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The File Submission System
	Requirements And Installation

Requirements

The submit system requires the following:

• A web server supporting CGI on a Unix-style system. I've actually tried it on Linux running Apache.

• Perl, including the standard CGI module.

• Perl's Digest::MD5 module, available from CPAN.

• A zip program for creating archive downloads. I've used it with Info-ZIP, which seems common on Linux systems.

Instructors must have accounts on the server, though they do not need to have command shell access. Also, since the submit system stores the submitted files under the instructor's home directory, these directories must be open for searching by the web server user. (If you use ~ in URLs to refer to files under user's home directories, you're already solved this problem.)

Installation

The following steps should install the submission system on your favorite server.

• Unpack the distribution wherever you like. Go the directory created.

• Modify the configuration settings in Makefile and the initial configuration file, submit.conf. The easiest way is to run the script setup.pl, or edit them by hand. This script will examine your system and modify Makefile and submit.conf accordingly. It should work fine on a fairly conventional setup with Apache server.

  perl setup.pl

  This just writes the files, or complains if it cannot figure everything out.

  perl setup.pl -i

  This enters interactive mode. It does the same inspection, then asks you to confirm or modify the values. When it can't figure something out, you can supply a value. The dialog does describe the values being set, in order to give you a fighting chance.

  perl setup.pl -h

  List the options. Or click for more complete instructions.

  If you prefer to edit by hand, Makefile and submit.conf document the settings reasonably well, or see the configuration variables page.

• Run make.

• Become root, and run make install.

• Instructors who will use the web interface must have a web access password set, and their home directories must allow search access by the web server user. Run the subwpass script take care of this. There was a man page installed, or see the subwpass page for details. Here are some possibilities.

  subwpass -r user1 ...

  That will set a random password for each user listed, and record them in plain text in the file PASSLOG.

  subwpass -p Freddie -a

  This will give every non-system user the password Freddie.

  subwpass -r -x -a

  This gives every non-system user a random password, and also adds global directory search permission to each home directory for which it sets a password.

Version 1 Users

If you use version 1 and have assignments defined, version 2 should read them without problems. The control file format has been changed, but the second version can read the old format. It can not write it, however, so once any assignment has been saved by version 2, you will not be able to read it back into version 1. If you want to keep both versions around, install version 2 to a different location, and change the SUBMISSION_AREA variable to something besides submission.