First, let me say that I don't think any of us really know what has led up to the issue. From this point on my views are merely speculative.

People in charge of technology should NOT be teachers. There is this movement in the state of Wisconsin that no matter what position there are in schools, the only truly qualified people to fill them are people who have come up the teacher ranks; because it is "education" Let's use this same logic to other things.

If schools need a doctor or nurse, the only person to fill this position should be a teacher?
If schools need an accountant/CPA, the only person to fill this position should be a teacher?
If schools need a plumber or electrician, the only person to fill this position should be a teacher?

Doing technology stuff now for over 16+ year, 5 of the last years in K-12, there is a severe disconnect between using technology in education and the understand on how technology works, and how to make it work safely and securely for education.

A router, switch, server, etc doesn't care where it is being used. The RFC's and IEEE standards in technology apply to everyone. Not only that, there is best practice. Often I see all of these overlooked. Why? there are many reasons but I think the most common reason is simply there are people "in charge" that simply do not have a clue on how technology works.

One example I have is simply this. We have some people who think that using passwords is a waste of time and students lose valuable learning time having to login with usernames and passwords.

Now, to the even blow average tech person this is stupid. Yet, when you have people who do not understand that they are participating in the real world with real world problems, you have them setting policy and standards that are in direct conflict of the standards that are already in place.

In the RFC's there are certain "well known" ports for services. Yet, time and time again, we have state level organizations who think it is more secure to choose port 564 for ssl traffic. Can it work, sure. Much like you "can" send a 70 mb file through email. Duh!

OMG! There's proof that anyone can make themselves sound bigger than they are on the Internet. You can write whatever you want. I KNOW that BK is way over his head. Maybe he believed his own qualifying words, but saying something doesn't make it real.

"Providing Metro Milwaukee with the computer solutions they require. Mithrax Networking, Inc. was formed in May 2002 by Brandon Keirns. He saw a growing gap between what businesses needed from their technology partners and what those partners were offering and providing. Armed with a technical background including an Engineering Degree from Milwaukee School of Engineering, certifications from Microsoft and Novell, and along with five years of hands on industry experience, Brandon Keirns determined to fill that gap and strive to make Mithrax Networking, Inc. become Milwaukee’s premier computer consulting company and technology partner to the area businesses.

Offering exceptional service at an affordable rate has helped propel Mithrax Networking, Inc. into the upper echelon of computer consulting firms. Contact us today to see how your business can benefit from Mithrax Networking, Inc. acting as your technology partner."

Perhaps Brandon Keirns has bit off more than he can chew--trying to be the lead IT in the school district while trying to operate his own business enterprise. Trying is not enough sometimes!

Better than whats going to happen when contract talks come up again.

I think the verizon idea is not something the taxpayers would like to fit the bill for.

First, I can understand why they can't get onto the website at school but can at home. From school they are going through the suspect servers and the internet connection may be down to keep unwanted traffic out during repairs. Second, if you can get in from outside, why doesn't the school board or who ever has a district credit card, scoot on over to the Verizon store this morning and get wireless hook ups? I am sure someone there could bargain a short term contract for emergencies. That way they could get each teacher a quick fix to get back to working in school instead of waiting to get home. I realize it wouldn't be perfect and files in servers still would be inaccessible but they could do the same work they are doing at home at school. Heck, give me the card and I'll go and get them set up.

bkeirns@janesville.k12.wi.us thats the format for most email addresses in the district first letter of first name then entire last name

There should be no way that a professional department would have this amount of downtime. "Roadmaster" said the name of the person in charge was Brandon Keirns. In just a few minutes of searching I found that name linked to http://www.mithraxnetworking.com/contact... which brags about helping a school system with their security. And just because someone such as Brandon has some certs like MSCE or whatever, doesn't mean they know squat. (I have 30+ years in IT). My whole impression while looking up Brandon is that he is someone who has the a good line of talk, but doesn't have the skills of an IT professional. But what do I know? heh

Imsmart2, there's not much point in their displaying e-mail addresses if their mail server is hosed like their other servers.
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Perhaps someone double-clicking on an e-mail attachment is also what started their problems, so they're purposely not displaying them instead of accidently not displaying them.

Only the best for the tax payers money! The school system will probably dump the whole system and have the tax payers buy all new equipment before it's all done. Someone should tell them now that chicken soup doesn't work on computer virus.

This is a massacre of the masses

Also glad to see the teacher went to the press...obviously the board wasnt doing anything....5 weeks...lol. Im in awe.

WOW! Are they having the kindergarden class rebuild the servers? What are they rebuilding anyways? This would never fly in the business world. As a former IT person...this is a joke. There is NO EXCUSE for this. Good thing this IT person doesnt work at some kind of emergency management place....wow.

