Starting a Computer Co-op?

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Posted by Cliff on Wednesday June 12, 2002 @10:29AM from the things-to-know-before-you-begin-an-undertaking dept.

spacechicken asks: "I am studying at a major university in Australia. As is the case with (almost) all educational facilities there are never enough computers available for students. So I (with some friends) are thinking about setting up a computer co-op at (or near) the university. In exchange for membership, members will get a small amount of storage and reduced usage and printing rates. The hope is to not only provide word processing/web surfing (using Linux, Staroffice6.0 and Netscape) but also access to various apps needed for serious academic work (eg CATIA, ProEngineer). We are planning to run standard PCs, with higher end machines if needed. My question is, does anyone have any experience with this type of facility? Any advice?"

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Prepare to be leached by Kris_J · 2002-06-12 13:10 · Score: 4, Informative
As someone who runs a set of student labs, you're going to need to figure out how to cope with abuse, such as:
- Viruses, hacking -- people trying to install keyloggers, etc. Mostly from inside, but also from outside. You're going to need to spend a bit on a decent, centralised, rapidly updating, anti-virus system. And/or key very up to date with security patches for your chosen OS and apps.
- Bandwidth hogs. You're going to need to install a quota system and/or traffic shaping, or else whatever pipe you've got is going to be saturated straight away.
- Porn. 'nuff said.
- Don't be surprised if someone uses your labs to cyber-stalk other students.
Expect the printers to spend most of their time down, particularly at the end of semester. It's not a huge amount of fun when someone who has had four months to do an assignment starts yelling at you because the printers are down for the last hour before their deadline.
The only way it will work is if a small group really lay down the law as to what is and isn't going to happen. And that's not much of a co-op. You're better to present the case to the various departments that the current labs have reached capacity and new ones need to be brought on-line.
(Or possibly, someone could teach students that when the lecturer says that the presentation doesn't need to be in Powerpoint that it really doesn't and you don't have to spend 10 hours on the layout when you could just print off a set of overheads from Word.)