Second Day of Work
We started the morning with an early meeting at Strathmore. We were met by an administrative assistant named Rose, who introduced us to the dean of the IT department. Strathmore was founded as a christian school, and the dean stressed that we were expected to abide by their dresscode and that we stay out of the newspaper's scandal page. We had a hard time keeping a straight face.
We were able to use their lab facilities to download some software to use at Alliance. We managed to get a copy of the latest JDK and some anti-spyware software. Zahir and I went to Alliance and worked for the afternoon.
The biggest problem was that some machines simply had no working input devices. Either they had no USB port, or no CD drive, or had no drivers for the USB port. Luckily, we found one machine with some working USB drivers and were able to install the JDK on it. We also copied the driver files onto a floppy disk and figured out how tomanually install them on other computers.
The problem is that the floppy disk got infected with a boot-sector virus. None of their virus scanners were able to remove it, so we just had to ignore it. Unfortunately, this meant that every individual file copied from the floppy triggered each computer's anti-virus monitor (which we couldn't disable). It was very frustrating, but we managed to get it to work.
With the help of a technician named Walter, we started moving aworking CD drive from computer to computer and started installing the JDK on a few machines. This was pretty effective and we were able to get about 12 machines up and running by the end of the day. They're moving some more machines into the lab, we've got two laptops, and 5 linux boxes en route, so I'm pretty confident we can get at least 20-25 machines up with the JDK installed.
It should be noted that the Alliance kids had really hacked the hell out of all these computers. We had to open some machines to reset BIOS passwords and format a few disks because they had hijacked the machines so badly.
We were able to use their lab facilities to download some software to use at Alliance. We managed to get a copy of the latest JDK and some anti-spyware software. Zahir and I went to Alliance and worked for the afternoon.
The biggest problem was that some machines simply had no working input devices. Either they had no USB port, or no CD drive, or had no drivers for the USB port. Luckily, we found one machine with some working USB drivers and were able to install the JDK on it. We also copied the driver files onto a floppy disk and figured out how tomanually install them on other computers.
The problem is that the floppy disk got infected with a boot-sector virus. None of their virus scanners were able to remove it, so we just had to ignore it. Unfortunately, this meant that every individual file copied from the floppy triggered each computer's anti-virus monitor (which we couldn't disable). It was very frustrating, but we managed to get it to work.
With the help of a technician named Walter, we started moving aworking CD drive from computer to computer and started installing the JDK on a few machines. This was pretty effective and we were able to get about 12 machines up and running by the end of the day. They're moving some more machines into the lab, we've got two laptops, and 5 linux boxes en route, so I'm pretty confident we can get at least 20-25 machines up with the JDK installed.
It should be noted that the Alliance kids had really hacked the hell out of all these computers. We had to open some machines to reset BIOS passwords and format a few disks because they had hijacked the machines so badly.
posted by Steve Weis at 4:54 PM
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