Teach42

A couple of days ago, I was working on my wife’s computer when things started to go… wrong. Horribly wrong. It’s a Windows XP machine and it began to go into an RPC loop, where the computer starts up and shuts down within a minute. It smelled suspiciously like a worm, the Blaster worm in particular. I admit it, I’m much more careless with my own equipment than I am with the school’s computers. I hadn’t backed up for a very long time, nor had I kept my anti virus up to date. In short, I did everything that I warn my teachers against doing.

I started off doing a few Google searches and quickly found directions for removing Blaster. Pretty cut and dry, easy stuff. However, I quickly found that although the computer display the primary symptom of Blaster, it didn’t display ANY of the secondary symptoms. There were no changed registry entries, nor were there any suspicious processes running. When I ran the fix file that Norton released, it couldn’t find any traces of Blaster.

Peculiar to say the least. I expanded my sphere of research. Unfortunately, nearly every source that I could find related to my primary symptoms all pointed me to the Blaster virus. That didn’t help me at all. I began a post on the Experts-Exchange where I described the problem and asked for input. If you aren’t familiar with Experts-Exchange, it’s a subscription site that has an incredible user base. If you can’t find your answer in the archives (and you’ll probably be able to), you’ll almost definitely get someone to respond to your post with an answer. I’ve found it to be well worth the money.

Of course, nobody seemed to be too helpful with this one. One person did suggest that I do a repair of Windows XP which sounded like a good idea. It took a few hours, and unfortunately didn’t help the situation at all. I tried several more ideas but at this point I was pretty darn sure that I was going to have to reformat. That’s not such a terrible thing, but I hadn’t backed up the computer yet! Quickly my primary problem changed from fixing the computer to just getting my data off of it. I couldn’t get windows to burn a CD or to recognize an external drive. Networking was completely gone, so I couldn’t connect to another computer. I was getting pretty close to the end of my rope when I decided to do a little brainstorming with a colleague.

I described the problem to Jon and he suggested that I try to load up another operating system on the computer and then use it to copy the files off of there. Another operating system? Brilliant! I had a copy of Knoppix laying around, so I popped it in the CD drive and booted it up. Instantly, I had a fully functioning Linux machine with a wireless connection and a CD burner. After several more Google searches to address a few problems (how do I see the hard drive, how do I mount up a network sharepoint, how do I copy files back and forth easily), I was rolling.

Right now I’m in the process of backing up all of my important files to one of our servers. I could just as easily have burned them to CD, or moved them to a key chain drive. I’m not going to lie and say that it was incredibly simple, but all of the answers were out there, just waiting to be discovered.

In order to solve my problem, I used Google searches, web sites, bulletin boards, colleagues and instant messaging. There was no single source of information that provided me with the information I needed to accomplish what I needed to, but by combining multiple sources of incomplete information, I was able to find a solution.

These are the skills that it is imperative for our students to learn. They may not become computer technicians, but the same skills apply to nearly any walk of life that requires individual thought. You wouldn’t need these skills if you were working on an assembly line, but you would if you were designing one. Or if you were working on a car. Or if you were a lawyer researching a case. Or if you were a doctor trying to diagnose something elusive. Or if you were a businessman trying to get an edge on the competition.

Or if you simply want to figure out a way not to lose those digital pictures that haven’t been uploaded to Flickr yet.

The answers are out there. It’s up to us to teach our students that they have the ability to find them.

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