All Things Technology Related Thread

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

Management in a municipal IT dept up 81 from you. We convinced our director and city management to remove admin rights for all users. Has virtually eliminated spyware and virus issues. I'd recommend going to the mat on the issue. "Honor code" ain't got nothing to do with it. The internet is full of crap..even in reputable places. Whether people intend to cause issues or not doesn't matter.

Did your calls of "I need to install this", increase, decrease or stay the same? Just curious because my staff has some limitations technically (inherited them, didn't hire them!) and the less I can make them do, the better.

Dirtbag, I agree. The one REALLY scary thing we got was the Cryptolocker virus. Talk about something that TOTALLY Fs you. We have DeepFreeze on all of our public machines, a part-time person logged on, got the virus, ALL attached drives get encrypted. The bad part about this virus is that you really have no recourse besides to recover every single file/folder of the connected network drives. This took down one department an entire day while we recovered half a terabyte of data.

I started pushing this GPO (because I'm the Law School director, so I get to do what I want independent of the Undergrad side ) that is supposed to block it. Time will tell, but good call on that. Just curious if work increases or decreases based on removing admin rights.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

BD, interesting about your Macbook. They used to burn me up because our students are probably 80% and they tell me honestly, "I bought it because it's cool." I had a huge chip on my shoulder against Apple products that has cooled down since.

Do you ever find that Apple breaks down physically sooner than PCs? I work on Apple hardware just as much as I work on PC software. The past two weeks alone I've replaced a dozen Macbook HDs, at least 3-4 motherboards and numerous iPhone requests (that I don't touch because that's a DELICATE operation).

Apple is rock solid software-wise, but damn, nobody seems to have one older than 3-4 years from what I've seen.

[JoeRedskin]

Ummm, I think I burned out motherboard, and probably the fatherboard and, when I tried to restart, I couldn't find the "any" key. Oh, and I accidentally spilled my soda in the machinery box thingy. ... you can fix that right?

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by TheMalcolmConnection

Did your calls of "I need to install this", increase, decrease or stay the same? Just curious because my staff has some limitations technically (inherited them, didn't hire them!) and the less I can make them do, the better.

Increased for awhile since they couldn't do it themselves. Faced with an almost universal response of "no" it didn't take them long to realize we were serious. Removing admin rights meant they couldn't just install whatever. That was the point. Too many security issues, too much to have to support, and biggest of all too much risk associated with licensing. When we told management micro$oft could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for being out of licensing compliance it didn't take them long to agree that having a free-for-all had to end. Within a year everyone got us to it. We figured out quickly too: if people don't think the IT department is a bunch of dicks theyre probably not doing your jobs.

[BDBohnzie]

Originally Posted by TheMalcolmConnection

BD, interesting about your Macbook. They used to burn me up because our students are probably 80% and they tell me honestly, "I bought it because it's cool." I had a huge chip on my shoulder against Apple products that has cooled down since.

Do you ever find that Apple breaks down physically sooner than PCs? I work on Apple hardware just as much as I work on PC software. The past two weeks alone I've replaced a dozen Macbook HDs, at least 3-4 motherboards and numerous iPhone requests (that I don't touch because that's a DELICATE operation).

Apple is rock solid software-wise, but damn, nobody seems to have one older than 3-4 years from what I've seen.

My boss (CIO) has been an Apple guy for years, and Apple has slowly infiltrated our hardware inventory. Before that, it was Dell and only Dell. We have 2 Mac Minis (2010), 4 MacBook Airs (Mid 2011, Mid 2012), and 2 MacBook Pros (Retina, Late 2013) in use right now, and the only hardware issue we encountered were the 128GB flash drives that were recalled. Before I got mine, I just saw Mac as completely overpriced for what it is. Now that I've used it everyday for a while now, I dig it, but glad I'm not paying for it LOL. I've thought about getting a Mac Mini for home. Fairly affordable, small form factor, solid software, and since my wife and I have iPhones, iTunes runs so much better on Mac than Windows.

I'm using Mac at work because of mobile app development. I'm able to keep tabs on the iOS Developer in XCode while I develop for Android in Eclipse.

With our company moving more and more resources to the cloud it'll be a matter of time before we move to Chromebooks and Cloud Desktops for a majority of our users.

[That Guy]

mac's cost like 40% more for the same hardware (apple is a hardware company, after all), but most of it is the same, so i doubt there are any more hardware issues than pc. and once they went BSD/intel... well, it's hard to mock technically.

if you want to save money you can buy min spec'd and up the ram/hds/etc yourself if it's a big enough lot.

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by BDBohnzie

With our company moving more and more resources to the cloud it'll be a matter of time before we move to Chromebooks and Cloud Desktops for a majority of our users.

We're piloting a small VDI implementation. Just got our first batch of zero clients. They're just monitors basically. Pretty cool.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by JoeRedskin

Ummm, I think I burned out motherboard, and probably the fatherboard and, when I tried to restart, I couldn't find the "any" key. Oh, and I accidentally spilled my soda in the machinery box thingy. ... you can fix that right?

I know this in jest, but allow me to blow your mind: I just helped a recent hire (less than 30 years old) learn how to DOUBLE CLICK.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

Increased for awhile since they couldn't do it themselves. Faced with an almost universal response of "no" it didn't take them long to realize we were serious. Removing admin rights meant they couldn't just install whatever. That was the point. Too many security issues, too much to have to support, and biggest of all too much risk associated with licensing. When we told management micro$oft could fine us hundreds of thousands of dollars for being out of licensing compliance it didn't take them long to agree that having a free-for-all had to end. Within a year everyone got us to it. We figured out quickly too: if people don't think the IT department is a bunch of dicks theyre probably not doing your jobs.

