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Re-purposing a Student Tech Service Group?
discards writes "I help run a student group at a Canadian University. For almost 15 years we've provided students with services such as web space, email, wireless internet on campus, cvs/svn, database access, mailing lists, etc., all using Linux and FOSS. In recent years, however, we have faced becoming obsolete. The university now provides wireless access, people get their email from other places such as Google, which also provides free svn access, web space, and so forth. Since we have a large amount of decent, usable hardware, as well as space, funding and a very fast internet connection, we are looking to possibly reform instead of just withering away and dying. We would like to ask Slashdot for ideas as to what we could do; preferably something that cultivates student research or provides an otherwise useful service to students, though all ideas are welcome."
Sounds like all you have left then is to provide entertainment.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Pirated music. :-)
You could provide hosting for recent graduates that want to make their own start-up. This seems to be one of the main expenses for such graduates besides costs of living.
You could focus on local projects, find an on-campus place for OSS projects involving just the school(and encouraging students to cooperate) build school spirit or something. Even better start one or two, get them involved and evangelize.
I doubt the web hosting is going to be able to compete with google, byte for byte, but having one that's relevant isn't always about size...
At some point every person needs tech support. They don't know how to do something, their computer died, they lost data, are infected by a virus or some basic functionality has been lost.
Tech support would be number one on my list of helpful services.
The other thing that would be helpful is basic computer education. Yes, I know that most people in college already know how to work on the computers, however some, possibly older students, might be embarrassed to admit they don't know everything they feel that they should know. Confidential, one on one tutoring can eliminate the fear of admitting they aren't fully up to speed.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Forget college students. Do something for inner-city youth. Gather old computer parts from your school or lbusiness, put them together, install linux and give them to schools with limited computing resources. Involve the students in this process as well. Teach them how to install linux. Then teach them how to administer their own system.
I think we could work out a very profitable deal on your part.
-----------------
Stephen Pilgrim
Assistant Manager
RIAA campus solution recruitment
Move toward becoming a help center, someplace for students to turn to for assistance.
Students need help in all areas from install software and setting up their machines for classes to virus removal and re-installation of their operating system.
Also, you could set up a paid tutorial service for applications used in some of the accounting (and other) courses.
There is a real need for something like this on all campuses and the University IT department just does not have the manpower to provide it.
Tom
Porn and/or piracy.
Perhaps this type of guidance & aid to your fellow students may be of use (as a "new type of service" your group may offer others), ala points such as are noted in this guide online:
HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003, & even VISTA, + make it "fun-to-do" via CIS Tool Guidance (& beyond that):
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=997120fdbd632fa871dc28209608c6a3&showtopic=2662
* Simply changing your role, & the services you could offer others, is a start...
( ... & that is a start, right there, in the points in that URL above!)
APK
P.S.=> CIS Tool, & the other points (many of which 'layer ontop of' CIS Tool's points for securing a system), also applies to various *NIX variants (& distros, such as are seen in Linux for instance/example) - so, thus, you're NOT "solely restricted to Windows users, only" etc. et al ... apk
Why not take on a bigger challenge, and focus on teaching? Run small mini-classes on various topics, teach programming at all kinds of different levels, how to solve engineering problems numerically, etc. Since it is an engineering/design school, you can provide some kind of (real-life or online) forum helping people use technology to solve problems. I suppose this will somewhat depend on how your college's schedule works, but you will find that students will make time for you if you're providing a useful service. You've got the hardware -- now you just need to find a niche to add the value.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I have just joined a similar group, the Harvard Computing Society (http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/). We try to provide more up to date web services to student organizations. We provide web hosting for student groups that is capable of running all the latest web goodies like Drupal, Mediawiki, sql, and the like. We also maintain mailing lists for student organizations, and advocate for better tech practices at Harvard. There are also lots of other cool projects in the pipeline that may or may not go anywhere but are fun to work on: IPtv, content aggregation from student org websites, internet phone, and other off the wall ideas. I am still new to the organization, but everything seems to work very well.
Taking this successful example, I would suggest taking advantage of the fact that you can be less bureaucratic than the school's general IT staff to provide more modern web tools to student organizations.
How about offering a back-up service for students work? Sure, you currently offer services that could be used as such but your average student has no idea how to do it. Offer a nice simple web interface that allows them to upload files that they really wouldn't want to lose.
As other posters have pointed out, you could also move into entertainment services and help for recent graduates.
I wouldn't ditch things like the svn/cvs, webspace and database access though. My CS department used to run their own services and having them on campus was great since I could go ask our helpdesk people if something went wrong or I needed extra space etc.
Silly rabbit
Since we have a large amount of decent, usable hardware, as well as space, funding and a very fast internet connection
Imagine a Beowulf cluster?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Offer what Google doesn't; a protected data repository for the students IP. Make a local hosting source for all of the CS (and other) departments online projects, and educate them about why where you keep stuff on the 'net is as important as any other aspect. I know that all my g-mail is searchable, readable, and essentially the property of Google (if you can believe their TOS). Teach the students about Corporate and Private IP, how to protect it when it needs protecting, when and when not to hand over your rights...start discussions about why your data center is or is not needed.
The key is that your users need to have a motivation beyond saving money. If someone is with you to simply save money they will be easily lured away by a cheaper competitor. You need to get people involved because they are passionate about what you do.
Maybe start up a content production cooperative (movies, music, stories, ...) with a policy of releasing everything under a Free license? Your student group can provide all the production facilities and branch out into buying microphones, cameras and so on. Make it even more interesting by having an open "bazaar style" production process too, instead of just presenting finished projects.
Get a bunch of people together who are passionate about freedom for arts and technology. These people will stick with you for the long term.
There is plenty of infrastructure now for the Libre movement (svn servers, web, email providers, source forge...). Don't compete with that which is is well established. What is needed now is plenty of fantastic content under Free licenses, with which we can run the mafiaa out of town.