A hardcore disaster recovery plan needs to be put into place immediately! Its unfortunate that most plans are created on a reactive basis rather than a proactive basis. IT should be 27/4, so working this weekend should cut the five week recovery time down to one.

The School Board won't list their email addresses on the website so they must want us to call them at home. Printing an email and putting a stamp on it?!? Certainly not!

http://www.janesville.k12.wi.us/sdj/scho...

Anyway, I plan on calling the commissioner and anyone else who'll pick up their phone and DEMAND that they listen to the people who elected them and get this Brandon Keirns, Doug Bunton, Tom Evert, and anyone else caught in the crossfire into a meeting and get some real answers.

Let's hope as Employees, Parents, and Taxpayers that someone is held accountable or at the very least the truth be known by more than the ones who are hiding it.

Just entered some late assignments and updated my students’ grades. One of the school board members said that, “children are getting a good education despite the problems” and that is because teachers are entering grades, attendance and reinventing lessons at home that are locked up in virtual outer space somewhere. If the district is expecting this to go on for at least another 5 weeks then the teachers union and the board really need to be negotiating and renegotiating the definition of the “work day.” The expectations for teachers need to be addressed clearly instead of teachers just “keeping it together” at our expense. Buenas noches.

haha

8 weeks!?!?!? Replace all those PeeCee's with Macintosh/Apple products. IT would be sitting like the Maytag Repairman.

Maybe it's time for Brandon to answer to the people.
I am not saying anything is his fault...but obviously, Doug Bunton doesn't have the answers.

IT Manager = Brandon Keirns

I'm drawing a blank, but it is Brandon can't be sure of the last name I want to say Masterson. He is the SON of an administrator. I believe she is a principal.
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Again, I would just like communication and questions answered. We as teachers don't know what is wrong, we don't know what will be available when. Will we EVER get our files back?
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I just brought home lesson prepping materials, sadly because I can get on Skyward from home so I could enter grades, but didn't bring home gradebook. Sorry kids. Why can I get on at home but NOT at school? Isn't it just a secure website?
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I honestly think there needs to be a board investigation into this. Anything that dramatically effects ALL the students through ALL their teachers for over two months needs investigating not just by administrators on the way out but by our elected officials who aren't trying to protect people.

Or do we have to file an open records request to find out?

WHO IS the IT manager?

Where is the new IT 'guru' in all this mess? Why is Doug Bunton addressing the School Board on a topic he obviously knows very little about?

I agree that this problem is clearly outside the scope of that IT Dept! Was nothing ever identified as a potential problem or was it just ignored by the district administration as a problem for future staff members to deal with since they are all on their way out. (Former IT manager, Dir of Human Services, Dr. Evert ....)

It seems to me that we either need to be hearing something from the IT manager and make him accountable for this mess OR allow Doug Bunton to take all the responsibility for problems that have to go waaaay further back than the six months the newbie has been on the job.

Maybe that’s the reason we haven't seen the IT manager either he's too scared to show up or Doug Bunton's too scared to have him show up.

I'd like some REAL answers from somebody that can give them!

And on the flip side...there should be an under-achieving, over-paid, IT guru concerned about keeping his job because he didn't anticipate and out-smart an "under-disciplined, under-achieving (in everything but his computer) Janesville School District student" who has made him look incompetent and cost the taxpayers big bucks.

I suspect that somewhere in Janesville, some under-disciplined, under-achieving (in everything but his computer) Janesville School District student is very self-satisfied and endlessly amused while savoring every word generated by the Gazette and those that comment here.

It's also possible they thought they had backups, but never ran a DR test so they never knew they were bad. It's the old IT story of the company that dutifully made it's backups everyday. Then one day they needed to restore and discovered all their backup files were blank. A backup alone is not enough. You have to test the process from time to time.

fbcoach- WOW, if this is all caused because the backups were pitched??? then I'd say that person should not have a job anymore. ALL the backups pitched? We keep the current day offsite and the rest of the daily backups in a safe with our monthly backups kept offsite. So if they don't have at least some kind of system (or even if they do have this kind of system) and all backups were gone, then that person does not deserve to be in IT anymore.

It's a shame that you have to spend your own time to do work that should be done while "at work".

Is it possible this is the result of having to continually cut the district budgets? I live in Madison (raised in Janesville) and I know every year they constantly try to decide what to cut from the budget to keep the taxes in line with the state law. This year we have a referendum on exceeding those state imposed limits and I suspect it will not pass. With this economy how could it?

In any case, this really sounds like a huge fubar from the start. Why haven't they restored from a good back-up? I wonder if they've never run a disaster recovery drill before. Or are they putting too little importance on the problem? Something doesn't seem right about 5 weeks to recover from a problem of this magnitude.

