiddies are dealt with harshly because it's clearly prohibited by our policies. One of the sysads goes over to the script-kiddie's room and has a niiiice, long talk with him/her. People who misbehave even with the warning get taken off the network.

3. Fill bandwidth with quake and/or MP3's and have other students be completely powerless against loss of bandwidth

   Hmm. Lots of people play Counterstrike over the network, and it does tend to cause a lot of collisions. =) But the network's still pretty fast. We don't shape packets to.. discourage.. these things.

4. Be very unprofessional and unable to fix problems quickly, and finally

   You give students too little credit. =) Network problems are fixed as soon as the responsible sysad is free (we have people assigned to certain locations). Activating someone's account takes one day. Network troubleshooting - depends on the kind of problem, of course.

   We don't do computer maintenance, since the students are in charge of that. We keep the network up and running, and we look for ways to improve it. We try to avoid problems whenever possible. =)

5. Not be organized enough because of the high level of turnaround in students (every four years!).

   That's why training is very important. The seniors will be graduating soon, but other people are being trained. We place a lot of emphasis on creating a low-maintainance, hassle-free system that makes it easier for succeeding batches to admin the network.

You got that right. But it's fun and it's experience and it's a cool excuse to work with Linux and all sorts of other nifty things. I get to meet other geeks. I like that. =) or a free for all for students who wouldn't care about the users. Well, that part I'd disagree with. Although we're there to keep the network running, our job's really to help people connect.

I really don't mean to troll nor am I bitter about dorm living, I just haven't met many cool dorm student representitives.

Ah, don't worry about that. Maybe you're just looking in the wrong place. =)

For sure.

Being 16 and proud, this means one thing first: It's easy to exploit your work for money that no professional would work for. You don't think about health care, do you?

That's OK for ever-money-starfing schools and colleges; but you shoulnd't take that habit to business - it'll destroy you after a very short time.

Disclaimer: I'm 40, CEO of a consulting company - we're troubleshooters, normally called in when some dumb-ass (both young and old ones :-) ruined a project. I had my shares of both young and old know-it-alls. Previously, they ruined my day. Now, I it earns my money.

Joachim

People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]