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Aussie Uni Dumps Dual-Boot In Favor of Linux
kNIGits writes "News.com.au is reporting that the University of Wollongong have dumped their previously dual-boot installations in favour of booting Linux only. Among other reasons, staff enjoy the ease with which they can 'lock down' first year students, stopping them messing with the systems prior to learning anything about them."
Linux taking over at uni
Chris Jenkins
17Dec02
LINUX is making inroads into the nation's universities, pushing Windows, Unix and Apple operating systems off the desktops of first-year IT students.
It is making ground in IT courses because Linux is both easy to lock-down, easy to pull apart and offers simple licensing for distribution to students.
At the University of Wollongong, which has about 1700 computer science students, machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows or Linux have been changed to Linux only.
"We get large number of inexperienced people in first-year and we are really trying to keep down our overheads and concentrate our professional support more in the later years," said Les Ohlbach, operations manager for the university's Department of Informatics."
"The best way to control the first-years was to put them in a Linux-only environment where you can lock it down pretty well."
Students moved to Unix and Windows in second- and third- year, he said, with Macs used for multimedia training.
At the University of Western Australia, which has around 1650 students in its computer science courses, Linux has totally supplanted more traditional Unix distributions, such as Sun's Solaris in the school of computer science and software engineering.
UWA's senior lecturer in computer science and software engineering Chris McDonald said Unix was dropped from teaching around 1995, and was no longer specifically required for any research projects.
UWA recently dropped Apple from its IT education programs in the school, for the same reason that Unix was abandoned -- expensive proprietary hardware.
"It wasn't so much the [Unix] operating system costs, because it usually came with the machine or we could get pretty good prices as an educational institution," he said.
Linux was easier to give to students for home use, Dr McDonald said.
"If we were using Solaris or HP-UX or something like that, I'm sure there would be very different and costly licensing issues involved," he said.
"We are trying to move to an environment where what we provide in the laboratories can be mirrored in the students' home."
Mr Ohlbach said the University of Wollongong favours Linux for first-years for a similar reason.
"We are teaching programming, so they [students] need to run all sorts of IDEs and development environments. On Linux they can quite easily do most of their code at home at fairly low cost," he said.
Dr McDonald said in teaching open-source platforms to students it is important not to "just ram open-source issues down their throats. It's important to explain why there is a difference in philosophy, why it's reasonable to not to totally tread the path of one particular vendor, one particular monopoly."
However, Dr McDonald said UWA's school of computer science and software engineering was part of Microsoft's academic alliance program, which allowed the free distribution of Microsoft operating systems to enrolled students.
The school used Linux and Windows to teach operating systems.
"It's good to show not just the similarities, but more importantly the differences."
Linux allowed better teaching of the principles behind software development, he said.
"We'd rather explain how things work. We do that by taking things apart and putting them back together again, rather than just showing people how to use particular GUIs that other people have designed. It's our belief that open-source software better explains those concepts," he said.
"Personally, I think that just showing students how to use operating systems tools and networking tools, is more training than education.
"From 2003 UWA's school of computer science and software engineering will be using Linux, in preference to Windows, for our first-year Foundations of IT unit."
Mr Ohlbach said it was important for students to have exposure to multiple operating systems and development environments.
"Anybody wanting to be a professional computer science person, or an IT person, generally doesn't want to be seen as just a Mac or a PC party, " he said.
This report appears on news.com.au.
The cards you're thinking of are often called "Sheriff Cards".
:)
Apparently they have them in my old high school now. Poor kids... hacking the network was one of the more fun things about high school.
I'm not fully versed in all its wonders, but the Windows Policy Editor (or whatever its called now) can completely lock down a machine. It's a vastly underutilized tool for environments where you don't want users messing with the machines. I remember getting annoyed the first time I sat down at a box which wouldn't let me even look at the start menu. Any and all Windows admins should look in to its proper use in their environment.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
There is a software solution for Windows called DeepFreeze. It works very well. I love seeing the look on faces when they delete random .dlls or change wallpaper only to find that they magically re-appear when the system reboots.
Yes, you *could* use windows policy editor, but there are some major issues with it (having just locked down a standalone windows box for kiosk use I'm well versed in the pain of poledit for Win 2000..)
Note that policy editor is now primarily designed for a computer in a Active directory tree - without active directory you have to edit a "local" policy, ie edit the registry directly.
