Education | Mount Pleasant Independent School District

Adonis 1000 gets an “A” from the Mount Pleasant Independent School District

BACKGROUND

The Mount Pleasant Independent School District is a K-12 school system that encompasses about 5,000 students and 900 employees spread across nine campuses. The district is fully accredited by the Texas Education Agency and incorporates involvement from parents, civic organizations, industry and local citizens to provide the best educational opportunities possible for its students.

OPPORTUNITY

Members of the Mount Pleasant Independent School District’s technology staff were finding network management to be exceedingly time consuming using Microsoft Active Directory®. Misconfigurations were common, and in order to track errors down, administrators had to scroll through and scrutinize multiple pages of event logs. Additionally, network downtime was as issue due to the instability of the windows servers. Windows-based DNS/DHCP solutions are inherently insecure due to their underlying operating system, as well as the fact that they use an older version of BIND that is open to zero day exploits. Exhausted from battling with a network that was not only error-prone but also prone to attack, the District decided to look into adopting an enhanced network solution.

SOLUTION

Dissatisfied with their software-based system, Mount Pleasant School District chose to implement an appliance-based solution developed using a hardened OS. Network engineers assessed several appliances and settled on the Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Appliance from BlueCat Networks. Adonis is a purpose-built, hardened and optimized network infrastructure appliance with an integrated firewall to thwart security breaches. Services unrelated to DNS have been stripped from the operating system, and Adonis uses the industry-standard BIND 9.x, incorporating additional security measures to stop zero-day/denial of service attacks such as cache poisoning and other network threats.

The appliance’s iron-clad, hardened OS appealed to the team, as did Adonis’ advanced error-checking capabilities. Even the smallest error with BIND can cause a critical stop in DNS functionality, leading to crippling system downtime. The Adonis Data Checker is the most advanced BIND error checking system available today, analyzing DNS/DHCP data’s syntax and interdependencies, as well as pinpointing errors in a configuration before deployment. Whether the errors are syntactical or logical, Adonis detects them before they become critical issues or initiate a chain reaction of failures.

IMPACT

Administrators now catch errors before they become problems. Users error-check name server configurations and IP allocation in real time, prior to deployment, thereby effectively avoiding the syntax and logical errors that used to lead to business disruptions. Noe Arzate, Systems Administrator and Network Security Specialist at Mount Pleasant Independent School District remarked, “It’s so easy to troubleshoot! We can check for misconfigurations on the fly”.

Adonis’ user friendly interface and wizard-driven setup and deployment were an added bonus for the District’s network specialists already accustomed to using Windows. Administrators already familiar with UNIX, Windows, or Linux environments easily integrated Adonis into their existing Active Directory environment, using a simple wizard to step through the process. The team then went on to build complex DNS/DHCP configurations with ease, using additional wizards available within the Adonis Management Console.

Arzate maintains that “Its been a good experience thus far and looks like it’s getting better”. System administrators also referenced increased network reliability, more efficient change management, and reduced support costs since switching to Adonis. These benefits combine to drive better ROI for the school, and free up staff and budget that can be redirected towards servicing its students.