EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
In May 2008, the EECS Instructional Support Group posted an on-line survey that asked students for
feedback about the Instructional computing resources. The answers were very helpful. An analysis of
the responses is below. In conclusion, here are actions we will take in response to these comments:
-
replace CRTs with LCD displays in 275 Soda
install SVN (subversion) client software on PCs in EECS Instructional labs
install additional power strips for laptop users in 199 Cory and other labs
add RAM to the SunRay servers and seek a donation of workstations to improve the CS3 lab
Kevin Mullally
Manager, EECS Instructional Support Group
378 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kevinm
Survey Population: The majority (47/72) of respondents were EECS majors (question #1), and the majority
used labs for CS classes (question #4). 6/72 were on the teaching staff (instructors, GSIs, etc). Our total user population of
2700 students in Spring 2008 included about 1020 students in EECS majors. Our survey sampling was small, but the
responses we received were well-informed and valuable.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Laptops: 78% have laptops, and this reinforces our commitment to supply more laptop stations in our labs and
improve the wireless connectivity. However, this ratio is still not high enough for instructors to assume that each student
could bring a laptop to a lecture or a discussion section.
Operating Systems: The ratio of Windows/Linux/MacOS users was not unexpected. But a high percentage of
users (61%) have actually installed Linux. Because many of our respondents were EECS majors, this may be somewhat
inflated when compared with our total population. But it bodes well for UNIX; new students need to be comfortable with
the fundamental UNIX command line interface, as EECS software and curricula still require it.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Use of the labs: Questions #5 and #6 give us an idea of whether we need to keep our labs accessible all night and
how effective the cardkey system is in allowing after-hours access.
If we extrapolate these usage ratios over our entire student population (2700) and assume that they are all in their busiest
semester, we’d need to accommodate perhaps 30,000 person/hours in our labs each week. Divided over 400 workstations,
that means that each workstation would be used for 75 hours each week. This is a crude estimate of the demand in our labs.
We could probably close some labs at night, as long as there are other labs or network servers that can serve the same
purpose.
With 88% of the respondents having successfully used the cardkey system, it seems to be serving its purpose well (ie
securing the labs while also allowing the students to enter).
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Email service: Questions #7 and #8 help us gauge the usefulness of the EECS Instructional mail server. Students
have many alternatives for email servers, and it’s possible that the Instructional server has become redundant and that
students either don’t know it’s there or choose not to use it.
Only 41% of the respondents (many of them EECS majors) use our email server, and this is probably a high ratio when
compared with our total population. It appears that we could retire the EECS Instructional mail server, redirect the email to
the user’s CalMail account by default and provide a WEB site for our account holders to change that email forwarding
address if desired.
Users may want to isolate email to their instructional account to sort it from other email or to isolate spam that comes to it.
But modern email clients include filters for discarding spam and splitting the incoming mail into different folders. Users can
forward the email to a free account from Google, Hotmail, etc if they really want a separate account for the semester.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Use of networked services: Questions #9 and #10 gives us an idea of the usefulness of several services.
The responses reinforce our need to support laptops in the labs (electrical outlets and AirBears).
It is apparent that most of our users are aware of our remote login and interoperability services (Remote Desktop, ssh,
XWindows).
It is encouraging that more than half of the respondents had used our various WEB-based network services for email,
newsgroups, account maintenance and software downloads.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Use of networked services: (continued)
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Tech support: We prefer that students send email to “inst@eecs” as a means of reaching our distributed tech
support staff, so it was a surprise that this is the last resort for many students.
on the account forms and on signs in the labs.
We inform our users about our email address
It is efficient that many students look for answers on the WEB first. Next, they ask the teaching staff, then look for the
technical staff and finally send email to the technical staff.
We appreciate that many questions may be about the coursework and not about the computer infrastructure, and these
questions are appropriately directed to instructors and GSIs. But we also want to be easy to reach when the problem is in our
jurisdiction.
Students may favor text messaging over email now (that is a question that we forgot to ask in this survey), so we are looking
into text-to-email services that would allow students to reach us that way.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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The Bug Reports and Suggestions:
The bug reports and suggestions were constructive. There were no big surprises, but the comments will help us to set
priorities for correcting the problems. I’ve grouped my responses by topic, below.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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Comments we would have liked to answer via email to “inst@eecs”:
Students:
Instructional Support:
On the day the CS 150 project was due, there was an
administrator forcefully logging out people on the
computers in 125 Cory, doing some admin work (I'm
guessing) over Remote Desktop, and then logging out.
Very frustrating experience, and thank god nobody lost
any significant amount of work.
