As soon as River Dell high school students returned to school, one grade in particular was met with a huge debacle. When students began turning their computers on after their ten-day break, one by one students realized something was wrong. Apps weren’t opening and the internet wasn’t connecting. Some tried running updates, others tried restarting. Nothing worked.
Freddy Tineo of the technology department spoke about the issue. “Certificates were not updated, so that’s why it happened. [Students’] responsibility with having a laptop is to check for updates and to run them. Basically, freshmen don’t run any updates. This is what happens when students don’t run any updates.”
But what were the reactions of the affected freshmen? Kai Okawachi, class of 2027, shared his perspective. “The computer stopped loading the software right in the middle of class, and reloading it didn’t work. I felt annoyed and a little frustrated. I went into tech and I didn’t really understand what the tech people did, but they managed to fix it.”
Ms. McGinley’s Language and Composition class in particular was heavily affected by the computer trouble. “It was very strange. Only my freshman class was affected. One of my freshmen students said ‘they were loaning out laptops like pizzas down there,'” mentioned Ms. McGinley.
After students brought their devices to tech, the tech support staff had to reimage each individual laptop.
“Reimaging is refreshing the entire computer. It’s getting new certificates, new software, with everything updated within our network. If you go out of this network and you don’t anything updated, then you might have an issue,” said Mr. Tineo.
It seemed that only the freshmen body at River Dell was affected. A plausible factor for why this could be was that their laptops all came from the middle school. Instead of getting a brand new laptop at the start of their high school career, students brought over their middle school laptops.
“They got kind of caught up in an interesting situation where I think it had to do with when they started school or whatever. There’s different versions of applications that auto-update and it just seems like that particular class had a magical version number of the application that didn’t automatically update,” said March Wachter, Chief Information, Technology and Infrastructure Officer.
It was found out that this update was sent out particularly due to a bug in an updated version of Dyknow.
“So what happened was, the Dyknow company, they have this application that the teachers use to monitor their classroom, and they put out a version that was a part of the auto-update. It seemed that more than half the people got that version–and that version was broken. They admitted to it months after when we asked why things weren’t working properly, and the only way to fix it was to actually reimage it, that was the quickest way. We tried to fix it remotely, but it didn’t work,” added Mr. Wachter.
Though the new year had a rough start, all malfunctioning laptops were fixed and the freshmen returned to their normal school day.
