For the second time in a week or two, the library has ground to a screeching halt. Nothing’s checking in, nothing’s checking out, I can’t look at the catalog for you, most of the time the patrons can’t use the computers, I can’t do a damned bit of my work, etc. Everything has stopped. Why? Because some fucking douchebag stuck his goddamned god complex on our computers!
What the fuck do they get out of it? Big fucking man, keeping me from updating holdings, aren’t you so fucking special? Do they get paid? Do they hate the world and fuck it up for the hell of it? What exactly is the payoff here?
Please tell me at least there’s some nasty money-grubbing payoff in this for somebody. Credit card numbers, bank accounts, something. Please, please tell me some reeking cuntnugget didn’t do this to us just for the fucking hell of it!
I’m too tired to come up with a decent rant, to tell you the truth. This shit has gotten to be so damned exhausting I don’t want to even think about it anymore, but you know what? Tomorrow at 9, there I am again, “Sorry, the computers are down.”
And you? You who sees all those blank screens and the signs that say “Down for Maintenance” and then you come up to me and say, “Are the computers down or something?” You? Fuck you. Oh, and YOU? Who has ADVICE for me about how we wouldn’t get viruses if we blah blah blah blah? Fuck you harder. Next time I’ll refer to you our IT department, which has been working steadily since before New Year’s trying to run this thing to the ground, and I’ll let them eat you alive. Asshole.
Heh. And won’t you be embarrassed if one of the IT guys comes up to you the next day and says something like, “Wow, Zsofia, I didn’t know you knew Professor Schmidt ! I mean, THE Professor Schmidt ! Fixed everything right up !”
While I know having patrons use the computers is likely making their job easier, I have to say that I tend to agree with Absolute. What sort of steps have they taken to prevent this problem?
Not at all. They’re real tech people. They thought last week they’d gotten the thing licked and cleaned off, so they turned all the computers back on again. When it popped back up again (I assume it’s the same thing but it could be a new one, I don’t know), they thought it wasn’t on the patron computers, but I guess they changed their minds. The patron computers are protected with Deep Freeze and stuff, and they haven’t been a problem as far as I know, but we got word not to turn them on tomorrow morning. I don’t really know very much about what’s going on, since the IT people are getting a little… testy and uncommunicative. I can hardly blame them. We’ve never had problems like this before at all - everything that’s come in before has been fixed really easily, it’s certainly never taken the whole shooting match down before.
You know what? Things have gotten so hysterical that there’s a rumor going around that the virus is hiding in the phones. I’m not even kidding or making that up.
I hate viruses just for all of the concerned friends who email alerts that tell you not to open attachments with subjects like ‘so-and-so’. Usually I get this emails from people who know even less about computers than I do.
Thank you for that important information. :delete:
Intellectual curiosity? Please. The meme stating that virus writers are some kind of misunderstood genius needs to die. Perhaps it was applicable at one point when viruses actually took a modicum of skill to write, where advanced knowledge of assembly and OS internals was a must, but now every virus is some variation of some VB script, it most certainly doesn’t apply.
People write viruses because they’re pricks and they enjoy pissing people off. That’s the top and bottom of it.
I’m a little baffled as to how your network got into this position in the first place? Does it have unsecured wireless? Does it not have a firewall that blocks out certain ports and restricts certain protocols? What exactly are you allowing your patrons to do? Download executables? E-mail with attachments? Save to the HDD? Run unknown IM? P2P?
Tell me there’s at least a software firewall that blocks certain websites.
From what it sounds like, you’d be ahead of the game if you were to just make users sign on as Guests with no Admin privileges.
How on earth does something get from your patron-workstations to your internal data systems? Those things should be kept apart at all costs. The ideology here should be to do everything you can to keep both networks clean, but assume the patron machines are going to get hacked / otherwise messed up so keep them away from your data systems.
I’d go so far as to set up some sort of auto-format & re-install of the OS & basic applications once a week on all the patron workstations. They should basically be fresh machines every 7 days.
I work in a small office that used to have recurring virus problems under the previous Admin, but when I got the job we soon installed a decent (and by no means insanely expensive) firewall/gateway and haven’t had a single virus since. Not one.
I am reminded of the blissful days before libraries went online.
You can’t hack a card catalog. Unless you set it on fire or something.
Yeah, I know it’s nice to be able to renew or reserve a book online. But the inconvenience of not being able to use the computer system (or have all the terminals occupied) sometimes supersedes this.
Sorry, just a bit of pointless rage against the machine.
Card catalogs take a lot more work to maintain and update than computer catalog holdings, but they don’t get viruses. Well, not unless you count food/drink/fire damage to be a virus.
There are still people who refuse to learn to use the online catalogs (which are more user friendly than the card catalogs they reminisce about) and instead play the “do you have this?” version of the 20 questions game while there are long lines behind them.
On the other hand, other than the transients we get in the library, we have more people who use the library to use the internet than we actually have who check out books (I’m not counting DVDS or CDs, as this tends to be more common with the internet-only people) on a regular basis. The power going out or the computers not working causes the library to be a ghost town in my area.
