Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs? 267
Benanov asks: "I'm doing a literature review on the Feasibility of Linux for a public-access lab (i.e. not Computer Science students at a university but instead the entire student body would have a login), and I haven't found any detailed studies about any places where this is actually done. If you know of any citeable sources about studies / reviews, I'd really appreciate it."
university of washington (Score:1)
Re:university of washington (Score:2, Informative)
Isn't this rather standard? (Score:1)
Isn't this basically what companies like Netcom and Compuserve did? Unix systems with large numbers of unrelated users all having logins. You'll need some sort of central directory for passwords (pam_ldap or something similar should work wonders there), but otherwise it sounds like what Unix-like systems have been doing for decades.
Re:Isn't this rather standard? (Score:2)
Re:Isn't this rather standard? (Score:2, Informative)
So set up Gnome or KDE on the workstations, no admin privileges to any user accounts of course, with the home directories Coda-mounted and with things locked down per standard for an ISP's shell machines (ie. tighter than a nervous virgin clam). Minimal services running, don't install dangerous things like nmap, and give them a desktop skin that resembles Windows and an xdm/gdm/kdm login box. You only have to assemble the workstation image once, then just clone it over onto workstations as needed. Kernel modules and DHCP are your friend here.
For extra evilness points, lock down their dot-files by making them owned by a special user and not writable by the account itself. This requires a bit of a balancing act, since some dot-files do need to be writable for storing state.
This is the same process needed to secure the workstations used by the CS classes, you're just talking about several thousand workstations instead of several hundred. There's more administrative overhead, but the actual things needed for each workstation are roughly the same. Just be sure to have a beefy enough fileserver (or spread the load over several) to handle the network-mounted home directories.
Look for overlap with LTSP studies... (Score:3, Informative)
Good and bad (Score:2)
Re:Good and bad (Score:1)
Or, let 'em use the Linux equivalents and be happy. I have a friend who's not much of a geek who's been using Linux for over a year now with few problems. Her biggest problem is the fact that HR departments _demand_ Word documents. :-(
Re:Good and bad (Score:1)
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
And I'm definitely female - I checked before I posted this just to be sure.
And haven't you heard of linuxchix.org [linuxchix.org]?
Re:Good and bad (Score:1)
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
That said, you could do what they do at my school (where no labs are CS only) -- install Linux on 3/4 or 1/2 of the computers at the front of the lab and make the rest Windows machines. For those who want to check their email or browse the web, there's about a one-minute learning curve. For those who want to write papers, they can go to the quieter back.
Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)
What are open school labs for? Internet chat? No. Games? No. The purpose of open labs is to provide computers for people who can't afford their own so they can get their work done. That means word processing, spreadsheets, maybe some web browsing. All of those things can be done using Linux and various free packages. They need to edit or print out their MS Word document that they wrote at home? OpenOffice will do that just fine. The only problem I've ever had with it handling MS documents was some wrong background colors in an Excel spreadsheet, which is easily fixed.
As for the confusion, that's what lab assistants are for. "That icon is the web browser, that one is the word processor..." Quick and easy, and exactly the sort of brain dead stuff every lab assistant has to deal with all day, every day, regardless of Operating System.
For the few people who absolutely have to have Windows or Mac programs, have a few specialized labs set up for them. That's neither new nor different in a college environment, where just about every department has at least a small lab with some computers set up for the specific needs of the students taking those classes.
If a student wants to use a program not offered in the open lab, they can go find the department that would use that software and make an arrangement, or they can get their own damn computer.
What are open labs for? Lots of change... (Score:2)
Not every college student has a computer, and not every computer is a laptop, and not every laptop has a wireless LAN card (though the latter's become affordable, if the college has the access points). The jobs of an open lab have changed a lot from the days when most work was on terminals connected to a big shared machine, and they'll keep changing as technology changes the affordability and portability of the average student's computing resources, and y'all in the academic-staff business will have to keep hopping, reinventing yourselves, and getting new budgets approved.
So what are they for now?
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
I never got used to AIM, but I can image that it is a very good educational tool. I used to use finger & [y]talk all the time as an undergrad to quickly talk with friends about a project requirement, test date, etc. These days few machines allow finger and AIM has replaced it.
Couldn't you install some AIM client that doesn't screew things up and point users to it? I know there is a Java client, I can't imagine that being very evil...
