German Ministry of Education Throws Away PCs For 190,000 € Due To Infection 347
An anonymous reader writes "German IT magazine Heise reports (original in German) that the Ministry of Education in Schwerin had a Conficker virus infection on 170 machines, that was dealt with by simply throwing them on the trash. Other German authorities have now decided that 'the approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy' and that the 187,300 Euro invested in this radical form of virus removal were inappropriate. The ministry had earlier estimated the cost of cleaning their desktops and servers by more conventional means to 130,000 Euro."
Far cheaper options (Score:4, Insightful)
Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.
Forget about virus infections for the near future.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Insightful)
Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.
Forget about virus infections for the near future.
They already had licenses to the Windows installations so the cost equation would be the same, it only differs if you assume they would try to clean the infection and not simply install Windows after format c:
What the [admin's time] factor expands to is another thing, and hardly favors the GNU/Linux approach. If the idiots are dumb enough to throw out new PCs because of a virus infection, they most certainly are too dumb to install anything but Windows.
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They ain't dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
If the idiots are dumb enough to throw out new PCs because of a virus infection, they most certainly are too dumb to install anything but Windows
I don't think that they are dumb
Actually, they are smart
1. It ain't their money --- the money is from the gummint
2. By throwing the thing away they save all the effort to reformat the disk and to re-install the Windows OS, plus softwares
3. With the computer dumped, they will get to enjoy newer computers --- again, the money came from the gummint
Re:They ain't dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't have virus protection or anything security related. So the taxoffice watchdog told them to come forward with a security plan.
This is just as stupid as it sounds. I've not heard if they were close to a Windows 7 induced hardware upgrade cycle anyway. But there is absolutely no excuse for having no security whatsoever.
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Zey voz just obeyink orders?
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Not to mention that the 130k probably includes the cost of preventative action to stop this happening again. Much easier and quicker (therefore cheaper) to start from scratch with a new security baseline than try to impose one after the fact.
Got a client at the moment discovering the very same home truth right now with something rather less virulent that Conficker running wild on their network. That'll teach them how "optional" AV update subscriptions are.
Re:They ain't dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
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And, more importantly, they'll be fully using their budget this year, allowing them to make an argument to have a budget increase next year. If they save money, their budget will be cut.
Re:They ain't dumb (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems that my country is not alone in employing the stupidest morons they can find for jobs in the departments/agencies/institutions that the state controls. Waste of money and waste of human resources in a time when unemployment for young people is soaring.
A damn shame.
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Munich decided to do that in 2003. 10 years later, they're still working on the transition.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently the Ministry of Education in Schwerin did not, and they're still dealing with the consequences.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Interesting)
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And many organisations are still stuck on Windows XP with apparently no plan or ability to switch in the near future despite EOL gone flying by and EOS approaching rapidly.
But this is like an organisation that decided to transition to WinXP when it was new, and are still in the process.
So what's your point other than that a massive infrastructure change is hard?
There needs to be a point besides that very important one? People paint switching to Linux as if it's an easy option. It's not, it's and incredibly long and frustrating process. And most people will would wish they never started.
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But this is like an organisation that decided to transition to WinXP when it was new, and are still in the process.
Well, no.
XP debuted in 2001. Munich didn't even start discussing it until 2003. Votes were passed in mid 2004, and shortly after the project was halted for non technical reasons. They started planning in 2005 and then did a pilot test to see if it was worthwhile and feasible.
The actual migration started in 2006, the same year as Vista came out, at which point the migration started piecemeal at
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure a large part of the decision to toss em in the garbage was because someone wanted new gear. Can't forget about the political element to an IT infrastructure.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Insightful)
Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.
Forget about virus infections for the near future.
Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.
Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.
This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.
All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.
In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you sit and stare at a computer while running virus removal tools. Move on to the next computer. This is a very common virus with pre-made tools available to remove it from several vendors. Just start it running on 100 computers at a time - just as fast as you can run and type.
