Welcome Back!    

Hello. We in Technology hope your summer was just what the doctor ordered. For those of you unfamiliar with the Tech Gazette, it is a publication for faculty and staff meant to disseminate useful information to you regarding technology here on campus. Areas covered include, among other things, staff training, viruses, network policies, how-to's, interesting websites, and tech tidbits. You will be notified by e-mail when a new Gazette is available, and you can always access current, as well as past issues, via our school website, www.smes.org. Click on "Around Campus", click on "Technology", and select "Tech Gazettes".

Technology Training

A potpourri of courses will, once again, be offered throughout the year. We start off with PowerPoint, an especially useful software for those of you preparing for Back to School Night! The second offering this month is GradeQuick, the gradebook program used by US and now by MS faculty.

Accessing Your Folders Remotely

Students, faculty and staff have the ability to access their folders at school using FTP Internet protocol.  If you are an experienced Internet user and already familiar with using FTP, you can access your folder using the Quick Link on the resources pages or by typing FTP://206.135.101.8 (students) or FTP://206.135.101.25 (faculty/staff) in the URL.  You will be prompted for your user name and password and you will be able to navigate to your  folder on the S:Drive.  If you would like to use a program to assist you in retrieving and storing your files, you can download a program called FreeFTP using the Quick Link on the Resources page and install it on your computer.  The first time that you use it, you must fill in the following information:

FTP URL        206.135.101.25

User ID          your  SMES  logon ID

Password     your SMES password

Click on connect and you will be connected to the S:Drive folders.  Navigate to your folder listed in the FTP Site Files window, highlight the file that you want to transfer to your computer, and click receive.  The file will be transferred to your computer into the folder listed.  After you have completed working on your file, you must transfer your file back to your folder on the school network.  Highlight your file listed in the Your Files window and click send.  There is a status box in the lower left hand corner that displays messages about the status of your requests. 

When you are finished, click disconnect.   If you need additional assistance, please notify the Helpline at ext. 697 or type "help" in the "To" section of a new email.

A Word from Dr. Chuck...

(Chuck Jones is our venerable Mr. Fix-It in Technology)

Per the McAfee dictionary, a virus is “A computer program file capable of attaching to disks or other files and replicating itself repeatedly, typically without user knowledge or permission.”  The number one method of spreading viruses is through email.  Most of these viruses are in the form of a file attachment with an exe or vbs extension.  The second most prevalent method of spreading viruses is via floppy disks.

  St Margaret’s utilizes TrendMicro software to detect and remove viruses or delete documents that cannot be cleaned.  TrendMicro is automatically updated on a regular basis.

 Common misconceptions about viruses include:

• ·         “I never open an email from a stranger, so I don’t have to worry about getting a virus through email.”  The truth is, most email viruses come from someone you know.  The virus attaches to their email without them knowing or is sent out on its own to everyone in their address list.

•            “Since my computer has virus protection, it is automatically scanned and I therefore don’t have any viruses.” Your computer  may have had a virus before the anti virus software was installed or was infected by a new virus before an anti virus update was made.

•                    “I installed anti virus software at home so I’m now protected.”  New viruses are written every day.  Frequent virus updates are a must.

• ·         “Hoaxes cannot be damaging”.  One recent hoax advised people to delete a file that was part of the Windows operating system.

• ·         “With all this protection in place at SMES, I can use my Hotmail or AIM accounts without getting infected.”  Besides hogging network bandwidth (speed) from the rest of the community, these other email programs do not feed through TrendMicro. You must depend on the local machine for anti virus protection.  Workstations are only updated weekly.  
  If a computer has been off during the update period it may not have been 
  updated for longer than a week.

Through a combination of diligence and luck the St. Margaret’s network has thus far avoided any virus outbreaks and/or network shutdowns.  And, since email is by far the most likely method that could shut down our network, please only use St Margaret’s regular 
or Web Outlook for any email used over our network at school or 
via a dial-up.

Did You Know?:  TrendMicro detected and 
cleaned or removed 110 viruses from the 
SMES network over this past summer.