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Tonight I was defeated by my synagogue's IT people -- who, I might add, are probably not doing anything especially clever, and certainly weren't out to defeat me.
During the trope class the instructor gave us an exercise to do and then went across the hall to set up Trope Trainer on the computer. We're using the classrooms in the religious school; this will be relevant later.
Five minutes later he was back. He pointed toward me and said "you're a computer professional, right?". Ok, not in the sense he meant, but this shouldn't have been hard and now my reputation was on the line. So I went across the hall to see what the problem was.
Trope Trainer runs from the CD -- that is, you have to have the CD in the drive to run the program. I wouldn't be surprised if you could copy everything to your hard drive and then lie to the software somehow, but that's not how it works by default and they don't offer the option. Ok, whatever.
So we run the program and start getting "disk access blocked" messages. They are coming from the firewall. Inspection of the firewall reveals no way to configure it or temporarily disable it. Ok, I say, off to Control Panel. This machine is running XP, so it takes me a little while to find the security settings. When I do, I'm told "access denied".
Lookie, I said, someone who actually set up a computer such that the default login doesn't have administrator access. Wise, but right now it's in our way. Does the teacher know the administrator password? Ha, silly me -- they don't tell him things like that.
One of the students is on the staff, so I asked her if she has admin access. Nope. And then I got the rest of the story.
They were, apparently, having trouble with kids bringing in computer games and playing them when they were supposed to be using the computer for studying. It's not that anyone cares about the games per se, but there's only the one computer and they were tired of having to monitor it. So they set up a firewall to prevent that. No one realized that there was any legitimate-for-this-context software that would also be hindered.
So sometime before next week they will fix this somehow. And I am glad that people there take security seriously -- the administrator password wasn't anything obvious, nor was it written on a post-it note next to the computer. But alas, I was not able to deliver working software into the hands of the teacher and my classmates. (I didn't think of the copy-the-CD trick until later, though I think all access to the drive was being blocked anyway.) I am disappointed.
During the trope class the instructor gave us an exercise to do and then went across the hall to set up Trope Trainer on the computer. We're using the classrooms in the religious school; this will be relevant later.
Five minutes later he was back. He pointed toward me and said "you're a computer professional, right?". Ok, not in the sense he meant, but this shouldn't have been hard and now my reputation was on the line. So I went across the hall to see what the problem was.
Trope Trainer runs from the CD -- that is, you have to have the CD in the drive to run the program. I wouldn't be surprised if you could copy everything to your hard drive and then lie to the software somehow, but that's not how it works by default and they don't offer the option. Ok, whatever.
So we run the program and start getting "disk access blocked" messages. They are coming from the firewall. Inspection of the firewall reveals no way to configure it or temporarily disable it. Ok, I say, off to Control Panel. This machine is running XP, so it takes me a little while to find the security settings. When I do, I'm told "access denied".
Lookie, I said, someone who actually set up a computer such that the default login doesn't have administrator access. Wise, but right now it's in our way. Does the teacher know the administrator password? Ha, silly me -- they don't tell him things like that.
One of the students is on the staff, so I asked her if she has admin access. Nope. And then I got the rest of the story.
They were, apparently, having trouble with kids bringing in computer games and playing them when they were supposed to be using the computer for studying. It's not that anyone cares about the games per se, but there's only the one computer and they were tired of having to monitor it. So they set up a firewall to prevent that. No one realized that there was any legitimate-for-this-context software that would also be hindered.
So sometime before next week they will fix this somehow. And I am glad that people there take security seriously -- the administrator password wasn't anything obvious, nor was it written on a post-it note next to the computer. But alas, I was not able to deliver working software into the hands of the teacher and my classmates. (I didn't think of the copy-the-CD trick until later, though I think all access to the drive was being blocked anyway.) I am disappointed.