SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation 621
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
Would cancer research been a better use? (Score:1, Interesting)
I understand wanting to find aliens, but it would have been nice if this had been for the folding@home project. Then again, maybe once we find the aliens we'll discover they have a cure for cancer. It's really hard to know which one should take precedence.
Oops (Score:5, Interesting)
Tone of TFA (Score:2, Interesting)
Little taken aback by the tone of the write up in the local news and the quote by the superintendent, "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research, [..] however, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."
The whole article implies that SETI is some out there kookie search for aliens and in no way a scientific endeavor that has at times been funded in part by the US government. That's local news coverage for you though.
Re:Oops (Score:2, Interesting)
I also did the same thing with rosetta@home
Coming from Linux and OSX i always thought that low priority processes couldn't slow down the system too much and i was right. It works good on my Mac and on my servers. I never notice the program is crunching.
On Windows it's another story. Those multiple cores machines at work became very slow. Even if you restrict the rosetta to one core it will manage to slow the system considerably.
Re:Would cancer research been a better use? (Score:3, Interesting)
The aliens probably wouldn't help with a cancer cure. Consider what would happen if another substantial cause of death were eliminated. Lifespans would be extended beyond our unusually long lives now. The world's population is already too high, and growing beyond the unsustainable level. While it's nice to think we can get rid of something that causes pain and death, pain and death are part of life. If you reduce the death rate, you'll have to reduce the reproduction rate.
I'm sure the next effort would be to identify and control the "grow old" gene. They already know how old age works, but they'd want to control it. Ok, so you stop the aging process, so people live for 100 years as if they're in their 20's and 30's. Great. I'd hope we have a whole lot of new planets to extend to, because sure as hell this one will be used up quick.
Re:$1 Million... Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
it ran as a screen saver
However it might have ran, it certainly didn't 'save screens.' Back in the day I saw many many CRTs with their phosphors permanently 'burned' by the SETI@Home display:
http://blog.sherweb.com/wp-content/uploads/seti_home_screen_l.gif [sherweb.com]
I used to advise people running SETI@Home to turn off their CRTs.
Re:5,000 machines, US$1M (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's say (pulling number out of ass) being busy vs idle uses an additional 25 Watts. They're saying it happened over 9 years. 25*24*365*9/1000 = 1971 KiloWatt Hours per machine. At $0.10 per KWH, that's a match. So then we fight over whether it's really a 25 Watt difference, really happened for 9 years, what the school actually pays per KWH, etc.
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Interesting)
It isn't that he was using more, or even less, electricity by running SETI@Home. The fact that he was using government electricity for non-governmental purposes is the problem. It is no different than hooking up a hose to a county fire hydrant to fill your personal swimming pool. You benefit, they pay.
SETI@Home as a background process probably does not significantly slow down the machine for the typical user. They never notice the lost cycles. So it isn't like you really slowed down the responsiveness of the machines.
But there is the consideration of whether the machines were running (switched on) when they normally would not have been. If it would normally be off instead of in screen saver, it is 100% waste, from the county point of view.
SETI (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't intend to troll but to get a response.
Seriously, I don't believe in aliens beyond movies, and I don't understand the interest about this program. I'd like to know why would someone install this, can some users tell me about it?
(But please no conspiracies)
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, assuming the district had a policy in place to shutdown unneeded systems at night, and assuming he instead configured SETI to run all night, they yes, there would have been a significant power draw. Or, if he had SETI set to run at 100% and prevent idle modes, perhaps (assuming all the PCs supported a low power state). If it doesn't support sleep states (most computers in 2003 didn't, or were not configured for it if they did) then on is on and off/sleep is off, than that's about the only differences.
SETI uses very little HDD resources, and set to run in standby only modes automatically suspending, with reasonable CPU limits, and considdering schools use warranties on the systems they don't lease anyway, there's little technical reason to believe SETI increased the rate of system failure. Maybe if he tweaked them to run at full out 100% CPU, and chose bad settings for user mode interactions he could have run into some heat issues, but if a retail/business PC can't run at 100% CPU for extended periods, that's a warranty issue anyway...
I don't buy this. Years of running it, and noone noticed? No, they;re using this as an excuse to fire him on some other issue, probably a personal one, that they can't otherwise fire him for, and leveraging SETI as a counter to any wrongfull dissmissal suit he might otherwise file (which pretty much guarantee's he'll HAVE to countersue at this point...
Another case of a school system loosing millions of taxpayer dollars fighting frivilous suits.
Re:Some figures don't quite add up... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Interesting)
From TFA, the figure of $1.2 to $1.6 million dollars counts lost electricity, the cost of replacing something like 2,400 procesors ruined by running 24x7 at 100% utilization, the cost of labor to uninstall the software (apparently it doesn't have an uninstall option the way he has it installed), auditing the systems, redoing all his sloppy wiring, etc.
