1. Fedora in Education BalCCon2k17 17th September 2017 Nemanja Milošević
Fedora Project
Teaching University of Novi Sad

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

3. Fedora Community in Serbia
Release Faculty of Sciences, Novi Sad
Freenode
@FedoraSrbija on Twitter
Two Fedora Ambassadors:
Momčilo Medić
Nemanja Milošević

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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!

8. The project
Why Fedora?
Actively used in education

9. The classroom

10. The classroom

11. 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)

12. 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

13. 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

14. Management Some cool stuff we did with the scripts:
Used locally seeded torrents 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 minutes at the end of the day :)

15. 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
...

16. 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

17. Questions?
Contact: