University dual-boot lab setup
August 6, 2007 12:38 PM Subscribe
What are some best practices for managing a (university) lab full of Ubuntu/Windows XP dualboot machines?
Last year I pulled together a dual-boot environment for my university's computer science lab. Since the lab is used by both computer science and non-CS students (and the university's main OS is WinXP Pro), the default boot option was WinXP. Last year, we used Fedora on the Linux side of things, along with NIS for authentication, NFS for /home sharing, and e-mail for sharing files among classmates.
They're trying to pull together the disk images that they will duplicate on to all of lab computers right now, so I'm looking for any tips or best practices on running a lab full of dual boot machines. I'd like to switch over to running Ubuntu on both the server and the client machines, switch away from using NIS (because LDAP feels easier to administer), and use Samba to allow students to access their files from their Windows machines in the dorm.
How does your school or other similar institution handle this type of situation? What's the best way for students to share files among themselves and the professor? The CS faculty uses Moodle for the "classroom management" software, so it would be excellent if there was some sort of integration with that.
Last year I pulled together a dual-boot environment for my university's computer science lab. Since the lab is used by both computer science and non-CS students (and the university's main OS is WinXP Pro), the default boot option was WinXP. Last year, we used Fedora on the Linux side of things, along with NIS for authentication, NFS for /home sharing, and e-mail for sharing files among classmates.
They're trying to pull together the disk images that they will duplicate on to all of lab computers right now, so I'm looking for any tips or best practices on running a lab full of dual boot machines. I'd like to switch over to running Ubuntu on both the server and the client machines, switch away from using NIS (because LDAP feels easier to administer), and use Samba to allow students to access their files from their Windows machines in the dorm.
How does your school or other similar institution handle this type of situation? What's the best way for students to share files among themselves and the professor? The CS faculty uses Moodle for the "classroom management" software, so it would be excellent if there was some sort of integration with that.
This thread is closed to new comments.
We did not concern ourselves with file sharing, and I don't think you should either. Students primarily used email to save/retrieve documents, and some used USB drives. A few unlucky ones used floppy disks, which tended to fail at the most unfortunate times. I can't see any reason to have students sharing files with the professor. It sounds like a good idea, but professors aren't going to use this feature other than to distribute assignments, and a web page works well for that. Professors don't have time (or the inclination) to personally give instruction outside of set hours.
If you instruct students to set up Samba shares, prepare for tons of help desk calls and compromised/vulnerable computers in the dorms.
posted by meowzilla at 5:05 PM on August 6, 2007