Good luck if your able to get your teaching files back.

I'm sitting here at Craig HS. Thought I'd try to get on Skyward because 75% of the system is fixed. Couldn't get on, so I'll have to try to do my grades from home. Why can I enter my grades from home but not school? I'd love to know.
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We also have a district server that contains ALL my lessons that I have developed over the years. I STILL cannot access it as I haven't been able to for the last 3 weeks. I have a personal back up of some, but not others. So, I'm remaking everything I teach for the last 3 weeks. Am I getting by? Yes. Is it as good as everything I have polished and perfected over the years? Absolute not, so kids suffer
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We have had almost ZERO communication from the ESC as to what is going on, when it will be fixed, what the problem is etc. etc. etc.
Supposedly communication is one of the main Studer points, I guess they ignore that when it suits them. Am I frustrated? Darn right I am!!
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I would rather have them shut down the entire system for 2 days and say no computers at all until Monday but then we'll be back up full than go 5 weeks with this mess. What is going to happen when the quarter ends in 3 weeks and we still can't put in grades?
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Lunch room rumor (note I told you its a rumor) has it that they had NO backups of skyward or other vital programs because the new head of IT through them out during the transition. I sure hope Mr. Bunton or one of the school board members looks into this.
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To those who complain, I'll more than make up the 5 minutes of "clock time" I spent typing this re-creating Thursday and Friday's lessons (that the district lost)tonight on my own time at home. For the record:
NOTHING IS BETTER AT CRAIG HIGH SCHOOL AS OF WEDNESDAY!!!!

Apparently they do not have any backups... it should take less than a day to completely wipe a server's hard drives and install from a known good backup. This is beyond ridiculous.

As a person related to someone who has done computer work and sales and repair for 17 years, you are darn right that even 8 hours is too long to be down. Time to revamp the IT department I would say. Put in good virus programs and run them every day if necessary!!

I'm floored. I'm an IT person as well and I know how long it takes to redo a server. While I realize they have 80 to deal with, another 5 weeks??? I wonder if the board's lack of IT understanding is why they are so acceptable to an additional 5 weeks to fix the problem. As someone else mentioned, I can't afford any downtime and have to schedule downtime after 10pm or on Sundays. Heck- I had a lighting strike that took out the server, router, switch, cable modem, 3 pcs and 7 monitors- I had everything back up in 4 hours (with the exception of the damaged pcs). How so quick? because I was prepared and had plan in place for recovery. I have had a virus situation once before on a bigger network than the one I'm on now and we still had our 4 servers+ 200pcs cleared within a day. All because we had plans in place.
I don't know how you can have 4 weeks with no resolution let alone another 5 weeks.

Stottler wants school staff and parents to come to the school board instead of the press???? I don't think so. At least in the paper, the community gets to find out what incompetence is going on in the school district. Doug Bunton should have been reporting this fiasco to the school board all along.

As for the IT staff, other than the newly hired top IT person all they can do is try and clean up the mess their boss caused when he came barreling in the district and started changing things up without taking the time to really study the school districts computer system.

Would this be happening in any large corporate business? Of course not!

This is utterly preposterous. I've noted before that I've worked in corporate IT for Fortune 100 companies, and even eight days of continuous downtime would be impossible to contemplate. Eight weeks would put them out of business. I'm left speechless.

Anything over 1 day for that many servers is uncacceptable. When a virus hit the company I work for, with over 100 locations and servers globally, our system was disrupted for less than half a day.

It does seem that the District's IT department is in over it's head, and the experts that they have brought in to help may be over theirs as well.

This would NEVER happen in the business world. Maybe Mr. Studer can help out in IT, too!

Why would the Government IT people be in a hurry to fix a problem that their jobs depend on? They have no incentive to fix anything timely or protect against these things. It is not like others here in mention where they are accountable to a profit center like a business is. Everything government does it does this way. This incident will likely give them a bigger budget and a larger staff to do nothing with. Contract it out to a firm who is responsible to a budget, let the free market and profit driven incentives fix this issue once and for all.

If they had a good IT staff, not even great, GOOD, this would never happen.

I work in IT and I can guarantee any of our systems are down longer than 24 hours, I've got some 'splaining to do.....

http://digg.com/security/School_district... digg it the world should know about this

Janesville66-Why did they write this story in the first place? Because it is news. If I was the reporter the question on loss of data would be one of the first questions I would ask. This issue had been swept under the rug until a teacher went to the Gazette. Again, I plan on going to the teachers and the administration with my questions, but why isn't the district or school board addressing the situation? If it didn't happen let us know. A good guess is they might not know if anything was lost.

andiwonderwhy....1 week? Where I work this would have never happened in the first place, but heads would roll at 1 hour of downtime. We can't even schedule a planned 1/2 hour of downtime in the middle of the day. Any planned downtime takes place on Sunday.