This would be a terrible accident by the sys admins –
the preservation of your work is the most important
thing. (We invest in disk mirroring and tape backups in
an effort to ensure that.) So either the sys admin was
unaware or this may have been the automated
Windows Update service, which runs at night and
occasionally reboots the system. Perhaps the users
could have emailed a complaint to us (although that is
difficult if your computer has just crashed) so that we
could stop this from happening or at least post a
warning.
…I've been logged off while in the middle of
simulations…
Lack of subversion clients and an ability to install
them on the Windows machines in 125 Cory.
The sys admins would install it on request; we support
a UNIX-based SVN server.
Subversion clients on the Windows machines!
Many of the computers in the lab for 61b were not
working at one point, interfering with my ability to work.
We check the labs daily and may not have known there
was a problem at that time.
…what's with not being able to use mutt/pine on any of
the machines? I'm a huge mutt-nut
Mutt and pine are available on our UNIX computers.
Ask us for help if needed.
I've needed access to a linux machine and not been
sure where to find one I could use
We have Linux servers. Ask us for help if needed.
mail forward[d]ing (POP or IMAP) for imail.eecs unless
it already is in place because I have not been able to
We have email forwarding. Ask us for help if needed.
find it.
profile loading on windows machines
larger profile storage space on my named eecs
account. I made a few visual studios projects and i ran
out of space and couldnt logout until i deleted all but one
=( make the U drive work better, it seems to randomly
be unaccessible.
Users need to manage the contents of their own
profiles in Windows; if the user loads a lot of files in it
and it gets too large, then problems occur when
logging in and when logging out. Ask us for help if
needed.
I would like it to be easier to find out information about
the machine I am logged in to. Specifically I would like
some command that will give me a listing of the
hardware specification for the machine. It's possible
that such exists and I simply don't know about it, but in
that case no one I've talked to know of it either.
We have a WEB site:
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~inst/iesglabs.html
And each operating systems has its own way of
displaying the hardware inventory.
Ask us for help if needed.
… some of the computers in 330 Soda have trouble
printing.
We’d like a report about which computers and software
you were using, so we can fix them!
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Comments about the computers and network:
Students:
Instructional Support:
More capacity on AirBears (I often see intermittent connection
problems in rooms with lots of laptops connecting)
Faster airbears! I have the urge to uplug the INST machines
on the 2nd floor because airbears is so bloody slow!
Wired network ports for laptops would be awesome! AirBears
is so unreliable and slow that it makes classwork often
difficult/impossible to do, and I can't stand using CDE - I much
prefer to use my own laptop. If you're paranoid about security,
you could tie MAC to CalNet login the same way as airbears
works. This would be an amazing feature.
More power strips in labs…
The EECS department is upgrading the wireless
access points in Cory and Soda Halls, and the
AirBears wireless net used by students transits
those access points.
Agreed! We want to accommodate laptop
users. Some students still unplug our
equipment even though a power strip is right
there… (why?)
…It would also be nice if the computers ran faster.
It would be nice if the lab computers ran a bit faster, since
loading firefox alone takes awhile. Otherwise, they serve their
purpose well.
This is all about the money (and grants).
Get new computers! Please!
The more you could keep running, the better. :)
kevinm@berkeley.edu
Agreed!
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Comments about the physical conditions in the labs:
Students:
Instructional Support:
The hardware in 275 Soda is horrible! The monitors in
particular are often completely unusable.
Monitors for CS61BL lab are pathetic. Some hurt my eyes to
focus on. The monitors in 105 Cory on the other hand are
beautiful.
Higher resolutions on the computer...or something...cause
when i stare at the eecs computers (so far only the unix ones),
my eyes get dizzy/ slightly blurred. I think maybe the screen is
dirty? I still think the resolution needs to be upgraded...maybe
switch to lcd screens.
We hear you! We will replace the old
CRT monitors in 275 Soda (CS61B lab) with 20”
LCD displays for Fall 2008.
We are trying to replace the CRTs in 5 other
labs (Soda and HFA), but it costs about $6000
per lab, so we’re doing 1 per year. 105 Cory
was the most recent.
Some of the monitors in the labs (275 Soda, for example) are
terrible. They're blurry with no way to adject sharpness. Also,
In the meantime, we’ll replace the worst CRTs in
some monitors display at low resolutions so that everything is
those labs with better CRTs.
zoomed in and you have to shift the viewport around to see the
whole desktop.
New monitors would be nice.
New monitors for CS61BL lab rooms. Possibly
It would be nice to have some of the keyboards or mouses
fixed
We replace them when we know they are
broken. We don’t check every device, so we
rely on students to report it to us.
Please clean the keyboard/mouse every once in a while. Also,
mice are sometimes non-functional. (2nd floor Soda)
The kbds do get filthy, but it is prohibitive to
clean them. We are trying to replace kbds and
mice in 1 lab each year (about $1400 per lab).
The labs desperately need new chairs…
We spend about $800/yr to repair broken chairs.