All you have to do is get one computer fixed reliably. Then just make sure you do the same thing to the others. It's not like you have hundreds of totally unique infections.
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Why would you sit and stare at a computer while running virus removal tools.
Because they are paid by hour, duh. ;)
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Or just reimage the machines from scratch.
Or sell the machines, there are bound to be organizations willing to buy them, reimage them, then resell or use.
Trashing them is just idiotic.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Informative)
There a more than 1200 Linux viruses
Liar. There's something like < 100 viruses of which maybe 5 have ever been seen in the wild...
ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place. And it's completely irrelevant too since the workflow is the same.
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ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place
Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Insightful)
ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place
Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.
secretary: OK. so what do you mean that "this new ribbon bar is all you need"? Where'd my "print" menu go???
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:4, Informative)
or, wait for it, control-p
Actually, that's what infuriated me about Office 2008. It removed "unused" items from the File menu, and Control-P wouldn't work reliably.
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Depends how you count. Do you include worms that target software like Apache or SQL servers? Most people count worms that target the Windows Server equivalents as Windows viruses.
1200 is still high but there are plenty of viruses that affect Linux systems, even if they are not targeting the OS itself.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:4, Insightful)
It really depends on the situation. Being Germany it's possible that all the average worker needs is SAPGUI, which doesn't really differently on Linux than it does on Windows.
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Far cheaper options (Score:5, Informative)
1200 viruses? I think you're exaggerating. Maybe you're counting some variants of the same "virus" - like several times each. I don't know the exact number, to be honest. I do know that I was repairing damage due to exploits on Windows monthly. When I switched to Linux, I stopped repairing computers, until hardware broke.
How many millions of viruses are available for Windows now? So few virus writers support Linux . . . *sigh*
Here's a number that will blow your mind:
"At day’s end on April 12, for example, Symantec published the summary shown below, noting that its latest Virus Definitions file contained 17,702,868 separate signatures."
Don't take my word for it - read the article!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/the-malware-numbers-game-how-many-viruses-are-out-there/4783 [zdnet.com]
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You already knew that - but did you read the article? That was my challenge to AC - those millions of Windows viruses can be reduced by an order of magnitude. Ditto for his claim of 1200 Linux claims. ;^)
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> There a more than 1200 Linux viruses. That notion of yours is bullshit.
I have ran Linux as my primary desktop for over ten years, never run an anti-virus, never got infected.
> And you are forgetting costs to teach your average secretary how to use Linux + New Software licenses + migration costs.
Are you forgetting how radically different Win8 is from previous versions of windows? And, unlike iTunes or other proprietary garbage, there is no 79 page license you have to sign for Linux. As to migration c
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So don't use Red Hat. Lots of free linux distros out there.
Or do use Red Hat as it will still be cheaper.
If Windows were free I would still prefer Linux, just for the licensing.
All the different licensing takes up my time. Quite a bit of it.
With the crap I have to go through for viruses, licensing, updating, and basic windows problems I spend a lot of time that I would not have to with linux.
I have 3 Linux servers, 2 SCO Unix Servers, 2 Windows 2008 servers, 1 Windows 2003 Server, 34 Windows XP machines, 2 Vista Machines, 1 Windows 7 Machine, 1 Ubuntu PC and 4 Lin
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Far cheaper options (Score:4, Insightful)
all of your old apps from XP/Vista/7 will run on Windows 8.
Are you sure?
Yeah, many do run, but at what cost. There's a plethora of software which can't integrate at all with the Metro (or whatever it's called) functionality. Amazingly, in the tiled UI you can't even read what time it is, only the date. If you want to use Yahoo Messenger, you have to drop to Desktop mode. Daemon Tools? Desktop mode. Avast antivirus? Yeah, Desktop mode. Chrome, Firefox, Opera? Ever-the-fucking-desktop-mode! This is valid for a vast majority of existing (and popular!) Windows applications. And it's been what, 6+ months since Windows 8 got live and most popular application makers have no plans to create tiled apps for Windows 8. So much for 100% compatibility.