Very, very interesting. It's tough to be a dick because the climate here is almost a "even though this is a W&L computer, it's MY computer." For me, the biggest benefit of users calling for installs is that we get to vet them. I imagine our calls will go down significantly once people realize how embarrassing it'll be to call and say, "SooooOoo, I was hoping to get this Hello Kitty! screensaver installed."

Since I'm in one building, I don't mind walking to someone's office to check out an app for them. What did you do for laptop users? That's my biggest concern right now since I have professors traveling all over the world and the last thing I want is for them to absolutely need an install and we can't help them.

My thought was to create a local backdoor account with like a 25 character password so they can install in case of emergencies, but the password would be prohibitive to them logging in as that account all the time. Sure, we have a couple savvy users who would change it, and I would just deal with that as I went forward.

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm in charge of this initiative for both sides of campus and we're wanting to work through all scenarios.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

We're piloting a small VDI implementation. Just got our first batch of zero clients. They're just monitors basically. Pretty cool.

Are you doing Citrix? If so, we're 3 years into it right now and I can give you a ton of input on that. We're going with streaming applications this summer because honestly, people just HATE waiting for a Citrix desktop to load.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by BDBohnzie

My boss (CIO) has been an Apple guy for years, and Apple has slowly infiltrated our hardware inventory. Before that, it was Dell and only Dell. We have 2 Mac Minis (2010), 4 MacBook Airs (Mid 2011, Mid 2012), and 2 MacBook Pros (Retina, Late 2013) in use right now, and the only hardware issue we encountered were the 128GB flash drives that were recalled. Before I got mine, I just saw Mac as completely overpriced for what it is. Now that I've used it everyday for a while now, I dig it, but glad I'm not paying for it LOL. I've thought about getting a Mac Mini for home. Fairly affordable, small form factor, solid software, and since my wife and I have iPhones, iTunes runs so much better on Mac than Windows.

I'm using Mac at work because of mobile app development. I'm able to keep tabs on the iOS Developer in XCode while I develop for Android in Eclipse.

With our company moving more and more resources to the cloud it'll be a matter of time before we move to Chromebooks and Cloud Desktops for a majority of our users.

That makes good sense. I only ask because I've seen more people switch from Apple BACK to PC this year than I ever had.

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by TheMalcolmConnection

Very, very interesting. It's tough to be a dick because the climate here is almost a "even though this is a W&L computer, it's MY computer." For me, the biggest benefit of users calling for installs is that we get to vet them. I imagine our calls will go down significantly once people realize how embarrassing it'll be to call and say, "SooooOoo, I was hoping to get this Hello Kitty! screensaver installed."

Since I'm in one building, I don't mind walking to someone's office to check out an app for them. What did you do for laptop users? That's my biggest concern right now since I have professors traveling all over the world and the last thing I want is for them to absolutely need an install and we can't help them.

My thought was to create a local backdoor account with like a 25 character password so they can install in case of emergencies, but the password would be prohibitive to them logging in as that account all the time. Sure, we have a couple savvy users who would change it, and I would just deal with that as I went forward.

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm in charge of this initiative for both sides of campus and we're wanting to work through all scenarios.

People just eventually accepted that the machine wasn't "theirs". I think most people sort of inherently knew that the free ride was going to end at some point. There really wasn't much blow back. Only a few times did we have have to go with the "if it is something you really want to debate then you can go to your director, convince them to fight for it, and then we can meet with management and debate it." Never once did they take us up. They knew that what they were asking for wasn't a business need.

In terms of laptop users we treat them the same although we don't have much of a permanent deployment off campus. Generally we have them use a VPN client to terminal back into their local desktop. Just curious but why do your users seem to have the need to install stuff? We keep our stable of supported tech narrow and business-need focused. I can't imagine what would much different in an academic setting.

As for the VDI. We run a large implementation of VMware for our server needs so it was natural to integrate their VMview product. Citrix was our focus when we began but the costs associated with it getting up and going versus just leveraging our existing resources were too much.

[FRPLG]

We do use GPOs to manage everything and have laptops specially configured to allow all users to manage network connections so they can get on wifi and such as needed.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by FRPLG

In terms of laptop users we treat them the same although we don't have much of a permanent deployment off campus. Generally we have them use a VPN client to terminal back into their local desktop. Just curious but why do your users seem to have the need to install stuff? We keep our stable of supported tech narrow and business-need focused. I can't imagine what would much different in an academic setting.

Maybe it might just be me being worried that we WILL run into something down the road? All laptops users just have a docking station, so VPN isn't an option if they need help. We DO pre-load Teamviewer (remote control software) on their machines, so if they have an internet connection, we can always remote in.

I guess I'm just being a Nervous Nelly with the fear that the ONE professor who goes to Indonesia and needs something will be like, "I REALLY needed that and I couldn't install it."

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by TheMalcolmConnection

"I REALLY needed that and I couldn't install it."

Our answer to this would be, in a nice way, "And did the world end when you couldn't install this?"

In reality we just don't see people needing to install things very often. Patches and so forth(Java, Adobe, etc...) are another deal but we manage that stuff with actual patch management technology.