Re: Octave Web GUI

[John Verzani]

Hi Tom,

The chroot is done using software written by Lincoln Stein of CGI.pm fame:
http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/sbox

To use this, you basically create a directory with all the necessary
files in it: (octave, perl, gnuplot, the cgi scripts, ... all in their
proper place) and then configure sbox to point to that directory. Sbox
has limits on usage to prevent troubles created by malicious
programmers (eg. eating up all the memory.) It was a bit of a pain to
set up -- in particular, I recall that compiling octave to install in
the correct place was tricky, but not impossible. I am more than happy
to answer any questions that I can.


--John Verzani
Tom Weichmann writes:
 > On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, John Verzani wrote:
 > > Hello,
 > > 
 > > I've written a PERL/CGI/OCTAVE interface and can gladly share the code
 > > with anyone interested including posting it if anyone desires. The
 > > main concern should be security as OCTAVE allows _lots_ of access to
 > > the underlying system. To work around this, my scripts filter out bad
 > > commands, and then I take the further step of running it inside a
 > > chroot 'sbox' environment. I'm glad to provide details of this as well.
 > 
 > 
 > I am VERY interested in the chroot environment which you have implemented. 
 > Since you have posted this I have started to research chroot.  It seems as if
 > the cgi/perl srcipt would have to have superuser privs to perform the 
 > chroot. 
 > I can not figure out how to do it.
 > 
 > Thanks for your help,
 > 
 > T.C. Weichmann
 > Sutdent Researcher
 > State University of New York Collage At Buffalo

-- 
....................................................................
.  John Verzani                  mailto:address@hidden  .
.  Dept. of Mathematics      http://www.math.csi.cuny.edu/~verzani .
.  City University of New York                 tel: (718) 982-3623 .
.  College of Staten Island                    fax: (718) 982-3631 .
.  Staten Island, NY 10314                                         .
....................................................................



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