Aussie Uni Dumps Dual-Boot In Favor of Linux 505
kNIGits writes "News.com.au is reporting that the University of Wollongong have dumped their previously dual-boot installations in favour of booting Linux only. Among other reasons, staff enjoy the ease with which they can 'lock down' first year students, stopping them messing with the systems prior to learning anything about them."
Hehehehe... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've met a tech who was working for a high-school, and 90% of his time was used in fixing Windoze computers after students messed-up with them. That changed when they installed some cards (don't remember the name of the cards) with RAM on them that effectively made the hard disks read-only, and stored in RAM whatever was written on the hard-disks.
So, whenever a PC was screwed-up, all you did was power-cycle it once!
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently they have them in my old high school now. Poor kids... hacking the network was one of the more fun things about high school.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2, Insightful)
You clearly don't have even the very slightest clue about what you are talking about.
Do you even know the difference between a piece of software that keeps an image of the HDD clean, clear and free of crap while emulating a small write-only partition and a policy editor that (pathetically) attempts to stop users from doing things?
The number once difference would be that deepfreeze is pretty much immune to virii. Is policy editor? No, because it doesn't work at all like deepfreeze.
This is like comparing ghost and xcopy. Sure, I could keep a backup copy of my hard drive with xcopy, but only ghost offers the bulletproof solution.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2)
To be fair though, Linux wasn't as useable to the average person back then as it is now. Lets just hope people starting this process from the beginning don't make these mistakes.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:3, Interesting)
> is really just learning an application: explorer.
Um, have you ever tried to administer a Windows box? Knowing
Explorer is what you take for granted; it's the undocumented stuff
that you have to know to survive. You're dead in the water if you
aren't comfortable with the registry, for example. First time any
problem crops up, you'd best know how to work with cabinets, and
which undocumented batch files that get created by install processes
are run on startup and, if broken, have to be deleted in order to
restore the system to a bootable state. (And no, I'm not talking
about AUTOEXEC.BAT; if you thought that was what I meant, you'll
end up formatting the drive the first time anything goes wrong, but
not until after you pull out your hair first.)
The difference between Windows and Linux is not one of complexity;
Windows and Linux have roughly the same amount of complexity. The
difference is one of documentation: Linux has some. (The other
difference is consistency in terms of the visual appearance of UI
widgets; almost all Windows apps use the same widget set. (That's
a good thing.) RedHat is working on this problem, but their
solution is incomplete at this time.)
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:5, Informative)
Windows was originally designed around the presumption that there was really only one user on the system, and that user could/should do whatver (s)he wanted. To that was added the eventual realization that Oops! That's not always the case.
This has resulted in the back-ending of all sorts of security hacks onto what is still, essentially, a single-user system. A side effect of this is all sorts of special cases and wierd holes in the design of Windows that results in the need for things like PE.
Unix, on the other hand was designed as a multi-user system almost from day one. In this context, a single user system is simply the special case of N==1. Locking down a Linux system requires little more than putting passwords on GRUB and the CMOS editor, and possibly pulling the setuid bit from some questionable binaries. Once that's done, there's little that a non-root user can do beyond trashing their own account, or various DOS type stupidities (which can often be responded to by a good sysadmin).
Beyond that, the ability to prevent first-year stupidity is only one of the reasons why Linux was chosen as the standard for first-year students. Not having to worry about being sued when the students post the source code that you gave them (under some sort of non-disclosure agreement) on the net when asking for an answer to a question is another. Multiple GUI desktops, extensibility and totally free access to the source code are some of the others.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2)
What's your point? An improperly administered box is an improperly administered box.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now at uni things are so much more free yet the systems so much more secure. We can use the floppy drives, have our own email addresses and websites, and even the /sbin/ is a+x (I don't know how bright this is on there part). All is well...
Unless you go into one of the windows labs in which case you are assaulted with kazaa, icq, msn straight after logging on. You will find the harddrive to be full of crap. Also many people do 'confirm' their password after logging on thus I assume there are password files on those computers with hundreds of students passwords, all with measily encryption.
At least until XP, or the next windows after that makes into the labs it seems windows will always be a hassle for maintainers.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2)
I installed that Centurion on nearly a hundred machines in a past job. It's not nearly as good as you're making it out to be. It's pathetically easy to defeat.
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2, Insightful)
In the process you made some underpayed lab technician's day a little longer. And students wonder why the lab machines crash when they go to do real work, (or they b1tch because the machines are locked down tight). e_e
Folks, the computer labs at (insert your favorite college here) aren't necessarily the best-funded part of the school, despite what you might want to believe. Depending on the administration, the college might not even have a proper IT division. The people who maintain the labs may also have to maintain the faculty and classroom computers, in addition to tutoring students and teaching classes.
Please, mentally masturbate somewhere else. No tech with a day's worth of trouble tickets needs to see how 'l33t you aren't. They've got better things to do.
