Remember when you were in college and you were working on your senior project or even a class project and you had to make the decision, do it all at home (with your crappy internet connection, less powerful machine, etc) or do it on a machine at school and beg the admin to set up all the special things you needed (and be told no most of the time and when they did say yes, wait a week for it to happen)? Ok, maybe you were in college in the days when you couldn't do things at home (poor punch card folks, my condolences) so for you the problem was worse, you were totally at the mercy of the people running the machines.  
 
My university has finally solved the problem, with zones. Of course this would be just a few months before I graduate and after I am done with all of this type of work, but I am excited for the rest of the students. Now students have complete control over their (virtual) machine plus they get all the benefits of using a machine in the lab. If only we'd had this when I did my senior project (ok, I *was* the admin then so it was not too bad).  
 
One student is logging his experience, called The Bunsen Project. It looks as if he broke php already (3/27/03 - it has been fixed) but here were his first two entries after getting the zone:  
 

Virtual Machine - March 6  
 
Today I got the virtual machine from the CSL. With this, I will be able to set up a MySQL account so that I can put my project online, instead of having to resort to static box. More importantly, however, I will be able to have full administrative access to the server which will be great practice.  
 
Server Installs - March 9  
 
Well, it took several hours, but I made lots of progress today with the server. I was able to install several essential programs using the 'pkg-get' program from blastwave.org. Here are some of the programs I installed:

• aspell
• curl
• enscript
• figlet
• htmltidy
• links
• lynx

 
 
I decided to compile and install the apache server from scratch because I figured I could get more out of it. Because of this, I've run in to some problems and my server is still not up yet :(

 
 
Doing this isn't just nice for the students, it makes the admin's life so much easier too. Now when a student or instructor needs to set up a project, he can just hand them a zone and let them go. Oh, I wish we'd had this when I worked as an admin there...