Safe Languages :-)

[Ian Holsman]

the per-child MPM of apache2 was designed for this task, but I'm not 
sure how stable it is.

another approach would be to run multiple webservers on the machine,
one for each student.

your portal would then proxy the request to the students individual server.

the students would only be able to execute code as their own users,
which may not fix everything, but it would help a bit I think.


HTH
Ian

Scott Penrose wrote:
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> Hi Dudes,
> 
> I am writing a module in our Portal which allows the execution of code 
> from people we do not trust - students.
> 
> The idea is to provide a module that allows languages to be programmed 
> with very simple inputs and outputs.
> 
> A simple example is - Enter some Logo Code and the output is a GIF.
> 
> I can use Safe (perldoc Safe) to do perl code with some level of safety, 
> but what I am really looking for is better educational languages.
> 
> How would I go about providing a Safe environment for those languages. I 
> do not have the luxury of a separate machine, but I can run separate 
> processors.
> 
> Ideally I would have some of the following:
> 
>     * Perl - maybe just a tiny subset of perl
>     * Logo - that would be ideal
>     * C - Hmm... tricker, but don't need to support everything, just 
> some syntax
>     * Java - As for C
>     * Lips/Scheme - There is a Perl module for this isn't there?
>     * Miranda ?
> 
> Anyway - Obviously what ever I choose they are mostly limited in that 
> they are restricted to general programming with only a very basic input 
> and output (at this stage a single line of input and plain text output - 
> - or generation of a graphic).
> 
> Ideas welcome :-)
> 
> Scott
> - -- Scott Penrose
> VP in charge of Pancakes
> http://linux.dd.com.au/
> scottp at dd.com.au
> 
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