Network people at my school are idiots, need information on how to stop viruses

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Fireballs

Gawd
Joined
Oct 27, 2000
Messages
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Ok, so the dorm network has been running at .9KB/s for most of the year except for a couple weeks during January. The IT guy blames it on viruses and says he has no way of fixing it. I know there's a way to fix it...and I need to show them how or ask them to let me fix it or something.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix the problem?
 
Originally posted by Fireballs
Ok, so the dorm network has been running at .9KB/s for most of the year except for a couple weeks during January. The IT guy blames it on viruses and says he has no way of fixing it. I know there's a way to fix it...and I need to show them how or ask them to let me fix it or something.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix the problem?
Click to expand...

No one is going to be able to tell you how to fix a problem just based on what you've stated so far. Slow campus networks *can* be caused by some virus, but there are many more variables involved that can not be accounted for without an indepth review of the entire site, usage patterns, networks, wan connections, etc.

School policy and politics also come into play which can be a bigger factor here than you realize. I myself have been talking to a small community college about drastically improving the campus network, however its a moot point due to budget constraints and the fact the present "IT" people have no interest in doing anything more than they are now.
 
If the network is being clogged up by virus traffic originating from computers owned by students in the dorm, you could run around and install a free virus scanner on all their computers.
 
what school..god i loved UF, 300+kbytes/sec all day, gigabit ethernet, and 802.11 coverage campus wide.
 
Well at the beginning of the school year about 15 of us attempted to visit every dorm room on campus and install our Symantec Corp. Edition,blaster fixes, SP1 etc on every computer. We have a relatively small campus of about 2500 rooms so we got most of them in 4 days. We also disabled pings off campus, and disabled them from the biggest dorm. Though we are looking at the possiblity of using www.netreg.org, you can customize it to scan computers for virus scanner,windows updates, if it passes the scan it is given a routeble ip as opposed to the non-routeble one it is given first by the netreg box. We got everything pretty much under control, i get like 500 a second usually :-p, and our campus is just about done with entire wireless coverage.
 
Originally posted by Fireballs
Ok, so the dorm network has been running at .9KB/s for most of the year except for a couple weeks during January. The IT guy blames it on viruses and says he has no way of fixing it. I know there's a way to fix it...and I need to show them how or ask them to let me fix it or something.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix the problem?
Click to expand...
Student computers spewing lots of traffic due to viruses will cause the network to be very slow. Due to legal reasons many Universities won't touch student computers, thus it is up to the student, not the University to fix these infected computers.

That leaves several options: pull infected systems off of the network, let infected systems sit there and spew or pull all systems from the network until everything has been cleaned up. Tracking down infected systems is very laborious. In many cases, there just aren't enough staff to track down infected systems, pull them off the network, and possibly notify the user (which is even more work).

Your network admins seem to have chosen the 2nd option. We chose the 3rd option at our University after our network admins spent several futile 24 hour shifts trying option 1.

I fail to see how students failing to install anti-virus and keep their systems patched makes the network staff "idiots". If you have a better solution, let's hear it.
 
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