We have these at work and there was a big outcry when IT tried to get rid of them. I use them from time to time to do things like: Keep git and other backups. Convenient place to scp files to/from. Upload files that coworkers can grab. I don't use it, but others used them as permanent IRC endpoints (using screen or tmux presumably).
Notice a cloud VM or container probably doesn't work here. You need something with a permanent presence, and shared between users (with separate Unix accounts).
Running a remote VScode backend on those while it is technically using the traditional shared server feels like that is not for the "shared" part but just because it is free and available?
Open up other machines to the internet and recommend people upload their code to github instead of the school's file server. People who want to read email can use their web browser to load gmail or outlook depending on what the school goes with. For the cron jobs I would want to know what is being scheduled before providing a recommendation on how you can get rid of the login server for it.
Perhaps it is worth noting that all super computers I know (like the Dutch Snellius and the Finnish Lumi) are Slurm clusters with login nodes.
Bioinformaticians (among others) in (for example) University Medical Centers won’t get much more bang for the buck than on a well managed Slurm cluster (ie with GPU and Fat nodes etc to distinguish between compute loads). You buy the machines, they are utilized close to 100% over their life time.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 664 ms ] threadNotice a cloud VM or container probably doesn't work here. You need something with a permanent presence, and shared between users (with separate Unix accounts).
Bioinformaticians (among others) in (for example) University Medical Centers won’t get much more bang for the buck than on a well managed Slurm cluster (ie with GPU and Fat nodes etc to distinguish between compute loads). You buy the machines, they are utilized close to 100% over their life time.
https://www.public.outband.net
Probably one of the stupider things I have thrown together, But I had fun making it.
https://hashbang.sh
One time X forwarding Matlab saved me a hefty sum of money (for a student) as I could complete an assignment remotely.
Our admins urged people to nice their processes, but my overthewire password cracking sessions were always killed no matter how nice they were.