polarhome.com realm, since 1999, offers shell accounts, development environments as well as other cloud access possibilities like remote shell, web hosting, mail, irc etc.
Polarhome user accounts are standalone accounts perfect for development but do not fit very well for a classroom's educative, group activity.
Even thought, many teachers created polarhome accounts for their classes, polarhome.com did not actively support this activity. Now with raise of cloud computing and server virualization there is a possibility for polarhome to provide this kind of services, free of charge, for all those classrooms that need it.
How does it work?
polarhome.com is accesable from both IPv4 and IPv6 (the next generation IP protocol) networks.
The classroom accounts are requested by the teacher and are prefixed by an unique SCHOOL-CLASS prefix. (teacher may choose an username, students get numbers)
Like in the example below:
School name: KTH, Stockholm, Sweden
Class: NADA, 2012
Number of students: 19
Teacher's username: kalle
Polarhome classroom usernames would look like: kthnada12-kalle, kthnada12-01, kthnada12-02,... kthnada12-19
Students and the teacher are able to adminstrate their passwords and change finger information for real names etc.
The classroom students use the polarhome servers and network infrastructure like ordinary polarhome shell users, with additional group access to each other files that is supervised by the teacher.
The teacher is reponsible for all activity in the classroom.
A classrom account includes the following:
polarhome shell account for the teacher and the students with:
ssh, telnet shell access
mail and home page
own database access
pop3, imap mail access
usermin access
webmail access
etc
own private mailing list administered by the teacher
own common database, beside the accounts' own databases
online guaranty - polarhome is 99.98% uptime since 1999, but can not guaranty uninterruptible business continuity. Therefore it should be used "AS-IS".
physical access to the hardware
access to the server console
access to ILO and MP consoles
How much it costs? Polarhome classrom accounts are absolutely free. No addmission fee. No hidden costs.
