iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Unless you’re reading this posting via Facebook, you may have noticed that you now have to sign in to add comments to my blog postings.

I tried to resist as long as possible, but the signal to noise ratio was getting too high for me whenever I had to approve comments.

I could have add a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” But I find their squiggles to be fundamentally inaccessible, even the audio or reCAPTCHA ones, and I didn’t want to further promote the technology.  My admiration for Alan Turing aside.

So I’m now asking commentators to sign in via Facebook Connect or OpenID.  Both technologies never disclose your password to my site, and warn you about what they are disclosing and in this case it’s not much more than your name/handle.

You may not know it, but you may already have an OpenID! Google, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress and others all provide the service to their users.

This also means that comments are no longer being closed after 90 days.  Feel free to comment on all the postings going back to 2004.

Thanks for your time and patience.

Brock University’s documentation for Isaak, Brock University’s Sakai-Based Learning Management System (LMS), is maintained within a wiki at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai. This wiki is intended to be a practical, readable, guide that is aware of the context that instructors use Sakai/Isaak for teaching at Brock University.

What follows I had actually hoped to present on this at the last Sakai Conference. Brock University is not a member of the Sakai Foundation, but had intended to become one, as such the ambiguity made it hard to register.

Brock University offers only a few on-line or distance courses and as such Brock’s LMS functions primarily as an additional channel of communication; content distribution; and community for otherwise face-to-face courses based at one of the two physical campuses. This amounts to slightly more than a thousand courses with faculty responsible for their own course spaces with complete control over it. The responsibility for assisting instructors in their development of on-line course content falls upon myself and the other important members of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) at Brock University.

The CTLET strives to offer a high level of support through: one-on-one consultations, workshops, E-Mail dialogues and phone-based support, but one thing is certain; every instructor cannot expect that when they need help with Sakai/Isaak that they can pickup the phone and get someone immediately. If the answer to every question about Sakai/Isaak could only be found at the other end of a telephone the ability to distribute critical information would be severely limited and it would represent a considerable bottleneck.

Personal one-on-one help is important and very effective, but it is also resource intensive to deliver. University technical and pedagogical support staff work conventional business hours, however, instructors need not work from their office nor work conventional business hours. These are schedules and locations that do not always compliment each other.
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When setting up my VPS server there were a number of options for building it. The VPS admin tool gives you “virtual” control over the power switch and the ability to rebuild the server with a fresh OS image at any time. A2 Web Hosting has a few flavours of Linux to choose from: CentOS (the GPL-based rebuild of Red Hat’s Enterprise Server 5), Gentoo and Ubuntu. I went with CentOS as I use it at work, and Enterprise-Grade always seems good to me.

From here on I’ll assume that you know something about the command line, and that you’ve got a good SSH client like the OS X Terminal or Putty and a way to upload files via an SFTP client like Cyberduck or Filezilla.

One my first steps with a pristine Linux operating system is to create a folder called “backup” and an “etc_original” folder in there and copy all of the original etc folder files there for reference.
mkdir /backup
mkdir /backup_original
cp -r /etc/ /backup/etc_original

What you’ll need on your server

Depending on the install/image you use you may have everything you need right there, but here are the packages I install out of the gate:

First off I install the screen tool (more about screen at www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-use-screen-command-under-linux.html) so that I can walk away and reconnect to this process, rsync for moving things and backing things up and telnet for testing ports/servers:
yum install screen rsync telnet
Make sure Apache’s installed and that we’ve got all the PHP modules we need:
yum install httpd php php-cli php-zip php-mysql php-mcrypt php-mbstring
Also get some SSL support:
yum install mod_ssl openssl
Install MySQL client and server:
yum install mysql mysql-server
Install the firewall
yum install iptables

Once all of those packages are installed you’ll need to set them up.
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Since I just went through the process of setting-up my own self-managed VPS (virtual private server) system I figured I’d share my experience in the hopes that it will help someone else with some basic command-line comfort looking to gain control of their web hosting or being the process of scaling up.

This is the start of what I hope will be a brief series of blog posts describing the process.

I went with a VPS system because of the considerable cost savings over a full dedicated system and the ability to scale-up from a low-power system to a high-powered system. In fact, I did just that when I initially opted for the 128mb system, but found that I need 256mb. My VPS (and previously shared host) is A2 Web Hosting and they’ve been pretty good to work with.

Here’s what mattclare.ca is currently running, I’ll go through each elements and how I’ve configured them:

• CentOS 5 Linux Operating System

  Including:

  • Installing the basic files and packages
  • Securing SSH and the rest of the server
  • The Apache web server
  • MySQL database
• Google/Gmail for mail (and calendaring, etc.)
• JungleDisk/Amazon Webservers for backup

Ray Henderson, new president of Blackboard (Bb) learn, sent out an E-Mail/blog post to the WebCT/Bb community today that amounts to a bit of a mea culpa.

As Brock University transitions from their WebCT CE 6 (Blackboard Learning System CE) Learning Management System (LMS) to Isaak, Brock University’s Sakai-Based LMS, it’s nice to see someone from Bb give a honest assessment of their acquisition of WebCT.

Ray shares what he’s come to understand and most of their clients suspected:

…the WebCT course management systems went through a major re-write just before Bb and WebCT merged – CE6 and Vista 4 were the results of that re-write. Just after the merger was completed more than 500 clients ended up going live on these new products.

It wasn’t until these clients went live that we discovered a large number of bugs (over 2,000) and some critical architectural issues. Frankly we made a mistake in not battle testing the new releases ourselves after the closing of the merger and for not keeping WebCT’s support center in Vancouver at full strength.

Brock University was one of those clients, and you can ask anyone who was at Brock University during the fall of 2006 or the start of term in winter of 2007 and 2008 to find out the number of issues Brock had – or read the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies’ annual reports.

That said, it’s small consolation to finally be given a frank assessment of what append and to know that Bb is finally willing to give an honest accounting of that part of their company’s history.

Brock gave-up a considerable amount of features when they abandoned WebCT CE 6 and may have missed out on some real potential with Blackboard 9. But that said, almost everyone at Brock University is pleased with Sakai and the transition appears to be going very well.
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