[UbuntuWomen] re-introduction

[Belinda Lopez]

This is great to hear!  I'm Belinda Lopez and I cover the Education 
projects for Canonical.  I'm in the midst of putting together some 
literature to help school and university decision makers learn more 
about Ubuntu and its capabilities.

 From the community stand point, testing is sorely needed as is any 
documentation you want to contribute of how you accomplished your 
solution.   The pxe boot solution is exactly how we designed our 
'training' version of Ubuntu to use to setup training classrooms for our 
partners.  Ante Karamatic, ivoks on IRC, is the guy who figured this out 
and it sounds similar to what you did with the modified initrd.  I'm 
pretty sure this is not documented on the help.ubuntu.com wiki but maybe 
you could start by documenting it?

For the Cloud training course, we created a few scenarios where cloud 
solutions might work.  Setup gets easier with each release and some of 
the common uses included gaming sites when new releases happen, our own 
Ubuntu releases when we get hit pretty hard,  and on the research side, 
pharmaceutical simulations but this could be any high computing scenario 
such as major news stories and scaling for holiday shopping.  Dell is 
offering a hosted Cloud solution to Universities for both high 
performance computing but also as part of virtualised desktop solutions.

let me know if I can help in any way.

regards,

Belinda


On 09/29/2010 11:54 AM, Kay Nettle wrote:
> I thought I would re-introduce myself and ask for some advice.
>
> My name is Kay Nettle and I work as a linux sys admin at the CS dept
> at The University of Texas at Austin.  We have recently retired all
> our user Solaris boxes, so we decided that now would be a good time
> to move to a more package based install of ubuntu.  We had been doing
> a base install and then building most of the software ourselves.
> This has been really interesting (not always in a good way) for me,
> since I built a good deal of the software.  We are now pxebooting our
> machines to do the installs with a modified initrd (I had to modify
> the passwd and group files in base-passwd),  We have our own repository
> as well as a mirror, so our install traffic doesn't go outside the
> dept.  I've had to figure out how to get gdm to do the correct thing
> for a public lab.  Fix polkit so random people couldn't reboot
> machines, etc.
>
> As soon as we get some time (and round up some machines) we are going
> to try and set up an experimental cloud cluster.
>
> I admin the linux boxes with another person and we want to give back
> to the community.  We aren't really sure what would be the best way.
> We thought about a web page explaining what we did and the problems
> we have run into.  We also thought about testing, since we install
> gnome, kde, xfce and lots of other window managers.   If anyone has
> any suggestions, please let me know.
>
> Kay
>
>    

Education
Canonical
belinda.lopez at canonical.com
dinda at ubuntu.com
IRC: dinda
Office: Galveston, Texas
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