“If they’ve mastered big-ass triangles, than surely they’ve achieved world peace and conquered scarcity. Ah well, I guess there’s nothing else for us to teach them”

warps away

Seriously, dealing with Windows OOBE is like walking through a used car lot.

“Decline offer” “Decline offer” “Not right now” <hey, we need to update! See you in 30 minutes!> “Remind me in three days” “Turn off cloud backup” “Yes, I’m really sure” “Decline offer” “Share minimum telemetry” (oh, you thought you could turn that off? Lol. Lmao, even)

I don’t know how anyone finds that mess easier than linux.

Especially since women are under constant pressure to chase unrealistic beauty expectations.

Userd is not listed in sudoers.filed. Lennart poettering will now teleport behind you

I feel like the move would be to ask if they have any toys they want to bring into the game

exasperated “Does anyone want to say a word about the recently deceased?”

“It’s a shame he didn’t get to try Linux”

“You are free to use increasingly niche technology until you’re marginalized out of existence or give in and lick the boot”

Aka: Green Is My Pepper

I remember waaaay back in the server 08-08 R2 days, you could do something in server manager (such as installing a role) and while that process was running, you had the option to see the powershell command it was running in the background. That was pretty cool

The only place left for you is freeBSD and writing your own tiling window manager

Sounds good! It’s always a good idea to make sure everyone is on the same page about the risks involved in a project. I must also stress that you reach out to IT personally and make sure they know what’s going on. We’ve definitely had faculty go behind our back before, I’m sure that happens at other schools too, lol. I do have some final thoughts based on your bullet points to consider:

1) Server computer is a Mac Mini (latest model I think?). I’ve been told they would replace macOS with Linux, still I believe I should ready if they don’t (I don’t have experience with macOS at all)

I would personally avoid this, just due to the fact that the hardware might be in an insecure area and easily forgotten. Once the team is done with it, they might just leave it in place to idle forever. Or, someone might find it, not know what it is, and remove it. A VM running in the campus datacenter is a lot safer than a computer under a lab counter. This also avoids future hiccups with an exotic OS/hardware combination that you might not be thinking about right now.

*2) Server will be situated in university and provided a static IP address *

You’re going to need IT’s involvement on this, full stop. Just because an address isn’t in use right now on the campus network, doesn’t mean that it’s free for you to use. As far as public facing IPs go, those are totally managed by campus IT. You will need their permission to host services on them.

3) Team needs remote access to the server, presumably comfortable with using CLI

See number 2. You need IT’s permission to host services on the network.

4) I am unlikely to be permitted access to server myself after setup, so it should be ready to be managed by the team

You need to document everything you set up ready to hand off to whomever will be managing this server. This is unlikely to be someone on the research team, as if they can’t set it up themselves, I doubt they’ll be able to maintain it.

5) Extra hardware and/or paid software could be arranged but to a limited extent and within reason

There’s generally going to be a budget and/or grants available depending on the scope of the work the research team is doing. Going through the proper channels (IT Dept and Grant Officer) will give you access to these resources. As an example, a center involved with our school was doing watershed research and we were able to secure them a grant for tablets they could use for fieldwork.

One final, important thing to consider is what data this research team is collecting, what they’re using it for, and what’s going to happen to it once they’re done with it. If there is any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in this dataset, there might be laws (e.g. GDPR) that you might need to comply with.

I hope that you don’t think that I’m harping on you too bad, it’s just that there’s lots to consider outside of the raw technical side of things that many homelabbers don’t really have to think about. I do admire your willingness to take on a project like this! Hopefully your IT department aren’t sticks in the mud and would be willing to help out on this. If they had any sense they would as it prevents users trying to DIY things in the first place.

I might double check if you’re taking the research team’s word for it. It’s very strange to me that IT won’t help with setting up remote access, especially if you’re doing something like setting up a tunnel that would likely bypass their firewall rules and network monitoring. If anyone compromises your tunnel and are able to access education, financial, or health records with it, your IT team and you will be in very hot water. I’ve had to set up remote access for research projects before, and that involved site-to-site tunnels between participating campuses. These always run on the university’s VPN infrastructure, you’re not going to be rolling your own talescale or wireguard to do this because you want to be able to inspect the traffic flowing over it. You’ll also need to tie into the university’s identity management platform to make sure that only authorized users have access to the server. Whatever you decide to to, at least deliver a copy of your documentation, because once you’re out of the picture, it’s going to be up to campus IT to maintain it.

I guarantee that if your university IT department knows nothing of this they will not appreciate a shadow IT device set up on their network when they find it. And they WILL find it. Reach out to your school’s IT team and make sure your research team has approval to do this before proceeding

Source: worked in Higher Ed IT

Maybe if your “meme” wasn’t some bullshit about “you can do anything if you really really try” I would take less offense. It’s easy to start a car company when you’re rich

Lamborghini was already a successful tractor manufacturer before he started making sports cars.

He’s the millennial Mr beast

Just tried this and my DE got replaced with Sway and now there’s algae oozing out of my keyboard

Even the digitals you had in the 00’s didn’t have very good red eye correction (if any at all)