Seems to me if sensitive information is in breech than god forbid we keep files on paper it the stuff made from pulp. Anybody remember this stuff we call paper? It puts people to work in forestry and mills...or we spend money in IT and put people to work in jobs that have no resource produced just fear of security. Take the good with the bad I guess.

There definitely needs to be a change in leadership and a new head of the IT department brought in--this guy is obviously in WAY over his head.

First off: this should not have happened, so why did it and then prevent it from happening again.
Secondly: Why is this taking so long to fix? If this was a business or corporation this would have been fixed probably within a week. If it is taking so long, maybe the should fire the current people and hire some of the students to fix it....they would probably have it fixed within a few days.

They do not want to be forced to pay for Identity theft protection for it's students and staff. If they can somehow hide this under the rug.

as I said... other opinions and that is what confuses the layperson. :)

I'd be worried that student and employee information has been explioted to sources that shouldn't of had access What the district doesnt tell you is that if a virus gets in depending on the type of virus it can relay back information to other computers in the world for illegal purposes.

ame8736 - There is no product which is best for everyone, much the same as there is not a home security system that is best for all homes. To choose the correct program you must take several factors into consideration. Things like: its processor (CPU), amount of memory (RAM), internet usage, amount of time you are willing to spend to keep the system protected, etc. It is always best to speak with an expert; www.YourOwnHelpDesk.com is a local company that primarily sells their services and advice, not hardware and software.

All of that being said, Kaspersky, BitDefender and Norton are at the top of most lists.

ame8736, you will find a million opinions on the best virus software. I have used them all--literally. This is the best I have found for your home: http://free.avg.com/download-avg-anti-vi.... It is free and they send out updates almost daily. I have found applications such as Norton are very resource intensive (they slow your system down). I know there will be other people that will disagree with me, but this is my personal experience. I've worked with computers for 20 years. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur). Also, for your home, you should also be using both Spybot AND AdAware and you will be golden.

Why does the gazette have to do the investagating, some comments just crack me up. if you want to know if personal info has been taken you would think you would call your self and find out if you were so concerned

Sorry, 8 weeks to address this issue is about 7 1/2 weeks too long. How did it happen in the first place? I haven't heard of any super virus infecting any other businesses or schools in this time period. I would like to get some assurance from our school that there hasn't been a loss of personal data on the school districts students as well. More investigation is needed by the Gazette.

If any of you have any computer sense at all you will understand that it takes time to fix one of these issues, (not to mention that the JSD has 80 of them)..
even the best Security software available has FLAWS.
Not everything is 100% fool proof... If they would not just rely on PC's and broaden their OS Platforms, they could reduce (not eliminate) virus attacks. I use to be a RELIGIOUS PC user, but after having to rebuild my home network several times.. I went out (after some research) and Bought an MACINTOSH, did it solve my problems??? almost all of them ,, The only thing I have issues with "Apple" programs are ...not enough of them,, My daughters have my old PC's and I still have to use them occasionally to do some programs... WITH ADDED SECURITY programs.. (by the way, my MAC has yet to be infected)

Actually I am contacting the teachers. I thought it was a good question for other parents to consider so I posed it rhetorically.

Their phone doesn't work.

tjncj - why are you asking the gazette and people on a gazette discussion board about mid-term grades that were just sent out. Wouldn't it make more sense to call your childs teachers and find out directly from the source.

ame8736,

Not to worry, just make sure your computers, including servers are running virus protect.

Any is better than none and make sure that the virus definitions are updated regularly, daily works for me.

IT people make good money

Now that is a pretty sad I.T. department if it is going to take that long to get them back up. Of course that is what you get when pay so little.

Don't believe the district when it says this is NOT affecting classes. That is NOT true! What about computer classes that rely on files on the network? The grades are absolutely NOT up to date because my kids teachers do not want to put in grades at home since they have not been assured they won't get the virus there. The adminstration has not been forthcoming with information until the teacher at Craig finally spoke up. Now, Ms. Stottler doesn't like the way the board handled Evert's retirement...well, that's what the members of each school have felt for a long time. The people that should know don't or aren't involved in decision or updates.

Has the question been asked if the virus was accidentally introduced to their system, or was it maliciously introduced?

So are the grades in the system that parents have access to updated and correct? How about mid-term grades mailedout recently? I have the feeling they may not reflect current status if teachers are waiting to input them in the computer system. Can someone address these questions?

If a virus can knock out this big of a computer system what hope does the general public have in not getting a virus. And which virus protection is the best one? We have heard that McAee is best. others say Norton. Who are you to listen to