Category:Latest SOFTICE News
From SOFTICE
This page is a place where the SOFTICE team members will post news and updates whenever we reach a new milestone of the project.
2008/09/12: SOFTICE is over, welcome LINCS
The SOFTICE grant officially finished 2008/08/31, we have received confirmation that a follow-up project, made in collaboration with Polk County community college (PCC) and funded by NSF's Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, is starting this semester. The name of this project is LINCS (Linux Networks and Connection Systems) and will help us apply what we learned during SOFTICE to develop an entirely online curriculum in Linux system administration. Stay tuned for more details as we enter the early planning and setup steps of this new project. Here's a sample of local press coverage of this grant.
Alessio 12:25, 12 September 2008 (EDT)
2008/07/24: Virtual Appliances Available
Both the SOFTICE Virtual Appliance and the OS Labs students VMware image are now available for download. The previous wiki pages will provide you with "getting started" instructions (rudimentary for now) and a link to where to download these virtual machines from. As of today, this work is still in its preliminary testing stages. The SOFTICE virtual appliance has been tested on Debian Progeny and Debian Linux distributions (but not windows). The student OS Labs VMware image has been tested on Windows XP so far. We welcome comments on your experience (positive or negative) with these virtual machines and will attempt to be responsive if support is needed. The key of making these deliverables most useful is to be aware (and address) the issues which can be encountered on the multitude of settings these virtual machines can be deployed in. So don't hesitate to contact me by email.
Alessio 04:31, 24 July 2008 (EDT)
2008/07/13: Migration to the SOFTICE-OS-LABS vmware image
In addition to having students use the SOFTICE operating systems labs in institutions which are giving a try to our supporting cluster to host their virtual machines, I should soon have a vmware image meant to be downloaded and which will allow students to work on the OS labs on their own PCs instead of having to connect to a SOFTICE cluster. This should also make it easier for instructors to adopt all or part of the OS labs without even having to set up either a full-fledge load-balancing cluster or a load balancing cluster based on our SOFTICE virtual appliance. Right now, the labs are being tested during summer 2008 to check which ones are compatible with the vmware format and the 2.6.24.3 kernel. The ones which are fixables are being adapted to the new kernel version and will be released at the end of this summer. Stay tuned for a URL to download this vmware image. The labs which turn out to feature some deep rooted incompatibility will be scheduled for re-development during spring 2009 at the next offering of the OS course in our IT department.
Alessio 08:44, 13 July 2008 (EDT)
2008/05/01: A Bowl of CEReAL
Recently founded the Computing Education Research At Lakeland (CEReAL group) which will allow us to federate projects related to computing education research (including SOFTICE and its follow up projects). Take a look at http://lakeland.usf.edu/cereal. You will also find there links to recordings and information about virtualization-related events organized.
Also, the Readme First: Overview page has been updated to provide clearer links to the 3 different ways you can adopt our labs;
- Install the labs on your own Linux machine
- Install a SOFTICE masternode virtual appliance to turn a windows or Linux desktop machine with two network cards into a load balancing cluster while still using it for its original purpose
- Install your own load balancing cluster hardware from scratch
We might soon have a SOFTICE student virtual appliance which will help students and independent learners surfing our site to work on the Operating Systems Laboratories without even having to use or set up a softice server.
Alessio 17:40, 1 May 2008 (EDT)
2008/03/22: SIGCSE special session
A special session was organized at SIGCSE 2008, Portland, OR with two homologue projects (Xen Worlds and VNetLab) in order to provide the participants with an overview of recent applications of virtualization in computing education. Please find more information about this session (and the surveys we disseminated to the computing education community at large) at
Our team is also now exploring computing education research topics beyond SOFTICE in the context of the Computing Education Research At Lakeland (CEReAL) group. Follow up projects meant to expand the results obtained in SOFTICE are listed on the groups' page and will be incorporated in this wiki as soon as results become available.
Last but not least, our prototype of SOFTICE virtual appliance has been tested during fall 2007 as part of Alex Kranh's IT senior project. We plan on finalizing it and facilitating the couple of password changing procedures during Spring / Summer 2008.
2007/05/28: NET labs taught in spring 2006 / publications / new project
The networking labs have been taught as part of a lab complement to the 3 credits EEL4782 course at USF Lakeland during spring 2007.
Updates are also available in the Publications page;
- a IEEE IT Pro paper should be soon published with an overview of the SOFTICE technologies (virtualization + clustering) and their comparison to state of the art related technologies.
- A CCSC paper will be presented in november and will complement last year's paper which was focussed on classroom management + OSC labs. This time, we focussed on the networking labs.
- A similar complete picture of our work is also available in the IEEE EIAE papers
Also, the prototype of Linux system administration labs (ELSA) will be expanded by a follow up project building on SOFTICE's results. Stay tuned for more information about this.
Alessio 23:00, 28 May 2007 (EDT)
2006/11/19: OSC laboratories completed by a case study assignment
A case study assignment for the operating systems concepts course has been added. While it's not part of the SOFTICE grant itself, it turned out to complement nicely the pedagogical objectives of the OSC laboratories.
The laboratories #00, #01 and #04 from the OSC series are being evaluated as "one shot" assignments in the COP 4610 course this semester. It turned out that even without a laboratory scheduled (yet!) for COP 4610, the laboratories series is an interesting pool to pick programming assignments from in order to highlight with some hands-on practice specific aspects of the lecturesAlessio 03:34, 19 Nov 2006 (EST)
2006/08/21: ELSA and OSC labs status
This is the official end of the 2nd year of this grant! After one year dedicated to the system administration aspects, we have been pretty busy developing several undergraduate laboratories meant to exploit the benefits of the underlying technologies used to set up our infrastructure. As of today, we're wrapping up the labs for 2 courses:
- OSC (Operating Systems Concepts)
The "scheduling" laboratory is still in need of heavy development. Other labs will be wrapped up along with their instructor manual by the end of august.
The testing and evaluation in the battle field^H^H^H^H^H^^H classroom will start during fall 2006 as some of the OSC labs will be used as assignments in the COP 4610 IT Operating Systems undergraduate course I'll be teaching.
- ELSA (Elementary Linux System Administration)
While the former labs series was one of the two initially planned objectives for year #2 (along with the networking labs), the latter has been added to the project's objectives relatively recently. It is meant to support a 2nd course on Linux system administration focussed on workstation / small server administration. This lab series is meant to be preceeded by a "user-side" introduction and followed by an "advanced Linux system administration" series that will cover networking-oriented services in more depth.
At this point, we're ready to start spreading the good stuff (tm) and help others make the best out of it for their own courses' benefits. Don't hesitate to contact us at peoples -at- <this host> if you're interested in using either the laboratories or the supporting infrastructure for fun and (educational) profit.
Enjoy,
Alessio 00:51, 2 Sep 2006 (EDT)
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