am doing an Information an Communications study(4 years). Very interesting and all.

At the moment I am in one of two periods of 20 weeks where i get to put theory to practice. i my case I am employed in an umbrella of 5 schools. (age group 3 to 13) with none of them more then 100 attendants.

I found AO at the start of my study. And it has been a wonderful place to be. Now that I am "doing" things a also find all the nice/strange/stupid problems a admin faces everyday. I am learning more then I ever would think I would. But I'm also running into things I can't fix.

One of those is MSN messenger. All the schools have a policy that there will be no chatting allowed. But the damn thing keeps getting installed and used. I can't figure out who is doing it because the login for everybody is exactly the same.

Leerling(student)

Sometimes not even a password has to be provided. But lets not discuss the security practices. Believe me when I say i would like to change it but because of the situation can't.

The ad luckily allows me to disable the default messenger in windows but the students don't care about that anyway. I can however not find an option to disallow the use of MSN messenger. Blocking ports on the very limited NAT of the router to the isp for the service did not help. I think it creates a HTTP tunnel but I am not sure. Anyway I don't think that with my resources I can block or redirect that tunnel.

A crude hack for login scripts that i thought up didn’t help either. The program starts before the script gets executed. So the automated deinstall wont help. Nor can't i simply delltree the folder. Trying to stop the program before deinstalling gets me a RPC error.

I'm sure one of you guy's has had some xp with this. and i would really like some help now.

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On all the locations the setup is comparable to this:

A win 2000 or 2003 server provides file and printer sharing. It holds an AD with only a very simple login system for the students. Somewhere else in the network and Alcatel speed touch 510 provides internet access. The DNS runs through there. At first the DHCP server was located there too but in two cases I moved it to the servers. (A whole new story in itself)

there are no subnets in place. Its actually all plugged in a central switch and people hope it works and if it doesn't I get to fix it. When thing's get out of hand a support company can come in.

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P.s.

In light of this huge post I made. In two (soon to be three) locations I have replaced old servers with new ones. (2003 server) I know the setup of those locations very well now. The others are more ore less unknown but from what I have seen its the same. The schools run on a minimal budget and none of that budget is in my hands. The computers differ from top of the line stuff to old Pentium pro's that are on their last legs. The networks are complete crap at times. When installing the new servers the support company (who also provide the computers now which I am damn grateful for) got someone to help me out. He had some more experience with the network and showed me what was hidden in some of the patch closets. They had connected two pc's through one patch cable. I have no problem in telling you I'm only 18 and admitting that I am only beginning to get my ears wet but I had on idea that was even possible and I am still wondering what that will do to network performance.\

Anyway’s are there any nice things I could try out implementing or experimenting with on these networks. (spare pc's and the such are no problem)


(edited for spelling and grammer)