I would iterate Bonnie's point. Along with faculty and students, IT staff (university, college, or department affiliated) should become a target audience for POSSE courses. Some of the IT staff have temporary positions, some are our students, doing sys admin hours. They should certainly get involved in our TOS conversation.
Mihaela From: tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-boun...@teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Nicholas Whittier Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2011 9:53 AM To: tos@teachingopensource.org Subject: Re: [TOS] Infrastructure Team: Can haz? Hi All, I'm hijacking the middle of this thread, because I just joined the mailing list, and have some thoughts I'd like to add (I first commented on Sebastian's blog post, then noticed the activity here). As a new voice, I'll first voice my apologies if I re-spawn old topics or cover details already mentioned. First, a lot of great points have been made about: 1. Not duplicating services that already exist (setup a git repo vs use github, setup a wiki vs join an existing project, etc.) 2. The value in having a fairly turnkey server config available for demonstrative purposes, ideally for limited duration events that are not intended to focus on system administration, but rather the software/tools themselves. 3. The value in setting up an entire system. That is, for individuals to familiarize themselves with the installation/configuration of the software. One thing that was touched, but not made explicit (again, sorry if I missed someone's notes that made this point) is the mentality change when newer users know they are working in a sandbox. In my experience, when you tell someone to post an update to a live wiki (even if it's backed up, changes can be undone, and they are aware that mistakes and issues are perfectly acceptable), there is a certain element of hesitation to such contribution. If you tell someone that you just created a wiki with some realistic demo content, and they should test their updates in that location, many of those hesitations disappear. In this respect, I think there is a definite value in providing easy server installs for users/leadership at TOS events. To that end, we touched on AMIs and VB Images (which was part of my comment on Sebastian's blog), and we mentioned hosting providers with one-click type installation procedures available. I think the AMI/VB Images are a better way to go, because this allows full administrative access to the machine, which could be helpful as its own learning tool. It also ensures that users are working in a sandbox that is not their personal machine (which more accurately simulates the real scenario - always a good thing). Using AWS and pre-built AMIs also gives us the opportunity to be sure that users have access to an OS of our choice (as opposed to any limitation based on available hardware to the user, or hosting provider decisions. Continuing on this path, I propose the following as providing great opportunities for both events and TOS efforts in general. Decide on a few common configurations that work for most TOS efforts. Generate not only the AMI/Images of these configurations, but also walk-throughs for the entire server build. This gives us the opportunity to spin up the entire sandbox with everything we want in minutes. Having the walk-throughs around also gives us the opportunity to build-out the entire system as part of the exercise relatively quickly, and with a reasonable amount of confidence that no aspect of the server build-out is going to cause unexpected delays. The walk-throughs themselves also serve as a helpful instructional tool for users who may need a boost to get through some initial barriers. As I mentioned, this was a bit of a mash-up of a lot of what has already been said, with a dusting of my thoughts on top. I would love to assist with some of this documentation, or ami/vb image generation. Or, if everyone thinks we need to move in a different direction with the effort, I am willing to assist in other ways. On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Sabin, Mihaela <mihaela.sa...@unh.edu<mailto:mihaela.sa...@unh.edu>> wrote: Karsten, the idea of "remixing FLOSS technology" has a very important pedagogical value and impacts important curricular areas (networking, operating systems, security, software system architecture, software system applications and administration) in a coherent and relevant way. Any teaching materials that could assist faculty and students to learn about sandbox-ing will be great. Your examples below are excellent starting points. In a perfect world, they can become self-contained teaching modules that can be linked to the TOS textbook. > On Wednesday, January 12, 2011 11:31 PM, Karsten Wade wrote: > > I want to show a professor how to clone a git repo from LibreOffice and > make it available on another host so that others can clone from my > branch and check out the cool stuff I'm doing without it having to be > merged back to LibreOffice. So _today_ I can do that with > gitorious.org<http://gitorious.org>, but last year-or-so I couldn't. I would > have been > messing with httpd and stuff. > > Say I want to show how easy it is to setup a yum repository for your > packages before they get submitted to Fedora, today I can do that using > fedorapeople.org<http://fedorapeople.org> but only if I can install the > Fedora packaging and yum > devel tools locally. What if the professor brought a Windows or OSX > machine? I sure would like to boot to a Fedora spin or POSSE remix ... > > What I'm saying is that I can think of a huge number of ways to remix > FLOSS technology that might benefit from seeing how something is > actually done rather than looking for an existing project that hosts it > as a service or provides it as part of their FLOSS infrastructure for > contributors. I wouldn't summarily close the door on the idea of POSSE > instructors being able to spin-up needed services because of the risk > that it might make people think we are recommending they just go in a > corner and do their own thing. > > I think there will always be a new FLOSS technology that needs a quick > example or dirty hosting for the week that is not provided somewhere > else. How to get that is still a bit murky, although I do see the > Dreamhost-style as being close (I use this for my personal projects, > for example, and it works well for that.) > > - Karsten > -- > name: Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener > team: Red Hat Community Architecture > uri: http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki > gpg: AD0E0C41 _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org<mailto:tos@teachingopensource.org> http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
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