As a former lab tech... Re:Hehehehe... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can tell you that the lab tech who obsesses over Quake is going to lose. You've got 0 budget and the products to secure the network are chosen by unqualified people who got the job of head of IT in the district because in 1985 they were teaching second grade and happened to tinker with an Apple II at home...
The smart ones just secure against the stupid people and look for the smarter ones and bargain with them that you'll let them play quake if they keep out of the pr0n and viruses, and they kind of keep their eye out for stupid people trying to ruin it all for them.
BTW, Rarely are the colleges any better. They have better heads of departments, but their main workers are CS students without the motivation to find a higher paying job in industry. (I generalize, of course, but I haven't seen many exceptions.)
_____
(OBTopic: nice win for Linux. I always thought that Linux might make a superior corporate solution for precisely these reasons. In a non-development environment, only a system administrator should be able to install an applicaition, for example.
However, I know that Apple tried to play both sides of the fence as well, and they never had much success breaking into the desktop side of Multinationalica.)
Re:Hehehehe... (Score:2, Interesting)
Overall, deepfreeze (and other such software) tends to protect its own files from deletion (windows does too, since deepfreeze is running the deepfreeze DLL will cause windows to throw an access violation upon deleting it). Although, if you can get the machine to boot to DOS, you can bypass it. However, it isn't very difficult to stop anyone from doing that...
UNSW (Score:5, Interesting)
8 years ago it was Sun Solaris.
5 Years ago they moved to Intel Solaris
Now they have (or are) moving to Intel Linux.
anyway, good stuff at Uni of Wollongong.
duel boot (Score:5, Funny)
>Engineering department has been running
>unix/linux for years, no duel boot.
Well, duel boot, that is something I would like to run. Just install windows and a few linux/BSD dists, turn on the machine and leave it over night. Then we finally could settle this thing.
Ps My bet is on that spiky fish eventhough that little red bastard with the fork might be nasty. I mean, how hard can it be to beat a geek from redmond or a penguin? Hmm, could be a whole army of penguins of course, well that might get tricky.
Re:duel boot (Score:5, Funny)
The article. (Score:3, Informative)
Chris Jenkins
17Dec02
LINUX is making inroads into the nation's universities, pushing Windows, Unix and Apple operating systems off the desktops of first-year IT students.
It is making ground in IT courses because Linux is both easy to lock-down, easy to pull apart and offers simple licensing for distribution to students.
At the University of Wollongong, which has about 1700 computer science students, machines in first-year labs that used to boot from either Windows or Linux have been changed to Linux only.
"We get large number of inexperienced people in first-year and we are really trying to keep down our overheads and concentrate our professional support more in the later years," said Les Ohlbach, operations manager for the university's Department of Informatics."
"The best way to control the first-years was to put them in a Linux-only environment where you can lock it down pretty well."
Students moved to Unix and Windows in second- and third- year, he said, with Macs used for multimedia training.
At the University of Western Australia, which has around 1650 students in its computer science courses, Linux has totally supplanted more traditional Unix distributions, such as Sun's Solaris in the school of computer science and software engineering.
UWA's senior lecturer in computer science and software engineering Chris McDonald said Unix was dropped from teaching around 1995, and was no longer specifically required for any research projects.
UWA recently dropped Apple from its IT education programs in the school, for the same reason that Unix was abandoned -- expensive proprietary hardware.
"It wasn't so much the [Unix] operating system costs, because it usually came with the machine or we could get pretty good prices as an educational institution," he said.
Linux was easier to give to students for home use, Dr McDonald said.
"If we were using Solaris or HP-UX or something like that, I'm sure there would be very different and costly licensing issues involved," he said.
"We are trying to move to an environment where what we provide in the laboratories can be mirrored in the students' home."
Mr Ohlbach said the University of Wollongong favours Linux for first-years for a similar reason.
"We are teaching programming, so they [students] need to run all sorts of IDEs and development environments. On Linux they can quite easily do most of their code at home at fairly low cost," he said.
Dr McDonald said in teaching open-source platforms to students it is important not to "just ram open-source issues down their throats. It's important to explain why there is a difference in philosophy, why it's reasonable to not to totally tread the path of one particular vendor, one particular monopoly."
However, Dr McDonald said UWA's school of computer science and software engineering was part of Microsoft's academic alliance program, which allowed the free distribution of Microsoft operating systems to enrolled students.
The school used Linux and Windows to teach operating systems.
"It's good to show not just the similarities, but more importantly the differences."
Linux allowed better teaching of the principles behind software development, he said.
"We'd rather explain how things work. We do that by taking things apart and putting them back together again, rather than just showing people how to use particular GUIs that other people have designed. It's our belief that open-source software better explains those concepts," he said.
"Personally, I think that just showing students how to use operating systems tools and networking tools, is more training than education.