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
We lab personel often allowed people to use the computers for other purposes such as writing papers and such, mostly because the school was actually a little short on open lab computers, and it wasn't uncommon for those labs to be full. The only people who knew about the computers in the math lab were people who used the math lab for its intended purpose, so we figured it was OK.
Allowing chat clients was way out of the scope of the lab, and given that the PC algebra coursework was supposed to be done individually, it was actually antithetical to the main purpose of those computers. Additionally, the lab had a strict policy against users installing software of any kind. I managed to get permission to install SETI@home clients on a few of them (it was a math lab, after all, and SETI is doing some pretty cool math). I couldn't get the clients to run right on those machines because they had crappy monitors that wouldn't do 800x600, and they couldn't handle it running as a background process, so it was a relatively short-lived experiment.
The fact that it wasn't installed by us was a big part of the problem. It was students who were installing it, and they wanted AIM. If we'd had aanther AIM-compatable client installed, they probably would have downloaded and installed AIM anyway. I never saw anybody using for potentially legitimate uses like you describe, but even if they were they still should have gone to an open lab and used one of those PCs rather than tying up one that somebody else needs to get their classwork done.
Also, this was in the AOL5.0 days. At that time every lab tech I knew had nightmares revolving around AOL software. It caused all kinds of problems. I don't recall there being a significant amount of alternative or compatible clients around at the time. Basically you had AIM, ICQ, or maybe IRC if you were a 1337 h4x0r, and they were pretty much discrete. (I don't mean any offense to IRC users, that's just the best description of the few people I knew that used it)
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
Case in point-- my parents were lost with Windows 95. I put together a RedHat 6.1 system (now running 7.1) and they stopped calling me for tech support, and they started using their computer more
The point is that the users of a computer center (or my parents, for that matter) don't want to be administrators of the system, and they don't need to install much software, so the fact that Linux requires a little more knowledge to do these things minimally is not an issue.
Anyway, I know that this is not what you are looking for-- I wish you the best of luck in finding quotable studies.
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
Those computers were not there for the student's convenience. It was not an open lab, it was a math lab. Those computers had specific purposes. If people wanted to do stuff like chat, there were open labs within a 10 minute walk where they could do all the chatting they wanted.
The relatively few students who were installing their own software were inconveniencing the students who needed to use those computers for their intended purpose. My job was to help them do that work (which I was very good at) and to enforce the AUP, which included a NO USER-INSTALLED SOFTWARE clause.
Even in an open lab, though I would still have the same policy against user-installed software. In an academic environment, unauthorized software causes about 80% of the problems admins have to deal with. That's why utilities such as ghost exist.
Re:Good and bad (Score:2)
Second, these were Windows 95 boxen. The software that these computers were intended for didn't run on NT, and since this was 3 years ago, there weren't any other options, not that we had the budget to upgrade the OS even if one were available which ran our software and had any kind of security at all. The security model was an AUP posted on the wall above each computer which was enforced by tutors such as myself. The AUP was quite specific regarding user-installed software.
Third, this was a math lab, not an open lab. All the software needed to perform the intended function of those machines was provided already. It was the students who insisted on installing this crap that had no respect for the usability of the machines, since the software they installed, particularly AIM, often hosed up software people needed to do the work for which these machines were intended, which included a PC-based algebra class. I was concerned with usability for people who needed those sytems to do their classwork, not usability for some idiot chatting on AIM.
Fourth, there were open labs within a 10 minute walking distance of mine, though they they had similar AUPs. Anyone who doesn't understand why an AUP would include a clause against user-installed software, which apparently includes you, doesn't know enough about networked environments to be making judgements about the abilities of others. Since you are obviously ignorant, let me enlighten you to the basic facts relevant to our current discussion: User-installed software is responsible for the vast majority of problems, especially in an environment such as a school computer lab. Computers in those environments are there for a reason, and that reason generally does not include chat, games, pornography, etc, and if any of those activities interfere with the the intended purpose of those computers it is the duty of the staff to remedy the problem, which we did by kicking the user out and reimaging the drive.
Finally, for the record, the last time I checked my IQ was in the 150 range. Your prose style suggests that you are well below that mark. Perhaps, in keeping with your world view, you should consider irradiating yourself? You know, leadership by example and all that...
Re:Good and bad...and the expensive (Score:2)
So the idea is you need to do productivity stuff...you fire up the virtual desktop from a central win2k server..and view it on the lab computer.
