Computer Services for Students? 88
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?"
IMAP mail. (Score:5, Insightful)
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My department(Student Government) could really use a dev area for website ideas. I would LOVE a VPS type setup that the tech commission could play around with.
Our current portal system doesn't allow any sort of database interface so I've been limited to .shtml as far as dynamic content goes. Now I have a Senator asking for a forum and without a database that can't happen. I'm going to have to use my commercial servers to host our entire site pretty soon with all the upgrades it needs. And I can imagine th
Remote folders (Score:4, Insightful)
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My university (University of Leicester, wwwl.e.ac.uk) has just starting allowing remote access to files using webDAV. Internet explorer supports it so windows supports it, theres especially good apple support for it and KDE and Gnome have good support too.
you can check out their support page on it here: http://www.le.ac.uk/cc/cfs/files/webaccess.html [le.ac.uk]
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Really? The Good Old Days really *were* good, I guess.
If you make that suggestion, maybe the Uni will see it as a new revenue stream and implement it.
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*I've had problems recently when putting my laptop to sleep on one subnet, waking it up in another subnet (new IP), and trying to save a file that's already open.... but that's admittedly not a common situation. It works as well as a slightly-laggy local disk
Suggestions (Score:1)
Forums for classes
Something like http://www.experts-exchange.com/ [experts-exchange.com] for answers to questions
Just my 2 cents for things I'd like to see us implement.
QueenB
Reliable service (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, you could ask the students and staff what they want. One of those vote and, potentially, win an iPod -- or some such other electronic gadget -- things often has a pretty high turn out. If that doesn't work, hell, you store their mail. Just parse that for ideas!
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Good point, but build the intelligence at the network layer wherever you can, so that if smtp server 26 goes down, no-one will even notice (;-))
-dave (my sysadmin once said "clusters are less reliable than uniprocessors") c-b
Random suggestions. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Random suggestions. (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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> 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 langu
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Alumni accounts (Score:3, Interesting)
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Some places you have to be very careful with this because the upstream network provider's agreement may not allow it. That was the case at my University back in the day.
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And I get 300MB for all files incl. email.
Always room for more uses (Score:5, Insightful)
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IRC/Jabber daemons (Score:1)
subversion/wiki/project management (Score:2, Informative)
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Offerings... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask students for other ideas. I get the feeling that many students (esp. those in non-technical fields) may not want or need much more than that. That's from my POV as an engineer having worked with many non-techies in the past. Besides the email access, the most popular use of IT services was for checking grades, registering for classes, etc., which is now all done eletronically.
Also, check out other university web sites for information and what they offer.
Good luck!
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so no to more disk (Score:2, Insightful)
How about a cluster, to let some kids do cluster programming, or an app design class for clusters?
(insert Beowulf joke here)
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I don't know if this school has an architecture or fine arts department, but they could get some use out of it. How about a film school for video editing & converting?
Math Programs (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
Maxima (Score:2, Interesting)
Dude, it's a no brainer... (Score:3, Funny)
accessible, large amounts of storage. (Score:5, Insightful)
A jabber server (Score:2, Interesting)
Might be obvious, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I thought web space was standard but I guess not. It certainly was at my undergrad and even where I got my Master's (which is not a techie school like ugrad was). But I get here for my PhD - a top ten research university - and I find that students no longer get web space. Because the damn undergrads are all on myspace now or whatever. I have some workarounds via my department, but unfortunately my only option for a full website seems to be serving it on my office iMac, with an ungodly long URL.
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ever consider using dynamic dns such as something from the free side of dyndns [dyndns.org]?
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Avoiding long URLs [Might be obvious, but...] (Score:2)
You can then cname ..
www.mydomain.com -> my-Imac.myDepartment.u-of-something.edu
When you leave the university then you can then just copy the files off of my-Imac, and install them on a proper shared hosting server or set up your own colo'ed machine, or whatever suits your fancy.
subj (Score:3, Interesting)
Or you could provide email forwarding for life for university alumni. That'd be fucking HUGE.
Free LexisNexis and Westlaw access (Score:3, Insightful)
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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
MIT SIPB (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mit.edu/sipb/sipb.html [mit.edu]
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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 gai
Human factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, I'm a student tech employee, but that's beside the point.
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Oh well, at least I got more out of the experience than they did... right?
VPN access to the University network. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and if you have enough HDD space... a bigger disk quota is always handy. And contrary to what others have said, students with any sense will not fill it with porn and warez. Trust me, nobody wants the embarrassment of getting caught.
Web space and enough programs on public pc's (Score:1)
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MySQL (Score:2, Informative)
Have a proper Calendar system (Score:1)
VNC (Score:2)
I wish they offered... (Score:2)
My College (Score:2)
Gives me the standard webct, webmail both through the school portal and horde, a personal website on the domain, FreeBSD shell access, McAfee antivirus (which kindly blocks all IRC for me
Pretty standard offering I suspect.
What do I wish my university provided to me? (Score:2)
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bob.jones.2006@foo.edu
jane.jones.2010@foo.edu
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Get another e-mail address instead of the university one? What is the point then of even having a university e-mail address?
No, what would should be done is to have e-mail addresses in the form of last_name + first initial + random two digit number @ year_graduated (like 06 for 2006) +
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Research (Score:1)
Until you figure out which nice-to-have services you want to provide students, give back by dedicating some of the unused server resources to research projects.
http://grid.org/ [grid.org] comes to mind. I'm sure others will be able to suggest a long list of great organizations that need help!
Personal virtual servers. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
For CS or AI, more cycles is always welcome (Score:3, Insightful)
Over here at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam we have 'computation servers'. Any CS/AI student can log in and use the 4-way SMP machines for their studies (and let me say that this is a real help when running CPU-intensive algorithms that otherwise would take weeks to complete). Bigger iron like the old DAS cluster [cs.vu.nl] with it's 200 nodes is used for parallel-programming, distributed systems courses and more serious applications.
If you don't know what to do with it, hand it to graduate students that need the cycles.
vpns (Score:1)
Two Words (Score:1)
Radio? (Score:1)
I am sure the schools/colleges run clubs who will enjoy having there own ways of giving out information and radio is one of them.
Ask the CS majors what they need (Score:3, Insightful)
Why try to re-invent the wheel (and then have to *support* that wheel)?
What I'm saying is, make all the stuff you currently have work better, maybe add a feature that people have been asking about, but don't bother with stuff that you don't need.
This may sound silly, but... (Score:1)
Linux Terminal Services Server (Score:1)