Beowulf cluster?
On the one hand, I can applaud the fact that these techies want to do something worthwhile with their time.
On the other hand, I can't help but notice that the first reaction to discovering that their work is no longer needed (at least, at the level they are prepared to provide) is not to inform their employers that their budget is too large and positions can be cut, but rather they seek new reasons to exist and to expand.
The upshot will be higher expenses for students.
Of course, techies are far from the only people who seek job security in this way, but it's still sad to see it happen.
Sounds like you're a solution in need of a problem. Try asking the students what you can do for them. I'd probably start with the postgrads since they tend to actually need things, and know they need it.
I know at my uni people found it hassle when needing to crunch data - server slots were a scarce resource and there was a lot of people scheduling things so they could crunch on their workstation over the weekend (often dropping in to see if it got stuck).
I'll bet there's a large number of other groups crying out for decent hardware, space, funding and maybe even the fast internet connection. If your group's services are no longer required it's time to hand the resources over.
Chances are, no matter what you do you're actually pretty much expendable.
So, when are you giving up your paycheck?
Why not turn your organization into a startup incubator, giving grants of money, server space, bandwidth and consulting to students with promising ideas? If successful, it could turn your city/university into a real tech hotbed.
The ICC is a good net chess club at about $30. per year. There is room for another. That would be more than true if you can create software to spot people who cheat by using PCs to find their moves before posting them. By the way the ICC model may be the best on the net.
Traditionally you are providing services that the University is not able/willing to provide. So provide some service that the U doesn't. Perhaps you can be a "speak easy" (i.e. and anonymiser for the local U's IPs)
Everyone needs online backups, but most providers of these services charge money. Make it .Mac compatible, so it's easy for Mac users. It's a great service for backing up papers and other homework assignments. Who knows, you might actually be a life-saver if some Ph.D. student gets his laptop stolen and wouldn't otherwise have a backup of his dissertation.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Branch into offering telecom services such as LD, voicemail boxes, VoIP, etc... If you already have the hardware and internet connectivity, it's only a small step to branch into providing voice services. Canadian DIDs are cheap and with a couple of DIDs you can provide extension-based vm boxes. Outbound calls within Canada are cheap as well... Help people connect and keep in touch with their families and friends.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
Reminds me of the scene in "Independence Day" when the President asks the alien what he wants humans to do. And the alien answers.... DIE !!! Time for you (metaphorically) to die.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
How about helping other kids in the surrounding area(underprivileged or otherwise) with computers and introducing them to Linux and related FOSS software?This is only if your school gives permission,of course....I don't think they should have a problem with their used hardware being used to educate kids,increasing their Corporate(Schoold) Social Responsibility image in the process.
I placed a bunch of the worlds problems on pieces of paper in one hat, and filled another hat with pieces of paper that had new and exciting things written on them. Then I picked one from each hat.
On the first attempt I pulled my cousins name & realized I forgot to empty the hat after Christmas last year. Then again, I suppose you could consider him one of the worlds problems.
Anyway, on my second draw I pulled Virtualization Technology from the new stuff hat and Homeless People from the problem hat.
You could setup virtual apartment buildings and create ~/s for the homeless.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Start your own dating service for the students.
Sounds a little bland, of course, but since you have the hardware, bandwidth, and funding, you can spice it up a little: Either find some type of FOSS social MMO, or start your own.
Ask yourself this; What does every college student that hardly ever leaves his dorm need? Another way to procrastinate online!
Maybe change the focus to having your students do a little more research on what students and faculty are actually doing. As an example have the students look at various websites posted by students and faculty and see what can be changed to make the site more interactive or figure out where a database could be used to help gather and sort data. Students could also look around campus at the various publications and forms and change them into online forms or databases. And as always good fall backs are cleaning & restoring computers and performing upgrades. Hope it helps. Good luck.
Roskilde University in Denmark could maybe be an inspiration for you in that respect:
From their site:
QUOTE:
Welcome to the Science Shop
Roskilde University wants to bridge the gap between enterprises, NGOs, public institutions (externals) and students. By participating in the Science Shop students and enterprises/NGOs/public institutions contribute to the sharing of knowledge and know-how between universities and the world outside. And the university becomes better at targeting our programmes towards the labour market and at preparing students for the transition from studies to working life.
The Science Shop constitutes the framework for project cooperation between students and enterprises/NGOs/public institutions. Students work with the practical aspects of the theories they have studied and gain relevant experience from the cooperating partner in the world outside the university. Enterprises, NGOs and public institutions can have somebody from the outside take a fresh perspective on them. In addition they will be able to see what it is like to work with academics, while at the same time obtaining focus on problems they may have or having shelved projects dusted off and re-examined. The main benefit for enterprises/NGOs/public institutions is that the students have up-to-date academic knowledge and may adopt unconventional approaches, which enable them to suggest new solutions to optimise everyday routines. Because of such cooperation, both enterprises/NGOs/public institutions and students will be better prepared for the future.
A project is an examination of a subject or a problem. It is based on specific research questions which students seek to answer and which serve as a connecting thread in the project. The research questions will generally require that students incorporate knowledge, theories and experience from a wide range of areas to find relevant answers, applying various methodologies and using different theories. The scope and extent of the project depend on the requirements formulated for the degree programme in question and on the number of students in the project group.
It is still not possible to view the database of the current project proposals. Therefore please contact us, if you need more information or want to know about the current project proposals. We still do not receive many project proposals in english, but are working on establishing cooperations including our englishspeaking gueststudents and international NGOs and enterprises.
QUOTE ENDS:
You can find information here: http://www.ruc.dk/vb_en/
I am planning to see if we can use them ourselves with respect to our own software project.
Regards
Einar Petersen - http://globability.org
Create/provide an open source Web2.0 alternative to Google's Gmail. Seed a P2P distributed cloud email-storage solution on your hardware and network, which will be augmented as users add more peers.
