Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
Note: I'm a regular HN reader/commenter, but posting this under an anonymous account for obvious reasons.

There has been some discussion here recently about the value of computer labs in universities. This is my experience with the university computing facilities as a CS graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. While it is a personal perspective, it is also pretty representative, as you will see.

When you walk up to one of the machines in our lab, you are greeted with a text login. I guess that separates the men from the boys right there--if you aren't l33t enough to know how to run X, you can't even get started. And X is set up to run fvwm2 by default.

No, that's not a typo. I really meant fvwm2.

If you haven't used it, you really can't even imagine how bad it is. It's one of those Unix beasts from the 80s which uses desktop metaphors that aren't in use today. Mostly it just draws windows, everything else is up to you. Windows gets focus when you mouse over them. Things we take for granted in a desktop like the task bar aren't available. You need to right-click to do anything, but the right click menu isn't stable--it disappears when you release the click. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Here's the kicker: since most students have never used Unix before, they assume that's what Unix looks like, and they spend their entire college years dealing with this shit. Our department has been expending major efforts to increase computer science enrollment; I'd say everything they're doing is a rounding error compared to the effect that students' first impression of being a CS major will have.

Often, I'd be working in the lab, and some kid will come up to me and ask something like, "hi, I downloaded this text file, now I have no idea how to edit it." The really ironic thing is that all the machines run Ubuntu, the whole point of which is to have Mac OS-like usability! Note that Ubuntu doesn't even ship with fvwm2 by default, which means they actually went and installed it. They are not lazy or incompetent, it seems they are actively trying to hurt their users. (To be fair, they have an FAQ that tells you how to start other window managers, but of course no one's ever read it, and even if they did it wouldn't do them an ounce of good because they don't know what a window manager is to begin with.)

One time, when a student asked me a question about the window manager I showed her how to edit her .xinitrc to start Gnome instead. She was like, "Oh my GOD!!" and wouldn't stop thanking me. After this happened a couple of more times I felt heartbroken and powerless to stop the atrocity and stopped going to the lab. I mean, many of them are 18 and 19 year old kids, they shouldn't have to suffer like this :-(

By the way, you might wonder how the professors put up with the admins (their machines are also set up to start fvwm2). Since most of the professors graduated decades ago, fvwm2 is probably what they used as students. They don't seem to find it all that painful, since they probably never upgraded from pine and fvwm2.

After a while, I got my own office, which meant I could go and work there without having to see the other students and scream silently to myself. But that didn't last long.

There was no sound on any of the machines, even those in semi-private offices. I don't mean no speakers--they removed the audio drivers from Linux; /dev/dsp didn't exist. While that was mighty annoying, it was nothing compared to my troubles when my research started to involve writing code. Other than the fact that our disk quotas were 1GB, that is.

They wouldn't let me run jobs overnight. I had to get some kind of special permission; the reason was apparently "security." I have no idea what that had to do with security. I bet the character "Mordac, preventor of information services" was based on these guys. It was truly a synthesis of everything that's wrong with academia and everything that's wrong with corporations.

Apart from security, the only other thing they cared about was covering their asses. (Now that I think about it, their emphasis on the former might have been merely a manifestation of the latter.) If I went down to their office to ask a question, they'd say "send an email." The idea being they'd have a record in case of a dispute, I guess.

One time I needed a package installed. After a week of passing the buck, they said they couldn't do it. The worst part? It was something that was available in the Ubuntu repositories! But apparently they don't install things using aptitude, the easiest package management system in the world; they have a policy of installing everything from source (!!)

That was when I gave up; I worked from home after that until I graduated. I would still occasionally go in to use the printers, which gave me a chance to observe things deteriorate even further. At some point, campus IT removed the guest wireless access. As for the authenticated access, I don't know why they couldn't authenticate you through your browser like everyone else, you actually had to install their crypto shit. I got it working on Windows after some hair-pulling, never did on Linux (which is what I was on 90% of the time).

The incredibly ironic thing about this is that since Austin is #1 in the country in Wi-Fi hotspot density, you can get wireless from somewhere as soon as you step out of campus but the campus itself is a Wi-Fi wasteland.

While my experience with IT might have been exceptionally bad, many a time, when I complain to students in other universities, the answer I get is, "oh my god, I know, right?" I have some first-hand experience of it since I travel a lot for research. When I go to Berkeley, for instance, I know that the campus Wi-Fi AirBears is nearly unusable, we just go to Brewed Awakening and use the free Wi-Fi there.

So there. I hope this adds something to the discussion of whether Universities should have computer labs. By far the best approach, IMO, would be for the department to buy the machines but let the students run them. Of course, this leads to questions of who gets to be root and so forth, but that's kinda the whole point: working together, building trust, resolving conflicts, and administering networks of computers are all vital parts of the education that CS students should receive but currently don't. Some Universities may not be bold enough to go this route for fear of lawsuits. The second best option would be to scrap the labs altogether, rather than prolonging the insanity.