[lobbying-org] Homerton CO, privacy and Linux
Martin Keegan
mk270@cam.ac.uk
Thu, 4 Apr 2002 14:54:05 +0100 (BST)
On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Martin Keegan wrote:
>
> It is alleged that the CO of Homerton wants anyone who has a machine
> plugged into the network to hand over the root password, and will only
> allow Windows and MacOS.
>
> Can anyone confirm this?
I have now phoned the head of computing at Homerton, and he has explained
the situation.
Students with machines plugged in in their bedrooms don't receive the same
level of support unless they're using Windows or MacOS. Basically, the
college offers support to those two operating systems (as those are the
ones the COs grok), and everyone else is on a "if it breaks you get both
parts" support scheme.
This is more than Jesus College offers in practice.
It looks like Homerton offers a lot more in the way of shared filespace
and facilities internally, and that users of non-MS OSes (counting MacOS
as an MS OS (think MS Office availability) have to work out how to get to
these things themselves if they want to use them. It may be that you just
can't get at them with Linux. TCP/IP network access is not restricted by
OS, you just might have to set it up yourself. It looks like there's an
ethos at Homerton of the COs setting up your personal machine to be on the
LAN.
With regard to requiring administrative access, this is a misunderstanding
of some installation instruction dealing with the system privileges the
user needs to configure his/her machine to get onto the network. If it's
the CO doing this, you need to log them in as Administrator for a little
while, but it doesn't go beyond that.
Mk