They spent $15,000 having 5 different companies come in to do audits to try and figure out why CPUs were at 100% utilization. Apparently the first 4 companies have never heard of the task manager. At those rates, I'm not shocked they figure it will cost over 1 million dollars to audit the 5,000 boxes and fix everything.
I get billed out at over $100/hr when I do consulting work. But even I can't believe it costs $15,000 to look in the damned task manager and see SETI is tying up the CPU.
Sounds like over-reaction to me (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know all the details of this but a decade or so ago I was a (volunteer) administrator of the IT system at our local rural school district. Sometimes I'd take computers home to install software so I could play with the kids while the software installed instead of sitting on my ass (for free) at the (empty) school and do it. Besides, they locked the schools up and wouldn't give me a key.
I discovered that the kids could find porn so used a proxy and some regexp filters to try to keep porn at bay. But it turned out that the kids could find porn faster than I could block it so I started grepping the logs for the seven bad words you can't say on television and then adding those sites. Then I started making headway. The HS math teacher was involved in this too. We'd see a suspicious site in the log, check the site for content and if it was porn we'd block it using a regexp expression. Simple and cheap.
But that took time... so I'd add them at home remotely (everything, including the routers, was on Linux boxes that I built and installed) but the teacher who was helping was observed after working hours going through thi process. Unfortunately the person watching thought the teacher was surfing porn (instead of checking sites for content) and turned him in. Quite the brouhaha. One parent was incensed that we used the students to "find porn". Good grief!!!
That incident very nearly cost the teacher his job but I attended the school board meeting that addressed the issue and explained what we were doing and why (no money in the budget for servers, software, etc.). The teacher kept his job and we got to buy some blocking software to work with the proxy and I didn't have to spend an hour every night checking logs. One problem solved.
The administrator in this particular case probably faced some of the same issues as I did. So they found school property at his house (they would have at mine too) and are investigating him for downloading porn (they would have probably done the same to me). I think getting the cops after him was overkill.
$1M in expenses for running SETI is ridiculous. However according to the newspaper report from his home town he was instructed by a former school district administrator to remove the software and did not. Of course, that admin might just be trying to cover his own ass. But at least someone knew SETI was on those boxes prior to the new Superintendent taking office.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Interesting)
RTFA It says in the article that "the software was authorized by a previous administration". He did ask (supposedly) and was allowed.
By running all of the school machines at 100% load the school used more power and network then they would have otherwise and so this situation did "cost" them. The fact that he was given approval will probably shield him from any legal action regardless of the 'change of administration'. Where they got the $1M number I'm guessing is straight out of their posteriors but who knows over 10 years what the real delta probably was.. they are just laying the groundwork for a potential lawsuit, restitution or just a cooler news headline.
My favorite part of the article is the fact his wife sounds like she thought he was *directly spending all of his time at work searching for aliens. He should probably tell his wife how his fleet of software toys work. Gave me a good chuckle which is always worth the article read.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the more complete article [eastvalleytribune.com] on the story, "Former administrators, including former superintendent Joyce Lutrey, knew about the software and told Niesluchowski to remove it" and "[h]e assured them he had removed it". So, I'm guessing, that's why "I'm sorry and I'll remove it now" wouldn't have been an adequate response, even if SETI@Home was the only problem issue, and there wasn't the porn issue, and the issue of the school equipment at his house apparently being used in his home-based business.
Re:$1 Million... Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if the problem wasn't him trying to prove aliens existed, schools can be weird on religious grounds - is that a subtext here?
No, the problem was that he was stealing a lot of idle processing power to pursue a personal hobby. Maybe if he had gotten somebody to sign off on this it wouldn't have been an issue.
Re:Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I am, and my citation is personal experience AND testable results which can be quickly verified on your computer.
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/redelm/ [sbcglobal.net]
Run this. Right now. One for EACH core of your CPU. Idle process/nice 19. Do it on Linux (livecd works) and Windows.
Try using Firefox when you completely set it up. Please report the results.
Re:baaaaloney (Score:2, Interesting)
That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
So many organizations allow computers to remain on overnight so it might have been electricity that would have been wasted anyway.
As with the poster above, I think the porn and misappropriated hardware at home is the sticking point. The SETI at home is just icing on the cake.
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and ...
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Interesting)
His wife says that in TFA. In the more complete, newspaper-sourced story, the district says that a the problems had come to the previous administrator, who had ordered the software removed, and that the tech supervisor who is now under investigation claimed, at the time, to have removed it as directed. Now, as far as I know there is no public concrete evidence of who is telling the truth here, but its worth noting that the wife could be telling the truth as she knows it and the district could be telling the truth, the only thing required for that to be true is for the tech supervisor to have lied to his wife to make himself look persecuted when the trouble started coming down, and for her to trust him. And how hard is that to believe?
