Comment Re:There are some issues, in the eyes of admins :( (Score 2) 170
According to my experience the so called 'professional' administrators of my university's network are totaly untrustworthy and incompetent. In my school we have this team of volunteer students that administer the three largest servers in the whole of the university - it has been doing so for the past 8-9 years with a budget as miniscule as possible - there was no IT adminstration for the university until 1994-5 and when it formed, it was staffed by beaurocrats and 'professional amateurs'.
Our systems are under constant attack due to the IRC servers they run - most of the nework segments outside our juristiction are so full of holes that a simple scripted DDoS brings down the main academic (so that's three universities losing their connection) link with the Europe backbone. Ofcourse it all gets blamed on the attacks directed at the IRC servers. It doesn't matter that we have the logs to prove that our systems are running flawlessly, that no system on our segment does packet amplification and our firewall keeps redundant traffic to a minimum, that our spam and security policies are the strictest possible and that our patches are always up-to-date with a delay of at most an hour.
The 'administrators' see an attack directed at our IP and immediately block all access to it from the outside world to "not cause further problems for the rest of the academic network" - they don't improve their firewalls, they don't clean up the thousand insecure linux boxes that are setup around the university labs, they don't even make sure that the main router for my school has a decent UPS so that it can come back up when the power fails
There have been times, when a power cut run over an hour, that the router took three days to reboot - their emergency response time is limited to working hours Mo-Fri. If the power fails Friday afternoon we get network on Monday morning.
The longest time our servers have been offline (I don't mean off the Internet though :( )was when our ancient Hewlett Packard gave up the ghost in 1997 and we moved from HUX to Linux - It was just two days - A day to decide to move to Linux and a day and a night to setup two boxes for users and services (the main administration was running a VAX system then).
My point is that students who volunteer for IT administration will work their butts off during difficult times - they are smarter, more up-to-date with technology and don't have a 'civil servant' attitude. Not to mention the fact that they gain immense hands-on experience that pays off tremendously (and I'm speaking for myself ofcourse).
Just me two bits.
Our systems are under constant attack due to the IRC servers they run - most of the nework segments outside our juristiction are so full of holes that a simple scripted DDoS brings down the main academic (so that's three universities losing their connection) link with the Europe backbone. Ofcourse it all gets blamed on the attacks directed at the IRC servers. It doesn't matter that we have the logs to prove that our systems are running flawlessly, that no system on our segment does packet amplification and our firewall keeps redundant traffic to a minimum, that our spam and security policies are the strictest possible and that our patches are always up-to-date with a delay of at most an hour.
The 'administrators' see an attack directed at our IP and immediately block all access to it from the outside world to "not cause further problems for the rest of the academic network" - they don't improve their firewalls, they don't clean up the thousand insecure linux boxes that are setup around the university labs, they don't even make sure that the main router for my school has a decent UPS so that it can come back up when the power fails
There have been times, when a power cut run over an hour, that the router took three days to reboot - their emergency response time is limited to working hours Mo-Fri. If the power fails Friday afternoon we get network on Monday morning.
The longest time our servers have been offline (I don't mean off the Internet though
My point is that students who volunteer for IT administration will work their butts off during difficult times - they are smarter, more up-to-date with technology and don't have a 'civil servant' attitude. Not to mention the fact that they gain immense hands-on experience that pays off tremendously (and I'm speaking for myself ofcourse).
Just me two bits.