Why not just crack Carleton Campuscards fulltime?
How about training the university admins how to recognize the difference between a naif white hat hacker and someone who really wishes them ill?
Ben Franklin ran a group dedicated to meeting regularly and talking about what they could do to further their careers. http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/philadelphia/aps.htm
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Keep offering email services. GMail is not an acceptable alternative in many situations. In the Canadian University where I'm a faculty member some groups refuse to send mail to gmail addresses because Google scans all mail (this violates privacy contracts on some research material). This will affect final year undergrads and grad students mostly and already occurs. In addition things like the US "patriot" act mean that provincial privacy laws in many cases make Universities very uneasy to send any private information to gmail addresses due to the server location in the US - our University has not yet refused gmail addresses but they are working up to some sort of policy which will probably do so.
I tried to join the local student group that manages lans, sysadmin stuff ecc...
...but after i saw their requirements, i did not even tried to talk to them.
...
Their rating system is: 40% your university year, 40% your marks and 20% your skills.
Since the ratings are public, I could even see that everyone had 16%+ in the "skill" part.
I'm so angry I'm not even going to tell them all their security holes (_lots_ of them, someone is already using them).
my suggestion is just: don't be a bureaucrat. you can lose interesting help.
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
Maybe y'all could hook up with the engineers down at Queen's, and help them get Clark Hall Pub re-opened?
That place was awesome.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I've been to a university and college, both in the same city as Carleton, and their IT services were mostly lackluster. So my suggestion is: Compete! Keep maintaining your wireless internet, or even improve on it. Make a really good bulletin board/forum for trading, advice, anything a student might need. Even with all the free offerings floating around the 'net, I would have still preferred one specifically for my campus.
You can probably drop email, but for everything else, have a look at the services Carleton offers. If you think you can do better, then do it! Even if the services are equal, it's an incentive for Carleton not to let their own offerings turn obsolete. My experience is that as long as they can advertise it to prospective students, your typical post-secondary institution doesn't care how useful their services are.
With all the ids, personal info and bad practices of student users these days, maybe you can offer some form of identity management to them. Set up a web SSO solution (OpenID and a portal?) they can use as a portal for everything else, educate along the way as to why they should use this and let them see where their information goes. It could be useful and educational.
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Google doesn't allow SSH access.
This is a Canadian college, so it's the CRIA that they have to deal with... though it's not like there's much different between them.
I have an idea for a great project that the article submitter could do, it would be great at any college. Most especially any college in the US. In fact I would like to thank the RIAA for essentially proposing the idea, and in fact having it passed into law here in the US.
H.R. 4137: College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, signed into law on Aug 14 2008, and mentioned here on Slashdot a few days earlier, contains the following requirement:
(29) The institution certifies that the institution--
(A) has developed plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents; and
(B) will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property, as determined by the institution in consultation with the chief technology officer or other designated officer of the institution.
I think it is in fact a FANTASTIC idea for colleges to "offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property". There are a multitude of sources across the internet for Creative Commons or other 100% legal music. I think you (and any other college) should set up a hosting site on your internal network. A huge easy repository of hundreds of gigs of 100% legal 100% non-RIAA 100% non-CRIA music. They want colleges to offer an alternative to the illegal downloading of their music? I say we damn well give them exactly what they want. The most effective way for a college to deter illegal downloads is to drown students in an overwhelming more-than-you-can-eat supply of legal downloads. Trying to block students from illegal downloads is a largely hopeless task because students are going to find ways to circumvent those blocks to get what they want. But if you get students hooked on more-than-you-can-eat legal music downloads, that is the most effective way to reduce or eliminate the desire for RIAA-music downloads. For any college in the US, I suggest this is the best and most effective way to comply with the law. If you are in Canada or anywhere else, I still say it's a great way to get a jump on things before the RIAA-CRIA-or-other-clone comes knocking. You can tell them that you already have an official school policy and program in place to minimize the downloading - illegal or otherwise - of their music.
The simplest system is just to have a basic server on the campus network hosting all of these files, but there are endless ways you can expand and improve upon that service and build a powerful community interest in it. You could have some sort of streaming service. You could have individual student accounts with some mechanism of tracking individual "collections" of the songs they like and playlists and maybe personal ratings of songs. You can have some simple way for students to recommend and "share" these songs with each other. You could set up some sort of streaming "radio channels", and maybe even a way for students to run "radio channels". You could use the data on student music collections or song rankings to to do intelligent recommendations of other songs they may like.
You can do something as simple as a minimalistic webserver just hosting the files, or you can build it as big and as advanced as you like. By having this on the campus internal network you cut down on external ISP bandwidth needs.
Oh, and the best part? Getting to bask in the delicious irony of giving the RIAA&friends exactly what they asked for with a big fat FUCK-YOU-UP-THE-ASS-SIDEWAYS-WITH-A-PING-PONG-PADDLE.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I'm currently a student (after being an admin for 10 years) working on a history degree. The one thing every class wants is lively out of class discussion but you never get it with the "blackboard" clones. Make available a PHPBB workalike to instructors with easy to remember URLs (eg, HIS3660.youdomain.com).
With that simple tool an instructor can post videos, syllabus, and class material that can be seen from any browser.
You could probably even offer this to student groups including the, gasp, non-school sponsored ones that don't get resources (like the history club I'm in).
Hire me...
Then my fortunes changed when I had the chance to buy a used Altos 8086 computer running Microsoft's version of AT&T Version 7 Unix called "Xenix" ( )
What was great about it, is that it had a program called "learn" ( ) which was a tutorial that taught both Unix and C.
It's a shame that "learn" is not included in modern Unix and Linux distros. That would be a valuable resource for students that would otherwise only be exposed to an OS (which will remain nameless here) that was designed for computer illiterates.
This is your chance to make sure the next generation can at least perceive the elegance and thought that went into making an OS and programming language that was designed by and for programmers, instead of by and for businessmen.
