Introducing Linux To Small CS Departments?

Erik Anderson asks: "I am a senior in the Computer Science program at a relatively small (2500 students) liberal arts college. Finally, after much pushing, we (the students) are going to be allowed to install Linux on one of the workstations in the advanced computing lab, and I have been chosen to install/maintain/admin/etc the box. What suggestions or advice would you have for distributions and/or software? This workstation will have some flavor of X installed, and will be used by many students. Disk quotas will need to be enforced and system security and data protection will be of utmost importance. This computer will be primarily used for network experimentation by the students and software development."

Find a local LUG

[Jethro]

If you're... well, almost anywhere, there's a good chance you can find a local Linux User's Group. There's a list at http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Softwa re/Operating_Systems/UNIX/Linux/User_Gro ups/ (sorry, slashdot keeps breaking the loooong link). If you can't find anything there try a Google [google.com] search. Searching for "twin cities linux users group" found the local one here pretty easily (;


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A better plan.

[mindstrm]

Use NFS. Seriously.
Make this machine an NFS server, and create a boot floppy for the other lab machines to allow them to boot into linux. In this manner, users can have local-root on their workstations if they need to do network experimenting, but the system-level stuff stays there, on the one box, secured by you.

Also, this is a better exercise, and more true to what unix is about.

Free advice (worth what you paid)

[rjh]

1. Go with a conventional, mainstream distro. Sure, Kondera MNU/Linux (or pick-an-esoteric-distro) might have cool packaging, but good luck finding people who know its ins and outs, or, for that matter, ensuring there's an upgrade path.

2. I'd strongly recommend either Red Hat or Debian. Those two seem to have the largest market presence in North America, and Red Hat has a fairly nice pay-for-support deal going. Debian appears to be more stable, but it's a matter of degree. Red Hat 7.0 really isn't as buggy as people are making it out to be. Stormix Technologies has a distro, Storm Linux, which is based on Debian and is exquisitely cool.

3. Do a default, out-of-the-box install first. Then get some good books on security (UNIX System Administrator's Guide, Maximum Linux Security, Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, etc.) and start locking down the box. Don't put it on the network until you're certain it's locked down tight enough for your purposes.

4. Document your installation process. You don't need to list every package that's installed; just start with your base install and detail the changes you made from there.

5. If you have to do something more than three times, write up a HOWTO for it. The HOWTO isn't for you; you already know how to do it, of course. But the people who come after you might not know how you did things originally, and leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of HOWTOs is manna from heaven.

6. Keep a logbook. Make a log entry when you install new software, when you uninstall software, when you have problems with DHCP, when you get the problems fixed. This kind of detailed tracking is invaluable. Make sure the logbook is kept in a reasonably safe place, and make sure it's written down--floppies can go bad, drives can crash, etc.

User accounts

[qux.net]

In a situation like this, what's the best way to maintain all the student accounts? Integrate with one of the existing NIS+ domains (school servers are Suns), or are there better ways (maintaining a complete user database for 2 machines seems like a waste of time/effort)?

Oh, and do one Debian, and one RedHat... :)

Re:deb

[anderiv]

Yep - that's what I was planning on doing. We are tossing around the idea of authenticating to the LDAP server, but I would rather stick to local users at first till we make sure everything is running well.

Re:User accounts

[anderiv]

Right on - we are going to have one faculty-run RedHat box, and one student-rum Debian box. I will be in charge of the Debian.

Re:Are you sure?

[anderiv]

Oh please - give me a break. I don't think that I've ever heard a worse stereotype. And about the computer science dept at Bethel...sure, we may not have the depth of classes that one could get at a university. That's a no-brainer. My education, however consists of much more than just CS courses - classes that could not be found at a large school.

Re:Depends, how will it be used?

[anderiv]

Thanks for the recommendation - the sticky thing is that it will indeed be used as a GUI terminal. however, I anticipate many students also using it for remote access stuff...

Depends, how will it be used?

[psiphyr]

Short answer. Mandrake for a GUI local terminal, or Slackware for a cmd-line and/or remote-access system.

Long answer:

If this going to be used primarily at the local terminal, I'd suggest Mandrake (What?! I said the samething before using it). It's a RedHat varient, and is very easy to install, admin and use.

2 downsides are that, until you know the distro, stick to the "Recommended" install. It's picky about certain things in the expert.

Also, unless you tell it otherwise during the install, you're stuck in the GUI. Great terminals, but I like a true prompt.

If this going to be used remotely via telnet/ftp/samba/etc., I whole heartidly recommend Slackware.

I run Slack7.1 on both my home and work desktops. I (personally) find it's way of orginizing the resource-config files much more friendly than RedHat/Mandrake.

Also, if you note my signiture, every one of them is running slack (most with 90+ days uptime, one just broke 400).

In the end, it's all a matter of choice. I went through 5 or 6 distros before coming back to slackware.

Distro's aren't important but integration is

[Stonefish]

Integrate your account management into your NT domain or existing domain. There is a new paper somewhere on http://www.samba.org explaining how to do this for NT domains. Managing multiple accounts is a pain in the arse. If the system is virtually invisable to your system admins they will become very positive about linux.

deb

[mojo-raisin]

Debian is simply the best and it's developer base is continuing to expand rapidly. Great support too. Run woody on the workstations (XFree4 w/matrox cards is great) and potato on file/mail servers.