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. (continue reading…)