Slashdot Mirror
Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs?
Benanov asks: "I'm doing a literature review on the Feasibility of Linux for a public-access lab (i.e. not Computer Science students at a university but instead the entire student body would have a login), and I haven't found any detailed studies about any places where this is actually done. If you know of any citeable sources about studies / reviews, I'd really appreciate it."
Jamie Zawinski has produced a nice document describing how he did it, problems he faced, etc.
[LINK]
The SEUL is an organization for using Linux for education. There's even a case study section.
The Carleton University EngSoc Project is a wholly student-owned and student-run UNIX network at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Once the largest Linux userbase in the world, they've provided Linux shell accounts to every undergraduate Engineering student for at least 7 years.
Since 1996, they've offered a Public Access Lab using donated hardware and space provided by the University. They started off using 486 machines that booted RedHat 3 and NFS mounted from a blazing P90. Then they moved on to using NCD X-Terms. In 1998, Corel Computer donated Netwinder systems for use as the PAL workstations. In 2000, the lab sustained water damage from construction on the roof, and the Netwinders were replaced with ThinkNIC thin clients.
But we don't have any useful literature to provide.
The University of Notre Dame and University of Michigan both use an AFS/Kerberos set-up for large volumes of accounts.
Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university. Michigan's CAEN is also an AFS/Kerberos system for the whole College of Engineering.
MIT's Athena project is pretty interesting (and also partially uses an AFS/Kerberos scheme), but it probably won't help you set up a quick public network of Linux machines since it focuses more on the research side of things (not to mention the fact that it's been actively worked on since 1983!).
In general, you will probably want to decide between an AFS/Kerberos set-up or an NFS set-up.
With AFS/Kerberos, you as the administrator would directly control a pool of servers ("Vice") which physically contain the data in every user's account. The client machines ("Venus") would get temporary "tickets" from the central Kerberos server (which you also control) to access their accounts which are stored on Vice.
In the NFS scenario, the physical location of accounts is totally decentralized and distributed across all the machines that users actually work on. This means less work for you as an administrator, but it also means less security since random users' data is actually stored on the disks of the computers in the user pool (in AFS, Vice machines are considered to be "locked in closets" to which only the administrators have physical access). It's good to remember a golden rule, "physical access to a computer always implies root access." Using a tomsrtbt disk for example, you can change the root password on just about any Linux machine with a floppy drive.
Since Vice (in the AFS scheme) computers are presumably kept behind locked doors, you avoid this type of problem. However, AFS is harder to maintain, and you probably have to pay Transarc for a commercial version.
For more info on AFS/Kerberos and NFS, I recommend surfing the ACM Digital Library, in which you can find the seminal papers on these various technologies (if you're an ACM member and have access). You may also be able to find case studies there (which I found to be surprisingly hard to find on the web).
it's interesting.
We moved our 15 year old son to a SuSE distribution last year. He had issues because he wasn't sure how to get to his network drives and couldn't get Starcraft running, but after a couple months he was able to install Wine and get Warcraft going (didn't get Starcraft going, much to his dismay).
Four months ago we moved our 8 year old daughter to the same SuSE distro - took away her Windows 98 and made her quit cold turkey. We configured KMail and let her go. She's had NO help and she can create documents, print web pages, browse, and runs some of the KDE games. No complaints from her at all.
So can people get used to it? Even non-geeks? Sure. If an 8-year old child can do it, I would think a college student, regardless of their general computer competency, should be able to do it as well.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.