TechScreen Revised

TU Dresden provides a wireless network with high speed that covers nearly the whole TU campus. However a lot of new, especially foreigner students face the problem that they cannot connect to this network with their current University login and password.

It's great if you use Outlook to manage all your email, but many people like to use web based email, such as GMail or Yahoo! Mail instead of downloading their email to their computer. And in this cases, users probably wished that Firefox could open there (GMai or Yahoo!) mailbox when clicking an email link on a web page. Instead, Firefox will open Microsoft Outlook (if you have it installed).

When deploying a JVM-based Web app usually so-called Java Servlet containers resp. application servers are used for the produciton system/environment. Probably the most popular and common Java server in this field is Apache Tomcat (and other even more feature-rich ones like JBoss or GlassFish). Apart from that, there's also Jetty which can be seen as a somewhat lightweight alternative. Nevertheless, there are some subtle differences to be taken into consideration when configuring it as opposed to Tomcat.

I need to make backups of a webapplication's MySQL database and some files for a client. Backups should be done on a daily basis and the whole system should be as cheap as possible - "ok, backups are important, but I don't want to spend any money on it anyway...". The backup should be fully automated. Furthermore installing an FTP server on one of the client's local machines (to upload the backups there) is not wanted, due to security concerns.

While giving a training course on PostgreSQL, the problem arose that a pg_dump of their database would take too long. The database contains more or less nothing else than BLOBs (PDF files). Currently only 500MB, but there are 45GB of archived files (from the last 10 years or so) and new ones will be added on a daily basis. So at least 50GB (older files could be removed) will be stored in the database. Doing a test dump with pg_dump takes approximately 3 minutes for 500MB (on the given system) - which means 50GB will take somewhere around 5 hours.

I administrate a small (1 server, <10 clients) network where I deployed a Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard as domain controller, DNS / Exchange / WSUS / PostgreSQL / ... server, and default gateway (2 NICs). However the internet connection is occasionally dropped.

While collaboratively working together on an open-source project (which aims to provide a fresh web app framework in this concrete case) and moves at a fast pace it conseqeuntly turned out that using the standard approach of centralized VCS for it soon hit its limits. Therefore, we jointly decided in the community to switch to a decentralized one, namely Git. This DVCS was originally developed by Linus Torvalds for managing the development of the Linux kernel. Its main concept basically is that everybody has his/her own complete "clone" of the code repository.

So the basic problem here is how to best work together productively in a programming/development project and the question which are good tools providing capabilities to potentially support and improve this. One such tool is a version control systems (VCS) which basically helps to keep the code and especially its progress under (version) control in a code repository (transparently). A specific such VCS is Subversion (a.k.a. SVN). This is at the time one of the most popular and up-to-date systems of its kind (i.e., centralized VCS).

For my Ph.D. thesis I need a community portal, which supports students to share their experience about internet technologies. It turned out, that the content management system Drupal is a perfect fit to fullfill the given requirements. As usual for a content management system, Drupal also has its own user management function. This means, that students have to register before they may produce content on the portal. Although TechScreen is a software system on a prototype level, it is yet hosted on a server inside the TU computer network.

For security reasons a server offering webservices should be installed new: It is used to run CGI-Webapplications manipulating data in an Oracle 8.1.8. database via webformulas. I first installed Solaris and then Oracle 8.1.8 and the webserver. Both are running without errors. In the next step I used the compiled Files from the backup copy: The webservices are running. To modify the applications a new compilation is necessary. I dir not panipulate *.c files. I just tried to compile it. CC or GCC did not work.