Command line enviroment for pupils.

[Teth]

ok I got asked an intresting quetion this morning and said "yes no problem" having thought about it a bit I'm not so sure it can but I thought I'd ask here first so here goes.

The ICT course has reached the operating envirmoents stage and a teach wants pupils to use a command line environment to contrast with they're experience of GUIs. Easy I thought but then it occurred to me if I turn off dos prompt blocking for her class it will go off for the whole student body and I can't exactly have kids on the command prompt can I. No problem I thought I'm sure somone has written a simulation for teaching just this kind of thing.. but I can't find it if they have.

So do any of you have a solution to this to let pupils use a command line enviroment. I want to make sure the teacher doesn't teach it as "GUI good easy to use", "Command line bad complicated to use". I'd like to see it taught properly that command line is powerful for experienced users. That of course means letting them run a batch process of some variety. How do you do it? / Do you do it?

[CyberNerd]

we allow ssh access to a SuSE server for this.
It only get used for a php A level course though.
alternatively you could open telnet on a windows server and allow

telnet://servername

in IE.

[webman]

Since the Windows telnet app is a console app, your command line restriction may not allow it to run. You could use a standalone telnet client or something like PuTTY which supports telnet.

[Ric_]

Or you could stick a VM on the clients with a proper OS in it That would allow contrast between Windows and Linux plus Linux has a CLI.

It doesn't matter what the kids do in the VM, just reload it when they've finished trashing it.

[Teth]

a VM is a nice idea actually I think they should be exposed to Linux as part of operating systems instead of the idea of operating systems that aren't windows being all in theory.

I'll have a test run and see if our P4s with 1gig ram make a credible job running something like Ubuntu in a VM.

[Ric_]

I'll have a test run and see if our P4s with 1gig ram make a credible job running something like Ubuntu in a VM.

They might just handle it!

The Debian VM we had at BETT was using 82MB of RAM (including cache, etc.). Admittedly there was no GUI.

Damn Small Linux could be the way forward or even Knoppix.

[Midget]

What about creating a user account that is allowed CLI access and just making the kids use that.

[Teth]

My concern with actually giving them command line access is things like Fdisk which could cause me to need to re-image alot of machines

I don't supose VMware is free for educational use at this point?

[Geoff]

Yes, you can get VMWare server to create your images, then use VMWare player on the kids PCs to run the images.

[tom_newton]

Would have thought you'd require minimal space for a very simple command-line demo... easily get it in 32Mb of RAM and 500Mb HD.

Tom

[jet5y]

Another vote here for using Virtual PC/VMWare. We use it all the time for letting the kids run visual studio. They can do anything they like on the machine then without fear of them breaking anything or messing about with the security on the machine.

[ind13]

what about something like deep freeze or microsoft shared computer tool kit.
you will be able to give the students that extra bit of access, and then just restart the pc to reset it back to normal.

ive got a feeling that you can give them access the command prompt but then limit the tools they can use. ill see if i can find the instructions

[jet5y]

The thought of them accessing hidden drives and viewing scripts, security info or sending net send * messages would put me off.

[srochford]

Remember, that if they can access scripts from the command prompt then they can do it from in Notepad, Word or anything else which can read text files.

Similarly, if they can run "net" at a command prompt, they can also run it by (eg) shelling from a Word macro.

If you have scripts which contain sensitive info (eg passwords) and they don't need to be run by students then set the permissions so they can't read them. If they do need to be run then encode them. Similarly, if you don't want students runniing the net commands then change the permissions on net.exe so that they can't run it

If you only want to block net send then disable the alerter and messenger services - the default for XP SP2

Steve

[mattx]

MS do virtual machine. [ Virtual PC ]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx

Its free to use, I use it on my Vista workstation to test my scripts and progs for our XP PCs.