http://www.switched.com/2008/03/31/11-year-old-takes-over-as-schools-network-admin/Seeing as our high school network hijinks pretty much led to semi-permanent suspension, our barren hearts were actually warmed by the story of 11-year-old Jon Penn, who has been in charge of his elementary school's 60-machine network since last year. The previous network administrator at the Arkansas school simply up and left, leaving the IT systems in shambles -- and in the hands of Jon's mom, the school librarian. Jon's since scrubbed the aging Windows 98 machines of their accumulated viruses and spyware, and he's installed a firewall and virus / spam filter to keep things clean while he works out a plan to move to Windows 2000 and centralized system management. Right now though, Jon's got his hands busy doing everything from fixing everything from paper jams to revising server configurations, and it sounds like he's having a ball -- he says he's been testing out virtualization products lately, and he's studying up for A+ technician certification this summer. Looks like school's a lot more fun when you're running the show, no?No means to assert bragging rights or anything, but I was doing much more than this kid at age 11. I would analyze network packets between ad-hoc networked Windows XP and 98SE computers, spiff up my system the manual way through the registry and startup configurator. Spyware and viruses? Only a joke for the ignorant and misinformed. Long gone are those days of running Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy in harmony. Oh, and I believe my favorite thing to do back then was to install Windows updates, mainly service packs. I remember on Christmas Eve 2002 staying up all night for XP Service Pack 1 to download (dialup) and install so I could play with it after Santa brought me the goodies.
Man, those were some good times.