Just as I hate having to use terminal on a Desktop Linux OS, I also hate having to drop to Desktop mode 10 times an hour to do the stuff I usually do. That makes the tiled side of Windows, no matter how colorful, useless and annoying. You switch to Desktop mode to use your browser, then back to Tiled mode to look for a setting, then back to Desktop mode to do this, then back to Tiled mode to check weather, then back... for fuck's sake. It's an OS with two GUIs. RE-TAR-DED.
It is just an evolution of the Windows product line, not a radical departure from it.
It is a half-baked piece of shit, and that comes from someone who used Windows since... well, 3.1 and tried hard to use Windows 8.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Google translated article (Score:5, Funny)
Money well spent (Score:5, Insightful)
If its 130,000 euros to fix a virus infection and 187300 to upgrade AND fix the virus infection, then you may as well upgrade.
The real problem here is the 130,000 euros to fix a virus infection.
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If its 130,000 euros to fix a virus infection and 187300 to upgrade AND fix the virus infection, then you may as well upgrade.
The real problem here is the 130,000 euros to fix a virus infection.
yeah.. 130 000 for 170 computers. could have bought new computers with the "fix" money too.
Re:Money well spent (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter what OS you use (considering the OS licence is already paid)... How can the format of the drive + reinstall for 170 machines cost 130k$
Quick estimate: IT guy is paid 100$/h (gross overestimate) and can reinstall 1 machine per hour (gross overestimate)... Total: 17k$
How the fuck do they estimate 10x that???
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Re:Money well spent (Score:5, Interesting)
Conficker.... suddenly it becomes clear. I know an organisation that was infected, and they ended up spending 2 weeks with a Microsoft consultant to clear everything up. The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one. Silly old Microsoft.
So, if they upgraded their PCs too.... makes perfect sense. I wouldn't have binned the old ones though, I'd have wiped the HDDs and sold them or given them away.
Re:Money well spent (Score:4, Interesting)
This thread is disappointing. So much hate. Hate leads to fear, and fear leads to the dark side.
Anyway. Conflicker. Nasty. Simple. Old. A clean up is not easy, but conflicker requires some bad baselines to be operating for it to get through and thrive. If you fix the baseline issues, the clean up can follow. A clean susyem thats updated properly isn't infectable via conflicker. So frankly a system sorted put back in should be fine. You'll obviously have to do this step by step and yes, there is a price. Most orgs this size have IT staff so I don't know how the figures are drawn up.
I also have to say, the clean up tools and detection tools mean attacking conflicker infection is on the easier end of security clean up. The story is sad because it seems to indicate ever present stupidity in public services. Advocates and supporters of public services need to understand that its not a ob creation scheme. If someone has a role or job, they must be competant. Trained. Skilled. People who are not have no place in it.
Re:Money well spent (Score:4, Interesting)
No, conflicker has worm elements. So, the hard part of the clean up is not per se an individual machine. Its that you need to solve the baseline problems that allow conflicker to do its thing.
Re-installing 'stuff' won't make this go away. Doing it wrong just reinfects the machine.
So, as I said, what has to be done is the cause and baselines that allow conflicker to replicate have to be solved (harder part) - and then machines with good baselines go through clean up and go back on the network (easier part..)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007 [microsoft.com]
Any tech learning about conflicker can read about it, and start to understand what needs to be fixed. Patch, correct password weakenesses, stop autorun etc etc. Today, this is somewhat simple as a lot of tools and detection tools exist.
People in threat waving around Fdisk and re-install media saying 'they could fix this' - probably in fact are clueless and need to understand the problems involved. Conflicker breeds off poor security and bad baselines. Thats how it gets in. Thats how it replicates. Thats how it hangs around and re-infects.
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And how would that fix the problem - exactly?