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Interesting)
Really?
SETI@HOME is doing intense math calculations using as much CPU as it can. Starry Screen Server is not.
Suppose someone left that hydrant running?
Suppose the person who is in charge of the fire hydrants decided to use one to fill his own pool
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's anything at all like Queensland state schools when I worked there, some PHB would've seen there were no classes and eyed the IT department... yeah. I was expected to work during school hours only. "You're still here? Go home, we can't pay you." The IT motto when I worked at EQ was "doing everything on nothing". Meanwhile, four hundred million dollars on a new stadium for the state's capital city? No problem.
Seriously? Open text editor, write small shell script, tell group policy to run script on all machines... done. If however the school is running 5,000 machines with no imaging, network booting, group policy or central user storage - which I find bloody unlikely in this day and age - yeah, somebody should definitely be getting fired. Just maybe not the guy in the article.
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I read it sounded like he had set very tight screen-saver policies to maximize his SETI@home time. It was so bad that teachers using a whiteboard application in class would turn around for a couple minutes to explain something, and SETI@home would kick in and hose the whiteboard app. The only way to get the whiteboard back at that point was a reboot - likely a buggy app itself be the teachers should be able to do their jobs. The point of a school is not to "win" on SETI@home, but to teach kids their three R's. It sounds like this guy was becoming a significant hindrance to that.
The point is, he had no business putting SETI@home on his or anybody elses computer. He is actually the person who should be removing that application and any other unapproved software from teacher's machines whenever he finds them. He should have been configuring the computers to minimize operational costs by setting reasonable idle and sleep policies. Someone said they did not want him turning the machines off at night, well that's fine, sleep mode lets them wake instantly and it cuts the power consumption to almost nothing.
That's what his job was - efficient management of the school network. Not only was he not doing his job, he was doing the exact opposite of his job, and doing it for notoriety among the SETI@home community.
I know why (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll bet that you were running it on some of the older P4 machines with HyperThreading. If you have HT turned on, idle processing will NEVER work right under Windows, and it will cause the types of slowdowns you saw. (I experienced the exact same thing with Folding@home when I installed it on a P4 w/ HT.)
Here's why: Hyperthreading uses a single core, but presents itself to the OS as multiple processors. If you run power-hungry software that uses 100% of the CPU time, it actually shows up to Windows as using 50% time on two processors. Add in something that runs in idle mode (like the @home programs), and they see 50% unused processor time - so they go ahead and fill up that other 50% - which puts the processor's ACTUAL usage to 200% - causing everything to run at half speed.
Yes, this is an over-simplified and not-exactly-right explanation, but it's close enough to the observed reality to suffice.
In any case, turn off hyperthreading and run it again, and you'll have no, or very little, slowdown.
Re:Oops (Score:4, Interesting)
According to my math after using a Kill-A-Watt, running Folding@Home on my PS3 would cost me roughly $10/month in energy costs.
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say neither article is any good. TFA is very scarce on details and put too much emphasis on "looking for ET", while yours has some pretty silly claims. The picture of the lack of cable management is rather unremarkable (sure, it could be improved, but it's hardly a huge mess: most of the wiring looks fine, it's just that large bundle to that one switch with lots of extra wire hanging down), and the "firewall" story is bull (SETI@home probably requires a hole out, not in, which already suggests that the network setup is paranoid if they default to blocking all unknown outgoingports). They also make it sound like SETI@home is malware, with the "hard to uninstall" stuff. And the dollar estimates are clearly crap too: it doesn't take millions of dollars to clean out the same program out of all your computers. If your setup is any good, you can just reimage them. If it isn't, just make a script to do it for you and slap it onto a dozen USB drives that you can plug in and out.
Did he deserve to be fired? Probably. Should he have installed SETI@home on those computers? Nope. But all this crappy media spin and criminal charges stuff is way over the top. So he took some stuff home and downloaded some porn, fire him and move on.
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, but I think that the school district refusing for the last 3 years to allow their employees to institute a policy of turning most machines off automatically between 6pm and 6am is a big part of the problem. If they had allowed this, your question would have been mooted.
This is not about energy consumption - this is about a school board member who wanted to polish her image at election time.
Re:But how is it a crime? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a better source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html [azcentral.com]
Be sure to read the comments on that article (and other similar articles) as well. It is obvious that this is all political. They guy's "crime" was neither that he ran SETI, nor that he took computers home for repair. It's that he occupied a position that Birdwell wanted to fill with one of her family members.
Re:He also had equipment from the school at his ho (Score:3, Interesting)
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence.
This is quite common practice in lots of schools. Maybe the guy wanted to investigate problems with the computer or install new needed software in the comfort of his home?
Of course, the bitch that wants to fire him in order to put her own crony into his position isn't going to tell that to the media...
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Interesting)