"From 2003 UWA's school of computer science and software engineering will be using Linux, in preference to Windows, for our first-year Foundations of IT unit."
Mr Ohlbach said it was important for students to have exposure to multiple operating systems and development environments.
"Anybody wanting to be a professional computer science person, or an IT person, generally doesn't want to be seen as just a Mac or a PC party, " he said.
This report appears on news.com.au.
Re:The article. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder WHICH monopoly he refers to?
I think it's important to teach skills and not languages. The platform shouldn't really matter. But what I read there is "we're gonna teach non-proprietary solutions". I don't think the OS matters for the undergrads.
I learned programming on Solaris and later Linux, and honestly there's no real difference between them for 95% of what you do in school, since you are NOT administering the box, and the interesting tools are opensource, portable, and provided by the school - you just have to USE them. This probably holds true for BSD as well.
I do believe that we shouldn't be teaching kids to develop in MSVC++ and MFC. I think that's god-awful - we should learn to use makefiles and know the dependencies in our code, and not waste time on things that aren't portable to our jobs, on a yet-to-be-determined platform.
Re:The article. (Score:3, Interesting)
we shouldn't teach ANYONE to program in any of the Microsoft visual environments. it promotes sloppy coding, bloat and tons of other things that make just plain old BAD programmers.
you want to teach windows programming? then use the free solutions out there teaching the API interfacing and other parts of fighting with a windows environment is so much more important than the drivel the MS visual dev.
Give the studen MORE understanding and a tool they can freely take home legally. you get a better programmer.
and as a side note. every teacher should at the end of every semester force all the student to program in an embedded environment or put tight size cap's on the compiled program.
Anyone can make gigantic bloatware, a good programmer makes fast tight code.
another good idea, like invading the soviet union! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:another good idea, like invading the soviet uni (Score:5, Funny)
Locked down... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Locked down... (Score:3, Informative)
I like your idea, having a ghost style system restoration setup - drop the image and be done, and of course mount all user dirs to a drive off in some serverhaus. But from an admin's standpoint, I would first consider that the most dangerous people in the world are those who overenthusiastically announce "I KNOW FOO!!!" (where "foo" may be, say, first aid) seconds before they clumsily (and dangerously) attempt to practice the art they boasted of so vociferously. It is this type of person who is unwittingly capable of committing irreversable damage.
Perhaps then the optimal solution is to put first year lusers in iron boxen of sorts - they can't do any real damage, except to their own ~. Of course, this can also be done with careful administration using chmod and chown. =) It may not teach them patience, but it has all potential of working the overenthusiastic energy out of them without killing your machinery.
Re:Locked down... (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't install kernels or do system administration, but I could still learn about processes and privileges (and how to get around them :-) and file tools and scripting and compilers and ...
Danny.
Re:Locked down... (Score:5, Informative)
I think your understanding of what locking down a computer
means is inadequate. It is possible to learn a lot
more things with a locked down Linux terminal than it
is with a personal windows computer.
For example, you can program a Linux computer with
C/C++, Java or what have you even without a root account.
You can, in fact, execute most of the utilities in
the
And those directories contain hundreds and hundreds of goodies
that you can have a lot of fun learning.
Thus, your premise
that locking down a Linux computer would be unelightening
to a user is horribly inaccurate.
The university mentioned in the article needs to
lock down their computers because they are
publicly accessible: a lot of people can use then.
And of those individuals who have access to a public
computer, two kinds are especially dangerous:
the novice user and the malicious expert. The novice
user must be protected from mistakes made
on account of his ignorance. The malicious user must
be prevented from subverting the system in order to
satisfy his evil ego.
As an example of the first
case you can imagine a secretary innocently
deleting the \windows directory of her computer.
It can and has happened. As an example of the second
case, you can imagine someone replacing internet explorer
with a trojaned version. Any student who has learned
a little of DOS in his or her first day of class knows that
replacing explorer.exe with an ascii file explorer.bat containing
just the single line: echo y | deltree c:\ would lead
to hilarious and ego-gratifying events. This exploit
is certainly not bad for someone who has just one hour
of DOS.
Re:Locked down... (Score:5, Interesting)
First, give me a moment to whine about the general usage computer lab. At its worst, a handful of applications were delivered via ZenWorks. You had Explorer, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, and Netscape 4.0 (this was at a time when 4.7x was considered obsolete). That was it. Ninety percent of my computing needs could not be filled in that environment. They've since loosened it up a great deal, but I still don't feel that they're providing me a usable service.
My other example is my school's UNIX box. It's locked down in the way that such boxes generally are. I am the Lord and Master of
In short, there's a right way and a wrong way to lock down a network. Linux makes it easy to do either.
Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:3, Interesting)
In our undergrad labs at cs.usyd.edu.au, there was a low-end pentium for the sole purposes of ftping files from your floppy to your 3meg quota'd ugrad account on the nix machines. It was win3.1 (even though this was in 1998-2000), and all it _appeared_ to have was a crappy ftp client and 2 other semi-useless programs. You were given a 3 minute time-limit to use this machine. But one day, I recursively transferred the wrong files, and the ftp client was crap, and couldn't recursively remove directories, so I went to the c:\windows directory (or whatever), in the ftp client, selected command.com, and clicked the "run" button. I then was in a dos shell where I could deltree.
Moral of the story: There is no security in removing the start button
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:4, Interesting)
- secure it - and most linuxes are reasonably secure out-the-box these days
- set a strong root password. Give the students limited sudo access if necessary
- Probably a little bit of hardware stuff (disable floppy booting etc)
- Maybe setting up a restricted shell or GUI environment
But basically, students would be pretty safe on a linux box without root access. And it's simple and well-known to set up. Compare that with Windows Policy Editor. Does anyone really use it? Maybe a few but I'm sure it's not as well documented or as well tested and probably not as robust as simply locking out root access to a linux box.Windows Policy Editor - could it be any worse?? (Score:5, Informative)
Note that policy editor is now primarily designed for a computer in a Active directory tree - without active directory you have to edit a "local" policy, ie edit the registry directly.
A disclaimer: maybe an active directory policy is nicer to play with, I don't know - local policies were enought of a pain for me as it was..
here's the fun with local policies..
firstly - the policies affect ALL users, INCLUDING the administrator. (WTF?!?!? you say?) so.. lock out all registry tools, disable "command prompt" and run on the start menu - and you're screwed - no more windows administration. time to reformat the box. (or at least attempt to "rescue disk" it..
second - policies quite often are applied in REAL TIME. hmm.. disable registry editing.. (screen flashes) - oh bugger, policy editor has stopped working..
The way to get around this is to remove access to the %winnt%/system32/GroupPolicy dir for the administrator (that's right, you remove access to the root user to prevent the policy applying to that user.) of course, this dir has to be accessible to make any changes. And the changes apply immediately. Forget to reapply the restictions to the admin user and it's reformat time, again.
if you want to use policy editor I suggest having a recovery cd lying around, as I guarantee you *will* be locked out of your system, unless you're extremely careful.
I love windows security, it rocks.
Re: Windows Policy Editor - could it be any worse? (Score:4, Informative)
A properly configured local policy can lock down exactly what you want to lock down, and affect only the users you want it to affect.
Also, in Active Directory, you use things called "Group Policy Objects" to apply policies to workstations, and it's WAY more powerful than local policies.
Go here [microsoft.com] for an overview of GPOs.
Looking down anything? please help me with.. (Score:2)
how can i set a quota on solitaire's use on my box?
dad will now have to find a second hobby or some other box. thanks, slashdot!
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:2)
follow the guides and the people (beta) before you
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:4, Informative)
Starting with Windows 2000, admins have access to "Group Policy". Essentially, any user interface setting -- and most system settings -- can be controlled via this either on the local machine or remotely.
Group Policy kicks ass. You can completely lock down a machine so that cmd.exe doesn't work no matter what and the only
The fact is, under Windows 2000 (and XP), administrators have never had an easier time setting up, controlling, troubleshooting, and fixing a user's desktop. If Linux had anything to easier to compare to this I'd be using it (admins being essentially lazy).
At length, I've evaluated Redhat, Suse, Caldera, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X. (At length means ~40 hours on each setting up desktops and administrative consoles and testing things out.)
I have many Redhat machines running on servers at work. I have a Yellow Dog machine running my web site and email and OpenBSD running my router at home.
The FACT is no one has a better way to administrate and trouble-shoot end-user desktops than Microsoft right now.
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:2, Insightful)
Its quite possible to lock down user's desktops in linux if your familiar with linux. It doesn't sound like you are. It also sounds like your looking for a single point-n-click program to do it with. Well that just doens't exist, but it doesn't mean you can't severely limit what a linux user can do.
Its also trivial to ssh or vnc in and take over a session of kill the appropriate process if needed. I laugh in your general direction for even joking that its somehow easier to remotely troubleshoot desktops on windows.
Your also comparing apples and oranges a bit since the linux and microsoft desktop are two very different beasts.
So not its not a FACT afterall.
Also and don't take this the wrong way. Spending 40 hrs each on some distros hardly qualifies you to proclaim MS king of all administration.
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:2)
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:5, Informative)
In Linux (and unix in general) you can allow people to do almost anything with their own account. If they mess their homedir (and it's quite unlikely to get your personal stuff to the point you can't login at all by accident), just clean it by resetting the configfile that breaks the thing.
You can have people run custom window managers, code their own software (even that damn window manager), whatever, if they happen to know how, while at the same time making sure they don't mess the system up if they don't.