A disclaimer: maybe an active directory policy is nicer to play with, I don't know - local policies were enought of a pain for me as it was..
here's the fun with local policies..
firstly - the policies affect ALL users, INCLUDING the administrator. (WTF?!?!? you say?) so.. lock out all registry tools, disable "command prompt" and run on the start menu - and you're screwed - no more windows administration. time to reformat the box. (or at least attempt to "rescue disk" it..
second - policies quite often are applied in REAL TIME. hmm.. disable registry editing.. (screen flashes) - oh bugger, policy editor has stopped working..
The way to get around this is to remove access to the %winnt%/system32/GroupPolicy dir for the administrator (that's right, you remove access to the root user to prevent the policy applying to that user.) of course, this dir has to be accessible to make any changes. And the changes apply immediately. Forget to reapply the restictions to the admin user and it's reformat time, again.
if you want to use policy editor I suggest having a recovery cd lying around, as I guarantee you *will* be locked out of your system, unless you're extremely careful.
I love windows security, it rocks.
Jeesum, no wonder this world is coming to an end. There are SO MANY IDIOTS OUT THERE WHO THINK THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
You don't use PE on Win2K, you use group policy editor. OMFG-no wonder there are no jobs
That's the difference between a secured Unix system and a 'Windows policy editor lockdowned' system.
In windows you just have to close down all ways to do nasty things. End result : undestroyable but also completely useless pc. Nobody can do anything on it.
With a Unix system, students can't mess around anything BUT they can do whatever they want in their personal enviroment and a Unix box is still a usefull tool without root access.
Just because you don't know how to use a tool, doesn't make that tool bad.
A properly configured local policy can lock down exactly what you want to lock down, and affect only the users you want it to affect.
Also, in Active Directory, you use things called "Group Policy Objects" to apply policies to workstations, and it's WAY more powerful than local policies.
Go here for an overview of GPOs.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
The University of Sydney's got a huge unix tradition - not as much as UNSW but i think Aust has always been unix-inclined, out of the 'pressure spotlight' I suppose, or something. The admins love the linux computers here, they never have do anything to them. Especially the Tektronix dumb terminals, they just sit there and accept input. Slow as hell though, I use them only when I need to get an assignment done and there's no computers left. I think they're retiring them over the Christmas break, that whole lab area is being rebuilt.
The whole backend runs on linux clusters (went to a little after-lecture talk about it). File servers, CPU servers, connection servers. They have a few sun servers but one of them explode every year and they haven't bothered replacing them. Clusters are so much cheaper!
The last batch of new systems we got at the beginning of last year for 5 labs, P4s with TFTs, bucks this trend though, as 4 of these labs got Win98 and the other Linux. They don't even bother locking these Windows down either, they just wipe and upload drive images from the server every night.
Though that kind of sucks, means we have to reinstall Warcraft 3 every day.
they made me do it
Older versions of DeepFreeze were pretty funny. Set the system clock sufficiently far into the future, and it magically crashed. The first thing you do after that is delete DeepFreeze, and you have no more DeepFreeze problem ;)
Windows was originally designed around the presumption that there was really only one user on the system, and that user could/should do whatver (s)he wanted. To that was added the eventual realization that Oops! That's not always the case.
This has resulted in the back-ending of all sorts of security hacks onto what is still, essentially, a single-user system. A side effect of this is all sorts of special cases and wierd holes in the design of Windows that results in the need for things like PE.
Unix, on the other hand was designed as a multi-user system almost from day one. In this context, a single user system is simply the special case of N==1. Locking down a Linux system requires little more than putting passwords on GRUB and the CMOS editor, and possibly pulling the setuid bit from some questionable binaries. Once that's done, there's little that a non-root user can do beyond trashing their own account, or various DOS type stupidities (which can often be responded to by a good sysadmin).
Beyond that, the ability to prevent first-year stupidity is only one of the reasons why Linux was chosen as the standard for first-year students. Not having to worry about being sued when the students post the source code that you gave them (under some sort of non-disclosure agreement) on the net when asking for an answer to a question is another. Multiple GUI desktops, extensibility and totally free access to the source code are some of the others.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
To my knowledge, COMP2501 (Algorithms and Data Structures) is still running.
I have not found this to be true at all. We routinely install all the apps a particular user will need, then lock the machine down for that user so they can't destroy anything other than their own home space. Can't change any of the local settings or install programs. And it takes about 5 minutes to do so from a clean install. It would take seconds if a security policy file were setup in advance and "applied" on a new user account, but we are a small company and we tailor each machine to each users needs/experience.
The real reason was more likely bias, cost, or just plain stupidity.