Novell actually differentiates shutting down and powering off. On modern Windows versions they do the same thing, but presumably hitting "shutdown" is either for non-ACPI computers, or it takes you the DOS prompt

Somewhat relevant Old New Thing article: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160419-00/?p=93315

Also, modern Windows versions aren't based on DOS, so there's no DOS prompt to drop back to. It is true that some old machines didn't know how to power off in response to software comments, though

novell? they still going?

Looks like they were acquired in 2014

But they're still doing stuff apparently

crazy

That was like 4 years ago, my school was still using Novell and XP

The school district doesn't want anyone changing their passwords, though Active Directory presumably doesn't allow admins the right to deny users the right to change their passwords

Reason is that they don't have a password reset interface

There's a User cannot change password check box on the user properties page in ADUC

Oh right... I forgot

If you forget your password, only a handful of people in the district can reset it for you.

Exciting

And everyone's passwords are just their student IDs.

It's a public secret.

That's appalling

and they tell you "don't share your ID with anyone" ... and how's that going to happen if the student ID is literally the only identifier that the system has for each student?

i.e. there is no security, because your username and password are your ID.

Heh, better hope nobody ever e-mails somebody an Office document they made

And then when you look through Active Directory Search, the IT people have generously slapped on users' full IDs on their names.

The username is in the metadata

Heh, yeah, usernames are accessible to any user with valid AD credentials of any kind

@oldmud0 <evil grin>I wonder if the same restriction applies to the IT Admin accounts</evil grin>

And the IT people have also decided that NTLM is the best method of SSO for the intranet.

I didn't even know Windows would accept NTLM for SSO

Oh, you mean for IIS sites?

Yeah, for IIS. Oh yeah they use IIS!

IIS is fine, but NTLM is less than ideal

Teachers get to change their passwords, and in fact their laptops are BitLocker enabled

And on top of that, they can't install anything on their own laptops.

And on top of that, support tickets to propose new software to be added to the catalog can take up to 6 weeks of turnaround time

They pretend there is a very tall hierarchy in terms of administration, but in truth it's very shallow.

Does the IT department care about the long turnaround?

No, because there's practically no IT department.

Ah. I was going to suggest that they give me a call

I make things that deal with this

What, like etherkillers?

Self-serve installation of pre-approved software

Oh, the self-serve part is no problem.

It's just System Center

But they're not admins?

Ah, System Center, fun

No, teachers aren't admins of their own laptops.

They're not even local admins of the computer labs they have.

The dumbest part about the nonexistent IT's "grand scheme" is that in order to "preserve performance" they turn the resolution of the thin clients down to 1024x768 even though the monitors are 16:9!

@oldmud0 Where is all this stupidity happening?

And the best part is that nobody notices a thing! They don't notice how blurry everything is

If there's a Terminal Services deal going on, it does take more effort for the server to render more pixels

No it's not even Terminal Services, it's some VMware PCoIP thing

Hmm, I'm not familiar with that

You could be incriminated and sent to ISS because they were looking at the web filter log one day and they saw a lot of hits from you, without even bothering to understand what you were trying to look at and whether or not the log times and locations ("we know where you are!") match with your schedule. And if they do bother to check, it's some "formal investigation conducted by the District"

@oldmud0 VMWare Horizon?

So, impersonation is really easy and it's also really easy to get sent down. And it's also really easy to play unblocked games.

@cat Yeah VMware Horizon, running in an HP thin client

Ick

spits out hairball

Worst part about Horizon is that they set it to that it's not persistent.

So you can't keep documents saved? I'm not familiar with that product's terminology

Sure if you disconnect accidentally, there's a good chance you'll keep your session. But if you log off, the VM is destroyed.

If so, I imagine it's to save on space; you're supposed to use web apps?

Oh

You can keep your documents saved in a campus-specific "home drive" or you save it in Google Drive

Yeah ours is set up like that too

One of them you can only access within the campus, and the other you have to download it somewhere and then send it back up. So both of them are bad.

that question seems like a failed attempt to promote that application. It isn't even a iOS application.

The home drives are only 700 MB, so it's pretty useless

Now they also have some premounted shares like "student shared" which is read-only for students.

@Ramhound Flagged as spam

The Lords of the Ring: Shadows of Mordor game is so much more fun with a trainer so you can literally kill every named orc in the game without dieing lol

And if I do something the teachers don't know how to do, their response is basically "What are you doing? Are you hacking?"

then turn it off and watch a random orc get prompted :-)

Example: I open VMware Horizon on the school tablets. I show it to the teacher, teacher freaks out. I open Horizon on my laptop. I show it to my classmates, they don't bat an eye.

There's always someone ahead and someone behind

@Ramhound that game is frustrating because everything returns. not doing so well and dying, and everything gets promoted. go on a rampage, and less than 5 minutes later orks have come out of the blue and repopulated the whole place.

That is the entire point of the game lol

these orks must be morman or catholic

Its literally "kill orcs"

or rabbits

yea that

What's confusing for them is that Lync was renamed Skype for Business so they're like "If I have a former student of mine's Skype, can I add it here?"

And to add insult to injury, the school has some serious enterprise-grade DPI firewall that runs as part of the web filter.

