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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?"
IMAP mail, instead of POP3 access.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Really well done remote folders are a blessing. Make them usable both with SFTP (for the Unix folk) and whatever folder sharing system is best for Windows that works over the internet.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Nifty bells and whistles are great, but it does suck to read "Oh, sorry. The network will be up in a little bit." or "CMail is down now. Come back soon." every couple of days. Make it stable, then add stuff. (But I'm sure you already knew that, the fine sys admin that you seem to be.)
Also, you could ask the students and staff what they want. One of those vote and, potentially, win an iPod -- or some such other electronic gadget -- things often has a pretty high turn out. If that doesn't work, hell, you store their mail. Just parse that for ideas!
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Bigger disk quotas are always appreciated.
More web environments would be nice (PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails).
MySQL backends for said web pages.
Bulk up on the software available from the shell.
Publicly accessible CVS/SVN repositories. As in, users can host their projects there, and grant others rights to check out and maybe even commit.
NetHack.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Subject says it all
Free shell, mail, and web accounts are already a good deal. Can shell users install and run graphical applications (VNC or X11 over ssh)? If not, that's something you could do with your extra resources. You could run a tor entry node to let users anonymously route their Internet traffic. You could run any number of distributed computing clients. You set up some kind of virtualization and let users have root accounts on their own virtual machine, perhaps after making them sign yet another usage agreement. You could also give me an account. I'm sure I can find a use for some extra computing power!
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
subversion, wiki's, and project management tools. Things that help groups of students work together. remote storage is really nice too.
From my experience, the email and web hosting are two most important offerings. Email: I echo offering IMAP access (encrypted, of course) as well as POP3 access. When you say "Web Access", do you mean to the email? That's important.
Ask students for other ideas. I get the feeling that many students (esp. those in non-technical fields) may not want or need much more than that. That's from my POV as an engineer having worked with many non-techies in the past. Besides the email access, the most popular use of IT services was for checking grades, registering for classes, etc., which is now all done eletronically.
Also, check out other university web sites for information and what they offer.
Good luck!
Add some CPU and memory instensive programs like Matlab or Maple. They can be quite handy in math courses, and especially with AI.
Run a game server!
Give everyone a gigabyte or more of online storage space. Provide multiple ways to access it. That should include ssh, webdav over SSL (very important IMO), and possibly crappy-old FTP though I'd personally try to avoid providing any non-secure protocols. Then provide simple instructions on how to use it, probbably primarily through webdav. Windows has built-in support for webdav since Win98, though I think 98 doesn't support HTTPS. You also might consider setting up SAMBA or NFS, though that's a bit more tricky to operate over a WAN.
AccountKiller
When I was in college, they had just started to give each student an email address. I can't say that at the time I appreciated or used it, no one I knew did either, but in hindsight a university run instant messaging service would have been super convenient for keeping in touch with other people in the same class. So instead of spending a half hour trying to figure out what a particularly poorly worded assignment meant, you could just ask.
No, I'm not retarded.
Also, I thought web space was standard but I guess not. It certainly was at my undergrad and even where I got my Master's (which is not a techie school like ugrad was). But I get here for my PhD - a top ten research university - and I find that students no longer get web space. Because the damn undergrads are all on myspace now or whatever. I have some workarounds via my department, but unfortunately my only option for a full website seems to be serving it on my office iMac, with an ungodly long URL.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I'd say dedicate at least 1% of avalible CPU to something like Folding@Home. Set aside 10% for mathmatica use by the physics department (someday something will happen, and you'll be glad you have friends in high places), and the rest for x11/web/email etc.
Or you could provide email forwarding for life for university alumni. That'd be fucking HUGE.
moox. for a new generation.
Soooooo expensive if you're paying for it yourself!
I'd check out what SIPB (Student Information Processing Board) has done for the MIT community. They've been around almost forever and have done a lot of great of things over the years.
http://www.mit.edu/sipb/sipb.html
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Of course, I'm a student tech employee, but that's beside the point.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
At my university, computing services provide VPN access into the university network. Not only is this pretty damn useful for accessing the university services (such as the file storage they supply as an SMB share), it is also pretty good when surfing the internet from insecure wireless access points -- such as those in the local Starbucks -- as you can tunnel all your web traffic through it. Make it fast and with enough bandwidth, and those students with laptops will be thankful.
Oh, and if you have enough HDD space... a bigger disk quota is always handy. And contrary to what others have said, students with any sense will not fill it with porn and warez. Trust me, nobody wants the embarrassment of getting caught.
I'm provided with PHP, but I would like a MySQL server database for my website.
Use Maxima. It's comparable to Matlab and Maple, but opensourced. Granted, yes, you're with a University, so you probably have some money, but jumping through the hoops can be a pain in the ass when you want money.
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.
Over here at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam we have 'computation servers'. Any CS/AI student can log in and use the 4-way SMP machines for their studies (and let me say that this is a real help when running CPU-intensive algorithms that otherwise would take weeks to complete). Bigger iron like the old DAS cluster with it's 200 nodes is used for parallel-programming, distributed systems courses and more serious applications.
If you don't know what to do with it, hand it to graduate students that need the cycles.
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If you don't have any use for it, let the CS majors use it. They NEED those cycles and storage. The students-at-large probably don't. They can get all those services for free from some other website.
Why try to re-invent the wheel (and then have to *support* that wheel)?
What I'm saying is, make all the stuff you currently have work better, maybe add a feature that people have been asking about, but don't bother with stuff that you don't need.