Imaging, security, configuration, and maintenance for the masses

Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies (EPLT) [1] at the University of Washington maintains and supports a fleet of approximately 1,000 general-access student computing workstations across campus. Our services include a broad range of software offerings, multimedia creation capabilities, research support, teaching support, and full featured in-person consulting. The distributed placement of the workstations in a variety of environments, and the high numbers of clients that use them presents some unique technical problems and support issues that EPLT has solved and worked into a robust environment. We have a firm commitment to keeping the workstations as unrestricted as possible, to presenting a consistent, sensible interface to clients, to a fast turnaround between clients and to minimizing downtime of workstations. Using Windows Active Directory [2], Windows Software Update Services [3], Faronics Deep Freeze [4], Symantec Ghost [5], and a small set of custom backend configurations and scripts, we have managed to provide a consistent, robust, full featured computing experience that presently serves up to 60,000 clients per week.