[K12OSN] Personal web pages for students

[Jay Pfaffman]

Configuring Apache's userdir module is pretty easy.  Giving students
an easy way to move data there is less simple.  I'd say you want to
configure Samba, FTP and maybe WebDAV (another apache module) to let
students move stuff there.  Those things aren't that hard either,
until you try to deal with administering accounts for everyone and
have a centralized authentication scheme.

I consider file sharing and system backups the two essential services
that a school (and especially university) should provide.  Strangely,
few actually do it.  This is especially true because the people who
could make file sharing easily available have their own drives (and
aren't forced to use public machines in labs).  The result?  A normal
person is expected to FTP their files to a workstation, work on them
there, and FTP them back when they're done.  This alone is reason
enough to move to LTSP.

And don't get me started on authentication.  My university has 3
password databases and that includes only the ones that *everyone* has
access to.

To provide a place to post web pages for a class full of 5th graders
is easy.  To do it for a university is a non-trivial task.  I don't
believe that having an unlimited budget to pay for software licenses 
makes any difference.

----- Original Message -----
From: Luke Maslany <l.maslany at jmc.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 08:25:08 +0100
Subject: [K12OSN] Personal web pages for students
To: k12osn at redhat.com

 

The college I work for has asked that students have the ability to
host web content through personal web pages.  Although I am fairly new
to Linux, I have decided that a LAMP setup would provide this ability
while staying within the budgetary constraints (that is to say no
money has been allocated to complete this task!).

I have two questions: 
1) What permissions are required on the userdir directory?  
2) How are other schools, colleges and universities dealing with this
sort of request?  In particular, how are your students uploading their
files to the server?  (FTP, WebDAV, etc…)

Many thanks for any help or advice you can offer, 

Luke Maslany 

-------------------------------- 
Luke Maslany 
Network Engineer 
Josiah Mason College 
l.maslany at jmc.ac.uk 
-------------------------------- 
 

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-- 
Jay Pfaffman                           <pfaffman at utk.edu>
Asst Professor of Instructional Technology, U. TN, Knoxville
Experimenting with gmail, please honor the Reply-To