These folks are in the perfect spot to offer colo hosting, data-processing and event site hosting for Girls Gone Wild, Shane's World and other college-age oriented pr0n producers.
They'll make a mint and the students can "work" their way through school without even leaving campus.
Win-Win as far as I can see.
Why not turn your machines into a high performance cluster where graduate students can submit research jobs (in a queue)?
The computer science club at UW used to run install fests. This was great for anyone that wanted to try out linux or add a dual boot to their system. The case-modding workshops always attracted interested crowds.
It's pretty obvious: you have decent hardware, cheap plentiful bandwidth, and a bunch of college geeks.
Welcome to the wonderful world of adult web hosting.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Asterisk PBX -- free long-distance calls. /they/ can decide how to use. Open this up to teachers so that they can use this space in their teaching & research.
Nethack server.
KVM space -- Allow users to have their own virtual machines online that
http://ipv6experiment.com/
From their site:
Perhaps they could use some bandwidth or admin help. From their mailing lists, I've gathered it's a pretty small group who may welcome such a large amount of help.
How about using it to teach students about virtuali[s|z]ation? That seems to be a growing trend among businesses and could certainly prove to be useful, as well as giving them experience with a range of virtualisation offerings.
It would also (at least on certain virtual server products) allow them to work with a variety of different operating systems, without risking messing up critical servers, and possibly learning about snapshot and roll-back options using virtual servers.
In addition, they could learn how to secure different operating systems, and be shown an example of how a server might be hacked, and what to do to lock out the attacker, perform forensics, and repair the damage done (admittedly reputation is harder to repair than an OS/app), and when it's best to wipe everything and start again (or roll-back to a known good server image).
On a completely different track, you could try to start up a University-wide social networking site, and allow the Alumni to join it too. Use it for sharing events, knowledge, ideas, fun, jokes, etc, maybe even have an API so students can extend it like with Facebook.
Obviously this would require some management to ensure that students don't use it to break University rules, intimidate other students, allow copying of others coursework, sharing of copyright materials, etc, but it some of this could be delegated to responsible students, and give them experience and hopefully make them feel valued.
I'm part of a similar student-technology group in the US (http://www.yale.edu/its/stc), and our focus is very much on tech support. Our situation is different; we have a hundred members, and we focus on fixing people's software and hardware problems and providing direct education through a combination of helpdesk and house calls, all free of charge. But that's one possibility; you could morph your organization into a free tech support group, either for general computer issues or for specialized tasks like web development.
And far and beyond the thing to do with your hardware is convert it to number-crunching. Either run the machines for other people, and let them submit jobs to you, or just donate the machines to your favorite science department. My college's chemistry department is perpetually hurting for processing power; they don't own any department-wide machines, so if a lab has detailed calculations to perform, it has to buy its own hardware or rent time from a lab that already owns some. Donating all your hardware to a computation-heavy department could be a huge favor.
I'm currently the president of the Computer Science Club at another Canadian university. We, too, have a variety of machine architectures, and provide web/email accounts to students. We've stopped seeing as many signups for the web hosting and email side of things, and we've shifted our focus recently to a number of other things. For example, we're starting to run tutorials to introduce first year students to both the University's undergraduate computing environment as well as our own, and advertising some of our more powerful machines as a method for students who want to run processor/memory-intensive experiments to do so cheaply. One other thing we did was to make a deal with the web-design club at our school so that they now host all club sites which they design on our servers, since we have the ability to set up subdomains under our university's domain on their behalf. Lastly, one other thing which we're working on improving is setting up a proper library with copies of the various textbooks needed by students, as well as various other recommended reference books.
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
"In addition, they could learn how to secure different operating systems, and be shown an example of how a server might be hacked, and what to do to lock out the attacker, perform forensics, and repair the damage done (admittedly reputation is harder to repair than an OS/app), and when it's best to wipe everything and start again (or roll-back to a known good server image)." - by Firefalcon (7323) on Sunday September 21, @12:39PM (#25093815) Homepage
Agreed, 110%, & I stated pretty much the same idea a bit earlier here in this very thread:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=970939&cid=25093275
(Thus, 'great minds, think alike', lol!)...
Anyhow/anyways - This type of idea/service offering to the students, staff, instructors (& yes, network admins/techs/engineers) also, SHOULD 'go over well' with the init. thread posters' comments, & especially via offering services (& education in it, IN the same stroke) such as "how to secure your PC/Server" &/or "virus/trojan/spyware/malware-in-general removal services" too - saving said clients (students/instructors/collegiate staff of all types) time, money, & ALSO preserving this fellows' job (alongside that of his colleagues).
APK
I worked for a few years at an organization at my university, the OSU Open Source Lab http://osuosl.org/ which was founded as an effort to help give back to the open source community. The OSL now hosts a wide range of projects. Working there as a student required maintaining a large range of services for people all over the world and taught me more than I ever learned in class. If your department is starting to have some free cycles and spare hardware and spare bandwidth perhaps you can offer your resources to help support some of the projects that you have depended on over the years. Feel free to contact the guys at the OSL, perhaps they could help you get started. I know the OSL's mirrors http://ftp.osuosl.org/ could use some more bandwidth, perhaps you could partner with them to provide another mirror node. Cheers,
http://stuff.mit.edu/sipb/
The Student Information Processing Board at MIT really has what you're looking for. All sorts of advanced services for students and lots of education from Haskell to hacking to LaTeX. They do a lot and do a pretty damn good job at it too.
A word of warning though, if you ever needed to fulfill a stereotype about nerds look no further than their ample Linux Beards. These guys mean business.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Join the grid, the lhc people need all the computers they can put the hands on, (simulation, data analisys).
It's useful and is visible enougth to be a "insurance"...
