COP Spring 2011 Assignment 4 Working with Servers Due Monday, 28th February in class (17H15)

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1 COP Spring 2011 Assignment 4 Working with Servers Due Monday, 28th February in class (17H15) February 2, Objective In this assignment you will be asked to use a virtual machine. You will configure your Linux operating system to function as a web-server. You will install a content management system known as Drupal. You will install a new theme and customize it for a different user experience (CSS). 2 Requirements You will need to be able to burn a DVD or have a USB drive with at least 4 gig of space. If you do not have a either you will have to schedule an appointment to demo the project. To be able to demo you will have to install and configure the project on a laptop. The assignment is due Monday, 28th February in class (17H15). 1

2 3 Instructions 3.1 Web-server (15%) To get a working web-server we need a couple of elements: Apache2 PHP5 MySql Fortunately Ubuntu makes it easy to get a working server. Before beginning please ensure your system is up to date with the latest patches. Open a terminal and type the following two commands: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade You can follow these instructions: When all is said and done, if your server is working and installed you should be able to launch your browser in your virtual machine and go the the link and see a page that says It works!. Apache has a default directory for the storage of its web-pages for Ubuntu: /var/www. 3.2 Apache Extra credit (5%) Configure your web-server so that any registered user can have a directory public html in their home directory and have the link: work. 3.3 Setup Drupal (35%) Drupal is a free content management system that you can download from the Internet: org/files/projects/drupal-6.20.tar.gz. We are using Drupal 6 and not the newly release Drupal 7. Feel free to tinker around with Drupal 7 if you like. For installation instructions you can follow documentation here: Hints and help For the database portion they talk about using a web interface to setup your database called phpmyadmin I recommend you install it unless you are comfortable using the command line for MySql. Hints: When you unzip phpmyadmin make sure to place it in the /var/www directory (you will need so do it with sudo - sudo mv phpmyadmin /var/www). In your browser you can then navigate to and interact with your database after logging in with the user/password you created. 3.4 Theming (50%) Drupal has a number of extensive themes that can simply be plugged in. However, we want to create out own custom theme for this project. Since we don t want to start from the absolute beginning we will be using a starter theme and simply extending that theme for our purposes. The theme is called Zen: Download and unpack Zen 6.x.2.0 to your drupal theme directory sites/all/themes/. In Drupal under the administration panel you will see under Site Building the option Themes, enable Zen. Now if you navigate into the zen directory you just installed you will see a lot of files, read the file README-FIRST.txt. We will be creating a sub-theme so pay attention to the instructions for Building a sub-theme, be sure to follow the instructions in the README.txt. Once you have your

3 new sub-theme configured you should go to the Administration section again and enable your theme, also check make default. You will now be presented with a plain looking theme. In your sub-theme folder you will find the css folder. Inside you will find a number of.css files. You will be editing these to affect a change to your site. Minimum requirements (does NOT guarantee full credit): Custom background colors for the left, right bar and content area. Custom colors for link: unclicked, hover, active, visited. Header text should look like header text (color, size, background). Add appropriate padding and margins so different content appear different and separate from each other (paragraphs, headers, list items, tables, etc). CSS3 is encouraged Hints and help To help you gain an understanding of CSS you have been given an number of CSS class and id declerations. You have to fill in the details for those declerations. But trying to figure out which identifier belongs to what file can be daunting. Fear not help is on the way. If you had followed all the instructions you should see something as follows: Now to isolate areas on the page you want to style Chrome and Firefox both provide excelent tools to help developers. Chrome already has its tool built in by default. Right click any where on the page and at the bottom of the page you will see Inspect Element. By clicking on that you will see a new sub window appear in your browser:

4 If you mouse over the different elements they will highlight on the page. If you look on the right handside you will see the CSS that affects the different elements and which files they are located in as well as on what line in the file they are on. Firefox has a similar developer window. To enable it you have to install an extension called Firebug then these same capabilities will be available to you. 3.5 External Serving (Extra credit 5%) Configure your virtual machine to be accessible from your host machine (the machine the VB is installed on). This requires you to configure your forwarding ports for your virtual machine. I suggest you read the virtualbox documentation here: You should read section Configuring port forwarding with NAT. If this is working you should be able to access your virtualbox server by typing your IP address of your host machine into the browser. Since this does not export with the submission, to get credit for this you will have to come by my office (schedule a time) and show me how you configure it on my virtual machine in my office. 3.6 Hint Google is your friend. Use the ubuntu forums to look for solutions ( Use the user guide for virtualbox. They also have a forum to search for solutions. If you have to compile anything to get it to work then you are probably down the wrong track. 4 Submission For the submission we will use the export option on the virtual machine. When you open your virtual machine go to File in the menu and select the option Export Appliance.

5 You will get the export wizard. Select our machine and hit next. The next window you will get to say where to save the export. Make sure it is somewhere you can find after the export is complete. The name should be something like (but doesn t have to be exact) COP Nienaber - Ubuntu ova. Don t check anything, leave Write leagacy OVF 0.9 and Write Manifest file unchecked and Hit next.

6 The next window is the Appliance Export Settings just hit next. No changes needed here. The export should begin now. It can take some time so be patient. Just wait for it to complete.

7 When it is complete you will have a copy of your virtual machine in a new file: COP YOURNAME - Ubuntu ova Burn these three files to a data DVD or copy to a USB drive. The size total size will be somewhere between 1 GB - GB. If it is bigger that is fine. Bring the data DVD to me in class. 5 Class extra credit This extra credit is worth 5% on your final grade in this class Requirements Purchase a domain name (godaddy.com is a popular choice). Setup a home server using Linux. Configure a fully functional Drupal website using Drupal 7, there should be data on the site (topic of your choice). Make the site accessible on the World Wide Web Submission You will come to my office and demonstrate to me how you achieved it. I will ask for a demo and some additional questions to verify. Using url ghosting is not acceptable. You have to use a DNS A record for forwarding. Hosting on a machine at home is preferred but if you can not achieve this there are other hosting options available such as Amazon EC2 The deadline for this is the last day of class - 20th April 2011 at 17H15.