Watercooling: You're doing it wrong

I still don't know every part of the system because.. well I think its a mixture of the fact that it is a complex network structure and the fact that there is no documentation. But that's okay since some teachers work there long enough to know some facts I can "harvest" from them and bake a nice knowledge cake with it (aww what a charming analogy).

Every week there is a new surprise for me. And I don't mean minor surprises like that only every third workstation have BIOS passwords or that some teacher-only workstations have Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and viruses on them, no I mean something really surprising.

For example I was trying to physically see every switch so I would know in what conditions they were.

So every floor should have a switch rack that connects all the rooms of that floor with the main server in the basement. I mentioned before that there is no documentation about what port of the switch is connected to what room but that's not what I was going after this time.

All switch racks were normal, in good conditions and locked except for this ONE rack in the second floor I just couldn't find. After interrupting several classes in order for me to see if this classes have the switch rack somewhere in the back I didn't find anything. The only rooms I skipped were the toilets - who would ever put switch racks in toilets, I thought...

I entered one of the boy's toilets and was surprised to find what I was looking for -> a switch rack with broken handles (locks) that could be opened and tempered with by every guy in this school.

and it looks like this ->
 

Even the best security system has no chance against the janitor

I couln't belive my eyes when I saw the logs of the DHCP server.

Line after line I saw iPhones, Laptops and other mobile devices requesting (and receiving) IP addresses. We do have a WLAN but its secured pretty good. In fact you have to authenticate yourself with a certificate and AD username/password until the access points allow you to connect. I didn't think that the students (ages 11 to 19) figured out how to do that with their smartphones so I had to research a bit more where these devices got in.

I figured that the connections must have come from students of the university which is right across the street - but how.

After researching and reading logs from all the access points (to figure out if one of them is not configured properly) I went for a bottle of Coke which is next to the server room in the basement.
On my way there I noticed that one of the cleaning ladies was surfing from her private notebook. The thing is that only teachers and students have AD (Active Directory) access and so they couldn't have one. I asked her if she had a personal internet stick or how she was surfing. She couldn't answer - even if she would have understood my language she probably wouldn't have been able to give me an answer so I took a look on my own and saw that she was connected to an access point called "Netgear"... I now knew that there was something really fishy.

All she could tell me was that the janitor had something to to with it so I asked him about this mysterious WLAN and he said that (hold tight) - in order for him and the other non-teacer-staff to surf the web he connected a netgear router he bought to one of the ethernet cables in the PC room.

That was it - the complex certificate-based WLAN access security method was bypassed by the janitors encryptionless and not-at-all configured Netgear router so him and the other staff can check their Facebook accounts.

This also enabled EVERY PERSON in a 50m radius to connect into the school without a password and had access to poorly configured printers, network shares and all of our servers. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry and all I could think of way "yep.. this is really going to be an interesting job"

Change is imminent

I just took over the system administration of this school a couple months ago and one of the first things I thought when I was introduced in the running system was "This is gonna be interesting"

When I took over the system I had no idea what I was getting in to. There was NO documentation. Nothing, not even a paper with a pencil-drawn network map or something. I got the Hostnames of the School PCs by looking into the bare dhcp config file where this was once hardcoded.

The serverroom looks like a wine cellar with water stains on the floor and made out of clay bricks. In this room are the main switches which are also not documented - no numbers, no descriptions, nobody knows if  a port is used on the other end or not. In the summer I'll have to do that myself so I can do some debugging if a PC somewhere in the house has a network related problem.

The main server (running freeBSD) has some good hardware pieces but someone ordered it in a normal case and so the case was put on the bottom of the server rack (standing there looking like some desktop pc that was placed in the rack)

In the summer when nobody is around I'll change this system completely and bring some order into this chaos. I fought weeks until someone found the root password to the main Server which hosts DHCP, DNS, WEB, Active Directory, Samba and some VMs.

But the system is so unstrutured right now I couldn't even tell if someone broke into the school network.

so you see.. this is gonna be interesting..