If on the other hand you are religiously against using/teaching licensed software, why not take control over some orphaned but useful open source project. Or start your own. Make sure it is an interesting software so you can get fellow students enthusiastic about it. To stay in the Matlab field: you could work on numpy, perl::pdl, or add modules to gnu-octave. If that's too boring, why not make your own 3D animations, or programmable interactive robots, as a teaching project for students. Depends a bit on the background and interests of the people in your group at the moment.
Another idea: start an online platform for freelance projects for students. Try to get local companies involved. Students can get their first work experience, you get a lot of organizational and communication skills. As a student group you are probably not allowed to have the group make a profit from using campus facilities, so if you will calculate a provision you have to make sure you invest it in students parties :)
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
My grand-daddy, who was a merchant marine, told me never to switch porpoises mid-sea. Doing that could get you... What? Oh, re-PURPOSING... My bad.
Get off your ass and go ask them. Do a survey. Why are you posting on Slashdot where possibly 5-10 people from Carleton will see this story? All of the responses you are getting here are ideas, but not the needs of the students.
UGCS (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu) has the same problem. The main draw of UGCS is the fact that accounts are permanent instead of only lasting until graduation, and that it permits many things that the campus IT department doesn't allow (e.g. CGI, colocation, substantially larger quotas, etc.) You might want to ask the other student clusters listed at http://www.student-computing.org/
Setup the computers to seed popular torrents. It'll take a lot of load off the school's regular Internet access while providing the students with a valuable service.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Use it for porn, duh.
Run a mirror.
I have a personal website that I built myself, by hand, from scratch. When I go looking for a hosting service, I look for someone who can provide the features I want to include on my site (guestbook, feedback, perhaps script access) but everyone these days is obsessed with Web 2.0 or whatever the catchphrase is now. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten my site set up the way I wanted it, working the way it was supposed to, only to have the people providing the service change some component that I used (i.e. the guestbook) so that it completely ruined the established look-and-feel of my website.
My school gets their student e-mail accounts through gMail, and I have no problem with that, but as far as I can tell, google sites only allows you to build cookie-cutter sites, based on a limited number of templates.
Services like Google's make everybody look the same. I don't want my website to look like the one the visitor just came from, or any website they may have visited elsewhere. I want them to remember it, and come back again and again.
The value of your system should be readily apparent to those who have a vested interest in standing out from the crowd.
Anthony D. Baye
Junior, Comp. Sci.
SDSM&T
Start a business incubator. Help tech students learn the basics of accounting, business law, incorporation, etc. and hopefully have some good ideas come to fruition. Provide hosting and support for student businesses. Provide CRM instances for students to track their contacts.
They will pay it back big time if they make it big.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Become a local user group. You could have SIGs (special interest groups), such as a Linux User Group (LUG), programming SIGs (possibly for different languages), etc.
User groups provide educational opportunities, similar to ones discussed in other posts here. They also provide social opportunities, allowing people with similar interests to meet each other. In addition, you'll be helping people solve problems, and provide technical support.
Become a local user group. You could have special interest groups (SIGs), such as a Linux User Group (LUG), programming SIGs (possibly for different languages), etc.
User groups provide educational opportunities, similar to ones discussed in other posts here. They also provide social opportunities, allowing people with similar interests to meet each other. In addition, you'll be helping people solve problems, and provide technical support.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
While doing my graduate work, I was stuck in some of my research because the IT staff would not upgrade to most recent versions of lots of software (reasonable, their workload/employee was intense).
We formed a student group called "unsupported" that was free to upgrade and maintain software under the slogan of "if you ask nicely we might look into it." Faculty could not use it to maintain actual research projects (they had to write IT support of whatever they needed into grants), but wildly speculative unfunded projects could (and did) use our services to obtain and "lightly maintain" software.
You might find something like that interesting.
You should already be putting a lot of your cycles to use with folding@home, seti@home, whatever@home.. then when you find something better for your processing and bandwidth powers you'll just have less extra cycles to spare.
I agree, tech support on campuses today can quickly become anachronistic; that is, if they are not have the requisite intellectual curiosity or do not have the cajones to spearhead new technologies like cloud computing (for distributed mathematical modeling), online E2E voting (for student elections), Educational MMORPGs and a list of other systems being developed now ready for deployment to the student population ASAP. You should have programmers on staff that can help contribute or partner with your CS department for folk that can contribute to these wonderful OS projects. It is important for you to realize that if you do not participate you are accepting other institutions philosophies of style, privacy and security that may be incompatible with yours or be forced to pay some contractor to customize it for you. You would be surprised how useful you will become when you start asking people not only what they want help with today but attempt to understand their needs well enough to plan ahead for what they will be clamoring for tommorow.
Stop playing WOW in the server room and start reading journals about UI Design, Human Computer interface and cybernetics for more advanced theory. Why should you study these journals instead of just reading the old faithful IT pulp mag, this website or some other "tech website"? Because you need to not only see what is coming down the consumer pipeline in a couple of months or be beta testing a new whiz bang software package; you need to understand where all this interaction is heading and how you can get ahead of the curve technologically by enmeshing your department in the active process of problem solving individual and institutional scale issues by being able to posit your own design philosophy coherently into the future and apply it cogently and adaptively as variables change.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
You could possibly provide a virtual environment for students. If they want to experiment with various operating systems, code, or whatever - you could provide them with a number of virtual machines for their projects.
You could use VMware, which would probably be the best solution at this point, but it's more expensive than the alternatives. There's also VirtualIron, based on Xen, or free Xen systems to use.
I think it could be a service to your student base.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
When a public institution finds itself out of a job because it is no longer needed... that public institution should shut down and give the funding back.
As an organization paid for with student fees (and possibly some government funds?) when your 'mission' is complete, you don't go looking for another mission, you go looking for a new job!.
The organization you work for has zero inherent right to exist once it's purpose has been OBE (Overcome By Events), or the problem it was created to solve has been solved.
