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As someone who was a lab TA for a little while and a district-level sysadmin for a while longer, the thing which comes to mind when I think of school machines i
by rachelbythebay 14y ago
As someone who was a lab TA for a little while and a district-level sysadmin for a while longer, the thing which comes to mind when I think of school machines is "fragile". They could in fact be "broken" in the sense that it would take a nontrivial investment in time to get it back to a state where anyone could find it useful again. Even firing up "ghost" (or whatever the equivalent is these days) takes a while to happen.
I guess this probably isn't as bad now with actual privilege separation (non-admin accounts) in Windows and Macs these days, but some memories are hard to forget.
There's something to be said for a box which is going to be just fine if you power-cycle it.
- derleth 14y agoOne more reason to love Xen and friends.
- derefr 14y ago> There's something to be said for a box which is going to be just fine if you power-cycle it. Presuming a Windows environment, have you ever tried DeepFreeze? Every school environment I've worked IT for that hasn't gone diskless seems to have started using it in the last decade. A lot of demo computers on display in stores, too (I think my local Apple Store is now using the OSX version; not sure how widespread that is.) If you're running a Linux setup, of course, you can just do the equivalent with a tmpfs overlay on /.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoNot personally, but I saw things like it used back then. It was pretty funny, since the machine would get a new virus definition file, then it would blow itself back to the snapshot, and then it would get infected... and so on, and so on... Fortunately I only had to witness it and never had to run a whole fleet of Windows boxes.