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Introducing Linux To Small CS Departments?
Erik Anderson asks: "I am a senior in the Computer Science program at a relatively small (2500 students) liberal arts college. Finally, after much pushing, we (the students) are going to be allowed to install Linux on one of the workstations in the advanced computing lab, and I have been chosen to install/maintain/admin/etc the box. What suggestions or advice would you have for distributions and/or software? This workstation will have some flavor of X installed, and will be used by many students. Disk quotas will need to be enforced and system security and data protection will be of utmost importance. This computer will be primarily used for network experimentation by the students and software development."
1. Go with a conventional, mainstream distro. Sure, Kondera MNU/Linux (or pick-an-esoteric-distro) might have cool packaging, but good luck finding people who know its ins and outs, or, for that matter, ensuring there's an upgrade path.
2. I'd strongly recommend either Red Hat or Debian. Those two seem to have the largest market presence in North America, and Red Hat has a fairly nice pay-for-support deal going. Debian appears to be more stable, but it's a matter of degree. Red Hat 7.0 really isn't as buggy as people are making it out to be. Stormix Technologies has a distro, Storm Linux, which is based on Debian and is exquisitely cool.
3. Do a default, out-of-the-box install first. Then get some good books on security (UNIX System Administrator's Guide, Maximum Linux Security, Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, etc.) and start locking down the box. Don't put it on the network until you're certain it's locked down tight enough for your purposes.
4. Document your installation process. You don't need to list every package that's installed; just start with your base install and detail the changes you made from there.
5. If you have to do something more than three times, write up a HOWTO for it. The HOWTO isn't for you; you already know how to do it, of course. But the people who come after you might not know how you did things originally, and leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of HOWTOs is manna from heaven.
6. Keep a logbook. Make a log entry when you install new software, when you uninstall software, when you have problems with DHCP, when you get the problems fixed. This kind of detailed tracking is invaluable. Make sure the logbook is kept in a reasonably safe place, and make sure it's written down--floppies can go bad, drives can crash, etc.
Integrate your account management into your NT domain or existing domain. There is a new paper somewhere on http://www.samba.org explaining how to do this for NT domains. Managing multiple accounts is a pain in the arse. If the system is virtually invisable to your system admins they will become very positive about linux.