As a student who goes to said university, I can honestly say that EngSoc is not withering away any time soon. The wireless that the university provides is ridiculously spotty and slow. I'm glad I'm an engineering student, or I wouldn't have a stable wireless connection on campus.
Ask the students who live on residence. When I lived on campus, I would have killed for a VPN or a proxy that didn't have throttled ports.
Seriously. The world could always use more support of FLOSS. You are in the perfect place to provide it. Get students involved, show them how the FLOSS community works, and have them start working on projects and pay them.
Probably better learning experience than some university's CS programs.
another thing that sucks about university is books. A major cost in books is paper and printing costs and whatnot. I'm sure textbook companys would be more than willing to sell you liscences on e-books for much cheaper than the books themselves. Considering how many students have laptops, if you were to provide a E-book store, where instead of sending a e-book file, students could log in from any web browser to their account and view their books online from any web enabled device. You would be providing a cheaper form of textbooks for students, great convinence (no more i forgot my book at home), a use for your massive bandwith, and a profit for yourselves. -mike
The Internet spread power around and provided for lots of innovation or at least trials of new ideas. It really seems like there is now a re-consolidation of power to servers like Google an others. This is, IMO, very *BAD* for FOSS and innovation in general. When even Universities don't have IT centers and services but merely consume services as commodities allot of the wind is going to go out of the FOSS sails. Students will certainly have fewer chances to be involved in real IT (and internships at corporations tend to be pretty lame).
I'm continuously surprised at the pro-Google [almost fan-club] attitude of so many.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Provision some of your hardware to run a hypervisor (like VMware ESX) and provide interested students or student groups with their own *real* virtual server. That is quite distinct from lame site-hosting provided by most free services. This would be valuable to any research groups or local FOSS projects.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
A publicly accessible bewolf cluster?
Your problem isn't any of the ones you listed. You need to be writing your own back-end applications so you can roll simple (SIMPLE!!!) shit like a guestbook on your own. If you have a year of CS under your belt, you are MORE than qualified to write a guest book.
Doesn't matter what the backend language is, asp.. php... UNIX shell, perl... Control the backend apps, you control the site. Let the hosting provider provider your guestbook? Puh-lease. You'll always be at their mercy because you'd might as well be writing your guestbook-and-similar crap.
Plus you might actually learn some CS problem solving techniques by writing apps. You aren't going to learn CS.squat tweaking HTML and CSS until you're blue in the face.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
One of the most valuable services you can provide is your collective clue, available at a meat-space location. Some of the other suggestions (providing virtualization support, teaching classes on various aspects of computing, security hygiene), are great ideas and will definitely help the community. An actual physical place where people with an interest in computing and hacking (in the good sense of course) can just gather, work, bounce ideas off each other and help the community, is rare, and something the web can't provide. Having a group like that SIPB was invaluable to me, when I was an undergraduate, by being a concentration of people with such interests. And since we were located right next to the main computer cluster/lab, we were also able to help other members of the community on a wide range of computing topics.
It seems that you could use your infrastructure to provide value-added voice and audio services to your community. I'm thinking that anyone with a PC or an 802.11 handheld gizmo could use your service to access applications that the official campus networks probably would not support - like audio conferencing, cheap mobile voice services around campus etc.
Surely there's some way to licence a sort of collaborative radio channel where students could play their own music or discuss lectures etc.
How about making a very specific search engine to index everything you can about your campus. Or have a way for students to respond to polls - there must be a million things students want to ask other students.
Nullius in verba
you can help out EFF and run a TOR server!
or you can donate the computing power to the SETI project
Consider going to your Liberal Arts colleagues in the humanities and ask them this question. I am sure with all of the new computer work in those fields there will be areas where your students and their's will find overlap - education - value.
While a clever way to comply with the law, this is wishful thinking. Most students will avoid the service because it doesn't have $RIAARTIST1 or $RIAAARTIST2.
To give some perspective: my college has a well-publicized campus radio station, but only a small percentage of students listen to it over ClearChannel stations.
The ACM chapter at my university was in a very similar spot when I was there (a couple of years ago). We tried to help provide advanced tech-support (at that time, having a USB floppy drive and knowing how to use ddrescue saved quite a few term papers), campus-wide educational opportunities (hour-or-so presentations aimed either at computer people or the general public), and local FOSS mirrors.
We also realized that, like you, we'd essentially been running pilot projects of technologies the university later deployed campus-wide (such as wireless access). We sat down with the IT staff and worked out a plan whereby we'd keep them up to date on what projects we were playing with and look into new technology at their request (such as 802.1x from our SOS), and they'd give us some room to experiment on the main network.
Among other projects, we ran an IPv6 gateway (SixXS tunnel) until I graduated that provided native IPv6 access to anyone in the science building (and with lots of Macs, Linux boxes, and Solaris machines, it was used pretty heavily), and we ran a pilot project with three different types of thin clients running from the same server for comparison and evaluation.
Did you get an account just to post that? And you posted a name that looks like your real name...
May I suggest you get a new account and don't link it to your off line identity. You did know that you can't delete Slashdot posts didn't you...
Oh well, serves you right. Just remember, what you post on line stays online, better not to link anything except a single personal/professional website to your off line self. Having multiple on line persona's helps too.
If you have too many resources, offer some to student projects. Not all student projects have connections that can garner them better equipment than whatever old junk the university gives them -- and student projects can be quite resource-intensive. I know from experience that it's fairly frustrating to do massive number crunching that would take a week for a single run on a 16-way Opteron system with 64+ gigs of RAM when all you have is a single Pentium III with 64 megs of RAM and a hard drive too small to offer enough swap space.
