thenyelabs.com

So I’m an employee of the Information Systems (IS) department of the university I attend and have been working on innovating some ways to improve the teaching of our upper level IS classes here. The IS classes we teach are your typical Windows 2003 server, which is essentially a MCSE prep course, advanced networking, which is essentially CCNA prep, systems development and implementation, more business process yada, your intro and advanced linux coursen, as well as some database flavors. The traditional setup we’ve gone for is open up as much as we can in the advanced classes to give the students a real feel for using the networks and servers and so on. The problem comes in the fact that if you have more than one section of a class, every student who sits down at the machine personalizes the heck out of it, causing frustration to the other students using the machine, and ultimately to myself as I spend time rebuilding Active Directory after one student tries to teach the other one a lesson and ends up hosing the machine. The traditional solutions of Deep Freeze, Altiris weekly imaging, or any other non persisting software just doesn’t work because often over the course of the semester a student does projects that build on projects, they need their data to persist. Additionally, if you build an AD setup, or a linux network and build yourself a firewall to sandbox with, you run into the problem where the big stuff, the stuff every kid wants to play with, is only one in a classroom (one promoted domain server, one firewall everyone connects through, etc) and if they want to play with it, they’re just out of luck.

The solution.

I attended VMWare 2006 in LA, while there I hit a workshop put on by a professor from a University of Nebraska professor who talked about how he wasn’t able to teach linux due to the school’s IT freaking out when he mentioned a non Microsoft flavor being installed on a school PC. He requested they simply install an application…. VMWare player…. And then the first day of school he handed everyone a DVD burned with a linux image, some tools, and documentation. He said it worked great.

The application.

I took our linux course, have them all use bridged networking of course, and put a linux vm on a deepfreeze image. The linux image has all the student user accounts preloaded and the beauty is in this particular course, the fact that deepfreeze kicks the image back to a clean version on ever reboot is great. So we let our beginner linux guys do they’re tasks and assignments on a clean rig each time. Our advanced linux guys get an install of linux server or workstation and they make two or three copies of the 3 gig image onto a computer or drive, then load them all up, making one their server, one their firewall, one the client. In this manner, as they make adjustments to their firewall, they jump on their client pc by clicking a tab, and see that they can’t see the server anymore. They can try and hack their way in, build their own firewall, see what’s most effective, what the process of securing a network is really like. Finally, our server 2003 class gets a volume license install of the software in a VMWare image on a dvd. The image is then copied to a persistent directory on our imaged machines. They make 3 copies of the image, taking 9 gig of the virtually unused diskspace notorious on school PC’s, I actually just made a persistent partition and made it 15 gig for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Once you have three copies, you walk them through their very own setup of Active Directory, promote the install, set some group policies, etc. Then they bring up another machine and make a child for the parent. It takes some tricks to get the machines to talk to each other, but once you get it down it goes pretty easy. Essentially, set your host options correctly, use NAT or Host-Only, install AD on the server machine, shut both of them down, bring up the primary server completely, then bring up server b, you should be fine. But in the end, you have a fully functional AD setup that the student is the admin over. He breaks it, he fixes it, everything. You can even use empty space for adding some “virtual” drives and letting them add partitions, convert disks to dynamic, run everything from mirrored drives to raid 5. It works very well, and in the end, the students get real experience with real scenarios, experience that is worth it when a student is able to leave with confidence in his abilities. Additionally, if they totally hose any install, all I’m doing is copying a fresh 3 gig image over and they’re up and running, down time is roughly 12 minutes, and that’ll be faster as I fine tune our network setup. :) Anyway, it’s working amazingly well for us in a university setting, as always, I’m happy to answer questions and such….