This software can be accquire once CVS has been installed. The environment variable CVSROOT has to be set up prior to checking out a copy of the software. On a Unix system, the environment variable can be set temporarily on the command line or can be set up longer term via something like the ".bash_profile" file if the "bash" shell is being. Similarly, this variable has to be set into "wincvs" on a Windows box.

The current CVSROOT string for anonymous access can be found on my web site. The command sequence to get the software is

   CVSROOT=whatever_is_on_the_web_site
   cvs export -d install_directory elecTran
 

If the code is successfully, then you should set up Apache ant so that you can create a coursework in order to move to testing the system. This last is described in , and the command to execute on the command line from within the install directory is:-

      ant -DappName=course_name createnewcourse

At this point, the Tomcat and Mysql systems should be set up.

Once, the Tomcat system has been installed and tested, there are some minor changes normally required. These are to enable https access and to change the port number used by Tomcat to listen to requests. These changes are made to the "server.xml" file in Tomcat's "conf" directory: the path to this file from the Tomcat installation directory is "conf/server.xml".

To enable https access to Tomcat the second and last line of the following code should be removed:-

 
    <!-- Define a SSL Coyote HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8443 -->
    <!--
    <Connector port="8443" 
               maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
               enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
               acceptCount="100" debug="0" scheme="https" secure="true"
               clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" />
    -->
 
 

Tomcat comes with default port numbers for its various services: 8005(shutdown), 8009(coyote), 8080(http), 8082(proxy), 8443(https). It is easy for there to be a conflist between two or more Tomcat installations running on the same machine if these defatult port numbers are used. You may have had a problem already in testing your Tomcat installation. It is best to choose some other set of numbers for the services on your Tomcat installation by editing these values in "conf/server.xml". Note that each service should have a different number and that numbers above 6000 should be used, below these are public port numbers. Once you have doe this you should run Tomcat to see that you canstill run Tomcat.

If you are running the system on a headless server, no X windows screen attached, and you intend to display dynamically generated images, then you need to set up a vncserver to provide an X interface for the generation of the images. Running this is described below, but at this stage if this is to be done, the Tomcat start-up script, ("bin/startup.sh"), needs to be edited so that Tomcat can be started with the display number for the running "vncserver", see . My version of "bin/startup.sh" is:-

#!/bin/sh
umask 077
DISPLAY=:$1; export DISPLAY
echo using DISPLAY=$DISPLAY
CATALINA_HOME=/opt/UCLCScourseware/java/tomcat/jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28
CATALINA_BASE=/cs/academic/staff0/marine/ucacpar/TC
export CATALINA_HOME CATALINA_BASE
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh

For the database server, it is necessary to determine the port number that it listens on for remote accesses: Tomcat talks to the database server on this port number over the network. For Mysql, the port number is given in the "safe_mysqld" section of the ".my_cnf" file in the Unix home directory: for Unix the port number is specified on a line thus "port=6303". For Windows, the default port number for Mysql is 3306. Again, if other users mught be running a similar dtabase, it is best to change the port number from the default value, again to some high number.

Having discovered or changed the port number, it must be entered into the coursework definition file along with the name of the machine on which the server is to be run, the name of the database, its interface class, and the name of the JDBC database driver. This is as follows for a Mysql database:-

dbServer=mysql
dbClass=MysqlInterface
dbDriver=org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver
dbHost=localhost
dbPort=29784
 

At least 2 users are required on the database besides the "root" user: it is not advisable to use the root server from Tomcat. One of these users will have write privileges to the database and the other will have read privileges on just the user and password table. Before doing this a database must be defined for the coursework, and a minimal user-password tableet in the database. The actions in setting these up are explained below for a coursework with name "D2" for a Mysql database.

The database should be set up with a name relatd to the coursework: it could be the same as the courework name or number. To create the database with name "D2", the following Mysql code is executed as root at the prompt "mysql>":-

        create database if not exists D2; 
 

        use D2 ;
 

A user-password table can be then be created with the command:-

create table if not exists users (user VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, password VARCHAR(50) NULL, role VARCHAR(20) NULL) TYPE=MYISAM;
 

f.bloggs        washingUp      manager
 

        load data local infile "path_to_file" ;
 

        select * from users ;
 

grant usage on *.* to tomcatUser@amy.cs.ucl.ac.uk identified by 'fridayAfternoon' ;
grant select on D2.users to tomcatUser@amy.cs.ucl.ac.uk ;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON D2.* TO p.rounce@amy.cs.ucl.ac.uk IDENTIFIED BY 'washDayBlues' WITH GRANT OPTION;
 

Once the above has been done, the details of the database table, and the table names for the user and other tables, and the name and password for the low priority user, "tomcatUser" and <, and quote>fridayAfternoon must be entered into the coursework definition file:-

dbName=D2
dbUsersTable=users
dbQuestionsTable=cwquestions
dbMarksTable=qumarks
tomcatUser=tomcatUser
tomcatUserPassWord=fridayAfternoon
 

Once the above has been done, Tomcat and Mysql have been set up and their port numbers modified as necessary, a database for the coursework has been set up with a user-password table with a manager entry added.