Re: Open access to student labs

[Keith Furrow <kfurrow () PCC EDU>]

Greetings,

At Portland Community College we require the open labs users to
authenticate through an application developed in-house.  As such, we
have no Windows, AD or Netware login accounts for students, all users
auto-logon as administrators on the lab computers and can do
virtually anything -- but the systems reboot after each use and
Faronics Deep Freeze restores the systems to their original state.

We call our application CLAS (computer lab authentication system).
It basically takes over the computer and won't allow access until
valid credentials are entered.  The database of users is on a Redhat
AS server with a LAMP backend.  Management of accounts is done
through web pages as are many reports.  We log every usage, as well
as the IP address assigned to each session.  Currently we're using
the system on four campuses, with around 400 computers.

Similar functionality can be found in products from Pharos and Geneva
Logic, although they had shortcomings for our environment.

Keith Furrow
Portland Community College
Cascade Campus
Phone 503-978-5260
Email: kfurrow () pcc edu

> 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.
>
> If you would like to answer me off the list I can aggregate the answers
> and send out a summary.
>
> Thanks and happy holidays-
> Boaz.
>
> Boaz Gelbord
> Manager of Information Security
> The New School
> 55 West 13th Street NYC 10011
> www.newschool.edu