Computer labs (admin documentation)

Detailed administration and deployment guide to install and customize computer labs of the Mathematics Department of Sorbonne University.

Summary

The aim of this guide is to explain how to install and configure computer labs in an automatic way. The distribution used for computers is Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop, and the distribution used for the server required for netboot and custom repository is Ubuntu 20.04 Server.

The installation and customization of the computer labs are roughly through these steps:

1. Setup netboot server for UEFI netboot with preseed;
2. Setup repository server to serve a custom apt repository;
3. Setup lab’s computers using UEFI netboot with preseed, then followed by configuration with Ansible;
4. Install software though apt or pip;
5. Maintenance like wake on LAN or packages update.

These three steps are automated with Ansible using the collection ufrmath.computer_labs.

Installation of the Ansible collection

To install and Ansible collection ufrmath.computer_labs:

1. Create a Python virtual environment and activate it:

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate
   

2. Install sshpass and Python requirements:

   sudo apt install sshpass
   pip install ansible netaddr jmespath
   

3. Install the collection:

   ansible-galaxy collection install git+https://github.com/guillod/computer_labs
   

Documentation

This page is the administration and deployment guide, other documentation are available:

• User documentation for teachers and students (in French)
• Git repository of the Ansible collection used
• Automatic documentation of the Ansible collection

Out of scope

• Properly configured network with access to Internet (optionally behind a proxy)
• Properly configured LDAP server to authenticate the users
• Properly configured NFS server for home directories