12th
Mar
2008
Mar
2008
First official meeting of GNU Lab @ MES CE
There was a meeting during noon in our college to discuss about the future activities of GNU Lab at MES CE. It could be considered as the first official one. Raju sir, Raghesh sir and a few students including Shyam and Mahesh were present. The participation in the meeting was less as the study leave for university exams for second and third years starts today.
The current active topics were discussed and Raju sir suggested to go through the previous years Google Summer of Code topics to get more for the GNU Lab. Other suggestion were to have the college labs open 24 hours and to provide the root password for students, so that they could do much more. Raju sir himself supported us by quoting IIT’s and NIT as examples and said that the authorities here are not much encouraging and the college could develop in these aspects only with their help. He also suggested few ideas to overcome such situations. I am a bit disappointed too, that the conclusion of the meeting was to give first years works like to introduce or work with a particular software or topic. I think there might be talented ones who could do much beyond that and the selection criteria should not be based on year or semester wise.
install Xen and then you can have as many virtual machines
as u want with root password .virtualization and appliances based on xen is the next thing
-ashok chandran first batch
Mesce@groups.yahoo.com
For installing a software itself, we need the root password… If we don’t mess up with the computers, who else is going to do that? Shouldn’t we also be aware of the administrative privileges?
just reminds me of au mau chai our first lab admin we used to trick him so much that he used to ban us from lab .talk to saheer about this he is from our batch . Set up a system with say 10 vms and then give base os root admin to college. I bought a pc shared with my room mate. That is what we all did au mau chaus go to he’ll :-). They restrict because they don’t know.u can have a local nw of systems with root pad as well.some ideas
Now we have one system in multimedia lab with the administrative privilege for the work of GNULab. The problem is with CS department only. They still have the old RedHat….
All systems in multicore computing lab of IT department are changed to Debian etch and the root access is open to all…. Then why not with CS?
old RedHat LOL.
RHEL and SLES are still standard commercial distributions supported by industry leads like HP,IBM etc…
Either they think multimedia guys are dumb or they think CSE guys are too smart. May be they are afraid of REINSTALLING REDHAT. 😉
They should fear the mechs who took away keys from keyboard than us. 🙂 CSE always has good well mannered kids who will just crack a few passwords and share answers on network. They took out the network ,removed root access and restrict the time we get in lab. The lesser the evil. After buying a pc we literally shunned the lab and they were happy as we were not pestering them for midnight lab access.
linux without root is like having a beautiful g/f without s*x. 🙂
I mailed shaheer about it. Why dont u escalate it? Being first batch we had the privi to go directly and talk to anyone? Hope it is not lost in time.
what work do u do at the muticore computing lab? Are u working on any major projects or in learning mode?
I am admin to mesce@groups.yahoo.com. You are invited to join us. We are bunch of oldies and would love to help u in all ways we can.
By the by if u put an ubuntu cd and boot the system offline how can they prevent u from having root 🙂 All u need is a reboot. To store ur data u can mount USB drive and use it as disk to store data. or better boot from a usb based linux distro . 🙂 You can connect to network as well. We are not violating any law as we are not logged in as root on the redhat system only we are loaning the hardware.
We have our own ways to boot into a system with admin access, by using a bootable USB and by the by the systems in labs don’t have a CD drive except a few. So, no Ubuntu and also with just 256MB RAM, a little swap space, and old hardware, its hard to work from a boot CD. But why the authorities behave so?
Now about multicore computing lab… The IT department gives us more freedom… Though we haven’t started any serious works, we had a workshop on l10n, Raju sir, Raghesh sir and other staffs supported us very well. The details of the workshop is here.
If the authorities are afraid of reinstalling or changing the distro, we aren’t…. We are always happy to do the works. We have a group here. Please check it.