[OSCTC-planning] install privileges and our curriculum

[Albert Lee]

Hi folks,

Shauna asked if I had any advice to share from setting up live lab
environments before, so here's basically what I can recall offhand
(Asheesh also probably remembers some details). The last time I did
this was long enough ago that we used live CDs; USB sticks weren't
quite the commodity they were now.

In undergrad, our ACM chapter's local and regional programming contest
was held in the CS department's computer lab. Each team needed access
to an identical desktop with specific software. The lab machines
mostly ran Windows at the time, but we could boot anything on them
temporarily.
In our case we also needed each team to log into non-privileged user
accounts, and restricted their internet access.

I built the contest client images using some (mostly) off-the-shelf
scripts that would convert regular Debian installs to live CDs. This
made it very easy to start from a minimal install and test
customisations. We used a central server on the network to provide NFS
storage, auth and other services, which also came in handy for making
last-minute changes available to everyone. Some live USB systems
provide writable space now (you might even be able to make permanent
changes to them).

One hitch was assigning the original static IP addresses for all of the machines
(we weren't allowed to run a DHCP server on the network) - I scraped
all of the lab machines' MAC addresses while they were running
normally, and baked them into the image along with a custom network
config script. Aside from the fixed network configuration, the images
would likely have worked on other hardware just fine. If you do run
into this situation, let me know.

I'm guessing your requirements are less complex, so there should be
much less upfront work. It probably consists of starting from a basic
desktop install, adding software you need, and using (probably much
improved now) tools to generate live images.

-Albert