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

IMAP mail.

[FooAtWFU]

IMAP mail, instead of POP3 access.

Always room for more uses

[delirium of disorder]

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!

Might be obvious, but...

[porcupine8]

There are some good suggestions above. The one thing I'd say is make sure what you offer is always compatible with various OSes and web browsers. I want to bang my head when I come across a web-based service at a University that says it will only run on IE (and harder when I tell Safari to pretend it's IE, and the page works perfectly).

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.