Now, imagine that user has to do some task, and they have messed up their configs. Now on Windows you either repair their profile (which can take quite a time if you can't login as them, if possible at all) or take backup of files, create new profile and copy the files over, on linux you just throw the default configs to their homedir and all you lose are few hacks in some files (say .bash_profile/.bashrc or may .Xsession)
About the config thing.. if you setup linux in ~40 hours (for shared use) you are pretty fast. If you can do the same (in ~40 hours) for Windows you are superman. Start counting from when you get few hundred PCs with blank harddrives, with no images ready, etc..
And once you get new systems with different hardware you have to do it again :) With linux you dump the same image and switch either kernel or module config.
Windows has it's strong points, but administration isn't one of them. At least if you are trying to do it well. In a Uni even "we are not mission critical, we don't need the best security" isn't argument, since what would better target for a hacker than a Uni with a lots of computers and students doing all kind of things with irregular patterns.
Btw, the Windows 9x/ME policy system is a joke :)
If you can't get past it whily you can still do something with the system, you probably shouldn't be securing anything ;-)
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:3, Informative)
Except that you could clone 100 identical unix hardware workstations using basic unix tools. No need for a third party product.
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:2)
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:2)
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:3, Interesting)
On a floppy copy an alternative shell for windows and name it say winword.exe. You most likely can run anything you want off the floppy, so then you just run say the kernel debugger or the MS hole of the week ( ie is weak to loading HTML scripting attacks off disk also. ) -- and then you can use policy editor to start mounting all those hidden windows shares and hijacking other user's computers.
This is why windows is a joke - suid programs and permissions controls by name of a file.
Re:it's a solution--just not a good one (Score:3, Interesting)
You must be talking about what Windows used to be like a couple of years ago, since networks of UNIX workstations have never been managed like that. Come on, people have run UNIX networks with thousands of machines since the 1980's. Do you think they didn't figure out how to deal with those issues long ago?
There are several common ways of setting up such networks, and they are generally much simpler to deal with than anything Microsoft offers even today. Adding a new machine to a UNIX network requires no more than just plugging it into the network and possibly adding it to a list of recognized clients. Users, data, and applications are installed centrally. Applications run transparently over the network, or locally, whichever way you prefer. "The latest patches" or "new applications" aren't even issues--things are just automatically consistent.
Windows has taken some of those ideas and thrown them together into an inconsistent and cumbersome juble. But where networks of UNIX workstations just tick along by themselves, Windows-based networks require constant handholding, fixing, patching, and reinstalling. Microsoft is trying to paper over how messy and dysfunctional their system is with lots of dialog boxes and GUIs, but it just doesn't help: in the end, managing Windows networks is still a lot more work. Oh, of course, you can try and buy lots of expensive third party software to get some of the UNIX-like manageability, but that only makes things even more expensive and complicated.
I used to manage networks of UNIX workstations with dozens of users on the side. If I had to spend more than an hour or two on it per week, that was the rare exception (and then it was usually due to some hardware failure on the server). And I certainly didn't need any expensive or complicated third party software for doing it either.
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:2)
I agree with the parent, that more Windows shops _should_ use Windows policy to reduce tampering. But it's only _shell_-based security, not OS-level security. Bypass the shell, and...? A better solution, if you need/want to stick with Windows is to use NT/2000. Then you could supplement policy with ACLs, auditing, user rights, registry permissions, etc. NT with sane security settings AND policy enabled is not so trivial to circumvent. Maybe this is true of XP as well. I lost interest in Windows when they came out with "Windows ME". More like, Windows yourself!
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:3, Insightful)
Secure the hardware (Score:2)
Of course, you could just set up XTerms in the labs and safely lock the computers away. As a bonus, you could prevent people from saving their assignments to floppy only to lose them the day before submission.
Xix.
But netboot may be a solution... (Score:2)
I shall also gratuitously recount my housemate's experience with a student who dealt with the University prohibition on Doom by fdisking the machine and installing DOS (this was a while ago). Dozens of machines were nuked before they LARTed the guy.
Xix.
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:3, Insightful)
Go read The Ten Immutable Laws of Security [microsoft.com].
The first three laws are particularly relevant:
Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Anyone with a boot disc can get around your policy. Or even worse, just take the HDD and read off it at his/her own leisure.
Re:Another Solution - Windows Policy Editor (Score:3, Funny)
Glad for them but... (Score:2, Insightful)
LINUX is simply mainstream now. The news is what you do with it and not simply that you've tried it out.
locking down a *nix machine (Score:3, Informative)
Re:locking down a *nix machine (Score:3, Informative)
Re:locking down a *nix machine (Score:2)
Re:locking down a *nix machine (Score:3, Interesting)
No because the real resources needed are the human resorces to test that the new version of Windows dosn't break anything. Including applications, educational establishments tend to need to run more applications that business environments. (This may well mean that workarounds need to be discovered and tested.) Then you need to work out how to deploy these systems, when users don't work to a 9-5, Monday-Friday schedule.
