I have wondered about Peter's problem as well. Particularly in larger classes, one wouldn't necessarily trust all students to behave nicely. In those cases, it would be nice to have a sage notebook that runs a little more locked down.
As a point of feedback that some of the sage advocates might care about: The security concerns have prevented me from asking the local sysadmins to install a student-accessible notebook server. If we had one, I would be more inclined to include some sage-based assignments in courses (I have tried before, relying on the public servers - with mixed results) A partial solution would be to have a "sage coursework appliance", running as a virtual machine. In a virtual machine, there would be no problem binding (local) unix UIDs to sage notebook server accounts. Then the sage engine could be run setuid-ed to the corresponding user id, thus shielding students more properly from each other. Plus, an expert would only have to do all the setroot jailing etc. once, for the benefit of everybody else. I wouldn't trust myself, or the average sysadmin, with setting up a proper setroot jail. If there were an admin page where one can manage accounts in a big table (class list upload?), it could be quite straightforward to set up accounts for the course. In fact, there are universities that have a central authentication service, such as http://www.jasig.org/cas. If sage's authentication were to be made pluggable, plugging into services like that would be not particularly difficult and means you don't have to do any password management. There is a trusted third party that will vouch for the user's identity. All you're left with is to decide if that user is authorized to use the service. That means no handing out of login details in class! It also means that students are using the service with an account that is definitely trackable to them. That's a deterrent to misbehaviour. Perhaps William feels inclined to consider these options when he starts working on the notebook in September? He'll probably come up with much better solutions. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