I can't even do SSH key exchange because the firewall interrupts it.

I can't use Tor either, because most bridges don't do obfs4 AND an HTTP port

Regular SOCKS proxies get taken down in about 30 seconds, and subsequent attempts to connect to the same proxy get taken down in 5.

Meanwhile, download speeds from anything Google are abhorrent, ranging from dialup to about 500K

I still don't understand how their network equipment hasn't caught fire yet from the load that they get

@oldmud0 - TOR isn't helpful. Your provider can identify you. Your provider can also identify any user who uses TOR. A combination of those factors means. They just have to interview or identify everyone who used TOR. That is how some numbskull got identified after he called in a bomb threat because he didn't want to take a test.

Of course that numbskull wasn't the smartest pencil in the set I suppose

@Ramhound how exactly can I be identified even with obfs4?

In the case i described

The numbskull was identified because he connected to his schools network

It was only a matter of identify which students were connected to TOR when the threat was made.

Hint: He was the only one

@Ramhound What happened to him? Jail sentence? Expelled from school? Fined?

All of the above?

I forget

did they just explode the threat out of proportion (no pun intended) or was it actually a serious threat

It just confirmed what I thought

TOR does not provide anonymous internet if your provider can identify you.

@Ramhound yeah but why would my provider ask me if I use tor

also it's Tor, not TOR

Metaphor: Using Tor when nobody else does is like trying to be anonymous by wearing a ski mask in a crowd

Actually that was kind of a bad metaphor

Because they could figure out who he was, unlike people who are masked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@BenN Metaphor fails if you are on the piste :)

Wouldn't that be a simile, since you used 'like' in the sentence?

A better comparison would be not wearing your name badge at work so you can be rude to customers.

@MichaelFrank Hmm. "I like ice cream". Does that make it a simile? :)

"This ice cream tastes like haemorrhoid cream."

You just stated that you like ice cream.

A better comparison would be like trying to compare using Tor when nobody else does when nobody else is making comparisons in SU chat

What did I just write

Just don't try and circumvent your schools policy. Problem solved. ;)

My school's policy sucks

Not saying there shouldn't be one

Go to a better school then.

@oldmud0 Yeah. I think we got the picture ...

Well yeah I wish I had chosen a STEM school 4 years ago

All similes are metaphors, but not all metaphors are similes.

@DavidPostill Oooh okay.

All oldmud0s you might find are trolls, but not all trolls you might find are oldmud0s in hiding

Then again, comparing you to me is like comparing me to you, except that an overarching comparison generates a simile-metaphor hyperassociation.

See? Perfect forward secrecy.

oh gosh I'm going insane again please I must leave

there is microsoft sam playing in my head at the highest speed possible

I thought similes and metaphors were siblings in the inheritance hierarchy, under analogies

But yes, what I said was a simile

@MichaelFrank: I think I understand why my Nexus 9 was having trouble with the Final Fantasy IX cloud saves. The problem was probably Google Play Services.

@bwDraco Yea, it gets a lot of 1 star reviews ;)

Cleared the data for Google Play Services and all seems to be well.

Oh well, that's good.

This does temporarily break Google sign-ins. I'll see if this permanently fixes the issues.

I saw Final Fantasy VII released for Android, but is apparently quite a poor port.

My tablet was giving me incessant "Unknown issue with Google Play services" errors. That should be addressed as well.

I still cannot be sure if this permanently fixes the issues, though. I was previously getting connection timeouts and internal errors when trying to push cloud saves from my tablet. My phone had no trouble with cloud saves whatsoever.

I always thought it was some sort of Google sign-in issue because cloud saves on Android use Google Drive (but separately from your files).

Time will tell if the problem is solved.

It takes 500 posts for me to get a star when other people get stars about every 150 posts. Maybe I should work on my stupidity a bit more

@oldmud0 Or wittiness, or jokiness

According to journeyman, it's not joking what I do, it's trolling

Stars are pretty much random IME

Though there are star-baiting tactics that unfortunately work really well

yup. Like every time I say woof ;p

see?

Yep, depends on the person too

@oldmud0 I said you were trolling cause you were disrupting a conversation we were having over video cards ;p

e.g. chmod

@JourneymanGeek A star within 6 seconds ;)

@BenN yeah, running gags are part of the channel culture ;p

I'm kinda sad that "Uncle David" didn't stick; it was hilarious

@BenN Running gag to remind @cat of her stupidity ;)

@BenN I've always liked "STARS PLS"

And by always I mean since I apparently invented it a few weeks back.

That was in my mind ;)

@BenN Yeah. I had just seen "Dr Phil" on the TV the other side of the room (I suppose my mum was channel hopping) and "Uncle David" just popped out :)

@MichaelFrank Its a piss poor game by modern standards. Even on a PC.

I don't know what I should try implementing first, the file system or the controls for interfacing between the PC and the VCR

yes

I think the latter makes more sense

no

@oldmud0 Why do you want to control a VCR from a PC? Don't you have a DVR?

Implementing stuff is fun!

yeah but hard drives are overrated

the best way to figure out the true capacity of a VHS tape is by using it as general storage

@oldmud0 But nobody uses VHS anymore ...

<raises hand>