So know you only have to maintain that one central win2k server ( its 2 backups ) instead of a whole lab of windows machines.... of course the licensing issues in this are um...interesting.
-jef
Re:Good and bad (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as programs they are going to want to use:
Check out UofM... (Score:2)
-Adam
Re:Check out UofM... (Score:2)
As far as it goes, Bradley has used Unix machines (originally AT10 years). I suppose it's possible that they stopped that practice, but I doubt it. Go poking around www.bradley.edu and look for Computer or Computing Services to find contact information, I'm sure they'd be willing to talk to you about how they deal with the issues that come up in giving shell accounts to naive users.
Re:Check out UofM... (Score:2)
Re:Check out UofM... (Score:1)
now go to sleep
CMU (Score:1, Informative)
"You mean... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:"You mean... (Score:2)
-Peter
Re:"You mean... (Score:1)
Same as Unix labs? (Score:1)
I'm intrigued by the idea, but please clarify some activities anticipated on these computers.
linux k12 project (Score:2, Informative)
DNALounge uses Linux kiosks for the public (Score:5, Informative)
[LINK] [dnalounge.com]
Re:DNALounge uses Linux kiosks for the public (Score:1)
I would think most Windows/*nix people would think of such endorsement as heresy. (-;
Re:DNALounge uses Linux kiosks for the public (Score:2)
Well, a one-button keyboard couldn't be used in the Windows world. How would you give it the 3-finger salute?
Ooohhh. One button mouse!
Re:DNALounge uses Linux kiosks for the public (Score:2)
As far as my productivity is concerned I prefer 2 or more button mice BUT the one button mouse does make things very simple for Joe user.
Purdue (Score:1)
Re:Purdue (Score:2)
what applications? (Score:2)
Redhat (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Redhat (Score:3, Insightful)
MIT (Score:1, Informative)
TU Darmstadt (Score:2, Insightful)
Not quite linux but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Trust & familiarity (Score:4, Interesting)
CMU (Score:2)
Make it user-friendly. (Score:3, Insightful)
One time early in the academic year, I noticed a user had forgotten to log out. In the xterm that had been opened with mwm, I saw:
% netscape
% netscape
% netscape
% netscape
% aol
bash: aol: command not found
% aol
bash: aol: command not found
% aol.com
bash: aol.com: command not found
% aol.com
bash: aol.com: command not found
% netscape.com
bash: netscape.com: command not found
Make all the jokes you want about LARTing the newbies, but there were absolutely no options on screen. Furthermore, there are no solid equivalents for popular Windows or Macintosh software packages on Linux or Solaris. IE for Solaris is lackluster compared to Windows, Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it), GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop, and StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.
Re:Make it user-friendly. (Score:2)
This is just plain crazy. Moz1.0 and OpenOffice1.0 are both incredibly solid, full featured, and more than acceptably compatible.
I run a team of programmers who have to submit pretty documents to a company full of folks who use nothing but MS; we run Linux for development purposes and have zero significant issues going back and forth between Word and OpenOffice1.0.
Re:Make it user-friendly. (Score:2)
How did you get rated so high? First you claim that thousands of people use this system at Carnegie Mellon to somehow justify it as a well designed network. Then you spout off the above load of BS. First mwm is not the default window manager on linux or solaris and hasn't been for years. Maybe back in the days of SunOS 4.x, but anything written in the last 5 years has been using CDE, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, KDE, GNOME, etc. The last two can look and feel an aweful lot like those windows and macs. And where did you come up with the NUM LOCK problem? Linux boxes are surprisingly stable and cheap and can run hundreds of users off of one box. They can remotely display their desktop to windows and macs as well as other unix boxes natively. They can share files with windows, macs and unix boxes easily from default installs and include all the software necessary to automate the process of moving and managing your data out of the box. Perhaps Carnegie Mellon and its supposed computer scientists don't know anything about computers or how to use them but that gives no excuse to your post. Please link to sites that can't be drawn by mozilla and give reasons for the problems with the Gimp, StarOffice, KDE and GNOME and why people, university students, would have trouble using said software. Oh and in the example of a nightmare user experience in mwm can you tell me why netscape was never displayed? It sounds to me like either you made all this up or nobody has administrated your unix network in the last 5 years. Since your post is about improving the usability of Linux do you have any suggestions?
