Unraid in the Classroom

Christian Rodesch is a computer science teacher at the Lycée Guillaume Kroll Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg. In Mr. Rodesch's BTS Cloud Infrastructure class (Brevet de technicien supérieur), the students are tasked with assembling a server and setting it up as a fully functioning NAS. Students are split into 7 groups of 2 and assigned different NAS software solutions.

After going through the OS installation, set up, configuration, and looking at all of the features, they are to present to the class on how everything went, advantages and disadvantages to the software, explain any problems they encounter, and go through a live demo of their new NAS server.

This semester, Professor Rodesch wanted to add Unraid to the list of OS choices and when approached, we were more than happy to help out!

Classroom Server Specs

• Intel S5520-series

So, quite old but still good enough for the class. We take the servers apart and the students then have to install all the components and document the process. They’ll need to install the following parts:

• RAM: 8x2GB
• Native HDDs 1x 160GB SATA in slot “DRIVE_0” connected to SATA_0 on Mainboard1x 160GB SATA in slot “DRIVE_1” connected to SATA_1 on Mainboard.
• RAID controller installed in PCI Express Slot with a backup battery attached.
• RAID HDDs3x Seagate SAS Cheetah 146GB in slots “DRIVE_2-4” connected to ports 1-3 of RAID controller
• 2x working power supplies (one of our main problems as they tend to fail one by one)
• 1 SanDisk USB stick connected to a rear USB port for the OS

A few weeks after initially hearing from the students, Steve and Noah, we received a nice email and report about their experiences with Unraid:

"Good Evening Mr. Jones,
Today we held our presentation about Unraid with success. In general, we got nice feedback from the class and decided to include a little feedback from our side that may help you to make improvements to your software. 
We quite enjoyed the design and the structure of Unraid. It is really easy to manage and set up. The built-in creation of virtual machines and the possibility to import Docker containers is a feature that we really liked.

The community applications are a great feature, but things like the file system ZFS or the protocol iSCSI are not really supported. Those are the only flaws that we noticed.

We really enjoyed collaborating with you and wanted to thank you again for offering us this great experience.

With best regards,

Steve and Noah"

As the semester at the school came to a close, we received another email from Professor Rodesch thanking us again and letting us know he planned to continue teaching his course with Unraid. Great stuff!

We want to wish Steve, Noah, and Professor Rodesch success in their future educational and professional endeavors.

Following this great experience, we would like to expand and offer Unraid as a teaching aid for other school's Computer Science/IT departments. If you are an instructor interested in teaching with Unraid in the classroom, please get in touch.