Wipe - reinstall - re-infect. Well done. Do you like wasting your time and everyone else's?
Re:Money well spent (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one.
Then the first one wasn't really fixed, was it? Microsoft released a patch that blocks re-infection so all you have to do download that and their Malicious Software Removal Tool to a CD, disconnect each machine from the network and run them in order. Problem solved.
The high cost is probably due the cost of certifying that the infection was removed and the PCs are safe to use with sensitive data again. Removal is trivial if somewhat time consuming.
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And you have NOT? Oh my God! I bet that cable was squirming around and hissing for months.
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I've been trying to get my company to do this. Most of the machines we throw out are higher end Core 2 Duos that just need Windows reinstalled (if that) to bring them back to optimal. Unfortunately, the Powers that Be have decreed they have to go in the bin for a recycling company to pick them up. The end result is that we pay someone to resell our PCs that we've already wiped and don't see a dime of.
Happens more often than you think (Score:2)
1) ignore it
OR 2) buy a new machine give the old to the trash
I am not kidding you , I saw back in my day 12 PC desktop being sent to the trash because they had a variation of PONG virus on their HDD (that was DOS time).
Conficker???? (Score:2)
What is this? 2008?
Re:Conficker???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Conficker???? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, it's still very much alive and out there. The parents PC contracts it regularly (my dad has appalling security and browsing habits). A friend of mine (who I generally regard as more IT literate than I am) just spent a weekend cleaning an infection of it off his (fully-updated, Macafee-profected) Windows machine.
And now for a gratuitous side-rant:
The source of my friend's infection was apparently a minor video-hosting site carrying game-walkthroughs. On balance, I believe him on this, because I'd had warnings from AVG about such sites myself in the past.
The trend over the last few years has been for game-walkthroughs to shift from text-format to long sequences of videos. Personally, I hate, loathe and despise this trend from a convenience point of view (try searching 30 videos for how to find that pesky item you're missing, compared to doing a quick search on a text file). But it's had some other unpleasant side effects.
See by default, these videos go on youtube. Thing is, however, game publishers sometimes object to complete video walkthroughs of their games being hosted there and do DMCA takedowns. So the videos then crop up on less notable video-hosting sites. Many of which appear to be malware infested hellholes.
So the moral of my (horribly off-topic) side rant: video walkthroughs suck. They're difficult to search, they're inevitably narrated by some idiot called "Tad" who feels the need to say how stoned he is roughly every 30 seconds and - they're turning into a really horrible malware vector.
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People do video walkthroughs because they're easily monetizable. I can make a video for a game and put it up on Youtube and get ad partner money. If I write a text walkthrough and put it on GameFAQs I'm pretty sure I get exactly $0 forever. If I try to host it myself and put ads on my site, it's likely no one will ever read it because people will just go to Youtube, GameFAQs, or the game's wikia site if it's popular enough to have one.
It sucks, but that's how it is. Expect more video walkthroughs in the fut
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They can't rei-mage them with windows? (Score:2)
How much does that cost? One worker should be able to do a machine in ten minutes or so.
760 Euros per PC (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet the 'conventional' estimate was 760 euros per PC to fix it...
I think its one of these cases where they're locked into a service contract for the PC they bought, and its easier to bring forward an upgrade than let the service company rip them off. The translation says they'd almost fully depreciated the PCs anyway, so they were several years old anyway.
So now some party (no doubt connected to the service company) is kicking up a stink because they didn't get to rip them off.
But it looks like the right th
Re:760 Euros per PC (Score:4, Interesting)
For half of that money I'd fucking take a first class plane trip to Germany, pay for my own hotel, and be done reimaging their PCs over a workweek. That includes deploying whatever they need deployed on those PCs, and leaving a solution in place to reimage them at will. And that's all being quite green when it comes to Windows administration. At work I really only do the minimum needed not to need to muck with it.
