Nathan Carter wrote: > > Dear Jason, > > I believe we met on the shuttle to our hotels at the Joint Meetings last week, and talked about setting up a sage server for use in a class. You gave a talk on it, but I was unable to attend. You suggested that I look at Dan Drake's wiki post on how to set up a sage server under VirtualBox. That was a big help, and I've completed nearly all of the steps.
Fantastic! I'm glad Dan's tips worked well. I'm also posting this to the sage-support mailing list, since other people might also have similar questions. Also, Dan reads that list, so he might be able to elaborate. > > I write now asking if it's okay to bother you with a quick question about his very last step. He writes this on that web page: > >> Create an unprivileged user that defaults to the sageusers group: >> sudo adduser --ingroup sageusers nb1 >> I also created nb2, nb3, nb4, and nb5. I don't know how many you really need. Next, generate a passwordless ssh key as the sageadm user and copy it to all the unprivileged users; it's convenient to use "ssh-copy-id n...@localhost" for this. > > I'm not sure what these users are for, and he never says. Do you understand this step? For your reference, the page is here: Yes. This has to do with the server_pool option for the notebook() command. Basically, things look like this: Web browser (i.e., the sage notebook) <---> Sage server <----> {sage processes for the worksheets} where <---> indicates communication. The sage server (the initial sage process that you run and then type "notebook()" into) takes commands from the web browser notebook and sends them on to child sage processes, one for each worksheet. The idea behind the server_pool option is that the worksheet sage processes can be run as a relatively unprivileged user for security concerns. The point behind nb1, nb2, etc. are that they are the accounts under which the child sage processes for worksheets are run. You'll notice that in his start_notebook.sage file, he essentially passes the server_pool=[nb1,nb2,nb3,nb4,nb5] option into notebook(). You can read some short documentation about it by looking at the help for the notebook command (notebook?), or if you need further clarification, don't hesitate to ask (either me directly or on the sage-support mailing list). Welcome to Sage! Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---