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From: Todd Whittaker (WhittakT_at_franklin.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 11 2005 - 13:48:03 EST 

Message-Id: <s231a1a0.041@gw.franklin.edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 13:48:03 -0500
From: "Todd Whittaker" <WhittakT_at_franklin.edu>
Subject: Re: Web-CAT hosting


Steve,

We are seriously interested in hosting. We've talked to our IT staff, and they're willing to provide us with a box to run it on. IT will administer the plain box, but it is up to us (CS faculty) to do the deployment and administration of the software. I like your idea of a time line-based plan. Our summer term actually starts in April, and our fall start data is September 5. But, since our courses are actually pressed on CD in July, we'd need to have a pretty good run at getting this done by the end of June.

Our major platform is RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, which will run Java and Tomcat with no trouble. We'll get a WebObjects license too. So, that leaves a couple of architectural questions:

  1. You said that Web-CAT is two basic components: the server which receives and time stamps submissions, and a set of scripts that kick off the grading process in a sandbox-type down environment. Do we need two separate platforms (one for the server, and one for the scripts) that communicate over the network?
  2. What database can/should we use for the server? I'm hoping that Postgres, MySQL, or DB2 will do since those are either free software or freely available to academics. I'm also assuming that there are some configuration files that we could just point to the database with a username and password.

Thanks for all your assistance!

--
Todd A. Whittaker
Program Chair, Information Technology
Franklin University
614-744-3067
whittakt_at_franklin.edu

>>> Stephen stedwar2 <stedwar2_at_cs.vt.edu> 03/08/05 12:39PM >>>
> 1. Requesting to try to host Web-CAT here for our students (knowing the lack of docs).

If you're seriously interested in taking this path, I'll be happy to work with you on it.
We've got to tackle the "first" nonlocal installation at some point, and I'm pretty
sure we'll never get an installation guide until we actually try to do such an install
and write up what we did (and what didn't work) :-).

> 2. Using Web-CAT as an optional system for our students, and stick with hand-grading.

This is also feasible, but probably not as useful as (1), IMHO.

> 3. Investigating alternative (and perhaps inferior) submission systems.

Of course you don't want to do that! ;-)

Think it over and decide what you want to do. If you want to put together a locally hosted installation, then lets try to work out a plan and a timeline. You'll need to identify a server (even a plain old workstation will do) that will act as your local host and pick your OS/patform. I'm assuming you'd probably want to do this during the start of the summer, so that you can have things operational and checked out before the summer is over. Until then, you can play on my server to get the feel of things.

BTW, it is our spring break now, and I am hoping to have some major changes to how the grading/assignment configuration works fielded during the next week or so.

-- 

Stephen Edwards            604 McBryde Hall          Dept. of Computer Science
e-mail      : edwards_at_cs.vt.edu           U.S. mail: Virginia Tech (VPI&SU)
office phone: (540)-231-5723                         Blacksburg, VA  24061
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