Re:Make it user-friendly. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a small minority. Are those few pages really worth keeping on the Windows upgrade treadmill?
GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop
Not for professionals, but for many people it's more than enough. So buy a few workstations with Photoshop, and let the GIMP do its thing on the rest of the machines: being "good enough" instead of a full replacement.
StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.
In terms of what? Have you really used the latest StarOffice/OpenOffice.org packages? Yes, MS Office does have larger feature set, but how many of those features that StarOffice doesn't have really get used?
Re:Make it user-friendly. (Score:2)
Furthermore, there are no solid equivalents for popular Windows or Macintosh software packages on Linux or Solaris.
Spoken like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I use Linux every day all day. Mozilla (Galeon) for browsing, OpenOffice for editing documents that are also edited by colleagues running MSOffice on Windows, gaim for instant messaging, samba for accessing Windows shares, Evolution for email, etc. etc.
What other applications are they likely to require again? Sure, if they need to run some specialized app that is written for Windows (and won't run under Wine) then maybe you might have a problem. Other than that, can the FUD.
Vanderbilt Does This To Some Degree (Score:1)
Simple End User Linux (Score:4, Informative)
@ UC Irvine (Score:1)
One issue that the admistration had was the users breaking into the machines. We auto-spawned X sessions and used the restrict flag in LILO (which allows no special options to be passed to the kernel at boot time e.g linux init=/bin/sh) and we never had any problems. Of course, we also patched the machines whenever there were local or remote security holes via an automated patching system.
Another good idea might be to have the machines reboot, mount a miniroot at night and copy their os partitions over from a central server, similar to what I've seen norton ghost do on windows boxen.
and of course, you can use them for the obligatory parallel computing tasks during the night
Project Athena (Score:3, Interesting)
things have worked at MIT for the last
18 years (although with various Unixi,
now including Linux) starting with Project
Athena in the early 80's. Athena is where
we get X Windows and Kerberos.
Australian National University - Redhat (Score:1)
I suspect that with this number, things have moved beyond the computer science department.
Quote from a older article:
He said the strong background in Linux at the ANU made it an ideal environment in which to become an expert programmer.
"We provide Linux laboratories for students to work on, the staff use Linux and in 2000 we won the Gordon Bell Prize for the fastest Linux machine in the world -- Bunyip," Mr Edwards said. "
YOU ARE TOTALLY CRAZY LINUX WILL NEVER WORK (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, at Columbia, they have all these dumb terminals, which run Linux and an X session. They're not bad for checkin' yer mail, but they don't allow you to do much else. For some application where the types of software needed are very limited, I think that it's prolly great.
For the real computers labs, for the non-cs types, they are mostly Windows (NT or some such) or Mac. The NT machines are pretty well locked-down and something like this would be quite easy to achieve; it would probably even be more secure (well maybe) with Linux.
I guess the real thing is choosing software. OpenOffice is alright, but I don't know if random people are actually going to want to write papers with it. I mean, I have, but...well...people might have some issues with their floppies. That's probably the biggest thing. Dang floppies.
You should really use DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, maybe Lotus 1-2-3.
UTD Does It. (Score:5, Insightful)
Though their web site [utdallas.edu] is a bit sparse on details, you could probably shoot an email to a member of the staff [utdallas.edu]. They're friendly people, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
Re:UTD Does It. (Score:2)
Ironic, of course, that the workstations are in the Arts & Humanities building and not the CS building.
Viruses (Score:1)
Re:Viruses (Score:1)
Re:Viruses (Score:1)
Anser: (Score:5, Interesting)
She's your average windows user, don't ask her about hardware or drivers she just wants browse the web etc.
She had no trouble logging in through kdm.
she had no trouble using the default kde3 setup. All this with no help from me (i wasn't even watching)
She can check her email, browse the web, listen to music and print stuff out (thanks cups + kdeprint).
A couple of months went by, I haven't watched her use it at all...
I asked her the other day, so how do you like linux?
her answer: "It's just like using windows" and "I like the way it looks".
Seems to me unsophisticated users aren't able to set up a kde3 box but they are sure able to use one.
Keep maintenance scalable (Score:3)
Even relatively unsophisticated users can help out with routine maintenance. Plan to be able to allow an automated method (net or CD) to restore default files and configurations or to do a fresh install. This allows people with relatively few technical skills to restore machines or put the icons back.
