Installing a classroom server
While the USB boot drives are effective, using them can be cumbersome. Students can forget to bring them to school, and reliability for some thumb drives may be an issue. Also, the IT department may not sanction devices that bypass the security centrally managed systems support.
Many school computer teachers become the recipient of donated systems each year. During my own teaching career, there have been systems that had become infected by viruses or had some hardware problems. Relatives of students typically decide that the cost of removing infections or fixing the computer is better spent on purchasing new equipment. Most often, people assume that at the very least students can salvage these systems for parts.
The desktop computers used in the classroom server lack a hard drive but have plenty of RAM and a fast CPU. With a hard drive rescued from another system, the students install Ubuntu Server and enjoy a terrific shared resource for the next round of lessons.
A classroom server doesn’t have to be particularly powerful. Running command-line utilities and nongraphical applications places only a minor load on a computer. The latest classroom server is equipped with an older system with an Intel i3 CPU and only 8GB RAM. It can be revelatory for students to install a server operating system. Installing Ubuntu Server, for example, takes less than 30 minutes for a typical installation. None of the students have installed a server version of an operating system before. The biggest surprise is the lack of a graphical user interface. Almost every student today has a smartphone with a touchscreen. The computers they grew up using always have a mouse and interface with radio buttons, scroll bars and icons. Getting accustomed to a CLI has never been difficult with some demonstration and simple documentation.
Students are further surprised when a server is run without a screen attached. Showing them pictures of any modern server room, they can see hundreds of rack-mounted computers and few if any monitors, and they begin to comprehend that remote access to a computer is more typical than they realise.
When installing the Linux server for my classrooms, we always ensure that SSH support is enabled. Using SSH permits access to the server from virtually any computer on the network. In situations where USB boot disks are verboten, you can add SSH support to Firefox and Chrome browsers very easily. In the current classroom, there are a large number of Windows computers that are used for web design classes the school runs, and it would be impractical to make these Linux systems. SSH access from these computers is done from the browser or with Putty,(www.putty.org) a free SSH client program.
There are advantages to only using this approach over the USB drive setup. When the students are using the USB boot method, they have to email programming projects as attachments. With a server, students login and have access to a dedicated storage directory. The system administrator can easily view the directory tree and see the files that the students are creating.