[UbuntuWomen] re-introduction

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Kay Nettle <pkn at cs.utexas.edu> 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.

I think a site would be great. I am currently working with a
non-profit that services several local schools which have a very
similar setup and we engineered things from the ground up. It'd be
great if there were more resources out there so neither of us would
have had to start from scratch! I'm also currently working on more
public documentation for our setup (right now it's spread over a few
shared google docs).

Since I started work with schools, I started getting somewhat involved
in the Ubuntu Education team (mailing list here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-education) some of
their discussions are more along the lines of educational software and
Edubuntu, but there is talk of deployments like yours and LTSP
deployments. It's not a very high traffic list but I could see it
being even more useful if people like yourself were active on it.

Plus you might want to add your school here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Education/UbuntuSchools

Finally, Belinda Lopez is also working with educational stuff, she has
posted some great things on her blog of late:
http://dindafoss.wordpress.com/

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com