Computer Services for Students?

FreeCycles asks: "I'm one of the staffers of an all-volunteer university group that provides free shell, mail, and web accounts to students, faculty, and staff. Thanks to the generous donation of a certain famous server manufacturer, we suddenly now have more processing power and storage than we need to sustain our current offerings, and we are trying to figure out what else we could offer the university community. Since many Slashdot readers are current or former university students, what do you wish your university provided to you?"

Comments

Alumni accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject says it all

Re:Random suggestions.

[TheRaven64]

I'm going to be moderated flamebait for this, but Python is the new VB. The language is very easy to learn, and makes doing the Wrong Thing(TM) very easy. It's sometimes almost-functional, but not really, since the maintainer refused to merge the tail-recursion optimisation patch. It's almost-OO, except the syntax makes Python OO code about as pleasant to read as C OO code.

I've used a few things written in Python, and it's the only language where I always have to go through the install, debug, use cycle for other peoples' code (Jabber transports, I'm looking at you in particular).

Personal virtual servers.

[munpfazy]

Certainly scientific and numerical computing packages are nice - but unless you already have a deal with the vendors trying to negotiate cheap licenses can be complicated.

A free (if resource intensive) option that I'd love to see on our university system would be the possibility of running a virtualized private host, eg. with User Mode Linux, Vserver, or even just BSD jails.

That way those who want to do so could mess around with anything they desire without much risk to the host. Give people the freedom to mess with things, and chances are some of them will find interesting things to do.

Having root access on a dedicated server is really nice, and it can be difficult for the average university student to manage on their own. (Sure, dynamic host name forwarding and so on have made running a server from home fairly cheap, but for many students living in a tiny room with only a laptop it isn't really feasible to run your own machine without first having a good reason for it.)

Of course capping network access, disk space, cpu time, etc are all perfectly reasonable things to do in such a situation - and it might be a good idea to regularly scan for things like badly configured mail servers. You'd have to think carefully about how to assign either IPs or NAT port forwarding, but assuming only a few hundreds of students take you up on it, it shouldn't be impossible to come up with something both useful and unlikely to piss off the university brass.

Setting it up as an opt-in service would probably cut down on administrative headaches. Only the few percent of students who would take advantage of the service would be likely to ask for it.

Finally, one other random idea: set up a couple of individual machines for non-grant-funded personal computation projects. Let students apply for time, perhaps with mini-proposals conducted through some existing undergrad research program. There are probably plenty of senior thesis projects that could make good use of even modest computational resources.