USB Drives Survey

[Dos_Box]

Christmas is coming,

The sysadmins are getting fat,

The kids are all getting USB drives in their stockings,

Let's grab our tin foil hats!

 

 

As you can see there is a new survey up. Lets settle this once and for all shall we? I admit what is good for one is not neccercerily good for another, but the issue and amount of negativity towards USB drives is astounding. I love them and with the correct GPO's in place they are perfectly safe, admittedly there are issues with pupils copying huge volumes of information, ok, MP3s, MPEGS etc to their user areas, but it is nothing which cannot be stamped down on with good monitoring of the user areas and amended AUPs. This christmas I can forsee that lots, and I mean LOTS of kids will receive MP3 players, many of them in USB form for Christmas and I think its about time we sorted out the facts from the myths.

[Ric_]

I have issues with some of my terminals not liking USB drives in the first place!

 

However, I can think of several places I would prefer to stick the things than in my network :twisted:

[ChrisH]

I let staff only use them at the moment. I have them locked down with drive letters. The other reason for this as well is barely any of our machines have USB ports at the front and we all know what happens when kids start rooting around the back. Idealy they would be properly locked down with software restriction policies but this doesnt stop the pictures and MP3s etc getting onto the network. Its also a little hard to monitor MP3s since they produce them in IT lessons on audacity and such so until there is a real need for them were going to stick with current policy.

[Dos_Box]

This is where strict, and I mean strict monitoring of the user areas is called fro. All you need is a couple of examples made (I'm sure they will queue up to volunteer) then you will eventally get some more resonsable use of the network. What may be a good thing to make the kids realise is that if they have those files on thier USB drives than there is no need for them to be on the network in the first place, especially when the risk of discovery and punishment is so great.

[Netman]

Anything that banishes floppy disks to the mists of time has got to be good... I love them, we even sell them on at cost to the kids so we have some influence over them getting good ones! It's all down to personal responsibility really... there will always be those that need 'educating' and those that use ICT resources responsibly.

[Michael]

USB flash memory drives are definitely the way to go! I've distributed them to all staff for about 8 months or so now and it's been a great success! We only bought 128MB drives, but seeing as most documents teachers want store are only Word or Excel files it isn't a problem!

 

The drives we bought came with their own small extension lead which is handy. If you're running 2000 or even better XP on your clients, it should work with all available flash drives without the need to install a driver.

[beeswax]

how long before a member of staff comes to you saying that their pen drive is full and can they have another one?

 

beeswax

[Sylv3r]

We let the students and staff use them here no problems, just basically to get rid of the older technology such as floppy disks as we all know how annoying it is when people lose work through corruption. We have bought a batch of 100 with the school logo on them and selling them to pupils at a small loss to encourage the use even more.

[Michael]

@beeswax - To be honest we haven't hit that wall yet, but if someone told me that tomorrow, I'd ask do they really need to carry so many documents with them in one go? More than likely the answer would be no. If they started putting MP3's or high resolution images on the drives I could imagine the drives filling up quickly.

 

Eventually I suppose we'd replace all 128MB flash drives as we are replacing floppy disks now. I suppose with falling prices 512MB, 1GB or possibly even greater capacities could be bought in the future.

[steve]

I hate these things with a passion, they've caused us no end of problems.

 

My main issues with them are data security - staff taking information off site that can easily be lost forever, or worse a kid finding it and having access to confidential info - data protection out of the window.

 

Reliability, seen too many of them fail, prompting much hair pulling because they never back anything up.

 

We now have a no support policy on these - some staff continue to use them, despite them all having a laptop that syncs files so they can work on them off-site. If they ask for recomendations on them, I tell not to buy them - if they do buy them its at there own risk, and when they break, just don't come running to us.

 

Students are prevented from using these (and floppies) via a GPO, they have other methods of accessing files off-site, but if they do bring one in, they are allowed to bring it to us to load the information.

[Dos_Box]

My main issues with them are data security - staff taking information off site that can easily be lost forever, or worse a kid finding it and having access to confidential info - data protection out of the window.

 

Don't let them. NTFS and other security measures should prevent this.

 

Reliability, seen too many of them fail, prompting much hair pulling because they never back anything up.

 

They are 100 times more reliable than floppies!

 

Students are prevented from using these (and floppies) via a GPO, they have other methods of accessing files off-site, but if they do bring one in, they are allowed to bring it to us to load the information.

 

!!No floppies either. Good grief. Are you a secondary? I think it is recommended by Becta that pupils should be allowed and enabled with the ability to take work home. It sounds like you are creating far to much work for yourself like this. I really think we should be pushing the positive use of technology, not banning it for conveiniences sake. Its not a dig at you so please don't take it personally but there is a lot of tin foil hat wearing taking place with regards to USB drives, and I'd like to set the record straight. besides, there is no storage medium which is 100% reliable, be it floppy, USB drives, CDRW or external hard drives, but to ban them and remove their functionallity for the sake off a few fixable issues seems excessive to me.

[Ric_]

@Dos_Box: We give them email which should be sufficient for sending all but the largest of files.