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Process to re-image a computer
1) Call end user, ask when they won't need their computer for 1 hour
2) Start re-image remotely
3) Restore data/setting/installed software, which was all automated and part of the re-image process
Most of my time was playing phone-tag with the end user t
Re:They can't rei-mage them with windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Small correction (Score:5, Informative)
And there is more to the story: It was estimated, that the cleaning of the PCs would cost ~135,000 €, and a replacement, which was planned anyway, would be 190,000 €, thus they decided to replace early instead of spending the 135,000 € on the clean-up and throw the PCs away a year later.
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well duh, the more to the story is that they got a quote for 800 euros / computer to fix the issue, an issue their admins/cio should have fixed while on the payroll..
800 would have been enough to buy new computers.
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That's making the assumption that they have the man-hour resources to clean up the infection themselves. Likely, they aren't well enough staffed to just divert the number of people needed to cleaning up the PCs in a reasonable amount of time.
they got some sort of cio on payroll. he's got all week for this. if he's unresourced for this, he could have bought the resources for a lot less than 800 euros per hour - even in germany. their staff is going to be spending the same time setting up the new computers as well.
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Still, 135K€ for cleaning a bunch of PCs...what did they do, piss off the resident BOFH? Did someone make a lewd comment to IT about their jobs being outsourced to the 'cloud' that week? 'Tis the kind of prices you pay after you insinuate that someone's parents were blood relations...to their face...and then proceed to draw them a diagram outlining family relationships to ensure that there's no chance of a misunderstanding.
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Okay. They'd spend 1.350.000€ on cleaning, because the contractor cleaning those would happen to be a son-in-law of the chief of the agency and successfully charge for ten times the work. Then they'd spend the 190.000€ on new hardware a year later and throw the cleaned PCs out anyway, and pay another 1.000.000€ on consulting fees on how to buy these to the same company.
Welcome to corrupted as hell Southern Europe. This is pretty tame to stuff that actually happens there. Worth noting that Ire
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The cheap solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not use this as a way to teach the kids how to install the OS from scratch?
It costs them over 750 Euros to reimage a PC? (Score:2)
Really?
You can't estimate this linearly (Score:3)
I guess they simply multiplied the cost of virus removal with the number of machines. But it only takes once to find the source of the problem, the remaining 169 machines could've been fixed at minimal cost after that. And of course, it doesn't cost a cent to just wipe them all clean.
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Assuming generic medium skilled German IT guy's fully burdened cost is $168,000 USD/yr and that this level of effort will require a staffing change (both very good assumptions)
Let's say this medium skilled IT guy gets a €3000/month salary, that's €36,000/year. There will be other costs, but it won't come anywhere near the number you assumed. Also, dealing with malware is a standard task when managing Windows desktop PCs, no matter whether you blame it on market share or on Microsoft. So if it requires a staffing change, then they didn't have the right staff to begin with.
Assume 44 usable weeks a year, or 220 useable days, that's roughly 1 machine a day.
An admin responsible for over 100 desktops should have set up an infrastructure for re-imaging so th
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$168k for a technician? Fully loaded in Europe, you're probably looking at about $40k for a full loading on tech resource necessary to diagnose and fix this kind of problem.
You don't necessarily need config control to do a fix, though that would likely entail one later on through the sysops and change control processes worked into the standard working day.
There are so many inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in that post that it really did give me a chuckle.
Damn (Score:2)
The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.
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Where are all the machines they threw away?
The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.
There are many establishments which could have benefited here, but there are two issues with that - first, the machines would have to be sanitized so there is a guarantee that no confidential information is stored on them (90% of government IT disposals ignore that rule, but the Germans are actually among the best at following it); and second, I am pretty sure that the majority of recipient organisations would say "no thanks, we cannot handle the clean-up" if an organisation said "here you go, have 170 PCs
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Clarifications (due to rampant bullshit here) (Score:5, Informative)
This happened in 2010.
Those were old computers.
They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.
So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.
The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.
