Recently I set up the VMware image to be a class server and from that I experience, I think that it is still a bit beyond the reach of a non-unix person to easily set up a good secure sage server. While the vmware image is an absolutely fantastic base requiring minimal extra configuration, the small configuration changes that I made required unix knowledge and would probably be beyond someone who did not have time to learn unix.
What I'm envisioning is an easy-to-administer VMware appliance-like image that runs sage as a notebook server in the best way that we know how. A scenario here would be a high school teacher who wants to run a sage notebook from a server in the school library or his computer in his classroom and has never used unix before. He should be able to download the vmware player and the sage image and be able to configure the image (like change the networking address to a static address, etc.) and get the image up and running in minimal time (1 hour?). So far, issues to address that I've thought of include: 1. Abolish the default ssh login, but provide an easy way to add a remotely-accessible ssh account. 2. Configuring Sage to start at bootup (see the faq entry for this recent solution). 3. Switching between bridge networking (needed for outside access) and the non-bridge working (which is easier and needs no additional setup, if I understand things right). In my case, I also had to set the IP address and other network information of the image. I wouldn't expect a non-unix person to know to look at /etc/networks/interfaces. We might need two different images here--I couldn't find a way to switch the networking in the VMware player (only in the server). 4. Make the embedded sage processes run as a different user than the notebook (see http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/msg/700de97f06bcc83e ) 5. A long time ago, it was mentioned that sage should be running from an unprivileged port and maybe some sort of forwarding should be done to redirect port 80 to the unprivileged port. See http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/61363cbcdeefebfd/63a41b7ca761f1a1 and another message from Alex that I can't find right now. We should probably make it so that the vmware image is a model of how to set up the notebook with all the tips and tricks that we know to make it secure and usable. Is there anything else that people have had to configure on the vmware image to get it set up right? Now, for the ncurses part. It seems like it would be very, very nice to have a minimal admin menu using ncurses or newt (with the python snack module) or dialog. Each of these has a python module, so hopefully it should be fairly easy. I've never done any text-based GUI programming, but I'm willing to try to whip up something. Are there any experts here that could give some advice about what to use or how to do it (or whip something up even faster)? It seems that an interface that at least has the options to create a remote ssh account, set up sage to start on bootup, and set the networking information for the box (DHCP or a static address) would answer some of the issues above. In the future, we could add to the menu and keep things simple for non-unix people. Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
