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Ask Slashdot: Linux Support In Universities?
An anonymous reader writes "I study Computer Science at a university in Melbourne, Australia. I recently went to a 'Directions of IT' seminar run by our central IT department, where students were invited to discuss issues with the senior management of IT. During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems. Several of the managers laughed at this question, and one exclaimed 'Linux!' as if it was the punchline to a joke. The head of IT at least treated my question seriously, but I didn't get a concrete answer. So, I would like to ask Slashdot: Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless? How does IT support Linux users generally? Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?"
Does your university require some sort of special software to access its wireless network or something? My university has hotspots just like any wireless service. You can connect to it with whatever OS or device you like. They don't support Linux directly, but they certainly don't block it from the network.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How does IT support Linux users generally?
Not in university, but I would assume it’s still the same old “if you use something other than windows or maybe mac, you are free to do so however you are on your own to figure it out and resolve any issues!” attitude. Which really I think is fair. At least now Novel is mostly dead so you don’t need to deal with that shit ;p
I guess the question here would be, what specifically about the network do you need to support Linux. Basic connectivity should usually just work, unless they use some weird connection tool (do those even exist any more). Whatever web based systems your school is using _might_ work. Whatever standard tools your teachers dictate you use will probably be one platform only (and if they laughed at the mention of Linux, you can guess what platform that will be).
And some general advice: don’t go too crazy trying to do _everything_ in Linux for the principle of it. If it’s easy, do it, if not, just get a windows VM up and running to do your work. Unless you enjoy that kinda stuff, the frustration of trying to get a teacher to accept the work you did in a tool he has never heard of on a platform he isn’t familiar with just isn’t worth it for the warm and fuzzy feeling.
During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems.
What is the authentication and accreditation methods/technologies involved with this "new system?" It's entirely possible the meeting was for 10,000 feet people and not the actual IT folks. For instance, your current system appears to support Linux (PDF Warning) and I would be surprised if the plan was to drop this.
When I went to the University of Minnesota 2000-2004, the wireless was more or less agnostic to the operating system and their documentation has gotten much better. When I was there I helped set up some Gnu OCR stuff on Linux so that people could scan books in the labs and at halls--perhaps if your response had been to investigate and volunteer documentation for a Linux solution, they wouldn't have treated you as the punchline to a joke? (I know that not everyone has as much free time during college, this is just a suggestion.)
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
Yes, of course, back in 2000 when I was fresh off the farm, I was constantly ridiculed for asking questions about Linux. But for different reasons. Because I didn't know the difference between Linux, Unix, Solaris and BSD. The labs at UMN supported all of those widely with many many seats (well, maybe not BSD) and when I sat down at one I was temporarily outside of my comfort zone and would ask incredibly stupid questions. If you adopted the role of being the friendly helper to your administration, perhaps they could, as did I, eventually realize the amazing awesomeness and power of these operating systems? If they don't, you can always argue that diversity is great and offer to help with supporting your operating system of choice by making some documentation.
My work here is dung.
Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless?
No, although many faculty run Linux or OpenBSD. I have been able to discuss several different methods with faculty to connect to the WPA-PSK network; general consensus is that wicd works better than NetworkManager, and OpenBSD works better than wpa-supplicant based distros.
How does IT support Linux users generally?
They don't. Officially recommended to run MacOS or Windows.
Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?
Yes. They seem to be from the MS School of thought. You remember those people...everything must run MS and if it doesn't, it sucks. The guys who run Ultimate editions of everything even though they don't need it, and brag about having a beta version of Office. Well now they work in IT.
Generally, they're laughing because they've had the same discussions internally. I work in a university, and my servers mostly run Linux, but sometimes the software required for various user/student/client activities is only available on Windows (and if we're lucky, Mac). Linux just doesn't have enough of a userbase to be a roadblock to some software being adopted. Mac didn't used to, either, although that has changed in the past few years.
And, keep in mind, like in a lot of places, the most technically minded people aren't always the one making the final decisions. Heck, sometimes it's not even IT making all of the IT decisions.
I am not sure how many other campuses are like this, but our campus (Southern Illinois University - Carbondale) makes use of Juniper VPN in order to allow students, faculty, and staff to log onto wireless. Basically the access points are open to all, but you need to use VPN software in order to be able to access the rest of the campus network, and ultimately the internet. For Linux users like me, it was a little bit of a pain to set up, since it makes use of a Java client to automagically set everything up. Luckily I use 32-bit Linux. 64-bit users from what I hear are generally out of luck. Also out of luck are students who want to use their Android device on our network, since a Juniper client hasn't been set up/made available/customized? specifically for our campus yet.
This is funny, because I've had no issues with campus-wide printing service for Linux.
Yeah, I'm mean, seriously, at this point it's a GIVEN that some University students and faculty will be using other operating systems - Mac especially, and pretty much any University that has a Computer Science, Software Development, or IT program should have classes in which students are at least exposed to Unix/Linux and are taught how to do development and/or administration for Unix and Unix-like systems (as they are used a lot in Enterprise IT).