Don't forget to put a password on the bootloader and / or BIOS so that it's less easy to fiddle with the machine. You want it to boot up normally from the HD or net each time, but not allow custom kernel parameters or booting from the CD, floppy, or unintended places on the net. You may also want to mount some or all of the local file systems read only, to slow the rate of decay. Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake are better each time, but all still have a lot of extra (troublesome) packages mixed in with the default installation. Keep user profiles and home directories on the file server(s).
Find out what the students will be doing and pick relevant packages (Mozilla, Opera, XMMS, xpdf) and be sure to pick out relevant default settings. A lot of the principles listed on Jakob Nielsens's web site [useit.com] are relevant for a desktop as well.
One university I saw last fall in Norway had all of their "MS-Windows" machines running Linux with Metaframe or Wine or something, so that's a good work around for legacy apps like MS-Excel. The University of Michigan has one of the better computing environments I've seen.
Illinois Institute of Technology (Score:2, Interesting)
We also had pretty fast access to the internet - no port blocking; too many Mud players (me included) and a few Muds that ran on school property (eventually went away; cool admin left). Man, those were nthe days.
Project Athena @ MIT (Score:2)
You may want to check out MIT's project Athena (Academic Computing at MIT). They have been using UNIX machines for the student-wide computing environment which includes all different kinds of applications (word processors, spreadsheets, CAD software, scientific applications, programming environments, instant messenging). There is also a Linux and a NetBSD version of the Athena environment.
I haven't been following the developments but I believe they were looking into introducing more Linux machines in the computer labs and enriching the Athena environment by adopting GNOME.
Perhaps some current MIT student can provide more information.
Here's some links:
An overview [mit.edu]
A dated article from the MIT student newspaper [mit.edu].
An FTP server [mit.edu] where you can download the Athena software (MIT license)
All of MIT's Clusters are UNIX/Linux (Score:1)
What's so new about ...x in public labs? (Score:5, Interesting)
The machines have usually been Sun, but I don't think Linux would be overwhelmingly different from them...
So forgive me if I don't quite understand the question. UNIX has been a feasible solution for all students for years, and there's little reason to believe Linux wouldn't be.
NMT (Score:1)
Also, to type papers or anything office related, one has to use windows....
It works well, but would work better if anyone cared to allow easy printing under Linux...
5 Years Old and counting (Score:4, Informative)
Since 1996, they've offered a Public Access Lab using donated hardware and space provided by the University. They started off using 486 machines that booted RedHat 3 and NFS mounted from a blazing P90. Then they moved on to using NCD X-Terms. In 1998, Corel Computer donated Netwinder systems for use as the PAL workstations. In 2000, the lab sustained water damage from construction on the roof, and the Netwinders were replaced with ThinkNIC thin clients.
But we don't have any useful literature to provide.
Re:5 Years Old and counting (Score:2)
for at least 7 years
Heh, yeah I guess so. I graduated in 1997, and I think I got my first account in the summer of 1995, between 2nd and 3rd year. A real shell account - much better than than I got from CHAT - and a SLIP dialup so I could run Mozilla from home. I even helped write some of the first FAQ - how to use passwd to change your password, etc.
Yeah! (Score:1)
Cambridge PWF (Score:3, Informative)
Tips (Score:3, Funny)
2) Use KDE/GNOME. Ideally, set it up to boot into X, have KDE/GNOME both installed and the users can select the one they want.
3) Lock down permissions tighter than a Vatican nun.
These tips will produce a perfectly usable system, fairly sturdy against morons trying to(or accidentally) screw up the system or introduce viruses or what have you. And make sure to review the logs, paying special attention to those who use the root account, either with su or by directly logging in
Re:Tips (Score:2)
They were working fine before, but the admin decided that since a porn banner came up accidentally when one of the students was surfing(which said student stood up and admitted it was him when the admin chewed us out) meant the class as a whole was guilty of surfing for porn, and he had to lock the systems down.
Oh... and we need to print out our practice test results. So, we log in as administrator to run the test program. But administrator can't print or successfuly change the permissions to print.
If this course wasn't free, I'd be having a shitfit by now...
problems? (Score:1)
But this is a situation where Linux's power might be its undoing. In the physical presence of a Linux box, it is trivial for someone with the proper experience to boot into single-user mode, change the root password, and bam. Suddenly they are sitting in front of the most powerful hacking machine available outside the Pentagon.
