SPSS travails regarding a course clash

Update:
ITCS has sent an email with instructions on how to use the virtual machine thing that Manojna below had helpfully pointed out to. This is for those 60 students whose licenses may run out this week. Pls follow the instructions and get your SPSS extended. IT has also kindly agreed to help out should you run into any difficulties during this process. I'm glad a way has been found around this issue.

Sudhir


Update: Received the following from Manojna Belle.

Dear professor,


I’m one of the students affected by the course clash. Thought of sharing the work around that I am using to get around the problem. Here’s what I did:

I installed virtual box (a virtual machine software by Sun/Oracle – it’s open source available at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads), installed windows on it and then installed SPSS there. Seems to be working fine. The whole process took me about 45 mins.

Good thing about this is that an “image” can be created from this virtual machine. Whoever needs to replicate this can just install the virtual machine and import this image. So I’m guessing if IT can do what I did and create an image, everyone can setup their system in about 30 mins by simply installing virtual machine and importing the “image”.

Note: The virtual machine I configured didn’t have online access for some reason(not even the intranet). Had to install cisco nac to resolve it. But doing that was a little tricky – the only way to transfer content onto the virtual machine without internet/intranet is to mount a folder from the “host” machine. Others won’t have to do any of it, if IT can provide an “image” that has online access enabled.

Thanks and Regards,

Manojna Belle

Have forwarded the email to IT to see if they can use this to deploy on a large scale. There are 60 people in common between ENDM and MKTR. So yes, there is a lot at stake here.

Sudhir
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Hi all,

I received this email from Gaurav yesterday:

Hello Prof,


A lot of us are also taking Prof Arun Preira's course on Entrepreneurial Decision Making (ENDM). We installed SPSS trial version for one of the assignments in that course some days back (more than a week). Since this would be a 15 day trial it might not last the duration of the marketing research course. Request you to have a look at what we can do.

Thanks and Regards,

Gaurav.

I forwarded this to IT:

Hi Team IT,


Could you tell me if the 15 day license would work if a previous 15 day license had already been deployed for another course (see email appended below)?

Pls advise.

Regards,
Sudhir

And this is the reply I got:

Dear Professor,


Regret to inform you that it doesn't allow us to re-install the same for another 15days, because it registers all the values in system files.

Regards,
Satish

Basically, I'm at a loss at this juncture. SPSS is the mainstay for this course and I was under the impression MEXL is the mainstay for the other course. Now, we have ourselves a fix here. I'll take it up with ASA and again with IT to see if there is a fix possible.

I wonder how many such cases of overlap between the 2 courses are there actually. I've asked ASA to send me the list of those affected

Update:
Basically, after a conversation with the IT folks, I see that we have a few options here, none of them particularly good.

Option 1: Re-install the OS. That clears the registry and the new 15 day license will be accepted automatically. However, this typically tends to take an hour odd per machine and is likely to overwhelm both student and IT team time. Still, folks willing to spare an hour for this can opt for it.

Option 2: Partition the hard drive and install Linux or WinXP or something there. Within that, an SPSS version can be installed. Not sure how different this is from option 1 in time and trouble terms.

Option 3: Do without SPSS in class. Borrow a peer's machine for a while or use the LRC lab's comps to complete homeworks on. Not a great option but workable since there is no comp-based SPSS exam component this year.

If anybody has any other ideas, pls let me know. Shall be happy to explore them further. Team IT has agreed to again approach the IBM-SPSS vendor with a fresh request but is not optimistic about a positive response given how much we have already asked of them this year.

Sudhir