[papalazaroo]

I agree with everything Dos_box has said. We actively encourage USB drives by selling them in school (anything to get rid of floppies for good) and have no issues at all. Sure the kids bring fill up their space with mp3's but with quotas in place they only have so much room.

[steve]

Yes we are a secondary. Don't get me started on Becta

 

We do allow access to files away from school, more secure, reliable methods too. Do Becta insist it must be with USB keys?

 

If you can explain how you can secure USB keys for staff and students, I'm happy to reconsider my opinion of them.

 

But just how do you stop a kid loosing a USB key and their entire gcse coursework that they never backed up - despite constantly telling them to so?

[Dos_Box]

The problems with USB are the same as with floppys. Just at a larger scale. For a start I would suggest that you try to convince staff and pupils that USB drives are not a storage medium, but rather a transport medium. It does not alleviate them of the responsablity of ensuring that their work is stored on their user areas (where it can be backed up), but that they should use them only for transporting work from school to home and vice versa. That should cover you in the loesing courswork stakes.

As regards to securing USB drives there are plenty of posts on the forums on how to lock down USB drives, such as launching programs from them or installingg software from them, and for the life of me I can't find a single one at the moment! :oops:

 

If anyone here has a seperate USB GPO which allows the secure use of USB drives and had the AD management printout of the changes required could they post it here please.

[Face-Man]

Anybody know a way to stop music being copyed from them (USB sticks) to the network home drives. I keep having to clean them up. Which I can do with a script but I'd much rather not have them in the first place. As it would stop the students (and staff) using expecsive computers to share crap music around. (For genre information delete the C)

[Dos_Box]

You need the Administrators NAsty File Search curtesy of EduGeek. Goto the downloads section and help yourself.

[Ric_]

or my script which can be run at logoff in verbose mode (hence displaying a lovely list of files as they are deleted )

[Norphy]

Anybody know a way to stop music being copyed from them (USB sticks) to the network home drives. I keep having to clean them up. Which I can do with a script but I'd much rather not have them in the first place. As it would stop the students (and staff) using expecsive computers to share crap music around. (For genre information delete the C)

 

We use Veritas Storage Exec to manage our disk quotas. The nice thing about Storage Exec is that it lets you stop certain file types being uploaded onto your network shares. We have a policy in place that stops them putting on media files, executables and scripts on there. They're only allowed to put on documents. It costs about £600 for a single licence iirc.

[ChrisH]

That kind of functionality is coming in with 2003 R2 I believe so that will be nice to have those functions natively.

[Norphy]

True, however the problem with 2k3 R2's implementation is that it uses the file extension to check the file and nothing else. Storage Exec (if you want it to) can check the file and make sure it is what it says it is.

[john]

True with the R2 only looking at the extention, but how many little darlings are going to figure that one out before the release of Longhorn Server which will (so I have been told) be intelligent like the Veritas solution?

[CyberNerd]

@Face-Man

Anybody know a way to stop music being copyed from them (USB sticks) to the network home drives. I keep having to clean them up. Which I can do with a script but I'd much rather not have them in the first place. As it would stop the students (and staff) using expecsive computers to share crap music around. (For genre information delete the C)

 

Focusing on the HomeDrives, This can be accomplished using Samba. Samba sits between the real (*nix) filesystem and windows so you can use it to veto, delete or even hide certain files. This would prevent kids from renaming files and allow you to block music, batch files etc. in your smb.conf:

veto files = /*.mp3/*.vbs/

The samba approach is the most elegant IMHO because there is a huge amount of flexibility. For example the Recycle VFS module will redirect deleted files and can be used as a 'recycle' bin for homedirectories, it can vscan particular files, give sensible pre-defined audits of files, set quotas, distributed filesystem and lots more. Samba also benchmarks faster than 2k server !

 

Alternatively, some antivirus solutions will prevent pre-defined extensions from being stored on an NTFS filesystem. McAfee (server) certainly does. in general windows needs an awful lot of expensive add-ons to get it to function as an SMB server as well as samba can.

 

http://us5.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection

[Norphy]

True with the R2 only looking at the extention, but how many little darlings are going to figure that one out before the release of Longhorn Server which will (so I have been told) be intelligent like the Veritas solution?

 

When I was at school it would have been the first thing I tried. I was always the one trying to get around software restriction policies and the like. I would have hated me

 

Once one kid works out how to get around a restriction, it spreads around the school like wildfire.

 

In any case, when is Longhorn server actually going to be available? I know Vista is just a few months away but Longhorn Server is a little further away isn't it? It took MS about 18 months to release 2k3 after XP came out.

[Geoff]

When I was at school it would have been the first thing I tried. I was always the one trying to get around software restriction policies and the like. I would have hated me

 

Tell me about it. I often hear the phrase 'Poacher became the Game Keeper'.

 

In any case, when is Longhorn server actually going to be available? I know Vista is just a few months away but Longhorn Server is a little further away isn't it? It took MS about 18 months to release 2k3 after XP came out.

 

Realistically, I don't think we'll see Vista until 2007. I don't expect Longhorn Server until 2008/9. I expect XP will get a facelift and a service pack. 2k3 server will probably get lots of Longhorn Server features backported to it.