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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.
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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?
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!
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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.
Project Management/Collaboration tools are one of the most useful service available at my University. Another possible option is remote GUI apps (here we have CITRIX and can run common office apps, by this may be too expensive to license). X11 forwarding with access to a word processing app, presentation app, an advanced math application (i'm thinking of software we have available like MatLab, but anything that can solve complicated math), and a spreadsheet app would probably be one of the most cost effective uses. As many others have mentioned more storage is always useful, along with web site perks like MySQL database access are always nice. Here we recently offered a service similar to Facebook for current student and Alumni to network.
The number of possibilities are endless, one thing you should really think about is polling the students that currently use your services. They probably know what they could use more than anyone.
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
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.
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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
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Of course, I'm a student tech employee, but that's beside the point.
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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'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).
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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.