Getting your hands on sufficient horsepower can mean the difference between a decent project report and one with the evaluation being in the "future studies" section. If your servers are under-utilized you can offer time slots to student projects; I'm sure they will happily take them.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
how bout streaming media? Let college DJ's on there, and have "news" about the college in between? If it is a comp.sci school offer people free hosting? You probably have thought of that, but no better pratice than with a real Web Server. What about having a few old switches/routers that Cisco/Routing class students can ssh in and have a real lab instead of packet tracer (not the same)
0) Online storage space available via SMB, WebDav, and maybe kerberized NFS. Complete with the ability to do things like specify sharing permissions via SMB, WebDAV, NFS, and HTTP (I think Google's web space is less flexible than this)
1) Tech Support
2) User Education -- not the same as tech support, but often as valuable, if not MORE valuable. Offer small classes for all different levels of computer user. Things like "only stupid people send email attachments -- store the attachment in your online storage space, give the right people the appropriate permissions, and then send a link to the file, instead of the file itself, in that email".
3) Outreach -- see if you can use whatever funding you have to reach out to secondary schools that have less than adequate computer education programs. Depends somewhat on what types of funding you have, and what the limits are on that funding. If you're a student volunteer organization, you may have trouble with affording this. If you're a university funded organization, you may have trouble being authorized to spend your funding on things outside of the university. If you're a fee charging organization ... who knows. And maybe you're a mix of all of those.
4) Data Sync and Backup -- Using the online storage space above, offer people things like ACAP, SyncML, ActiveSync, rsync, kerberized rsync, scp, and similar mechanisms for backing up some or all of their data (depending upon storage limits). Probably one of the biggest risks for students these days is losing critical school work (and contact information) due to the poor backup infrastructure available to their now decentralized devices. Perhaps also allowing syncing the ACAP/SyncML/ActiveSync contacts and calendar data up to any online services that you can think of, as well (essentially making yourself a free-to-students alternative to goosync, though perhaps not limited to syncing with Google, and not limited to SyncML).
5) Google Apps for Education -- One advantage you can get, as an eductional organization, over them going straight to Google is that you can open a domain for your school under "Google Apps for Education", giving the students ad free Google services for the duration of their attendance at your college (but part of the deal that google requires is that once they're no longer a student, you have to tell them that, so that then they become ad supported accounts). Free to you, no ads for them, and a lifetime account within the name space of their Alma Mater for them.
Student tech service:
1) Provide a means and place for people to apply what they learn in class (simple webspaces, simple CGI on Apache) /done/.
2) Provide a means and place for people to learn about things they won't learn in class (WebDAV and deployment of Flash and real-world security policies)
3) Try to contact Microsoft and IBM to see about getting free copies of their software to make available for your group (as well as quotes on exactly how much they would cost if they were sold to real-world businesses), and if you have an academic advisor get them to make the inquiry for you.
4) More than anything else, become a means for students (and possibly people in the community who need help) to get the things that they need to get done
Take on the challenge of finding local nonprofits that need websites, and then find students (or teams of students) who are willing to take on those needs. Better yet, see if you can provide a list of site requirements to a web development instructor, or get the various parts of the faculty to look to you for real-world projects for their students' portfolios. (A web developer, say, to code it; a graphic-arts-for-web major to do the imagery; a back-end database guy to get real-world understanding of what the various database metrics actually mean; a project manager, to make sure everything gets done...)
Perhaps you could even go so far as to get something offered through your organization an independent CS course number for independent work.
Realistically, you know you need to make your organization non-redundant. I'm inclined to agree with the "college DJ" thing (especially if your college doesn't have a radio station, it'd be possible to build a netcasting system that would at least be available to people on your college network); I also agree with the ipv6 bridging idea (if you need an ipv6 tunnel provider, you can always email ipv6 at research.earthlink.net -- that's where I get my home tunnel from).
You have resources. You realize that your resources are being duplicated. Now, your job is to figure out how to keep your resources relevant. (I wonder if you could get business credit for trying to overhaul this -- you're basically doing what a CEO needs to do when faced with an increasingly competitive marketplace and the need to reinvent the organization.)
Above all: Good luck!
If services are useless given the freely available access perhaps it is a good time to close up shop. Seriously, go spend the resources (time, money) on something else.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Since your services are apparently becoming redundant, why not downsize? (or "wither away and die" as you put it). Sell/donate your equipment, and reduce your staff & budget. I'm sure that your money could be put to better use elsewhere. If you're not needed any more, then it seems like a waste to try to keep using resources in this way.
Start running a fab lab for the campus community - use a grant/your budget to get a laser cutter, vinyl cutter, desktop cnc router, and some soldering irons, and let students use them on their personal projects. This is already going on on other campuses and at community centers.
The best introduction is Neil Gershenfeld's book Fab. Carleton Library doesn't have a copy but email me, (penguin at supermeta dot com), and I'll lend you mine, I'm in Ottawa.
Installfests and install practice with all sorts of distros (for students and non-students) and computer hardware assembly practice. Group troubleshooting is a great way to learn practical skills. It gives you the potential for connection with the community too.
How about asking for donations of different IDEs? You don't even need multiple copies... one copy on a machine to play around with is good enough. Some stuff might be available through a MSDNAA program.
Don't know about your university, but mine neglected learning the actual software or languages you were using (most lectures and material were theoretical but assignments were practical!) Also, putting together a computer or installing an OS was something some people picked up on their own, but is scary to do by yourself for the first time (especially if your only available machine is your production machine at home). It's something that's kind of expected out out CS students, but never taught.
Talk with them about the services that they can't provide to their users because they don't have the budget. Or ask them what services your group could take over to free up their people for other things.
The risk is that if you're seen as taking people's jobs away in the IT department, they'll just clam up.
We are the 198 proof..
Host online open access journals. Start a series of journals that apply to the schools in your university, have said schools participate by having professors serve as reviewers/senior editors, enlist journalism students to serve as editors and summary writers, and put student research into the journals. Each journal would become a 'community' or subset of your original design, which was student access. Once operating open them to students at other universities. If it works out, open those journals to professionals and other non-students outside and have them participate in running them. It could put your university on the academic journal map. It would at least introduce students to publishing, something they'll greatly need if they continue in academic training. It could also provide journalism students with badly needed training in science/academic reporting and writing.