Result? Linux gets to be associated even more with hacking, and the spooks start taking an interest in our favorite OS (Linux). And that is some scruteny we don't want, thanks.
In this context, I think shelling out for Windows is the best bet.
Re:problems? (Score:2)
Score: +5 Ingenious troll
Best flawed rationalization for using Window$ I've seen in -- ten minutes?
t_t_b
done and done. (Score:1)
pmj
University of Bonn (Score:2)
U of Md (Score:2)
I used to work in the WAM and GLUE labs when I was an undergrad at UMCP, and the folks that managed the systems were pretty friendly, if you can get contact info for the current WAM sysadmins, they can probably give you better pointers. In the mean time, there is a page giving useage statistics [umd.edu] for the WAM/GLUE cluster.
MIT Athena (Score:1)
www.k12LTSP.org (Score:2)
The admin may have to keep a tight reign... (Score:2)
From my distant memories of the dummy terminals at the University of North Dakota's CS department, one person starting a series of forked processes can leave a big hurt on everyone. Not that the setup would be anything like the server-terminal configuration at UND, or that there won't defenses against such problems... but users will find, either directly or indirectly, ways to at least take down individual systems down due to the freedom that such systems have to allow to be useful to a general audience.
That said, Windows and other public systems have all these problems too. If you've ever been in a general student computer lab more than a few times, there's just going to be dead systems every few dozen chairs. You're still going to want to scan any writable medium you've used on the system for malicious programs before you use it after bringing it home, and there's still just going to be problems with the configuration acting differently than even experienced users expect.
The only way I can see to truly prevent many types of problems in a public setting would be to not allow user executables, have a limited interface for most users, and logically ensure that at no path along the bootup, use, and shutdown of a system can a user do anything outside of expected things with the system. That means no boot-from-CD or disk, no systems with access to BIOS settings on bootup, etc, until after login to ensure security - which is likely not possible with most hardware.
Anyway, I have no suggested solution - just issues I see with any public system, including Linux ones. They're not big issues either, considering that most public systems now seem to work fine with their limited security. But not all the advantages touted for Linux will be automatically present in a public system!
:^)
Ryan Fenton
How much functionality do you want? (Score:2)
Where I used to live, the local library's public systems were (afaik still are) run on Win98. They were hideously unstable (Netscape had a habit of locking out input and requiring restarts). Where I live now, the libraries run Win2k; it's still Windows, but at least it works.
I suggested to the librarians a couple of times that they could run Linux, but both of the tech librarians that I knew were unfriendly and bitchy types, and one of them I got into a heated argument with over a small issue of file translation. Pretty typical of the entire fscking town, if you ask me...
/Brian
AFS or NFS (Score:4, Informative)
Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university. Michigan's CAEN [umich.edu] is also an AFS/Kerberos system for the whole College of Engineering.
MIT's Athena project is pretty interesting (and also partially uses an AFS/Kerberos scheme), but it probably won't help you set up a quick public network of Linux machines since it focuses more on the research side of things (not to mention the fact that it's been actively worked on since 1983!).
In general, you will probably want to decide between an AFS/Kerberos set-up or an NFS set-up.
With AFS/Kerberos, you as the administrator would directly control a pool of servers ("Vice") which physically contain the data in every user's account. The client machines ("Venus") would get temporary "tickets" from the central Kerberos server (which you also control) to access their accounts which are stored on Vice.
In the NFS scenario, the physical location of accounts is totally decentralized and distributed across all the machines that users actually work on. This means less work for you as an administrator, but it also means less security since random users' data is actually stored on the disks of the computers in the user pool (in AFS, Vice machines are considered to be "locked in closets" to which only the administrators have physical access). It's good to remember a golden rule, "physical access to a computer always implies root access." Using a tomsrtbt disk for example, you can change the root password on just about any Linux machine with a floppy drive.
Since Vice (in the AFS scheme) computers are presumably kept behind locked doors, you avoid this type of problem. However, AFS is harder to maintain, and you probably have to pay Transarc for a commercial version.
For more info on AFS/Kerberos and NFS, I recommend surfing the ACM Digital Library [acm.org], in which you can find the seminal papers on these various technologies (if you're an ACM member and have access). You may also be able to find case studies there (which I found to be surprisingly hard to find on the web).
