Hosted Virtual Desktop for Computer Science

[Tombo]

Hi,

 

We have the issue of staff and students in computer science wanting to use websites and software that would normally be blocked on smoothwall or allow access to things (like github) that could cause damage to the network. I was thinking of using a hosted virtual desktop environment to push the risk off my systems. I know i can do some of this locally and believe me we do but im still asked for more as courses change.

 

Has anyone done this? How easy was it and how much did it cost? I am constantly saying no to people and i need another way around the issue.

 

I have looked at Azure but it seems way over complicated. Are there any easier platforms out there for education where this already exists?

 

Thanks

[dmj]

I did this many,many years ago with win7 (that long ago) using https://www.ovirt.org/. It was self hosted, but you could just as easily do that in a cloud (which, I think, is your question).

The content filter was adjusted for the ip range of those machines. IIRC the clients booted from pxe into an rdp client that connected to their respective vm.

 

It's probably a bit OTT for what you need, I'd be inclined to host a VM on the clients and give the virtualhosts a DHCP scope on a firewalled network with the extra Smoothwall permissions.

[Davit2005]

There are threads on here about using virtual box on each machine, might be worth a look. How many students/VMs are you talking about and would this be isolated to certain year groups? Edited September 22, 2022 by Davit2005

[Tombo]

We do use virtual box already but the teacher wants to move away from it for some reason. So that makes me not want to press any further with it, although im not sure there is a realistic alternative that is not going to cost me a fortune.

[paulkerton]

We do use virtual box already but the teacher wants to move away from it for some reason. So that makes me not want to press any further with it, although im not sure there is a realistic alternative that is not going to cost me a fortune.

Well if it is a departmental desire, shouldn't there be some cost to the department?

[dmj]

You really need to pin down what the requirements actually are, then cost out a few options. I'm pretty sure you'll end up tweaking the virtualbox deployments when they get the prices for hosted VDI.

[Tombo]

Virtualbox is fine, my concern is that they want students to access github for education, in order to do that i have to unlock github as it uses the same resources in smoothwall. This means that the students that dont behave have access to standard github which is full of tools to hack virtualbox. Ive had to say no hence looking for an alternative.

[dmj]

There are a few options: You don't actually need access to github to teach git, the two are completely independent - so I'm guessing the teacher either want to access some github repos or wants the students to have their own repo. If it's the latter you could whitelist the school domain at github.com//* if it's the former you just need to download the repo's and have an on-premise copy.

 

Another option is to host gitlab (free). We did this at a University where I worked previously. https://about.gitlab.com/install/

 

I mentioned earlier that you could just add the virtualbox clients to an IP whitelist, which I don't think is a terrible idea.