You shouldn't even have to ASK about Mac and Linux compatibility this late in the game - IT should KNOW that they need to provide compatibility with those OSes.
The good news is, that unless you are using some exotic extension to WiFi (like requiring some sort of Active Directory-based login before you can even get an IP address), Mac and Linux users WILL BE compatible with a WiFi network already, as it is an IEEE standard which both have supported for about 10 years.
Search around for your prospective university's Linux User Group. They would have all the information about how easy it is to run Linux in their environment, whether it is officially supported or not.
As an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, I'm going to assume this is no big deal, but possibly at least confirms what people think. CMU has several Unix clusters, as well as Mac clusters. All of the downloadable software is supported on as many platforms as the software is created with. In fact, several classes (especially the digital IC design with CADENCE) are operated only in *nix environments.
VPN access to on-campus resources are also provided in all operating environments, and having used both the PC and *nix ones, I can say documentation is quite complete. This is a relatively recent development, however, as the documentation and support has greatly improved since I started at CMU.
It greatly helps when the professors are experts in the software they're teaching and help debug problems with the IT department. (The Hadoop cluster was especially fun to debug, especially with the broken JAR file passing in 0.20.1).
Weird.
Linux was an integral part of my Computer Science education.
The first few CSC courses were all run from a lab with tons of Alpha terminals. Later courses were conducted in labs where all the machines dual-booted Windows and Linux. Almost all of our programming assignments were done in a Linux environment.
Plus, half the university's servers were running on some sort of Unix-like OS.
And you're getting ridiculed for asking about Linux?
Seems a little weird to me... Is Linux really such a marginal part of a modern university environment?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Oxford's campus-wide wireless LAN project, OWL, operates like a hotspot scheme with open access points and a redirection to a login page for temporary credentials when you open a web browser. If you're a student or faculty member, you can instead use Cisco Anyconnect to access the university VPN and bypass the login screen.
Not only does the university support Anyconnect on Linux clients, it also provides guidance for setting up an entirely Free Software alternative for those who would rather not download the official software. It's really quite good.
Further details at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/wireless/
I've struggled with this over the years - the IT department at a lot of Universities is completely separate from any college or program. They'll get the bright idea of doing something not supported on Linux (they'll usually try to support Mac as it has greater representation among the general population), then the CS departments and students, maybe the IT academic department (that is, the department which TEACHES IT as opposed to the University-wide department which MANAGES IT), and maybe some of the scientists (Physicists, Chemists, etc) who use Linux have to complain that IT broke compatibility, and *hopefully* it gets fixed.
In an ideal world, IT would consult users about PROPOSED changes, incorporate feedback about such problems, and find solutions, beforehand. Yeah, right.
I work in IT at a university, and Linux support is on a best-effort basis. Wireless isn't an issue, because we use WPA2 Enterprise. If your IT department isn't using open standards for something like wireless, I hate to think what else you have to deal with. The biggest Linux issue I have is VPN access. Unfortunately, the support/use of open standards kinda ends with the WiFi network. The VPN is Juniper, and requires a horrid Java-based client to access it. The web portal you have to use to get the client is an ASP abomination, and ineptly attempts OS detection, routinely failing on Linux. It's possible to actually get the client, but not without 1) Digging into the page's source to find out where the clients are, 2) using the JS console to trigger the function that actually retrieves the client, 3) writing a bash script to load the client and required Java libs, and (on a 64-bit machine) 4) installing 32-bit JRE and using that location in said bash script.
I had expected a university with a top-notch CS department would be better than average on basic IT stuff. But no, it's Windows cargo-cult bullshit everywhere you go. Don't get me wrong, there are always pockets of interesting stuff going on... But universities in general... brilliant faculty and students, but the place is actually run by retarded monkeys.
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I'm pretty sure networking hardware and the software they use are platform-neutral with respect to client connections, and they took your issue as an instance of "THAT dude who thinks he's leet for using linux yet doesn't know how networks operate."
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I work at a major University in the US (rhymes with Schmarvard).
I lead a team of 6 that offers Linux training, OS installs, desktop support, and a Debian-based HPC/Web/Database/Tomcat/Wiki/RT environment. We used to get lots of requests to install Linux on laptops or desktops, though those have mostly slowed due to the fact it's easy to install. The desktops are almost all Ubuntu.
Most everything else we do is OS-agnostic since there's a lot of OS X on campus. I think the only thing that's really specific to a Windows environment is Exchange and the Outlook client. I just fire up a VirtualBox VM and run Windows 7 in it.
Yep, wanted to buy computer. I was looking for a specific model and asked them if I could get the rebate by having windows uninstalled. Can you believe, the guy says, "Why would you want to ruin your computer by doing that?" I told him that I would rather have some distro of a linux os on it. Like Debian. He responded by 'educating' on why windows is so much better. And since apparently he had 'personal knowledge' of Debian he said that the performance of a linux distro would never match the performance of a venerable OS like... gasp.... VISTA! The truth is the same now as it always has been. People who don't understand something always think its worthless by default.
