One of the advantages to working in a school over the summer is getting to pick through the stuff kids leave behind in lockers when the janitors clean them out. But I have to admit, the kids are getting better at cleaning out their lockers. We didn’t find a single calculator this summer! Last year they had a stack of ’em. Unfortunately, most were unusable – the ones that were, we made sure the student helpers got them. But this year, my only spoils of war were a newish paperback dictionary, 7 black BIC pens (all unused, it looks like), a purple protractor, and, the coolest find of all, a huge pack of colored pencils – barely used. Crayola brand, even! So, not my best haul, but not too shabby.

Today was spent moving monitors to my science lab from the rooms whose computers will we be getting rid of this summer. I’m almost done with this (I did this last Wednesday, too). I even finished a computer today! I mean, it’s ready to go for next school year. Acrobat has been updated, Graphical Analysis for Windows has been installed. I virus checked it (more about that in a minute) and it’s virus free. Spyware free too. And then I updated Clean Slate to build 873. So it is ready to go – woot! (1 down, 299 to go!)

Yesterday, when dad was working too, I looked at the traffic coming out of our network. We installed a packet sniffer onto our network last Friday because we’ve got major slowdowns online and we wanted to see where the slowdowns were at. So when I looked at the weekend traffic, I discovered there was some traffic using the IRC protocol. Um, WTF? What would be using the IRC protocol? 3 PCs were doing it and I located their IP addresses and thus computer identities. They were three computers in the high school social studies/yearbook classroom. Upon examining the computers, it looked as though no students had signed on since May 26th. So the IRC traffic couldn’t be web based. Dad and I thought “Virus!”

We cannot afford to have virus software on every PC in the building. All of the servers, the two tech computers, and the administrative computers have eTrust antivirus, but no one else does. So when I want to check a PC for viruses, I map to its C drive (all C drives are shared – brilliant idea I came up with 2 summers ago) and check it from my computer. We checked all 6 machines from that classroom. All 5 student PCs had at least the idim/backdoor trojan horse and one had several instances of Redlof.A (a virus) too. The one with the Redlof virus had 980 instances of either the virus or the trojan! Wow! Personally, I was impressed.

Now, what’s the real hoot here is that these 5 computers had Clean Slate installed on them, just like all the others, last summer. So that means the viruses were present last summer and were there all school year! I had to laugh. And from the treasurer’s assistant, I found out the teacher had been complaining about the poor performance of his student computers. (He never told us – and the assistant might be mistaken about which computers he was speaking, too.)

But the presence of the virii convinced dad that when we set up classrooms this summer, we’re going to start from scratch. The goal is to make, for each classroom, a Ghost image and burn to DVD. And then keep the DVDs organized by room in our filing cabinet. We wanna have virus-free Ghost images. 🙂 So when I was working on that PC today, I mapped to its C drive and virus checked it. I didn’t want to rebuild from scratch if I didn’t have to. Lazy me, yeah.

I’ll be working tomorrow and Friday on getting computers ready for Ghosting. And hopefully start learning how to do Ghost to DVD stuff. (I learned Ghost over the network last summer. That’s brilliant stuff.) Gonna be a busy summer. And B-WISER is next week. But it’s way too early to panic. I think I’ll panic after I get back from my Italy trip in July. 🙂