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I can't quite imagine a business of that size not having a system in place to reimage machines at will. At one place I work we have two dozen machines and I'm well underway in having them all PXE boot into an imager which then either boots the existing image from the hard drive or updates it prior to booting. Once I finish shaking down the test deployment on a few machines, it should be ready to go. Users have had roaming profiles for years now so that's not an issue.
Re:Clarifications (due to rampant bullshit here) (Score:4, Funny)
This happened in 2010. Those were old computers. They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.
So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.
The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.
This happened in 2010. Those were old computers. They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.
So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.
The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.
How dare you inject reason and facts into a /. arguement? You're supposed to say Windoze Bad Linux Shiney Free and accuse anyone with a different view of being an MS shill or troll. Replacing rather than cleaning is the right thing to do, it would have been more fiscally irresponsible to clean and then replace, and no doubt under German law the old ones were recycled rather than just dumped in the trash.
given that reimaging would involve more than simply pushing out a new image but would need machines to be offline to avoid reinfection, there is also productivity losses and associated costs as well.
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that's not the problem.
the problem is that they didn't say that the 800 euros for a reimaging fee was bullshit.
conventional means 130,000 Euro (Score:2)
Whoa, whoa, wait people, I'll clean them for half of that price and still be happy with it.
They'd need to look into more efficient "conventional means".
So thats where they got the idea (Score:2)
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's only so many times you can lather, rinse and repeat in a given time period before someone points out that you're insane.
Some folks might think I'm saying switch to Linux instead of just creating a fresh patch of systems to be virused. Smarter folks would realize that VMs with automated image rollouts would be a much better (and even OS agnostic) investment in the long run.
Is that PC hitting public facing stuff, or does it allow users to bring their own data? Then it should be hosted via VM then unless you're focusing on 3D graphics applications.
Next time they do a Hardware upgrade, you just roll out the VMs again and save virtually all the "support" cost of the rollout. Pays for itself after one or two upgrades. Doubly so if you've got a nasty malware infection since you already have the re-imaging process in place. With hardware supported virtualization standard now, it's kind of dumb to even not be using it...
Not the German Ministry of Education (Score:3)
The ministry of education of the federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern acted in the illustrated way. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a small state in the north east of Germany. The central auditing authority of that state (Landesrechnungshof) recalculated the effort and determined that the cost of the early replacement due to a virus infection was too expensive considering the alternatives.
The German ministry of education is placed in Berlin (which is also a federal state having its own minitry of education) and called "Bundersministerium für Bildung und Forschung" (engl. Federal Ministry of Education and Research).
On the bright side... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't understand what the problem is (Score:2)
Its school right? They have students right? While I don't think it would be good to go down the path of using what should be instructional hours to do maintenance on the school this one seems like there would be ways.
I have to assume there are some computer science, computing for business, personal business type courses where doing some operating system installs would be defensible as providing "useful background." So a couple class periods from those courses the students could be borrowed for the purpose
Computer Culling (Score:2)
2. Dump infected computers in trench
3. Shoot computers with machine guns
4. Cover computers with dirt
Problem solved.
Interesting solution (Score:2)
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A few cities. "Government" is not a single solid entity.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There a very few local municipals using Linux. Some are even moving away from Linux and back to Windows.
OSS is officially endorsed and favoured. But most of the stuff is still Windows.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Germany? (Score:5, Informative)
The original article is on the German federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which is a small state in the north east of Germany. It is not the central government in Berlin. I can understand if people find that confusing. However, there are 16 federal states. Every one of them has a ministry of education.
Furthermore, the German government replaced Windows for Linux in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but after the election of the present government, they changed it back, because they are conservative and neo-liberal and do not like this commie Linux stuff. Officially, they determined that the other Ministries were not able to share documentation, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used ODT and they used DOC. The fun fact here, ODT is mandatory for all government documentation (but obviously only on paper not in reality).
Re: (Score:3)