Increasing remote labs reliability and efficiency by using a live CD

Remote labs are laboratories where the hardware devices are accessible through the Internet 24 hours a day for running experiments on physical processes, like, e.g., control experiments. The increased availability of experiments in a remote lab is certainly an advantage for users, but may be the cause of recurrent hardware and software failures. Thus, maintaining physical processes in a remote lab may result an onerous task for lab administrators. The remote lab inefficiency due to hardware and software maintenance can be certainly reduced if the time required for software reinstallation and/or upgrade is kept as short as possible. In this paper, a technique based on the use of a bootable (live) CD on the servers side of a remote lab is reported. This solution allows an administrator to greatly reduce the time needed to fix a hardware/software failure, as well as to add a new process to the lab in a faster way. The application of the proposed method to a remote lab (the "Automatic Control Telelab") developed at the University of Siena is presented.