I recall a SciAm article about a couple such journals that started literally as a spare box under someone's desk and grew into well respected journals.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Promote libre software, libre tutorials/texts, and related causes like anti-DRM efforts. We currently lack good tutorials for GNU/Linux users regarding applications like OpenOffice. Allot of the ones in existence fail to really support GNU/Linux-even though they are not specific to an operating system necessarily (although in practice they end up being). For instance the other day I attempted to submit an suggestion for improving a tutorial where the site asked for suggestions. The message I got back was they simply weren't interested in supporting GNU/Linux (at least that is what it amounted to). They claimed to be OS neutral. Then said they only support the unmodified releases. The problem with this is that they really meant they only support OpenOffice.org downloaded releases. This source of unmodified OpenOffice releases is only suitable for MS Windows users. It is simply too difficult for users on other operating systems to install it using this method. It isn't the normal route for getting OpenOffice on GNU/Linux. To deny adding even the mere mention of Ubuntu requiring openoffice.org-evolution meant users of this platform who were inexperienced or new to computing couldn't use the tutorial. This is the type of thing I would like to see improved. Either working with such sites to redirect GNU/Linux libre software users to fixes for minor issues when following such tutorials when those specific tutorials are not really supporting non-MS Windows users-or writing / modifying those tutorials for libre / GNU/Linux users.
I do parallel computing w/ R (mentioned by GP post). I run it as a compute server on 432 different cores at the same time. I can use all those nodes interactively in parallel.
Could I do that with Matlab without paying more than 1/2 the cost of the cluster?
No.
I have found that what gets used on campus is what people want to use. In our research group people use Matlab, IDL, R, and Scipy.
People will use mostly what they want to use. Occasionally a close minded prof will require a particular language or package for an assignment, but fortunately all the packages are sufficiently similar, that it does not matter much.
I believe this is standard for most schools now days, or what I have seen:
- on line web-sight/form/IM tools to discuss homework also allow professors to answer questions posted on line
- integrate IM tools/e-mail/text message/other to facilitate communication between teachers, students, and groups
- web casting of classes
- web interface for on campus programs to use at students home
(via terminal services or other choice)
- account space to share files for group projects
- teaching basic computer use (spam, malware, virus, extra, good password policy, basic trouble shooting of computer issues)
- translate recorded classes (web cast into online lecture notes)
- posting/messaging of delayed/canceled/meeting of classes or groups
- facilitate the moving of data from one program to another
- find a ways to easily post complex problems for the teacher to look over (up load file, images, animation, that would allow the teacher to point out possible idea to look at to solve the problem or point out what the student is miss or other) allow this to be privet between students and teacher
- keep track of passed/recurring questions for classes and setup an FAQ for that class (teachers might need to help)
EngSoc? How are there no 1984 jokes yet?
More than a few university's are mandating a computer than can be hooked up the university's network. IIRC they have specs that every computer has to have that can be connected. I am not sure about this part but think it may be close as well. They also have a list of software that the student can buy at the bookstore. IIRC its a list of commonly used applications like word processing and spreadsheet and other type software. What you can do is to create the network (to every dorm and every other common student area) and through in wireless access as well. From what I understand this presents a *LOT* of on going work. My memory is iffy but I think Princeton does this as well as many others.
I would offer full virtual servers running FOSS (GNU/Linux, *BSD). Push the creativity and responsibility to students side. Let _them_ do whatever they want to do, whatever they can possibly come up with. Clouds, services, etc. Limit them via fair policy. In this way, environment is created by them where they can create better social services, search engines, fiddle with applications running on multiple servers at once, etc. For example XEN can be used or some commercial virtualization offer.
IMO hosting pr0n would attract more users :)
Provide students with a "clean" desktop OS that they can access remotely for using online applications; there are plenty of students out there with adware/spyware laden PCs who have problems with accessing online applications. Think of hosting Ubuntu and FreeNX and students can access an always-clean desktop OS (if you set it up that way) or if funding permits, provide students access to a Vista desktop for those who may be running XP Pro or a FOSS OS like Ubuntu. I know I still run XP Pro on my desktop because my hardware won't suppport upgrading to Vista, but would like to be able to have access to a PC running Vista from the comfort of my own living room. Since XP Pro has RDP client built in, accessing a remotely hosted Vista desktop would be easy. In either case load up the apps that you typically host in the on-campus computer labs (MathCad, SPSS, etc.) and let students run those applications remotely vs. standing in line in the lab.
While the students may no longer need you, the same may not be true for the faculty.
From your article you already appear to have the expertise to setup a mini Software Development group for the school. Which would also be a plus for any CS students to join and gain some hands on project work. The popularity of such a group would entirely depend on your school; it would be of more use to a business/engineering school then a liberal arts school.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
Educate them on the benefits (and problems and risks) of FOSS. Help them switch. Even if they don't want to switch OSes, there's lots of things they can do, in terms of better mail clients, office clients, things like GIMP, etc. OTOH, if they switch to Linux or BSD, a lot of the nastiest dangers and problems go away.
RIAARRRHHHHHRHRHRHRHRH
oh my bad, I thought we were growling in here :)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
And that's exactly what I'd do, if I had the privileges required, which I don't. This was my point exactly in my previous post.
Then you need to change hosting providers, once more, and finally.
Not providing shell access to a web hosting account is, in my opinion, a crime.
This is why I always deal with mom-n-pop ISPs. "Hey, can I get a shell account on that box?"
Well, plus then I can always say, "If you give me X I'll consult for you on Y"
Even if shell is a little hard to get, there's plenty of places that will let you run PHP programs.
30 seconds of googling turned up phpwebhosting.com, which offers php, mysql, shell, perl, python, ruby-on-rails, a gig of disk and email. For ten bucks a month.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
You host my club's website!!