Skip to main content

TIFU by accidentally removing web filtering from upwards of 750 middle school student computers.

To be fair, this happened a few weeks ago, but I was too busy not getting fired to think about it the day it happened.

As my username suggests, we utilize Microsoft Azure/Endpoint Manager(Intune) to manage our windows devices at the school district I am employed with. Ever since COVID hit our part of the country (USA), all students were issued a 1:1 device, so every student and staff member has some kind of mobile device (iPads in elementary, different types of laptops for Middle and High school).

Endpoint Manager has a feature called “supersedence” that essentially tells an application “delete the old version before installing this new one.”

We push out an application to the devices that handles all web filtering (preventing the students from going to sites they shouldn’t, both per acceptable use and the Child Internet Protection Act).

My mistake was trusting that a function within Endpoint Manager worked as it should, and not realizing that the aforementioned feature was in “Preview” (Microsoft’s way of saying “don’t use this anywhere important because we won’t help if it blows up).

From my end, I ran tests on about 10 devices and everything worked perfect, decided to deploy to one Middle School (about 750 students) and to be honest forgot about it with everything else I had going on.

Fast forward two weeks later and a students device gets brought to my boss because they had some highly inappropriate/borderline illegal content on their device.

We investigate to see what happened only to find out that 600+ student devices failed to install the new filter.

Some even said it had it on there already, though I verified it didn’t.

Essentially it just deleted the old version and then did nothing, so for two weeks an entire middle school could go anywhere in the internet they desired.

I scrambled around with one other technician and put my hands on every computer in that school and made sure they all had the new one installed.

Took about a week and I had to confiscate about 100 devices and wipe them, but crisis ultimately averted.

TLDR: Trusted Microsoft product to work, instead of replacing internet filtering on student devices, ended up just deleting it for two weeks, allowing middle schoolers to go to any website.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TIFU by forgetting my purse and attempting to get fuel

Not the craziest story but hey. I'm obligated to say this was a few months ago but I cringe every time I go past the petrol station . My petrol was getting low, not dangerously so but it said 27 miles left, (oftentimes it then suddenly drops to about 16 for example, and then 5 and then 0 very fast) I didnt have my purse on me as I just didn't need it... Picked my daughter up from school and then went on to collect my 2 stepdaughters from across town and then set off for home. En route the gauge went to 7 and then suddenly it was 1 so I stopped at the petrol station near our house. The petrol was on 0 as i pulled up to the pump and that's when I realised I had no money. I left the kids in the car at the pump and went in to talk to the cashier, it wasn't mega busy but there was a queue, I'd heard that they can help you if you can't pay for fuel. Like keeping something of yours as security. It was an elderly man and he basically refused to help. At this point i...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU - Don’t do what I did

On Sunday morning Aug. 24th, I awoke to discover a large blind spot in my right eye, which turned out to be what is called wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). It has resulted in a very significant, permanent loss of vision in that eye. Although I maintain good peripheral vision, whatever I focus on at best is very blurry, and mostly disappears. I can barely make out the large E at the top of the eye chart. If this happens to my left eye I’ll be unable to read or drive. It turns out that I missed the opportunity that I had to prevent this from becoming a serious problem because I failed to report what appeared to be minor changes in my vision. In the weeks prior to August I had noticed that what I knew to be straight lines appeared to my right eye to have a little waviness. I also noticed that the color of my front lawn, which I could see through the window from my recliner,  was subdued, looked almost gray, in my right eye. So I scheduled an eye exam, which revealed the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU by getting suspended for 2 days by my front office in school.

I (13M) am an African American student at Jeannette junior high who had got suspended for 2 days here. I was in math class minding my business until my teacher had told me to go to the main office, which posed no problem to me. As i went down there, the people of the front office had stopped me and made me get a new ID (yes, we have id's.) so i had asked them if i could maybe do a different alternative and call my mother to let her bring the Id here, even then, the Id isn't that important. So, although i was talking to them in a calm manner and not showing any signs of rebellion, they had threatened to call the police on me without thinking twice before calling my parents. This is where i started getting angry, and even then now the black peers agree that could have been a racially motivated action. They then told me to sit in the office conference room because of that, leading into more anger. They had then called my mother who had came over to the school didn't even let ...
Post a Comment
Read more