Re: Open access to student labs

[Greg Vickers <g.vickers () QUT EDU AU>]

Hi Boaz,

Boaz Gelbord wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I would be interested in knowing how many institutions have student
> labs with open access versus forcing users to login.
>
> At the New School we have open labs in which students need to identify
> themselves at the front desk but can then just sit in front of a
> terminal and work without logging in (we also have some public terminals
> in the cafeteria and elsewhere where no ID is required). These machines
> are locked down so that students have no administrative privileges.
> Forcing users to login at the labs would be a technical challenge and
> create extra work for our helpdesk but would help us track down users
> who violate our policies or in case of an incident.

Here at QUT there are ~2000 lab hosts across four geographical
locations. Central labs are managed by one group (~1500 hosts) and the
other lab hosts are spread across other faculties/schools.

We have an AD implementation and to get access to a lab host a student
has to use their student number and password to log onto a lab host.

Some labs are protected by swipe access using the Cardax system, but
this does not stop a student who will wait at a door until someone else
with swipe access comes along and lets them in. This is not a huge
problem, it's just not a guaranteed method of restriction physical
access to a computer lab.

The central lab hosts use a combination of Rembo and DeepFreeze to
re-image the PC after a student has finished using it, a reboot is
forced when a student logs off, so any data that user left behind
(either saved files or cached/temp data/files) is removed from casual
retrieval. The students have administrative access to these hosts so
they can do what they like to these computers.

Most Faculty/School computers use a similar image management technique,
(or Ghost) and do not grant administrative access for student accounts.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

--
Greg Vickers
IT Security Engineer & Project Manager
IT Security, Network Services,
Information Technology Services
Queensland University of Technology
L12, 126 Margaret St, Brisbane

Phone: +61 7 3138 9536
Mobile: 0410 434 734
Fax: +61 7 3138 2921
Email: g.vickers () qut edu au
IT Security web site: http://www.its.qut.edu.au/itsecurity/

CRICOS No. 00213J