I don't want to come off as Anti-Linux (Score:2, Informative)
You have been able to lock down windows desktops since 3.11, YES YOU HAVE!
I am in favor of running linux, but it seems to me that may not have been the real reason why. It just couldn't have been. Altough.....It does seem like a good reason to give those funding it if they were heavily in favor of linux.
Infact, IMHO it seems that malicious students will still be able to "screw" with linux box all the same. Without much extra effort.
Re:I don't want to come off as Anti-Linux (Score:2)
Re:I don't want to come off as Anti-Linux (Score:2, Informative)
My university CS department uses Linux for all of its classes except assembly language programming (the text comes with MASM on CDROM).
The reason my school no longer allows programming in Windows is that instructors discovered that they were giving passing grades to students who had no idea what was going on behind the scenes in the Visual C development environment. Their reliance on an IDE was adversely affecting their education.
Re:I don't want to come off as Anti-Linux (Score:2)
You, my friend, are crazy. If that machine is connected to a network, it is open to all sorts of nasty attacks. In addition, it's open to unstoppable user attacks.
Re:I don't want to come off as Anti-Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, in some sense, you have been able to. Windows-based kiosks do it, for example.
However, you can "lock down" UNIX/Linux and still use it as a development machine, which is crucially important for a CS department. Actually, there is nothing to "lock down"--UNIX/Linux has been designed so that ordinary users can get all their work done in the default user environment and still be protected from one another.
Infact, IMHO it seems that malicious students will still be able to "screw" with linux box all the same. Without much extra effort.
UNIX is quite good--20 years of use in multiuser environments with malicious students has seen to that. We are talking UNIX machines with hundreds of simultaneous (!) users, not a bunch of Windows PCs into which people log in sequentially. Linux has inherited much of that UNIX design.
Is it impossible to break into UNIX/Linux systems? No--there are always some bugs. But if you set up a regular UNIX/Linux system with a reasonable set of well-known programs, there will be only very few people able to break into it (and you hire those as sysadmins :-). With Windows PCs, you have to go through a lot of trouble to "lock them down", you end up with machines that have a lot of unpleasant restrictions, and it's still not going to be very secure.
Note, incidentally, UNIX/Linux provides security while many users are logged into the same machine, a much harder problem than what Windows even attempts to provide.
Slow news day... (Score:4, Funny)
How often are we going to see stories like this? I got my grandmother to switch... better put it on the front page.
Linux or Windows (Score:3, Funny)
The Microsoft sales rep told me that Linux doesn't have a "Trustworthly Computing" thing, so I bought Windows!
This Microsoft "Trustworthy Computing" thing means I'm safe from viruses and hackers, right? Right???
Nice! (Score:3, Funny)
I was so disappointed when Dr. Watson didn't make it into the year book.
Strange observations (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of posts are somewhat blinded by the use of the phrase 'locked down'. Look, it's a school lab. They're trying to teach specific things. Linux is great for setting up a system for specific usage, with permissions and all the other UNIX goodies. This is good. I imagine they waste a lot of time re-ghosting machines or doing the usual IT troubleshooting... especially with a bunch of hotshot students trying to show off their l33t 5k1llz.
Really, do you think even one of these students doesn't have access to their own computer at home/in the dorm? Most Comp Sci courses require the students to have a computer for themselves. They can screw around with their home distros all they want. In fact, they should, you learn a lot, in the exploratory manner. A lab, for teaching specific lessons, that's a different thing.
Come on, guys. It's not a big deal. The news is that the Univ has gone all Linux. No one is even discussing this.
Re:Strange observations (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, the top 10% (lets call them The Slashdot Readers) do. But not everyone does. Most don't. Hundreds of people are in the labs in the night before assignments are due, even those with computers who want to work with other people.
At uni, labs aren't for teaching sessions. They are for taking what you learnt in lectures and doing your assignments. A lot of the time, unsupervised.
Re:Strange observations (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Strange observations (Score:2)
Nope. At least, not with Red Hat. That's the whole point of "kickstart"; it lets you configure one box manually (which you pretty much have to do with Windows as well) and use it as a "template" of sorts for as many others as you need. I only know RH, but I'd be pretty surprised if other major distros don't offer somethign similar. And as another poster mentinoed, ghosting works just as well with Linux as with Windows.
Re:Strange observations (Score:2)
By locking it down the students WILL learn more! (Score:2, Funny)
Converting The World.... (Score:3, Funny)
Now if I could convince my employers to give up dual-boot!
My supervisor..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Before that, he was using BSD386, and other Free non MS OS's. He has been at UOW all this time - I do have to say, I like the sound of that place. Of course, being a scientist (a real one - read - not one of those crappy biologists
Re:My supervisor..... (Score:2, Funny)
On behalf of all us with Bio degrees in the house (come on, I'm talking to you three Population Ecologists in the corner), I'd just like to say:
LOOK AT THE FALLING STAR!
sucka.
READ the article! (Score:2, Interesting)
- "easy to pull apart" ... expensive proprietary hardware"
- "offers simple licensing for distribution to students"
- "dropped Apple
- "easier to give to students for home use"
- "what we provide in the laboratories can be mirrored in the students' home"
- "easily do most of their code at home at fairly low cost"
People read the article! (Score:5, Interesting)
They also mention that they like linux because it's easy to give to students. They don't have to worry about costs or licensing, they just hand the students a CD and they're on their way.
"We'd rather explain how things work. We do that by taking things apart and putting them back together again, rather than just showing people how to use particular GUIs that other people have designed. It's our belief that open-source software better explains those concepts," he said.
That seems pretty logical to me. The article really wasn't about taking away freedom at all.
Learning Experience (Score:2)
Speaking of switching, and maybe OT, I've been contemplating more and more about switching back to a *nix based system as all the games that I want to play will not run on my system and I am not too keen on building another one that will just be outdated in a year...(Am I growing out of my geekness, or just tiring of spending so much money?)...Its almost as big of waste of money as my car is...No, I think I will just optimize the one that I have and probably load OpenBSD on it.
Amigori
GNU/Linux is still usefull after lockdown. (Score:2, Informative)
In windows you just have to close down all ways to do nasty things. End result : undestroyable but also completely useless pc. Nobody can do anything on it.
With a Unix system, students can't mess around anything BUT they can do whatever they want in their personal enviroment and a Unix box is still a usefull tool without root access.
Why use anything other than Linux for comp sci? (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you want is to be an MCSE, then why waste you time with college? You can take a weekend course for a few hundred bucks (instead of 4+ years for several thousand dollars). This quote from the article by Dr. Chris McDonald of UWA pretty much sums it up:
Exactly. Showing someone how to point and click isn't teaching them anything. It's only training them how to use someone else's tools (and there are books that can teach you that in 24 hours). Real computer science education, where you gain a fundamental understanding of both high and low level concepts of the computer requires more than just clicking a start button.Slashdot Social Experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'd like to know is - how can the Slashdot Effect exist when no-one clicks through to read the article?
This karma-reducing social experiment was proudly brought to you by kNIGits in Australia.
Answer (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot Social Experiment (Score:3, Interesting)
Because of the karma system, you're only seeing people who employ karma-whoring strategies rather than intelligent commentary. That means making politically correct comments about whatever the submitter said. That means mouthing the standard, "freedom-reducing lock down is bad!" kind of remarks.
Don't fixate! Read! Read! (Score:4, Interesting)
Please stop fixating on the whole locking down bit!
Timothy craftily negelected to list anything but the potentially inflammatory and sensational 'lock down' phrase. It's EASIER for them to use Linux (and makes more sense and it's CHEAPER), not "they can't lock down Windows". These are newbies who DO know how to fuck up a Window machine pronto. They'll have to do some learning before they can pull a good cock up of their Linux box. And since this is a Uni, students learning is kind of high on their list of 'things we want to happen'.
And please take note this is not the whole Uni. My girlfriend works there and she (and her whole department) uses Macs. But it is a step, IMHO, in the right direction for UOW.
As someone at an Australian university... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Control. Whilst I would normally shudder at the thought of restricting IT access, I do appreciate UOW's desire to better manage their machines. We recently had some new machines running Win2k installed in my area, and within a day, one was in poor shape thanks to a particular idiot installing the latest Windows Media Player version on it and somehow stuffing up the OSA installation. He was able to so do thanks to the IT stroke of genius of giving everyone admin access. Whilst this may be an human issue rather than an OS one, every bit helps :)
2. Cost. We are all aware of the studies that compare the cost of Linux to other OSes. In any case, regardless of the outcome, I do know that my insitution will be spending multiple millions per year (as of next year) for desktop software licences for MS products because of the new licence arrangements. In a country that has mounting financial challenges in university funding, alternatives to MS software need to be found.
3. Ethics. Maybe this is too strong, but IMO it is not. Why should tapayer money be spent on making a single corporation (even) richer? A centre of teaching and research ought to have academic independence of multinational corporations.
These are just a few, IMO, valid thoughts about the issue. Regardless, UOW deserves to be applauded for the initiative.
Just be careful (Score:2, Interesting)
They've actually removed Linux at the moment, as they attempt to change their linux policies.
uow labs (Score:4, Interesting)
There are other compsci labs around that haven't been dual boot for longer than this. The article also doesn't mention anything about the proportion of CompSci(linux) machines compared the number of mac/wintel machines around the uni which I'd estimate at around 85-90%
At least the compsci department support staff are always trying new things, actually being taking initiative about things. kudos guys. see you for a drink soon.
