Re: Only IE? Answer: You bet!

Re: Only IE? Answer: You bet!

"I really feel for sysadmins trying to maintain a MS
office or enterprise - can only wonder what their past
life must have been - but at least they have a modicom of
expertise and can begin, with a little bit of courage,
digging themselves out their mess."

I am a computer support specialist at a local community college on a closed "redmond-only" shop. In my area alone, I have over 120 workstations and four servers. Over the last five years I have learned how "NOT" to update and patch. I am only one person. My goal: harden the servers and reduce the user "churn" on the clients.

On one isolated network I have installed a Linux-based server with Samba to run and store a redmond-based application. It's nice to see the looks on the college employees who interact with this adult basic education program as well as the director who can reliably report fiscal data to state and federal bosses.

"Who I really feel for are those like my father. At eighty,
a good Baptist and only wanting to check his mail, why should
he have to worry if his computer is a zombie porn server or
that his mailing list has been intercepted to spam his friends?"

There was one person in our area who is quite an active surfer. He has an older machine, a Micron 440, a staff machine that is not part of my inventory, but I can work on, that was crippled to the point he could do no work. I used both Spy-bot S&D and Ad-aware to remove around 500 and 420, respectively, spy and malwares off his system. I also installed Firefox as a replacement browser. Needless-to-say, he is a happy adult basic education instructor.

While I am not a religious person, I try to be moral. I completely agree. I would hate to have one of my machines being a zombie "porn" server.

llun_ved - somewhere in the american frontier