Yeah, but you can't download Windows source code nor most of the parts from MacOS, so Linux is a good case study.
Huh? Sure you can.
My school uses 802.1x TTLS-PAP, with the SSO username/password, for authentication and encryption. On wired, there's a (standard HTML) portal that registers your (or an entered, for consoles) MAC address when you enter your password. I do IT support in the dorms; we don't officially support Linux, but it's usually even easier to configure than OSX (which is quite finicky with 802.1x) - on Linux, when you attempt to connect, it guessed the authentication method and just requires your user/pass. Windows needs a supplicant for TTLS - we use a configured SecureW2 installer.
The engineering school's big beefy server (appropriately named Eniac) runs a custom SuSE distro, as well as a few large labs (with home directories mounted over NFS). All my classes have either gone to great pains to be OS-agnostic, or require Linux - never Windows. For credit, all work must compile on the engineering school server (no "it worked at home!", you must check) but it's usually not an issue. For reference, my major coding classes have been a compilers class in OCaml (ugh), a graphics class in Qt/C++, a hardware class in C, and a number of classes with Java. For the most part, I did the work in OSX and tested on their machines before submission. I have an OS class next year that actually requires Linux, because we'll be using direct syscalls and they want to ensure consistency even across different Unixen.
The engineering school is really OSS-friendly, to the point where I think it'd be hard to graduate from it without Linux proficiency (though people sure try...). In fact, I can't think of a single class that's required proprietary software of any sort, even in the liberal-arts school.The networking folks are Linux-heavy as well, so the whole campus feels that. But the business school is a MS shop through and through (Exchange, domains, etc).
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When I decided to go back to school, I started with a community college. Their wireless network was pretty much open, but for some perverse reason, it worked with the Windows DHCP client, and with udhcpc, but not with dhcpcd (used to be the default on Gentoo) or dhclient (default on Ubuntu/Debian). It seems fairly likely that this was a bug in their server software, and while I wasn't ridiculed, I never did get any help from the university -- I had to figure this out on my own. As much of a Linux geek as I am, I'm really not sure where I got the idea to just try other DHCP clients.
The university didn't really seem to care that I solved it, or how I solved it, and I don't think they ever put it into a FAQ or anything. The networking club did appreciate it, since a few of them were at least playing with Linux. I never tried it with a Mac, and never saw a single Mac while I was there, so I have no idea if that would work.
But it was because of this, and because the next two courses in their "computer programmer" degree (after Mainframe Assembly) were COBOL and Visual Basic, that I got out as soon as I could. After one term, I left for a real university. (Incidentally, one more factor validating my choice is the fact that the community college kicked me off their cyber defense competition team as soon as they realized I wouldn't be there next term, because "that's how it works in the real world" -- the guy running it is of the opinion that as soon as there's a hint you might leave, you get escorted out the door by security.)
So, that brings me to today. The university I'm at now does provide some amount of support for Linux, to the point where some of their FAQ pages include stuff about Linux, and if I ask a question, it's very possible I'll get an actual answer. The wireless uses MAC filtering, but there's no actual requirement that I use any particular software -- and, bonus, if I make sure to uncheck the "use NAT" box when registering my system, I get a real, Internet-routable IP address and dynamic DNS (with a little firewalling; obviously outbound SMTP and inbound Samba are blocked). I could, theoretically, run a webserver on my laptop that'd be accessible from http://serenity-xps.student.iastate.edu/.
The facilities provided are a genuinely heterogeneous mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux everywhere -- that's labs, remote access machines, etc, and they do point out things like rdesktop for the Windows machine. I've avoided getting a copy of MS Office by using rdesktop to connect to the comp sci Windows terminal server (which has a recent MS Office installed) whenever Open/LibreOffice won't work, I've had no issues printing with lpr on the commandline on the Linux remote machine (though sometimes it's easier to convert to a PDF and print from that Windows terminal server).
Individual courses are hit-and-miss, but mostly hit. I've had English classes which met in Mac-powered computer labs (one started on Windows and then switched to checking out Macbooks), an entirely-Java/Eclipse programming course which was just transparently cross-platform, and a programming course which required people to use gcc and graded you based on whether your code ran on a particular Linux machine you had ssh access to, and a Digital Logic course which was just switching to Linux machines in its labs. That last one was a little bumpy -- all the lab instructions were in .docx and not all opened in OpenOffice -- so I got the professor to give us PDFs, so hell yes, Linux was both required and supported.
The most common per-course issue is people still sending doc and docx around (though most accept odf and all accept pdf for anything I write). There was a course which required people to produce a PowerPoint presentation with an audio recording of our narraiton included, which is a PITA even if you have Windows and PowerPoint -- here, I did something ridiculous and built an HTML5 presentation inst
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