Computer Services for Students?

FreeCycles asks: "I'm one of the staffers of an all-volunteer university group that provides free shell, mail, and web accounts to students, faculty, and staff. Thanks to the generous donation of a certain famous server manufacturer, we suddenly now have more processing power and storage than we need to sustain our current offerings, and we are trying to figure out what else we could offer the university community. Since many Slashdot readers are current or former university students, what do you wish your university provided to you?"

Random suggestions.

[An Onerous Coward]

Bigger disk quotas are always appreciated.

More web environments would be nice (PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails).

MySQL backends for said web pages.

Bulk up on the software available from the shell.

Publicly accessible CVS/SVN repositories. As in, users can host their projects there, and grant others rights to check out and maybe even commit.

NetHack.

Alumni accounts

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject says it all

A jabber server

[black_rob]

When I was in college, they had just started to give each student an email address. I can't say that at the time I appreciated or used it, no one I knew did either, but in hindsight a university run instant messaging service would have been super convenient for keeping in touch with other people in the same class. So instead of spending a half hour trying to figure out what a particularly poorly worded assignment meant, you could just ask.

subj

[Hadlock]

I'd say dedicate at least 1% of avalible CPU to something like Folding@Home. Set aside 10% for mathmatica use by the physics department (someday something will happen, and you'll be glad you have friends in high places), and the rest for x11/web/email etc.
 
Or you could provide email forwarding for life for university alumni. That'd be fucking HUGE.

Re:Math Programs

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea, but Octave might be a better choice than Matlab if you're deploying this software to everybody. No reason to spend the $$$ on Matlab licenses for students that won't use them.

Though, perhaps the Uni in question already has a licensing deal with the Matlab folks.

At the U I went to; there were X Matlab user licenses available, but the number of students was far greater than X, so unless you needed Matlab for coursework, you didn't get it on your account.

Re:Random suggestions.

[An Onerous Coward]

Python itself is fairly sweet. The language is easy to work with, and it's got several helpful modules. I've only played a little with TurboGears (the Python answer to RoR).

Maxima

[r_jensen11]

Use Maxima. It's comparable to Matlab and Maple, but opensourced. Granted, yes, you're with a University, so you probably have some money, but jumping through the hoops can be a pain in the ass when you want money.

Re:subversion/wiki/project management

[iny0urbrain]

Agreed on the project management tools. Wikis are an amazing tool for collaboration. I work in IT at a college, and I've got the student Help Desk staff developing an internal knowledge wiki. I couldn't recommend a wiki service more. I'm also amazed that nobody has suggested a blogging service yet. Having blog.university.edu/user available to students and faculty would be great!

Re:Free LexisNexis and Westlaw access

[gameforge]

Correct. I go to a state college and have free access to all that stuff for as long as I'm a student and for one year after graduating, all tied into our library's website.

Since I'm in school now and I believe our school campus [ahec.edu] is a great example of a modern, online campus with a very pleasing computing experience, I'll throw in some ideas:

- First make sure the obvious stuff is covered. Do your computer science students have computers to work on? Are there other classes which could benefit from computer power? Even if it means putting your existing servers in classrooms and using the new stuff for servers. For example, do you have any 3D animation classes? Do they have some machines that can render fast?

- My school offers online classes. They're not only always full, but not enough classes IMO are offered online. What's the situation at your school? I realize this also depends on faculty availability for online stuff, and other factors, but it can make freshman composition & related type classes easier for both students to get into and on-site facility planning.

- We have WiFi in every building on campus; this is EXCELLENT. We do have shell accounts, but nobody uses them/knows what they are... But, every section of every class at the college has a website with a forum, group e-mail, a files section (so the instructor can post slides, syllabi, follow-up info, etc.), and I believe a chat room. We also get class announcements here (i.e. test postponed, class canceled, etc.)

- Our registration & scheduling, tuition payment, financial aid setup, grade listings, and other facilities are all online. This makes registering & managing your account with the institution a piece of cake.

- If you REALLY have a lot of spare equipment, clustering would be something to consider, but a standalone system that gets used for mundane day-to-day stuff is going to be more valuable than a real nice cluster that one class uses for a couple of weeks a semester simply because it happens to be there.

- Make sure to get your students' feedback (and faculty feedback) before making a final decision. They're your customers, and your team.

Re:Random suggestions.

