The Mentor Instructional Environment provides for student use of web-based technologies to meet the goals of particular IU courses and the piloting of third party (or possibly IU-developed) instructional applications. For the former, two types of student accounts are available: With "generic" accounts students may develop and serve web pages or applications through a central Apache server accessed at http://mentor.ucs.indiana.edu/~account. "Tomcat" accounts provide individual Tomcat and Apache servers for student-developed Java applications. In either case, faculty may request student access to an Oracle database backend. Contact Enterprise Decision Support Services for information about the latter.

Announcements:

Accounts:

When making requests for accounts please specify generic or Tomcat accounts and whether Oracle access is necessary. Faculty should provide contact information (name, phone number, email address/userid) and identify their school, department, and courses for which they are responsible. Please specify the number of student accounts required. If you would like to provide a naming scheme for the accounts keep in mind that they must be 3-8 characters in length, begin with a letter, contain only letters (lower case) and digits, and be unique for the environment.

(IU instructors who would like to use the Mentor environment should make their requests well in advance of intended use since multiple groups coordinate setup of the environment.)

Environment Details:

Hardware: Sun V880

Available software (a partial list):

Additional software should be requested through your instructor. Required lead time for installation will depend on the nature of the software and other priorities.

• Solaris 9 Operation Environment
• pine4.63 (includes pico)
• emacs-21.4
• jed-0.99
• vi is always availble with Solaris
• gcc-2.95.3
• perl 5.8.6 with DBD-Oracle-1.14, DBI, Apache::DBI, Apache::DB, Bundle::LWP, CGI, Date::Calc
• tcl-8.4.9
• tk-8.4.9
• php-4.4.0 (available only for cgi use)
• Sun's j2se-1.4.2_08
• transform
• apache_1.3.33 or
• apache_1.3.33 with mod_perl-1.29 and mod_jk-1.2.10 (jakarta tomcat-apache connector)
• jakarta-tomcat-4.1.33

Documentation links:

• Transform
• Apache
• Tomcat
• Oracle
• Perl
• PHP
• Java

Check back for additional information as questions arise and are answered.

mentor.ucs.indiana.edu can be accessed only through a secure connection. See other UITS resources for information about the SSH2 client. FTP will be available only on a temporary basis.

Direct printing is not available from mentor. Open the file in a browser, view the document source, and print.

To access your "generic account" pages through a browser, type: http://mentor.ucs.indiana.edu/~username/filename. Substitute your account name for "username" and your specific file for "filename" (or just http://mentor.ucs.indiana.edu/~username/ if you are accessing your directory index).

To set up a site for Dreamweaver, specify your address as http://mentor.ucs.indiana.edu/~username, and host directory as /ip/username/www/

In order to use Transform you must first install it in your account. Login and change to the directory where you will store your forms (i.e. www/forms). Type tf_install at the prompt to install Transform. You should install Transform in every directory where you will keep forms.

To run CGI scripts from your account 1) put the script in your www directory or any of its subdirectories, 2) name your script with a suffix of either .pl or .cgi, 3) set the permissions to read, write, and execute for the owner only, 4) test your script from the command line before using it from a browser. If you have a tomcat account, you can check your own log files for error messages produced from invocations of your script from a browser.

Global_registers is turned off for PHP. This may require some changes to your scripts. The "shebang" line is required for PHP since PHP is installed for cgi use. Documentation for PHP on the central servers is generally applicable (see http://www.indiana.edu/~wmhome/PHPlanguage/index.shtml).

To avoid the "class not found" issue for Tomcat see http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/Class_Not_Found

The basic connection string to Oracle database oed1 is:
DriverManager.registerDriver(new oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver()); Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:oracle:thin:@dbserv.uits.indiana.edu:1521:oed1","username","password"

Place .jsp, .html, .pl, and .cgi files in your ~/www directory. (~ stands for the home login directory.)

Place .class files in your ~/www/WEB-INF/classes directory.

To start Tomcat and Apache run the command /usr/local/bin/cmd_apache_tomcat start

To shutdown Tomcat and Apache run the command /usr/local/bin/cmd_apache_tomcat stop

To restart Tomcat and Apache run the command /usr/local/bin/cmd_apache_tomcat restart

To avoid having to restart tomcat after modifying servlet, add the reloadable="true" attribute to the context path in your server.xml file.

To run a servlet from the web browser, in the location field, type: http://mentor.ucs.indiana.edu:port#1/servlet/yourservlet (substitute your account's first port number for port#1, and substitute the actual name of your servlet for yourservlet).

To access your HTML pages and Perl applications through the web (tomcat account), in the browser location field type: http://mentor.uits.indiana.edu:port#/yourfilename (substitute your account's first port number for port# and substitute the actual name of your file for yourfilename).

Port numbers are assigned for tomcat accounts. If you loose your port numbers check here to find the one needed for accessing your servlets and pages.

Disk space usage by account is also listed here. Data is collected weekly and averaged. Disk space units are in kilobytes.

Contact Information:

Last updated: 16 October 2008 Copyright 1998-2008, The Trustees of Indiana University