Re:AFS or NFS (Score:2)
I hope they don't offer public console access to their SPARC boxes (Stop-A/Stop-N is your friend).
Re:AFS or NFS (Score:2)
AFAIK, OpenAFS is a complete implementation, and it is available for a couple of platforms (not just for Linux on the client, and definitely for Linux on the server).
dna lounge (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/
Penn State (Score:2, Interesting)
If you REALLY want to give access... (Score:2)
You might want to configure a wiki to give people a persistent platform on which to post their views and organize their information.
phpwiki [sourceforge.net] can even organize wiki pages into community calendars.
Go for it!
I run my own community wiki [packet.org] as my part for defeating the bandwidth whores and content killing IP pimps at their own game.
Anectodal evidence but... (Score:4, Informative)
We moved our 15 year old son to a SuSE distribution last year. He had issues because he wasn't sure how to get to his network drives and couldn't get Starcraft running, but after a couple months he was able to install Wine and get Warcraft going (didn't get Starcraft going, much to his dismay).
Four months ago we moved our 8 year old daughter to the same SuSE distro - took away her Windows 98 and made her quit cold turkey. We configured KMail and let her go. She's had NO help and she can create documents, print web pages, browse, and runs some of the KDE games. No complaints from her at all.
So can people get used to it? Even non-geeks? Sure. If an 8-year old child can do it, I would think a college student, regardless of their general computer competency, should be able to do it as well.
Re:Anectodal evidence but... (Score:2)
I've been repeating myself about this for a couple of years now, but I could have predicted that your eight year old would take to it quicker than your fifteen year old. Any person who is given a set of SW to run and who is not in the habit of changing very much on the setup will happily adapt to Linux (or anything else for that matter). For such people (and there are a lot of them in businesses), what OS is run on the desktop will become a matter of cost and reliability. And we all know who will win in the x86 market.
As a general rule, up until you reach the true geek category, the more sophisticated a user, the *more* difficulty they will have switching to Linux.
Shouldn't be too hard (Score:2)
In fact, there are several Sparc stations in each lab and I use them for browsing and email while waiting for a windows machine for 3D Studio.
They're pretty easy to use, and everything that a non-comp sci major would not need is not prominent. Email, Web Browsing, Text editing are all simple prominent buttons. Even changing your personal preferences, backgrounds, etc. is simple.
UNICAMP(Brazil) (Score:2, Informative)
They've recently changed the libraries machines OS from Windows to Linux (Autologin and Netscape). Most of people don't care (I think that was because the browser was always Netscape).
Aside of that, If you want it to work fine and people use it, use something that will NOT SHOCK THEM, like KDE3, Gnome or IceWM(if you don't have a good computer) and pre-configure it in a cool way: a menu with things that matter first, desktop icons and some explanation of the basic programs(like mozilla, kmail, evolution, konqueror, galeon).
If you have some processing power, get some cool theme, like Liquid for KDE3(the best), Acqua or Luna (looks like WinXP).
I recommend you to introduce Evolution, Nautilus, Galeon, Kmail, Konqueror and Mozilla first, they're all easy to use.
The server could handle it using NFS and ypserver.
Eat this... (Score:2)
Better than windows (Score:2)
Linux is better than windows. It was designed for multiuser from the ground up. You log in, and you have access to your files, and only your files (with permissions you can modify this, but most lab users won't need to share files anyway). With windows you log in, and you get access to all locally stored programes and files. Want to mess up the comptuer, guess what, Windows give you the rope to hang everyone. Linux only gives root enough rope to hang everyone.
If you have kids, then linux is all the more important. Adults will mostly just use the comptuer for what they want to do. kids will often do their best to destroy the computer. Linux gives you enough protection that kids generally can't destroy the comptuer (if they get good, then openBSD is an option)
I remember high school. Kids all over doing their best to ruin the comptuer system. There was always someone wanting to do a format of whatever disk could be found. Always someone trying to delete critical applications.
Windows is based on a trust model. Macs are the same (I've not worked with OSX though) Linux is assumes that you don't trust yourself. Linux is the only way to go for public machines.
MIT uses Linux terminals (Score:2)
Re:It's feasible that this page is wide! (Score:2, Informative)
JK
Re:MIT (Score:2, Funny)
Oh my!
Re:MIT (Score:1)
'Course I can't mod right now. But HEY.
Re:Kiosks at Columbia (Score:2)