Student Web Servers

[OllieC]

Here's an interesting one... the IT teachers would like students to be able to access some kind of web server so that they can use web applications such as wordpress and joomla for their IT work. An idea I thought of was to have a small web server installed on each student machine, having data (htdocs, databases etc) stored on the student's user area whilst all the actual software runs on the machine.

 

I was looking at XAMPP lite but not really sure where to get started, obviously all of the paths can be changed within the configuration files for apache/mysql etc but I'm not sure that would work... surely the structure that has been setup by the installer would need to be present on the students' user area...?

 

In short, this is all a bit experimental, does anyone have any kind of experience doing anything like this or have any suggestions. It may be that there's something out there much easier to use than XAMPP that'll do the job.

 

The basic requirement is that the students can use php/sql on the computers to set up websites, their htdocs/databases follow them round and at minimal impact to their storage space.

 

Any suggestion greatly appreciated.

 

Ollie

[glennda]

Here's an interesting one... the IT teachers would like students to be able to access some kind of web server so that they can use web applications such as wordpress and joomla for their IT work. An idea I thought of was to have a small web server installed on each student machine, having data (htdocs, databases etc) stored on the student's user area whilst all the actual software runs on the machine.

 

I was looking at XAMPP lite but not really sure where to get started, obviously all of the paths can be changed within the configuration files for apache/mysql etc but I'm not sure that would work... surely the structure that has been setup by the installer would need to be present on the students' user area...?

 

In short, this is all a bit experimental, does anyone have any kind of experience doing anything like this or have any suggestions. It may be that there's something out there much easier to use than XAMPP that'll do the job.

 

The basic requirement is that the students can use php/sql on the computers to set up websites, their htdocs/databases follow them round and at minimal impact to their storage space.

 

Any suggestion greatly appreciated.

 

Ollie

 

do you currently have vm's? you could set up an apache web-server on a new vm, and then create all the users access to it- but depends on how many students you need it for

 

Toby

[pete]

Have a look at webmans how-to

 

FTP and Web server [bishop Barrington IT Wiki]

[OllieC]

do you currently have vm's? you could set up an apache web-server on a new vm, and then create all the users access to it- but depends on how many students you need it for

 

Toby

It would be a lot of students, more than I'd be happy to set up accounts for individually. I'm also less inclided to set up a central web server that they can access, I like the idea of the server environment being individual for each machine, teacher would be able to pull up work in the lesson by going to their computer name and suchlike.

[rh91uk]

The way I would do it (and when I was at college writing lots of ASP applications) is that I would set up an IIS server with FTP. Create a directory for each user from a text file (I have a script to do this with if you want it?) then give them access via FTP to that directory. Then, create the HTML pages, upload etc. You could also install MYSQL onto the same box and do the same kind of thing (never configed MYSQL and IIS together though ... shock horror!).

[ICTNUT]

Have a look at webmans how-to

 

FTP and Web server [bishop Barrington IT Wiki]

 

this is exactly as we have done it at a few schools and works very well.

[webman]

I'm also less inclided to set up a central web server that they can access, I like the idea of the server environment being individual for each machine, teacher would be able to pull up work in the lesson by going to their computer name and suchlike.

 

The only issue here is that the teacher would need to know the computer name that a given user is logged on to. One benefit of the central server is it has one URL, just change the username part. You can even create a basic front-end to make it even easier

[pete]

You also run into the issue that the teacher can't mark / check work when the student isn't logged in. A central server means they can look at it any time.

[OllieC]

Okays, thanks guys, will have a play around with the ubuntu setup in that wiki. If I can get that running I'm sure we'll have a very happy IT department.