New handin mechanism

by jmishra on October 16, 2015

Hi Students

Looks like the old handin mechanism of uploading stuff to canvas is not working in a scalable and efficient way. So we have already devised a new handin mechanism. You might be aware of the CS ecosystem maintained by the CSL. All files are kept in a distributed manner on top of the Andrew File System (AFS). Your aim is to copy over your assignment files to a predestined location on AFS.

Do you know that each one of you has a CSL id and an email address of the form csl_id@cs.wisc.edu? If not, finding the CSL id is pretty easy. Visit https://csl.cs.wisc.edu and click on Student Info -> Activating your account. Log in using your NetID. It will say “Logged in as: your CS id” on the left hand side of the page. You can change your CS password if you want. Note that this password can be different from your NetID. They are two separate accounts. Now remember your CS ID.

The main motivation behind introducing this new handing mechanism is that uploaded projects can now be accessed from the CS web server in a straightforward manner without going through canvas.

Once uploaded, projects can be accessed online using a web browser from the following location.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cs559-1/handin2015

This will show you a list of projects. Right now we have only p6 and p7. Clicking on any one of them will take you to the list of students by their CS IDs. By default only the student, Professors and the TA can access a folder owned by a student. You will have to use your CS ID and password to access your folder.

But at this moment none of you have anything submitted in any of those folders. All empty! So let’s get to how to copy your creative stuff to the AFS folders.

GNU/Linux and Mac users can use the terminal to copy files. From the terminal, use the cd (change directory) command to go to the folder on your local disk which has all your JavaScript resources plus a single html file referencing those scripts. No need to zip anything now. We will not accept zip files. Assume your CS ID is teststudent. This is what will do the job.

scp -r * teststudent@galapagos-10.cs.wisc.edu:/u/c/s/cs559-1/public/html/handin2015/p7/teststudent/

Things to note about the above command:

  1. replace teststudent with your CS ID
  2. you can replace galapagos-10 with any CSL lab computer hostname. galapagos-10 will do the job just fine.
  3. replace p7 by the project in hand. Like p8 for project 8

If your submission had an index.html, you can now access it from the following link.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cs559-1/handin2015/p7/teststudent/index.html

It may ask for your login before giving you access.

If you uploaded wrong stuff and would like to delete everything and upload new stuff, you need to use ssh. This will give you a terminal prompt and you can use regular bash commands to delete or modify your submitted content. To ssh in GNU/Linux or Mac, use the following command.

ssh teststudent@galapagos-10.cs.wisc.edu

This will prompt for your CS password. After getting a terminal prompt, issue a command like the following to change directory to the correct location.

cd /u/c/s/cs559-1/public/html/handin2015/p7/teststudent/

Now delete or change your files. To upload new stuff, first exit the ssh session and then do another scp as mentioned above.

Every student folder for every project has a file called .htaccess which enforces the authentication you go through while accessing links to your project. This is done so that only the professors, the TA and the concerned student can access their stuff. However, if you would like to share your project with a colleague, edit the .htaccess file. The last line of the file lists users that are allowed access. Add your friend to the end of the list like your_friend’s_cs_id@CS.WISC.EDU. Never share your password with anyone. Once your friend is added, she can access your page using her own CS authentication. You may also delete this file so that anyone can access your files (useful if you want to show your stuff to friends outside of CS).

Windows users can use PuTTY for ssh and PSCP for scp.

You still have to post a link to your project in canvas and write a line or two describing it. The link should look like the following:

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cs559-1/handin2015/p7/teststudent/index.html

Don’t ignore canvas completely. The new handin mechanism is only enforced for P7 and further projects. For P6 you will have to use canvas. However, to gain some practice you can also submit a copy of P6 in the manner described above. That way we can also gauge some issues and have them fixed before P7 is due.

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