Campus maintained facilities for using Realm Linux include, as of this writing, Daniels Hall Room 204, Withers Hall Room 224, Dabney Hall Room 120 and 718, and Harrelson Hall Room 247/248. Also, there are a scattering of college and department labs throughout the remainder of campus. These facilities are designed mostly to be used by students (both graduate and undergraduate) for computing needs such as courses, email, and web.

In this environment, the Linux boxes are completely locked down, and there are very few people given administrative rights to these platforms. This matches the stance taken on the Solaris Kit boxes in University labs. This allows computing support organizations to provide a reasonably robust platform with a high level of service without having to worry about per-machine customizations or per-machine “quirks”.

	Note
	Different labs may chose to lock down their systems differently. You may notice differences between labs in how hard drive space is used and if the machines will let you use removable media like CDs and disks.

In order to use a Realm Linux machine in a University lab, you must have a valid Unity/EOS ID (issued to you by ITD when you first join the University) as well as Hesiod permissions to log on in the lab you wish to use.

When installing a Realm Linux box in a faculty or staff member's office, the administrator has the option of granting additional permissions to the user(s) of the machine(s) in order to make their lives easier. The first thing to note however is the similarities with a campus student lab. For starters, faculty and staff are not given unlimited (root) access to the system simply because it is a Linux system - as with the Solaris kit, they are restricted to a user account despite the fact that it is their desktop machine.

At the discretion of the systems administrator, the faculty/staff machine can be configured to allow the primary user of the machine to use local drive space. If this option is excercised, the local drive space should be mounted under /local; this space is not backed up on a regular basis, and there are no scripts run in the Realm environment which will affect this space.

Faculty/staff machines should behave almost identically with standard lab machines with respect to mounting portable media such as CD-ROM's and Zip diskettes; all filesystem mounting is handled by the automounter. However, administrators for different groups of machines may choose to configure the automounter differently. Many lab machines are configured to only allow access to floppies and Zip disks via the mtools package.

Realm Linux machines in dorm rooms are not as thoroughly supported as in labs or faculty/staff offices. The restrictions on machine accesses, especially with respect to the root password and root priviledges, are nonexistent. This unfortunately means that the computing support infrastructure at NCSU (which includes ITD, ITECS, and college / department level systems administrators) is unable to support Realm Linux boxes in student dorm rooms.

Support is not in fact nonexistent, however. You still have the support provided through the Linux User's Group and the realmlinux-* mailing lists, especially realmlinux-user@lists.ncsu.edu. If you will be using a Realm Linux machine in your dorm room as a student, you should be familiar with Linux Systems Administration concepts and should be very comfortable supporting your own Linux workstation.