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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."
I've met a tech who was working for a high-school, and 90% of his time was used in fixing Windoze computers after students messed-up with them. That changed when they installed some cards (don't remember the name of the cards) with RAM on them that effectively made the hard disks read-only, and stored in RAM whatever was written on the hard-disks.
So, whenever a PC was screwed-up, all you did was power-cycle it once!
The Uni of New South Wales Computer Science and Engineering department has been running unix/linux for years, no duel boot.
8 years ago it was Sun Solaris.
5 Years ago they moved to Intel Solaris
Now they have (or are) moving to Intel Linux.
anyway, good stuff at Uni of Wollongong.
t'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.
:)
In our undergrad labs at cs.usyd.edu.au, there was a low-end pentium for the sole purposes of ftping files from your floppy to your 3meg quota'd ugrad account on the nix machines. It was win3.1 (even though this was in 1998-2000), and all it _appeared_ to have was a crappy ftp client and 2 other semi-useless programs. You were given a 3 minute time-limit to use this machine. But one day, I recursively transferred the wrong files, and the ftp client was crap, and couldn't recursively remove directories, so I went to the c:\windows directory (or whatever), in the ftp client, selected command.com, and clicked the "run" button. I then was in a dos shell where I could deltree.
Moral of the story: There is no security in removing the start button
- secure it - and most linuxes are reasonably secure out-the-box these days
- set a strong root password. Give the students limited sudo access if necessary
- Probably a little bit of hardware stuff (disable floppy booting etc)
- Maybe setting up a restricted shell or GUI environment
But basically, students would be pretty safe on a linux box without root access. And it's simple and well-known to set up. Compare that with Windows Policy Editor. Does anyone really use it? Maybe a few but I'm sure it's not as well documented or as well tested and probably not as robust as simply locking out root access to a linux box.Why would anyone want to use a text editor that is not vi?
By locking down, I think they mean students can go in and randomly format the drive like they could in a stock Win9x setup.
They also mention that they like linux because it's easy to give to students. They don't have to worry about costs or licensing, they just hand the students a CD and they're on their way.
"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.
That seems pretty logical to me. The article really wasn't about taking away freedom at all.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
People have been saying for years that Slashdotters don't read the article, so I thought that I'd test the theory. I'd submitted the story and highlighted something insignificant about the article in the submission. Browsing through this page, I see lots of people discussing merely what I wrote at the top - 'locking down' students. If people actually read the article, they'd see that it was more about teaching software development in an open source environment, and also the fact that they can give free Linux cds to the students to replicate their training systems at home.
What I'd like to know is - how can the Slashdot Effect exist when no-one clicks through to read the article?
This karma-reducing social experiment was proudly brought to you by kNIGits in Australia.
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.
Please stop fixating on the whole locking down bit!
Timothy craftily negelected to list anything but the potentially inflammatory and sensational 'lock down' phrase. It's EASIER for them to use Linux (and makes more sense and it's CHEAPER), not "they can't lock down Windows". These are newbies who DO know how to fuck up a Window machine pronto. They'll have to do some learning before they can pull a good cock up of their Linux box. And since this is a Uni, students learning is kind of high on their list of 'things we want to happen'.
And please take note this is not the whole Uni. My girlfriend works there and she (and her whole department) uses Macs. But it is a step, IMHO, in the right direction for UOW.
- I am made of meat.
My University's PC lab ran linux (dual boot with Win 2k), but it also ran telnetd which anyone with a computer science login could telnet to. This led to some interesting fork bomb wars between 'friends', and didn't really help us get on with our (probably late) work. Ironically, although Linux is chosen (amongst other things) its security, it was Windows that was the most secure in this case, simply due to poor administration.
They've actually removed Linux at the moment, as they attempt to change their linux policies.
Being at UoW and knowing the people who did this I can't say it's a surprise. The only things that windows were really used for in those labs were software engineering type programs and Word/Excel for the first years and non-compsci people who used the lab.
There are other compsci labs around that haven't been dual boot for longer than this. The article also doesn't mention anything about the proportion of CompSci(linux) machines compared the number of mac/wintel machines around the uni which I'd estimate at around 85-90%
At least the compsci department support staff are always trying new things, actually being taking initiative about things. kudos guys. see you for a drink soon.
"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."
I wonder WHICH monopoly he refers to?
I think it's important to teach skills and not languages. The platform shouldn't really matter. But what I read there is "we're gonna teach non-proprietary solutions". I don't think the OS matters for the undergrads.
I learned programming on Solaris and later Linux, and honestly there's no real difference between them for 95% of what you do in school, since you are NOT administering the box, and the interesting tools are opensource, portable, and provided by the school - you just have to USE them. This probably holds true for BSD as well.
I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC. I think that's god-awful - we should learn to use makefiles and know the dependencies in our code, and not waste time on things that aren't portable to our jobs, on a yet-to-be-determined platform.
