Development Server for A-Level Students

[basicchannel]

Hi,

Could anyone give me any advice on setting up a central web server for students to develop database and PHP applications on?

Obviously there's XAMPP and WAMP, but can you set up individual accounts for students on these? I want something where they can upload their stuff into their own directories via ftp, and create their own MySQL databases too.

I'm also thinking about setting this up on a Linux server

Thanks

[camel]

webmin with the virtualmin module?, not tried it but did look at them a while ago for a project.

[basicchannel]

Ah, OK. I've heard of webmin before. I shall have to download and have a play. Cheers

[glennda]

Look at LAMP. I have a linux box with FTP and each student ftp's using AD auth. An Apache site pointing at /home/DOMAIN/ then once each user logs in and uploads files it will then appear as http://hostname/username/

[basicchannel]

I just found this from a previous thread. I might give it a go.

FTP and Web server [Bishop Barrington IT Wiki]

[basicchannel]

Wonder if anyone can help?

I've tried to follow the above document without too much success. I say that, I managed to get most things set up, but when I connect to ftp I get a 500 OOPS error. This is only resolved when I manually create the individual user's directory inside the /home/DOMAIN/ folder. So if I'm getting the ftp error:

500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/home/DOMAIN/schubert

I create the dir schubert inside the DOMAIN dir, and assign permissions to the account. It then connects fine in ftp, and uploads without error. But what I have now, is hoe the hell can I access the students folder via the net as originally planned. At the moment my server is pointing to /var/www, so attempting to navigat to http://10.0.0.1/DOMAIN/schubert or /schubert or /home/DOMAIN/schubert/index is never going to work.

AS I said I've followed the BBarrington wiki document to the letter, but it is for an old version of Ubuntu so some things, such as some lines in the smb.conf file were missing.

I'm so confused.

[glennda]

You need to change /etc/apache2/site-enabled/default to point to /home/domain instead of /var/www

If i remember rightly you need to set the permissions on /home/domain so that Domain users can write to the folder it will auto-create folders inside for each user but i might be wrong.

[basicchannel]

So simple, yet such a PITA. Thanks a million glennda. I am so happy, if you were standing next to me right now you would be beating me off with a pooey stick.

[glennda]

not a problem! Here to help!

Obviously if you wanted to restrict to only some year groups you could change the Domain Users group to a year intake etc

[jamesfed]

Maybe something like this could help - Overview - Enkompass

[CyberNerd]

I setup exactly the same think for students about 5 years ago. we don't use it any more because the php teacher left.
I used the apache mod_userdir mod_userdir - Apache HTTP Server which publishes the a subfolder of the home directory.
Students used sftp to upload their work.

[dhicks]

Could anyone give me any advice on setting up a central web server for students to develop database and PHP applications on?

If you want a Linux-based server that pupils can SSH into with their Active Directory credentials, you can set that up via Samba:

Configuring Samba

[basicchannel]

Hi again

After trying to install phpmyadmin I realised I forgot my mysql root password. I tried to reset it but it wasn't having any of it, so I uninstalled and reinstalled MySQL, set my new password and all seemed well. Now I'm getting errors when trying to access phpmyadmin login that are saying:

phpMyAdmin - Error The mysql extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration

So I try to install php5-mysql as it seems like it's missing, and it does the usual prompt to install the package, and after confirming Y I get the following message and then nothing else:

php5 (5.3.3-7+squeeze5) squeeze-security; urgency=high

  * The following new directives were added as part of security fixes:
    - max_input_vars - specifies how many GET/POST/COOKIE input variables
      may be accepted.  Default value is set to 1000.
    - xsl.security_prefs - define forbidden operations within XSLT
      stylesheets.  Write operations are now disabled by default.

 -- OndÅej Surý <ondrej@debian.org>  Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:22:26 +0100

php5 (5.3.3-7+squeeze4) squeeze-security; urgency=low

  * Updated blowfish crypt() algorithm fixes the 8-bit character handling
    vulnerability (CVE-2011-2483) and adds more self-tests.  Unfortunately
    this change is incompatible with some old (wrong) generated hashes for
    passwords containing 8-bit characters.  Therefore the new salt prefix
    '$2x$' was introduced which can be used as a replacement for '$2a$'
    salt prefix in the password database in case the incompatibility is
    found.

 -- OndÅej Surý <ondrej@debian.org>  Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:31:16 +0200

As far as I understood it, it was just telling me that there were some php updates, but it doesn't install php5-mysql. Everytime I try to install it comes up with the same thing, even after doing an apt-get update beforehand.

Any ideas? Do I need to manually update something?

[basicchannel]

Looks like i've found a possible answer courtesy of stackoverflow.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9231610/error-when-installing-curl-debian-squeeze

will try in the morrow