[TheRaven64]

I'm going to be moderated flamebait for this, but Python is the new VB. The language is very easy to learn, and makes doing the Wrong Thing(TM) very easy. It's sometimes almost-functional, but not really, since the maintainer refused to merge the tail-recursion optimisation patch. It's almost-OO, except the syntax makes Python OO code about as pleasant to read as C OO code.

I've used a few things written in Python, and it's the only language where I always have to go through the install, debug, use cycle for other peoples' code (Jabber transports, I'm looking at you in particular).

Personal virtual servers.

[munpfazy]

Certainly scientific and numerical computing packages are nice - but unless you already have a deal with the vendors trying to negotiate cheap licenses can be complicated.

A free (if resource intensive) option that I'd love to see on our university system would be the possibility of running a virtualized private host, eg. with User Mode Linux, Vserver, or even just BSD jails.

That way those who want to do so could mess around with anything they desire without much risk to the host. Give people the freedom to mess with things, and chances are some of them will find interesting things to do.

Having root access on a dedicated server is really nice, and it can be difficult for the average university student to manage on their own. (Sure, dynamic host name forwarding and so on have made running a server from home fairly cheap, but for many students living in a tiny room with only a laptop it isn't really feasible to run your own machine without first having a good reason for it.)

Of course capping network access, disk space, cpu time, etc are all perfectly reasonable things to do in such a situation - and it might be a good idea to regularly scan for things like badly configured mail servers. You'd have to think carefully about how to assign either IPs or NAT port forwarding, but assuming only a few hundreds of students take you up on it, it shouldn't be impossible to come up with something both useful and unlikely to piss off the university brass.

Setting it up as an opt-in service would probably cut down on administrative headaches. Only the few percent of students who would take advantage of the service would be likely to ask for it.

Finally, one other random idea: set up a couple of individual machines for non-grant-funded personal computation projects. Let students apply for time, perhaps with mini-proposals conducted through some existing undergrad research program. There are probably plenty of senior thesis projects that could make good use of even modest computational resources.

Re:Random suggestions.

[goofyheadedpunk]

I'd swear you were using a template for this. I've seen it at least once before in almost this exact phrasing. Could you clarify your points?

> It's almost-OO, except the syntax makes Python OO code about as
> pleasant to read as C OO code.

What's good syntax for object oriented code? How is python's bad?

> It's sometimes almost-functional, but not really, since the maintainer
> refused to merge the tail-recursion optimisation patch.

Where does Python sell itself as a pure functional programming language? Surely the patch was not rejected by the dev-team out of spite. Was their reasoning flawed in your opinion? If so, how? There are many reasons, none of which you are stating, that the patch may have been rejected.

> The language is very easy to learn, and makes doing the
> Wrong Thing(TM) very easy.

What are specific examples of python making the Wrong Thing easier to do while making the Right Thing more difficult?

> I've used a few things written in Python, and it's the only language
> where I always have to go through the install, debug, use cycle for
> other peoples' code.

This is specious reasoning, at best. You're taking a few data points and extrapolating to a general conclusion, i.e. Python is a bad language. But, unless you can specifically point out where the language is at fault in these programs, I would put forth the conclusion that the programmers were bad and that you would have had to go through the install, debug and use cycle no matter their language of choice. I would be wrong, of course, if you could point out where python, and not the programmers, were at fault.

> I'm going to be moderated flamebait for this.

No, you're not. This is an old /. cliche. Stating that you're going to be moderated a certain way very likely means you will not.

Anyway, I'm not trying to reverse-troll you Mr. Caustic Poster, but am, rather, genuinely interesting if you have anything to say other than what appears to be an irrational and unfounded stance toward a programming language (Which, don't feel bad, is not unusual). Please reply, if not here then through email, as I would like to further understand your position.

I think you're wrong and illogical and I would, pretty please, like to be convinced otherwise.

Re:MIT SIPB

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

I ran across that site today while in the SIPB room, actually...it seems to be last year's webpage (which is still probably enough for the submitter). SIPB's current page is http://stuff.mit.edu/sipb/ [mit.edu].

In particular, scripts [mit.edu] is a webserver that allows CGIs in several popular languages and SQL databases, has auto-installers for software like MediaWiki, and depends on quite a few hacks running on SELinux to make the site secure between users (I've heard that even if you get Apache to run arbitrary code you gain nothing).