[Discuss] how to manage a bunch of ms boxes?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Eric Chadbourne
<eric.chadbourne at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Hi All,
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> I have a public computer lab with a little under 40 windows PCs.

What version of Windows?  I've heard of Windows only solutions that
don't involve virtualization where this would matter.

> Here's what I'm currently thinking of doing. ?Install Ubuntu and
> virtualbox on all of them. ?Upon automatic login a shell script starts
> that checks for the latest windows image. ?If the PC already has the
> latest image then start virtualbox in full screen mode else download
> image and then start vb. ?This way every user has the same exact
> 'computer'. ?It will make my life and the teachers lives easier.

If the machines have the disk space for it, why not keep two copies of
the windows image  locally (master and working)?   Do a local copy of
master to working on every restart.  This should reduce the time it
takes to boot the systems up (and not pound the network at the start
of class when every machine gets restarted after the gold image gets
changed).  When you decide to change your gold system image, you can
do a one time copy of the gold image to become the new master on all
of the machines.  Also, It's not clear to me if you were planning on
using the ability of VirtualBox to do immutable images.   That
wouldn't require having to reserve enough space for two local image
copies and will guarantee NO changes made by the user remain after
they logout as well as even faster logins.  You would still push gold
images to the client machines at your leisure rather then having it
happen during class.

If you plan to do networking within the Windows systems (not just the
host Linux OS), you have to consider whether the Windows systems have
to have different names/IP addresses.  If you stick with using VB's
builtin NAT, you should be okay for web browsing, but if you plan to
do Windows' filesharing
you could have a problem.   If you allow printing, you might want to
set up CUPS queues on each Linux system and have your Windows images
print to
that locally.  CUPS can then forward print jobs on anyway you want.

If you currently allow people to use their own media (USB flash
drives, CDs (for data, music, recordable to backup files), you will
have to figure out how to do this with VB.  Unfortunately, I don't
know how I would approach that issue; but I suspect it is doable.
Personally, I would do a lot of google searches.  I'm sure you aren't
the first person to attempt this using VB.   Other peripherals such as
USB scanners, headphones, cameras, etc. are likely to be even more
difficult.
I've personally run into situations where VB's graphics driver doesn't
work well with some Internet streaming software with some versions of
Windows.  (This may have been fixed.)  Whether using VB for this is
feasible at all is going to depend on just what you need/want to
support.

Good Luck,
Bill Bogstad