Thread: Deep Freeze Unfrozen

Bit of a story here. Our dept computers have been dogs for the last 4 years, as the head of departments approach has previously been to buy new computers when the old ones were shagged and were just left to rot.

Our new HOD has finally seen the sense in fixing these old computers up, but didn;t want to pay anything for it, when along comes the son of a senior teacher...a network designer who say's he'll do it for next to nothing.

So away go the computers, and they arrive back working nicely with RAM galore and reformatted. The blokes highly intelligent and very knowlegable about PCs and speaks excellent English for a Gvt School survivor. He did howver seem a litle arrogant and was loathed to have us see how he was configuing the PCs.

The issue as usual when somchai techies get on the case is the ridiculous software they install, and JohnRH and I gor straight to work uninstalling Kapersky and putting on trusty old AVG, installing SpyBot, updating the 3 year old Ad-aware he'd installed, and getting them up to speed.

He came in yesterday to install the last of the computers he'd taken aware and was heard to complain in Thai that we'd changed his software choices. We politely disagreed and resolved between us to let him hae his fun and we'd do our thing once he'd gone.

We came in this morning having gone home while he was still there to find that all of our software choices had been uninstalled. On reinstalling them we discovered that on reboot the computer zapped them again straight back to his configuration.

Fortunately his beloved Kapersky alerted us that there was a keylogger installed and on closer inspection we realised that this twat had installed Deep Freeze on all the computers.

What this does is to freeze a hard drive partition so that no permanant changes can be made to it. It the kind of thing they should install on the kids computers downstairs, but he knows damn well that we're knowlegable about computers and has no place installing this crap on our pcs like we're kids. He was hired to upgrade and reinstall. Not to tell us (the poeple who have to deal with these machines day to day) what we can or can't do with them. He's right and nobody should be allowed to tell him otherwise. He's effectively banned us from installing new programs.

Now this piece of shit software is hardcore, requiring an admin disk to unfreeze it legitimately but fortunately we found a crack which un freezes it without a password or admin disk, and then instructions on manually uninstalling it in the registry (7 registry etries to delete). Deep freeze hacked off the computer...sorted!

THE HOD was seeminly oblivious to all of this and was just told that they should save on the D drive. Don't you hate it when seemingly friendly techies try and stitch you up like that?

We've also now systematically removed all of his compulsary twatty self-promotion wallpaper, and system dialog logos....knob head!

This is the best bit:
>Fortunately his beloved Kapersky alerted us that there was a keylogger installed

Don't you just love it when people sow the seeds of their own downfall?
-j-

King of your own castle again.
Well done.

Yeah, we liked him til he pulled the Deep Freeze number on us...absolute spite because we liked completely different software to him. The old dears in the office wouldn't have minded as Word was installed and the Internet worked, and Deep Freeze lets ypou install stuff, but not permenantly....it'd have been a different story when it came to grading time and the grading software couldn't be installed....done em big favour.

Yeah king of our fucking castles...it's nice to out-do a smarmy 26 year old techie who thinks he's foking it.

Put a lock on the case and burr the screws for good measure...

Well, AVG is pretty reliable IMO and it updates silently and regularly. Kapersky on the other hand crashed my wife's computer last week and is a pain to update. Nod32 ain't bad.

In any case there's no excuse for treating adults like children who can't be trusted....fine if it's the students but when they've got a freer reign than the teachers it's just insulting.

I could see how such an approach would be useful in a corporate environment too.

hmmm, didn't you ask him to take care of business for you, Louis? Almost - if not totally - for free as well? When he did, you weren't satisfied, so you changed it all back before you and he had a chance to sit down and talk it through? Did you ask him specifically to install one or the other program? Did the HOD do so? Is the AVG version you installed a free one, did you have to buy it, or is it a pirated version?

Well, personally, I would have been pissed of with you as well, and tried my best to lock you out... at least until my job was done. After that, feel free to tamper with the setup all you want, but then the monkey is on your shoulder and not mine, and whatever happens is your fault...

His actions are fully understandable... perhaps he behaved like a prick, but as you know, there are always two (or more) sides to a story, so perhaps you did as well

Is the Deputy staging a coup? Or at least a minor uprising??

No Discus, he was asked to have a look at the computers and upgrade them. By the time he'd put DF on he'd finished and wasn't coming back. AVG was the legitimate free version, and almost every single piece of software the guy was putting on was a pirate version....including Deep Freeze. To date WE have not installed a single piece of pirate software. We did ask him not to worry about installing software, we just wanted the computers running and networked.

The HOD hasn't a clue about computers, and what's more she doesn't care if they're frozen or not, as long as she can use MS Word (which is also of course pirated), however we didn't want to start calling him as he'd only start giving his spiel to the HOD why it was justified and I have long experience of Somchai techies getting their way over farrangs.