This will (Score:2)
Unfortunately,unless we have an industry standard office suit to compete with Microsoft Office, lots of companies are going to hold back. Comments,merging and other aspects of Word which make professional and academic documents exchanging and analyzing easier are still missing in Open/Staroffice. The publishing industry: they would love to shift to linux, but the fonts/word processor aren't up to the mark. But Linux will get there -> soon.
Just a Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
(You all know what comes next:) BUT, I don't think that Windows should be completely eliminated. Windows is still the de-facto standard in industry and universities owe it to their students to give them skills they can use. It is also essential that universities maintain neutrality in the sense that they do not give the impression that they are promoting one system over another - a university's role is to eductate and do research, not dictate what the world will do or follow current fads.
Before everyone gets the wrong idea; I use the same argument to motivate the use of Linux at the university where I work (it is a very good way to teach students UNIX rather than only teaching them Windows). So what is needed is a balance.
Dual-boot? (Score:3, Insightful)
That sounds like a LOT of hassle for the admins in the first place... University of Toronto has separate Linux Redhat, Win2000 with Netware, and (still a few) Solaris labs. Separate rooms, separate operating systems, just go where you need based on what you need to do. The Windows machines are even more "locked down" than the Linux ones - you can't even change the wallpaper, for example. Can't move/remove icons, can't change the start menu, can't (really) install programs. I've never seen a trashed Windows machine, whereas I've seen Linux machines that have gone belly-up with a rather pissed off admin trying to fix it. Then again, I spend more time in the Linux labs.
The dual-boot idea for a public lab makes very little sense to me in the first place - if the university's THAT desperate to save money, maybe it's not the best place to go. More likely though, the admins realized the way they were doing things wasn't really the best way, and changed to something more logical and easier to manage (and not all that new or innovative at that) - how does that constitute news??
just like USyd (Score:2, Informative)
The whole backend runs on linux clusters (went to a little after-lecture talk about it). File servers, CPU servers, connection servers. They have a few sun servers but one of them explode every year and they haven't bothered replacing them. Clusters are so much cheaper!
The last batch of new systems we got at the beginning of last year for 5 labs, P4s with TFTs, bucks this trend though, as 4 of these labs got Win98 and the other Linux. They don't even bother locking these Windows down either, they just wipe and upload drive images from the server every night.
Though that kind of sucks, means we have to reinstall Warcraft 3 every day.
Going towards it here... (Score:5, Insightful)
GNUWin [gnuwin.epfl.ch]: open your Windows!
Re:Going towards it here... (Score:4, Insightful)
For all we know, there may be some new radical ideas in the next few years that void the need to be an expert in Linux or Windows. What a horrible waste of time to work at perfecting a restricted set of skills for a proprietary system.
This is significant news (Score:3, Insightful)
This story is typical Slashdot. Small university department moves to Linux (= big story); Multinational Company switches from Sun to Microsoft (=no news).
Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead.
Yawn.
In other news, the University of Queensland... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fuck UQ and their sellout for the almighty buck. If that is not what is was, I apologise, but it sure looked just like that from where I was at the time. I feel for the academics caught in the middle of it all.
the original quote (Score:2, Funny)
on it, you know they are just evil lies."
(By Linus Torvalds, Linus.Torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)
Re:I Love It! (Score:5, Funny)
By those metrics, Microsoft Outlook has got to be the most freedom spreading software since it allows anyone to mess with your system.
Oh, the irony!
Re:I Love It! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I Love It! (Score:2)
Re:I Love It! (Score:2, Funny)
Ahhh!! Run away!! The staff are all Ghosts!
(sorry, I've been playing way too much Starcraft lately
Re:I Love It! (Score:5, Insightful)
UNIX wasn't designed to "spread freedom". Rather, it was designed as a simple, powerful multi-user operating system. It has been used for decades in academic environments filled with malicious hackers and it has survived.
What's "free" about Linux is the code (and it's "free as in freedom", not "free as in beer"). In terms of security and control, it inherits what UNIX provides. But you do get full control, down to the individual bits, if you install it on your own hardware, which is a lot more than one can say about Windows.
Learning what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends what you want your students to learn.
I have two students doing a placement with me at the moment. What I want them to learn is how to put together a simple website that presents their town from the perspective of young people. What they are self-learning every time I turn my back is how to search for photos of Britney Spears and install them on the KDE backdrop. In my case, it's only for a week, and there is no exam at the end, but if I was trying to teach in a college, or trying to teach any subject other than IT, I would want to lock down, filter and otherwise restrict the students by every means at my disposal.
Also, most of the people I have worked with who 'learned about computing' the way you suggest are quite simply unemployable in any IT-related line of work. They know enough to get themselves into lots of trouble, but not enough to get themselves out of it, and then expect to just walk away like they did at college. Education means structure, syllabus and assuming responsibility as well as experimentation.