Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

Re:Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my Uni... by grinich on Saturday March 28, 2009 @04:28PM (#536743)

First of all, root access to the machine should be granted to anyone at a terminal. Physical access bypasses any sort of realistic security placed on the system.

At MIT, the computing infrastructure is largely a collaboration between students and admins. This has worked incredibly well, and led us to have a continually evolving system and created a great system for tech support.

Right now we're in the process of testing Athena 10, a ubuntu-based overhaul to our old redhat system. It's a huge task, and a majority of the bugfixes and patches have come from student hackers.

You're running linux, so that's a start. I'd suggest seeing if you can get some of the defaults changed (such as fvwm2), and maybe start a discussion about moving to a more user-friendly distribution.

Here's a few resources about Athena@MIT: http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v24/n02/240203.html http://blog.spang.cc/2008/01/10/mit-athena-not-dead-yet

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Re:Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my Uni... by smokey_the_bear on Saturday March 28, 2009 @05:03PM (#536781)

My university copied one of MIT's old versions of Athena, and called it project Vincent. It was fantastic, so far ahead of anything else I'd seen in 1998. Too bad they started to phase it out and lessen support in favor of a big microsoft network. Though it happened when non technical students started to use computers too.

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Re:Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my Uni... by sketerpot on Sunday March 29, 2009 @04:27AM (#537228)

Iowa State University, right? I'm a student there right now. They've improved since the Microsoft dark age, moving their server infrastructure to Linux and clearing away the legacy cruft except in the humanities departments. No, the big problem now is that the computers are so locked down you can't install software on them! This isn't so much an issue on Linux or MacOS -- you can install everything to a folder easily -- but the Windows machines are a pain in the bum when you need some software you don't have. Even if you have standalone exe files they sometimes refuse to run for permissions reasons.

This is a major software issue. In the happy land of Ubuntu, I can just use "./configure --prefix=~/myroot", and everything will work out more-or-less fine. On MacOS I'm just dragging around application bundles. But on Windows this whole process is colossally painful, and the situation would probably be dramatically improved if you gave everybody the damn Administrator password and carte blanche to use it responsibly.

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