Student VM's

[NokiX]

Hi All,

 

I am unsure if this is the correct location to post this as it fits under lots of categories but basically we have a few students who are part of a games club where they use gamemaker and a few other type of games development software however these students wish to use notepad++ to make it easier for them when writing some parts of their games.

 

Now my network manager doesn't wish to allow them to use notepad++ as it would make it easier for students to write potentially harmful scripts and since these kids have already been in trouble for poking around the network before we don't want to give them any incentive to do so again. We came up with the idea of possibly setting up a VM which isn't tied to the domain so this way they can't poke around the network and can just use that VM when creating their scripts with notepad++ since we would likely run windows 7 on the VM. The problem we have is that each user would need to be able to save work to their N drive but of course this would require access to the network which is what we want to avoid.

 

Rather than spend huge amounts of time on this for only a handful of pupils we wondered if anyone else has this sort of setup maybe for other purposes rather than the same purpose we would like to use it for but if anyone has suggestions on ways to do this please let me know!

[clareq]

Have a look at virtualbox - there are a number of posts on here about it. You have the ability to pass through a mapped drive on the host machine, without giving any network access.

[Boredguy]

You can easily use VirtualBox to run a VM, and have a "drive" available in it that actually connects via the host to a folder on their network home drive.

 

As far as the VM is concerned it is a stand alone computer with no network connectivity.

[FragglePete]

We use VirtualBox also - they have full admin rights to a VM running Windows 7, but it's disconnected from the network with the exception of a folder which maps to a folder in their home drive. The VM is set to immutable so any changes are lost when the VM is shutdown. A script is used to launch the VM which disables access to the VirtualBox console so they can't change any settings.

 

It's proved popular here as a solution to let them run havoc with their own code on a sandboxed VM. The only downside is that we copy the VM image file to each PC during our rebuild process. This file is in the order of 13Gb in size so takes a while.

 

The only thing fly in the ointment now has been the demands of the exam board for our AS students. During the exam, they are only allowed access to Paint, Word and Python. Nothing else. So having to have a rethink on that at the mo.

 

Pete

[bald_pig]

All this just for notepad++? Not being funny, but anything they can do in notepad++ they could do in regular notepad. The real issue is why are you letting the kids run scripts in the first place?

[NokiX]

Thanks for the suggestions guys!

 

All this just for notepad++? Not being funny, but anything they can do in notepad++ they could do in regular notepad. The real issue is why are you letting the kids run scripts in the first place?

 

We have been wanting to look into VM's for a while but it's not been a priority until we had this request come in from a few of the students. The network does block a lot of scripts however but some of these kids are quite bright and we don't want to give them the temptation to mess around with scripts in notepad++ since it makes reading scripts a lot easier so if we only give them this platform to use notepad++ they won't be as tempted to try and mess about with scripts on our systems.

 

I hope that makes sense!

[flyinghaggis]

I'm in the process of setting up a Virtualbox VM image at the moment. I've disabled network access but wondered are there any security implications with installing the Virtualbox Guest Additions/Extensions?

 

Also, our head of computing has also been asking if it would be possible to get internet access on the guest OS but I'm still trying to think of a secure way of achieving that. Not sure if it's even possible without giving the guest OS access to other PCs and servers on the network which we'd obviously want to avoid?

[clareq]

Why would they need Internet access on the VM - they only need to minimise it to access the Internet on the host.

[flyinghaggis]

Why would they need Internet access on the VM - they only need to minimise it to access the Internet on the host.

 

I agree with you. I wasn't planning on giving them it but our computing HOD asked for it as some of the apps (like visual studio) have online help guides and various components that might require internet access. They seem happy enough with it being isolated at the moment in general so I'm going to leave it that way for now.

 

I've mapped a drive to their home area so they can copy files back and forth between the host and client.

Edited May 6, 2015 by flyinghaggis

[Boredguy]

To provide internet access to the VM would also open up the possibility of accessing network resources directly which would defeat the point of giving them a sandbox environment.

 

While there are possible ways round it, accessing the internet via the Hosts browser is much simpler and safer. Most of the Visual studio help should be easily located via a quick internet search anyway.