Listen that's not true at all. You can run anything you want when you rename the EXE to a runnable like 'notepad.exe'. Add to this Word VBA scripting and you'll have admin on the box in seconds. In our lab we have people still installing porn and crap b/c it's so easy to do this.
On a floppy copy an alternative shell for windows and name it say winword.exe. You most likely can run anything you want off the floppy, so then you just run say the kernel debugger or the MS hole of the week ( ie is weak to loading HTML scripting attacks off disk also. ) -- and then you can use policy editor to start mounting all those hidden windows shares and hijacking other user's computers.
This is why windows is a joke - suid programs and permissions controls by name of a file.
"You can run anything you want when you rename the EXE to a runnable like 'notepad.exe'"
This assumes that they have write/change and execute in the same dir."You most likely can run anything you want off the floppy"
You are admitting that the machine is misconfigured"and then you can use policy editor to start mounting all those hidden windows shares and hijacking other user's computers."
This also assumes that the shares have been modified since by default the $/admin shares are only available to admins. Also I would like to know how to use policy editor to mount a share.Don't mistake poor configuration for a poor OS. *nix has its strengths but management at the desktop level isnt one of them. Windows has it beat IF you know how. But that goes for both
Auckland Uni is expressin the dis-satisfcatin with Microsoft licenscing policy by moving to Sun Microsystems' Star Office.D =3047439&thesection=technology&thesubsection=gener al
Read here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyI
Fuck UQ and their sellout for the almighty buck. If that is not what is was, I apologise, but it sure looked just like that from where I was at the time. I feel for the academics caught in the middle of it all.
What were the skies like when you were young?
I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC.
we shouldn't teach ANYONE to program in any of the Microsoft visual environments. it promotes sloppy coding, bloat and tons of other things that make just plain old BAD programmers.
you want to teach windows programming? then use the free solutions out there teaching the API interfacing and other parts of fighting with a windows environment is so much more important than the drivel the MS visual dev.
Give the studen MORE understanding and a tool they can freely take home legally. you get a better programmer.
and as a side note. every teacher should at the end of every semester force all the student to program in an embedded environment or put tight size cap's on the compiled program.
Anyone can make gigantic bloatware, a good programmer makes fast tight code.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The university that I work at(CS dept.) has every now and then talked about going to dual boot machines in the lab. I just can't think of anything worse. We actually had some dual-boot machines in TA offices, did not work well for the most part, because any support we had to do on them(patches and such) all had to be done right there.
Plus, if they're machines that someone in the dept. can just reboot like that, you really can't enjoy the idea of allowing remote access at all to them.
Every now and then someone thinks this is a brilliant idea for the lab, and I have to come back and explain that there is *no reasonable way* to keep a beast like that up to date.
Okay, done ranting
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
You must be talking about what Windows used to be like a couple of years ago, since networks of UNIX workstations have never been managed like that. Come on, people have run UNIX networks with thousands of machines since the 1980's. Do you think they didn't figure out how to deal with those issues long ago?
There are several common ways of setting up such networks, and they are generally much simpler to deal with than anything Microsoft offers even today. Adding a new machine to a UNIX network requires no more than just plugging it into the network and possibly adding it to a list of recognized clients. Users, data, and applications are installed centrally. Applications run transparently over the network, or locally, whichever way you prefer. "The latest patches" or "new applications" aren't even issues--things are just automatically consistent.
Windows has taken some of those ideas and thrown them together into an inconsistent and cumbersome juble. But where networks of UNIX workstations just tick along by themselves, Windows-based networks require constant handholding, fixing, patching, and reinstalling. Microsoft is trying to paper over how messy and dysfunctional their system is with lots of dialog boxes and GUIs, but it just doesn't help: in the end, managing Windows networks is still a lot more work. Oh, of course, you can try and buy lots of expensive third party software to get some of the UNIX-like manageability, but that only makes things even more expensive and complicated.
I used to manage networks of UNIX workstations with dozens of users on the side. If I had to spend more than an hour or two on it per week, that was the rare exception (and then it was usually due to some hardware failure on the server). And I certainly didn't need any expensive or complicated third party software for doing it either.
I worked as a tech at a local high school for a year.
I can tell you that the lab tech who obsesses over Quake is going to lose. You've got 0 budget and the products to secure the network are chosen by unqualified people who got the job of head of IT in the district because in 1985 they were teaching second grade and happened to tinker with an Apple II at home...
The smart ones just secure against the stupid people and look for the smarter ones and bargain with them that you'll let them play quake if they keep out of the pr0n and viruses, and they kind of keep their eye out for stupid people trying to ruin it all for them.
BTW, Rarely are the colleges any better. They have better heads of departments, but their main workers are CS students without the motivation to find a higher paying job in industry. (I generalize, of course, but I haven't seen many exceptions.)
_____
(OBTopic: nice win for Linux. I always thought that Linux might make a superior corporate solution for precisely these reasons. In a non-development environment, only a system administrator should be able to install an applicaition, for example.
However, I know that Apple tried to play both sides of the fence as well, and they never had much success breaking into the desktop side of Multinationalica.)