Fedora in Education BalCCon2k17 17th September 2017 Nemanja Milošević Ambassador @ Fedora Project Teaching Assistant @ University of Novi Sad

Hello Nemanja Milošević Fedora Ambassador since January 2016 Teaching Assistant since September 2016 Maintaining “Fedora classroom” with 25 workstations

Fedora Community in Serbia Release Parties @ Faculty of Sciences, Novi Sad #fedora-rs @ Freenode @FedoraSrbija on Twitter Two Fedora Ambassadors: Momčilo Medić (FedoraUser@fedoraproject.org) Nemanja Milošević (nmilosev@fedoraproject.org)

FOSS in education Reasons to use FOSS in education Ability to inspect and learn from open source projects No licensing woes, neither for the institution nor the students Our students can continue using the software which they are familiar with even after graduation Getting involved with the open source community Gaining experience through contributions Adjustable to all needs

The project Classroom “RC3” 25 workstations (Intel Core i5 CPUs, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA graphics) Previous solution was too slow Ubuntu hosts Separate VirtualBox VM’s with Windows 10 for every class Slow boot, losing too much time Difficult distribution of files (both ways) Very difficult to update/install software on all machines after the initial setup

The project Almost all software we use was already open- source and worked on Fedora For software that was not compatible, alternatives were found No virtual machines were needed Separate user profiles and configurations for different classes

The project Why Fedora? New kernels, full hardware compatibility with our workstations Almost all development tools available and updated regularly through official repositories Familiarity Most of the servers we use and manage are CentOS :) Good documentation, and support Free as in freedom!

The project Why Fedora? Actively used in education

The classroom

The classroom

The project How? Prepared one workstation CloneZilla to the rescue! Network was slow (100MBit/s) Used four USB3.0 drives with the images, one old 1GB flash drive for loading CloneZilla to RAM Our record for full provisioning and configuring: 1 hour 25 minutes What can be improved Automatic hostname setup (time consuming)

Configuration All workstation use the following naming convention for their hostnames rc3-number (rc3-1, rc3-2 … rc3-24) Professor workstation uses a different name The classroom is isolated from other networks Management from the 25th workstation

Management A set of Python3 scripts (github.com/nmilosev/rc3-scripts)* *needs some TLC Made with netmiko (paramiko) ssh module Currently the scripts can: Check which workstations are powered on Turn off every workstation Use x11vnc to “spy” on students Execute any command on all workstations Most powerful and probably the most used feature

Management Some cool stuff we did with the scripts: Used locally seeded torrents (thanks @meka_floss for the idea!) to distribute large files to all the workstations Used the same method to distribute VirtualBox appliances for conferences and workshops Updates, updates, updates Installing software on all the workstations Pulling/pushing files (tests, answers etc.) The most loved feature: Turning off all the workstations Saves 10-15 minutes at the end of the day :)

Future work WoL to wake up all the machines at once Scheduled updates after that Control the beamer over HDMI-CEC Meta-packages for our students A special Fedora Spin for our students sudo dnf install pmf-databases1 sudo dnf install pmf-introcs ...

Conclusion It is imperative to teach CS students about free open source software and its benefits We managed to fully migrate to Linux-compatible software in teaching Management is very easy Systems are very stable and performance is excellent

Questions? Contact: nmilosev@fedoraproject.org nmilosev@dmi.rs