You learnt C++ at school! I just used to get bored and hack into the schools database, remove any internet filters and see what other people had on their users :P
the most advanced thing schools IT ever taught me was databases, but not with access, with their own annoyingly laid out one which i had to use even though i could do it quicker and better in access (which they had bought!)
although that doesnt stop me hacking or writing very basic programs!
hehehehe. ive had a good idea. (for once), im going back to my school in 6th form, so im going to ask everyone who isnt going back if i can have their usernames and passwords (as they wont need them) then i can do what i want and i cant get kicked off the network. well i can, but ill always have another account if i can get enough.
hint - most academic names have a geust or test account with the same priviledges as you to test what student accounts can do, and so that at open evening etc they can have them running for anyone to use
ahh yes i know about the visitors accounts, but they dont have as much on them as us, and you easily get cought out when theres a bunch of students and one visitor account in a classroom, because the technicians are allwwaayyss watching you. but its fun if you can get hold of a techers account and take controll of any computer in the room.
My uni is weird, in some of the labs using Guest has more rights than our own accounts, so everyone uses USB pens at sticks to using Guest. Plus it means they can't see who did what
evil thing to do, log on as geust, bring up remote desktop connection and try to connect to another pc, at our school it just shows the log on screen, regardless of whether someone is already using it, so make it full screen and leave it as people try to log on giving them all kinds of errors
OR having that, and then having a picture of windows bluescreen open in powerpoint
we have been banned from running Linux at school (because they are too stupid to fix the flaws that linux has) so i just have a screenshot of windows open in the background and full screen i when someone walks by
mwahahaha, most pc's at our school are 3.0 Ghz P4's shuttles with and onboard card,but we have a pc with an athlon 2500 and a Radeon 9000, which is 10x better for hosting LFS and playing on (although if i have the reseources i have a dedi on spare machine), so to make sure someone wont nick it for their emails i unplug the keyboard and mouse (or just flick the switch at the back, very few people check!)
I think you'll find that you've been banned because is sounds as if your network is Windows based. Even using Samba, PAM, and some FUSE magic (and yes, it does take a fair bit of time to set that up), you still can't get the level of integration with windows domains that you'd like, including lockdown which is usually done via group policy. As much as I like linux, etc. as a sysadmin I really wouldnt want a set of people trampling around a network, poking every corner of it, and having a significant level of access to things that may have been denied on the local machines, for whatever reason.
Whilst a certain subset of people maybe responsible to use that machine, the vast majority of people won't be. I certainly wasn't at school, I got around a hell of a lot of things, and I sure as hell wouldn't want a younger version of me, on one of my networks. You have no idea the amount of irritation and wasted time simple things can cause. Networks are fragile, and as one of my customer's users once said to me "its a work machine, of course I'm going to **** it up, its not mine". If its not yours, you dont care. Simple as.
Then again, if the network was run properly, unauthorised traffic wouldn't go across the network anyway. So potentially its a moot point.
thats my point - Linux is only ever run off a live disc by the few people that can use it (one does it because he likes open office and uses Linux at home, so is much more comfortable that way)
but i dont see why linux should be able to connect to the network at all, surely it doesnt take much to stop it, seeing as no-one else uses it
Network communication should all be standardised, so you have no way of identifying purely from the general traffic, whether the machine is Windows, Linux or something else. The only true way you could lock down the network is to either fingerprint the OS of every single device attached - which even if you did it every X minutes, would be a waste of network resources and prone to mistakes - or require IPsec communication between every device (which is impractical and often impossible), or restrict the LAN to only traffic that is required. Such as SMB (Windows sharing, and Samba), printing on obscure ports to print servers, etc. The problem being that quite a lot of Windows software often doesnt list all the ports it requires, so upon deploying a new bit of software, which doesnt work, you either have to search the internet or get in contact with the software manufacturer (which usually takes an hour to get to someone who knows what you're after).
The obvious thing to do would be to purely stop booting from all devices, but the HDD's and then lock down the BIOS, but unless you have something like vPro deployed, then its a shit load of work to do, especially on larger networks.
Because of these reasons you should begin to see the importance of a physical and verbal network security policy. Total work required vs obedience of users is a big thing to consider. If you tell most people they shouldnt do something or face being banned from the network, then they'll follow this.