We are trying to replace chairs in 1 lab each
year (about $5000 per lab). 330 Soda was the
most recent.
C50 HFA needs better ventilation. It is like a greenhouse in
there.
This is a problem in HFA as well as in Cory Hall;
the campus facilities group are understaffed so
that the air systems don’t get checked regularly,
and it can take days to get a service call. We
don’t have much control over it.
Take out the garbage more often in 125 Cory! We had
overflowing garbage containers over the weekend before the
project was due and the majority of us were living in the lab.
This hits a nerve. This is the only instructional
lab that does not have a NO FOOD rule. It is a
courtesy to the students, so the students should
remove their own trash. The custodians are
understaffed and don’t work weekends. The
sys admins should not, but often do, clean up
the mess.
Put in couches.
This has traditionally been the role of the
student orgs; the CSUA has a lounge in 337
Soda and the IEEE has one in 240 Cory. Both
lounges have computers.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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Comments about the software:
Students:
Instructional Support:
I don't have rights to lock (Win+L) my windows named
account, …
We discourage screen locks because it hogs the
computer.
Problems with software like Labview, Matlab. Problems with
printing quota, also printing with PDF docs. Microsoft Word is
super slow when it starts. Problems with Windows, sometimes
hang. Whenever looked computer, I lost all files after I came
back. It seems someone logged in and reset computers.
Problems when log out computer sometimes
Wow, I hope you asked for help about the
specific software problems (inst@eecs). We
have to log out computers that are locked if we
don’t know when/if the user is coming back and
if we are applying critical patches.
License Issues with some of the softwares in CS150 Lab.
I hope you asked for help (inst@eecs). We are
not aware of any recurring license problems in
150 Cory.
Sometimes when logging in the .cshrc files complain that they
don't know of user cs61c and fail to source the class files. If
this happens, you have to log in and out a few times until it can
find ~c61c/.
We believe that the this caused by a transient
incompatibility between our OpenLDAP service
and the nscd daemon on our SUN servers. We
have not found a cure yet.
CDE is a steaming pile of cow feces.
Very colorful description. CDE is obsolete and
we can customize the window manager for a
class based on GNOME.
Having an entire class of 50 or so use Firefox on C30/C50/one
of the other SunRay systems is a recipe for disaster, even
with 8 GB of ram...
With no funding for newer computers, we can
only hope to add RAM or perhaps win a
donation of workstations. We did have to move
CS61B from SunRays to desktop workstations
in Fall 2005 because Eclipse was too
demanding on the SunRay server.
THE SUBMIT PROGRAM CANNOT DEAL WITH WHAT IT
LIKES TO CALL WHITESPACE
PLEASE, oh please, make the submit program accept
submittals which have white space in their filenames. This is
one of the top computer science schools and it's embarrassing
that one of it's most used programs does not support white
space. I'm a mechanical engineer with barely any programming
knowledge and even I was able to design a parsing system
than can deal with whitespace. It's frustrating to be submitting
something at the last minute and then realize that you have to
rename all your files.
Firefox would stop responding...then when i killed the
program...the instructional computer would still think it was
connected and would not open another firefox. This was
resolved after i got a new account the falling semester, but
obviously it was very annoying the semester that it happened.
I feel like the newsgroup online reader could use a better
interface; it's a bit clunky and a pain to use…
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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We will work with the author (a faculty member)
to address this complaint.
The EECS grading software (‘submit’, ‘glookup’,
etc) will never be developed to deal with every
condition, so users will have to work within its
constraints. We do at least want to document
those constraints clearly and offer work-around
solutions.
I wish you’d asked for help (inst@eecs).
Clearing your ~/.mozilla/firefox usually fixes this
problem.
Our WEBNews client is intentionally Very
Simple. Products such as Thunderbird offer
more full-featured news clients.
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EECS Instructional Support Users' Survey (Spring 2008)
Comments on our policies or procedures:
Students:
Instructional Support:
CS class accounts should work for Windows or UNIX; I found
myself in several different labs doing work and unable to use
my account on the Windows machines (330 Soda).
Traditionally, these users have not needed
Windows. But we will probably give them
Windows accounts in the future.
…I don't think most people use the imail.eecs email as
extensively as they could because... it's only temporary (for one
semester) and people would rather set up a forward. I prefer to
have it at least as a forward so I can post to the newsgroups
w/o getting myself on spam lists for years on end.
It is possible to forward your email from
imail.eecs, by entering the forwarding address in
your .forward or .procmailrc file
(http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/cgibin/pub.cgi?file=procmail.help)
More instructional macs that aren't under cardkey access.
Yes, they have been largely reserved for a class
that no longer needs them! We intend to open
the Mac lab to all classes in Fall 2008.
kevinm@berkeley.edu
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